Orchestrated by - PowerPoint Presentation

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Orchestrated by

The Silver Bullet Machine Manufacturing Company Limited

College of Social Sciences

Public Policy Workshop (2)19th June 2012

The University of GlasgowSlide2

Participants

Dennis Sherwood of Silver Bullet orchestrated the event

Alison Phipps

Andy FurlongAnne AndersonDeidre HeddonDenis Fischbacher-SmithEmma Smith

Michele Burman

Neil Munro

Ramona Fotiade

Richard Harris

Simon Ball

Tom Mullen

Gwilym Price

Iain Docherty

Jane DuckettKeith KintreaKenneth GibbMhairi Mackenzie

Silver Bullet

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Workshop objective

The Public Policy workshop held on 29

th

March was very constructive and productive, and since then, considerable progress has been made, notably:

formal agreement to the appointment of a new Chair (the notice for which will be published shortly)

the strengthening of the KE team with the appointment of Emma Smith, and the imminent recruitment of a KE Manager.

These new positions are important, and will certainly contribute to helping us achieve our overarching objectives of

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eing recognised as the premier academic institution for Public Policy in

Scotland (at least),

and

having real influence and impact on policy-in-practice, and on policy

actors.We all recognise, however, that these appointments, by themselves, are unlikely to ensure that our (rightly) ambitious objectives will be fulfilled – there are undoubtedly some other things we need to do too. But what are those ‘other things’? What do we need to put in place, now, so that, in the future, we don’

t say “if only we’d have done [whatever]… ”?The purpose of this workshop was therefore to identify as many of these ‘other things’ as possible, so that there are no ‘unintended consequences’, no regrets…

Silver Bullet

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What can we learn from other experiences?

To help us reach our objectives of

b

eing recognised as the premier academic institution for Public Policy in Scotland, and

having real influence and impact on policy-in-practice, and on policy actors

we are now in the process of appointing a new Chair of Public Policy, and we are also recruiting a new KE manager.

Drawing on your own experience, individually and in silence…

…

identify a small number (say, 3, 4 or 5) of instances in which a structural change (such as the

appointment

of a new role, or the formation of a new function or department) has been viewed as a key means of bringing about a bigger change …for each of these, assess the degree of overall success achieved, and the reasons why success happened

(or indeed didn’t).

When everyone has finished, share your individual thoughts with each other. What can we learn from these precedents?

Capture your findings in a 15-minute presentation entitled “Becoming a leading player in Public Policy: some lessons from other structural changes”.

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The attitude of the new professor, and the specification of the role

The attitude of the new professor – in terms of both the individual’s own personal characteristics and also how reality turns out to match (or indeed mismatch) his or her expectations and aspirations - is key.

This implies that we need

to understand each candidate’s personal characteristics, and then make an offer only to someone with the characteristics we seek, and

to ensure that our expectations are clearly articulated (leaving the candidate to map those onto his or her aspirations).

This in turn implies that we need to specify, in advance,

those individual characteristics and expectations. The big question is therefore “do we know what we want?”. For example (and deliberately choosing polarised extremes)…

Are we looking for an ‘aggressive go-getter’, a ‘TV personality’, or a ‘friendly helper’?

Is the role primarily one of ‘doing bold new things’ or ‘bringing together what we are already doing’?

Are we looking for someone with a strong ‘personal agenda’, who sees the role primarily as a vehicle for the achievement of their personal ambitions, or someone who is willing to be the ‘orchestrator of a collective agenda’?

Is the key stance ‘outward’ or ‘inward’ facing?

Is the emphasis on ‘building a new team’ or ‘developing existing staff’?

The reality is probably a mixture of all of these – and there is a strong temptation to leave the answers to these questions rather open, on the very reasonable grounds of “let’s see how things evolve” and “we should let the new professor have the opportunity to forge his or her own path”. But does vagueness at this stage also increase the risk of disappointment and failure? What do we need to do to be very sure of what we want, yet leave enough space for things to develop?

Some learning from other experiences

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Alignment

We – individually, in teams, and collectively – are already doing much good work in public policy. Yes, we can be even better, but we don’t want to run the risk that the new appointment will be viewed, with hindsight, as a set-back – a set-back attributable to, for example

causing talented people, currently with us, to leave

driving destructive internal competition, so that ‘wholes’ become less than the ‘sum of their parts’

significant reallocations of funds, so causing local ‘starvation’.

We must therefore ensure that

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e obtain full buy-in from all our colleagues that

being a leader in Public Policy is a ‘good thing’ for the University as a whole, and for ourselves too, and that

the new appointments are important in making that happen, and that

everyone will have a role to play in securing success.

We design the appropriate incentives accordingly…

…and we evolve our ‘social contract’ to eliminate dysfunctional behaviours, such as destructive competition and ‘hogging’ resources (such as people, contacts, knowledge… ).

Some learning from other experiences

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Clarity

Before we make any new appointment, we must ensure we have clarified, and agreed

the role

the structure within which that role sits

how the role will interact with current roles

and structures

the corresponding performance measures

the characteristics of the individual.

If we leave things too vague, we run a significant

risk of failure – and, in addition, any good candidate will spot this, and turn down an offer on the grounds that “these people don’t know what they

’re doing”.Suggested actions

P

ower must match responsibility

A danger to avoid is that in which someone is charged with a significant responsibility - such as “your job is to make us the leading Public Policy Institute in Scotland” – but to deny that person the resources, and power, required.

This is both a funding issue, which must be thought-through and resolved…

…as well as a cultural issue concerning, for example, authority, leadership, followership, the sharing of resources, and reward and recognition.

Make the new appointments welcome

It’s very easy to appoint someone, show them their desk, and leave them to it.

Let’s take this opportunity to make the new appointments really welcome – for example, by convening a ‘welcoming circle’.

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Is success just a matter of making the right appointments?

As a result of our meeting on 29th March, we are now in the process of appointing a new Chair of Public Policy, and we are also recruiting a new KE manager.

Are

these appointments sufficient to enable us to achieve success as regards

being

recognised

as the premier academic institution for Public Policy in Scotland, and

having

real influence and impact on policy-in-practice, and on policy actors?

Or are there some other things we need to do too?

Individually and in silence, make some notes on as many issues that also need to be addressed as you can think of, for example…Our collective capability - do we have the right strengths in the right areas?How

we disseminate our research – what can we do to maximise our influence and impact?

Our

effectiveness in working in multi-disciplinary teams: since the ‘big’ questions in public policy

inevitably

cross all our organisational

boundaries, what, if anything, do we need to do to improve

our

ability to create and deploy high-performing academic teams, and win the biggest grants?

When everyone has finished, share your individual thoughts with each other, capturing your findings in a 15-minute presentation entitled “Becoming a leading player in Public Policy: what else we need to do too”

.

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Our current capability – do we have the right strengths?

By and large, yes.

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ut let’s be alert to the issues discussed at the workshop of 29

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March. We mustn’t be complacent, for there are certainly some areas where we can be stronger – especially as regards ‘downstream’ activities such as delivery, implementation, engagement and impact. Clearly, we must maximise the output of our current capability, making our ‘whole’ become significantly greater that the sum of its current ‘parts’ – as well as adding one or two more ‘parts’. How can we best do this? How can we best organise to make this happen? How can we design the most effective incentives?

One approach, which could work well within our current structures, is to make internal secondments much more flexible, and easy to happen, so that people within a given current department can have the opportunity to spend ‘proper’ time at the new Unit.

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aybe the key to unlock this prize is the availability of funds for buy-outs.

And we can take the secondment idea further – inviting

secondees

in from various public bodies, and seconding our people out in return.What else we need to do

Don’t let the minutiae clog things up

It’s easy for us to get into arcane squabbles over the minutiae of methodologies. We must not let these things get in the way of forming larger inter-disciplinary collaborations. Somehow, the scientists seem to be able to work in large teams. We need to do the same.

We must up our game in engagement

Our mission will not be fulfilled with the publication of a well-respected article in a leading journal. In addition, we must ensure that our results are made accessible to, and are accessed by, policy actors. And we mustn’t fall into the trap of using the “you can’t lead a horse to water” argument as a reason not to bother. We must have bolder ambitions, and be willing to adapt how we put our messages across, and the timeliness of our work, accordingly.

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Best practice

Currently, we do different things in different ways in different parts of our Colleges. Is this variety ‘good’ (in the sense that different policy actor communities, such as central government in contrast, say, to local government, might genuinely wish to interact with us in different ways), or ‘sub-optimal’ (in the sense that some things genuinely work better than others)? How do we find out? How can we identify best practice? And what has to happen for those who currently are not using best practice to adopt it? This requires adequate resourcing, and is especially important as regards our relationships with actual and potential client’ communities – so best practice in KE is

KEy

.

Likewise, how can we improve our success rate in winning more, and bigger, grants? How can we ensure that we always have the best possible approach, and deploy the very best resources (including,

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or example, international input), for any opportunity? What can we learn from failed bids? And how do we make that learning stick?

Structure

Should we form an ‘Advisory Board’, to provide oversight, and also to provide an opportunity for frequent and regular external advice, from distinguished experts such as Sir John

Elvidge

and Josef

Konvitz

?

…and…

We must ensure we take this opportunity to break down the walls of our ‘silos’: a new single person, a new unit, cannot possibly achieve what we wish to achieve in isolation – this is something that requires a true collective endeavour.

We will also have to learn new ways of working too, as regards, for example

using language that is immediately intelligible to policy actors

recognising that sometimes it will be necessary to deliver urgency, even at the expense of academic rigour

building, and maintaining, relationships

increasing the opportunities for consultancy

accepting, and taking, risks we probably neither accept, nor take, now.

None of these imply a transformation from a prestigious academic institution into a bunch of intellectually dishonest cowboys; but they do imply that simply continuing to do what we are currently doing is unlikely to deliver success.

What else we need to do

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Engagement

We must define an ‘Engagement strategy’, which specifies how we can significantly enrich our engagement, and hence have substantially more real impact. This requires understanding what we, and others, do now, and then identifying, codifying, implementing and – most importantly – adopting best practice. This is a key task for the KE team.

Suggested actions

Secondments

We need to define and agree our policies on secondment, both within the University, and (in both directions) beyond…

… including the financial arrangements (such as required for buy-out time, etc… ).

The launch

The creation of the new

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nit provides an opportunity to make something of a splash, so let’s do rather more than an announcement on the ‘news’ page of our website. How about some form of festival, or other major event...triggering thoughts of ‘Gotham City’ (see page 27 of the report of the workshop held on 29

th

March)?

And in general, all events should be double-badged.

Many actions are implied in the points made on pages 8 and 9: we highlight these in particular…

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The announcement

What went wrong?

Individually and in silence, identify as many reasons (hypothetical, of course, but nonetheless plausible) as to why “Professor Radcliffe” chose to leave after only three years, with the implication that our initiative has failed. When everyone has finished, share your individual thoughts with each other. As a result, compile an aggregate list of potential reasons for failure, and, as a team, identify as many constructive actions as you can whereby each of these reasons for failure can be avoided. Also, what suggestions do you have as regards how we can track success?

Capture your findings as a 15-minute presentation entitled “How to pre-empt, and avoid, failure, and how to measure success”.

From

The Herald, 19

th

June 2015

“We are delighted that Professor Radcliffe will be joining us in September as Head of our Public Policy Institute”, said the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Strathclyde at a press briefing yesterday. “This important appointment strengthens our standing as the premier academic department for Public Policy in Scotland. Professor Radcliffe has had a most distinguished career, including five years as Professor of Public Leadership at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and, most recently, three years as Professor of Public Policy at the University of Glasgow.”

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Make participation worthwhile, for real

Intellectually, everyone will agree that having a new Public Policy Institute is a ‘good thing’. But is a nice warm feeling sufficient to encourage people actually to contribute and participate? Especially when the activity required is not what that person actually wants to do right now. Or when success is perceived as ‘my next paper’, with the emphasis on ‘my’. Or when I’m wanting to get promoted. This implies that we should look at our culture in general, and our various procedures (such as those associated with performance measurement, appraisal, reward and recognition), to ensure that these actively support and incentivise the ‘right’ behaviours.

Some thoughts as to how to avoid unintended failure

Get the funding model right

And talking of incentives… it’s imperative we get the funding model right. Two features immediately come to mind:

Have (more than) sufficient funds available, right from the start, for buy-out time, so people can participate unencumbered. And that also requires that there are sufficient ‘other people’ available to step into the gaps.

Declare, and deliver, from the start, a policy of “you earn, you spend” for the Unit. The Unit is a start-up, and like all start-ups, it needs investment.

C

ertainly, the costs of the new appointments represent that investment. But not all of it. If new funds won within the Unit are immediately top-sliced, that’s a disincentive, and must have a negative impact.

An important implication of a “you earn, you spend” policy for the new Unit is that some incumbents might cry, “Unfair! Why should I, just because I’m established, have to bear a charge for ‘College overheads’, while ‘they’ are getting away paying nothing!” The “what is fairness?” debate could keep us all busy for a long time; hopefully, it doesn’t take that long for us all to appreciate that this is the wrong question – the right question is “what do we have to do to maximise our collective success?”

Governance

We need to get that right too. The Unit is, from the start, bridging the Colleges of Social Sciences and Arts, and it’s inevitable that the other Colleges will be involved too. This suggests that the Steering Group should comprise the Vice-Principals of all of the University’s Colleges, plus some distinguished external people too. A very early task for that Group is to carry out a due-diligence exercise on the new appointment itself – for example, the eligibility of internal candidates, and the possibility of more junior hires too.

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Some suggested measures of success

Client demand

Something wonderful happens when an organisation no longer has has to survive by ‘selling’ its offer, but finds itself

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ontinuously stretched to satisfy client demand. A true measure of success of an intelligence-based enterprise is to monitor the ‘order flow’: ideally, this is a mixture of ‘repeat demand’ from people we’ve worked with before, and with whom we have a strong relationship of mutual trust, alongside ‘new demand’, from people we’ve not worked with before, but who seek us out because we are the very best.

Academic demand

And the other side of the same coin is to attract the very best academics too. How can we truly become a ‘magnet for talent’?

Reputation

We need to be, be seen to be, and be known as, the ‘go to’ institution for Public Policy Research. Fundamental to this is that everything we do must be of the highest quality, and all our work must meet the highest standards. And we must avoid the ‘rent an expert’ trap. That all goes without saying. But we also have to make that quality visible; we have to ensure we have exactly the right engagement; we must be willing to ‘take a stand’; and we must have impact. This all builds our reputation, which attracts the best talent, so enabling us to deliver the best work, which gives us the opportunity to excel, which builds our reputation even further…

It’s a real world

And in the real world, we must win the REF game, making as sure as we can that our Public Policy work hits as many REF buttons, across as many disciplines, as possible. Money speaks too, so we need to generate income, both from grants and directly from commissioned work. But in many ways, once we’ve started, these are results, the prizes won by getting everything else right…

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Are the REF incentives perverse?

Does the current REF process encourage sub-optimal fragmentation, and destructive competition, driving every university to compete for glory in the public policy space? Is an alternative to ‘doing our own thing’ for us to take the lead in creating a Scotland-wide Public Policy Institute, bringing together the very best people form the whole country?

Some more ideas…

The recruitment process

How can we be innovative in the process we will use for selecting the new Chair? Not for the sake of it, but with the intent of giving us a much better insight into each candidate, and allowing the candidate to get to know us much better too. The default, easy, option is to do what we’ve done before. But here is an opportunity for us to do something significantly different – and better…

Are two heads better than one?

In general, yes. But what about this particular case? Normally, we think of the ‘Unit Head’ as a single person, and that’s how we design the structure. But what if there were two co-heads – or even three? Think of the benefits – broader scope, mutual cover, more ‘batting power’… This does not in any way cut across the new appointment; rather it separates the appointment (which is a ‘good thing’ in its own right) from the structure, which could be a very smart things to do…

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And let’s not forget these thoughts from our last workshop…

Is policy a ‘poor relation’?

Does policy work have the same – that means high – regard and status as other aspects of our academic work?

This is, of course, a rhetorical question: the implication is that policy work is sometimes, and in some places, regarded as ‘grubby’, ‘inferior’, or ‘insufficiently academic’. The status with which policy work is associated need never be declared openly, but – as with all cultural subtleties – we all learn very quickly what the organisational ‘rules’ are… The result is that people will naturally gravitate towards the high-status areas, and avoid the low-status ones. So, if we wish to play a more vigorous, influential and powerful role on the policy stage, we must find ways to overcome our current cultural distaste. Simply saying ‘policy work is important’ is not enough: cultures are notoriously ‘sticky’…

Rivalry

This is indeed an ‘elephant in the room’. Let’s not be too paranoid – we’re not a community of insanely jealous monomaniacs. But we are human beings: human beings who want to be successful; human beings who know that knowledge can often be a basis of personal power – and that sharing that knowledge might run the risk of eroding that power; human beings that might be in competition for funds, roles, appointments and promotions (“If there is a new Public Policy Unit, what can I do to be appointed Director?”). Within an academic environment, where authorities are relatively weak, such rivalries can often be masked by an appeal to ‘academic freedom’, and a general acceptance of independent, if not maverick, behaviour. As individuals, we all benefit from – and indeed enjoy – this; if we wanted to be ‘managed’, we’d all join corporates. But the down-side of ‘individualism rules OK’ is in being able (or, rather, not being able) to realise a higher level of collective achievement, for our ‘whole’ to become greater than the sum of our ‘parts’. If a new ‘Public Policy Unit’ is to be maximally successful, we must find ways to address these issues, and of evolving our culture for the better, but without becoming a ‘corporate’. This issue must not be ignored, or brushed under the carpet. This elephant is too real and too big.

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…and these too…

Do we have the required vision, will and confidence?

This is a tough one too – few people readily admit they’re wimps. But once again, let’s not scourge ourselves unduly. That said, to deliver a new Public Policy Unit, especially one which will challenge the paramountcy of the Kennedy School, is no small task. That statement in itself could readily provoke the response “We could never achieve the reputation of the Kennedy!”. Which is indeed the point. Why not? And beware the self-fulfilling prophecy – if we set our aspirations low, we will surely achieve them. As regards vision, today’s workshop has already been very valuable in broadening, and deepening, our vision and understanding of what a new Public Policy Unit might ‘look like’. But maintaining and enriching that vision; avoiding all the pressures to dumb big ideas down; overcoming all the reasons-why-this-won’t-work; let alone making things happen – these all take will, confidence and prodigious quantities of energy. And that’s the will, confidence and energy not of an individual, but of us all. So we’re back to our culture…

Does our culture inhibit innovation?

And whilst we’re on the subject of culture… despite the fact that we are an academic institution, do we actively encourage innovation? Or do we actually behave as guardians of the

status quo

, creating an environment where new ideas survive only if they can run the gauntlet of challenge, scorn and apathy? Yes, these words are an over-dramatisation. But do they illuminate an important, real, truth? If we are to create a new Public Policy Unit – and one which will indeed challenge the Kennedy – then it must, just must, be

different

: different from what we do now, different from what the Kennedy does now. To be different, we must have ideas, ideas, ideas – and we must make the best of those ideas real. What a wonderful opportunity this provides to enrich – deliberately and decisively – our culture, and to make it one of true, academically powerful, innovation. The need is real, and urgent: but to make this happen will take not only commitment and effective delivery, but also dynamic and vibrant leadership and – very importantly – willing and active followership.

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Silver Bullet

The Silver Bullet Machine Manufacturing Company Limited

Innovation, Innovation, Innovation

Barnsdale Grange, The Avenue, Exton, Rutland LE15 8AHE-mail: dennis@silverbulletmachine.com Website: www.silverbulletmachine.comMobile and messages: 07715-047947Telephone: 01572-813690

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Making innovation happen

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high-performing teams

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