What happens when you stop treating residents as "customers" and start treating them like partners?

In this episode, Joe sits down with Rob Comber, Head of Change and Transformation at Ealing Council. Rob discusses his journey in local government, exploring innovative approaches to tackling complex social challenges by prioritising relational service design and building genuine connections.

What you’ll learn:

• Why involving residents in service design leads to sustainable solutions
• How to create a culture of trust and collaboration in public sector teams
• The importance of experimenting with new methods like agile and human-centred design
• Insights on transforming transactional services into relational, community-centred support

Whether you’re a public sector leader, a change-maker, or someone passionate about making an impact, this conversation is packed with practical advice and inspiring reflections.

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

In the last few months, you might have seen us talking online about the fact that we are writing a book, a book on the methods that we have found over time seem to be really helpful in enabling change to happen in the context of really messy challenges.

Over the course of the next few months, I'm going to be speaking with some of our clients, people that we work with, who we consider to be doing really pioneering work in this space. And today I'm going to be talking with Rob Comber from Ealing Council. Rob, how you doing?

Yeah, I'm doing good, Joe. Thank you for having me.

So we've known each other for a little while, but I guess only started working with one another in the last couple of years. So I don't actually know what your career path has been to get where you're at now.

So could you just explain what is it that you're doing now and how have you got here?

Yeah, of course. So I'm currently working in Ealing Council, which is in West London, as head of Change and Transformation.

But essentially in that role, I work with kind of leadership across the council to look at our change and transformation strategies and how we can make sure that the work we do around change is aligned to the council's vision for the future. So that's where I'm at now. I've been in local government for about 15 years now. Yeah, maybe 15 years.

Predominantly Kent County Council before Ealing, but I was also at the Department for Children's Schools and Families for a little while. I got into local government after being at the Department for Children's Schools and Families for about two years.

I was working there mainly because my. I had a lot of kind of experience with council services when I was a kid. Like a lot of kind of like social services and care intervention services.

And I guess, like, I kind of saw both, like, the brilliance of those services and like, when they can generally make a difference in people, but I also saw the worst of them.

And I think one of the things that not just me, but my siblings as well, who are now social workers, I wanted to do when we were younger is maybe kind of give a little bit back and try and make a difference for difference for people. I don't think we ever necessarily say that's what we intended to do, but we've all ended up wanting to do that.

So after university, I ended up at, like I said, the Department of Schools and Families. Children. Schools and Families for a couple of years before then moving into Kent County Council, where I did a Number of different roles.

Like I did a few roles in data analysis.

I did a role where I was looking at kind of quality of social work practice and how we can make sure that we've got good quality learning loops within practice to make sure we're continually improving.

I then moved into kind of roles that looked at service design and service development before then moving into the head of change and transformation role at Kent County Council in the children's services department where we started to bring in kind of more agile methodologies. We started to bring in kind of human centered design, design thinking. And we had a kind of a real focus on making sure that services.

Because at the time things are difficult financially, but making sure that our services that are really critical to people's lives were able to be sustainable in the future.

And yet they moved to Ealing where we're now kind of doing some kind of really exciting work with a really pro change kind of administration and leadership team that generally want to reinvent what local government means to people and start to open up new relationships with residents in Ealing by completely changing the culture and the way that we work. So it's all been very exciting and rewarding and difficult at times, but yeah, it's all really good.

I mean, lots of people get in contact with us or at least come into contact with us because they're already experimenting with different ways of working that are. They're coloring outside the lines a little bit and not working in the way that local government has traditionally, certainly on projects.

And I think that's probably the case with you. You were already thinking about and experimenting with agile ways of working human centered design. And that's where we started a relationship.

What was it that sparked your interest in those approaches?

So there's a few things.

So one is kind of when I was doing the quality assurance work with children's social work, one of the things that I noticed is that experimentation was a really key part of the change they were trying to create in people's lives. Social work. Social work practices is fairly heavily regulated with some really clear kind of practice frameworks.

But within those frameworks there's kind of really like clear space where social workers can experiment with families and try different techniques and different methods and different practices that enable families to kind of grow stronger together. I didn't see that across all of local government. I think there was.

There was definitely kind of quite strict models where you can't move out of those boundaries. But I think the thing that got me into it was, was a period of Time in my career where all we heard about was cutting services.

So there's a big focus on that. I think it, I think it just made it deeply sad to see like services cut. That I know when I was a kid like meant a lot to me.

Yeah.

So I started to look at kind of are there different ways that we can do this?

And like many people that work in local government, as soon as you lift the lid on the bonnet and start playing around, you can see there's loads of things that are broken that need fixing.

Yeah.

But there's also loads of really great people that work in local government that have just liberated from like the norms and the myths and the rituals that exist, can do really great things.

So at that point I started looking into Lean Six Sigma and looking at kind of how I could use that in a lot of my work and just naturally I like understanding how things work and understanding if I play around with them, what difference can I make. So Lean Six Sigma helped me do a little bit of that. But I think one of the things that I realized is it was quite.

Days are heavy, quite spreadsheet heavy, quite process heavy.

Yeah.

What I missed from that was the kind of the human elements. So I started then to explore like where what are the practices where I can combine what I'm doing with the Lean Six Sigma work?

Where are the practices that I've add value to it or are quite different to it that allow me to understand a lot more about the people and within that experiment in live scenarios and that's when, and that's at the same time when you might remember kind of future Gov were on the market.

Yeah.

They as a consultancy they, I think they did a lot to influence some people within local government. Yeah.

Start to shift a lot of the thinking and it was probably them and some of their events I went to which made me realize actually there's, there's a community of people that are probably thinking quite similar similarly to me and there are practices that are outside of local government that actually are quite typically akin to like digital and tech startups but actually work really well with a people to people organization like local government is. So that's, that's kind of how I got into it at that point.

Yeah. I think Dom And Carrie, who set up Future Curve, I think they both were on the same grad scheme as me.

So I. I went to a whole bunch of conferences where they were talking and they were a few years ahead of me, maybe three or four years ahead of me, and I. Maybe even a little bit more than that. And I remember thinking, oh, hang on a minute, there's something else going on here.

And I think they probably, although I've never really realized it, probably had an effect on me too. But there's a bunch of ways I could take this conversation.

So I'm going to try and keep all these different ways in my head, because I want to get into what do some of these ways of working enable? Like, what becomes possible when you work in these ways. I'll come back to that.

What I wanted to start with was, essentially, you're talking about there. I'm going to go out and I'm going to find out about these methodologies and I'm going to start experimenting with them.

I'm going to have a go at some of these things within the scope of my role. And I think sometimes people feel like they don't have permission to do that, and that's never been my experience in local government.

I felt in most roles, like I've had an enormous amount of autonomy to try and work in ways that I think are genuinely going to be helpful to residents. And I'm just wondering what. What were the. Was it.

Was it just you and the way you were wired, or was it the conditions in the council at that point that enabled you to start exploring some of this stuff? What was it? It's not just exploring, Right. It's like actually doing.

Actually doing it.

Yeah, yeah.

Exploring is one thing, but if not doing it.

Yeah, yeah.

It's different. So, like, if you start.

Personally, I think I like me and others that are kind of looking at the same kind of work, I think there's like an alignment with, like, how deeply we care about the work that we do and the people we're working on behalf of. And so with that care, like, to act is to care, right?

So if you deeply care about it, you want to act, and if you see things aren't working, you want to try and fix them and try and do something differently. So local government is full of these things. Whether it's kind of on the micro or the macro level. There's lots of things that can be.

That can be fixed. I've never once had a. Had a experience where I haven't felt that I Couldn't do that and start to explore new things and start to implement them.

But I think the conditions that, for me that not just helped kind of implement what I was doing, but kind of just gave me the freedom, the autonomy to go out and do that was I think to start by some, by building some really kind of credible stock with people that you're working with.

Right.

So I think there is, there's a degree of kind of relationship and trust that happens within, within local government. Yeah. If you have that relationship with people that trust you, you're trusted to go and do the work you need to do in a very autonomous way.

So that's. Those conditions kind of really helped.

But also I think there, at the time I started exploring this work, there was just a recognition that we can't keep doing the same stuff.

Yeah.

Like if we keep doing the same things over and over again, like we're going to be no better. So I think not, not just where I was working, but the whole sector was not just seeking new, new answers to the same questions.

I think they were seeking to open up new questions like ones that we didn't know know about before.

So I think those conditions were there to kind of say, well, perhaps what we need to do is move away from a, like a policy driven decision making model where actually we start to do better engagement with, with residents.

We stop consulting after we've made decisions and actually we kind of move from the inside out to the outside in and start just engaging with people in better ways.

So I think those conditions were there and I think because of the nature of like the service, I was working in children's services, it was a people to people service anyway. So we had lots of engagement able to happen.

I think for me, the thing that kind of enabled me maybe to do more was the first time I tried implementing something that was agile and human centered in its approach. And that was in Kent.

We redesigned the child protection model, but we did it by involving young people and families who had been through the child protection process as part of a project team, as part of the actual team, part of the actual team. We just said, let's be brave, we've not done it before.

Let's bring them in, they can be part of the team, they'll open up new conversations for us, they'll kind of link us into different networks so we can generally start listening to people in a way that has got some impact and purpose to it. So that was, that was probably the time where we saw it happen most effectively.

There because we were able to completely redesign the way that we did child protection. And because of that, like it reduced child protection figures by half in Kent within 12 months.

So being able to demonstrate an impact fairly quickly with something very, very new, where essentially I was asking people to take a bit of a leap of faith both in me and the methods we were using. And that payoff happened like once that first thing happened that people saw value in, it opened the door to kind of our start.

Not just to use it in part of our project work, but actually embedding some of the principles of design thinking and agile in all of our practice so that there is a bit of a sustainability. It's not just one person or one team somewhere that does this work. It's something that's done by everybody.

Yeah, but I think to begin with, it does, it does take somebody to take a bit of a leap of faith and to ask others to trust them as well and to face the fear of maybe it not working perfectly, all those things, you know, it takes, it takes somebody to be brave enough to, to do that. You know, I think a bit of courage goes, goes a long way. You know, it's not book smarts that help you to do work in these ways.

You know, you actually got to have some courage and test them out.

But you started to talk about that piece of work and it sounds like an amazing, amazing example in the context of that piece of work, what actually happens? What did these ways of working enable? Why were they part of making that really significant change happen?

Yeah, so, so we can't, we didn't, we kind of were quite deliberate enough not talking about, we're using kind of an agile methodology for this. We were just wanting to use the method but keep, keep it fairly low fi at that point.

So we just, we just said that we're gonna, we're gonna open up more conversations about people's lived experience of what it feels like for them going through the process. So we did a little bit of reverse mentoring.

We did some role playing as our discovery piece that people could understand the human elements of that process.

So not the what forms we need to fill out, when and what documents need to be submitted, but actually like what, what does this, what does it feel like for people?

So essentially we were, we started off by role playing journey maps for people and allowing kind of the social workers that, with people kind of have those sparks of, of kind of insight to say, oh, actually when I do this, it affects you in these ways. Yeah, I understand that. So we did we did it some. Yeah, we did that kind of role playing.

People kind of collectively saw the issues then and then we just, we brought people together and say what? Let's, let's design together. Let's start design together. We'll do two weeks time. We're going to do some mock child protection conferences.

Let's do that.

Once we, once we tried those out and built kind of a model for a child protection conference, we then started to look at well, what are the systems that go around it kind of what forms need to be filled out, what messages get sent. Let's see if we can change that. And by people designing it kind of in fairly short increments.

I think the, what people saw and the reason it became valuable is that they were starting to see value early.

Yeah.

So unlike projects that I would have done before that perhaps you don't generate the value until the end of a project's been delivered. We are seeing kind of incremental value happen like kind of in front of us.

Yeah.

And I think that for me that's the real thing that changed it from the leaders that are working with, you know, it's really difficult to like to pitch agile and like design thinking projects to an organization like a local government because we're so boundaries in terms of how we set budgets. Yeah. How we have standards and consistencies that way that we deliver work.

And essentially asking some people who have kind of got a long kind of tradition in quite structured approaches to say, let's bet on ourselves, let's say that we believe that this is the right thing to do and if we do it we're going to generate value and benefit to the organization. These are the benefits we think we'll have. But actually we don't quite know yet.

But when do you ever know like even if you're doing a normal kind of five point business case, like you still don't know the benefits you're going to have. So that narrative, trying to sell that to them and getting people involved really helped. We also made the process super visible.

So we had our director of children's services getting involved and coming in so they could feel it and experience it for themselves. So it wasn't just a small group of people doing a piece of work that actually because it was so controlled, wouldn't work elsewhere.

We opened it up to as many people as possible to come and get involved and try out or observe and that kind of really seemed to work. So yeah, I'm super proud of that piece of work as well.

It's not, not just because it was the first time doing a kind of a significant project using these methods, but actually it made a genuine impact for people. Like we saw, like we saw relationships change.

We saw people who are in very complex family environments kind of feel a bit stronger and feel that they had a bit more voice. There was a bit more kind of power sharing within the process and just kind of like liberating them from those constraints they had before.

Actually just really powerful in itself. Just giving people the power and choice and control in how services are run and delivered. This makes a huge difference.

Yeah, absolutely. There's so much in that.

I think coming back to something you said earlier on about people having some sort of stock in you and you know, building relationships with people to enable them to. Yeah. Have a bit of faith in you. I think that's so important.

But I also think that building genuine relationships with the recipients of services, you know, is, is important because we can't particularly a service like the one you're, you're describing, child protection, there's no perfect process, is there? Like there are some challenges in a family. There aren't a series of processes that you just put people through and all of a sudden their fixed.

The only way you really get to the heart of what's going on and how can I be helpful is by building a relationship with them and figuring out what's going to be the most useful next few moves. How do you think about that in the context of the projects that you work on?

How do you go about building those relationships with people that are actually going to benefit from the service?

So that is tricky.

I think there is some distrust around kind of local government and particularly when you look at social services, there's a degree of kind of fear and distrust of the service. So that's. It's always tricky. I think for me to start in.

Part of that is about kind of being incredibly generous with your time and like, and just leaning into some humility as well. So just being able to spend time with people to listen and to understand and to generally like empathize with people.

It's probably the starting point for it that for me like just creating the time, which in local government feels really difficult.

We're all very time pressured like to say that part of my work day is to sit and build a relationship with a resident by having a cup of tea or a coffee with them and listening to them. That feels like a really, like a real luxury that perhaps we don't always have. But that luxury needs to Be kind of like reframed into.

It's a really important part of our work that we have those relationships. So yeah, for me that's like being able to spend that time with people, to generally understand and listen is helpful.

One of the things that I've kind of noticed as well is that kind of in my career I've always done a lot of research, like some quantitative, but like a lot qualitative and just the process of conducting meaningful, well thought out research is an exercise in trust building in itself because it's a way of demonstrating and giving off the signals about who we are as people and kind of what we mean, what people mean. For us, it's important that that's done up front, like we're not doing it tokenistically once a decision is made.

And I think that's part of what some of the frustrations that kind of I've heard from people about local government is you only speak trust when you've made a decision.

So like turning that around to say, actually our job is to speak to people, care and empathise and then in our kind of relationships with people, will then design our strategies, our policies and the work that we do. So yeah, generous with time, bit of humility, genuinely caring and empathising with people, I think is really important for that trust building.

Yeah, I think that's so, so well put.

And I also think not, not only is it absolutely the right thing to do in order to figure out how to be most helpful and to be able to help later on, because you have some, you have some trust, but I also think it's important from, for like the change process, you know, for people who are involved in doing the work to change or improve the service, to be a part of that, so they learn for themselves what's not good. Quite working.

Because I think sometimes when people in transformation functions, and I've been guilty of this myself, do a whole bunch of research on a subject and come up with an answer and then try and sell it to a service, it just doesn't work.

Whereas if the service is a part of that work, a real partner in the work, then they get to form their own conclusions about what's necessary and probably come up with better answers than the people who are in the transformation function.

Yeah, so I, I kind of,.

I.

Didn't always think like this and this is when I got things most wrong. But the change can't be mandated. Like change is a.

It's a movement of people who are inspired and motivated to kind of change Themselves first and then look at how they change the broader system. So that's. So it is difficult.

So the, like not being able to mandate, which means we just don't go and put together some slide decks and a really powerful comms place and like, tell people this is the change you need to make. Like, change will happen over time, incrementally, person by person, by. Through a number of things. Right.

Through kind of our leaders modeling the change that we expect from our organization.

It's about making sure that people who are already working or acting or thinking in a way that represents change are amplified by telling great stories about those great people and the great work they're doing.

It's also about making sure that when we do our change work, we are transparent, authentic, and deliberately participative in the work that we do so that people can see it and feel it and understand it. So there's. So that's the thing that we've got to do.

We need to make sure that people are kind of motivated through storytelling, but then kind of know the direction they need to go in because they're seeing others do it or involving themselves in it. Yeah. That way we kind of help to understand our strategies for people perhaps are struggling to change as quickly as others. There's. There's.

I think there's a really kind of fine line between how much of it you mandate and how much of it you create. A bit of a social movement within an organization or.

Yeah.

Or a system.

Yeah. And I think when.

When people are struggling, it's usually because they stand to lose something, you know, and it's gonna be personally uncomfortable for them. And sometimes it's easy to forget about that. We can get.

Or at least I can get irritated at that situation, but actually, you know, they're gonna be finding it hard for whatever. Whatever reason, you know, And I probably don't know what that. That reason is, but a part of it is.

Is also, you know, leaning in when you see people struggling with the change or resisting.

Not just, you know, pushing past them and forcing it through, but actually having a, you know, drawing on the relationships you were talking about earlier on. I'm going to actually go and have a conversation with them and figure out what's going on.

And maybe there's a really good reason why we're struggling here. But again, that is an investment. That is the work. Right.

We've got to be generous in those investments as well. Because people, like, people do change. Like people change at very different speeds and different paces.

I think the really important thing is for us to be able to really tell a story about firstly why the change is important and what we're replacing that thing that someone was holding on quite dearly to. So that you're right. When people don't like change, it's because, like, there, there's a. Just a general fear of change sometimes.

But that fear comes from people like, believing that what will happen will be worse than what currently is happening. So that change of status quo means that situations are worse.

Involving people and being generous of your time to help them understand that might help change a bit easier.

And also, like, if they're seeing those incremental changes having small incremental benefits to their lives or their work, like, if we chunk it up, like, people generally can deal with that a lot more than if we were to say there's this massive change coming. Like, see how you can deal with that, guys. Like, I think it's chunking up will help us really. People just manage it a lot better, don't they?

Yeah, they can get to grips of it. They can get their heads around it. And it's the most caring way of doing change. Right. Just doing it incrementally with people.

Yeah. And the positive side benefit is that we get a little bit of value and perhaps residents get some.

Get some benefit from even just that small step, step forward. And people often like to say that people kind of act themselves into a new way of thinking. Right.

They do the thing and they're like, oh, actually, do you know what? This does make sense. This is helpful without having to force it on them.

You started talking earlier on about earlier in your career and having made some mistakes perhaps before working in some of these ways. I wonder if you talk about some of those, like, what are some of the. Because I got so many.

I got so many projects where I look back and I say, oh, God, with the benefit of hindsight, I would have done that very differently. Can you think of. Is there anyone that. That you can think of?

And I wonder what were some of the conditions that maybe weren't in place or things you didn't do that resulted in it going. Going south.

Yeah.

So I think when I said, like, one of the most important thing is that relationship building like that, where my projects haven't been as successful, I like them to be, is where I hadn't spent the time building those relationships with the people I needed to at the beginning.

Yeah.

So that was. But also, like, I think there was probably a lack of humility on my side as well.

Like recognizing that because I developed something or I'd created something, I'd spent and invested a lot of time in it, like it had to be the right thing, it had to be the thing that worked.

So those two things combined, like not really engaging kind of the stakeholders in the right way to say actually this, this thing that we're going to do here might feel a bit different, but I've got you, like I'll work with you as much as we can, but actually that your role is to make sure that you're comfortable with it as well. So as soon as things aren't comfortable enough, let's, let's work together to make it feel more comfortable for people.

And actually there's going to be times where like feeling uncomfortable is good, like you don't, it doesn't have to be, you don't have to feel safe the whole way through it.

So maybe not spending as much time as I should have done meant that when I came with to the kind of tada moment and said actually this is the thing that we've designed on your behalf, they're like, well that's so far from kind of what I ever expected. Like how did you get to this?

It just, it didn't, it didn't sell because I hadn't taken them on the journey and recognized that when we do any kind of generative work like we are, we're kind of iterating, evolving around the things that we learn. And sometimes the things that we learn go against our original assumptions about what it is that we need to do.

So by not taking people on that journey and kind of going in, like maybe not as kind of humble as I could have been around other people's roles.

That's when it, it didn't work and the work didn't continue after that because it was, people just felt, I think people felt done to rather than done with in that, in that moment, not everyone but the leaders that needed to make decisions on what we were doing, they were the ones that felt left out.

Yeah, I mean when I think about you, I think about relationships like that for me is one of your strongest qualities, you know, that you really do lean into building relationships with people and just like the language you just use there, I know this is going to feel uncomfortable, but I got you things like that. You never hear that in, in a professional setting. You know, often relationships between services are sometimes quite transactional.

Particularly if you work in a transformation function, you know, oh, the transformation. People are going to come and do a come and Do a project, they're going to give us something.

It's not that, is it, you know, it's something that we do together. And in order to be able to get to a place where we can do it together, we need to, we need to have relationships.

We need to talk in a way that demonstrates to them that we're both people and we're both trying our best and we're not perfect and probably some things are going to go wrong along the way. And it's like saying it in this kind of language, isn't it? That is not, it's not, it's not bullshit language.

It's real honest human to human communication.

And not just talking like doing, I think doing, but just playing as well. Like understanding, like where as humans like we can play together is also really important.

There's people that like, that come to work who are very different to who they are at home.

And that's cool, but at heart we all kind of want to be considered and felt cared for and involved and like we have to bring in our, our kind of authentic selves to work. Like we have to bring in our humor and humility and kindness and playfulness.

That all has to come out of work because if it doesn't, we're not gonna, we're not gonna build those relationships. So yeah, I think those, those things are really important. Right? We need to, we need to do that.

And I think there is something around trying to find like the organizational level that you can have the right conversations about. I think part of that is around the kind of psychological safety that we need at work as well.

So if we're asking people to be brave, to be curious and to experiment, people need to feel safe to do that. And that doesn't mean they need to feel comfortable at any stage.

They just need to know that they can be their authentic selves and they can have challenges, they can kind of rumble on issues together, they can kind of brainstorm and riff on ideas with people without feeling judged. I think being authentic is the way that we do that.

Yeah, I think about this so much. There are so many fundamentals that need to be in place for good change work to happen. And nobody talks about this stuff.

I mean there's an emerging conversation around psychological safety, but having real psychological safety in a team, a multidisciplinary team, I'd rather that than a bunch of people that know about agile and service design in depth. Very helpful to have people who are experts in the process. But real trust, real psychological safety, that for me Trumps things, you know.

Yeah. And I guess in that like people who are genuine servant leaders as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So people who can put others like needs like above their own. I think that's really important in the work that we do as well.

As soon as we get into kind of fighting around our own personal needs like we probably won't move things forward as how we can.

Yeah. So you've just. Well, you're in the process of building a team and a function, aren't you?

How are you thinking about establishing these kinds of conditions in that team? What's the work to do that?

So I think it's like I think about both the team and the organization because my team can't function if the conditions in the organization aren't right for them to function themselves.

So we've, we've moved within the last 12 months from a very traditional PMO model that we had in eating when I moved in, which I think it did some really powerful and positive things for eating at a moment in time. Yeah, but it's probably not what we completely need at the moment.

So we've a very ambitious vision as a council and that means a completely like it needs a really radical way of thinking about what local government is and could be in the future. So we recognized that we needed very different skills moving away from program and project management which are definitely still needed.

We moved more into actually we need people who genuinely care and can redesign services around people and what they need with really good alignment to our vision. We also need people who know agile and can actually deliver using kind of agile methodologies.

So we've kind of bought in kind of researchers, designers and delivery managers in the last 12 months. And the way that we've, part of the way that we've done that or part of our sell to people was we don't know what this is going to be.

We don't know the model that we're delivering yet.

We know the principles we want to work to, but we want to get the right people in first and then with those right people who have got the right values for the organization. So we are looking for some technical skills.

But for us what we're most looking forward looking for is, is the values that people bring to the work they do and bringing them together so that we can design kind of our models of change and transformation in eating. So we've been very deliberate in making sure that we recruit using a values based model of recruitment. What does that mean?

Well, we're kind of looking for people who are kind of. Who genuinely care about social issues and being able to deliver social impact.

We're looking for people who have got a very experimental mindset, so they don't mind, like, challenging the status quo and trying new things, learning, learning from those new things, but also are able to bring kindness and humility and generosity to their work so they can engage others in the work they do as well.

Yeah.

We also are looking for people who are inclusive in terms of their mindset and how they make sure inclusivity is every part of the work they do. And people have got a genuine, like, energy to deliver. Yeah.

So we've done a lot of like, our recruitment, we can change our recruitment to make sure those values came out from it. But we've also started. We in our team, we make sure that we've got lots of time for.

So we're genuinely professional at work, but we recognize that kind of laughter and play and fun is part of the work. It's not something different.

So we make sure that we build those qualities within the team just through the rhythms and the ceremonies that we put into the way that we work.

So that's how we've kind of started to build the team and we're making sure that they are kind of like, we're making sure they're supportive of one another. They've got weekly kind of time for their own development, so they're sharing their own knowledge, sharing their own skills.

And there's a really nice sense of community across the team at the moment. And people genuinely want to learn and improve and develop together. So that's how we've started to build that team. Organizationally.

There's things that we are, we're doing to try and bring, try and get the right culture in. So again, we're moving to more of a values based model. The way that we recruit people.

We're asking leaders not just to take accountability, their own service, but recognize themselves as a leader that's got accountability for all council services.

So any decisions that are made are based on all residents of the borough and all council services, which I think has helped to foster more collaboration across the organisation, which is great. And we're just moving away from kind of boardroom practices to workshop practices.

So our leadership teams, like once a month, wherever they are, they move away from the traditional kind of meeting and get into genuine workshops.

I've involved our chief exec and some of our strategic directors in design sprints where they've been involved in designing new concepts, but not only that, they've Been involved in acting out those new concepts in a live prototype. Well, a working prototype. So there's things we're doing that we're trying to encourage, like different practices and different ways of working.

The role of our team is that we provide, I think we provide leadership by doing and making sure when we do the work it's visible and transparent. We've got good communications around it, but we also provide a role of coaching.

So we try and coach people through the development of communities of practice. We make sure that we've got opportunities for people to check in, ask advice.

And the other thing that we do is we make sure that we're always looking across the organization for those things that are like really good practice. And when we see them, like we tell stories about them, amplify them. Yeah, yeah. So that, so we've got a way of doing that.

And just in like the last 12 months of our start of us beginning to do this, we're already seeing change in the organization.

I'm seeing, not that it's the only way to do it, but I'm seeing lots of post it notes on walls at the moment which 12 months ago we wouldn't have seen. So it tells me that people are, they're trying new stuff. Right.

They're trying to have different conversations and different relationships with their colleagues.

Yeah. I think one, one really important thing that you're doing is you're building a team.

I know you're not looking for people don't need to be real specialists to join your team. That values is where it starts. But you are building a team of, of real experts in the process of some of this stuff.

We were trying to get them to a place where they really know how to help people through workshops or to run a design sprint or to do user research. I think that lots of people try and implement an agile way of working or implement human centered design and it just doesn't work.

So we try and do it massively all at the same time in every part of the organization. There's not enough people to be helpful and help people with the uncertainty that comes with trying out completely different ways of working.

Whereas you've got stuff going across the organization, but you're introducing it and helping people through that process. Right. And I think that's really, really important.

And creating spaces where people can come and say, I don't know, like communities practice, not 100% sure on this, like where can I, where can I get some help? Or have we got some good examples of where this has worked Elsewhere. And there's no one right answer is there, to like introducing this stuff?

Well, it takes lots of different things across the organization to build a bit of a groundswell, doesn't it?

It does.

And I don't, I don't feel like we've necessarily had to introduce it across the whole organization because if I look across Ealing and I look across any of like the public organizations. I know, I think a lot of this happens anyway. It's just not named.

Yeah.

So when you look at the role of a, like a children's social worker, I said earlier, like, they generally empathize and care for the families they're working with.

They try and understand the causal points of problems and once they've got those, they work with the families to create new paradigms in people's lives. They try and create new ways of people kind of living and getting by. So. And if things don't go right, they try again. Right. They don't stop.

They try something different.

You can't just leave it.

They go again. Right. They keep going and things come in and out of the system all the time and they're constantly iterating and experimenting.

So it isn't a difficult cell if you recognize where it is already happening.

Yeah.

So I don't, I don't think I, I wouldn't like to say I've introduced it, but what I have done is kind of try and like translate what we're trying to do to the fact that we're already doing it in different spaces.

Yeah.

I mean, we've done loads of agile training with frontline children services folks and strip away all the language about ceremonies and roles and stuff.

And it just makes intuitive sense, you know, like this is the only way of making progress really, with a family that has, you know, hard problems to deal with. So. Yeah, I like that you've sort of landed on that too. Or it gives me some confidence that we're thinking in the right way as well.

I've spoken briefly about like communities and practice and people having opportunities to train together within their team. But it's also really important that we're constantly looking externally.

Like we're conscious that both the sector changes, but also kind of just industry in itself changes. And we need, as a, as a local government, we need to be able to learn from other pioneers. Right. So where can we go to be inspired by.

And some of those places kind of already exist in the public sector, but may not be seen as a public sector organization.

So basis, for example, are a company that I've worked with a couple of times in my career and have found them to be excellent practitioners both in Agile and service design, but also are the kind of people that I want to work with. They're kind of grounded in a social purpose. They are experts in the way that they coach and advise and work alongside people.

I've never experienced them like doing too like you do with some consultancies and actually they are kind of very generous with the way that they build relationships in, in local government, not just individually but the way they connect people together.

So having been on some Agile training with Basis, I've been putting my starfuk onto the Agile Agile training and we've also done some work with Basis and our leadership group to make sure that maybe to make sure that people aren't just hearing from me all the time. Right. If they hear kind of a voice of one person in the organization, it might have some impact.

If you amplify that voice with kind of external partners and people who've got knowledge across the broader sector, it plays a real, kind of, real role in making sure that the way that we develop not just individuals in the organization, but the culture and the disciplines that exist within the organisation kind of happen really well. So yeah, the BASIS have been great in doing that.

Oh, thanks. I appreciate you being so kind. Cheers for sharing.

You're very welcome. It's been very helpful.

Look, I've already kept you for a whole bunch of time and I feel like we could, we could keep this conversation going for a long time, but I think lots of people watching this will be after some. Some people will be after some inspiration.

Some people will be looking for perhaps even role models of people in similar jobs to them who are doing the kinds of things they aspire to do. But some people will be after some advice. So what, what advice would you give?

If you could give one piece of advice to somebody that's working in the same space that we're in now, I'm happy.

If you choose somebody who's earlier in their career or somebody who's later in their career, whatever, whatever most speaks to you, what would you, what would that advice be?

So there's probably a few, but it's like for me, the first one is like lean into being brave.

Because it is like to try something new in a sector that is built historically on things that keep people safe, whether that is council budgets or whether it is child protection services, whatever it is like the things that are there designed for people to feel safe and in control of what's happening. Like sometimes those things still aren't working even though people feel safe.

So you have to be quite brave to take a risk and try something different. I think that for me, like, like do it. Be brave. Like nothing bad's gonna happen as a result. But be brave. Be brave about it.

I also just the point I made earlier, like genuinely find time to build relationships with the people that you need to build relationships with. If you're trying to implement something new, it's never going to happen if you haven't got some kind of someone by your side co signing.

So I think it's helpful someone to do that.

Nice. I think that's a really nice place to end it. Thanks so much for coming. Spend the afternoon with me. This is mega helpful.

Thanks for having me.

So, as you can see, these conversations are quite a selfish endeavor on my part because I just get to learn a whole bunch from from them. And I'm certain that people watching these interviews will have their own questions or perhaps maybe even people that they would like me to speak to.

If you've got any suggestions about either questions or folks that you'd like me to interview, then I am very, very up for hearing about it and I'll try and make that that happen. So drop them in the comments on this post or maybe contact us on social media and we'll see what we can do. See you soon.