Solace in togetherness, recombination and collaboration. Weeknotes S5, Eps 4
One
One
Being Present
The early part of the week was spent getting in some planning time for the SOLACE Summit for those not looped in this is the yearly event for Local Government senior leaders and broader membership to come together to network, learn and decompress from the frantic world of public services in the 21st century.
This is our first time as a re branded TPX impact as we were previously present in our legacy companies such as Futuregov, Foundry4 and Ameo.
This was an overarching theme that I wanted to take to the summit as reestablishing in our colleagues and partners minds that we were still the same passionate, agile teams just under a different name and with greater reach and capabilities than previously too. This is so important in local government, as the reputation of excellence is a core tenet of being able to partner with the sector on its most complex and wicked challenges and something we take incredibly seriously.
Apart from ensuring continuity of presence with the rebrand I was also really keen to chat with colleagues and friends in the sector, my Solace family and upgrade my understanding of the areas that they are focussing on as we enter what will be an difficult winter for the sector.
One of the powerful things that I have learned from switching to an organisation that delivers innovation across central, health and local government and works across such a wide range of councils, is the breadth of knowledge, experience and innovation we have to share and build from in different settings.
From adult and children's social care to planning and housing, from community engagement to full stack data and digital transformation, from local government reorganisation to transforming SEND provision and energy and net zero. We have been working to co design future public services for over a decade and the opportunity for us to pull these experiences and scale or replicate for new challenges is incredibly powerful.
In addition being part of conversation at these events (my first on the supply side) enables our (and other passionate change-makers) experience to help externalise joint problems and solutions and throw them into the open for recombination and replication. This can be game changing when councils come together to collaborate and share innovation to both improve outcomes and reduce the cost of failure demand.
Two
The overbearing shadow of crisis
The Cost of Living was an obvious overarching theme of the summit especially on the back of the economic chaos catalysed by the end of September mini budget and foreseeable difficult winter ahead for many.
Jen was on an incredible panel on leadership through difficult times and hearing from Matt, Kath, Catherine and Simon was a fantastic insight on front line accountability.
We ran a really great live panel podcast with our partners Local Government Chronicle which will be available for download shortly (watch this space). I was fortunate enough to be part of the discussion with Deven, Kersten and Sarah, expertly chaired by my colleague Thomas.
Themes we covered
Defining the problem:
For the country, For our places, For our residents, For our organisations, For our staff
Exploring what we can do: we discussed examples around:
- Roles councils can play in a place
- Using data
- Changing how we deliver services
- Different approaches to leadership
- Economic growth and working within the private sector
- Wellbeing and culture
- Capacity, capabilities and skills — depleted from moving from one crisis to another.
- Much of the preventative or more proactive areas of councils have been lost — we discovered the depth of this with covid (data — who is slipping through gaps/not claiming benefits, accessing support)
- There are definitely areas to explore; Use of data only one example but often very poor use of data horizontally across vertical silos is an area of opportunity to address straight away
- Use of reserve budgets (only finite) and these costs are uncertain — example of unknown impact of CoL on poverty. Further transformation funding must identify a systems approach to reform not just direct revenue costs but indirect (failure demand too)
- Loss of council tax and business rates, forecasting council tax, increased benefits, increased pressure on temp accommodation costs, demand increases in stretched areas such as ASC/CSC, schools as 4th emergency service
Obviously this is just a snapshot and the hour was filled with discourse you can grab on the pod next week. However I am pulling together a more granular piece on specific areas of challenge that are within our gift to re imagine so keep tuned to the TPX socials as it will go out on our insights page.
Three
Reflections
I love this event, it’s one of my favourites in the LG event calendar (obvs slightly biased but it always feels like a family there).
It was also great that so many people showed real leadership by being present; it would be easy to put heads down and internalise with all the issues we are facing in the sector but its even more crucial that we are sharing, collaborating and externalising during times of challenge as this will be the only way we can collective serve each other and our communities to build resilience.
Big shout to our international colleagues in this context too as we had exec reps fro US, Europe and New Zealand and a group of us managed including Peter, Karen, Sanchia and Ray managed to get around a table for an hour to discuss how we can catalyse international relationships around focused global issues facing local government. More on this as we develop and solidify these partnerships.
Enlightening, Entertaining and Exhausting….
Now time to download and decompress to get fresh for follow ups on some of the exciting and urgent conversations and ensure we use the learning and energy whilst its fresh in minds to mitigate some of the unquestionable winter challenges we collectively face.
If i didn’t get round to saying hi, so sorry, shout me or maybe we can hook up at the rescheduled LGC Summit.