Guest blog by Kevin Slocombe, IPP ’22
Why are we only delivering against some of the promises we made to the city in the election? Why are only some of our key programmes to deliver inclusive growth being realised?
The Mayor of Bristol, UK was elected on a platform based around inclusive and sustainable growth; where every citizen can share in the success of the city, building a city where nobody is left behind. The electors put their cross in the box supporting those aims in a context of a city with economic growth and prosperity, where high tech is the biggest growth sector but where the gap between rich and poor consistently widens.
Having joined the Mayor in 2016, I came to the Harvard IPP program with an ongoing challenge to understand why we weren’t delivering on some of the core challenges to implement the public policy the people wanted. Why some of our flagship proposals stalled, why priorities were often coming from the bureaucracy and not the political leadership.
After session one of PDIA, I knew we weren’t managing the bureaucracy of the council well enough. I immediately recognised the lack of acceptance at some lower tiers of the management, of the failure of authorisation making it anywhere near the street level, of a questionable level of ability to implement, despite good intentions. I had been introduced to the triple A’s and needed to get closer to them.
My fishbone diagram was a breakdown of our key aims; housing, affordable housing, jobs, childcare, education, a diverse economy, inclusive leadership. Each would be a fishbone of their own but I wanted to test the economic theory of inclusive growth and make it real. I came with solutions as well as questions.
I learned that my first iteration was just that and I could break down the fishbone to more fishbones and then more fishbones and hand them out to allies in the team. I could ask people to lead on a bone, take risks, find more people to take risks with them and deliver change. I found that my questions were the wrong one’s and I wasn’t focussed on the problem. From first to second iteration, I realised the barrier to change and to implementation of our public policy was more fundamental. Breaking down problems was something I had a lot of experience in but historically, I always ensured I had a solution each time I did it. My single biggest PDIA takeaway right there – I don’t need to find the solution, I just need to break down the problem and find people to break it down with me. I don’t have to find the perfect answer, I just need to find the next iteration. Test, fail, iterate, test is not a system that has found a home in British politics. The retail nature of elections, the adverse nature of party politics drives politicians and advisors to a standard that failure and change is weakness. To test and then iterate in modern politics, in the UK and elsewhere is to be accused of a “u-turn”; the key media insult, the drive to label politicians as weak and create a narrative of poor leadership.
My next iteration was the realisation that the fundamental problem wasn’t that we weren’t delivering everything we wanted; but that the council was doing too much. Nobody was blocking, they were busy doing things nobody wanted and nobody had voted for. We had a corporate strategy that was 4 years old and described the need to slim the council to an institution that focussed on its core services and was responsive to the political leadership but we weren’t delivering it. Everyone was focussed on the doing and nobody was focussed on the stopping. My third iteration was to bank the fishbone and focus on a single spine that changed the way the organisation worked, on how the city was serviced and enabled. On prioritising the issues that mattered.
We were building homes, we were fixing city infrastructure, we were enabling development and economic growth, building with height and density. We were facing multiple crises in one go – the housing and cost of living crisis sitting alongside the climate and ecological crisis. We were bringing investment and building homes and employment space in sustainable locations. But we wanted more and the pace of change was slowed by the desire of the organisation to do so many other things that were less important, less necessary and often reflecting decades of out of date ambition and entrenched vested interests.
So this next iteration was to tackle the problem I had now realised as the core challenge: to stop doing stuff so that we could get the important stuff done better and quicker. Top focus in on our priorities as laid out by the political leadership, to spend resource and money on those at the top of our ambitions. At the same time the impacts of Brexit (the UK departure from the European community), war in Eastern Europe and a government led reduction in public spending had created a perfect storm of a substantial cost of operating increase. The council was looking at a budget deficit in the tens of millions. While this was a huge challenge with negative consequences on social care and on essential services, it was also a partner for change, a catalyst creating an urgent necessity to stop doing those things we shouldn’t be.
The latest iteration of my personal challenge sits within a budget project group – aimed at ensuring that all directors and senior managers balance the budget not just by reducing operational costs by salami slicing across the universal top but by maximising spend on the priorities listed above, while working with communities on a different model to protect public space, libraries, culture and sport.
Bring people with you to take risks against the things you care about is one of my favourite PDIA lessons. I have changed my approach to finding agents of change, looking for people at all levels who know how to get stuff done, to effect change. Building allies across the organisation has been rewarding and effective. There are many people who want to achieve the same outcomes for citizens and understand the problems and how to remove the barriers. They aren’t always where you expect to find them and you have to actively look and actively listen.
PDIA is hard. That’s a truth the Harvard team promote. In my context, people in cities and in governments have self-interests, they have ways of working and they have tried and trusted methods but they aren’t always required. Asking people to look at the problem rather than the solution, break it down and then find entry points to start iterating, works. Asking people to work with you on a problem builds relationships in a way telling people what the solution is, usually doesn’t.
Inclusive growth is even harder to deliver in a cost of living crisis like the UK is in today but we continue to work towards ensuring everyone has a decent opportunity. We took a problem driven approach to home building and enabled our own publicly owned housing company to gear up and manage large sites, previously earmarked for private development. That will bear fruit with one thousand social homes in the pipeline and in the last 12 months, over 2000 homes were built in the city, with many in an affordable model. Three schools built, additional special needs places and securing employment land amongst developments is a tool to shape an inclusive diverse economy.
I haven’t solved my problems, but I am aware of what the problem is and I’m continuing to work with my leads and receiving my lessons as we head to the next iteration, towards embedding the delivering of inclusive and sustainable growth in the city.
This is a blog series written by the alumni of the Implementing Public Policy Executive Education Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. Participants successfully completed this 6-month online learning course in December 2022, with support from the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative. These are their learning journey stories.