What if we organised an entire council around building social connection?

In this episode, Joe sits down with Tony Clements, Chief Executive of Ealing Council. Tony explains why he's placed social connection at the heart of the council's purpose, and how a Connected Communities approach is reshaping everything from children's services to emergency management.

Drawing on the evidence that loneliness can be worse for health than smoking, Tony argues that local government has a unique locus to build the relationships and community resilience that transactional services alone can't deliver. He shares how Ealing achieved its lowest-ever number of children in care by investing in kinship networks, why emergency management teams are treating the community as the real first responder, and what it takes to shift thousands of daily interactions toward building connection.

This is a deep dive into relational leadership, complexity and why the language of KPIs and "clarity" often gets in the way of the work that matters most.

In this conversation, we explore:

• Why the evidence on social connection rarely reaches public policy
• How kinship networks are reducing the number of children in care
• Why emergency response depends on community resilience first
• The limits of KPIs in relational, complex work
• How to balance short-term savings with long-term transformation
• Why the bar for change is higher than the bar for the status quo
• The bravery it takes to stop doing good things
• What AI tools are actually changing inside a council
• The chief executive as "rewilder" of the system

This episode is especially relevant for:

• Public sector leaders and chief executives
• Local government commissioners and directors
• Policy and systems-change professionals
• Service designers working on complex, human problems

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Tony, thanks for. Thanks for joining me. I'm really, really grateful you made the time.

No, not at all. Delighted to.

So let's start with social connection. You've placed social connection at the heart of your purpose in healing. Why is that?

So I think the first thing to say is it's about the political philosophy of the administration, and an administration that is permissive and wants to do something different with its time in office. So the political context around social connection is really important to what we're trying to do.

I think for me personally, over time, I've just become really interested in so much of the work.

So many of the studies that show relationships, your connectedness with other people are just the biggest determinants of your health, your happiness, all sorts of other things, and just how strong that evidence is and then how little it appears, often in public policy and public services. And so if we're thinking about our institutions, which have many, many challenges, what's the most impactful thing we can do?

I think it's using our capacities to strengthen community, build those connections, help build those relationships.

And I also look at quite a lot of the things we do now which are underfunded, which often respond to things like statutory duties that have been set over decades, and think to myself, those things are important. Many people rely on those, on those services. But are they as in touch with people's needs as they should be, as they've.

As they've developed over the decades?

So whether it's about mental health or loneliness that's described in terms of epidemic levels, do our existing services speak to those needs as much as they could. And maybe social connection is a better way into that.

So, yeah, tell me a little bit about the evidence space. I know you thought pretty deeply about this, and for people that are not familiar with it, but let's talk a little bit about that.

Yeah.

So, I mean, when I say thought deeply, I mean, you shouldn't get the impression I'm hunched over academic papers because you've got other things to be doing. You know, much of my way into this has been like, through the TED Talk or whatever. So. So I think there's a few things.

So there's the Harvard Study of Adult Development and there's some wonderful talks from its directors over time, which looked at, in fact, only men, which is, I think, probably a methodological failing over the last 60 years, looking at their health and happiness. And the most common feature of the happiest and healthy people were those that had networks around them from the public health angle.

The stat is now quite well known that loneliness can be worse for your health than smoking. But Julianne Holt, Lundstadt Also find on TED if you only have 10 minutes to look into it, it's a lot. It's a lot.

There's a lot more in it than that that really deepens the case, especially about the importance of our casual relationships, not just our deep ones.

And some work I had a little bit of involvement in, which started off in the States and has recently been replicated in the uk, is about the importance of connection to social mobility and economic outcomes. There's just loads there. And then when we talk about evidence based policy, we just sort of ignore a whole field.

I think probably because it feels tricky to get into, but yeah, there's loads there. It's really rich. And I think critically, from a local government perspective, we are the bit of the state that can make a difference to that.

We're not the only social force in society which, which is impactful in this sphere. But for me, local government has a particular locus to make a difference in that sphere.

So, yeah, there's some of the patterns that sort of put it at the heart of what we're trying to do.

So in practice, then, how are you putting this at the heart of your purpose? Because I know you're talking about being part of a connected community.

In practice, what are you hoping to do, to do and see happen that that results in improvements in relationships and social connection and all the stuff we've been talking about here?

Yeah, yeah. So one of the ways I describe it is that we have thousands of connections with our community and our residents every single day across all our.

Across all our services. And although they're very different services, it seems to me that all of them are an opportunity to build connection and build relationships.

They'll do it in very different ways, but I sort of think that small shifts in large systems, or many small shifts in large systems can make a huge difference. So it's about how we put that at the core of how we do our business.

And then alongside that there'll be some things that we would sort of really badge as, Here's a connected communities initiative and sort of use that as the bit of a trailblazer exemplar more broadly for, you know, this is what you can achieve and this is the sort of thing you can do. So the real holy grail is that whole sort of organizational shift.

I think that's really interesting because I don't think anyone can tell somebody in whatever service exactly what it means to be part of a connected community, what behaviors and moves they might make. And I think I'm right in saying you've explicitly said to people, I literally can't tell you exactly what that looks like.

So how are people interpreting that freedom at the moment? How is it showing up in Ealing?

Yeah, yeah. The best examples for me are the ones we don't expect. So, you know, some things we've tried to explicitly seed and other things have emerged.

And one example I like exemplifying is in our emergency management team. So in emergency management, it's a lot about protocol, command and control, gold groups, all of this, all of this kind of stuff.

But colleagues in that team have completely embraced the idea that in an emergency, it's the community resilience that makes the biggest impact. It's always the community that are essentially the first responders when the worst happens.

So they've brought together over 40 VCS and faith groups and run work with them about what they would do if there was a flood or something dreadful or dreadful happened. That increases our community resilience and their purpose as a service.

And, of course, the byproduct is all those people know each other and though just through going through that exercise, you've built. We've built those connections, no one commissioned them to do that.

You know, they sort of took that freedom and really built on the community resilience bit of the emergency management discipline. And then another example, which I think is one I use because it's an important one, is within children's services.

So we now have the lowest number of children in care that we've ever had in Ealing, and that is on a reducing trend, whereas in many places that's on an upward trend. And that is as a result of thinking about the community resources, the kinship care, the networks that we could wrap around a child who's vulnerable.

And the reason that example is important is, is because sometimes community work can be seen as the sort of fluffy stuff around the edge, and child protection is the real sharp end of statutory services for vulnerable people. So it's a sort of great exemplar that this work is relevant everywhere and relevant to some of the real core and difficult bits of our business.

I think those are both excellent examples. I suppose one of the tensions I can imagine is there is a.

Or there might be a pull to put in place, lots of measurements to work out if this stuff is working. And this is the kind of initiative that would get smothered by lots of indicators and KPIs. And would probably cease to.

Cease to work in the way that you're imagining. And I suppose the child protection example is a good one because that is one indicator that really is worth paying attention to.

But more broadly, how do you know?

How do you know if it's working?

I suppose you can't know for sure. But what is it you're looking for to know if this is working more broadly across the borough?

Yeah, it's a great question and one we haven't cracked and are still wrestling with.

So it is an increasingly common practice in the council that as we are starting something, the design at the beginning thinks about what we'll look at at the end to see if it's been impactful and also thinking about the diversity of things that constitute evidence.

So, yes, there's numbers, there's qualitative, there's stories, and, you know, I think lots of this work is an art, but there's more opportunities to bring some science to it and it will never be perfect.

But in my way of thinking, if your qualitative work and your data work and your anecdotes from staff are all pointing in the same direction, it's probably working. We're doing some great work in public health at the moment, or it started in public health. It's more corporate now.

Now about how we're training community researchers and working with academic institutions like Imperial College and to sort of help build that capacity for learning and assessing the impact. We're assessing the impact we're having, but we're still not there yet. And I still don't feel entirely satisfied with it.

And an anecdote I often use as I sort of go back to my university days where I studied anthropology and I had a lecturer who studied the Russian state.

Right.

Bear with me. We've got the time and in particular the relationship between the state and indigenous groups in Siberia.

And he traced this through the Tsarist period into Stalinism, Communism, then the post Soviet period. You know, huge historical shifts, but assessing the sort of lived experience of people engaging with the Russian state.

If you wanted your local official to do something with you for you, you still had to bribe them with a bottle of vodka, whether it was the Tsar, Stalin or post Soviet leaders.

So I have this sense of, we might imagine we're making all these great shifts within the council, but until we can find some ways to truly capture, on a bigger level, the nature of those interactions changing. You know, I'm sure none of my staff are bribed by bottles of vodka, but whatever our Whatever our equivalence of that is for the avoidance of doubt,.

That is not always saying,.

Is that changing? So that is my very long and roundabout way of saying, I don't think we've cracked it.

It's not something I'm sort of satisfied with yet, but our practice is improving in the area, I think.

How do you sit with that then? Because that's a tricky place to be in, isn't it? There's enormous amount of ambiguity, I suppose, then, at this point, how do you deal with that?

Well, I think it's sometimes about some realism, about what our current measures show us. So, you know, some of the metrics are important. The KPIs are important in lots of services, but they are only partial.

But they feel comforting because they're so neat and they appear on graphs and tables. So I think it's. The ambiguity is absent in the status quo.

We just choose to recognize it less because the way we report back looks simpler and neater. But, yeah, there probably is more inherent. More inherent ambiguity. But lots of public servants live with ambiguity.

Right.

You know, talk to a social worker who's trying to build a relationship with, you know, a child or a family that might have troubles in their lives. They're holding all sorts of tensions. The strengths, the weaknesses, the risks. You know, this isn't. This isn't foreign to public service.

Yeah, but I think we're going into the territory of the nature of complex problems, I think, aren't we? And when dealing with complexity, ambiguity is unavoidable. It's just part of the deal.

And often we try to pretend that complexity doesn't exist and explain it away and wrestle it into. Into measures that actually are just a sort of, I suppose, not really a true representation of reality.

But where I'm going with this is a few weeks ago we were having a chat and you mentioned that one of the most important things to be able to do in your role, or indeed as senior leaders, is to be able to spot the difference between the kinds of problems that you're dealing with when you're dealing with a wicked problem or a complex problem, and when you're dealing with a more tame problem. Can you tell me more about that? Why is that important?

So obviously some of this stuff comes from some of the theory around adaptive leadership and other things.

And it's increasingly common for training and leadership development to be in this space and using that framework of sort of, I think, tame and wicked, or there's various other framings of it.

And I think there is a implication Almost that, I mean, just in the language, you know, that wicked problems and the people who can deal with them sort of sit on a higher level and a higher plane. This is where you need your, you know, deep skills for and everything else. And you know, tame problems are just sort of business, business as usual.

And I guess my, my experience in this job is actually sometimes the tame problems are really hard and take real resilience, grind and perseverance to work through. But actually the confusion can go both ways.

So sometimes, you know, and this is a sort of, might be a weakness of mine occasionally, you know, I'd love to innovate away a problem, but sometimes you just have to go through the steps, use the technical expertise, you know, apply the resources and the perseverance to get to the end point as well as there's plenty of people who like the psychological comfort of trying to redefine a difficult problem, as you say, into a simple one because it's just more comfortable not to engage so engage with that complexity.

So I think my real point in this is just the skill and capacity of picking, of correctly identifying them and picking the right set of tools that work for each.

You know, I, I won't be asking my elections team and the 200 counters on the 7th of May to self organize into teams, develop their own innovative ways of counting the valet papers and then pick one by dot voting. You know, I probably, probably won't be doing that.

Have some courage.

I know, I know, indeed. Maybe I'm just, maybe I'm just, maybe I'm just too timid.

So I think the key thing is the sort of being able to identify the nature of the problem that you've got in front of you and what tools best apply to it. And I also think even in the complex and more systematic problems, you still need to combine the two.

Right.

So, you know, even if through whatever methods you've come up with an innovative solution you want to prototype, you still have to apply resources to it. You still have to check its value for money.

You still have to check everyone knows their roles and responsibilities and are going to do it on the right timeline. So even in the complex space, we can't neglect the practical tools that are sometimes required to, to get things done in a public sector institution.

Yeah, I mean, in practice, how does this shake out when you're in your senior leadership team meetings, are you having these conversations about what kind of problem are we dealing with here or is this just something that is now ingrained into people's way of thinking? In Ealing, and they're able to reasonably easily determine, well, this is a tame problem.

We need a plan, we need some experts, we need to trust those experts, or this is a wicked problem. We need to trust the people to figure this out together. Are you having conversations like that?

Yeah, I think. I think we do sort of organically, really. I don't think we sit there and, you know, look at each item and go, what. What column does this.

Does this sit in? But I think that is inherent to the business of local government.

And I guess the other thing about the sort of tame and wicked problem is not just the right methods, but the right people as well. People will have their leanings and skills across those domains.

So in a diverse leadership team, one thing I'm often thinking, and I don't just mean this in my slt, but more broadly within the organisation, you know, who's the right person that's going to get this? And also almost who's the right person that's going to relish this problem? Sometimes a problem can SAP you.

Sometimes you're like, oh, this is just the sort of problem I love.

Gives you energy.

Yeah, exactly Right. So I don't think we frame it explicitly in that way, but I think it's the nature of our business.

One of the difficulties we have, the vast majority of our clients are local curve, as you know, and we also do some work in the nhs, is that most of the problems we're working on are wicked problems. We do lots of work in homelessness, we do lots of work in social care.

And the nature of making improvements and changes and testing new ways of working in those types of situations is that they don't lend themselves to linear. Step by step, we do these things, we get this outcome. Just doesn't work like that.

But we're often in a situation where people really want that certainty, they really want a plan, they really want to know exactly what's going to happen and exactly what's going to come out the other end. I understand that need and the desire for that, but it is problematic because you often get into a situation where you have to.

Yeah, you sort of have to pretend that you're not dealing with complexity when you really are. And I want to. Do you face that?

Because I suppose internally you can have those conversations in your SLT and you can say, look, we're not dealing with a linear problem here, we're dealing with something much more wicked. But you do have other partners in the system. You do, of course, have your relationship with leader and members, how do you square that?

So part of it, I think is holding a space and being able to narrate what's going on.

Uh, and there's various ways we, there's various ways we, we do that and we've chosen to sort of build our capacity within, within the organization to do that, to do that.

Well, uh, and I think you've interviewed here a couple of my colleagues who, who would be the people I would point, point at to help us, to help us hold that space.

Um, I also think we need to interrogate existing practice because often I find the bar for change is set so much higher than the bar for the status quo, if you see what I mean. So we need to interrogate in those discussions. It can be important to go, well, hold on a second.

We've got loads of linear solutions, but we still have a homelessness crisis, we still have social care that's not delivering what it needs to. So there's a way of sort of not denigrating people's work in the slightest, but just a clear eyed view of what we do at the moment.

And is some change really a risk? Is some experimentation as big a risk as we might feel it is?

I think for me there is also we need to recognize that, you know, local government is an applied science or an applied art and action and doing is important. And that is the culture of many of my directorates. They're doers.

Right.

So even if it's not entirely linear, sometimes what you need to give people to make progress is just do this next thing. And that is also why the examples matter.

Some of the ones I've mentioned because you've got to show that, you know, you're not working for the sake of, you know, you're not workshopping for the sake of workshopping. When we've applied some of these approaches, they have made, they have made a difference.

So that exemplification is really, is really important as well because, you know, people are focused on what difference are we making for the people of Ealing, that's why they go to work in the morning. So yeah, probably those elements.

Yeah, no, I think that's very coherent.

I mean, this challenge I think is thrown into acute focus because of the savings pressures as well, because there are very real needs to make efficiencies in local governments right across the country. And it's sort of comforting to know that at the end of the year we will have made this saving by doing this differently.

But a lot of the problems or the biggest ticket items will not lend themselves to a slightly slicker process or a change to spans of control.

They probably need a completely different solution which may result in initially more cost as people actually start accessing a different kind of service. How are you, how are you threading that, that needle?

Because these two things have got to, they've got to sort of run on parallel track sort of, haven't they?

Yeah, yeah, they do. So.

And you know, this is, this is a constant sort of tension in the debates within, I think within, within every council, probably, particularly ours, maybe. And people often say, say to me, we need more clarity between these two things. And I have to say to them, this is not clarity I can give you.

You know, this is inherently difficult and complicated. I cannot clarify it away from. And I think I probably give them the somewhat unsatisfactory response of Two things can be true at the same time.

We need to budget, balance the budget this year and we need to build the bridges to the future that better serve our residents and make our institution more financially sustainable. It's not one or the other. The job of leadership in Ealing Council, this is the phrase I use, is to hold both at the same time. Yes.

Which I think sometimes my colleagues find a, you know, not an entirely satisfactory answer, but I think it's probably the.

Truest answer is the messy, the messy truth. Have you, how have you organized your governance to be able to do those things? Have you made any changes to that?

Because I almost think that these two things need, you know, if we think in adaptive leadership terms, they need, they need two different mindsets, you know, to be dealing with this sort of, with, with complexity and longer term view and need for testing and prototyping, all that stuff.

We need to be up on the balcony or, you know, but when it comes to balancing the budget at the end of the year, we sort of need to be down in the arena or on the dance floor and we need to be thinking literally, how is this going to balance out at the end of the year? And those two things are very difficult just from a state of mind thing to hold together over short periods of time. Have you dealt with that?

Well, we haven't changed anything in sort of formal constitutional governance and I think we've gone through a cycle of this and I don't think there's any sort of perfect answer. I would say in my first couple of years in this job we tried to do both together.

So, you know, our short term measures should also set the foundations and help enable the longer term ambition. In reality, I think what we found was the shorter term pressures just consumed the space for that longer term work, sort of despite our best efforts.

So we now have more of a twin track approach describing it in governance terms.

We have our medium term financial strategy board that does the things of layers and spans and digital and money out of contracts and all of that stuff.

And then we have our Connected Communities, Transformation and Innovation board which is trying to develop the organization's capacity for change and also those longer term, those longer term initiatives.

And that's of course not perfect either because suddenly the MTFS board will be doing something that is going to get in the way of the longer term stuff. But there is a reserved space, if you like, a protected space for that work with some money and for those discussions.

That's how we're holding it at the moment. I don't know, maybe, maybe if we talk in 18 months time, I've probably changed my mind again and maybe they're back together.

I don't think there's a perfect method for it. But yes, that's the cycle we've gone through. At the moment we're holding separate space.

I think that's really encouraging.

One of the things that I observe in local government generally is that the pressures are so significant that it creates a set of circumstances where it feels like everything needs to happen all at the same time. And capacity within, let's say a council is reasonably finite.

I mean, yes, you can hire a few people or you can bring some consultants in, but the budget is reasonably finite.

So if capacity is also reasonably fixed, then it stands to reason that you can't just keep adding more and more stuff in because if you do, then it's sort of tantamount to stuffing more paper into a printer and expecting it to print faster. It doesn't work like that, it just jams.

And with all of this stuff going on, I'm interested to know how you're trying to sort of manage it all at the same time. Is it about pushing responsibility down into the organization?

Because often I see that people in very senior roles who need to, they don't need to be involved in the detail, but they do need to help people prioritise. You know, this is important, that's not important.

But they literally don't have the bandwidth to be able to do that because they're supposed to be doing that for 100 things and that's clearly not feasible. So how are you thinking about that challenge?

So I think this is part of our progress as well, because I think initially with our connected communities vision, a highly permissive approach, you know, a bit of, bit of Cormac Russell. Let's start with what's strong, not what's wrong.

So within the organization, you know, lots of things were springing up which was good, which was positive.

But that actually adds to the complexity obviously because different people are being pulled in different directions as these things, as these things emerge.

And probably now we're at a stage where we need to be a bit more systematic and also because I think the other capacity is people's sort of mental bandwidth to get their head around this stuff.

And I'm thinking a lot more about the, at the moment about how I maintain tame the complexity in the work that we need to engage with while trying to simplify more of the processes and provide more of that, some more of that prioritisation. So I think we're probably at a bit of an inflection point there.

And you know, I'm listening to my colleagues in my organization who at times are telling me like this is too much because we've also got the social housing regulator coming in or you know, the family's first agenda that we've got to deliver and those sort of service level external pressures. But I also think there's something about the bravery to stop doing things.

Yeah.

And that doesn't mean stopping doing things we think are bad or ineffective because that's easy. Right.

It's about saying, yes, this thing we're doing might be good, but it's possibly taking capacity away from something that is very good or even more impactful.

And I found it quite interesting that often I've extended the invitation to people who say to me they're sort of too busy, maybe overloaded to say, well tell me the thing you'd like to stop. And people, people want to hold on to the, you know, people are not forthcoming about. No, I want to stop this.

And I can understand that, you know, if you've been running something for a while, you're invested in it, you don't think it's, you know, you think it's a good thing. And it often, and it often is.

But that's an interesting conversation we've been having in the leadership team about do we need to go a step further than inviting people to stop things, than sort of having a bit of a, a bit more of a, intentional decision making about, you know, saying that there are things we're gonna, we're gonna deprioritize? Yeah, dunno, that's, that's what we're wrestling with at the moment?

No, I'm wrestling with it as well because I, I think that there's, there's not, there's not that much thinking.

I don't think about what a much more adaptive model of holding these tensions together of the need for short term savings and improvements with longer term transformational change adding to this complexity. Way too many things happening all at the same time.

I don't think there's a huge amount of thinking about, well, what is a much more adaptive way of managing that.

And I think a sign of a healthy adaptive portfolio of initiatives, to use that language, would be that you would expect the portfolio would be changing reasonably frequently, not the core mission critical initiatives, but you would expect that some things would. We would test them and we would learn that they don't work and they would fall away.

And as they fall away, the bandwidth of people closest to the problem is expanded again. All the governance that sits around it goes away. So people have got more time for meetings.

And if that's not happening, I think that's a real sign that there's something really wrong. Because the nature of the problems that we're dealing with are such that a whole bunch of things that we try are just not going to work.

They have to not work.

But I'm interested to think, I'm interested to hear how you see your role in the mess because I think about my role in basis quite frequently and of course my reasonably challenging job and dealing with lots of complexity. But I'm not going to pretend it's the same level that you're dealing with. But I sometimes think about my work in metaphor.

So sometimes I think about my role as an editor for the organization. What am I editing out so that we're focusing on the things that are our highest point of contribution?

Sometimes I think about myself more as a farmer and I'm sort of cultivating conditions for people to do their best work and to, to be happy. I think optimizing for happiness is quite important.

But then sometimes I find myself being the tinkerer, watchmaker and I'm really getting in the way of things. And I experience myself as disempowering people. Sometimes it's not my main mode, but sometimes I do fall into that trap.

How do you see your role in the council? What type of role is it?

So. Well, as you find yourself, it can be those at different times. It's about getting the balance right.

I think sometimes the detail does need your attention and sometimes there's no avoiding that you've still got to do that. Well, in a way that sort of adding value rather than getting in the way. Interesting. You're a farmer. I think of myself as more a rewilder, actually.

Say more about that.

You know, what are the naturally regenerative processes? You know, that's the sort of mantra of the rewilders that, you know, the connections between the parts are as important as the parts.

And if you're constantly amplifying those connections, you're adding to the diversity and abundance of what's going on, what's going on in. What's going on in a system. But they're all metaphors to think with, aren't they?

I think the other bit of my role that is probably distinctive or may not entirely be distinctive because lots of my strategic directors will do this is also about the capacity to shape the external conditions of how we operate as a, as an organization. So, you know, this links into your sort of capacity and bandwidth point.

So one of the things I do with my sort of London chief exec hat on is I'm the sponsor of lottie, the London Office for Technology and Innovation. So, you know, that serves all of London.

But my influencing role with that in the public service reform space, I'm the lead chief exec for public service reform at London Councils.

It's not going to transform the operating conditions of my organization, but it's about sort of nudging the wider environment into a place that is more, Go back to your, go back to your farming more fertile for the type of work that we want to do. So I think, you know, I'd add to your levels of work certainly a more external facing piece.

And yeah, I'm constantly trying to amplify the right connections, the right examples of the work that we're doing. And as I've said, you know, you there as editor in recent times, I am thinking more about the prioritisation within the organization.

And I think part of that prioritisation, sorry, is, you know, what do we do in collaboration with other boroughs, which is where Lottie comes in. You know, Lottie doesn't, you know, Lottie doesn't run adult social care.

It's another version of that protected space that I've tried to create within the council, but a sort of protected space that boroughs can come together to learn and innovate together. And I think that collaboration is going to become a bigger and bigger feature of certainly the London system, but maybe our sector as a whole.

Well, I'd like to talk a little bit about that.

I think this is one of the things that I feel very privileged for is that we get to work with an enormous amount of local authorities and we, we just see how other people deal with common challenges.

Of course, the nature of those challenges are slightly different in every locality, but just the insight that we get from seeing the ways other people approach those challenges, I think can be valuable when we share it with our colleagues in a new organization. So I'm interested with your Lottie hat on. What opportunities do you see for collaboration, for innovation, for. Yeah, I suppose those two things.

What opportunities are you seeing at the moment?

Yeah, so I think there's a lot. So if we're going to do things differently, we need new and different methods.

Right.

And some of those capacities we are not going to develop on a borough level, but we could collectively. So I think about Lottie's recent role in supporting the borough's adoption of AI. Right, so Lottie employed an AI ethicist.

Ealing is not, you know, 32 boroughs are not going to employ 32 AI ethicists.

But as you're putting together your policy and approach to AI in quite a contested space, it's really important you think carefully about these things.

Um, you know, something else, Something else Lottie did was a whole, whole day on adult social care and had actors acting out the real experiences of people in the adult social care system. And it had people from councils, people from the private sector, voluntary sector, nhs. There were some nice touches.

They, they, they sort of pumped in a hospital smell.

Oh, my.

A point where someone was being, someone was being admitted. Yeah, we could have a go at that on a borough level, you know, smell or no smell.

But the interesting point about that was people from different sectors seeing the system as a whole, sometimes for the first time.

And from the residents perspective, you know, we're, you know, we're only going to do that sort of thing on a sub, regional, regional basis to sort of learn, learn together. And we would struggle to get that diversity of views and perspectives on a, on a borough by borough basis.

So, you know, we're not going to solve adult social care in a day, but I think it begins to show the potential for, for how we can expand that space for innovation together.

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A lot of the thinking around improvement, be it at a borough level or at a regional level, has been about optimizing efficiency, has been about incremental improvements. But I think there's less conversation been about optimizing our work and working conditions for learning. And learning is often an afterthought.

We get to the end of a big piece of work and initiative and it's too late to learn at that point. Especially if we spent lots of money and if we've been very public about the work that we've been doing because it creates an enormous tension to.

Yeah. Not to, I suppose to downplay something that hasn't gone so well sometimes.

Yeah.

What kind of learning are you getting from that? The Lottie forum, is that finding its way back into Ealing?

Yeah, no, absolutely is so. And sometimes in. And this matters sometimes when you've got limited bandwidth in an easily consumable way.

Right.

So I'll go back to the AI example.

You know, if you go on the Lottie website, there's a whole set of like draft policies which Lottie have put together based on the experience of working with boroughs, other sectors and you know, you'll need to adapt them for your organization.

But they've been built up through that, through that learning and are, you know, is an easy product to consume if you, if, if you like so and then with lots of their data and data sharing work, you know, data, you know, some of the plumbing of this work is really difficult to do and data is a sort of classic one.

What do you mean by plumbing?

So the, the sort of. Some of the real basic infrastructure.

Right.

You know, so you'll try and do something. It sounds great. And then you'll trip up over the fact you can't use the data for the thing you wanted it.

Right, exactly.

That kind of thing, you know, so again, you know, it's not the most exciting stuff, but Lottie's demonstrated that, you know, by following some models, you can put together those data sharing agreements in, you know, in weeks, not the months that it might have taken in the past. So that's another good Practical, easy to apply, easy to apply example about those learning conditions.

We talked a little bit about AI. What opportunities are you seeing there? I know you've run, I think, a Magic Notes pilot and have been recently public about the impact of that.

What opportunities do you see?

Well, I had quite an interesting. I don't know, I found myself sort of shifting quite a lot on the.

The AI conversation at the beginning of it that we had in the organization, because we looked at some of the business cases that other organizations and indeed other councils who were sort of launching massive transformation programs on the assumed benefits of a technology that hadn't been sort of wholly applied.

And the sort of reason we really started looking at it was in some ways no more than my sense of sort of slight FOMO that, you know, some big technological wave was gonna sweep the sector and, you know, we might find ourselves not having the faintest idea what to do about it. So in some ways, our conversation didn't start from the most productive place.

But I looked at some of these things and I was like, I'm not prepared to sort of bet the farm on this, you know, so. So we took quite a different approach. We introduced some AI tools into the organization.

Magic Notes was, was one obviously copilot, you know, commonly used a few, a few others, and established a sort of center for sharing the learning as people began to use the tools in their everyday practice. So, you know, here's a license for copilot. See what you can do with it almost. But then quite a systematic. What are people learning?

What are the use cases that are emerging in real life rather than, you know, an assumption that we're buying from a supplier? And I think for us, that distributed approach has worked really well. Magic Notes has completely flown. Some other things less so, but that's fine.

I guess it's put us in a space where we're using AI in a way that is improving the productivity of our existing ways of working. It's not transformed us as a organization. But I think that's fine, actually, it may come to.

But I think, you know, and I think we have attracted some attention from how we've used AI and that particular approach to it. So, you know, we often find ourselves sort of invited to things. The highlight, I suppose, was we got invited to the Prime Minister's AI summit.

I think we were the only public sector people there. And we got 15 minutes with the, with the, with the PM to sort of describe what we'd. Describe what we'd done.

So, you know, I never, I never set out that we would, we would make AI the center of our strategy or particularly become, become known for it. But it's probably an example of the unpredicted things that emerge when you try different approaches.

Well, that's the thing, isn't it? I mean the good practices are going to be emergent but you need to be experimenting in order for those things to emerge.

But I think the most recent research I think suggests that the vast majority of AI experiments fail and that's normal. We should expect that.

And provided that we're working ethically within some sensible boundaries that are safe and legal, I think that's to be expected. And okay, I'm interested to know where you get your inspiration from. What initiatives or organizations are you looking at?

And yeah, is any of that finding its way back into Ealing?

I'm probably more magpie like in my approach than the emulation of specific organizations.

But I see fantastic work actually done across London and across London boroughs, most of which is unheralded, unappreciated and people forget that there's innovators all the time within large organizations. So I see quite a lot of that across our sector.

And you know, the Lottie angle and the public sector reform work I do London wide quite often brings me into contact with oh, that's interesting. And I go back to base and tell my DAs or DCS go look at that please. And sometimes it flies for us, sometimes it doesn't.

Probably a nice example of something I came across which has worked for us.

I don't know if you've come across them but now foster who are seeking to sort of transform the whole lens through which we use, we view fostering, we're the first borough to use them at scale brought 14, 15 new foster carers through the system. You know, that's quite a big impact actually when you consider the alternatives for where those looked after children go.

And yes, that was from the sort of magpie approach at a conference and going oh that's interesting. I'm not going to bet the farm on it, but I think I'm prepared to bet something on this.

No, that's great, that's really helpful.

One of the things that strikes me about you is that you are, you're pretty relaxed guy generally or at least when I've been in, in the same room as, as you and I'm interested to know if you've got any. Yeah. If you've got any sort of personal practices that enable you to, to, to, to be like that. I suppose so.

I think, I think probably temperamentally, I'm quite. I'm quite calm anyway. I think, I think in some ways, actually it's part of it is the, for me, part of the balance between home and work life.

So my kids are still relatively, relatively young, 6 and 8.

So, you know, when I go home, there is this, you know, scraping of fish fingers off the floor and doing the phonics and, you know, whatever, whatever else the, you know, the small dramas and triumphs of primary school life is.

So I don't quite find my job all consuming in the same way because there's very, you know, there's some other needs to meet at home, which I think probably helps help some of that balance. And sometimes I find life all consuming when you try and try and do both those things.

But then I think there is something important about being able to hold some of the risks and anxieties in a system as a senior leader, as something that enables others. And I was watching Men in Black with my. Where is this going with my kids recently?

But again, this is one to bear with me, Jo, and, and I don't know if you know, the film, but Will Smith goes into the, you know, Men in Black facility for the first time and Tommy Lee Jones is telling him what's happening that afternoon. And there's an Achillean battle cruiser about to destroy the world. And, you know, Will Smith freaks out and goes, what are we gonna do about this?

Tommy Lee Jones says, look, there's always a battlecruiser or an intergalactic plague or a alien invasion. You know, we can't lose our heads about this because we're the people, you know, we're the people who need to deal with it.

Or, you know, slightly more dramatic words to that effect.

And there is something about the nature of local government that, you know, there's always a regulatory intervention you're worried is going to go wrong and wreck the council's reputation or a difficult safeguarding case you might be being kept up to. Up to date on or something that the council has messed up in the community. And, you know, the community and councillors are up in arms.

There's always those things. But I don't think it serves anyone to have senior leaders in a flap about it, even if you're articulating and narrating what they are.

So there's a great Haitian proverb that I often say to folks in basis beyond the mountains, more mountains, which I think perfectly describes that. Do you have an outlet, though, for some of that?

Do you have A small group of peers where you talk about these things, because I sometimes struggle with that in basis. I feel like, oh, God, there's nowhere else for us to go. Now I'm stuck. And I do have a small group of peers that I can talk about this stuff with.

Yeah.

So I think the London local government system is, is a really supportive one, actually. So the, the chief exec group meet about every six weeks across the whole of the city. And then in our West London group every, every month or so.

There is a, A really open environment there for people to, you know, share their problems and their, and their triumphs.

And, you know, I would feel extremely confident that the vast majority of my colleagues, if I said, I'm really worried about this, can you help me out? Would lean into it. And indeed vice versa. So I think there's some colleagues in that London chief exec group. Andy Donald from Haringey chairs it.

Ali Griffin at London Councils have done really well in their leadership to curate that, you know, other groups of chief executives. Occasionally there's sort of egos and alpha behaviors and they may be.

Sometimes those forums, I think, for others can be the least comfortable forums, but that's not what we experience in London and I think it's actually a big benefit of the, of the London local government system.

That's great. Well, look, we're coming to the end of the conversation. Just a couple of relatively quick fire questions.

Okay.

Give me a book that's influenced your thinking.

Why don't I just tell you what my favourite books are and you can. I don't know how much it influence or chimes with my thinking, but I completely love Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy.

And apart from them just being fantastic adventure stories, I think he ends it on a place where the protagonists are being allowed through the land of the dead. And the quid pro quo is you need to be able to tell a good story about your life.

And that's, you know, and that's his, I think, probably his ending message of, you know, making the most of the time, capacities, relationships that you've got. So I've got Ardenni. So I think mostly I like them because they're, they're great stories. But if I'm.

If I'm trying to derive a message from it, maybe it's. Maybe it's that one.

No, I like that a lot. And I'm an enormous fan of, of his work and those, those books are very influential for me too. What about a quote?

We got a quote that you try and live your life by maybe not live my.

Oh, I tell you what I came across. I came across one literally last week that I quite. That I quite liked from a writer I hadn't come across cross before, Maria deluc.

And she described leadership as the courage to be where the crisis is. And I like that for two reasons. One, because there's little heroism in that. It's not like, solve it, fix it, fight it, or those kind of analogies.

But I think there's something really important in, you know, in lots of places, it's easy to find something else to do, like maybe choose to work on the tamer problem. And probably the. The first act of leadership is to just be prepared to stand in that.

In that space and not, you know, rationalize why you want to be standing somewhere else a bit easier. So I don't know. Yes. Not one I've lived my life by, but came across it last week and, and it resonated well, I think that's.

A really good place to end it. Tony, I've really enjoyed the conversation. I hope you have, too. Absolutely appreciate you taking the time to do it.

Not at all. Really enjoyed it as well.