Easier INC

This 1-hour live discussion will be on the theme of systems innovation in the context of public administration and the public sector in general. Long since known for its bureaucratic approach of long-term fixed planning governments today are presented with ever larger and more complex challenges that necessitate new approaches.

In the context of these "wicked problems" the idea of systems innovation is gaining ground as a way to move towards a more distributed and emergent approach; one that focuses on transformation rather than incremental improvements; an approach that sees communities as complex adaptive systems to be worked with rather than have things done to them.

From theory to practice this panel discussion will explore a new way of understanding public admin through a complexity lens, asking if this new set of ideas and approaches can transform how the public sector operates to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

Speakers:

• Eve Mitleton-Kelly: Lecturer at the University of Cambridge & Policy Advisor to major international organizations & governments
• Marco Steinberg: Founder & CEO of Snowcone & Haystack, Faculty Member States of Change, Nesta
• Toby Lowe: Visiting Professor at Centre for Public Impact, Senior Lecturer at Northumbria University

The guests are joined by the host Bowen Feng, Community Developer at Systems Innovation.

This lecture outlines the problems that complexity poses for New Public Management, and identifies the elements of a complexity-informed approach to public management.

Read the overview

• What is complexity and why does it matter?
• What are the 3 key challenges of complexity for public management and why is the future of social action relational and bespoke?
• How does this all relate to Human. Learning. Systems. approaches?

Read The Paper

Social interventions are 'complex systems thrust amid complex systems " (Mowles 2014: 168). This paper explores the contribution that complexity approaches (Boulton et al 2015) have to offer the Performance Management (PM) of social interventions. The paper explores whether the use of 'Learning Communities' offers a mechanism to enable staff to improve their capacity to make effective judgements in situations of uncertainty.

Read The Paper

(Behind paywall)

Research on complex systems is becoming more prolific, and there is a need to provide some point of orientation to researchers and practitioners that are drawing on the body of literature that informs the field of complexity research. In this paper, I aim to give an overview of the development of the field and offer some overarching trends and patterns that are recognizable in research on complex systems. The paper then draws on the work to provide six organizing principles of complex systems to inform practical implications and methods for studying and understanding complex systems.

VIEW THE SLIDES 

Presented by Dr Toby Lowe (Senior Lecturer in Public Leadership and Management @ Newcastle Business School) the webinar views the challenge of creating complexity-informed evaluation by seeing it as a public management challenge. How can public management adopt a more complexity-informed approach? The session outlines an emerging complexity-informed approach to public management: the Human Learning Systems (HLS) approach. The HLS approach involves public services responding to the variety of human need through bespoke service provision, using learning as the engine for performance improvement and stewarding the health of the systems which produce social outcomes.

Human

One of the three key tasks of managing work in an HLS way (including funding and commissioning of work) means creating the conditions in which people can build effective human relationships. This means understanding human variety, using empathy to understand the lives of others, recognising people’s strengths, and trusting those who do the work. Variety, Empathy, Strengths and Trust (VEST).

Learning

In complex environments people are required to learn continuously in order to adapt to the dynamic, ever-changing nature of the work. In complex environments, there is no simple interventions which “works” to tackle a problem. “What works” is an on-going process of learning and adaptation. It is the job of managers to enable staff to learn continuously as the tool for performance improvement. This means using measures to learn, not for reward/punishment. It means creating the conditions where people can be honest about their mistakes and uncertainties. It means creating reflective practice environments between and across peer groups. This requires funders/commissioners to fund for learning and adaptation, not for “results”.

Systems

The outcomes we care about are not delivered by organisations. They are produced by whole systems – by hundreds of different factors working together. The final job of managers is therefore to act as Systems Stewards – to enable actors in the system to co-ordinate and collaborate effectively - because that it was will enable positive outcomes to emerge.

Human Learning Systems is an alternative to the ‘New Public Management’ approach. If you would like to see a selection of research evidence exploring how and why New Public Management fails, here is a selection.

Read the report

Donald T. Campbell, a renowned social scientist and psychologist, wrote on the need for collaborative policy making and is probably most well-known for his ‘Campbell’s Law’:

‘The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.’

This paper discusses Campbell’s law and the need to consider how social change can be meaningfully evaluated for impact by taking a complexity-informed world view.

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The paper ‘reviews evidence from medical care, job training, crime control and other human services regarding corruption similar to what is now being encountered in public education: mismeasurement of outputs (goal distortion, and threshold standards that harmfully redirect effort); mismeasurement of inputs (imprecise subgroup definitions and cream-skimming); and untrustworthy statistics (data unreliability, sampling corruption, and other forms of gaming).'

Listen to the presentation

• Dr Toby Lowe (Newcastle Business School) challenges the orthodoxy of performance measurement and begins to outline avenues for innovative alternative ways of addressing performance.
• He argues that payment by results and outcomes based performance management models are inherently flawed and create unwelcome paradoxes.
• Instead of improving the lives of service users, his research suggests that focusing on outcomes and results distorts both the priorities and practice of organisations and workers, leading to poorer results for those most in need.

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‘This review examines the evidence of the effect of government-funded outcome-based contracts in public human services. The findings indicate that while outcome-based contracts increase the measures of outcome for which they pay, these measures do not always reflect the intention of the contract designers, or desirable outcomes for the end-client. Measures of outcome that were not related to payment did not improve and sometimes worsened. Some outcome payments created incentives for service providers contrary to the achievement of desired outcomes.’

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This report from the National Audit Office ‘reviews the government’s recent experience of using payment by results (PbR) to deliver public services.’ 

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• Dr Toby Lowe (Newcastle Business School) and Kathy Evans (Chief Executive at Children England) argue that perverse incentives are not an unfortunate by-product of  Payment by Results (PbR) programmes, nor are they a technical problem that can be fixed with better metrics or measurement regimes.
• Instead they posit that perverse incentives are an intractable problem with PbR, converting the focus of innnovation onto how to shape the data reported at the expense of supporting the outcomes that matter.

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Abstract: ‘This article explores the operation of performance management in the Florida Welfare Transition program and its effects on decisions to sanction welfare clients. Our analysis focuses on the organization of discipline and, in the process, suggests that scholars may misrepresent and misinterpret the incidence of discipline when they fail to account for the dynamic ways that organization and management shape sanctioning patterns.’

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‘The use of ‘outcomes’ as a concept to measure the effectiveness of social policy interventions is inherently flawed and creates unwelcome paradoxes. This article explains why, instead of improving the lives of those who receive support, a focus on outcome information distorts both the priorities and practice of organizations who deliver such support, resulting in poorer results for those most in need. It provides an important first stage towards the evolution of new ways of conceptualizing ways to create improvements in social policy delivery.’

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This report by the Overseas Development Institute ‘asks and seek to answer a number of questions: What exactly is the results agenda in the UK context? Where did it come from? Why did it emerge? How have people reacted? And what can we learn from this experience?’

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• Dr Toby Lowe (Newcastle Business School) describes why we should not use outcomes to performance manage social interventions.
• He argues that the evidence is clear – Outcomes-Based Performance Management (OBPM) doesn’t work, citing that, “The overall conclusion from international experience of implementing an outcomes approach is that the journey is long and the results are disappointing.” (Wimbush 2011)

Read the report

Hal Harvey, co-author of ‘Money Well Spent: A strategic plan for smart philanthropy’ explores the unintended consequences of pushing strategic philanthropy and offers possible ways forward to prevent this from happening.