Carl tweets out about his new role at Public-i
This is a cross posting from my own blog which is probably more appropriately located here as it is about Public-i after all… if you read it there then look no further unless the typos in my stuff drive you mad and you’d like to read something a little more carefully polished.
The main reason for writing is that fact that Carl Haggerty is going to be joining Public-i for two days a week to work as the Product Manager for Citizenscape, starting next week. Carl has written about this here so this is my turn… I’m delighted Carl is joining us for all kinds of different reasons.
The first is that Carl is great to work with: having collaborated with him on the Virtual Town Hall pilot, as a client at Devon County Council and also in various GovCamp sessions I know that he combines expertise and forward thinking with the ability to challenge your thinking in a really positive and constructive way.
This ability to issue a constructive challenge is going to be a crucial skill for someone who is coming into a project – Citizenscape – that has been a huge amount of work for a lot of people over the last couple of years. The product has developed massively from the initial EU project and the Virtual Town Hall pilots and has now been deployed across our core Connect sites as well – but we can still go a lot further. It’s live, stable and useful but so much of the functionality is lying below the waterline – in the code, locked into the UX and in the admin functionality. We are hoping that a fresh pair of eyes – from someone who understands what we are trying to achieve with Citizenscape – will help push it forward.
The second reason I am delighted to have Carl join is about the blurring of boundaries. The fact that we will be sharing him with Devon County Council makes this a fairly unusual arrangement but one that I think reflects the new ways in which the public and private sectors need to be working together. I hope that we will learn a lot from working with Carl but I also hope he will learn from us. I am very grateful to Devon for being willing to support this kind of arrangement and I hope that the institutional learning goes both ways as well.
There is a lot of talk about the public sector needing to be more business-like, to behave more like the private sector, but we don’t often reflect on what this actually means. This kind of shared working is a way of exploring the cultural qualities that might flow in both directions. I am hoping that Carl will have a positive experience of working in a small business that is able to be far more agile and innovative than a local authority just by dint of its size, but that also needs to be constantly thinking about selling as an essential part of its lifecycle.
There. I’ve said it. The ‘S’ word. Doesn’t it send a shiver down the spine?
Dan Slee posted a very pithy piece which explained very clearly why the public sector is right to have a poor impression of the private sector sales process and which, as someone running a company, made me cringe. However I believe it’s possible – and perhaps even advantageous – to build innovative and useful projects that are sold and then co-created between public and private sector organisations. I also think that discussing value exchange – money – upfront in a project is one way to ensure that you keep the attention of all the project participants. In my experience doing stuff for free doesn’t really convince anyone that they need to take what you are doing very seriously – though on the other hand you do need to be sure that the value exchange is fair and defensible. I don’t want the public sector wasting money and I don’t want to be part of helping it to waste money. This point of view has taken me a while to come to, which is perhaps another story.
It’s possible that the only way we will substantively shift government practice is with these kinds of co-created projects and relationships. If this is the case then we need to learn how to work together – systemically – and the kind of cultural exchange that we are starting with Carl could form a valuable part of this learning. As we are both avid bloggers I am imagining you will hear more about this whether you want to or not.
There is a lot of challenge in the idea of opening up your organisation to have a client working with you as part of the team – not just on one specific project where they can be contained. Any organisation will have a degree of paddling below the water going on and it takes confidence in what you do to open this up to scrutiny. One of the reasons we are doing this, apart from the fact that you can’t learn without risk, is because we think that any business that works closely with the public sector needs to be setting itself at least the standard of openness that we demand of our government organisations. Projects like Chris Taggart’s Open Corporate is part of this but I think the blurring of organisational boundaries to create the most effective project teams is another. We have all worked closely with other organisations but this blurring of boundaries is something else.
I also think these qualities of confidence and openness are essential in a networked organisation, but I will come back to that thought another time.
The second reason I have been mulling organisational culture was as a result of a Twitter conversation discussing whether or not context is significant in terms of defining and understanding innovation. The consensus was a strongly felt ‘yes’. You can’t describe something as innovative without understanding the context in which the work is done and projects that are innovative in one context may be fairly mundane in others. @Pubstrat has excellent things to say on this subject.
This got me thinking about how you might more actively set the context for a future project. We are I hope – subject to various practicalities – about to kick off another Citizenscape pilot in the fairly near future. How can we set the right context for this project? The first and obvious point will be creating the right project team and relationships, but I think the critical element of this is in creating a shared context between ourselves and the client. Creating this initial shared understanding and actively discussing the fact that a project that is focused on ‘doing things differently’ means that the project itself needs to…well….do things differently.
I am trying to put together a more organised set of thoughts around the question of ‘agile project management’, which I keep coming back to. I think this idea of setting the new, shared context for a project – or an organisation – is part of that but I also think it’s part of what it means to participate in a ‘networked’ project, which takes place across organisational boundaries. It is more and more frequently the case that we are working in loose coalitions or temporary teams and partnerships and that our different work contexts are colliding. This is happening across internal and external organisational. I think we probably need to be thinking about what this means and trying to capture some of the approaches that make it all work more smoothly – capturing the context is one part of this.
The final reason I am thinking about organisational culture is because I find that so many of the conversations that I have with clients that start off talking about social media, engagement and democracy end up really being about organisational change. I increasingly come to the conclusion that we – practitioners – can’t continue to make incremental progress to unlock the real potential of the social web if we don’t start to actively discuss the way in which our organisations will change as a result. This is not saying anything new – we all know this to be true – but how many people are just below the parapet in terms of really talking about this fact within their organisations? How many senior teams are thinking in these terms? Time for a more public discussion and a lot more mulling I think.
