The Road to Collaboration...is paved with great ideas!
"Find the resistance... explore the dissonance...". This has been my note-to-self during a month in which Collaborate has hosted and participated in a wide range of debates on the future of services to the public. We have learned a lot. Let me explain...
Earlier in June we hosted aninvigorating discussion in partnership with TSIP between five expert and engaging speakers on the potential for more collaborative models of health and social care. Stephen Dorrell, Yvonne Doyle, Carol Propper, Victor Adebowale and Andrew Barnett took the system apart and put it back together again, advocating not a new raft of policy reform, but a systematic focus on creating collaborative partnerships that put patients at the centre of clinical and management practice.
We explored this ethos at the Commissioning Academy earlier this week, where Collaborate hosted a fascinating participatory workshop on user-centric public service design. In the North East and North West respectively, we probed the potential of collaborative system change and new partnerships between housing, care and support services. Next week on the South Coast we will be asking how a demand management approach could encourage better cross-sector working and a sharper focus on citizens.
What links this together is a desire to explore the 'how' - getting under the skin of collaboration and asking what it would really take for public services, business and society to start shifting culture and changing practice. Indeed, this is the focus of an exciting new strand of work from us on 'making collaboration work' across important areas of public policy such as living standards, local growth and spin-out service delivery. You can expect to see outputs in the autumn.
In September we bring many of these debates to a head in a major international festival of collaboration and social innovation we are hosting in partnership with the Social Innovation Exchange. A truly fantastic set of partners - including the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, FutureGov, the Young Foundation, Microsoft, NESTA and LGA Leadership Centre - will ask what happens when collaboration and social innovation are brought together to address major challenges in society, and what could be possible from a new coalition for major change. Watch out for a 'save the date' next week - it will be great to have you there.
Finally, a call for proposals of sorts - as we develop our Autumn/Winter programme of events and engagement, we are keen to get your input. Let us know where you are seeing great things happen or areas we should be exploring. We value your contribution and will work hard to shape our programme around the people who support us. I look forward to hearing from you.
Dr Henry Kippin, Director
@h_kippin
Meet our new Senior Fellow...
Collaborate was delighted to welcome on board its newest team member Sukhvinder Kaur-Stubbs earlier this month. Sukhvinder is currently Managing Director of Engage-us, and previously CEO of the Barrow Cadbury Trust and also the Runnymede Trust, a think-tank on race relations. Sukhvinder brings with her a wealth of expertise and experience in the modelling and implementation of citizen-focused service delivery in the UK and internationally. She is joining Collaborate at a particularly exciting juncture as we build a growing work programme supporting leaders to collaborate in delivering services to the public.
Searching for the "New New" Public Management
"This article is dedicated to the long forgotten, much maligned and politically irrelevant art of public management. A bit strong? Maybe. But one could be forgiven for thinking along those lines given what is an increasingly obvious disconnection between policy thinking and public management practice within government and opposition..... Read Henry's full article on the future of public management for New Start magazine here.
