Scaling relational services: a masterclass with Mark Smith

Joe Badman: 00:00:02

Okay. Hey, Mark. Welcome.

Mark Smith: 00:00:05

Hi.

Joe Badman: 00:00:06

Hi. We've actually only recently got to know each other a little bit, so I'm not entirely familiar with your career journey.

I know what you're doing now, but I'm not completely familiar with what you've done up until now. So can you share a bit of that with me?

Mark Smith: 00:00:18

Yeah, sure.

So I've literally, as of yesterday, I've just finished as director for Public Service Reform at Gateshead Council and also the senior responsible officer for Changing Futures Northumbria. That's a temporary funded initiative which is definitely going to come up in this conversation. So I was doing that.

I was at Gateshead for nine years, but before that I was consulting for a few years, mostly independently, working with great Manchester police on issues around vulnerability. Also some fascinating work with forensics and I consulted with some local authorities and police forces. But before that I was in council again.

I worked for Cheshire Western Chester Council for a bit in sort of transformation work. Right. I was in a district council doing again, system leadership and transformation work. But it all kind of started really, all that.

I didn't always want to do that. I found myself doing it because I started out as a researcher back in the 90s.

After I graduated, I was doing a research for Cheshire County Council and I just thought it sounded quite interesting.

And what I was doing was research which other people were using, so research into things like patterns of crime, economic development and the sort of success of economic investment. So you do the research, you ask all the questions and. But you give all the people the information, they do things with it.

Joe Badman: 00:01:48

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 00:01:49

And I got quite frustrated with that. I thought, well, what do they do with it? And well, they make policies. Okay, I'll get into policy work.

So I did some policy work with still within councils in Liverpool and in Warrington and various places in the northwest. And that got. I got frustrated with that as well.

Joe Badman: 00:02:05

There's a pattern emerging here because people.

Mark Smith: 00:02:07

Are making policies, but I think, yeah, but is it making any blooming difference? Yeah, and the research would. Would be inconclusive. And also you could see that things weren't working.

So I kind of got into the, well, how might we try this?

So I got into the improvement space and I started reading around the subject and at that time I read John Seddon's book Freedom from Command and Control, which really had a big impact on me. Just realized that some of the things I instinctively were grappling with, things like targets, where there was a sort of basis for that unease.

And he articulated it really well. So after A few other changes. I worked for Vanguard for a few years. I was really.

I learned an awful lot from them and an awful lot of what I learned there does feature in what I've done since, but there's been some significant departures from that.

So, yeah, I basically consulted, worked in local authorities as a researcher and as a policy person, gone into consultancy in different sectors, charity sector as well, and just found myself trying to, I suppose, improve stuff, learn stuff, and get into a place where, you know, you can go home and think, I'm making a bit of a difference. So that's essentially how I've ended up doing what I'm doing now.

Joe Badman: 00:03:26

So the people that we're talking to as part of this series of interviews are at the sort of cutting edge of working in more relational ways and iterative ways in public services. How did that come about? Where did your entry point into that world start?

Mark Smith: 00:03:42

I think it started before I realized it started because I grew up on a council estate in Nottingham and kind of saw that people were not understood, not listened to. You know, services would be very identical and you'd end up being frustrated with. With the council and with all. And.

And I suppose that was part of my DNA growing up, you know, in a. In a. That kind of environment. But I kind of put that to one side for it for ages.

But it just crept back in again when I was doing research and it really started there. But I think the penny really dropped when I was doing a bit of work with adult social care in Cheshire. I was a young policy officer.

I was what I must have been barely 30. And the director there, she was great.

And she said, well, we've got these performance indicators and some of them are glowing red and we need to, you know, you go and figure out why and what's going on. And I said, okay, which one are you worried about? And she said, oh, we do. We had a.

An indicator around the percentage of annual reviews of care packages for older people. Yeah, we don't do our annual reviews enough. Go and figure out how to make them do more. Okay. So I went along.

The first thing I did was just spend time with social workers and asked about his annual reviews. And the PI was driving the manager, the leader.

And what was obvious is that an annual review of a care package meant absolutely nothing to the person out there that was receiving it. They were interested in being understood and helped and supported, and they wanted to have a bit, you know, a relationship.

They wanted to identify with the people that they were helping with. And I Could see that in some instances where the annual reviews were being done, it was pretty soulless. They didn't say this.

They didn't see the same people each day. It felt very kind of transactional. It was quite transactional.

You're gonna get three visits a day, whatever, and we'll call one of them a review and that'll be that. And other people were getting really great good relational services or getting a lot out of it. It wasn't just a service.

And yet it's arguable that that would have featured negatively in this context. So the whole notion of why do these numbers matter when they don't actually matter? Why can. How can it be that this. This sort of inconsistency exists?

And I think seeing that is what is when the penny dropped. So I wrote a report for that director said I wouldn't worry about that indicator if I were used.

Joe Badman: 00:06:18

It's a bit off brief.

Mark Smith: 00:06:19

It's unimportant. Yeah. You. You really want to be going out and seeing it and you really want to be understanding that an annual review is here and are there.

And she actually said to me when she read it, she was angry. She threw it in the bin. No way. Yeah. And then she called me back about three weeks later and said, I fished your.

Literally fished your report out of the bin because something's piqued my interest. And it was around about then that I read John Seddon's book.

And it all kind of hit me that there is a fundamental underpinning problem that this little one performance indicator and annual reviews is just a drop in an ocean of gaming service target setting, which really. It's not just that. It's. It's not very effective. It can be damaging, you know, and that was it. Then I thought, well, we've got to.

We've got my work cut out to try to understand and add value in. In an environment where a lot of value has been taken away.

Joe Badman: 00:07:15

Yeah. I mean, it's very fortunate that she fished it out of the bin at all because there is a world where it didn't get fished out of the bin.

Mark Smith: 00:07:21

That's my sliding doors moment. Yeah. Not that I'm Gwyneth Paltrowing, but. But, yeah, I think. I think you're right.

I mean, I've never thought of it like that, but yeah, it was her response to it and my unease with the exercise, the brief I was given. Yeah. And the. Obviously I say the trick to it. There's no trick at all.

The common sense just go out and Spend some time with people doing the work, talk to them, find out what's going on. I haven't really changed. That's what I do. So I've done all the way through from way back over 20 years ago when I did that to now.

And you can't go wrong.

Joe Badman: 00:07:56

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 00:07:56

If you do that, you're going to learn something.

Joe Badman: 00:07:59

Yeah, no, absolutely. But where I was going with the bin remark was we just had a conversation, actually, before. Before we started recording about. Yeah.

How do you broach some of these difficult conversations with people when it's probably not the thing that they want to hear or it's going to be very hard for them to hear? How. How might you have done that differently?

Mark Smith: 00:08:19

Yeah, well, I don't think. I think it's really artful how you do that. I think you can plan for it and be as gentle as you like and it go horribly wrong.

And I think what I learned in consultancy more than I did in. In public sector, because you're.

It's a client relationship and you've got to be more attuned to the reaction you're getting and your ability to add value and be trusted was this idea that until people feel understood, they're not going to listen to anything you've got to say. Yeah. Even if you're right. So I often say it's not enough to be right.

And if you've done the diligent research and you've studied and you've gone and tracked the work and you've spoken to citizens and you're spoken to staff and you've got this kind of revelatory view because you've been given the luxury of time to explore it and you get giddy and excited, you turn up and you hit someone with that and they aren't ready for it, then you might as well not bothered because it's. It's as much as a dictat than the thing that wasn't working. So the context in which you. You bring that to the fore is really important.

So, I mean, this goes back to Gerald Egan, back in years, and his work around giving people plenty of opportunity to be listened to. Yeah. And critically for them to acknowledge that you've got them and you don't proceed past.

Go with whatever it is you might want to entertain or show or explore until they acknowledge that. Yeah. Whatever you might think of what they're doing, they. You need to. To be understood and they need to know they're understood. So it is a. It's.

It's not. I Mean, rapport building sounds so tokenistic, but there is something in it about let's just, let's just try to figure out your world a bit.

Not to critique it, not to evaluate it, just understand where you're at. And then if you agree, we could look at something slightly differently and see what's going on.

And then once we've done that, we might choose to take some action. So it requires a bit of patience and I think as efficiency has become more and more of an obsession, that patience is harder to come by.

So this work gets harder and harder, I think.

Joe Badman: 00:10:30

Yeah, I agree.

I mean, we have lots of conversations in basis with our consultants about how if you're not really aligned at the beginning of a piece of work like this. Aligned is a sort of vague word really.

If you don't, if you don't understand one another, you don't really understand what somebody's worried about, what they're trying to achieve. And you just get started because you got a whole bunch of methods that you think are going to be useful.

Yeah, well, things are going to go wonky really, really quickly and they're going to be irreparable later on down the line.

Mark Smith: 00:10:59

Yeah, I think that the notion of wrongness and rightness can be problematic there. I mean, in some instances that is the case, but so often it's about frames of reference.

It's about saying, well, I mean, is there even an agreement on the purpose of the work? So if you could get into conversations around why do we think we're doing this? It reframes what good might look like.

Joe Badman: 00:11:20

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 00:11:20

And that's not. But then saying you're right or wrong or good or okay or bad at something.

And I think so often consultancy type approaches are predicated on come and tell us what you think. And I don't think that's very helpful necessarily, even if it's what's been asked for.

Joe Badman: 00:11:38

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 00:11:39

So that sort of, okay, let me understand why you think what I think is important.

And then you get into, well, maybe that, that even just bringing that, bringing, giving voice to that starts to create some internal questioning and dissonance. And dissonance is good. Yeah, you know, it gives, it creates, it's the fuel for considering something different.

So yeah, it's, it's artful, I think, having those conversations. And I don't want to sound like I always get it right, because I don't.

You know, there are times you go back to a drawing board where you think you understand someone and you think they're about to acknowledge that you do and they'll tell you that you don't get them at all. And that's okay then because you can put your hand up and say, as long as there's humility. Oh, apologies, I've got that wrong. And all the rest of it.

So I guess the broad. The broad point is just give it time. Spend invest time in just understanding where people are coming from.

Even if your gut tells you or your experience tells you that they are barking up the wrong tree about a particular issue, you know that. Just be patient and display some humility.

Joe Badman: 00:12:46

Yeah, I think that's great advice. You mentioned the Changing Futures program and sort of associated that to. That is the liberated method.

Mark Smith: 00:12:52

Yes.

Joe Badman: 00:12:52

I'm sure lots of people watching this will be familiar with that work, but some won't be so.

Mark Smith: 00:12:56

Right.

Joe Badman: 00:12:57

Can you explain what that work is and what's been achieved through it?

Mark Smith: 00:13:00

Okay, so Changing Futures is a national program. There are 15 different sites of which we were one. So it was funded by the government. MXCLG or it's. Is it? Yes, it is still MHC.

Joe Badman: 00:13:12

Your guess as good as mine.

Mark Smith: 00:13:14

It keeps changing. And the National Lottery funded this program and we were the Northumbria bit of it so covers a big chunk of the Northeast.

And the purpose of the program was to support adults with multiple and complex needs. Their phrase, not mine.

And they wanted to create learning programs because they acknowledged the fact, they being the government, acknowledge the fact that weren't getting it right. The ecosystem of public services wasn't getting it right for a whole bunch of people, particularly those with a lot going on.

And in the one sense, it was a really healthy way of setting it up because they were saying we kind of know that we're going to have to create places to innovate and iterate. So that's good and we're funding that. So it felt free.

But then they said, however, the people that you help must have the following criteria and listed five particular things and said must have at least three of these.

And we wrote a beard about what we'd learned because we'd done some prototypes in case head before then around helping people with debt who were homeless by working relationally. And we'd made quite a lot of progress. So we wanted to expand that using this money and this initiative.

And one of the things that we learned is that people have been screened far too much already and I'm damned if we were going to add to that. So we wrote the bid, but we said to government, we being a partnership.

So there Was number of local authorities in the area, police and crime commissioner's office, third sector, you know, kicks and social enterprises, all sorts of people involved.

And, and we said no, we're just going to go to places where people, you throw a stick, you're going to hit somebody who's, who's in that position and we'll, we'll go, we'll meet people where they are. We're not going to go, you know, bring, drag them into us and screen them.

So we wrote that into the bid and we wanted to use what was, became the liberated method. So I'll talk about that in a minute.

To help them and to experiment and to learn and to iterate how to help people that the system's really bad at helping.

And we based it in four different sites because one of the things we wanted to test was that whilst the presenting issue is important, the chances are it's not the main or only issue. So what ought that to tell us about how we do this?

So we set up in four different sites that had different presenting issues and what we wanted to understand is how much of the work done in those four sites is the same. So the four sites, one was ostensibly a homelessness presentation at a partner third sector partner in the area.

So people would turn up at a walk in center to get a bit of help and we'd be there saying we're trying something different. Are you okay if we work with you? And they don't have to say yes of course.

And that be that one was A E frequent attendance at A and E. One was women's services, this is Newcastle, so people that were women that were fleeing domestic abuse and violence situations and the other was the Drug and Alcohol Team team in Sunderland, the South Town side at the, at the Acute Trust. So ostensibly they are presenting with a particular issue, the one that broke the camel's back and they're in that particular place.

And we set teams up of caseworkers and a bit more on them in a moment. But we used some of, we used some principles and rules, a combination of principles and rules which does lean quite heavily on Vanguard's work.

But it, it moves away from it in ways I'll describe in a moment. But the, the rules. There were two initially but we iterated a third. This is part of that. Moving away.

Joe Badman: 00:17:00

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 00:17:01

So the rules were simply don't break the law and don't do any harm. So if you don't break the law and that's sacrosanct. That's absolutely a line you Mustn't cross that.

That's far fewer rules than you would normally have to deal with in a frontline role. And we had a series of principles and we wanted to use principles because we wanted to guide the work but not constrain it.

We wanted to absorb the variation that is people without. So there had to be a. But there had to be a degree of consistency to it, such that it was something we could understand, you know, the efficacy of it.

So Liberated Method works on the idea that you have very small caseloads for very acute people, but it also means you can have bigger caseloads where there's less acuity that. Because our previous prototypes demonstrated that. So you got people who would be worked with on the basis of those two rules.

We're not going to do any harm, we're not going to break the law. And the principles were, firstly, we are not going to assess you, we are going to understand you and hopefully you'll understand us.

We're going to create an understanding.

Joe Badman: 00:18:10

And what does that look like in practice?

Mark Smith: 00:18:12

Well, an assessment is basically for us, it's for the service. So an assessment asks the question, how much of what we do can we do to you? Or how much of what we've got can we let you.

Joe Badman: 00:18:22

Internal focused.

Mark Smith: 00:18:23

Yeah, it's for us and it's very constrained. Whereas understanding is what matters to you. What matters to you right now, as in, I'm cold, I'm freezing, I'm skin, I'm scared.

And what matters ultimately, I'd really like to have this sort of life in this sort of way. Might not even know, but. So what matters right now is pertinent at first. What matters ultimately usually follows.

And understanding there's a difference between those two is methodologically really important. So we understand rather than assess. The reason that's not a rule is because by law, sometimes you might have to do an assessment of some.

So we're not assuming that, but we're doing it in context. And context is the word that runs through the sticker rock in all of this.

The second principle was that the scope of the work is set by the partnership between the caseworker and the citizen. See that iterated.

So the more orthodox redesign principle there is that the customer sets the scope of the work, or nominal value, whatever you want to call it. But we found that that led to a sort of the wrong kind of relationship. That wouldn't be based on understanding, that's based on provision.

That's what we learned, not that we didn't hypothesize. That it's what we learned in our debriefs.

But what we found was if you case workers are building a good rapport and they've done understand rather than assess, they can talk together about the scope of the work. Because one of the things that one of our caseworkers said beautifully was that we're not there to pull you out of a hole.

We're there to get in there and climb out with you. But you can't do that unless the person is alongside you. And that there is trust. Therefore, the partnership sets the scope.

And what that does to borrow from the recovery community is it lends into the notion of high support and high challenge. It's not just about high support. Give you what you want. High challenge. Didn't we say this and didn't or whatever it might be.

And it'll be very idiosyncratic. That works. It creates a relationship which has a bit to it. The next principle was around again that iterated.

It started off as we're going to pull rather than refer. We're not going to do any referrals because people bounce around between professionals constantly.

And the referral is the vehicle what the means by which that happens.

Joe Badman: 00:20:45

And what do you mean by pull in this context?

Mark Smith: 00:20:47

So what we mean is rather than push you via referral, we're going to pull that expert in. We have concert, we're not letting go of you. We have a relate. We have got a casework relationship.

Joe Badman: 00:20:57

Somebody's maintaining the overview.

Mark Smith: 00:20:58

Yeah, we hold in the ring on this. We are, as in the citizen and the caseworker are collectively responsible for what's happening.

And if we need a specialist, we'll get them to join the party. Now, you can't always do that. That's why it's not a rule. So if we do make a referral, we hold. We don't let go, we go with it.

But generally what we'd like to do is pull in. What we sometimes have to do is make the referral but travel with it. Yeah. So it's kind of pull and hold or refer and hold. Sorry, and pull.

So that's an iteration because we just said initially, oh, yeah, we'll just pull and caseworkers the same, but they won't come and we have to get. We have to do this. And yes, we can talk to the leaders about how to make them turn up.

But actually mighty, because there's a lot of the people that we're pulling on. They have a lot of their. A lot of Their job is spent doing stuff that is transactional, that can. Where referrals are. Okay, yeah.

So why would we pull them away from all of that? That's actually a strain into doing a harm territory. What we'd rather do is be more pragmatic.

So this idea of following the referral but working it hard generally worked. I mean it's a principle. It's not perfect, but it gives us a problem to solve.

Joe Badman: 00:22:12

But I can almost guarantee that that's not the referral in the traditional sense of the word. That's them following the person and having a conversation and introducing that this person is coming. And this is the context.

Mark Smith: 00:22:25

It's all the stuff that goes around the formal referral.

Joe Badman: 00:22:28

It's, it's not going off into the fair.

Mark Smith: 00:22:29

No. Yeah, we're going with it. So it's, it.

We're recognizing that the, the, the reality of other demand that's outside the scope of this work means that we can't just expect people to turn up but at the same time we don't let them off the hook either.

Joe Badman: 00:22:42

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 00:22:43

So that's what that tries to do. The fourth principle was that the decisions.

And again this, this is very vanguardy and they've, they've got a lot of experience in this and this one didn't really iterate much was that the decisions are made in the work. So I'm director and run the program. I'd make a single operational decision. Oh well, how would I know? And the caseworkers know that.

So they know that if they pull in for me for anything, it's not for permission, it's advice or it's support or it might be go and unblock that. Yeah. So the role of leadership starts to change and this is where the, the stuff around headwinds will come onto later on in a wider sense.

But those decisions are made in the work by not just the workers, but by the partnership between a worker and a citizen because they set the scope as per the other principle. And the fifth one is around time limits. Otherwise in there aren't any.

A lot of performance indicators for public services have got time wrapped around them and it's arbitrary. 4 Hours wait in a E being a classic. Clinically 4 hours is of no obvious significance. It's a thing.

But it's become a received wisdom that that is a, that time has a degree of significance. But there are loads of examples of time based performance indicators which lead to really weird patterns of behavior.

Yeah, they're planning applications is a good one. I think it's eight weeks. And the amount of things that take seven weeks and six days is remarkable. But they don't, do they?

So we timescales that are arbitrary are really bad news. So we just did away with them. But we did measure time, but we didn't set targets to it.

So that's important because if it's taken us a range of times to understand somebody and to be and for them to understand us, and we can understand why that variation exists, it helps our practice.

It might simply be, but that's just the nature of it, or it might be that there are some practices in there that can generate sort of good betterment, you know, iterations.

Joe Badman: 00:24:54

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 00:24:55

So measuring it is important, but holding people to it in a kind of performative way, not helpful.

So the liberated method is creating caseworkers that can be free to operate those rules and principles with people that they are working with if they've given their consent to be worked with differently. The teams have a budget, it's theirs and they can spend it on whatever they want, do no harm, stay legal.

One of the things that we noticed is that a third rule has come out of this, of changing futures. Northumbria. And this to my mind was real action learning.

So we noticed that when people that were really on the edge, people that were have years of addiction and had lost a lot of hope and we're engaging with our guys and we're. At first it's high support. We're just, you know, we're going to get in a hole with you and just sort it.

Very pragmatic, sort of accommodation, income maximization, sort of benefits, helping people with real acute health issues. But then the high challenge starts to come in. Okay, where's all this going? And it does mean it sounds a bit expensive to start.

You know what, you've got no food. We're just going to get your food. We'll get, we'll get you shopping in whilst we're sorting your benefits out.

Because if we're pragmatic and sensible, we can work together long term.

Joe Badman: 00:26:18

Yeah, yeah.

Mark Smith: 00:26:19

And because. Because hitherto they'll consume in huge amounts of demand cost and it would be. Be frowned upon by some bits of the substantive system.

Well, if you're going to keep buying them stuff, then they're going to keep being terrible. Aren't they going to want this? And we did notice that extrinsic support initially for a small group of people across the caseload.

They weren't getting past that initial point of desperation, if you like, because they were clearly in receipt of some support and they just wanted that. So we asked the question, where are people moving really well out of that into taking ownership and activating their agency?

You know, they have agency, it's not up to us to give it to them. But some people just aren't accessing it. Some do give them a bit of support and they do and it's fantastic. And then they take over and we fall away.

But some don't. And we, we called it an extrinsic loop. Who's caught in that extrinsic loop now?

What we learned when we looked at all the cases with the caseworkers is that just through habit and through practice and people's own lived experience, because some of the caseworkers have lived experience, Where it was successful is up front there'd be a conversation between the citizen and the caseworker about where's this all going? You know, what's the what, why would let's agree a purpose to this, even if it was a short term one.

The very act of having that conversation seemed to create a sense of this is a, this is here for the long term, this is a thing.

Whereas when it was just piling with high support and we'll come on to the agency thing later, it seemed more open ended and people were just thinking, well, I can get a bit out of this and I don't hold that against them because in a system that's treated them so poorly, why wouldn't you? So we agreed, we agreed a third rule which was to agree and iterate purpose from the very start.

And that was non negotiable because that meant we weren't actually pulling people into a cycle of unhelpful dependency to the program and to them. So we got it wrong and then we got it right. You know, it was a proper iteration.

And I remember saying at the start you'd need, I'd need some serious convincing to add a third rule. But it was there, it was, it was a great example of the caseworkers learning how to do debrief, how to do learning in practice.

We had some support from some academic colleagues who were really good at that and we were able to amend it. So the liberated method in the practice bit is all about those rules and principles and working in that way with a budget that they can spend.

It extends into the leadership space. Space as well, which I think I suspect we'll come on to. But that's the bit you see when you walk into a project that's running.

Joe Badman: 00:29:19

This method so what about the team itself? How is the team working together? What are their sort of working practices, working agreements? Where are they based, all that stuff?

Mark Smith: 00:29:28

Well, they could potentially be based anywhere because they go to people where they are. But they were based initially in these four locations, in physical buildings, in A, E, and in. Yeah, you know, whatever.

But then we, as the project came to the end, we weren't taking any new cases on for pragmatic reasons. We had to bring all the people into one place or the caseworkers, because they're working on established cases by this point.

Joe Badman: 00:30:00

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 00:30:00

And one of the many experiments that forced us into was to what extent does the location make a difference? Because we're actually actively going out to meet people and not much, to be honest. So it was relatively agnostic of that.

I think there is a benefit of proximity, particularly if you've got other agencies around. But for the point of view of those really acute situations, the location didn't make that much difference.

But they were based in those places in terms of how the teams worked. There was a group of caseworkers and they were supervised, led by a casework, a sort of team manager.

And above that was the kind of the program infrastructure which oversaw the learning and resourcing and all the usual stuff. But the caseworkers were of two types. So there were two different roles.

And they would work in pairs, one of each, and one was what we would call a community caseworker, which was a bespoke role. And this, they.

These were people that tended to have a professional background in the kind of public service system somewhere that were smart and angry with how it. You know, how it was. Yeah, yeah. Francis Donnelly, who's on the Change of Futures program, that's his phrase. And it nails, nails it.

So the smart and angry people, so that cohort of people included, we had a. We had a community psychiatric nurse, a probation officer, we had benefits experts, all sorts of different people, clinicians.

We also had another role, which is a peer support worker. So these are people that had lived experience, were most often in recovery. But it could be people who had experience of recovery in their family.

It doesn't have to be them. And what we wanted there so often with lived experience.

I've seen it where projects will have a lived experience panel away from the work, full of people that have lived experience, who we may choose to consult with when we feel like it in a really earnest way. And what we're finding is it was relatively ineffective and if anything, slightly patronizing,.

Joe Badman: 00:32:20

No ownership over what happens Next, it's just consultation rather than real participation.

Mark Smith: 00:32:25

It was an abstract extract thing and it was extractive from their point of view. And I never liked it. And so we basically said, what's to stop us having people with lived experience doing this work?

And there were some things to be able to be careful around in terms of re traumatizing people that were perhaps too early in their recovery journey.

So we saw upon the people from the recovery community to help us appoint these people and with their incredible backgrounds in a way that worked for them. So the, the method of recruitment was not what you would normally see. It wasn't formal interviews.

Yeah, you bring somebody along if you want, we'll have a chat and we'll see what it's like and. But what's critical is those roles were paid the same. And one of the headwinds that we had was the.

Because Gateshead Council in most instances was the employee organization. You've got all the stuff around HR and job evaluation saying, well, we can't pay him the same because he doesn't score the same.

And we were saying, no, we're paying them the same. This is happening. So my job was to work it with the other project leads is to make sure we dealt with that in the shadows.

So it didn't really affect the work. What was really interesting about that is that when we started off, that's not how we did it. We just had individuals with caseloads.

It was the iteration of debrief. So you say, how does the team work? They were debriefing very regularly in terms of group supervision, one to ones or one to twos.

And what we learned pretty quickly is that part of the iteration of the working practices was just pairs. Informal pairs.

Joe Badman: 00:34:00

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 00:34:00

So we paired them up in that way and it worked really well. So one of the caseworkers was more adept at navigating the system. The other one was more able to see and understand a bit of context.

And one of the traps we fell into, and this is a lesson that is very, very much worth learning, is we had those two roles, we paired them up and we patted ourselves on the back for doing that. And I was proud, I am proud of that.

But sort of a few months into that, the peer support workers, one of them said, by giving us different titles, you're taking away our decision as to. When we disclose that we have lived experience. Experience we not. We might not want to.

So even though formally their roles were titled differently, we stopped referring to them in that way when the caseworkers Weren't compelled to. It wasn't the way they were identified with because in some instances that's unhelpful.

And like we said, the relationship between the citizen and the caseworker sets the scope of the work, but it sets the tone of the workers as well. That's what that taught us. So tonally we sort of stamped that out and said, well, no, that's not what it is anymore.

And I wasn't party to that specifically.

I was very much, you know, listening into the learning and was blown away that we were able to get to that degree of granularity and that the caseworkers could see. My job was to make it really clear to the caseworkers that if they observe things like that, it changes.

It's not about what I think the other thing about those roles, I think it's extremely important to point out is that normally when you get stuck into public service reform work, what we try to do is redesign services. We may choose to redesign or tweak roles, but. But we tend to tweak processes or interaction of processes or structures. We're big on structures.

What that tends to do is it bakes in an assumption that we've broadly got what we need, we just need to arrange it differently.

Joe Badman: 00:36:14

Can agree more?

Mark Smith: 00:36:15

Yeah. And what this taught us, that this role, this low case load, generalist role is missing, it's just not there.

And it enables the time to build those relationships, to work on the small things that are big things and the things that you would never commission that actually are massively material to the people that we're working with. And it will vary infinitely because people vary infinitely.

You know, little things like accompanying someone to an appointment that they're nervous about, which actually in the end, good job. Because it uncovered a real, very serious health issue, which left unchecked would have had horrible consequences.

Having a wherewithal to sense the nervousness and to know I've been in your position and I would not, you know, I'd sack it off. So rather than just throw that assumption, it was gently to say, I'll come with you, it's okay. Oh, yeah, but I'll be waiting there all day.

It's fine, it's fine. And you can, I can hear people with an efficiency mindset thinking, well, that's a.

What spending all day just sat waiting with someone, you know, with the grave.

Joe Badman: 00:37:19

What if that one thing was the thing that made or, or broke, what follows? That that would have made all the difference.

Mark Smith: 00:37:26

And in that case, it did. Yeah, it was Hugely material. And we don't know until it happens. And this, it plays to a broader point about being much more comfortable with latency.

We don't have to necessarily be busy all the time for this to be working. Yeah. Latency allows us to be flexible and to think and to learn and to be generative.

This cultural thing about, well, if I'm spending all day with you here, I'm not. I'm not in a. You know, it feels a bit sweatshoppy. But that can be how public services are sort of predicated on this idea of.

Of industry being more of important than efficacy.

Joe Badman: 00:38:04

Yeah, yeah. And where's the value?

Mark Smith: 00:38:06

Yeah, we've got to unpick that and we don't. And. And what we've had to learn is that we'll put it this way. We wrote down everything the guys did. So they journeyed that you say, how does it work?

We gave, we lived. They called it the liberated method, by the way, because they felt free, the workers. But what we did say, we don't ask for much rules and principles.

Journal, though, please. Journal everything, both in terms of the legal stuff around records, but also what you're thinking, feeling.

And we'll use those to generate learning and will change practice. And that was really helpful to us because what we.

What we were able to do, and this was a really great moment, is that we were able to ask the question when we were a bit into the work and it was starting to show benefits. Okay. Some lives are being turned around here that have been bouncing around like this for years. What makes you good at this job?

So Francis, again, who I referred to before, he was one of the. Is one of the project leads, got the caseworkers together and just said, what makes you good at the job? And he wrote down what they said.

And it was all things like patience, resilience, empathy, the ability to deal with setbacks.

You know, this idea when somebody relapses, you don't sort of crumble, the sky doesn't fall in you go again, all stuff that is behavioral and value based. And when we asked what's kind of handy? And it was more knowledge, knowledge of the benefits system.

But when you looked at the job description, they were inverted. So as it stood, the essential was must know this, must have done this, whatever. And the desirable was. The stuff like that was absolutely essential.

So we flipped them.

Joe Badman: 00:40:00

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 00:40:01

So in every subs, because we. We grew the touch points, the foresights sequentially. So for the subsequent ones, we. We just flipped them, which.

Which created an Issue again with the HR lot saying, but that's not how we evaluate jobs, is that we're gonna have to. So we, so the leadership job becomes work on that to make it easy to do this. Yeah. And that flipped us into what is the role of leadership.

It's to act on these sorts of things and not to micromanage these other things. And that it permeates right the way through.

So the liberated method, yes, there's a lot of the stuff around the rules and principles, but I would say equally as much of the work that came out of that was done not in the teams, but with the leaders and with the partners and with the systems and all the rest of it, because that's key. I was saying before that we asked the, I tangented it a bit, but the.

When we asked the caseworkers to journal, really key point, we wrote everything down and we had, we, we just listed it also. Okay, what did they do that worked? And we had a list of tasks, things and then we just counted well, how many times were each of these things done?

And, and they weren't just by the workers, but by anybody.

So it incorporated things that you would expect from a public services system like, you know, hospital stay or housing provision or whatever, things that are off the system. So we called those system direct things that are there. Then we recorded all the things that, that we refer to as system adjacent.

So this is stuff that it doesn't inherently add value, but facilitates getting it. So a referral.

Yeah, you know, is, is in and of itself, it isn't really a thing you'd notice, but it's the means by which you get one of those other things. So system adjacent.

And then we look to the agnostic stuff, which is stuff that the system of public services ostensibly is not there to do, but we found ourselves doing it and you can do it anyway because it's not part of the system to stop you.

And that's waiting all day at an appointment with somebody or helping somebody go to a carpentry class or learn something or, or just help somebody with some clothes or bit shopping or whatever.

And what we found was roughly the ratio was really interesting because half by count of activity, not by cost of activity, but by count, roughly half of what they did was that system agnostic stuff.

Joe Badman: 00:42:31

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 00:42:31

Now that's really important because it tells us that you can do all the system change you like, it's not going to lay a glove on that stuff and you'll miss it. All you need to do is create the space for it.

Joe Badman: 00:42:43

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 00:42:44

And that, that requires some systemic stuff. But the actual work itself is agnostic of it. You just do it. 7%. So 50% was agnostic.

7% Was the direct stuff, things the system's here to do and the 42% was the adjacent. Why does that matter? What is Almost exactly a 6 to 1 ratio between stuff we need to do to get stuff and the stuff?

Joe Badman: 00:43:12

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 00:43:13

So when you go to leaders and say this is important a, because this 50% of what's going on isn't even commissionable. So stop thinking commission is the answer. It's not.

And then there's a six to one thing going on here and it's arguable that much of that falls 42 is waste. Because, you know, we can probably, we could have context to make good decisions about what's needed and then provide it.

So why are we so many hoops to jump through to get a bunch of things? So that was a useful little exercise for us because it, it did a couple of things. It, it shone a light on the whole system change piece.

You know, will it solve everything? We don't think so in this case. And it shone a light on a bunch of things you could do on Monday.

We do not have to wait for top down edicts, test and learn and all the rest of it important, but we don't have to wait for devolution and test and learn to do this stuff. And it will give you, will get you a long way towards where you want to go.

So I think it set us up really nicely for challenge in our own view as to where we need to focus if we're going to make this thing more normal. Because what we've found in roughly 78 of cases, lives were turned around. This was effective, it was working.

But we couldn't for once tell you exactly how it was going to go with anybody we worked with.

Joe Badman: 00:44:38

Well, how could you? I mean.

Mark Smith: 00:44:40

Well, that brings another tension in there, doesn't it?

Because when you commission there's a, there's a certainly in some forms of commissioning, perhaps the orthodox form of it there, the idea that this stuff is knowable and predictable, therefore the market can deal with it. Well, you're cutting off half of what you might do and it's good work. So I've only listed. Well, we listed mostly the value work.

So it was really interesting to see that one spin out. It wasn't quite what we were expecting to see and I'd like to, to do it more to get some more data.

But we got A decent amount, I think throws up the whole notion of how to do change, not just what we should be changing.

Joe Badman: 00:45:19

Yeah, I want to talk a bit more about learning. I've got several questions that I could ask you now, but I'm going to pick one.

I want to dig in a bit more detail into learning both at the team level and your role in that process. Because you've got caseworkers journaling, so how are they then making use of that learning so that it influences the practice?

And then how are you involved in this process so that when you realize something is going to interrupt them or block them from working in a way that makes sense for the people that they're helping, how do you find out about that at the right time so that you can then go and do what you need to do or provide the air cover or whatever it is?

Mark Smith: 00:46:04

If anything, I'd love to describe some really smart, genius way of doing it, but it was just beautifully simple. I mean it came from the nuts and bolts of. It was. At first it was the partnership between the caseworkers.

So they would talk to each other and they would. We would encourage them to iterate practice. So what do you think of that? Or to review, where did that visit go?

Because they knew they would be going to an OPS meeting and a team structured supervision meeting some point that week to talk about what they'd learned. So they would, they would, they would reflect together and journal it. Then they would go through their journals.

But what we started to do towards the back end is they would hashtag things and then Ron, the data guy would go through and he would look for patterns.

Joe Badman: 00:46:47

Also these journals are in some software or.

Mark Smith: 00:46:50

Well, they were originally in Excel.

And what we realized quickly is that we needed what we called a trusted governable platform that could actually work with the unit, the unit of analysis for the. It wasn't the transaction, but the relationship. So the latter stages of changing futures are seen.

A development of a new digital platform which enables the journals to be analyzed. Plus we can immediately do the agnostic adjacent direct stuff as we go along. Originally we have to do a big trawl, so that's what they're now using.

So the OPS meetings and the team debriefs would pull that out. Then case review would happen as well. So what would happen with case review is that every so often we would focus on three or four cases.

The caseworkers would come in. We thought about bringing the person in, but we decided we would do that differently because we didn't want to fishbowl them.

But we want to talk to the caseworkers about what they were learning and we would look for patterns and we would start to see things that we would need to work on. So housing kept coming up. Homelessness eligibility criteria kept coming up.

The idea that you had to have a local connection to be thought about, even though you were fleeing an area where you felt safe. Well, that task.

They would then task me, go and talk to housing, go and not unblock it for the program, and then go work with the leaders on why you're having to unblock it in the first place. So the liberated method is as live in the leadership space as it is in the. The practitioner's space. That's. That's really key.

So we did that extensively and that would then create sort of traction in the program, or it would remain a blockage, but we would just have to. At least we knew what it was. So that's broadly how it would work.

It got more sophisticated as we went along because we had more data and we were more practiced. So this is critical thing. There's two things here that are really worth bearing in mind that reflection.

The caseworkers became something they got better at because they'd never really. They weren't used to being asked what they thought.

Yeah, not so routinely, like every bluming day, because we, like I said before, we insist on learning. So that was really, really key. So they.

They felt like that was an added skill, if you like, and that nobody had status over anybody else on what was learned and when. Which was very good for us.

Because the second point I want to make is that we became more able to look at the depth of learning that was emanating from this point. So just by way of example, the. The caseworkers would talk about practice amongst themselves. And it might well be that. That's as far as it got. Oh.

In which, you know, we did it this way, but when you did it that way, the next day you. That was better. All right, we'll do it that way then. That's where that begins and ends as a method sort of thing.

But what we sometimes learned is when others were saying it too, we thought, that's not just you guys, how you work, that's iterating actual practice.

Joe Badman: 00:50:07

We had something emergent here.

Mark Smith: 00:50:09

Yeah. So that. But then if we saw a pattern there around. This is routinely easy, difficult because of X.

So we look at, well, what is super ordinary behind it. So then the learning level was a system or driver thing. So that's a Third level.

And when we sort of explored that, well, it's the Care act that sets a threshold or it's the. It's a local policy that. That determines this. That's a bit weird. Why do you think that policy is in place?

Oh, it's because the worldview that creates it is this, that this is a good idea. That local connection, for example, with homelessness is relevant. It's a way of managing demand or it somehow stops people flocking to your door.

I mean, it's debunked. I think that.

So one of the things I mentioned before, the extrinsic loop, when we were exploring the learning around people getting caught, we're asking ourselves, why aren't. Why isn't their agency kicking in? What aren't we doing? And we were right on.

So that's when we drew this sort of diagram of extrinsic merging into intrinsic and our contribution becoming less significant. And that wasn't a theory we started with, it's where we ended up. And the caseworkers could see that they were shaping theory.

And what was really gratifying, it wasn't like the people at the top of the structure were in the theory bit and a bit people at the bottom of it were in the practice bit. It was a hierarchy of depth.

So we ended up with literally two professors who were really good at this stuff talking to a bunch of caseworkers about this whole intrinsic extrinsic thing. And I'm just watching on thinking this is great.

Joe Badman: 00:51:51

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 00:51:51

Because the. They're the two, they're their sense making and pattern spotting abilities and their experience is fusing beautifully here. There's no.

It's parity in the room about who's saying what. And it gave us a much deeper understanding as to what was going on. And that's helped us to come up with that third rule.

Without that we wouldn't have done it. So the learning was absolutely baked in.

And one of the professors that we worked with, Hannah Hesselgreaves, who's now, she's director at policy called Policy Evaluation Research Unit, Manchester, she said that a focus on learning was more productive than a focus on productivity.

Joe Badman: 00:52:33

I love that.

Mark Smith: 00:52:34

That blew my mind.

Joe Badman: 00:52:36

Wish I come up with that.

Mark Smith: 00:52:37

I just. I think we've. No, I think that point is underscored. But we did not set out thinking that's what we're going to learn.

Joe Badman: 00:52:42

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 00:52:43

We didn't even think it is a question and it does sound a little bit indulgent. But actually the caseworkers got on board with that as well.

I think I, I am make one thing I'm conscious of, it's making this sound a lot easier than it really was. I mean this was four years of work and it took a while for people to wrap their heads around it.

There was a considerable bit of why are we doing this? Well, hang on, why can't I just go out and do the work?

Why do I have to come to this briefing and this debriefing, you know, and it ended up becoming self evident, but it took a while.

So all I would say to anybody wanting to do this is we probably didn't go heavy enough on the importance of that early on by building learning in, in a kind of very operational way like these meetings are for this, you're going to fill your journals in debrief.

We'll work out whether that's a, an issue that we can deal with here or whether it's one that's fundamental to theory or whether it's something to do with a system bit or it might be something else. That's key.

And the one thing I haven't said but is important is when we, when we engage with a citizen or to join the program, the first thing that, that we tried to do was to get them to tell us their story, their life up till now and for the, not just about the what happened, but their interpretation of it.

And one of the things that I think was, became clearer as we went along, it was kind of implied but became more explicit was that we had to stop ourselves taking their story and applying our interpretation to, to it because we wanted to tell a certain story to stakeholders and leaders about performance efficacy. You know, look how terrible this is because this happened to him or her.

But what the degree of terribleness or otherwise we were often describing in terms of public sector things like handoffs or cost. But what we wanted to do was stay in the space of the interpretation of this story belongs to the person who's telling it.

And that meant that we were almost having to agree those, well, not almost having to agree. That was so what is it about that? That was, you know, whatever. And they'd say, well, that wasn't so bad.

And I might look at it and go that's really inefficient. But what I thought didn't matter really.

And I think that became a good discipline because it then helped us with stakeholders and people in the system who were learning how to be relational in their help with us, who would talk about how frustrated they'd been or how Unnerved they were about what we were doing. And again, their interpretation was valid. It wasn't about us telling us, telling them they were wrong. So we became better and better.

I still think it's still conscious though. I don't. With me, it requires specific attention to refrain from that prism of performance and efficiency. You got to keep it in the.

Yeah, yeah, but what's your interpretation? Because that's the one I'm taking out of the room and I need to be confident that you understand that you think I get it.

So back to what we were saying before.

So that's, that's something again, those, those things around, what are we picking up from this was really key and that became particularly important when we got further into this work. We were starting to turn lives. Well, no, people were starting to turn lives around with our support.

And we were then learning what was material to that and how it was helping. And we were able to say these relational approaches are more effective than whatever else they've been exposed to before.

Joe Badman: 00:56:36

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 00:56:36

So that was fine until we were asked the question, what have they been exposed to before then and why? So we said, well, do you know what? We don't know. We've got their interpretation and they've told us a story.

So with the consent of a small number of the people that we worked with, we dug and dug into their consumption history. It's a terrible phrase, but just how have they interacted with services specifically?

Joe Badman: 00:57:01

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 00:57:01

What's it been like? They've told us what it's felt like. So we very patiently got specifically for the purpose of telling the story.

We got together and they told us their story. And from that we were able to infer where they'd been and who they interacted with. So we ended up getting 14 data sharing agreements from the.

It took ages, I bet it did, to get their actual data from. So hospital trusts, mental health trusts, probation, ambulance, social services, criminal justice system, etc, loads of it, housing.

And there's a guy called Ron Charlton who is an, an absolute legend. And Ron is the data learning lead for Changing Futures. He's actually retired Chief Inspector.

Joe Badman: 00:57:52

Right.

Mark Smith: 00:57:52

What I thought we needed early on was an analyst. Turns out what we really needed was a detective.

Joe Badman: 00:57:58

Right.

Mark Smith: 00:57:59

And he, diligently with a work ethic I've seldom seen in my life, pieced together all of these individual interactions sequentially. And in swim lanes for police.

Joe Badman: 00:58:10

Oh, he's responsible for those. Okay.

Mark Smith: 00:58:12

Ron. I mean he bought that came out of.

I scribbled something pretty much on a napkin to say It'd be great if we could make it look like this and we could get a sense of cost. And we know efficacy because he's told us his story his way. We know that. So we can. I'd like to triangulate all this and what's it called? Telling us.

And he was able to show for. For. He's not his real name. For Brian. That three and a half thousand interactions thereabouts, you know, two million quids worth of consumption. Nine.

Between nine and 14 years. Because the early years, it's, it's hit and miss, but then it becomes a solid bank of consumption.

You know, 800 or so assessments, you know, no understanding with 800 assessments. And all of this interaction for somebody whose life just got worse and worse and worse and worse and more, more,.

Joe Badman: 00:59:02

More of those interactions over time.

Mark Smith: 00:59:03

Yeah, yeah, it ramped up. Yeah, the trajectory was up. Trajectory was him dying. And he said that himself. Like I say, his interpretation is the valid one.

And, and where we ended up was being able to unpick not just the amount of consumption so we could point to it and say, tell me now that this isn't good value because we did it for other people as well. And it was a similar story or the connectedness.

But one of the things that we worked really hard to do was to understand what policies and assumptions were visible in that pattern of consumption. So this is where we moved away from his interpretation to ours. But we did it knowingly.

Joe Badman: 00:59:41

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 00:59:42

Because we wanted to understand what the system response was. So by looking at that, we could see, oh, that's a scale logic playing out.

Would put all the people with drinking issues or struggles with alcohol in the same block because it ghettoises them, but it keeps them out of the way. Right, because that's going to be good for their recovery, isn't it? You know, so we could see that there was some perverse logic going on here.

So, okay, that's notable. And various other reasons when he was turned away or, you know, screened out, only, you know, come back when you're worse being a common refrain.

And we were able to.

To piece all of that together to say, well, that policy is driving this one, but it's based on this assumption or this worldview, which in turn is based. And we were able to loop and nest these logics until we thought, well, what's the one that's driving it on that?

And again, this is something that I learned to do at Vanguard. But they. When I, when I was shown how to do it there, it was really good.

It was based on in health and it was predicated on this idea that the de facto purpose was something different around. I forget what it was now, but I think it was to do with sticking to the brief or something. Right.

And I remember at the time thinking this is really great, but our outcome was a bit different. What we ended up with was something a bit more.

And it was discernible that everything we saw across all of those 14 data ship providers, if you like, pointed to one superordinate purpose which was to create and maintain a position of defense. And what that does is it does a funny. Does funny things to risk. Yeah. Makes risk something that's about us, you know.

And one of the things that we could observe evidentially is that the default response to need is no. So the system defaults to no until such point that the defensible position has gone and the only defensible position is yes.

So it sort of defaults to no and resorts to yes.

Joe Badman: 01:01:55

And over time that threshold for yes has increased.

Mark Smith: 01:01:58

Yeah. And sometimes it's life and death. I mean a really good example of that actually just comes to mind. I'll never forget this. We.

One of the ladies we were working with in Sunderland, her history included kicking off at the hospital, right.

She was ill, she was not well and she would go to the hospital, she would represent with some issues which were genuine and really, really serious and she was impatient and she was troubled and she would kick off and her behavior was such that defaulting to anything other than no was like, you know, it's not, not worth it for them. Apart from the fact that if they default, if they said no to certain things, they would be culpable.

So their culpability governed the threshold, not the need. And I remember the phrase will only see her for eye life and limb coming out eye, life and limb.

So to my mind that was a risk calculation based on when we default to no. What's the edge of that?

Joe Badman: 01:03:02

Yeah, yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:03:03

And it immediately it had nothing. If you knew what mattered to her, you'd know that there was no congruence with that at all.

So her way out of this, her supported way out of this was something totally different. So eye life and limb. So it really shocked us into thinking we're going to have to work differently with the health system. System.

Joe Badman: 01:03:23

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:03:24

And I'm not judging them because that's the situation that, that's the whole point of this. What we looked at was policies and logics, not judgments and attitudes.

I mean you could argue this, this there's some inference there, but I'm not into that. I think that makes us a part of the problem. Yeah.

So, yeah, that idea of having to prove the point was key, but doing that, we called it the burning platform. So.

So when we're able to create those swim lanes and all of that consumption and that story around, you know, Justin cost 1.8 million and Brian was over 2 million. And on it goes. We wanted the ministers to know that whatever we'd spent on this work, which might look.

Well, that's a lot for a relatively small caseload.

Joe Badman: 01:04:10

Well, yeah, by comparison, but.

Mark Smith: 01:04:12

And we knew. We knew we had to do. We weren't asked to. You just felt like we had to to. Because we're aware we're not operating.

To some extent we are operating in a bubble because it's a funded piece of work, but we knew that it would do it a disservice if we just kept it in the bubble, which I think is why we've done that particular piece of work.

Joe Badman: 01:04:30

I think it's absolutely essential. You can't really shy away from doing that work because it is going to cost some money to create a fundamentally different offer.

Going to cost some money and there's going to be a delayed payoff to it.

So unless you've got some kind of story that actually makes sense in financial terms, I think it's naive to think that you can get away with without helping people to make that decision to commit to something like that.

Mark Smith: 01:05:00

I agree. I mean, this beautifully segues. Nicely done into. What is it that's stopping us doing this all the time?

Joe Badman: 01:05:10

Yeah, yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:05:11

Because we didn't want to just point at the work and say, that's good, isn't it? We kind of wanted to do that, of course. But also, here's where we. It didn't work. And here's what we found difficult, but the whole. What's it.

What I found interesting in consulting with academic colleagues is that they've helped me to understand not just the evaluative stuff, which has been gold, but the stuff around how it relates to current sort of paradigm in public services. You know, new public management stuff.

And I know it would be easy to pick a dichotomy and then just pick on one side of it and say this good, that's bad.

But what I would say is that the new public management sort of set up at the minute what we knew we were working contrary to that we weren't interested in standardization, we weren't interested.

Joe Badman: 01:06:04

In efficiency, is fundamentally not compatible. Right.

Mark Smith: 01:06:07

No, we wanted efficacy and we wanted to understand what it took to get it and how. But we also wanted to know how to build learning in so that whatever we did right we could iterate.

Otherwise it would be right for a bit and then not right anymore. And we asked the question what makes that hard? And what is it that and why? And what we. And we looked at work that we'd each done.

I'd looked at work I'd done in my career and worked at other people who had done really great work.

So I talked to Gary Wallace down in port in Plymouth who had done really great work around alliance based commissioning, but they hadn't seen big systemic change either or sector change. Neither had we. We just got some really great practice in this sort of artificial environment, if you like.

You know, we knew that and we realized that new public management for all, for whatever you think of it, it's incredibly internally consistent. In order to kill it, you have to create something that's equally internally consistent across the same bandwidth. So what do I mean by that?

Well, the way that, that new public management approaches leadership and evaluation and procurement and commissioning and measurement and, and operations, there's a consistency to it and you can't just unpick some of it because the rest of it will just take over.

Joe Badman: 01:07:39

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:07:40

So giving away my, the age of my kids who were in a Harry Potter phase at the time, right. There's a phenomena in Harry Potter they have, they have to get the Horcruxes. So.

Joe Badman: 01:07:54

Yeah, to kill Voldemort.

Mark Smith: 01:07:55

Yeah, to kill Voldemort you have to get them all.

Joe Badman: 01:07:57

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:07:57

You can't just get two of them. And I look back at some new public management.

Joe Badman: 01:08:02

This stuff about Horcruxes, it's very different. Yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:08:05

J.K. rowling did new public management. She's behind it all.

Because we, I look back at the work we did on council tax debt and we, we knew that we dealt with some of it but we'd miss other bits and that's why the didn't normalize. And I looked at Gary's work and thought, yeah, he's cracked that bit. We didn't actually, but he hasn't done this bit.

And we just wondered what it all was and it boiled down, we, we reckoned we got it down to sort of, depending how you phrase them, five or six different things, which would. We have to do them all in a relational way if we're going to turn this tanker. I don't know how we're going to do this, by the way.

I don't know what the answer is, but, but we identify what they were. And I think that was a piece of learning that was really profound because it went beyond the brief, like we weren't being asked to change the system.

I think the idea was, in fact, this gives away one of the Horcruxes that the government would take the learning and they would decide what to do. And actually that touches upon the role of leadership and the role and the way we evaluate. They are two of them.

Joe Badman: 01:09:10

So let's get into the Horcruxes. So what are we dealing with?

Mark Smith: 01:09:14

So in no particular order. So the movement away from evaluation and into evaluative practice is really important. The evaluation tends to be a moment in time done extractively.

You know, it's an extractive process and it's. The decisions are made abstractively.

You know, things like randomized control, trial sort of logics and what it does it others, the learning and it others, the evaluation.

Joe Badman: 01:09:42

What do you mean by that?

Mark Smith: 01:09:43

Well, you know, the work is done here and the learning's done over here.

Joe Badman: 01:09:46

And it might be done at the wrong time, far too late.

Mark Smith: 01:09:48

And there are all sorts of things in there that bug me about the actual agency of the people doing the work and their ability they should be pulling for expertise to help them do evaluative practices such that the learning is baked in. And I think we arrived there.

We didn't start there, but we arrived there and we knew that the confidence that gave us to make these changes wouldn't be gainable by any other means. And we knew that, that people were attracted to this because of the confidence and the rigor that we were able to do as we went along.

So we thought that's one of them. Now there may well be some sophisticated variations on that that I haven't thought I'd.

I'm all too happy to develop it, but the notion of that kind of building sense making into the work through workers doing it. There are some great people out there that are much better at that than me.

But we knew that was massively material and not what new public management is remotely interested in. So that's one. The other one is a more straightforward one, I suppose.

And it's about the nature and role of leadership because leadership in the new public management role way is very, well, it's very command and control, isn't it? You know, and the, the job of the leader. And again, this is, this comes back to what I learned at Vanguard.

You know, when they, the, the work that they, they would witness this notion of the job of the leader is to manage people and to manage budgets and to be compliant and to regulate.

Joe Badman: 01:11:13

That maybe have some answers as, as an expert in that silo of the organization.

Mark Smith: 01:11:19

Yeah, and, and really what we learned is that the whole notion of leadership is. It's a number of things, but it's to make it possible, easier and sustainable. So what makes it possible is to create space for learning.

What makes it easier is to do the unblocking. And what makes it sustainable is to say, well, next time one of these comes along, what do I need to do to make sure no unblocking is required?

And so that role of the leader changes.

I mean, there's other things about setting vision and purpose, but certainly in terms of delivering things, designing things and presiding over things, that was a shift that without that we're sunk. Third one is money. Not the amount so much, but the malleability.

This is well known and argued, but I don't know if you've ever been to a multiple disciplinary team meeting and I think it's an their. It's a study in how not to blink first.

Joe Badman: 01:12:23

Yes, and, and I didn't know what you were going.

Mark Smith: 01:12:28

Yeah, and you get it at partnership meetings too. So let's say it's an md. Let's say it's an MDT with a person. Yeah, Right.

We've all come along, we've all said our, we've all described our bit of the elephant that we feel who's going to lead the elephant away or deal with it. And everyone's looking at the table and why is that relevant to this?

Because what matters to those people is not being left holding this because they won't have the resources, time, energy to do it. Yeah, but at a partnership leadership level that malleability plays in when it comes to things like prevention.

So if, let's say the social care system became endowed with load more money and was able to materially invest in prevention and act way short of the threshold of care act and whatnot. And they worked preventatively and it worked. Let's just hold off a method for now. Let's just say it worked.

The main beneficiaries of that would be the health system and to some extent criminal justice system. But the money wouldn't reciprocally flow. It would basically say, well, thanks for that.

So the social care system types are left thinking, well, I needn't bother then because I'm left struggling, invest all that extra investment. But I'm not seeing any increase in capacity or resources. I might See an increase, a decrease in demand further down the line.

But that's not helping me now. So what's the best thing I can do? Well, I can't do that. I'll just double down on efficiency. I'll do what I do more efficiently.

It's the best thing I could see anything I can do. But if you're already work doing a whole bunch of things that are suboptimal, you're just doing them more efficiently. So the malleability of money.

So we were chatting before, before we came onto this about an early attempt to do that through things like total place was let's pool the budgets. And that would get you definitely towards this and that that is more of a relational view than a transactional viewer. And that the world did that.

It would be better. But I still have an issue with it in as much as if you pull the money then that's a lot of effort and a lot of people are crossing their fingers.

What I would want to do is to not. Is to act in a way where the money is sufficiently malleable so that we didn't need to pool it just went where it needed to be. Yeah.

So and if you allow it to flow, you can see what shape the money needs to be. And you need to create something in a place that allows it.

So if devolution is going to bite, if it can make that money flow where it needs to go based on demand and good work, you'll the shape of money works out. Now how to do that things like council stand. What's one phrase I'm looking for constitutions and whatnot and various other things.

I don't know, I'm not an accountant. But I do know is that when the money we created artificial money and allowed it to flow and it taught us where it needed to go.

Interestingly, for high consumers, one of the places that where the money would flow is housing. It stands to reason. But it would not just be the house and the property. It'd be the support, the wraparound. It as a proposition.

Housing in and of itself attractive attract whatever investment it attracts. But housing isn't just about a place to live. It's. It's the. It's the kernel around which you build a life.

Joe Badman: 01:15:53

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:15:53

And that's not reflected in how it's funding malleable money would reflect that because it's being driven by the work. Now I've just talked very whimsically about that. I know that's going to be rock hard.

That's why we do all this work around relational practice, but the substantive system hasn't. It hasn't really reformed it because we haven't tackled that. So that's the third one.

Joe Badman: 01:16:16

Yeah. We've got evaluation, we got role leadership, we've got malleability of money.

Mark Smith: 01:16:20

Okay. I'll give you honest fourth one, commissioning. Yeah. Which you may argue is a subset of some of the others.

I mean, with the world span around before commissioning came along, and yet somehow we see it as we have to do it.

So the idea that, you know, we can draw up a specific commission, introduce it to the market or allow the market to deliver it, and we measure on a bunch of predetermined outcomes, it does nothing to allow us to iterate to learn, to flex. Not just to learn, but to adapt, because it's not. The goalposts are always moving.

Joe Badman: 01:16:56

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:16:58

I think it assumes a linearity between the amount you do and what you get out of it is to be predictable and reasonable. And I don't think that's. It's. Complex environments don't cope, they just don't operate like that.

Joe Badman: 01:17:11

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:17:11

So I think commissioning is a point leverage. We need to think about the way we spend money.

I mean, what I would say is that the voluntary sector can spend a quid much more efficiently than the council. So there's something about. And when you.

When you think about those caseworker roles, there is something here that the how we pay for things question can be resolved more in the round, whether it's pooled and valuable money, but the means by which the money is distributed, that needs work. The fifth one, again, I think these things overlap.

Joe Badman: 01:17:45

Well, I was just about to say, because the evaluation point overlaps with the.

Mark Smith: 01:17:48

Commissioning point, doesn't it?

Joe Badman: 01:17:49

If we do that in an entirely different way, then we can't then slap on the evaluation process.

Mark Smith: 01:17:54

This is why we talk about internal consistency. Is these things locked together?

Joe Badman: 01:17:57

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:17:59

So regulation and inspection, it's an obvious one. And when governments say things like, what can we do to make it easier?

And so you'll get local practitioners saying it needs to be more like this and less like that. And when governments say not unreasonably, what could we do to make it easier? We often flounder. But that's one not to flounder on.

The notion of the way that regulation inspection comes currently works is. I mean, there'll be nuances around this that aren't true, but generally it's a pretty. What's the phrase I'm looking for?

Pathological relationship it's bad for us. Helen Sanderson, amazing woman. She once did a presentation when she was about, she was due to be inspected by cqc.

She ran it with the well being teams organization who are brilliant. And she had a resting heart rate up as a time series and she said guess, guess when the inspectors were in. And I think it was brilliant.

But I mean, I know that's flippant. Well, no, it's not flipping. It's kind of funny. But it does make the point.

Joe Badman: 01:19:06

Yeah, yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:19:07

That it's a parent child relationship. It's about compliance rather than efficacy to the point.

In fact, when we did the logic study through all that consumption, one of the things we noticed was it actually doesn't matter so much how good you are. It's about how bad you're not. You know, as long as you're not, you know, the paperwork can be the difference between good and outstanding. Say.

But really though, and I, and I don't know the inspection regime in enough detail, so. But what I do know is the effect that it's having. Sure.

And I don't know whether it's the manner or the tone or the design, but I suspect it's the latter.

What I think the Horcrux suggests is that if the regulation and inspection regime with its power can become benevolent, as in it becomes a focus for learning, like I think a mini version of that kind of, but not quite was me turning up teams and saying show me what you've learned. Learned, you know, and yeah, yeah. What data have we got? And are we sure? And what might we do? What, what would it be good to know that we don't know?

And I think that kind of philosophy backed up with method will create a locus for learning and improvement. But, and I get that we need to make sure that all the nasty things don't happen.

But it's arguable that, that regulation and inspection isn't stopping that. So what is it doing? It's creating artificial competition and it's taken away from the notion of collaboration in many instances it's.

Even if that's more apparent than real, that could, that could be the reality for some people. So regulation and inspection rethink. Definitely.

And again, devolution might help us here, you know, devolve that and regrow it congruent with the other things rather than separate too. And the final one is. And again it overlaps with the evaluative practice one.

But I want to sort of single it out, was the way that we use data and measures what what the caseworkers taught us when we asked them to journal, there was an initial reticence because they were like, well, who's it for? And we were saying, well, it's for you, it's yours, it's for you. And the team to work with.

Now immediately became apparent that, yeah, because they're used to collecting data for other people, it goes up and it gets massaged on the way up.

Joe Badman: 01:21:38

Yeah, of course. To the point of meaninglessness.

Mark Smith: 01:21:39

Yeah. And then instructions come down on the basis of it, and it was a gain. So rather than just keeping score, we need to learn, we need to get better.

When data needs to help us do that, we need to both be prescient with what are the signals. So we use council tax debt as a signal for possible, oh, something's not right here. Let's go find.

s our first prototype back in: 2018

The use of data and intelligence and insight, just using it differently to service learning and iteration primarily. And, you know, we. We do need to keep regulatory bodies happy and we need to work with them.

But those six things, if you did five of those and not six, the other one would bite you and you'd be. It'd be really hard. And it's why.

I mean, I was asked the question, you know, this public service reform lark has been around for years, like many, many years, and yet we haven't really seen massive reform. Why is that, then? And I think the internal consistency issue is why it's so hard to do all of those things in one place. So.

And again, what's great about this is Hannah's point about focus on learning, be more productive than focus on productivity. We did not start this work thinking we would end up talking about this in this way.

So it's really interesting that we got to this point where we felt we had a bunch of things to say about, yeah, you might like the turnaround it had for the people, but you need to do this stuff to make it normal.

Joe Badman: 01:23:12

Yeah. And for it to.

Mark Smith: 01:23:12

And credit to the government, the civil service in particular, because we wrote in the bid some numbers, you know, some guesswork around caseloads. And because we went to this level of detail in extracting the learning out of it, we delivered far fewer than we said we would.

And at no point were they on our backs about it. They were. They were treating it like a learning program. And I think we did the way we do it now, if we did it again.

I think we'd be able to be slicker and do it faster and better, like with anything that, that's learning. So it would be remiss of me not to give, you know, Val Keen was the head of it all. She was brilliant, he's brilliant.

And she gave us that air cover that my previous chief exec, Sheena Amsa gave me when we first started the Council Tax Network. So coming back to the leadership Horcrux, creating the space for learning again is another key role of leadership.

That's a fairly rambling account of all six of these.

Joe Badman: 01:24:10

Not, not rambling, not rambling at all. Voldemort is still alive at the moment. We're working, we're working on it.

One, one sort of question this raises for me is because, because I know you've said on, on many occasions, you know, what, what, what can you do on Monday? Both at a practitioner level, in a sort of middle management level, also senior leadership level.

But what about all of this that we're talking about doing this work in localities, but also trying to scale it. What's easier than people might think? And we'll get onto the what's harder than people might think.

Mark Smith: 01:24:45

It is easy to get started. I mean, I've used the throwaway line because there's often people agonize about where to start. Like there is a perfect place to start, there isn't.

So I talk about start somewhere, go everywhere, start small. It's okay.

I think going back to what I'd said before, about, about half of what the teams did when the method is liberated within those rules and principles, about half of what they did was pretty agnostic of the system. And yet we often start by tweaking structures, governance and system. We're not going to lay a glove on that stuff.

You can start simply by going to where demand comes in or some setting where you've got a combination of we know it's not working and the people there are smart and angry or there's at least a few of them. And I've listened to calls and I've spoken to people and you know what? We, we need to try something else.

So one thing, if you're a leader, a fact doesn't matter who you are, but particularly for leaders in the system, it wouldn't hurt you to go and put a headset on for a morning and just listen to what's coming in and ask yourself the question, what appears to matter to the person that's on the, on the call? This is Again, this. This is what I learned during my time at Vanguard, but I think building on that, you're into.

If you're a leader, this is something that's very much more recently emerged.

Take those Horcruxes and ask yourself, to what extent are these part of my worldview, part of my job, and how do I feel about each of them when I hear that description, Am I knocked by it? Am I? Yeah, but what you don't understand is. Or do you know what? I think he's onto something. Both are valid.

Explore both, either of those and ask yourself if the opposite of what you think is true, what might happen and how then might you experiment with that? I think the key is about experimentation. So if I'm a leader, I'm interested in those Horcruxes. I'm also interested in listening to stuff coming in.

If I'm a practitioner, then if I can keep it legal and do no harm, just do one differently, just see what happens and do. I mean, this is what happened in Council tax. Brilliant guy called Alex Bebb, who's still at Gateshead.

He was smart and angry and dissonant and he found I was quite new in post and he grabbed me and said, I'm really unhappy, you know, I don't like it. And he got me listening to calls and. And it grew out of that.

And now that doing that on Monday, it's easy to think, oh, yeah, well, that's not going to get you here and, no, it won't, but it will get you through Monday. Yeah, and it might make Tuesday and advance on Monday.

So don't think that you can solve it on Monday, but you can start on Monday, then you're into, obviously, the malleability of money thing.

So if you're a finance director and you're folding your arms saying, right, I'm not going to buy into any of this until I can be convinced it's making savings. I understand that worldview, of course I do. It's the job and, you know, they're accountable.

But I would ask the question, what makes it difficult for people to give me what I want? You know, what might I be able to do to free this up?

So in our work, it was being able to use the original budget for the first prototype, the team on a ten grand pot.

So Sheena, the chief exec, created the air cover for that and Darren, the chief finance officer, didn't really mind as long as we kept receipts and we measured everything and it was enough to fundamentally start to change some lives. And I Think that's key. And if you can just think about how can we help people change their life, you're starting in roughly the right place.

You can do that on Monday for sure.

If you're a very senior leader or a politician and you're hearing work like this, come up with all sorts of issues around place and partnership, then ask yourselves, as a place collective, what might we be able to do to make this work normal?

And I know, you know, this is where the likes of Mutual Ventures and Andrew Laird's stuff around radical place leadership is definitely making the right kind of noises. And I know your stuff around well, how do we actually give. Put flesh on that. Yeah, you know, I think yourselves.

And there are others, there are plenty of people around now that can help you do it on Monday or maybe, maybe they can help you do it the Monday after.

Joe Badman: 01:29:25

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:29:26

Yeah. Maybe the first Monday is you going out and not. I mean, why wait?

You know, I know we're waiting for public service reform to kick in for Test and Learn and pacmat Fadden stuff to kick in devolution. Fine. All right. But be ready for it by doing stuff on Monday because otherwise you'll. You'll base your. Your filter for interpreting.

That will be the stuff that's happening already rather than something you've learned yourself.

Joe Badman: 01:29:53

Yeah, completely.

And there's going to be, for everybody that embarks on a journey to establish this kind of way of working, there is going to be so much learning that you might as well start that process now.

Mark Smith: 01:30:05

It will not hurt.

Joe Badman: 01:30:06

Yeah. Because waiting to know more is not going to change the fact that you're still going to have to learn a whole bunch.

Mark Smith: 01:30:10

Don't make it easy. It doesn't make it easy, but it, it's, you know, there's a. There can be. It would be easy and under.

I have empathy for people that have got to the point of resignation. Right. You know what? Those, Those all crooks will sound a bit tricky. And this is. And it's so well bedded in that I'll just get through it.

I'll just get through. Do you know what? I. I have no judgment there because this stuff, it. I mean, I've got scars. Everyone who's worked in this way, it's got scars.

It is counterintuitive in some senses. If you've. Remember, you know, we've had 14 years of austerity. I'm not pinning everything on austerity here. We had new public management before then.

Yeah, but austerity did queer the pitch to a degree. Here. And what it has done is, you know, we've got senior leaders now that have only ever been senior or middle leaders through that period.

Joe Badman: 01:31:05

Yeah. Within this context, they've been managing decline. Yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:31:08

And being good at that has got them to elevated positions.

So part of what a leader could do on Monday is look at those Horcruxes through that lens and say, given that we hope the situation is changing or we hope to seek to change it, what is it that coping with the last 14 years, what can I let go of? Or what can I theme differently? I don't know the answer to that, other than what I've said in here. I've got some useful start points.

That's for every leader to work out where they are. But I think that will be really helpful and I think getting some help. I mean, I would say this because I'm consulting now, I'm not talking about me.

It doesn't even have to be hired help. It could be someone who you trust, who you can build trust with, who you can just surface this stuff with these anxieties, this dissonance. Don't.

And embrace the dissonance. That idea that, you know, dissonance is discomfort, it's the inability to reconcile conflicting ideas. Live in that.

Don't try and solve it, live in it.

Joe Badman: 01:32:10

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:32:11

Because that way you'll start to build some inquiry around. Well, what might I try differently? One thing I've. I haven't mentioned, I mentioned briefly Gary down in. In Plymouth, Gary Wallace.

Joe Badman: 01:32:21

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:32:22

So he arrived at similar. Similar places to where I've arrived. He didn't do any liberated methods at all. He did appreciative inquiry work.

And isn't it interesting that his sort of worldview and logics are pretty much in the same ballpark as where we got to in terms of those Horcruxes and in terms of other bits of practice, it's important that's. I've described our journey in creating the liberated method.

If somebody asked me to go in and do something similar, I wouldn't automatically start deploying the liberated method at them. I think I'd be deploying a more broader relational public service ethos and say, well, what's your version of this, then?

So when I get asked, how do you scale this? My answer is, you can't really. You got to grow it. Yes, but everywhere is growing it. It will grow strong, it will grow fast.

But if you try and scale it, scale normally means replicability, standardization, and the minute we do that, we kill it. So. So that's Where Vanguard's stuff is super strong around.

What I took from that work more than anything else was the use of rules and principles to both have rigor and flex. I think that's brilliant. But the specifics of those have iterated.

But I think that framing that, that I know there'll be others that have done it that way as well, but that's where I learned it. I think that's really, really key.

And I guess the other thing to say, perhaps controversially is yes, we probably need some money to make the change because it's hard to do this whilst keeping the shop open. Yeah, of course.

But given the amount of waste that we've seen in digging the burning platform work, we probably have enough money and the right people already. We're just swamping them. Yeah. Stuff and it's the consequences of that are making it really hard to lift our heads up.

But we didn't have to do much retraining around how to build relationships because people already know how to do.

Joe Badman: 01:34:26

Yeah, yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:34:27

This isn't a skills issue so much. It really isn't.

I think that is key because again that feeds into what can you do on Monday, what you don't need to do on Mondays and extend extensive training program. You don't need to do that at all.

Joe Badman: 01:34:41

Yeah. Or an extensive six month discovery that gets in the way of actually getting started on some of those.

Mark Smith: 01:34:48

No, I mean discovery in the sense of action learning. Yes.

Joe Badman: 01:34:51

Yeah. No, yeah, yeah. I think. Yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:34:53

Like preparing for a trial. Almost.

Joe Badman: 01:34:55

Exactly. Exactly.

Mark Smith: 01:34:56

Yeah. Yeah. That's just paralysis by analysis, isn't it?

Joe Badman: 01:35:00

Exactly.

Mark Smith: 01:35:01

Yeah. Let's not do that.

Joe Badman: 01:35:02

I like the idea of grand growing, not scaling. There's a metaphor that I've got in my head which, which I'll. Which I'll butcher because I haven't quite figured out yet.

But my, my wife is very green fingered and has, has lots of houseplants and we had one Chinese money plant. Are you familiar with the Chinese money plant? Yeah.

Now these things, even the worst of gardeners can propagate these things and grow them and our house is now completely overrun with these damn things. But the, the thing that I found interesting is that the reason why our house is overrun with them is because of the way you propagate them. So.

Mark Smith: 01:35:37

Right.

Joe Badman: 01:35:37

Different to some house plants where you've got to take a cutting and then you've got to put it in some water and let it grow roots and then put it somewhere else and give it some sun. Chinese money plants, when they start to grow, become Healthy, very small ones pop up at the base.

Mark Smith: 01:35:52

Oh, right.

Joe Badman: 01:35:53

But they're detached, they're tiny.

And provided that the one that you've grown from the beginning is strong enough and has got enough sunlight and water, it'll sort of be more or less fine on its own. It'll be strong enough to survive by itself. But the little one, that one does now need a whole bunch of attention.

You've got to make sure that's got some prominent spot, got plenty of light, enough water. But before you know it, if you give it enough attention, then that one grows and another little one sort of pops up next to it. And I sort of.

There's something in that. That metaphor because I think introducing these ways of working.

People have got this sort of notion that, oh, hey, we've got this model now, we're going to implement it at scale and it just doesn't work.

But if you can give enough attention to give it a really good go in the way that you have, you can build enough interest, enough other people that want to start working in this way and then sort of put a bit of focus and attention and sunlight and water on them and gradually I think we can have enough of these plants. So you end up with a house like mine that's absolutely overrun with them.

Mark Smith: 01:36:57

Well, I mean, I think I like it. I think the notion of growing propagation rather than implanting and whatever. I mean, one of the things occurs to me in describing that.

I mean, I guess this is. Could be a Horcrux or not. I'm not sure. Actually. It's not just how we lead, it's how we do change. Now, I think again, this is a.

A bit of a generalization. There'll be plenty of exceptions to this. So before anything gets metaphorically thrown at me, but.

But I've seen an awful lot of unwittingly sort of grown. I learned helplessness across the public sector in the austerity years, in particular around the idea that if we hire consultants and they'll.

They'll be able to tell us what do.

Joe Badman: 01:37:43

Definitely not.

Mark Smith: 01:37:43

I know I'm being. Nobody would ever say that it ends up what it being it amounts to and you won't get fired for it because you didn't come up with it.

Yeah, I know it's. And that's actually a bit of a trope. But it is observed. Is there now that learned hopelessness?

Helplessness has been really pervasive and difficult to deal with and it's done big consultancies really well. But I think the Patience for that has ended or is ending. I think now what we've got is people, a groundswell.

Donna hall calls it the rebel alliance of people that want to own it. Yeah, and I think you got to own this, otherwise it won't work. So what does a relational approach, as opposed to new public management need?

It would mandate Owning would trade more in things like landscapes of practice. It's not like we shouldn't talk to each other and grow it on our own without talking to anybody else.

There are things to learn and that become, you know, you'll have incubators and accelerators and all of that, but it's based on a landscape of practice where we're collectively and specifically owning this as opposed to that learned helplessness. It's not the same as a highly specialized process thing where you would pull a consultant in to help you do it.

It's not surgery, it's not manufacturing, all of which require high end expertise. That's specific and, and, you know, transferable. This, this is different. And yet it's often treated the same.

So that notion of, you know, again, a thing a leader can do, ask themselves, to what extent have I been kind of lured into that? Because this has been really difficult. And actually it's first things first, we've got to survive. And that has helped me survive.

This is why there's no judgment. But context wise, it's got to change.

So I think that's critical in terms of what a leader might do quickly, get that kind of help, go and listen to calls. Just trying to try and take a frame of reference which is less about the organization.

You know, that whole if you start with services, you end up with services thing. Well, what if we start with people? What do we end up with?

Well, in our experience, you start with people, you end up with relationships you end up with. Interesting practice. It's motivating. You end up with learning. Sometimes things go wrong, but they recover. And it's tiring in its own way.

Joe Badman: 01:40:04

Yeah, yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:40:05

And don't underestimate that as well. This is hard work.

But if you start with people, you end up with, if you're lucky, if you're fortunate, the kind of things that you have when you go home, you know, your relationships and your life and, and empathy and understanding. That's what happens at work.

If you start with people, even if it's people that are struggling and shouting at you, if you start with services, yeah, you'll just end up with services. And I think we are past that now. We've had that that's been the reform focus for years and it hasn't really got us very far.

Yeah, yeah, completely agree.

Joe Badman: 01:40:40

You talked about some of the things that are easier than you think. What are some of the things that are harder? We've talked about the Horcruxes, so there's that.

But I, I suppose where I'm getting at with this is I sort of want to know what some of your, some of your scar tissue is. Some of the bloody noses you've got.

Mark Smith: 01:40:53

Okay.

I mean, I would say some of the scar tissue comes from established professionals in certain disciplines who become instinctively threatened by this, who needn't be. But I get why they are. So you'll have. I remember we had a young woman who. I'm actually not going to go. I'm not going to describe the case.

Suffice to say there was a commissioned service working on a basis of what was commissioned, who were, quote, unquote, qualified to help this young lady who was not being helped very well at all. Yeah. And she was having a terrible time of it.

And we didn't know she was involved with this commission service, but she came to our attention and agreed for us to have. The first thing we do is say, well, who's helping you already?

And we spoke to the commission service and the professional that essentially had commissioned them, and they said, don't you come anywhere nearer. You're dangerous, you're unqualified. This is reckless. What on earth are you doing?

And we, we said, she's, again, I don't want to go into it, living in an environment which is obviously unsafe and she might not be fit in the brief, but she didn't care about a brief. Brief, yeah. And she said, she's telling us this. And we said, well, we're not here to undermine you, but we think this.

You know, I said before about those location missing. Yeah, that's what was happening here. They weren't commissioned to do something that was part of the answer.

They did have value to add, but it wasn't sufficiently broad or deep. So they took umbrage and had a right go and I had to intervene and get the caseworkers in.

And they were upset because they were made to feel really small. And I'd talk to and colleagues, spoke to the relevant commissioners and eventually patched it up and said, look, it's okay, we'll work with you.

And after a time, those that commission service were, do you know what? This is great.

Joe Badman: 01:42:49

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:42:50

And the professional commissioned it said, I kind of see where you're coming from now, now that sounds all lovely, but that was months, not days or weeks and that was really painful and it really hurt and it really undermined the confidence of the caseworkers. You will find always that there'll be people with established hard won professions that are uncomfortable with generalists.

But what generalists have is when they built that relationship up. What these roles have is context.

So one of the things that needs to happen is the value of having context needs to be elevated to the same status as being a social worker, being a nurse, being a cpn. Because that context is rich in its ability to help you do good, help be alongside people.

So that's difficult and it's hard to overcome and it will require friction because people need to unlearn and relearn and that's always painful.

The other one is when you're asking people that have worked with higher caseloads on with protocols, procedures and practices that are established and standardized and protect, protect them when you ask them to work, do no harm, say legal, agree and iterate purpose. And then the five principles, some people love it, the ones that called it the liberated method did.

Joe Badman: 01:44:16

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:44:17

But for some people it feels very exposing, really unnerving and it can actually really damage them. So do not.

Joe Badman: 01:44:25

What do you mean by damage?

Mark Smith: 01:44:26

Well, people get very stressed.

They feel like they are solely responsible for someone's life all of a sudden when they're not, you know, the person that's responsible for their life is themselves. We're not assuming that, but it can be interpreted as oh, it's on me now or it's on his now.

And that's why we went from singles to pairs because it helps for that to happen. So it does feel quite exposing. I mean it isn't because do no harm, stay legal and the principles, there's rigor there, it's not laissez faire.

And it does help us if you with the regular debriefing and, and the team structure and the group supervision.

You know, there's no ambiguity around what's expected and that, that includes, you know, if in doubt, don't and just let, let's be really, let's look after you.

But it can feel exposing because yeah you're, you're all of a sudden operating in the space that needs to be operated in because it hasn't been for years and that, that can feel quite overwhelming. So this, there'll be some people that don't want to do the first order casework but they'd much rather be what I Call the outer ring.

You know, it talks about pull rather than refer to be pulled upon. So somebody pulled you in. They have context and you are able to bring your expertise to bear to help. That's.

Some people are better at that and God knows we need that. Yeah, of course, yeah. Than doing this. But the sense of. Of purpose will draw them to this role. But it's in for them now. You can see it quite early.

And we had that issue and you'll always have it.

Joe Badman: 01:45:55

I mean, it requires an enormous tolerance for ambiguity.

Mark Smith: 01:45:58

It does, yeah. Yeah. And we had people that were really troubled by the fact that they didn't quite know what their job was, quote, unquote.

We didn't either what to do. No, it's really hard. But it's the nature of.

Of life, you know, if you're going to get involved at this level, that's something we need to embrace and what we need to learn as leaders point of view is how to create environments where that is easier to transition into and we had to learn on the hoof. So the scar tissue there. Yeah. So they're the two that spring to mind those professional boundaries.

And then the idea that because something is missing, this role is missing, it will rank up with those roles that are already there.

Joe Badman: 01:46:37

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:46:37

It implies those roles are deficient. They're not. They just need a degree of support from a new role.

And I think what's lovely is we had a social worker say to us once, I think I can make better decisions based on what I need to do on the basis that this exists. Yeah. You know, I've got context. I didn't have it before.

Joe Badman: 01:46:55

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:46:56

I had an assessment framework before for.

Joe Badman: 01:46:58

That's a hell of an endorsement, isn't it?

Mark Smith: 01:46:59

Yeah, I was made up. But that took a while. Yeah, that took a while.

Joe Badman: 01:47:03

Well, let's. Let's wrap it up. But I want to. I'm conscious that today is your sort of first day. Not in the job. Yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:47:09

It's weird.

Joe Badman: 01:47:09

So it's kind of weird, isn't it? And I'm wondering. I'm wondering what out of all of this, all of this, all of this work, what. What are the stories that.

That are going to stick with you the most, do you think? And these could be stories of citizens or stories.

Mark Smith: 01:47:22

Yeah, this. Goodness me. I mean. I mean. Yeah, just let's choose one.

I mean, what's lovely about this work is that the changing future stuff is focused on those people with high degree of acuity. But the earlier prototypes were more varied and so We've got stories from all points in that kind of continuum.

And I wrote a short article around the liberated method which talks a little bit.

It gives an example of the guy at the one end who had loads of debt and we thought from his presentation and his manner he was like in deep trouble and needed all this holistic liberated type support and actually he didn't at all. He just needed DWP to straighten out some issue about his.

Well, hmrc, sorry about his tax because he was a painter and decorator and it just moved into that and his income was sporadic and. And he just.

What he did was he catastrophized about getting thrown into jail for tax stuff and it just started to impact his mental health and his ability to function. So. But we, we misread it and thought oh God.

And when it turned out that that's all that really mattered, we got DWP actually was who came in and so sat down with him and said oh no, he's fine, we'll sort it out. And once we'd done that we never saw him again and he was fine. So that's one end. We were already all earnest and he just fine.

Joe Badman: 01:48:52

But that could have become something though.

Mark Smith: 01:48:53

Well it could have done.

Joe Badman: 01:48:54

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:48:54

But what was important is that we saw it for what it was.

Joe Badman: 01:48:56

Yeah.

Mark Smith: 01:48:57

His interpretation is the one that mattered, not ours. And off it went then at the other end. Yeah, this. There's people that have been. When I'm thinking of one person who again she.

Yeah, I used that example. Just so many. So this lady was. It was awful and bit harrowing, a bit of a trigger warning. So she was probably in a.

Either late 50s or early 60s, lived alone and she hadn't been really seen for a while and the. She was a council tenant and just so happened we were running a prototype around. I forget which one it was. I think it was around the place based one.

I might have this wrong but we did a small place based piece. Second one we did and the gas. The housing's gas fitter went to check the meter and he.

He knocked on and she let him in and she wouldn't look up and she was really unkempt. She had really good see psoriasis and was she.

She looked really uncomfortable and he walked in and it was sort of twilighty sort of time and the only light source was the TV and the place was a mess and she looked really, really troubled and he was like bloody hell, this is terrible.

He spoke to the neighbors, bless him, this guy and they said well, we've seen her being sick in the back garden a couple of times before and what on earth is going on? So they called us, they were aware of the work we were doing and, and they.

Somebody, the gas fitter referred it somebody and they picked and says I know it's prototype, I know it's not service but could you get involved?

So we looked her up on the system and she, somebody had attempted to make a referral in on her behalf but the response by the system was she needs to self refer.

Joe Badman: 01:50:55

Right.

Mark Smith: 01:50:55

I don't know why I didn't look into that.

We, we just turned up while the case, two of the case workers turned up and saw that she, the only thing she had to cook with was a slow cooker so she was undercooking food and it's making her ill. Right. There was no power or very little. Sorry. There was some power but the lights weren't working and she apparently was.

Money was being delivered through her door by a sister who was cashing her benefits in in and only putting some of them through the door.

Joe Badman: 01:51:23

Right.

Mark Smith: 01:51:24

So she was being financially abused and neglected all at the same time and, and we thought she was much older than she was. So the team just got involved and talked to her and, and didn't.

We obviously pressed all the safeguarding buttons like, you know, because do no harm, stay legal, but didn't waste any time in saying, you know, asking her what was going on and, and the first thing she wanted was the lights to work and the room, the place to be a bit cleaner and for a cooker and obviously there were things that she wasn't asking for but we knew were really important. We got the GP over and the GP was like any more of this and she wouldn't be too much longer. She's going really fast downhill.

So there were no specialist interventions at all. It was all practical, careful at her pace. She's looking after her, helping to look after herself and it turned out she loved to bake. She.

I used to love baking so obviously got a new oven and got the kitchen sorted out. The team did not wait for cleaning services.

They got it stuck in and she saw that and just immediately bonded with them and trusted them and she came out into her own place, got sorted out.

Obviously the police got involved with the benefits stuff and what was what I love about that story because she came good, she started looking up, she started baking cakes for them when they arrived and for the neighbors and God knows what else. It became very slowly over months she came back to life and ended up just. We have the thing about no time limits.

One day she just stopped going, calling, and that was fine. We just had her on a watching brief, you know, keep her eye out for her name. And the thing. It wasn't a package which reached its end.

It was a relationship that ran its course. She was socializing again. She realized what was going on with her sister, but she was so out of it. She hadn't clocked what was happening and.

And on it when. What was good about that is that the agencies all pull together beautifully. You hear stories of. Well, they never talk to each other.

The reason that they pulled together so beautifully because somebody was holding the ring on the. The kind of situation as a partnership. And everybody else knew, the cops, the gp, the housing people. They initially were quite defensive.

Well, we didn't know. It's not. To us, it's all right. We're not. We're not here to beat you up. Let's just, you know. And everyone worked together.

And what was brilliant is the caseworkers were trusted and treated as equals by highly paid professional people that were doing their thing. The only thing that they can do.

Sorry, the things that only they can do, they were doing well in context, at the right time, kind of choreographed by the caseworkers who were doing all the other stuff, building the relationship. It was the first time that the vision I had for it, the hope I had for it, all of it came together in one case.

Yeah, we had bits of it in other cases, but that was the first time I thought, if this can help her, it can help anybody. Now, I'm not going to say this gets into the space with things like abuse and safeguarding.

I know that the specialists for that are the specialists for that. Don't ever to ever think that this subverts that. It really doesn't. This is something else. It's relational, it's volume.

This will work for most people. That other stuff is very much for a smaller number of people. And it's absolutely critical.

So her story and, and the guy that barely needed us, but we're all primed and ready was quite good. I mean, there are other ones as well. There's the. The, you know, the guy who, you know, drove a train, somebody jumped out in front of it.

He was fine and then he wasn't. And then he drank and he offended and he got ill and he spent all those years just going off the rails and, and consuming all these resources.

And what was good when the team worked with him is that it didn't all work brilliantly. He relapsed. You know, it was great. And he consumed very few resources. After 18 months, they relapsed.

But that relapse will be shorter and shallower for sure. Yeah. Because part of recovery includes things not going so well.

Now without this, that would have gone into full scale everything or he might not have even survived. So sometimes we're not. Not every story has a polished ending, but it is a far better place than it would have been.

And the difference between the two, palpable in terms of welfare, in terms of cost, in terms of why we all get out of bed in the morning. So sometimes the partial successes, they're still successes. And a damn site better than where it was headed.

So there's things to draw from, all of it. And I suppose the other way I'd finish it wasn't from a citizen at all. It's, you know, we've had loads of stories of real turnarounds.

It was from one of the case workers who was initially quite skeptical of this since like, well, don't know what my job is, you know, and I could go back and have a higher caseload, help more people. Why am I only open five people when I could help 20 people now?

You can transact with 20 people, but you can relate to three or four or five or whatever. And she learned that.

And one of the team away days, we were asking the workers how they were feeling about it and she said it's the hardest and best job she's ever had. And this lady is not easily pleased. She, if she had any issue, she would not hesitate in saying, which is what we want.

Joe Badman: 01:56:55

Yeah, we want smart and angry.

Mark Smith: 01:56:57

Yeah, we want that. And when she said that, my, my heart leapt.

I thought, well, if she has reached that point from being skeptical and very, very efficiency driven and very much about volume and she's thrown herself into this in the way you have to.

Then, you know, I know that I came away from that thinking this is actually possible everywhere, not just a niche project that we're doing in go around Gateshead. And that, that was for me a real moment. So yeah, we can talk. There's life turnarounds. But this, it's when people's mindset changes and their changes.

I'm not. They're changing it, not me. They're processing this stuff and they're coming to conclusions. We're just creating an environment where that can happen.

You know, that's, that's remarkable. So yeah, there are some really strong stories there. It's it is difficult. It is hard. But as anything more you do it, the easier it gets.

And if the world can change a bit for us, the universe can just line up a bit better, then it gets easier still. So that's why I'm crossing my fingers for.

Joe Badman: 01:58:03

Yeah, well, it feels, it feels like we're getting there.

And the, the real reason I wanted to talk to you today was because I think that part of the secret of enabling this, this work to happen and to grow is really getting into the guts of it, really getting into the detail of it.

And the work that you've done as part of Changing Futures Program, I think, has been a really shining example of somebody that has just really got into the detail with your team. And if this work can grow, then 100% your work will have been a part of making sure that that happens a big part of it.

So thanks so much for taking the time to get into the weeds with me today and maybe we'll. But we'll pick it up again some. Somewhere down the line.

Mark Smith: 01:58:45

Yeah, they're getting the. Them Chinese money. Plant weeds. Getting the weeds, yeah.

Joe Badman: 01:58:53

Cheers, Mark. Appreciate it.

Mark Smith: 01:58:54

Thanks very much.