What does 40 years at the heart of public service teach you about truly sustaining change?

In this episode, Joe sits down with Tracy McKim, Head of People, Policy and Transformation at Newport City Council, reflecting on 40 years of public service and the power of relational approaches to service design.

What you’ll learn:

• Why relationships are at the heart of sustainable change.
• How starting small and learning through action creates lasting impact.
• The role of trust and collaboration in solving complex challenges.

Whether you're passionate about public services, service design, or driving meaningful change, this conversation is packed with practical insights and inspiration.

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

So we don't know each other that well. So I would love to know what is your, what's your career path been today? What's the, what are you doing now?

What's the journey been to get where you are?

Okay, well, I, I'm currently working for Newport Council. I'm a head of service there. I do a lot of different things. I do IT technology, intelligence. I said we know each other a little bit through that work.

I also am responsible for assets, for hr, services for health and safety, organizational development, long list policy and so on. So essentially I'm service to the other services.

I'm part of kind of the glue that helps the other services run, doing some really important stuff within that and some compliance work within that. And I guess I stumbled into it. So I've been working for 40 years this year.

That's absolutely maverick. Congrats.

Thank you. I'm still waiting for my medal for different councils and I stumbled into it.

I was 16, I didn't want to stay at school, I didn't like school very much and I just went for a job at a, at the time, regional council and they, at that time we still do trained people. I studied public sector stuff. I later studied governance. I did an MBA and then I moved from council to council in different jobs.

I ran it for 10 years. I've worked in intelligence for a long time, but I've been an auditor. I've trained head teachers, Jack of all trades.

Only in the public sector could you have a career that varied.

Yes.

Yeah. It's funny that though, isn't it? Because I did the same thing.

I mean, I haven't been working in public services for four years, but I have, I guess, almost either in or with, for almost 20 years now. And it's funny how many people in the public sector just sort of stumble into a job and then make it, make it a career.

And I wonder, I wonder what that is. What do you, what do you think about that?

You can only speak for yourself. But I, but I have peers who've done similar things. I think the variety is helpful.

I think what you start doing or in your life as things change, maybe you want to make changes. I've changed jobs about every three years and I've really stayed in a similar field that, that appeals to me.

I wouldn't get that privilege or experience elsewhere and I don't think I'd have stayed that long if it wasn't for the variety. And also we've changed the public sector in that time. What I came into is not. Is not what I see now. And it's really quite different.

I mean, there are, you know, advert for the public sector, there are employee benefits to that, you know, all of that good stuff. But you don't stay that long just for those things. You stay for other, other interests as well, I think.

Yeah. So, I mean, I'm interested in improving public services, learning how to make them better.

I've always worked in that area when I was in the public sector and now outside it, and that's kind of where we've come into contact with each other. And knowing that you've been in public services for 40 years, I'm interested to know, what do you think?

What's something that has always worked when it comes to trying to improve services? And what's something that doesn't work, that people think works but actually doesn't?

Yeah, I'll start with that if I can.

I mean, I think what increasingly doesn't work, and this has got worse over time, is the shiny new toy, the technology, the new system, the new thing on the market or in someone's glimmer, in someone's eye that they're interested in. That kind of good stuff doesn't travel well. If you transplant it onto something new, it might have worked brilliantly elsewhere.

It really is a dead cert for what you want, you know, that kind of answer for a problem that you haven't identified yet. There was a time when that did work.

Say more about that.

Well, I think technology has changed, hasn't it? You know, that kind of build it and they will come. Concept with the Internet, with a website, with an app, with new systems. There wasn't one.

You got one. It was better.

Yeah.

Now we're much more sophisticated. We have really complex systems. Transplanting a new thing, it might not be technology. I'm picking on technology a bit.

Transplanting a new thing, it could be a piece of practice directly onto a complex organization is just really the right thing or a good fit.

Not to mention the fact that you haven't got engagement in it and people haven't bought into it because it's usually one person's big idea and everyone else has to live with it. So there's, you know, there are inherent problems with that.

And then I guess it makes it easy to think about what works, because what works is it's really boring. You have to listen to people who know.

You have to map together multiple different opinions and different pieces of knowledge that are generally quite complex and often contrary to one another. And Find the truth that's in the middle, in the gray. And you have to spend time doing that, time on the run up time embedding it.

And that's tedious, isn't it? Nobody wants to hear that. And it'll take twice as long as we think. And we can't just buy something off the shelf. And it also can cost money.

But that's where change stays and continues, I think, and can continue to grow and overreaches its original aspiration. So it's kind of the counter to that, I think.

No, I think we, we think exactly the same about this. And I almost want to turn this into a therapy sess.

Oh, yes, that's better. Let's talk about you.

It's not about you, it's about me.

Because I think working in consultancy there's, you know, it's easier to sell something if it's been productized and you sort of make up a story about why this thing works and you, you know, we'll implement it in your, in your council and it'll make things better. But I just don't believe that. I just, just like you, I, I fundamentally don't believe that.

I think the real work happens when you roll your sleeves up together and just go through that tedious process of listening, learning, testing, embedding. And that's difficult to explain, isn't it?

It's difficult to explain for consultancies, but it's also difficult to explain for people in your position, I imagine, because what you're saying is, well, I know this is messy, but there isn't a perfect answer to this, to this problem. How do you reconcile that in your role? Because you've got to balance the sort of politics of the situation with the urgency to make something happen.

Yeah. What's the trick?

Well, there's no one trick, is there? But I think, look, sometimes someone wants to do a thing and it's just better to do that thing.

You have to know when you're beat, really, and when that's just the answer. So I think there are those occasions or there are occasions when that might be part of the answer. So you accept that given.

I think when I worked in it, we used to say a lot, you can do absolutely anything if you've got enough time and money. And of course, you can do literally anything if you've got enough time and money. And we never have.

So what you have to understand is what are the limiting factors? I think. And time might be a limiting factor. You might need to work really quickly.

There could Be some legislation that's coming in in April and that's it. You've got to do it, really. But it can be. Money will always be limited in some way, even when finances were much better in the public sector.

In the end, you're spending public money and you, you know, you have a responsibility to do that well. And also there's something about what are the risks? What are the risks of these different options?

The personalities and the people are kind of a separate task, aren't they?

But if you've done enough of your work, I think in really working through those complexities, you present those cases to the different people, working carefully with them and hopefully common sense will prevail. I'm a really big fan of proof of concepts. Pilots pump prime and call them what you like. Having a go, having a go at a thing.

It doesn't have to be perfect. Progress, not perfection, not my bosses all the time.

Yeah.

Progress, not perfection. So it isn't mine. But also not overdoing them. There's only so many discoveries you need to do.

You need to do a discovery and then have the confidence to say that there isn't anything else here to find. And finding more wouldn't give us enough. We'll move off now and we'll try and do something again.

That's really complex and there's no one answer to that. And I think there's something about leadership in that as well.

So giving everyone else the confidence to give positive and negative feedback, to say what they think to. To know when to call it if it's not working.

Yeah.

Or to know when to keep going if it's not working. Because it might, you know, the. Sometimes the. It can clear, can't it? There's something about giving that time and space to make that happen.

If you like setting the climate in which change can happen. That's really cheesy, but that is what it is.

There's so much in what you just said and I don't. There's a million questions that I want to sort of dig into. I'm going to have to. In the spirit of what you just said, I'm going to have to pick one.

I think something that a colleague of mine, Rick, often says is that relationships are primary and everything else is derivative. So if you've got the relationships right with people, then you can make lots of things happen.

But if the relationships aren't quite right, then you're going to get stuck, if not immediately, maybe later on down the line. And I'm interested to know what does that look like?

The job of maintaining relationships for the purpose of, you know, maintaining them long term, but also for the purpose of getting started on lots of difficult pieces of work.

Yeah, I don't know if I'm the right person to ask.

I moved from when I moved from my career at that time in technology into a partnerships role, into a partnerships lead because I think it's fair to say I felt I needed a lot of development in working with people in partnerships. And did I develop? I don't know, hopefully.

But what I found when I kind of reached into that world, which was not about change, but a partnership's job was actually it's much easier to do that around a functional thing, doing a thing. It's really hard to sustain and maintain relationships just on the basis that you'll get along and you've got some sort of joined up agenda.

You know, as you might read in a textbook, the way a partnership is really cemented is in that thing you did together, small or big, in a delivery thing. Succeed or fail and. But obviously if you succeed, it continues. So there's something helpful there and you show off about it.

But if it fails, you might blame each other. So anyway, it's a whole other story,.

But we'll get into some of those later.

I think the way relationships are best created is around doing a thing or jointly doing a thing, rather than kind of. Personally, I find it quite hard to create that. An artificial relationship, even though sometimes that's required. Artificial, wrong term.

But if you're not actually doing a thing or you're not ready to, it's hard to get that commitment, isn't it? I'm not sure I agree that it's all. I think it's 50. 50, I think.

What's the other 50?

Yeah, well, you can have the best partnership in the world. You can all literally love each other and be lined up about the. You never are. But otherwise it wouldn't be a partnership, it'd be one organization.

But you could all have the same objective and you could have spent forever getting to it in complete trust. If the functional thing isn't right.

Yeah.

The best partnership in the world won't make it right. It means it's more likely to get called out and rectified, I think. But you, for me it's 50. 50. The kind of.

If you like softer stuff and the hard functional, you need expertise, skills, the kit or whatever the thing is and a solution and the solution and that is hard, harder stuff versus the softer stuff. And I think is even. I think one can kind of collapse the other often.

Yeah, no, I think you bang on. And I think this comes back to your point about proof of concept and prototyping, because a lot of.

At least in my experience, a lot of the sort of discomfort you get with projects or the inertia or the getting stuck comes at the sort of in theory stage. Like, in theory, what is it that we're going to do?

But as soon as you actually do something, then you learn what works in practice and not just in theory. And like you say, it's through the doing and the hard work of that that you start to build relationships. I think so, yeah. I'm not sure.

I'm just using that to wax lyrical about my own point. So.

Yeah, no, I agree with that.

And also, there's somewhere in the middle, which means you put spade in the ground, figuratively and within the partnership, that suddenly winkles out some differences.

Yeah, yeah.

We all get along until we're putting some money in or some resource in, or it's. This thing works really well for my organization. It doesn't work well for yours. But we collectively agreed that was okay.

It might look a bit different when it's on the ground and you have a. You know, you be in the organization, you have a board or stakeholders who are not so happy with your great early decision to compromise.

So that's where the differences can start to show. And then it's circular, so you have to amend that sometimes, that solution and then go back around the partnership and get things better.

Or you have to accept that someone's going to drop off. Actually, it's not going to work. It's not going to work there. But it works for everyone else. And there we are.

Yeah, but that's all learning, isn't it? Because I think the job that we're in, there's always problems. It's all problems.

You know, there are little sort of blips in the road and you just got to sort of climb over them. And if working together flushes out some of those problems, then that's just something that has to be dealt with, isn't it? It's not.

It's not something to be avoided because it can't be avoided. We work in a system and people have slightly different agendas to one another.

We're all working towards a reasonably shared goal and outcome, but we're not always going to get along. And I think that's fine. That's just part of the job is working through that.

I think it is and that thing about the avoidance thing, because that does happen sometimes, doesn't it? We just move past that and go on to another bit of the problem.

But if you think of it as a whole system of gears and pulleys or pipe work or whatever, sooner or later you will come back around to the thing you avoided.

Yeah, yeah.

And, and that's.

Sometimes that's okay because the timing has changed or you've developed confidence in, in your work together or in something else which create, creates a bit of movement. Struggling not to think about pipes now, but, but you can't, it can't avoid it forever. It will come back.

And sometimes that problem can make everything else worse. You know, there's all sorts of consequences to that.

Yeah. I think something that's interesting about you specifically is you've stuck around for a long time.

I know you've moved jobs, but you've stuck around in organizations for reasonably long periods of time.

And some of these problems that we're working on, some of the really messy stuff at the moment, housing and homelessness, big issue, lots of problems in social care, they don't get solved in a month or three months or six months. They don't get solved in a year, they don't get solved in two.

And it needs people to stick around, working on them and be really resilient, doesn't it?

Yeah, and that's hard. And the other thing is, you know, that kind of textbook thing of recognizing your successes and making sure you pick up.

Well, you can't in most public sector, I would say, because they're so far down the path. Your bit of it is way past that. Success is, you know, rolling on for a very long time later. There's never that yay moment.

You know, didn't we do well that. It's not really like that. Or they're, or they're rare. You know, you might have a launch of a new website or something like that.

But the, the sort of problems you're talking about, what you're probably going to do is make things incrementally better. It's not going to be big tick mentally better. And you either are not around by the time that happens because you're doing something else.

You might, you might see it over there, but it's someone else's success generally. And, and it's hard to get that kind of motivation that comes from that movement and success.

So you've got to recognize the small part that you play in moving things forward, I think. And not everything works. And that's Even harder.

Yeah.

You've put a lot of work in and that thing has eventually either fallen back over or not being successful. And as you say, you learn every day's a school day. You've got to learn from that.

Yeah, yeah. So how do you deal with that with your team then?

Because I think the thing that motivates people more than anything else is a sense that they are making progress. They can see they're showing up, they're doing meaningful work and something is better, even if only a small amount.

How do you deal with that for yourself and for the people that you're working with?

Yeah, well, I don't want to be too glib about it, but if you want to have a kind of early win and make people happy, you probably need to be working in, I don't know, hairdressers or selling holidays or something like that. It isn't like that in the public sector job. So probably that context is already set. But it is about breaking up the problems.

You know, that how do you eat an elephant one teaspoon at a time type thing.

Disgusting.

Thank you. Recognizing those. So. So if all you did was that one bit. Recognizing that. We did that one bit. I mean, really good project management.

Again, boring project management. You know, no one wants it, but it really works.

Yeah.

If you can recognize the individual milestones, the individual parts that have come, come good within that and, I don't know, celebrates that you can't quite celebrate because you're not at the end.

But recognizing that and recognizing everyone's part in that and, and seeing how that learning can be taken into other things, I'm really keen on that. So, okay, we did this small thing here. Can we use that over there, there and there.

And there's also something about knitting in the thing we're doing with everything else. It's a bit tangential now, but I think of this a lot. You know, in the current world, we're all about automation and AI, aren't we, AI crazy?

The whole world is, and what can we do with that?

And it's kind of up here on a spectrum, but it's all part of the same spectrum, which is making things better, making that smaller system better, and doing something down here, which is changing. A business process is every bit as important as overlaying a bit of AI over the top, frankly, more important because it's the bedrock of the.

Of the other. And so where I'm getting to is, and the people who are there, they may not know all of this great, exciting stuff.

But they absolutely know their core business and if they can play a part in making that core business better, and most people already think their core business is good, you don't come to work to do a bad job. You already think you're doing a good job.

But being given the opportunity to use your time more effectively, that's an intrinsically rewarding thing, I think.

No, definitely. I think something that that's made me think of is just the importance of doing basic things really well consistently over long periods of time.

And I'd just be interested to hear your views on that. What are some of the.

When we're thinking about running services, improving services continuously over long periods of time, what are some of the basics that need to be in place for that to happen? Do you think that's not the sort of shiny this thing is going to solve our problem?

That's really hard, isn't it? And that's part of making change stick as well. I think skills.

Developing skills within that team and making sure people are responsible for their own successes. I'm part of my role is hr. I'm bound to say that the people are really important.

Their knowledge and skills and helping them to develop for the new worlds that they're moving into. I actually think local government is really good at that.

Yeah, big time.

Otherwise I wouldn't have lasted 40 years. I didn't know anything when I started, really. I thought I did. I thought I knew everything. Obviously I knew nothing.

So skills really, really important. It is important to keep an eye on what's shiny and new and the market.

But the basics for me are project management, progress, working with people, making sure those people have the appropriate skills, listening, hearing. There's a big problem with leadership, isn't there, that people stop telling you when you're wrong.

That's terrifying to me, I think, and should be for any leader. And you see that kind of nationally, I think with some leadership things, really listening.

And we haven't really talked here about the people who are impacted residents. People experience the service. What does it look like for them?

And just because it's not easy to sort out what we're hearing, that doesn't mean we shouldn't really understand what that looks like. These are all really basic, basic, basic things that haven't changed at all actually over the years.

But it is easy to forget about them when we're looking for complex or quick fixes.

Yeah. I mean, it's even things like for me, like how are we.

How are we running meetings and how are we making decisions with one another, you know, because you go into so many, particularly somebody in your position, I imagine in back to back meetings all, you know, all day, every day. And at least when I was in a leadership position in local government, I'd be in lots of conversations. I think I'm not.

This probably isn't the best use of my time. You know, we're not, we're not making decisions collectively or there's no process for making decisions. It's not clear who's making the decision.

There's no kind of facilitation of the conversation. And I think stuff like that, that would count as a basic for me.

But the project management point is a really interesting one because we do lots of work with people in frontline services and getting people to see the value that they each bring to a piece of work, I think is really important because obviously if you're working in a frontline social work team, they're bringing professional expertise, judgment, a real understanding of the system and the experiences of people that they're helping, but they know less about the process of making change happen. And that's something I'm often sort of struggling with. How do you make those two things fit together?

Yeah, and often those people don't naturally come together. I think about this a little bit. My daughter's in university training to be a social worker.

Oh, no way.

And, and she'll say to me, and I don't know anything about, you know, whatever it is, I know nothing about it. And, and when she tells me about real basic social work stuff, you know, or I might read an essay and I realize I.

That's a corner of local government. I don't know enough about that either, so. And you need both, don't you? So I, I do think, think about that a fair bit.

I think there's something again about finding real opportunities for those people to come together, but not overdoing it either. So the point about meetings is a case in point, isn't it?

If you're doing a piece of work and you need to understand what it looks like to the front line and what it looks like to the leadership or the change team need to hear about whatever that is. We don't really have change teams anymore, none of us.

But the people who are doing the thing, properly, capturing that, properly understanding it, you don't then have to engage with those people in every single meeting. They don't need to be there. And all this the kind of. I was going to say navel gazing.

We don't have time for that either solution finding far more diplomatic. But we do go back to those people and use them perhaps as the test later. And there's something about that.

But again, it's really challenging because they also have a job to do and pressures around that and might not want to sit and hear about some possibilities that may or may not make things better. And you just have to really work, I think, at making that valuable.

And that goes back to the something that came up earlier about creating a climate where change can occur for everybody, whoever that is.

And I guess the other thing that occurs to me about that is I think there is a danger that various people at the table or computer screen feel that they're not an expert, so they don't have anything to add.

Yeah.

And this is what we're saying over and over. Everyone, everyone has something to add in that. In some ways I think the job, the easy job is pulling that together.

Yeah.

And making something of it. Once you've got everyone. Got everyone there.

Yeah. I think there's something in there about like how do we. Without sounding too yes or too academic about it, like how do we optimize for learning?

So the people who are closest to the problem, so people who are working on the front line, they can learn what's working, what's not working. Change teams or people doing that work can learn what's working, what's not. Leaders can learn what's working, what's not.

And then we use all of that information to make good decisions and to adapt.

But sometimes just the way that public services is structured makes that very difficult because people in the front line have got really big caseloads and maybe they don't have time to come and share their learning or learn what other people are learning.

And leaders back to back meetings, sometimes it's not realistic within the way that services are set up at the moment for them to be there every two weeks or something to see what progress is happening on a piece of work and to give their input. So yeah, there's something about the way that services are organized that at the moment causes a bit of. Causes a bit of friction and frustration.

I think, I don't know, I don't know if you sort of see that in your role or recognize that view of the world.

Yeah. And I think where you.

Because you can cut into that a bit, you can have, I don't know, champions for this change within that environment and that kind of thing. You can cut into that. But you do see the same voice, you do hear the same voices.

So you tend, you know, that kind of can't, won't cut sort of set up where the people you really needed to hear from are not the ones stepping forward into that champion role necessarily. And you need to get underneath that also, don't you?

And also it's disappointing, isn't it, because they come and tell you all about their problems and in that moment everyone's at the table and we've, we've all got our eye on the prize. And then if you're doing the solution work really well, it won't come quickly and you might take some wrong turns.

Oh, we're all disappointed now and there's less people at the table and oh, it's all bit rubbish and I wish I hadn't spent my time on it.

And you've got to get through that to get to the really good solution if you're doing it well and that's hard to carry on and recognize that you're not going to get it right first time. And if you aren't getting it right, you absolutely need those naysayers at the table to tell you it's wrong, don't you?

The worst thing is, is not to hear that and carry on down that path without changing it. It is really hard. That's engagement. That's people. That is.

I'm currently working the, what we call the corporate center in local government and that's what it's like at the corporate center. Anyway. Anyway, you know, there's kind of everyone else with proper jobs, social workers, people working with schools and so on.

I've done those roles as well.

And it's easy to think that those, the, the HR people, the, the IT people, that the people doing the intelligence work kind of got nothing better to do than to come up with, you know, ideas to make everything harder. And it should be the opposite. I think that relationship is gritty anyway.

Yeah.

And needs, needs constant work and constant selling every now and again, something. So I talked about people. There's ways of cutting through it with people every now and again.

There are little pieces that float through on the change spectrum that cut through that. I have to name a product because I can't think of how to say it generically, but things like Microsoft Copilot, that kind of.

Everyone's talking about that kind of technology. People can just pick that up and run with it.

Yeah.

And Frontline practitioners are kind of really enjoying that, doing great stuff with it and making real time savings with it, then that needs to be turned into a bigger change. And how does that cut, you know, the business process stuff? And what could we do differently as a consequence of that? And how could we layer on more?

Because it costs and you have to find a way of funding it also.

But every now and again I think there are examples of things that everyone gets and everyone can just run with and then it's really easy for everyone to come to the table. Everyone has something to say about that personally benefits them really quickly. You know, web services and apps were a bit like that.

I could just come straight away and say, well, I can order a pizza online, why can't I do whatever? But they're rare. Most.

If only it was all like that.

If only it was all like that. You don't need to worry about those things. They will pervade.

Well, let's talk about, let's talk about some examples then.

So I'm interested in what kind of pieces of work have you been involved in or projects where perhaps it was pretty complex, really difficult, gritty, to use one of the words you just used. What stands out as something that you're proud of.

And what I want to get to is what are some of the common bits of learning that other people can take away? Is there anything that stands out?

I mean, all of the times where it was impossible and eventually it wasn't. I mean, all of those times that is the case and there's, there's lessons in all of that. There's. It's a, it's a really poor example, actually.

I mean, there's an example where we were trying to redo the council's website short story, completely rethink it and we were persevering, persevering with the old technology. It was already paid for and we already had it and it just, it was the assumed right way to go.

And we persevered for far too long without calling that a fail and pulling back and doing something different. But there was. But I'm also pleased with that. It's really hard to call it the fail that.

It was really, really hard and you know, I probably was part of that to say, oh, this we could just go call a stop and. Because you go past the point where that's a good idea, you. And we see this in a lot of major programs, you know, not, not just in the public sector.

You see that in the sort of things you see in the newspaper where things have failed. It's gone way past the point. And then you, you have to keep committing you over budget and then you might as well keep going and so on.

So I was really proud that we called that and we now have a great solution. But it was extremely challenging at the time and we also then took a look at what it means to fail. That kind of fail safe, fail forward.

There's loads of new phrases, aren't there? And do you learn from that? And how do you learn from that? And you know, being confident about the learning from that.

So I was really pleased about that because that created some cultural shift. And secondly, we now have an open source website which is really rare.

I think it's the only council in Wales currently, certainly the only bilingual open source website in a council.

Yeah, I think that's a really good example because it's just so unbelievably hard to call something to say right enough is enough and for everybody to be okay with that is hard because some people will have invested an enormous amount of time and effort into it and maybe they'll feel like they need to do some face saving.

Perhaps they have had to not necessarily promise counsellors, but really sell the benefits of the thing to a counsellor that is sort of publicly behind that thing. That's all really, really tricky.

So I'm not surprised that's one of your examples because I think once you've named one of those things then you've got a bit of a language within the organization, haven't you? This similar sort of situation happened on that project and it feels like we're maybe going into that territory and perhaps that's a useful thing.

And we also just to kind of. There was so many. It's easier to look at one example and think of multiple lessons.

We also went really high risk so it would have been quite easy to switch up one traditional, for want of a better term, known path, traditional solution for another.

Because now we're, you know, but then you kind of think, oh well, it's failed now, so we, we may as well go all out and do something we really want to do. And we had to turn it around financially and obviously open source is a way of doing that also. But it made us go for a higher risk solution.

Really we're not done.

So, you know, if anyone knows about the project and thinks, well, it's only half finished, yes, I know it's behind because we failed on the first solution, but it will be a better product and it's also a model that others in the region are looking at. We're leading on a regional piece, so it's a model for other councils.

I mean, that is something really to take a failure into a much higher risk success, I think is. Is something to be proud of.

Yeah. I mean, it feels like that in part has created the conditions for a much more.

Well, not necessarily a much more risky approach, but just a more innovative approach. And perhaps when it was perceived like it was chugging along.

Okay, the notion of doing something a bit more risky and going for the solution that you've now gone for probably wouldn't have been that palatable for people. We're sort of going into the territory of things that haven't kind of worked so well.

And we were sort of writing to each other over email and my mum was a career public servant and she would always say to me, it's not the things that are easy you learn from, it's the things that are difficult that you learn from. And at the time, this was a long time ago, 20 years ago, I didn't really realize how sort of important that insight was.

And I'm wondering for you, what are some of the things that have been really difficult and what's some of the learning been from those things?

Yeah, it sometimes feels like everything's really difficult, doesn't it? Especially now. I mean, everyone's an expert and all technology feels possible. Why can't we just do it all? Just almost wave a magic wand.

So it does feel like everything is really difficult. And you've referred a little bit to councillors and local government.

We have an administration that comes in for four years, so we do need to think about successes within those periods.

It's a reality, isn't it?

Generally the administration has made a commitment during that period that we have to, we have to commit to and deliver on. So anything that doesn't work is really challenging.

My toughest lesson was when I was IT manager, this is a leadership thing also that you know that thing. Whereas if, where. If you say something and you've worked somewhere a long time or you're something of an.

I'm going to do that because I'm not expert or you're in a leadership position and you say something and everyone thinks that's the thing.

Yeah.

And that this is a real life example that, that I use in other things.

There was a really difficult IT problem and there's a sort of kind of method and a group of people going through some problem solving that I breezed into as the IT manager. I mean, frankly, I should have just made them all a cup of tea, but. And I said, oh, maybe I thought, I'll throw one in, you know, and.

And I Said, maybe it's. I can't remember. Dmz, anyone who knows me just laugh at me saying such things. But I, obviously I knew about the technology.

I was the IT manager, but I wasn't really a techie and I threw in some solution and maybe I did make tea. I can't remember.

And then later that day, and it was a really big outage and problem system problem that members and the chief executive were engaged in and so on.

And later that day, I kind of breezed back through and there we were implementing my solution and, And I said, oh, God, I thought, check me out, you know, I've. I worked it out. And then I said, oh, you know, how did that come to pass? And the guy that was leading it said, well, you said that was the solution.

Honestly, I thought I was gonna have a heart attack. I mean, what do you mean? I just threw in an idea. No, you said that was the solution. So we stopped problem solving and we did that. What a lesson.

Yeah, yeah.

What a waste of half a day. Obviously, obviously it won the solution.

Obviously it could have been one of 25 things it hadn't been through, all of the things it needed to, to go through to get to that. That's a lesson right there. Not to, not to allow everyone else to follow a false return, you know, a wrong path, not to take one.

Loud, authoritative, opinionated, acting like they know what they're talking about, person's voice as being the answer. And there's just so many lessons in that. And I, I use that quite a lot.

And I've also been involved in programs of work, which is similarly stressful, where I've found grown people really distressed and, and not able to function and frankly, can't think anymore. And so coupled with that, it's made me think, what's my role here?

My role here is to take the heat off, to back everyone away from it and create the climate where this thing can be sorted or this project can continue or this change can continue. And it's. Know your role. And some of that is perhaps to go somewhere else to be.

Doesn't happen so much now, but to be shouted at by someone to allow the, the people with all of the knowledge to, to do their job. I don't know if I answered the question.

Oh, you answered it so well. Yeah, no, no, absolutely bang on. Because we talk a lot about this.

I mean, I think in our language we'd say that's sort of being more of an adaptive leader.

So like, rather than just because I think by Virtue of being a senior person in an organization, lots of people will look to you as somebody that has the answer. And in loads of these kind of situations, one person can't have the answer.

It doesn't matter if they've been there for the longest time or if they're an expert in that thing. It's just not how it works. And the solution is letting lots of people with different angles on the problem wrestle with it.

And that's a really uncomfortable position to be in. Because you were somebody leading something, you are accountable for that thing. But you also have to be comfortable with not knowing.

But there's another thing at play there that you're talking about people just taking your solution. And this is another thing that I saw one of my soapbox things is there's always a hippo in the room.

And the hippo, if you haven't heard this, which is great, is the highest paid person's opinion. So if you're.

Yeah, that is it. Yeah.

If you're the hippo in the room, then a weird sort of group think phenomena happens where people just. They just latch onto the thing you say. So like being very aware that you're the hippo in a situation is. Is so interesting.

And that's a perfect example of like you said something, you didn't even realize that it was going to carry so much weight and people just sort of.

I love this because I think also if you're involved and you don't have to be the most senior person. I don't perhaps not. Hippo is that. But also if you're. Often the person has the answer.

I'm something of a problem solver so I'm perceived to have the answer. I don't. I know lots of people who know lots of stuff. It's not my. I'm not the cleverest person in the room by a long chalk.

You've got to understand that as well, haven't you? I'm just one voice. But what I try and do now is not come up with any random solution or make absolutely clear. I just made that one up. Don't use it.

I mean, I wasn't joking. I did think I was. It was quite clever, but it wasn't the answer. But it is that about understanding that. I didn't know that was a thing.

That's really interesting.

Yeah. There's a couple of questions I want to ask you.

So just we started to talk about the sort of interaction between public services and residents and how really understanding their experience of services is sort of A part of the process of improving them. So I'll be interested to just get your thoughts on that a little bit. What are some of the challenges? What are some of the ways of doing that?

Well, that you see. Any sort of bits of advice, really?

Well, first I'll say I don't think we get this right, but I don't know. I don't know whether. Model where it is. Right. Whatever that looks like, it is really challenging.

I think if you and I. I'm also a resident, I'm a real person and I have friends who are residents and parents and so on. I think if you.

If you are over engaging with the public about every problem you've got and you see some of this, the feedback is kind of, we pay you to do this, do it.

So there is that view also of just please get on with it and this is your job to work out how to make these really difficult budget reductions or whatever it is. So there's that.

There's the other challenge of hearing the same people's voices over and over, but that's not to be dismissed because these are people who are willing to and sort of want to work with the public sector. We've got a citizens panel, most councils do, I think, and different forums, you know, younger people and so on.

Well, if they're a group of people who particularly want to share their opinions based on what they know from their peers, also, that's really helpful.

So it's not to be dismissed and then you're kind of reaching out to how you get to other people who perhaps wouldn't naturally want to interact with the council. And we. I have to come back to technology here a bit.

We use things like there's free WI fi on the buses and in order to get on, we might ask some questions, you know, things like that, where you can get little snippets of engagement and also sometimes direct people to. To something more detailed. Even then, even when we're talking about topics that kind of.

I would say everyone has a view on, it is hard to get anything other than a small percentage of people to respond. It's not that they don't care. They're busy, they've got their own lives. It's complex.

It's hard if you're talking about perhaps, you know, again, if I come back to savings, but it could be other things, complex things. Community, safety, anything you like. That takes time, doesn't it? I think the one really good example would be around participatory budgeting.

I don't Know how much I know about that, and I'm no expert, but we've had some really positive experiences with it. And that is where.

Based on a topic, a thing, making a place safer, supporting older people, just community work, but generally it's based on a topic because generally it's funded by something and the something comes with a criteria and where you have a sum of money, where organizations are invited to bid against that money to deliver a thing. And sometimes. And some of those are established organizations who already do things in communities, but sometimes they're not.

They're a group of disparate people who weren't a thing, who there was no provision in that area. And they come together to. Isn't that great?

But in doing so, if you're thinking, well, this is an answer to my question, in doing so, they come together in a huge group and do some training and give feedback and talk about the problems in that community. And so there's inherently a great piece of engagement that falls out of that.

I think the really good examples, the big examples, I think they're in Scotland, but we more locally have done quite a lot of that in Newport and that's. That's worked really well and we learn a lot from it.

And you have the person who can't remember what it's called, does the big picture in the corner of the room based on everyone's views and live in the room that's captured by a load of people who. Again, this comes back to the thing about staff, actually.

They came together about a thing because they were interested in a thing or in this part of their community.

And perhaps that's the key with all things that you need to think about what's of interest to that person and rather than what's of interest to you and what you want to know about. And that would be the same whether you're talking to partners, stakeholders, staff or residents, wouldn't it?

Yeah, I think, because I was going to take you back there, they're coming together around a thing. It's a doing activity because we do a lot of service design in relational services, so social care, housing, homelessness, those kinds of things.

And I think service designers sometimes get a bad rap for doing lots of discovery. So going out there and having lots of conversations, really getting under the skin of people's challenges.

But then sometimes it doesn't necessarily go anywhere we've understood the problem. And when the rubber meets the road, it doesn't go from discovery to actually developing the solutions.

I think what's really interesting and Impactful about what you're talking about is we're doing the engagement or we're doing the discovery work as a means to an end to actually make something better. And that might look like giving over responsibility for something to somebody who's better able to work on the problem.

It might look like designing something together. It might look like the council taking that information away and developing something. But ultimately, there's a goal in mind there.

There's some change in mind. It's not just discovery for discovery's sake. So, look, we're getting to the end of this and I'm interested here. What.

All of a sudden I turned into, like some kind of chat show host then.

You did. I'm a little bit scared now. I'm not gonna lie.

There's a red book, actually. Bring it in.

Don't sing the theme tune. Took me a minute then.

What's a bit of advice that you would give to your earlier self? So knowing that you were gonna end up.

I mean, you couldn't have known this, but let's say your earlier self knew you were going to end up in a role like you're in now. What's a bit of advice that you would give to that person? And my hope is that this will be useful to somebody else.

It's a bit earlier in their career.

I think there is something perhaps not to my most younger self, because she felt she knew too much. Anyway, I've definitely evolved. But I think, you know, more in the middle, there is that phrase, don't be afraid to start the dance.

So in some partnerships, we used to talk about this a lot. I don't know if you've seen the YouTube clip where there's a guy on a hill at a festival and he's dancing to a tune. Do you know this clip?

I love that guy. Yeah.

And. And for ages, he's dancing on his own, isn't he? And then eventually one other random person comes up. Everyone should watch this. And they both start.

And for ages, and it's all full. And if I'd been there, I'd have been laughing. I know I would have.

Yeah.

And then. And then suddenly there are 10 people and then like the whole hill.

And I think that really resonates because sometimes you've just got to give it a go. And for the longest time, it can be you. Usually I've got one other person who thinks it's an okay idea or they trust you enough to get up.

You know, they're thinking, I don't know where she's going, but okay. And you can be just stood out there for a very long time. I did some work with the the police around a crime in a partnership in a previous job.

And me and the lead were talking about this thing where we were kind of out front for a really, really long time and then suddenly something gives. And I think there is that. On my work phone, I've got a drawn picture that says don't be afraid to start the dance from that time.

It's a picture of a yellow sticky. And I think that's really important.

I think that is a perfect way to wrap this up. Hey, thank you so much for doing this. It's been absolutely fascinating. It's nice to get to know you a little bit better as well.

And yeah, maybe I'll be able to con you into doing this again at some point down the road.

Maybe.