Listening to Sir Mark Rowley (Metropolitan Police) answering questions from the public, we realise the enormous challenge that policing has to change their culture and enable the community to be confident.
Watching the striking doctors, along with the wider ongoing crisis in health and social care, we continue to struggle with a depleted workforce and systems that do not meet the needs of our communities.
This dysfunction continues across our public sector landscape: Education, Fire Services, Criminal Justice System and even Housing.
Why Are Our Systems in Chaos
When we are fearful, adrenaline and our neurochemical makeup causes our brain to focus on the presenting risks. This leads to tunnel vision, fear of rejection, defensiveness, withdrawal, compliance and the experience of being overwhelmed. Memory impairment and lack of creativity enable the threat to be prioritised and managed psychologically.
As individuals, organisations and systems, we appear to be traumatised and unable to move forward.
How Do We Create Curiosity and Deliver The Service Models which we need across the UK.
As a leader myself, I was fooled into the belief that governance with policies, processes and communication strategies, enabled our workforces to be competent and confident in dealing with their environments and through audit and feedback closed the loop to demonstrate completion of our quality outcomes.
I experienced the sense of chaos and fear leading to myopia, fear of rejection, defensiveness, withdrawal, and yet have continued to find spaces to be creative and innovative and can still thrive.
Although traditional models of governance and Business as Usual need to be woven into our services, these should not be prioritised over Sensemaking Capacity, Connectivity Capacity and Entrepreneurial Capacity.
Sensemaking Capacity
In order to make sense of the world around us, we need to understand our own minds, the minds of others and the context in which we are viewing the world.
This requires active participation of our communities in our sense-making processes, embracing and harnessing differences of opinion to create sense-making structures. These need to happen at all layers of organisations knitting together ideas and insight into a coherent strategy.
Rewilding Knowledge Management
Rewilding knowledge management moves away from the traditional, linear approach to knowledge management, and embraces a more holistic, organic, and dynamic approach. It involves creating a culture of curiosity, collaboration, experimentation, and open communication. This approach recognises that knowledge is not just a static asset that can be managed, but a living organism that needs to be nurtured and allowed to grow and evolve.
Through sharing knowledge organically, we can learn from our experiences, experiment and change.
Understanding How We Make Decisions
Cognitive aspects of decision-making refer to the mental processes involved in making a decision. This includes the ability to gather, process, analyse, and interpret information to arrive at a conclusion or choice.
Mental processes such as perception, attention, memory, reasoning, and problem-solving all need to be explored. Perception involves how individuals interpret and make sense of information in their environment. Attention refers to the ability to focus on relevant information and ignore irrelevant information but mindful of the bias this creates. Memory involves the ability to recall relevant information from past experiences. Reasoning involves using logic and critical thinking to analyse and evaluate information. Problem-solving involves identifying a problem and developing a solution to address it. These need to be considered as part of sense making and understood to create confidence.
Connectivity Capacity
Connection as a skill critical to build broad networks which drive creative collisions. This impact enables shared understanding, innovation and together with diplomacy create new opportunities and motivation.
Valuing People
Our competitive capitalist perspective has treated people as resources who are expendable, rather than unique talent. Our networks are often constrained into silos of like-minded individuals and form barriers rather than incubators for ideas and discussion.
Emotional Expression
The importance of emotional expression cannot be overstated. Our organisations are not just a set of policies and decisions, but a reflection of our values, beliefs, and aspirations. When we suppress our emotions and feelings about our lives, we are also suppressing our sense of agency and responsibility as citizens. It is important to acknowledge and express our emotions about our working environments, whether it is anger, frustration, disappointment, or hope. This can help us to build stronger connections with others who share our values and beliefs, and to mobilise collective action towards meaningful change.
Entrepreneurial Capacity
Together with sense making structures and connectivity, we can utilise entrepreneurialism to take ideas and translate them into reality.
Organisations and Context
Through understanding context, different action orientated capability can be explored. This requires a deep understanding of the different set of circumstances in which we operate, and the ability to adapt to match the demands of each context.
We all need to be able to identify whether a situation is simple, complicated, complex, or chaotic, and then respond accordingly. In simple contexts, we can rely on best practices and process-oriented approaches, while in complicated contexts, they need to be more analytical and often benefit from an expert perspective. In complex contexts, we need to be patient, experimental, and open to emergence, while in chaotic contexts, acting quickly to establish order and manage innovation in parallel may be a choice.
What Concepts Look Like In Reality
Through implementation of frameworks such as psychological safety, inclusion and trauma approaches we create trust to build the foundations for our systems to work effectively.
I have real experience of creating safe spaces which enable creativity to emerge but this needs role modelling, group dialogue, consistency of approach and true celebration of experimentation, error and learning from our experiences.
By practicing design thinking using a human-centered approach which involves understanding our users and ignoring the systems present, we can define the problem, ideate potential solutions, prototype and test which can reveal new models of delivery.
Ask interesting questions of people:
- In your view, why are we doing this?
- How do you see your role in this?
- What do you need to make this change?
- What do you need to re-prioritise?
- What is happening emotionally?
- Is there anything that you see that could go wrong?
Look for signs of energy, excitement and evidence of moving forward rather than traditional outputs and key performance indicators which litter our dashboards.
Lets remove the fear of not knowing what to do and replace with the worry of how this will impact me.
Lets remove risk adverse cultures, with the thrill of taking a risk and seeing what happens.
Lets create supportive structures where our wellbeing and individuality is celebrated so the worry and excitement can be shared and moving forward enabled.
The solution is to celebrate Entrepreneurship and the Agency of People to Change The System.
