Katrina Ings
Regional Commissioner Waikato, Ministry of Social Development

About five or six years ago a woman attempted to get mental health services for her neighbour. For about a week she was passed from one part of the service to the other. People agreed her neighbour needed the service but said that she wasn’t talking to the right person. Out of frustration this woman wrote a letter to the Minister, calling for accountability of the plonker responsible for the mess.

A couple of weeks later I was at a meeting with the Minister of Health who pulled me to one side and explained that she had received a letter from my mother. Realising it was awkward because I was responsible for mental health services the Minister said she would deal with it.

Most of us have those "remember when" stories that trade when families come together. This isn’t one of those "remember when" stories in my family. In fact, it has taken a long time for us to forgive each other. But as the years have given me a little bit of perspective and as I’ve overcome my acute embarrassment I realise that my mother was looking for "the troll under the bridge".

Paradoxes

In a country where few people do not know love and people are proud of someone who works in the public sector, there is a distinction between us as people, our values, commitment and skill and us as public servants. Mention the word bureaucrat and the notion quickly appears of a "circus of the timid" where entertainment comes from the clowns marked "reluctance" to enter the spotlights circling inside the ring.

At a time of more transparent accountability than possibly ever before, there is still the perception by many people in this country that what they see is not what they believe they get. There remains an enduring assumption that the "real power" sits somewhere else. The mixed results associated with managing and leading both stability and innovation have spawned and wrap around a second paradox. This is that alongside the recognised talent and responsiveness of the public sector is the continuing experience of inertia and avoidance from us.

As senior managers we can choose to see this issue of lack of confidence as merely a symptom. I have come to believe it’s more than that. Given that the people we serve are the reason we are here, then a failure or even shakiness of confidence by many in us is an issue we cannot avoid.

A few years ago when I worked in Midland Health at the Regional Health Authority, we used to conduct a survey each year of the satisfaction of the people in the region with the health services they were getting. Every year, no matter what happened, the results were the same. The people who had encountered the health services within the previous three months rated those services highly. The further away people were from experiencing those services the less confident they were. We’re talking about eighty-five to eighty-seven percent satisfaction for people who had received services, but the people who hadn’t received health services rated those services at around the forty to forty-five percent mark. We made a mistake. We kept looking at the eighty-five percent. We kept saying that the people that we were doing this for were happy. We kept forgetting that the vast majority were not. We did this because we were prepared to discount their views because they didn’t know or understand.

As a Public Service I believe we work for the whole country. If we do that we have to accept that the confidence of people in the communities that we serve generally is our issue. We cannot carve them up into those who do know and those who don’t understand.

There are a couple of reasons for this issue about confidence in us as public servants. They are about the nature of our role and the nature of change. The objectivity and the fairness that society requires of us as public servants is seen by people as being both necessary and unnerving. The objectivity that people rely on clashes with the reality that what we deal with impinges on people’s lives often at times of vulnerability or at points of change. What we deliver has an emotional component to its meaning whether it be taxation or trauma services I think we underestimate that.

This issue of confidence has been compounded by the pace of structural change and by policy change. This means that people’s understanding of how accountability works is unclear. This has led to a constant search for the people who are accountable and stunned disbelief when someone stands up and says, "It’s me." The search for the troll has been ongoing.

It is the nature of innovation that constructive change has only a temporary window of visibility. Change tends to begin as a possibility often in the minds of only one or two people. Our ideas, generally the strongest ideas, don’t necessarily start in our meeting rooms. That is where we bring them, but they didn’t start there. Innovation moves from being invisibile to being implemented which is the point where we see it. When innovation is really effective we need to institutionalise it, bring it into our organisations and let it change - not just that thing over there, but fundamentally - the way we do things, the why we do things.

The legacy of an innovation that has the most impact is that what we consider possible shifts. It shifts in our minds. How many of us here think back on how we used to do things in our organisations even 10 years ago and compare that with the things that we take for granted now. The way we do those things came through that innovation process. If we’re going to be mature in our innovation we have to be looking not at the thousands of disconnected things scattered all over the place but the strong ideas, the innovative ideas, that will fundamentally move the way we do things in our organisations.

Things We Have Done to Ourselves

Siloed organisational structures and accountabilities have reinforced silo thinking. In saying this I choose my words carefully. The organisational structures have reinforced silo thinking. I do not believe they created them. There seems to be a myth describing a previous time when we all worked co-operatively and innovation flowered. I have been in the Public Service for 23 years. If such a Shangri-La ever existed, it wasn’t where I was standing.

When we talk about achieving a balance between stability and innovation we are not talking about returning to anything but a way of gathering our lessons and moving forward. In doing so we must address expectation. For years we have managed expectations in the face of increasing and complex demands within the reality of finite resources. In managing expectations the tendency has been to focus on managing down. The result has been incredibly successful. The tragedy is that at a time when we are consciously seeking to innovate, many people have come to expect very little from us. Yet despite this we are continually rescued by the resilience of the public who keep coming, albeit with understandable scepticism.

This resilience has confronted a management environment of uncertainty about the relative priority of stability and innovation. Over the past few years we have been swinging between the two. This has resulted in defensive relationships that have been confused and confusing both with each other and with the people whose lives our decisions affect. Consultation has not been our strongest forte.

Given that we tend to learn from our own successes and other people’s mistakes I suggest that each of us attend someone else’s stakeholder consultation - as "object citizen". In my experience what we see are points of brilliance and the truly awful. The difference lies in the preparedness to listen and talk with, as opposed to "telling".

The failure to nurture the potential of our external relationships is exacerbated by separated internal functions where the notion of a value chain has often been lost in a culture that allows shifts in responsibility and blame. For example, policy versus operation and national versus regional or local. This has not only set a culture of division that makes the notion of constructive external relationships extremely difficult, it also denies potential innovation to the full range of resources (both funding and expertise) that could be mobilised.

We must break down dysfunctional cultures that work directly against creativity and talent. Too often these relationships turn into arguments about who really understands the way the world works. That is so destructive because we need each other. Thinking that we are strong and OK if others are falling apart is not acceptable now. We can’t keep doing that to ourselves or to each other.

The Challenge of Leadership

As senior managers from across the public sector the challenge of leadership is inescapable. There are three values of leadership that our people who work for us and the people we serve look to. These values are:

• clarity - where we are going, why, what we value here;
• consistency - integrity between what I say and what I do; and
• honesty - the simple notion of truthfulness.

There has been talk today about the value of the learning organisation. We need to go further than that. All the values of the way a learning organisation works are critical to us and essential to the development of an achieving Public Service. But as leaders in the public sector we also have a responsibility to also teach. This means sharing the lessons we have learned and the skills we have acquired. This cannot be left to someone else.

We have to break the silos and replace these with the value of "us". It is the notion of what each one of us is a part of. The silos are structural to a degree but more significant is the silo effect on our thinking that limits what we conceive as possible and ignores the value of the relationships beyond our own functional certainties. This breaking of the silos of our imagination and relationships is not a romantic "field of flowers" concept. Nor can we afford the risk that some will see collaboration as merely the latest fashion in Public Service management.

Collaboration emerges from two rational drivers:

• the complexity that exists beyond the boundaries of a single organisation, and
• the reality of finite resource.

Collaboration provides a way to achieve innovation that is sustainable and responds to the opportunities that exist within the communities we serve. To collaborate will mean that we step outside our doors. This will involve moving our reference of concern beyond that of our own organisations, to include the value and safety of others. Alliances, joint ventures and other forms of collaboration are understandably irritated by a failure to commit and to survivalist mentalities. Internal ways of behaving that we may have accepted as being not ideal but inevitable risk being seen as visibly disfunctional when we join others at the table. The risk of being justifiably regarded as an "ugly partner" is inherent in collaboration if we are not prepared to change internal siloed behaviour and attitudes.

We need to be big enough to come alongside someone else’s good idea and be prepared as senior managers to change our strategies. It is likely that this will involve reviewing our strategies and organisational processes. It is not only about why we need to collaborate, but with whom. Collaboration is not an exercise in indiscriminate relationships. Without focus and the capability to deliver on our promises, collaboration risks being an expensive and aimless gathering of the tribes where we get lost in the busyness and accessories of change that makes very little difference.

Leaders need other leaders. We know from international research that innovative organisations rely heavily upon the existence of leadership throughout the organisation.

What are we doing to develop leadership throughout our organisations? Innovation resides in the people who have the imagination and talent to conceive of something beyond the present. How confident are we that we know where these people exist in our organisations? What are the strengths in other organisations? To what extent are we consciously developing future leaders for the public sector, as opposed to the immediate needs of our own organisation?

How prepared are we to change the way our organisations operate so that they will support innovation? The public sector has a history of "shooting star" innovations and innovators. These have flared and then disappeared because they have been isolated from the support of the organisation core. The "let it happen and hope approach" to doing things differently will produce casualties of both people and hope when that was not our intention. Failure is fine, casualty is not.

However the desire for innovation also brings with it a responsibility to be real There is a difference between innovation and anarchy. Getting it really wrong is generally not celebrated anywhere. Innovation requires discipline - another paradox. It is really basic, it is the stuff we all know. It is questions like:

• Why are we doing this?
• Where does it fit?
• How will we know if it was the right thing to do?
• What does custard look like when it starts happening?
• What are plans B and C?

This is basic planning. But it is possible to be a creative planner. It’s just not a good thing to run amok. At the same time as we keep an eye on our planning it is important for us to remember that there is a difference between responding to complexity and complicating things. There is the value of doing the simple things well and the lesson that much of what is truly innovative is also pretty basic.

Conclusion

I’m more hopeful about the future of the Public Service at this time than I have been for a while. It is less about policy or permission. It’s about maturity. I know that innovation beyond the limits of our silos is possible and that others also know this. The challenge now is to join up the dots.

Living with paradox is part of the state of growing up. It is about being a grown up. It is being able to manage more than one idea at a time. The conversations and actions across the sector show that we are in the process of gathering our lessons and at the same time moving forward.

A while back I was challenged with three questions. They could be asked of any leader by the people we seek to lead.

• Can I trust you?
• Are you committed to excellence?
• Do you care about me?

For as long as we avoid the issue of confidence of the people we serve these questions will be problematic. When I think about the frustration that caused my mother’s letter to the Minister I have to accept that, at that time, the answers to the questions were no. I believe that our responsibility as leaders in the Public Service is to create an environment where, despite the difficulties, the answer can be, at least a watchful yes.

New Zealand State Services Commission