Breaking the Shell

Continued from http://breakingtheshell.blog.com/3093909/, part 1 at http://breakingtheshell.blog.com/3093874/

 

Part of our discussion on community engagement led me to trot out a couple of diagrams I often use as I find them really important.

 

The first shows the artificial divides we place between the customer, the service, and management. The second shows how we look for customer insight in all the wrong places – anywhere but where the customer already interacts with our service

Customer world, service world, management world.pps

Continuing from part 1 (http://breakingtheshell.blog.com/3093874/)

 

The major needs identified by participants in our first speed seminar were:

 

• A ‘Quality Mark’ for community engagement – beginner, intermediate and advanced to reflect levels of maturity
• SCL Executive to have a member of the public on the board!
• Develop our home reader service – volunteers
• Liberating the space – making library space a community resource
• Skills and sustainability
• Conflicts between existing narrow and new wider groups in the community engaged by libraries
• Workforce development – would sign up for training!
• Learn from local museums – they achieve great things, great engagement with tiny collections compared to libraries

 

But by far the biggest issue was measuring and proving value:

• VFM/impact measures – prove value – measure and demonstrate.
• Linking to social service agendas (two participants), and build on their engagement expertise.
• Show contribution to agendas – prove it and get the glory!
• Measures for community engagement and likely impact
• Impact – tangible evidence

 

This led me to think that there are possibly four types of measures:

 

• use and outputs – the standard footfall, use, membership etc – I don’t believe there will be many libraries doing great engagement unless they are getting people through the door

• perceptions – get out there and ask, and measure. The new national PIs for local government are highly perception and quality-of-life focused (see below).
  

• economic/external analysis – a bit tougher and more expensive, but you can do it – what’s the real impact? The next two years of the MLA CLP research (which we hope to be bidding for in due course) will at the very least determine the feasibility of this. However given the level of development and likely impact, most libraries are going to need to keep working before they are making a really successful visible impact.
  

• hijack other agendas – like the ‘be political’ point above, find what’s sexy in your local authority, and make sure you can contribute, then deliver, and prove it!
  

The last point highlights how measures link to method, as in our report (http://MLACLP.notlong.com) – until you know clearly what you are trying to achieve, and have some base for thinking that particular actions should achieve it, you will find it hard to measure.

 

Penultimately, look at the national performance indicators (http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/localgovernment/nationalindicator). The first block, Stronger communities, has a load which are great for community engagement:

• NI 1 % of people who believe people from different backgrounds get on well together in their local area
  
• NI 2 % of people who feel that they belong to their neighbourhood
  
• NI 3 Civic participation in the local area
  
• NI 4 % of people who feel they can influence decisions in their locality
  
• NI 5 Overall/general satisfaction with local area
  
• NI 6 Participation in regular volunteering
  
• NI 7 Environment for a thriving third sector
  
• NI 9 Use of public libraries
  
• NI 11 Engagement in the arts
  
• NI 13 Migrants English language skills and knowledge
  

There are a bunch more in the health and education sections.

 

Perhaps most importantly though, be proactive and present your own evidence – measure what you think is important and put it forward – you can’t lose and then won’t be on the defensive.

 

At the Society of Chief Librarians’ annual seminar – ‘The New Third Place: Libraries as the heartbeat of the community”. This follows on from some interesting research we did on the Big Lottery Fund Community Library programme (report at http://MLACLP.notlong.com).

Warwick University in Coventry seems lovely in the spring sun! Our first speed surgery session went really well with large numbers of attendees staying for the whole hour and a half (not so speedy then), and getting into a number of topics outlined below. We then got a bonus smaller session towards the end.

 

The first question was a good one and got the ball rolling – is community engagement new for libraries, or is this just what community librarians were doing back in the 70s? Sarah Wilkie from the MLA responded pretty sharply to that one, pointing out that the key difference is rather than community consultation being ‘part’ of a project lifecycle, engagement follows through the whole lifecycle (and indeed creates a loop to future projects). Slide 7 of David Potts’ presentation  (See http://www.mla.gov.uk/resources/assets//C/Community_Engagement_Regional_Workshops_10384.ppt on page http://www.mla.gov.uk/programmes/framework/framework_programmes/Community_Engagement_resources). Later on, we added the point that community engagement now is purposive – dedicated to some determined goal or end, and ongoing rather than ad hoc.

 

Other issues we discussed:

• There’s a continuum of engagement for libraries, from consultation through book selection to volunteering, management, ownership etc (cf Arnstein’s Ladder of Participation http://www.designingforcivilsociety.org/2004/11/ladder_of_parti.html)

 

• ‘Professional’ community engagement plus ‘professional’ customer engagement – we now have community building professionals, need to use their expertise, and also professionals on segmentation, targeting, service design etc from retail and service industries. Reflecting on this, I think in our report we talked about using ‘customer engagement’ tools to achieve ‘community engagement’ ends.

 

• Expectation-reality gap – we love to talk about high-falutin’ things in the library world, but then often go back to services where the carpets need changing, the staff put off customers, the lighting and whole experience is poor… need to crack the basics first! Fi Emberton of Embervision, http://www.embervision.cc/, one of our friends, has been revolutionising the attitudes of staff across the country with a focus on making the ‘retail experience’ of libraries really positive.

 

• Community is diverse – you’ve got to sell the vision. While you don’t do community engagement to get one point of view (you get diversity, and that’s the point! Our friend Kevin Harris at http://www.local-level.org.uk/ is very good on this), you do need to use art and skill to develop a vision that has something for everyone from this diversity.

 

• Shared problems unite divided communities – use stealth to bring people together. There is a good example from Bury on the MLA resource site linked above.

 

• Meeting targets stops outreach. While working towards simplistic issue, membership and footfall targets, other things can fall by the wayside.

 

• If a professional librarian is for anything, it is for creating an inclusive public space (with a roof!).

 

• Zoning of space and time. Appeal to all by finding spaces and times that suit the different segments of your community (see our report for more on this).

 

• It’s the staff – attitude is critical… the ‘library pause’, that microsecond the librarian waits when you approach their desk before attending to you, is what makes you feel that you’re an interruption to their day!

 

• Use other expertise – the professionalisation of regeneration and community development means there are people out there who know how to do this! We, The Research Unit, and other partners and associates, are available

 

• Councils and public sector want a community focus, service point, or hub – libraries could be it (extended schools, children’s centres are making the running).

• Be political – jump on bandwagons, champion sexy agendas, put your case!

Some specific things that people are working on:

• Regeneration etc – targeting individuals and families
• Gloucestershire – work on partnering with social services
• Northamptonshire – six hundred Friends, Investors in Volunteers

More in the next post!

 

Bit of a mouthful, eh? I spent the afternoon at this conference on UK public sector organisations working together to provide services in a joined-up way. (www.idea-foss.org.uk) It was a bit like a get-together with old friends for me, and I spent most of the time chatting with people I know when I should have been networking and trying to get new clients!

It was good to see Siobhan Coughlan of the IDeA - the mastermind behind the conference (who used to be the eGovernment Councillor at Hammersmith & Fulham back when I was eGovernment Manager), Stephen Parry of SeeBusinessDifferently, lean guru who I recommended as the after dinner speaker, Jason Price of Price Perrott limited who’s working with us on a review of Southwark’s Customer Service Centre, Yvonne Parish who’s our client at Hackney where we are working on the Public Service Promise - co-location of services with partners, and a bunch of customer services people from Staffordshire Moorlands, another client.

There were many more names I recognised on the conference list, but I don’t think they were all there.

It was a good event, particularly the ’speed surgery’ sessions where people got the chance to sample most of the fifteen workshop sessions which will be the main part of the conference tomorrow. But - and I may be a bit hackneyed now - nobody seemed to be saying anything new or exciting, particularly not the politicians. It is as though ‘transformational government’ in the UK has passed through the exciting phase and is now just about getting on with it, even though the same opportunities and obstacles are more or less in place as when I was first involved almost ten years ago. Or perhaps because the opportunities and the obstacles are still largely the same.

What does depress me is that it is still largely IT led, as evidenced by the high number of software companies exhibiting and sponsoring. I was pleased that Sector Projects, with our humble insert into the programme, were the only true consultancy involved in supporting the event, along with the IT bunch and a number of councils boosting their image.

Also at the conference were Camilla and Kirsty from Southwark’s Local Service Delivery Project. We spent the morning together at a workshop they ran with senior managers, at which I presented on the customer service strategy. Really interesting to see another council getting focused on rational provision of face-to-face services, and matching what’s offered to local need. Again, I was taken back I think seven or so years to running similar workshops at Hammersmith and Fulham - a case of plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

The IDeA is an interesting organisation. When launch, I thought ‘the Improvement and Development Agency for local government - I’ve got to be a part of that’! I even applied for a job back in the day. But I’m glad I’m a private sector consultant, because I think working for the IDeA would be as frustrating as working for a council. So many good ideas and so much opportunity to improve, but so little real power and influence to make things happen. Progress comes so slowly that it is only looking back that we can see that things really have changed, and so I suppose what marked the conference out was a mingling of central and local government folk and some degree of mutual respect and joint working. At lunch they also held a joint meeting of the central and local ‘Delivery Councils’, representative boards charged with taking forward the ‘transformational government agenda’ in central and local government respectively. That certainly wouldn’t have happened ten years ago.

Anyway, I’ll leave the ‘FOSS’ conference to my colleagues tomorrow as I’m off to the Society of Chief Librarians annual seminar in Coventry, which we are sponsoring. This time we are running one of the ’speed surgeries’ on our work on libraries and community engagement (http://MLACLP.notlong.com) so I expect some heated debate.

Hello everyone

I’m a public sector consultant in the UK with wide-ranging interests which will be covered by this blog: lean, six sigma, systems thinking, public sector reform, change management, diversity, community engagement, libraries, ‘transformation’, organisational development etc…

I work for Sector Projects, high quality strategic advisers to public service organisations primarily, and will be telling you more about what we do over time.

If you want to know more about me, go to www.linkedin.com/in/antlerboy 
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Best wishes
Ben