It’s not enough to wait, we need to get real about how things can change
At the risk of plagiarising Matt Hyde’s rather wonderful “weekly reflection” format on LinkedIn, I too had a good week last week.
A big part of that was hearing what insights we can take from the Greater Manchester experiment.
For those who aren’t familiar, Greater Manchester was the first example of the Combined Authority model that’s increasingly being rolled out across the country. So, it could turn out to be the “shape of things to come” for lots of other regions.
It’s also the UK’s fastest growing local economy and something of a standard-bearer for integrating public services, and aiming for a more inclusive, neighbourhood-based, community led model of delivery.
And yet, when you listen to those leading change on the ground, it’s not devolution that’s making most of their progress possible.
It’s grassroots collaboration. (You can catch the full conversation here if you’re interested)
As one of my guests, Warren Heppolette, put it, “There is almost nothing stopping organisations coming together across sectors and having the conversation about common purpose, organising and aligning towards solving common problems. At the most simple level, that’s the only thing we’ve ever really done, so I have a low tolerance for people who think ‘it’s all right for you in Greater Manchester because you’ve got a Mayor and a Combined Authority’”.
My other guest, Hayley Lever, echoed the sentiment: “We know it’s transferable because this way of working is spreading and growing across the country. And we know from the evaluations that it’s entirely possible [for others] to go on this journey, and to do it quicker, and with less pain.”
Hayley’s own grant-funded organisation has a staff of just 40 and yet, through a vast network of collaborations, both formal and informal, it has been hugely influential in helping to increase levels of physical activity across GM’s entire population of three million people.
It is testament to the power, not of devolution, but of relationships. And it’s a practical demonstration of how things can change.
Clearly, it’s helpful to have a local government that’s conducive to and encouraging of this kind of work. And in the case of Greater Manchester, one that actively convenes across public, private, and voluntary sectors around solving social problems.
But on most of these issues, that’s pretty much all they can do.
Whether it’s national or local government, they can only create the conditions that make collaboration to solve these issues harder or easier. They can’t actually solve them.
A group of people in Westminster, or in Manchester Town Hall for that matter, can’t define what’s required to help a particular family in Crumpsall avoid spiralling further into crisis, or for a socially isolated autistic child in Bury to develop friendships and connect with nature and adventure.
That part will always come down to us.
It’s hard to think expansively about our true potential as a collective, because we’re all conditioned to think of just our own pieces of the jigsaw. The focus we need to keep on our own cohort of beneficiaries, our own services and interventions, campaigning for our own cause.
Conversely, it’s easy to point to the problems in public services, of which there’s no shortage.
How they spend most of their time and resource on people who are already in crisis because so little goes into preventing those crises in the first place.
How they’re frustratingly fragmented, focused on narrow remit over holistic outcomes, constantly expecting people to navigate one disconnected service after another.
Yet we know people don’t “present” with a single issue – their challenges are often complex and intersectional, which is why agencies need to work together if they want to make a real difference.
Every one of those is a valid critique.
But we could also look at our own sector through that same critical lens.
And we could look at our own opportunity, and to our own agency, as to how things can change.
How we too can bring organisations together across sectors, to have those same conversations about common purpose. How we too can be far better at organising and aligning to solve our beneficiaries’ common problems.
There really is nothing stopping us.
Supportive governments and Combined Authorities and collaborative Mayors may come, and they may go. And each time it might make some things easier or harder.
But the lesson I’ve taken from the Greater Manchester experiment, is that the future is always in our hands.