How do you deliver relational services within a rigid corporate hierarchy?

In this episode, Joe sits down with Andrew Rostom, Head of Change (Corporate) at Haringey Council, where he shares his 20 year journey as a pioneer of public service transformation. Andrew opens up about the challenges and rewards of creating relational services that truly respond to community needs. He discusses innovative approaches like agile methods and human-centred design, and how these have helped build more responsive and effective public services.

What you’ll learn:

• How building relational services can transform the way we support communities
• The importance of empowering frontline staff to solve real problems
• Why prototyping and learning from failure can lead to breakthrough solutions
• How to tackle complex, multi-departmental issues with creativity and resilience

Whether you’re working in the public sector or looking for inspiration on leading change in complex environments, this conversation is packed with insights and practical advice.

Stay connected:

• Follow Joe on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/joseph-badman
• Read the latest chapters from our upcoming book: https://relationalservicedesign.com
• Master the methodology: https://basistraining.co.uk/
• Partner with us: https://basis.co.uk

You've probably seen over the last few months that we are writing a book, a book that tries to consolidate the methods that are most effective at enabling change in the context of hard, messy problems.

As part of writing that book, we're having some conversations with some of our clients, people that we work with that I consider to be doing really pioneering work in this space. And this afternoon, Andrew Rostom, who works at Haringay, has been kind enough to come and chat to me. So, Andrew, thanks for coming.

Joe, always a pleasure, never a chore. Thanks for having me.

So we've known each other for a little while now, maybe, I don't know, maybe perhaps even six, seven years, something like that. But I don't know what your trajectory has been.

I know you've been in Haringey for a long time, but can you say a little bit about where you are now and what's the path been to getting to that point?

Yeah, sure. So it's probably better if I start the other way around.

So I was a footballer growing up and like most kind of footballers at that age, all I could think about was kind of, you know, goals, goals, goals. And I actually ended up at Charlton, which back then were pretty good. Now I kind of radar they're near here, if that's any relevance.

And that was great. And I was doing YTS there and it was all fine until it came to going to uni and my dad just said, no, go and do something properly. And.

And, you know, like most kids in my generation, you kind of did what your dad said. Right, right. So did the whole uni thing.

And then in my last year, I had to do a placement in project management, which is very, very interesting given where I've ended up. And I managed to blag my way into a placement with HSBC and First Direct.

And at the time, and this is just going to sound ancient now, but at the time there was no online or Internet or computer banking.

And the project was basically to launch the online banking in the uk, which, with something called a CD rom, I vaguely remember, sort of like, yeah, bit like tea coasters, and went there and just thought, wow, this just sounds so innovative. You know, I'm in. And I kind of learned what they were doing, which was kind of cutting edge at the time, and I thought, this is brilliant.

Worked on that project and it just kind of really opened up all sorts of avenues to me. So from there I went to Holland and worked in Amsterdam for a bank called ABN Ambro and pretty much did the same sort of thing.

And that's why I have a real affinity for Dennis, one of your colleagues, and I'm sure we'll come onto that later. Came back to the uk, did some consultancy and I thought, okay, I'm kind of getting a bit bored now with the kind of sales.

Sales, sales, finance, finance, finance. I want to try and do something a bit different. Heard about public sector.

Got an opportunity to work for a local council called Haringey and I thought, this sounds really good.

I can try and do something which makes a difference and hopefully I'll be able to do something that from a kind of rewarded perspective, gives me something different to what I've had before.

Yeah.

And it was really funny because when I was just leaving my company at the time, my chief executive said to me, one or two things is going to happen, right? You're going from private sector into public sector local government. You're going to start on a Monday.

By Friday you'll either be running out of there or by Friday you'll realize you're never going to leave. That was 20 years ago.

Wow.

I'm still here, I'm still there.

And I think what really has kind of kept me there is the first program I helped Haringey with was just after an incident around children social care, where unfortunately there was a tragic death that had occurred to a child in the borough and that led to national government reform.

I think it was the Chilcot Report with some legislation which pretty much mandated that every local council from that point forward had to move away from paper records for children in social care onto systems and platforms.

And I was brought in specifically with the purpose of working with the social care professionals because obviously they know their job, but I knew systems implementations and it was kind of, you know, can we develop some sort of marriage together where I can work with them and hopefully help them to not only be compliant, but, you know, ultimately this is about keeping children safe. And that for me was something that felt like had real purpose to it and something I'd never had previously before.

And it was the opportunity to actually build a team of professional people who had never really delivered change before, but absolutely were committed to doing it and actually more poignantly felt really let down by what happened in the organisation. Wanted to do the best for the children's and families that they look after, but just didn't really quite know how to do that.

Yeah.

You know, in this kind of classic dichotomy between kind of what and how is something I think that will play out in our conversation later, but worked with them. That program went for kind of four years.

And I think off the back of that, I then kind of inherited a bit of a label for, okay, if we need to do change, let's see where Andrew can kind of help. And in that time, I've kind of worked my way all around the organization and I've ended up now as kind of the head of corporate change in Haringey.

And effectively, what that means is for all the things that we're trying to do, whether it's trying to be more efficient around our finances or try and provide better experiences for residents and communities, I'm probably somewhere in the middle of that with a team of people trying to get stuff done.

Yeah, super interesting. I didn't know these started out in, in the banking sector.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, that could, that couldn't be more different to working, working on a children's social care project.

You're telling me.

So most people that come into contact with us do so because they're, they're interested in different ways of working, perhaps more agile ways of working, human centered design, all of that kind of stuff. Maybe they're already coloring outside the lines a little bit in their current projects.

How did you start to get interested in that part of the world and that kind of work?

Yeah, that's a really interesting question, actually, because my experience in local government has been so dependent on the people I've been working with and the people I've been working for. And I've worked with some really kind of great leaders in the past.

Some of them have had absolutely zero appetite for doing things differently, being alternative, taking risks. One or two of them really have, I'd call them kind of pioneers.

And I think about 4 years ago I was very fortunate to work for a director who probably very selfishly had been told by the chief exec, we need to be innovative. No idea what that means, but we just need to be innovative, go and find a way to make us be innovative.

And you know, as things work in big organizations, that kind of filter its way down to me. So he said, come on, Andrew, we've got to find a way to just kind of grasp this innovation thing, right? What do you mean by innovation?

Well, you know, why don't you go and look at what kind of people are doing in the sector and kind of come back and talk to me. So I thought, brilliant, sounds great. I'm going to do that.

I'm interested in it anyway, so I'm going to kind of look around so I Worked through my network.

There was a guy called Dan Cobley at the time who I knew through a mutual friend and he was working at Google and he invited me down to kind of Google and Google X to kind of see what they were doing. And I have to say, it just kind of blew my mind.

Just, just the mindset that they have there, which was so far removed to how we work in local government.

Because in Google X what they're trying to do is basically look at a challenge or an opportunity and try and come up with a solution that is kind of tenfold what I guess in a traditional setting you try and aim for. And if you look at the kind of techniques that they use, it was all centered around kind of Agile and Sprint and Scrum.

And initially I thought, okay, this won't work in the public sector.

Then I did my research and I kind of found out that, oh, okay, there's a company called Basis here and they are badging themselves as doing kind of Agile and Sprint for public service. And I thought, brilliant. And then when I looked up, he was running the course. I saw Dennis and I'd met Dennis about 10 years ago.

Oh, no way.

Yeah, on a. On something called, I think it's still going now, the Public Service Transformation Academy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I did that years ago and Dennis was there and I don't mind telling him this now, I think I've told him this many times, but it was a five day course and he'd come in for day two, which was about systems change. And his session just absolutely eclipsed the other sessions. Right. And the subject wasn't even better, it's just the delivery.

And again, it's this wonderful thing about. It's not just about the what in the work we do, it's how you do it, it's how you deliver it. And he literally held the room for that entire day.

And again, it was all about thinking about alternative ways to kind of deliver and manage change. So the minute I found out that he was involved, I thought, right, sign me up. And I actually paid for it in my own money.

No way.

Because I was so adamant I wanted to go. And I think it was held fairly near here, south of the river. Yeah, it was in the London School for something.

Observatory, I think was in the British Interplanetary Society.

There you go.

My memory's not bad. Yeah, Observatory Planetary. I knew there was an array in there, but yeah, we went there. And again, honestly, best course I've ever done in my life.

Okay. Best course I'm 49 now. I don't look it. 49 Now. And in all those years, best. Best course I ever did. And I think I remember coming out of that course.

And you got to remember up until that point, I was a ppm, professional prince to apm, msp, blah, blah, blah.

This is sacrilege, then, all this stuff, Right?

Absolutely.

And I remember I was in the pub and there was a fellow colleague who'd been with me on the course, and I've got a tattoo on my arm and we were getting into kind of religion, and I said, look, I'm not going to get too heavy, but, yeah, I am religious. And I said, you know what she said to me? Describe how you're feeling after this course. And I actually quoted.

I've never quoted a Bible verse in my life, I never will again. But actually said, John, chapter nine, verse 25, where I was once blind, now I can see. Because this is how profound this course has been for me.

It's literally opened up my eyes and shown me that for the last 10, 15 years, I've literally been trying to operate with one hand behind my back.

Yeah, yeah.

And now it's not like I'm going to just use the other hand. I've got two hands. I've got two hands. I've got another way.

So when all these directors and people are saying to me, right, we need to think about this, and I've just been trying to do this very kind of traditional kind of approach and mindset to how we're going to tackle some of the challenges we've got. I've now got this other way that I just. I just knew is going to help us with some of the things that we haven't been able to crack yet. Yeah.

I almost don't know what I thought for a moment you were going to say that you'd had part of the course tattooed your arm, I thought, that is a terrible decision.

That would have to be some course.

Right. That is. I mean, that's some. Some awakening. I mean, I had a similar experience with Dennis, actually.

Yeah, we're going to have to cut all this bit out because this is doing his ego far too many favors. But, yeah, I mean, I was. I was really struck by. I was really struck by the how side of the equation. So you start.

You started to talk about the difference between the what and the how, and I think that's a really interesting conversation that needs a whole bunch of unpacking and I don't think many people are having it. So tell me about that. Where's your head at with that?

Yeah, I think so.

Again, because of a lot of the work that we do, the whole thing I always say to my team is, you know, if we're lucky enough to be at the table, we have to be able to share with some of the senior people that we're working with what's the value that we bring. Because these people are the ones that have got the challenges.

These are the people who sometimes are up at night thinking, I really don't know how I'm going to do this. And also, by the way, the organization is telling me I've got to be collaborative. I've got to find a way of getting my team to kind of lead change.

You know, what does that mean? How do I do that?

And I think one of the things that Agile offers for leaders is just a different way for them to set out what the challenge or the opportunity is.

But then once they've articulated effectively the what, it empowers them to bring together a team of people which we can work with through facilitation or being kind of a scrum master, to really think about the how.

Yeah.

And what's so powerful about that is more often than not the people that you bring together probably going to be the people that are closest to that challenge or that issue or that problem. They will inevitably be the ones that can kind of come up with ideas and solutions to cracking it.

But what they probably don't have is the right space, the right environment, the time to kind of come together, to think outside of their departmental head or their kind of service head and just think about kind of what's the kind of common purpose here? What's the one thing we're trying to deliver? And that's where I think Agile for me was a bit of an epiphany.

Because every time people talk to us about how do we, you know, do we want to run a sprint? I say, absolutely. We need to come up with what's the question we think we're trying to answer.

And actually, even that isn't something that you can just simply get to. You probably need to spend that kind of first day bringing people together. We probably need to hear from you as a leader.

And actually this requires real, I'd say, adaptive leadership.

So where I've seen it work really well in my organization is being able to say to leaders, look, if you've got this challenge or problem, I think there's a way that we can help you.

I can't promise that we can, but I can absolutely guarantee you that you will find that this process will give you something that your previous processes haven't. And it's completely down to kind of your style. But actually it's.

If we're going to be bringing people into the room that are not necessarily part of your hierarchy, think about a way of endearing yourself to them.

And we used a really good technique which your colleagues Matt and Rebecca have helped us with something called kind of a fishbowl technique where we kind of put that leader in the middle and it's quite an intimate setting and you know, Matt or Rebecca or occasionally myself will kind of interview the person in a kind of safe way. And then you bring that team in a really kind of close circle around them.

And it's amazing how a different environment in a different setting and a different line of questioning can really start to endear that senior leader to a group of people. Because I think first and foremost most of the people in the room have never even seen the leader. Yeah, yeah. In that way.

Probably never heard them use the language that they use. And I think when you can see visibly that this is someone that's got a challenge and they are almost. It's a call to arms and I need you to help me.

So this is not. We've got a problem. This is what we need to do. You need to do this. I want to see a report by Da da da. No, no, no, no, no.

This is what my challenge is. And I'm relying on you to kind of come up with a way of helping me to kind of figure my way through this.

And I don't even know if there even is a solution.

Yeah, yeah. Sometimes there isn't. Right?

There isn't. But I'm going to trust the process. I'm going to trust the process and I'm going to trust you.

And we've almost taken it on one step whereby we say to the end of that first day we have. And it's a bit performative but actually it works. Couple of post its on the wall end of day one. You've heard the challenge.

We think we know where we're trying to get to by the end of this week. Are you in? Because actually this should be about choice. Okay. We're not in a dictatorship. Okay. We've brought you together.

We think that you can play a really valuable part in helping us overcome this challenge.

But it's really important that you've got a sense of purpose, that you kind of want to be here and there's Been a couple of occasions where a few people have said, you know what? Not for me, absolutely fine, we still involve them because we'll bring them in later in a week in a show and tell.

But by and large, most people, by the end of day one, think, you know what, I'm going to give this a go. Something has piqued my curiosity here, and this just feels like a different way of trying to deliver a really good outcome for people.

And actually there's something here that I think I can learn. And we found it has worked profoundly insofar as people need to kind of do it and learn it.

And the more that they do it, the more that they learn, the more that kind of confidence builds.

And certainly in our organization, what's been really interesting is going back to my visionary director at the time who said, let's go and be innovative. Once this started to gain really big traction, his next request to me was right, we need to scale it, we need to go big.

This needs to be kind of the way we do everything.

And I kind of resisted gently and said, look, my own personal view from seeing how this is working is let's go small, let's go organically, let's try and work with people that want to work with us rather than try and force on people. Because I think in six months, nine months, 12 months time, we won't have to be talking to people about working in a different way.

People will be talking themselves about it. And actually that's a much better place to be in if people themselves are kind of recommending and advocating. This is a way of working.

We're not knocking on doors, we're being invited into spaces 100%.

And this is an agile way of going about, introducing this way of working, isn't it? Absolutely, yeah. I couldn't, I couldn't have put that better myself.

We started to talk about messy problems, hard problems, where you don't know, maybe you don't even know what the question is, let alone what the answer is. And we started to talk about some of the conditions that you need to even get started on those problems.

Like a leader that is willing to say, oof, don't really know, need your help. What are some of the other conditions that need to be in place for progress to be made on those kinds of problems?

Things that happen in social care, things happen in housing, things that happen, you know, these really messy problems.

Yeah, I think local government's an interesting place right now because on one level it's very contradictory. We've got Big political ambitions. And within a kind of four year election cycle, you almost can see the kind of peaks and troughs between. Right.

Ambition is pretty much king and everything we're doing is around the political ambition and financially how we can afford it is kind of less relevant. And then all of a sudden when we're kind of mid political process, finances become kind of front and center.

So what we've tried to do is we've tried to work with a lot of our senior leaderships to just say, you know, it's really for you to tell us what you think the priority areas are. We can give you some frameworks or some tools to help you kind of define, prioritize an order.

But once you've done that, we need to think frankly about the way we're going to be able to kind of overcome some of those challenges. Some of them you can probably tackle through traditional methods and approaches and methodologies. And actually that's fine.

And if they're in hand, not to worry. But there will be some.

Where you've probably been going two, three, four times and you've talked about housing demand, you've talked about the problems in adult social care around demand and demand management. Actually demand is not the problem. How we manage our demand is probably where the challenges are.

And actually for those sorts of challenges, simply just trying to bring people together for an hour or an hour and a half, it's not going to work because people are unable to switch off from, I call it the day job, the noise, the emails and actually that's the method that we've been using up until this point. Yeah. Okay.

And if we are faced with similar sorts of problems which are probably being caused by similar sorts of methods and approaches, why do we think that those same methods and approaches are going to help us to kind of figure our way out of this? Yeah, we need to find something that's different. And I really make that point. It's different, it's not better, it's not worse, it's different.

And actually you won't know until you kind of give it a go.

And I think working with leaders who are willing, working with leaders who are willing to kind of take a risk, a lot of the work that we do, I'm sure it's no different. To you it's about relationships. Right?

100%.

And I think I'm fortunate because of the length of time I've been in my organization that I've got some good relationships with some good people and all I ask them to do is trust Me, trust the team, trust their team, but more importantly, trust the process. And I tell you what, that's really easily said. It's much harder done.

I cannot tell you the amount of times I've been talking to people about doing some sprints and we're kind of in the sprint planning phase and kind of think we've understood what the question is we're trying to answer and who are the people we kind of need in the room and how do we kind of do the format? And at the end of it, I'll get an email from said person saying, right, can you send me the plan? Can you send me the agenda? Can you send me the.

Can you. And I said, I can't. Yeah, I really can't really tell now. I can probably tell you what we're going to try and do on Monday. Yeah, and that's about it.

Beyond that, beyond that, you're gonna just need to trust the process. Oh, and by the way, on Monday morning, we're gonna want to kind of hear from you. Yeah, yeah.

And here's some things you might want to think about because actually, you have got just as big a part to play in this as kind of we in the team have, because, you know, throughout the week, we're going to need to be kind of checking in with you to make sure that basically what we're kind of coming up with isn't kind of too off piste, you know, if there are any red lines, kind of, what are they? But effectively, this isn't just kind of, you know, you turn up on a Monday, here's a challenge, guys. See you later. No, no, no, no, no.

We're going to be needing to kind of pull you in and out, you know, throughout the course of the week. So when we get to Friday, there's no massive surprises.

Hopefully what we've ended up with is something which is broadly where you were hoping, you know, kind of the team would get to.

Yeah, no, really, really helpful. What are some of the examples that you think of where actually, do you know what? We applied some of this stuff and it was really effective.

What are some of the examples you use?

Yeah, so I've got a good example, actually, about something we did about a year or two ago called the Connected Communities Program, which to this day I think quite a lot of people are incredibly proud about it, because effectively what we were trying to do, and I'm sure we're no different to other kind of public sector organizations, is even though we say we are there to support residents and communities and think about kind of what they need. The way that we are organized is not around need. It's around departments and teams and structures and silos.

And what was happening was we had lots and lots of challenges and issues where people were kind of coming to see us with multiple needs. But we were organized in a way that was effectively passing them from pillar to post. And we just knew it wasn't working. You knew it wasn't working.

The data was telling us it wasn't working, were telling us it wasn't working. The members were telling us it wasn't working. And you just look out the door and you could see the queues out of the libraries. This is not working.

So we needed to find a different way of trying to manage this. So we used an agile approach to kind of run a design workshop to think about how could we do something differently. But at the time, we had no money.

We had no money, we had no resources, we had absolutely nothing.

I did.

Apart from. Yeah, there you go, There you go. And I tell you what did I say? That necessity is the mother of all invention. Yeah, absolutely. So.

But what we did have is we had an assistant director of customer services who said, this is a big problem for me and I really need some help and anything you can do to help me, I'm open to it. So I thought, brilliant. You don't need to tell me twice. I took that as a mandate.

And what we came up with was a model to trial, something akin to, effectively a multidisciplinary team. That's the first difference. Service agnostic. Second difference, no threshold. Third difference.

So these are three very, very different features to how we are traditionally managing effectively, kind of our front door. Now, again, I go back to the point. We had no money, we had no people.

So I said to this person, do you have anywhere in this service center slash library that we could use to kind of effectively prop up a temporary team? Yeah, we've got a business lounge around there. Doesn't really get a lot of traffic, so we can use that. Brilliant.

Can't use it on a Monday, can't use it on a Wednesday, can't use on a Friday. Okay, so I can use it twice a week. Tuesday and Thursday. Right, brilliant. Okay, so we had a business lounge.

Then it was, right, well, we're going to need people to form this multidisciplinary team. And actually, why don't we see if there's anyone who'd like to volunteer to be part of a trial, part of an experiment.

And we did A quick call to arms and we got people in. So now we've got a place, we've got people. We ran a sprint to then design some of the kind of basic infrastructure we'd need.

So, you know, a kind of form for when people came in.

So like key lines or questions so we could kind of really figure out, you know, why they come to see us today and actually was there anything else that we could help them with? And then we kind of used that to help with the triage, to bring them into this kind of new space.

We were nicking chairs from around the place, you know, some plants, tried to make it look a bit, bit presentable. And we had a very expensive, not Excel spreadsheet, right, that we were using and that was our ERP system.

So that was managing who we were seeing, how long they were in for, how are we helping them.

And we literally ran this trial for about a month and after a month we brought everyone back together and we use our Excel spreadsheet to see how many people would seen and how many people would helped and whether it had a knock on effect to reducing contact into other parts of the organisation.

And what we also did, which was very different, was we tried to see at the first point of contact whether we'd help that person to the point where they didn't need to return to the council. And we asked them to fill in a kind of a short questionnaire.

And what we found just from doing that was the feedback from the residents that we were able to help in that way was this is the first time I've been able to come and see you and actually get the help I needed without being passed from pillar to post or this is sort of like the first time that I've been able to come in and actually get what I need.

And I know now that I can go away with confidence and I don't need to think about or worry about someone kind of coming back to me because it was clear, it was evident that this new model was making a difference. So from that point I then went back to my finance team and I said, look, be running this for a month.

We go really well, got some good MI data, I could really do with a bit more resource. I'd like to make a bid. 20K. Okay. What, for how long? For 20k, another three months to just continue the trial.

So we did it, ran it for three more months, still making an impact, still making a difference. Even more case studies now about how it was helping people and that process kind of continued for about nine months.

And after month nine we had so much data about the difference it was making, we were actually taking directors down to see this thing working in practice on a Thursday and a Tuesday and even they were a bit like, wow. And sorry, what team is this? Well, it's a, it's a skeleton, doesn't really exist.

Throw them together, someone from housing, some are from benefits, you know, they're kind of doing it, but you know, look, they're here for them, it's making a difference. They can see the impact is making in terms of less demand coming into kind of their back doors.

And off the back of that we were able to develop a business case. And that business case then went forward and we got proper funding to establish a team.

So this is a property now in the organization that provide a function called connected communities.

And they're still there now and you know, they are probably one of the key areas that members of our residents and community will now use when they come into the Council for Life event type circumstances rather than more kind of transactional type services and requests. So again, without knowing it, we built a relational offer to help people with relational needs and issues. And guess what? It worked.

It never would have worked and it never would have happened if we didn't have an agile way of being able to see the problem holistically. But then try and take one tiny part of that problem and try and put one tiny thing in place to see if that would make a difference.

And iteratively and iteratively go along, do and learn, see what was working, change the bits that weren't working and ultimately come up with something which is still there today. And I think again, it's just a wonderful summary of kind of bringing the agile theory, if you like, to life.

Because a lot of the time people will hear the language and think we'll do and learn. What does that mean? You know, sort of like zoom out and then zoom in. You know, what does that really mean? Sprint cycles, what does that really mean?

But when you actually see something kind of come to fruition using that method and that process, and I'll tell you what, Joe, probably the best thing about that is it came from staff. Yeah, it wasn't a big flashy. One of the big four consultants kind of, you know, looking at your watch and telling you the time.

This was staff that came up with the idea and they're now seeing it kind of coming to fruition. And you know, again, the feedback we get is, you know, we want to be involved in the Change, you know, we're not just here to do the day job.

You know, we want to make sure that we can, you know, we can see when things are not working. We want to try and come up with ideas for making things better and actually having the opportunity to be involved in that is really rewarding.

So that, for me, I think, is certainly one of the examples that I would refer to and I always use when I'm talking to people about kind of, you know, where I think Agile makes a difference.

Because I can tell you with my hand on my heart, trying to follow a traditional waterfall Prince two type methodology, we never would have got a business case approved because. Yeah, yeah, we didn't even have a business case. Yeah, we didn't even know what we were trying to do.

We were literally figuring it out as we were going along.

And I think a lot of the problems that are there in local government right now, the reason why they have probably been there for so long is people just don't even know how to start.

Yeah.

And I think what Agile does is it gives you a mechanism to say, okay, we kind of see where you're trying to get to. What does the next couple of weeks look like?

Yeah. There are so many lessons in that. I wish that. I wish that was my case study.

That's amazing.

There's. I think one of the things I want to draw out is your request for funding and your business case.

This is so important because often business cases are based on lots of assumptions and best guesses and crossing our fingers and putting them behind our back. This is why, I mean, what you're talking about there is prototyping, call it testing and learning. This is a proper prototype.

And what you end up with there is real data about the likelihood that this is going to work, not in theory, but in practice, because it's actually happening.

The thing I wanted to get into was you started to talk about this being a relational service rather than a transactional service, and those exactly how that service operates can't really be defined on a piece of paper. Right. Because it's conversation by conversation. What needs to be from that experience?

What did the team need to be in place in order to do a good job? I guess, and to be helpful and to get some of the outcomes that they ended up getting.

Yeah.

I think again, in terms of trying to break the mold and adopt that mindset of we're going to try and work differently, I think it was trying to be less prescriptive around trying to preempt every typical scenario that could present itself at the front door and actually come with something a bit more generic, more akin to kind of a guide, which allows there to be some ambiguity. You know, we don't need to know every potential request someone's going to have.

Actually it's more about when they arrive, having the skills and the experience and the confidence to kind of make that person feel like we are here to help them and we will try and help them in whatever way we can. We're not.

Or should I say we're going to move away from some of the key performance metrics or which say, you know, you need to try and help someone within five minutes or you need to be on the phone with them for three minutes and then, you know, pass them on and move them on.

No, no, actually what's more important is we help this person to get whatever they need and if it means we need to take longer and if it's better for them, then surely that's got to be the right thing to do. So again, it's about engendering a sense of autonomy, which again comes back to the agile mindset of this notion of self organizing teams.

You know, let's empower the people at the front line to do what they think is right, to manage and deal with kind of what is presenting to them with a bit of guidance where needed, with a kind of phone, a friend where needed.

And what we found was that again, by doing that they were able to learn in some instances their scripts would help them, in some instances the scripts didn't help them. It's not a problem. Offline will tidy up the script. So the next time that presents itself, you've got something there.

But ultimately this is about kind of trusting people to do what they think is right within a specified set of parameters.

And again, that's where I think I can definitely see the difference between alternative approaches such as Agile versus more traditional approaches where, you know, more traditional approaches effectively require us to work to the script.

Yeah, yeah.

There isn't very much discretion or autonomy to move away from that. Whereas what we're trying to do here is provide somebody with a bit of a guide, bit of an aide memoir.

But ultimately saying that, you know, you need to think about choices and decisions that you think are right, you think are appropriate within a framework. And actually no one's expecting you or anyone to get this right all of the time.

We actually know that we're not going to get this right every single time. But that's a good thing because what we can do is we can learn from that.

And actually it's only by learning from that can we then refine it to make sure that moving forward, we're basically trying to ensure that we are hearing what people are telling us work, hearing what people telling us doesn't work, and building that into kind of how we need to kind of manage things moving forward. So yeah, I would say it's about empowering staff, it's about making sure that they've got the right knowledge and skills to do what they need to do.

But it's also about that sense of empowerment.

Yeah, I think this is such a perfect illustration of what testing new ways of working, working in a really relational way, what that actually looks like in practice. And you only get there by testing. Really, you only arrive at this model. You couldn't have designed exactly what they did beforehand.

And one of the not complaints, I guess one of the worries that people often bring up to me is, well, isn't prototyping really risky? And I sort of think it's the opposite because we're trying to de risk the situation by testing our assumptions sooner. What do you think about that?

Yeah, I'd have to admit that again, probably pre my exposure and usage of prototyping within an Agile framework, I was very concerned about the risk of doing it.

I think I'd come from a background where my lived and learned experience had told me, unless you've perfected this thing you're trying to do, don't even think about launching it, offering it, socializing it to people, because you know, if there are any flaws, you know it's just gonna fall apart and you know, you're gonna get a phone call or an email from someone saying, you know, what on earth has happened? And I can understand that mindset in certain settings, but actually if we zoom out and think, well, what are we really trying to do here?

And actually if what we're trying to do here is help people access information or access things that they need, this needs to then be designed from their perspective and from their point of view. And I think in some instances it's actually about bringing those people into the room.

And this is something which I'm glad in the last couple of years we are thinking much more, not just about developing an offer for residents and actually then say, there you go, does it work?

We're actually bringing residents and users and customers much earlier into the process now and thinking about how we can kind of do things like co design with them. And you know, again, really good example of how agile has helped us to do that in my organization. I'll never forget.

We were doing some work with our young adult service.

And again, back to the point I made earlier about making sure that the Agile message was spreading organically rather than, you know, a kind of an edit from the top table, the head of the young adult service had heard about some work that we had done in adult social care and said, you know, we had. They had this issue around kind of young adults where they just weren't getting the help on it they needed from the council.

And she was wondering whether Agile could be used as a way to kind of redefine the service offer. And I thought, brilliant. You have now become a product owner without even knowing it. So what? Let's do it. Yeah. What does that mean? What's procto mean?

I said, don't worry.

Effectively, you just need to kind of tell us what you think the challenge is and we will put a team together that will try and come up with some answers. Brilliant. So she did that and it was great because actually, when you look at what goes on in that space, it's not just people in her team.

You've got colleagues from finance, you've got colleagues from brokerage, you've got colleagues from procurement all across the organization.

So I thought it's going to be quite challenging because a lot of the people in the room are not necessarily going to be within that person's span of control. So that's a problem, but not a problem that put us off.

So we got people into the room and we were very clear and we listened to the head of service articulate kind of what the challenge was.

And again, we said to people in the room, right, you know, part of a team, think about where we're trying to get to by the end of the week, think about defining kind of what the problem statement.

The problem statement was effectively, you know, are we confident that young adults are getting the services that they need from us in the most efficient and effective way for them? And if any part of that statement, we're not, what are we going to do about it?

So we initially went into kind of ideation and we offered it up to people to kind of. We did suggest that they kind of broke out of their departmental teams.

They didn't do that, of course, but we did say to them on Tuesday that we were going to have a session where we wanted to kind of see some of the ideas that they come up with and some of the things they wanted to take forward. And I also said to Them.

We were hoping to get a young person to kind of come in and listen to some of the ideas that they come up with and to provide some feedback. Now, again, back to your earlier point about where some of the differences are with prototyping.

As you will know when you're prototyping something, it is literally a 30, 40% version of kind of what the end version might be. There are going to be holes in it, there are going to be flaws, but. But the whole purpose of trying to show it early is to get some of that feedback.

So the team had come up with some ideas and we brought this young person into the room and we then said, right, here's what we've been doing. Would you now like to talk to this person about some of the ideas that you've come up with that we think might make it easier for them?

So they kind of went round and finance person stood up and kind of said what they were going to do and the brokerage person kind of set up what they were going to do. And you could just see this kind of expression from this young person. It was almost like they were listening to a kind of a foreign movie.

They just couldn't really understand what was going on. And then I said, right, so how do you feel about kind of what you've heard there?

You know, do you think that's really gonna, you know, help you for some of the things that you're trying to get from, from us? And I think it was very obvious.

And, you know, I think they're what, 17, 18, you know, they said in no uncertain terms that actually a lot of what they heard, they couldn't even understand it. You know, they were using terminology and jargon and language which meant nothing to that person.

And their kind of repulse was, look, what I really need is some money to buy fridge and I need to know how I, how I need to go about to kind of get that. And at the moment it's just not clear. It's not clear on your website. When I talk to somebody, nobody wants to have that conversation with me.

I'm just getting passed around, passed around, passed around. And when I do eventually get somebody, I'm told put it in an email. So none of this is helping me.

I really appreciate the time that you're taking, but it just isn't for me. It's not going to work. So they left and I conveniently decided to then have a coffee break.

And then we then left and we left them in the room to kind of think about that feedback and let it fester. And when we came back in the room, we had a retrospective and I asked them, how you feeling?

And honestly, it was the first time where you could see the confidence had gone and they were genuinely really feeling uncomfortable about kind of what they heard. And I said, look, because I think it's going to be helpful, right?

Working in a different way is always going to mean that we're going to end up in a place that for some of us, is going to feel a bit uncomfortable. And the reason why it's going to feel uncomfortable is because we're doing different things.

What's basically happened in the last two days is you were presented with a challenge and a problem. And let's just use an analogy. The head of service was basically saying to you, right, here's an axe.

Go and tell me the most efficient and effective way to go and cut down a load of trees. And what you then did by not breaking out of your service silos and departments was just take the axe, run out the room and just start chopping away.

And when somebody then came in and was asked to give you an assessment of kind of what you'd done, they weren't very impressed, because effectively, you hadn't really listened to the problem and what you'd done was just run away and go into solution mode. I'm hoping that what you've got now is some perspective.

And I'm hoping that the perspective you've got now means that if you were given that same question, the first thing you probably do now is think about sharpening your axe.

And you can kind of see people were slowly getting what we were trying to say, which is so often we think about trying to overcome a problem and a challenge in exactly the same way that we've always done it before. Department first, think about the form, think about the system. We never think about the person.

And if you think about the person and what that person wants, needs, what they're worried about, what they're scared about, you know, this is a young person who's trying to think about having a way of being able to buy and eat and keep food in their house. You know, this is kind of a really kind of basic human need.

You come at it from a completely different perspective and you're going to come up with something that's really going to help them, which isn't going to be a form or a system, or it's going to be something which will genuinely help them. And I cannot tell you, Joe, after they'd heard that Feedback from that resident. What they then came up with was amazing.

And back to your notion of kind of prototyping and, you know, failing, etc. They never, ever, ever would have come up what they would have come up with had they not had that epic fail. Yeah. On Tuesday.

So I think there is something about, you know, you never really know what you need to change until you put into a situation where you get feedback from kind of the end user, the customer. And actually it's about what you do in that scenario. Do you sink or do you swim?

And I'm happy to say that in scenario that team really kind of came together and it was the first time it was a team. It wasn't. You're from finance, you're from children's, you're from brokerage. No, we're a team. We've just heard from that person.

Let's really sharpen our pencils now and come up with a way so that when we get to Friday we've absolutely got something, which means if he needs help next week, this is going to help him.

So yeah, I just think, like I said, the whole notion of being able to kind of come up with something, test it early, do a show and tell, realize it's just not going to really deliver the way you need it to deliver and then being able to kind of come back into a safe space, refine, go again with a completely different set of assumptions means that you're more likely to then end up with something that you probably never would have had you not followed that type of approach.

Yeah, I think that's such an encouraging example and that's actually a testament to the team as well, isn't it? To take a proper knock like that, show a bit of grit and then. And some humility. You know, actually we just got that wrong. Yeah.

And I will say it's hard.

I mean, I remember when I was doing it the first time, it was very alien to me that kind of, you know, on a Tuesday or Wednesday to literally have some post it notes on a, on a kind of a.

Where are we going?

Whiteboard and you know, present to kind of directors and very, very serious and senior people about an idea that I've literally just kind of sketched out. You really do feel vulnerable.

But I think what's great about this approach is it absolutely endorses this notion of, look, what you're going to see is not perfect.

Yeah.

This is not about perfection. This is about progress. And the reason why what you're seeing is not the finished article. Is because it can't be.

Can't be the finished article until you come in and you give us some feedback.

And whether that's positive, whether that's negative, doesn't matter, because your feedback is going to help us refine it and turn it into something which by the end of the week or the end of the fortnight is going to be a better version than what it would have been had we not shown it to you sooner. Now, that's something that I've learned to become comfortable with now, but in the beginning, I absolutely was not comfortable with it at all.

So I absolutely empathize with people that are kind of going through this process for the first time. But again, you know, you got to trust in the process.

And that's why I think one of the reasons why it's landed quite well in my organization is we try and bring people through in cycles. So the first time you kind of come in, just see the first.

The second time you then kind of come in, then you kind of learn more about what you see, and by the third time you're going to do it. And actually it's by doing it that you then learn and you kind of then move forward.

And it's wonderful to see people who initially were very, very uncomfortable with kind of working in this way and seeing kind of, you know, they're doing it themselves now, which is brilliant.

I think that's such a good place to leave it. It's really, really encouraging. And there's so much advice to be taken from that. And I'm sure that people watching this will have wanted that.

I asked other questions, so just let me know, like, what are the questions I should be asking people that are in positions like Andrew? Let us know in the comments and in future interviews, I'll try and incorporate those.

And if there's anybody else that you want me to talk to, then please let me know as well and we'll try and make that happen. Andrew, honestly, this was so, so brilliant. I really appreciate you taking the time to do it.

No worries. Great to catch up. And yeah, we must do this again.