Weeknotes S5, Eps2 Growth, Devolution and Bookclub
A couple of things I wanted to reflect on this week; one of them was that it’s really tricky at the moment to get time to get these…
A couple of things I wanted to reflect on this week; one of them was that it’s really tricky at the moment to get time to get these weeknotes in.
It’s been a really super busy spring so I apologise for the intermittent writing (although i do try to ad hoc shout about stuff on twitter) anyway let’s try and get to it as you have a bit more time set aside for the staff an hour.
One
Really really interesting week; lots of work going on around developing thinking around the new county deals that will be taking place through the levelling up paper and how we can support this.
WE have huge collective experience in the devolution and OD space from the Ameo (now part of our TPX group) work led by Mike D over the last 10 years, through personal experience in officer roles across a number of teams, and the political and senior coaching work in various unitary and CA programmes Claire H’s team have supported.
Our USP is not just the deals and devolution stuff alone but really that moment organisations find themselves in on day two trying to get to grips with how you organise yourselves to actually deliver the benefits of that devolution. It’s been a mixed bag up to now if we’re brutally honest and my absolute die hard belief from seeing how this plays out at the coal face is that it is fundamental that devolution has to be supported by the necessary skills and capacity to align an appropriate organisational (likely multi organisational/political) long term change programme with a 21st century mindset; agile and systems led whilst underpinned by a resilient digital architecture.
So really starting to get a thinking in place right now (watch this space local gov devo nerds) around this from both organisational and a digital transformation perspective. Will be more to come later this summer.
Two
Tying into the heme of effective devolution, we had a really good panel discussion this week through the Institute of Economic Development. Thanks to super panel members Owen, Zoe and Joe.
The premise was around GDP and how it is not an effective measure of economic health in developed countries (those of us ED geeks who have been banging on about this for a long time). The conversation in relation to other global challenges is timely and i wanted to keep it broad and open as a panel so we could start to think about the whole systems view.
It seems a really apt time to get some proper leverage here (we hope) with the acute issues in our economy currently around cost of living/inflation and growing discontentment with the huge disparity of wealth we continue to see.This on the back of Covid I think puts this front and centre of peoples minds of peoples minds.
The danger is in these circumstances, especially with the current government is to be knee-jerk, and move us away from any positive inclusive growth and measures being brought (clean energy etc) to combat climate change in favour of chasing the short term GDP.
We have to think long term economically with environmental sustainability and climate change. A great point from Owen on the panel was the risk of up to 200,000 UK low lying homes and associated livelihoods being lost in the forthcoming 20 years due to sea level rise this is catastrophic to the economy as well as being a horrific reality for those affected.
Three
Getting ready for the Multiplied book launch.
This is a great reflection for those working on public sector over the last few years and we are really lucky to have so much knowledge to pull on in this space . The book — get a copy here if you haven’t already really unpacks some of the challenges and opportunities we have in developing our public institutions for the 21st century both from a policy and delivery perspective.
We have a launch coming up so working with the team to try and get this organised has been great. Don’t worry if you aren’t currently on the invite list we will be running some more sessions around the country after the summer holidays, and also starting up a book club (Linda’s awesome plan) to unpack some of the key themes and chapters so we can really progress sharing and collaborating in approaches to these challenges.
Keep tuned for more
Friday is here and the sun is shining so wishing you all a happy weekend :-)