Breaking the Shell

Hello to all my millions of loyal readers
As I’ve had numerous problems with getting this blog to look right, hosted by www.blog.com, I’m considering moving to blogger, since I like the look of eg http://worldsgreatestmusic.blogspot.com and it seems easily customisable.
It shouldn’t affect you the reader, since the blog will still redirect through from www.breakingtheshell.com
Please do send me any comments or advice on my plan!
Many thanks
Ben

The guys at Superfactory have blogged on Evolving Excellence (www.evolvingexcellence.com - one of the best Lean blogs), about the Harvard Business Review article on Toyota’s contradictions (the article is at http://HBRtoyota.notlong.com). I wrote about this below (http://breakingtheshell.blog.com/3223360/)

I like the bit about being able to contradict or ignore your boss - that makes sound business sense to me, in fact I’ve noticed it’s a good habit I generate in my team

I’m fascinated by both the application of systems thinking, and the debate around it.

In the UK public sector, there has been an influx of ‘lean’, ’systems thinking’, ‘lean systems thinking’ etc - some of it very good, some of it well-intentioned but very bad, some of it just calculated rebranding of existing methodologies.

Certain people who I trust are putting together a guide for the public sector on how to procure ‘real’ lean, but in the meantime I think it is important to distinguish which ’systems’ you are talking about.

In my mind the provisional list of systems is three:

- the process as a system: this is the basic level which most suppliers will understand - lean as process improvement (see www.systemsthinking.co.uk)

- interpersonal systems: usually considered very separate from the rest, this is the systematic ways in which relationships between individuals impact on the overall organisation - any number of models, training and coaching approaches apply here

- the organisation itself as a system: the systematic and predictable ways in which different situational positions in the organisation impact on performance.

Of course, any good systems thinking intervention which is really about organisational development will take all of these into account. My favourite approach to the latter is Barry Oshry’s Power+Systems approach - see www.powerandsystems.com.

Senge and others perhaps cut across these three systems dimensions in powerful ways.

I recently came across a posting on the NW Lean yahoo group which illustrates some of the ways in which Toyota certainly is not focused only on the process as a system, but also has created a model which generates powerful results on the organisation-as-system level.

(The post is reproduced below, and quotes a Harvard Business Review article which is itself an excerpt of a book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470267623?ie=UTF8&tag=randombits-20&link_code=as3&camp=211189&creative=373489&creativeASIN=0470267623. The post is also accessible at http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/NWLEAN/message/10947 if you subscribe to the group - well worth it if you are interested in some wide-ranging debate on the practicalities of lean implementation. I was recommended the NWLEAN group via www.evolvingexcellence.com, an excellent repository for challenging views on what Lean is about - and increasingly, challenging views on libertarian politics).

What interests me is the ’six forces which cause contradictions inside Toyota’… three forces of expansion: impossible goals, local customization, and experimentation (creating complexity and diversity) and three forces of integration: the founders’ values, “up-and-in” people management, and open communication, which provide a framework of values, culture, understanding and therefore stability.

Compare and contrast these with Barry Oshry’s fundamental systems drivers in organisations which need to be optimally balanced: see www.powerandsystems.com, specifically

At its heart, simple stuff - organisations need to balance their systems to get a deliberate and optimal mix of change and development.

The fact is that these elements can be observed in a car company which has developed a brilliant approach to doing business, and by an experiential systems thinker who has developed a brilliant approach to taking people through their own learning about how systems operate in organisations!

Continued from http://breakingtheshell.blog.com/3096717/, part 1 at http://breakingtheshell.blog.com/3093874/

The final session was led by Roy Clare of the MLA and Professor Mike Thorne, Chair of the Advisory Council on Libraries (a sort of library kitchen cabinet for the minister – a ‘counter cabinet’?).
They are highly focused on bidding for money from the Treasury, identifying the way with oil prices going up and the economy going down, libraries can illustrate their strategically important role… how libraries can reduce crime, reduce community fragmentation, and support small businesses…
Participants were set a range of visioning exercises, putting them in different roles and identifying the future of libraries.
Some of the results of the group activities were:
Challenge: Imagine you’re the Chief Exec – top three strategic priorities, how can culture and information integrate and contribute to priorities, perceptions, barriers holding back library service, changes that Chief Librarians should be leading, and what support library sector bodies should give.
Thoughts:

Priorities are: Economy, health, education, Performance, economy, developing member capacity:

• Can contribute to partnerships
• Chief Exec wouldn’t think of libraries, so won’t see the impact
• Poor buildings in wrong location
• Staff in comfort zones with low aspirations
• Need advocacy and new models of delivering
• CILIP – wrote off
• Lifelong Learning – only consult?
• SCL – only source of leadership
• MLA – produce the research and demonstrate value
• ACL – what does it do?
• DCMS – Renaissance for Libraries
• British Library – professional lead

 

Challenge: Image you’re the head of a commercial PR agency – what are the top three selling points for public libraries, how to communicate, key barriers, manage weakest points, promote and market careers.
Thoughts:
Make a difference, improve quality of life and reach a mass audience
Offer people, space and resources to make this happen

Challenge: Imagine you’re a government minister with responsibility for libraries. What would you strengthen, what do nationally, what locally, what are the barriers, how should customer services be developed, and how do you see potential for libraries and the Olympics?
Thoughts:

Press the key government buttons in a clear way – understand them better

National – focused branding, ring-fenced funding, stronger national offers including digital

Local – much better community understanding

Modernisation

Challenge: What would priorities be for digital services, what are the barriers, what technologies will be introduced in next five and ten years, how would Chief Librarians innovate?
Thoughts:

• Achieve buy-in
• National infrastructure
• National portal, national catalogue
• Supplier license problems
• Workplace skills

 

Challenge: Imagine you’re the Chief Librarian of good LA – describe excellent library service, aspects, private sector partnerships, who controls library spend, competencies, partnerships, relationships within council and with partners.
Thoughts:

Partnership – don’t rule anything out. Deliver more to learning, skills, health community agendas than library museums and archives agendas.

Simple, confident, crisp advocacy messages.

Golden thread of leadership right through the service from top to bottom.

There were some ever-so-slightly negative comments about CILIP (!), and some points about ‘what is the Advisory Council on Libraries, anyway’, and ‘what does the MLA do now?’ (although also a focus on their declared aim of finding the evidence to prove library multiple impacts.

All in all, a good session, not too navel-gazing nor too divorced from reality. There’s hope for the library world yet! And we hope to be a part of it…

Continued from http://breakingtheshell.blog.com/3096355/, part 1 at http://breakingtheshell.blog.com/3093874/

The sessions have been excellent at the seminar – a very American and positive approach to libraries ( Chicago ), a very entertaining and focused session on what social capital is (John Field, http://crll.gcal.ac.uk/staff_details.php?ID=19), and Kevin Harris on Living Libraries and also community engagement.

No doubt Kevin will blog about his presentation at www.local-level.org.uk, and if he doesn’t put up the two great diagrams, I’ll either explain or copy them

But I just wanted to play back the question he closed with:

• The police don’t create public safety – they co-create it with the community.
• The NHS doesn’t create public health, they co-create it with the community.
• What do libraries and their users co-produce?

Kevin’s first stab at answers are:

They they help to form a vernacular culture – combatting the erosion of tradition and public memory, and that hey provide a Narnian wardrobe of access to worlds we didn’t know existed!

An interesting question for all services to consider.

Originally published in our client newsletter CityWatch in November 2007

Ben Taylor argues that even as the challenge for Finance Directors increases from all directions, they will benefit from taking the time to take organisational development seriously.

The world of finance managers is an increasingly complex and demanding one. Pressure is increasing on technical functions with new products, new approaches, affordable housing and financial market concerns, pension worries, and IFRS. The need for better financial management across whole authorities is being recognised through medium-term financial strategies, zero-based budgeting and the like. This year’s revenue settlements are looking increasingly worrying, adding further financial squeeze to the ongoing rounds of Gershon savings that must be found from increasingly bare-bones operations. Members are ever less willing to countenance Council Tax increases. There’s the headache of how to get fees and charges right, maximising income without appearing too often in the local press (avoiding this fate seems to be a preoccupation of some Executives). And, last but not least, increasingly the finance function is becoming a catch-all resources department, as disparate parts of the organisation including IT, HR, property and valuations, best value, benefits, and even front office ‘customer first’ responsibilities are piled on.

So, why then should Finance Directors be thinking about organisational development? And how could they find the time anyway?

At Sector Projects, we think there are five main reasons why organisational development supports and benefits the finance function:

1) Organisation development helps you to know your organisation better.
Financial and performance metrics, even if well set and well reported, don’t tell you what you really need to know about the Council. Even the politics which is such an inevitable part of organisational life only adds a little more. Boundary staff in your organisation (those on the ‘front line’) know so much that you need to know that you need a mechanism to liberate this valuable knowledge. What customers really want. Where the big money savings are. Who is underperforming - and why. Why the last big change effort failed. Why the next one will, too. Surveys, roadshows, asking them all help, but unless you make a sustained effort you will find it hard to tap into this goldmine.

2) You can really get people aligned to strategy - not just paying lip service to it. Strategy is probably one of the most over-used words in local government, which often leads to us under-valuing its potential. But when people from across the organisation feel they have contributed to generating a real strategy - that they have a stake in it - something quite impressive happens. People start understanding the reasons for what they are doing in their working lives, and become committed. Far more committed than any amount of carrot-and-stick ‘incentives’ can achieve.

3) ‘Change’ can become something you do together - not a constant struggle. ‘Change management’ is so often just a question of doing what you have to do scare people into compliance, or mollify them after the event. If organisation development is done well, change becomes a normal part of life, something which we can all learn from, and be better prepared for next time. The secret is, as with strategy, to make people genuinely involved in and contributing to what changes.

4) Organisational development can get your staff working to contribute to the organisation, not fight you. As the old adage goes, for every pair of hands you employ, you get a free brain. Yet we can so easily make our organisations places where people have to ’switch off’ their brains when they come to work. Not many people started their local government career as embittered, cynical resisters of change, equally dubious of the motives of the public, senior management, and Members. Yet a surprisingly high number end up in that position within fifteen to twenty years. Staff could be actively contributing ideas to improve performance and cut costs - but when was the last time someone spontaneously came up with n efficiency saving in your council?

5) Finally, it is possible to enjoy your working life more.
We all have to decide whether we want to switch off our brains, respond to crazy edicts from above, lose our enthusiasm - or whether we want to be positively engaged, honest, and enthused by our working lives. Sadly, the only way we can make this decision as individuals is often to move on and seek an organisation that suits us better. But good organisational development allow us to make this choice as a group - and allow work to become fun again.

In short, as our executive director Jim Brooks likes to say, “the job of an organisational leader is to turn a mass of critical people into a critical mass”.

So, how to do it? If this sounds like a panacea, you might be reassured to know it is very hard work. Results don’t come instantly, but they are usually long-term, sustainable, and cumulative. A good way in is to start to use a more consultative and involving approach with your staff the next time you have one of those big strategies to work up, a significant savings programme, or another change initiative. Creating a balanced scorecard, or any value for money measures that link performance and cost, are good ways to do this. But remember, if you are focused solely on making it happen, you are less likely to help people to learn to do it better.

How can you involve members in this? I’m sure some people reading the list of five key benefits were thinking about the capriciousness of members and the impact of this behaviour on trying to change the way the organisation works. The only way to work with this is to ensure that councillors are treated as part of the system, as they are. They must be involved and engaged, and they must see the benefits of organisational development too, so there’s as much of a job involving and selling to them as in engaging front-line staff.

Finance departments can set the tone for councils by focusing not just on the visible bottom line, but also on the underlying reasons why costs are challenging to control and reduce. If they do so, the long term benefits will be significant.

Sector Projects offer the revolutionary Power+Systems organisational workshop, a one- or two-day event for up to 80 people. Participants learn, through direct experience, how our behaviour is so often decided not by conscious choice, but by our role in the organisation - and a variety of strategies to change this behaviour in themselves and others. We can also offer a wide range of other organisational development support.

 

An article originally published in our customer newsletter CityWatch in January this year…

LGR has proved to be a contentious and difficult process, but then I suppose that is no surprise. The forming of new, large unitaries against a background of concerted opposition and resentment from predecessor bodies will present significant challenges to those few of the original bidders who have survived the severe whittling down process.

The business cases have been primarily focused on cost reduction, but a significant challenge ahead will be to prove responsiveness to local populations and effectiveness of service delivery. This challenge will be faced in the teeth of public resentment (and also, incidentally, the scepticism of large numbers of ‘double-hatted’ members, soon to be deprived of the allowance income from their lower-tier council roles). So the situation appears to be this: Counties face challenges with their distance from the communities they serve, and the transition from districts. Clearly districts are under threat from LGR, but they are also usually too small for unitary government.

There is no doubt that there is real potential for unitary government at the county and other levels, but with the controversy and legal disputes of this process in mind, it is hard to see a wave of unitary counties or districts (even amalgamated) spreading like wildfire across the country. Yet the challenges will not go away. Financial pressures will continue – the government has made it clear that even councils not going through LGR will have to deliver the same kind of savings. There are also some other serious concerns about District Councils that can have three hundred staff or fewer, not least the recruitment and retention problems of such small organisations, their resilience to staff changes at senior levels or in small professional teams. With the options relatively restricted, a third option is required.

Districts working together in strategic alliances represent that third option, which deserves out attention. This, too , presents a number of significant challenges and risks, but shared services and management holds real potential. I am talking here not of grand shared service projects that focus on transactional, back office services, led by large IT implementations, but of a range of practical joint working approaches whereby two or three teams providing the same service, by merging together, can operate as more effective and resilient business units. This can increasie efficiency, often making possible the removal of whole layers of management. But this can only be delivered with a shared leadership team from the top down.

In order to share services across organisations, there are a significant number of ducks that need to be in line. First and foremost, for a lasting alliance to be generated, both sets of leading members must like each other – enough to spend time in the same room – and have significant alignment of their overall philosophy (though not necessarily policy). Members need to feel that the change is a response to their agenda, that member oversight and scrutiny are being given priority, and that they have signed up to a coherent and acceptable protocol on the distribution of costs and benefits. Secondly, there must be clear understanding – and clear practical demonstration – of the real difference between managerial efficiency through sharing, and merger. The difference in reality is clear: talk of merger leads to High Court action and negative front-page headlines in the local press, whereas saving money through more efficient management of services, with no impact on the council’s ‘identity’, will gain plaudits even in the local press.

Once these initial hurdles are overcome, and members and top level officers have some basic shared vision, shared leadership (and real collegiality) must be established – it is no good bringing together two districts without real joint leadership, because managing two big silos is no more efficient than running two separate organisations. Other stakeholders need to be brought along – existing partners and local communities must be communicated with extremely well, emphasising that they are losing nothing, and gaining a stronger player for the public good. The staff of both organisations, who will inevitably sense threat, must be told straight whether and in what circumstances staff reductions are in the offing, and given the real benefits of pay and progression which can come from working for a bigger organisation.

As with any change programme, there must be clear opportunities for ‘quick wins’, demonstrating and building on success from the start (weeks, not months) – but beyond this, deleting a few vacant posts and cutting some duplicate management isn’t enough. To really show that this alternative to LGR can work, there must be a serious attempt at transformation, with the resources and organisation to deliver.

If these factors can all be put in place, there’s real potential – mainly, of course, for cost reduction, but also for performance improvement, business continuity, improved capacity, better recruitment and retention. All of these can be achieved while remaining closer to the community than any form of merger would allow, and without ‘who delivers the service’ changing as far as the public is concerned.

At Sector Projects, we’ve seen this approach succeed, and we have seen it fail. We know the issues. Some potential partner organisations are simply not going to be able to get alignment at the political and managerial level, and for some the benefits are so clearly one-sided that partnership is never going to happen. But for those that sense an opportunity, it should be taken. Building alliances between districts is not simply a knee-jerk reaction to the threat of merger into the county, nor is it about delivering the government’s agenda, though it ticks the box for shared services. In reality, this is about delivering your own agenda – self determination is the key outcome. Districts are, of course, wise to their own strengths and their own limitations. Sharing capacity and making savings while doing so can overcome many of the limitations without significantly undermining the strengths.

Our most recent experience has been scoping the potential savings and risks for Staffordshire Moorlands DC, who have now entered into a groundbreaking Strategic Alliance with High Peak BC , cross-county and cross-region, sharing a Chief Executive. Both councils recognise the importance of a clear concordat setting out their approach and a realisable action plan. But most importantly, they are putting in place real, visible leadership to drive change.

How the counties respond to this innovation will be very important. This is clearly not about ‘secession’ from the threat of LGR. Instead, it is about meeting the agenda in a different way, without closing off other avenues. One thing is certain. If this innovation is successful, it will generate real further opportunities for progressive changes in how local government is delivered.

An article written for Sector’s CityWatch newsletter to our clients…

Ben Taylor, Sector Projects’ expert in Lean Transformations, BPR, Organisational Development and TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) provides a guide to the latest transformation and cost reduction trends – without any Japanese words. It seems that the current hot topic in local government, along with continued, and growing, pressures on budgets, is ‘Lean Six Sigma’. This process improvement approach, which has been described as ‘TQM on steroids’ (do you remember Total Quality Management?) is in fact a fusion of both Japanese and American approaches to process improvement. There are good reasons why it is so popular, and important opportunities – and risks – for local government in general, and finance in particular.

What is Six Sigma?

Lean Six Sigma is actually a cross-Pacific merger of several insights into how organisations work and can be improved, two of which, according to some, represent conflicting ways of thinking about management.

1) Mass production; command and control. This is the mentality behind performance management, performance-related pay, BVPIs, shared services, and ‘economies of scale’. Many would say that Western management as a profession has developed based upon the lessons drawn from attempts to replicate Ford’s success. Management accounting, too, is based on the division of responsibility and creation of accoutantability by results; 2) The business process as a system. The principle here is that anything which generates value to an organisation is the result of a business process; a series of inter-dependent activities. This is of course fundamental to the whole range of process improvement initiatives (BPR, BPI etc);

3) Statistical analysis of processes. This is the study of the results of a process or an activity in order to gain insight into what interventions will be most effective. Statistical Process Control (SPC) was one of the first of the recognised business improvement approaches; because of its focus on generating the ‘right’ result (usually defined as meeting a specification), SPC is most often encountered in the context of quality.

4) The organisation as a system. ‘Systems thinking’ is the understanding of a system as a whole, and the inter-relationship between different parts. It’s the approach behind the Children’s Trusts agenda (‘prevention rather than cure’), and when applied to organisations, can explain why the behaviour of individuals tends to be influenced more by their role in the system than by anything else.

Toyota

The phrase ‘Lean’ was coined by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers James Womack and Daniel Jones in ‘The Machine That Changed the World’, their analysis of the way in which Toyota had built an incredibly efficient, effective, and high quality manufacturing capability. This ‘Toyota Production System’ (TPS) is largely credited to Taiichi Ohno, who was inspired both by a visit to a Ford factory in the US, and the American statistical process control and systems thinking specialists who were let loose in Japan to help with reconstruction after the Second World War. The original ‘Lean’ in the TPS really demonstrates an alternative to ‘command and control’, with a strong focus on the business process as a system, but also elements of the other two insights. It was also, by the way, the origins of that other famous 80’s initiative ‘Just In Time’ (JIT), and a host of other approaches.

Quality and Six Sigma

Meanwhile, Total Quality Management developed, with an emphasis on systems thinking and some statistical analysis. When this was ‘beefed up’ with some stronger statistical analysis, and positioned to be more acceptable to command and control management approaches (with most of the systems thinking removed), it effectively became Six Sigma. This created a large business impact (and an even greater impact on stock market valuations) for the first companies that embraced it, particularly GE and Motorola.

The name, by the way, refers to statistical analysis of the variation of a set of results from a desired result; the goal is to move the average result closer to the desired result and/or reduce the amount of variation. ‘Six sigma quality’ means that fewer than 3.4 results of a process per million are of unacceptable quality – though the mathematical and statistical validity of this is disputed.

The merger of the two

Both Lean and Six Sigma have been used to good and bad effect in production and in services. They now form highly codified sets of tools, often taught and used without any of the original insights that made them useful. They form something of a religion for their adherents, who insist that there is ‘one true way’ to efficient organisations.

‘Lean Six Sigma’ is the logical end result of this progression. Bolting together the tools of both approaches, it purports to offer the big impact and processing speed of Lean with the fine tuning, high quality, and efficiency of Six Sigma.

What it means for us

What does this mean for local government, and what does it mean for you? Well, there are proponents of various flavours of Lean, Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma competing for the right to reduce your costs and improve your processes. Many of them have achieved excellent results and they will all claim to have done so. The ODPM, as was, even carried out a study which showed real, tangible results (‘A systematic approach to service improvement’, September 2005 at http://www.communities.gov.uk/index.asp?id=1165574)

Those consultants who completely embrace ‘command and control’ management tend to get most of the work. They will take a tightly scoped area and reduce the costs significantly, though they might upset a few staff in the process. They are the type of consultants who are all tools and no insight, dogmatic clones who will turn up in your office, parachute in fifty men in suits, set up a ‘PMO’ (programme management office), and say ‘here’s the solution, now what was your problem?’ Those who completely reject command and control and embrace systems thinking are less likely to be around. The cliché here is a guy with a beard and sandals rolls up and sits around for a month, ‘absorbing the vibes’, then says ‘that’s what you think your problem is… but maybe it’s something deeper?’ Either way, trying to absorb these approaches and apply them sensibly to local government can feel a bit like being taught to drive by Nigel Mansell – potentially very rewarding, if only it wasn’t so dangerous and you had the time to focus completely on it and ignore everything else.

Opportunities and risks

It seems that both elements of Lean Six Sigma, whichever code name they are operating under, are destined to spread widely across local government. The opportunity is huge. It really is possible to reduce running costs significantly when this stuff is done well. If you are willing to embrace some changes in management thinking (and the rest of the management team is too), you can develop an organisation which learns and improves as it goes along, with frontline staff empowered to do sensible things, and managers working to support them by constantly improving the system. Most importantly, you can show that the quality of services you deliver, and the results they generate, can be improved at the same time as costs are reduced.

The risks are significant as well. You can alienate staff from the organisation and from the very approaches they need to improve their job satisfaction and the services they are delivering. You can waste money on improvement initiatives which don’t deliver, and then have to revert to the old, unpopular cuts approach. To avoid the risks, it is important to get some expertise on the inside, to experiment with applying the approaches, to be clear as to the extent to which you just want tools, sensibly applied, and the extent to which you want to change your management systems, and your thinking… and of course, not to be blinded by the science of these constantly proliferating approaches. So, as time goes on and these venerable but worthwhile initiatives continue pupping and whelping, what is the next initiative or piece of jargon to look out for? Well, my money is on ‘BPM’, business process management. BPM can encompass ‘all of the above’, but is primarily concerned with selling you software – automating the processes, or at least the management of them, and therefore has a strong connection with current approaches to performance management. It’s big in the States and in multi-nationals, usually a sure sign that some enterprising business development manager will try to make it the next ‘must-have’ for local government in the near future. We may also see ‘SPC’, or statistical process control, make a resurgence, free of its current Six Sigma home, and already there are signs that ‘DMAIC’ (the core Six Sigma improvement methodology), is being touted as an ‘alternative’ to Six Sigma. It will never end!

For a free jargon consultation – or alternatively, a jargon-free chat how we can help with efficiency programmes – please contact Ben Taylor at Sector Projects, on 079 3131 7230 or btaylor@sector-group.com

You can also connect with Ben (he’s very modern) at www.linkedin.com/in/antlerboy

 

Continued from http://breakingtheshell.blog.com/3094020/, part 1 at http://breakingtheshell.blog.com/3093874/

 

In our final speed surgery session, we got into the nitty-gritty of community engagement (should we use the term ‘nitty-gritty’? I’m not sure – see http://shorterlink.com/?EA0YNX, http://shorterlink.com/?HXIEPL, http://shorterlink.com/?9TUP3Z for the beginnings of an interesting debate, though sadly nobody seems to have got to the bottom of it!)

 

First up, how you develop ‘community profiles’ – a sketch of your community in order to tailor services. We do a lot of customer segmentation work for the public sector, so this is a subject I’ll be returning to on the blog in more detail.

 

Then, the terms of reference for management boards that involve members of the public. Many libraries getting Big Lottery Funds from the Community Libraries Programme are introducing these, and South Gloucestershire have developed a set of terms of reference that are being widely copied. But they, like many others, are worried about what happens when the public want to make decisions which go against their professional judgement. How do you draw the lines? How do you select members of the public for the groups? What will politicians say about it?

 

I have to say that I suspect that while the symptom might come up in terms of management boards, the root cause of the problem is elsewhere – it seems that if you are (despite having worked on community engagement for some time) having understandable nerves about handing over ‘power’, there’s something not yet firm or developed enough in the relationships with the community. To be discussed…

 

Thirdly, an interesting debate on getting staff to work differently – even introducing volunteer staff for the first time, they immediately go to the real basics – where will they put their bags? Where will they eat lunch? Where will they sit when we disappear into our little staff room for a tea break? These are sometimes people who have been working definitely inside their comfort zones for twenty or thirty years – and there are also long term problems with management and supervision structures.

 

A few suggestions the group came up with:

• Ensure there’s a clear template for the new role you want them to move to.
• Consider a rotation system (Dublin public libraries apparently move staff to new posts after a maximum of two years, and Sandwell and Dudley have introduced something similar) – Redbridge have just shifted most staff around, and Bristol have gone through a re-organisation and chose NOT to put a few people in the ‘obvious’ jobs. Clearly this is harder in rural counties – and there are issues about losing community trust with individuals built up over a long period – but worth considering.
• Certainly, building the expectation that change is now part of the furniture – get them thinking that the change now will be a prelude to future changes – roles are likely to change every few years just in the nature of things.

Finally, we talked about the excitement of libraries – how we can easily lose site of why libraries are so great, because it’s so obvious. Books for free – what’s not to like? One library is planning next year to launch an April Fool’s in the local press: ‘Borrow One Book, Get One Free’.

 

Dear millions of excited readers
I’m now ’soft launching’ this blog after months of manana-ing, but haven’t quite cracked the appearance! So please do bear with me as I get the format sorted out (blog.com doesn’t seem to be the easiest thing to use).
All comments are welcome at blog [at] breakingtheshell.com.
Ben Taylor