EiPL blog - Lunch & Learn
The Excellence in Place Leadership Programme was the focus at a recent Lunch and Learn session hosted by Amey, where ADEPT members were able to find out more about the programme and how participants from across the country are taking lessons learned back to their own local authority areas. This blog captures key points from the speakers at the session.
Background – creating an environment for change demands fresh thinking.
The session started with an introduction from Kirsteen Bailey from Amey.
The Excellence in Place programme has been running for three years as a collaboration between Amey and ADEPT, aiming at encouraging thought leadership. It’s set up as a forum for place leaders to share challenges, ambitions and to provide time and space for people to think outside the box, without the constraints of the day job.
One of the key elements has been about connecting with the wider sector, bringing in other local authorities, partners and industries. Since the beginning, each cohort has developed blogs, briefings and toolkits, to make sure everyone else could learn from the programme. The toolkits, aimed at sharing best practice and practical guidance with others, include the Green Finance Toolkit and the Customer Experience Toolkit, are both available on the ADEPT website. The current cohort is working on a levelling up toolkit that will be published later in 2022.
We’ve seen some real success stories. 42 place leaders have attended the programme over the three years and 40 per cent of these have been promoted or have new roles. In addition, 36 thought leaders, from a range of different backgrounds, have attended the sessions to deliver key speeches, all designed to stimulate thinking and innovation.
At the beginning of each programme the new cohort selects a theme, and this year levelling up was the focus. Each session was delivered through a lens of disruptive thinking, to provide different tools, techniques and thought processes to aid a fresh approach.
Deborah Fox, Surrey Council - Data-Driven Decision Making
Deborah spoke about data-driven decisions, explaining why using data and insight is so fundamental to the levelling up challenge.
Using data to define and baseline levelling up challenges must underpin your strategy and outcomes. In addition, interventions, which deliver against desired outcomes, can also inform your monitoring and evaluation framework.
My local authority, Surrey County Council, welcomed the levelling up white paper, as it recognised the importance of local government. Local authorities have a leading role to play in tackling some of the big issues today in society at the moment, including the cost and quality of social care.
Using data to target interventions
The use of data is great in giving us the ability to focus on the impact of our activities and measuring the outcomes of what we achieve. That's fundamentally different than just simply focusing on how long we take to do something or how much of it we do, and how much it costs, which we often get fixated on.
Data can really help to suggest where to target our interventions and inform what we could show or do differently, and it can interrogate performance to see if current policy is working.
This is a really critical point because we shouldn't just be measuring things ad infinitum. Metrics can help you to review strategies, change them, and then implement and measure something that is more successful.
The use of a policy impact assessment framework is really important and that helps us to organise the data and evidence local progress towards levelling up, helping to demonstrate the scale of focus on economic and social value that flows from the investment.
My key piece of advice is that metrics are not ‘one size fits all’ - they need to be bespoke. The quality is driven by very different reasons according to the locality, and we need to avoid unhealthy comparisons between local authorities. They certainly shouldn't drive your vision or temper ambition and innovation.
Using data to show strong leadership
Overall, my feeling is that what is needed most is to step forward, show strong leadership and collaborate. We need to establish a framework in which we can collect data and intelligence, using that to address trends and narrow gaps.
To help to develop this, ADEPT and EY collaborated to create a sample assessment framework, comprising a dashboard built on 16 measures. Three local authorities then trialled this framework.
This was a real lightbulb moment for me. The mapping provided a snapshot across each of the four levelling up pillars categorised by structural classification, and a set of graphs showed the metrics against the UK average. It revealed key trends and a view of the local authority’s performance. It allowed us to look at areas with depleted metrics, considering how to address these.
Data is central to meeting UK's levelling up challenge
Data is central to accelerating the UK’s levelling up challenge, but we need to measure what's really going on to indicate whether we are making a difference. It is important to note that Surrey’s strong and productive innovative economy contributes to the national economy, so it's really important to invest in the top, as well as the bottom.
Use metrics wisely, making sure to change your strategies and policies if the dial isn't changing on your local problems. Getting to the real nub of people’s problems will help you to target interventions where they are most needed, in a really cost-effective way.
You can read more about the Data Driven Decision making session on the EiPL blog.
James Crosbie, Reading Borough Council - Establishing Collaborative Partnerships
James spoke about the second EiPL session, which focused on establishing collaborative partnerships.
Defining what makes a great partnership is very difficult. Applying the lens of disruptive thinking, and applying some of the learning from the previous sessions helped us to drill down into this further.
One of the benefits of a programme like EiPL is the opportunity to learn and contextualise learning in your own organisation. We were able to think about partnerships that we’ve worked in, that haven't perhaps succeeded, considering the factors about why we failed and share this information to help others’ learning. Having a truly shared understanding of the problem was one of our key learning points.
Key factors to building a strong, collaborative partnership
We found the following factors contributed to a strong, collaborative partnership:
- Have a common objective - going into a partnership without shared understanding and a shared vision is only going to fail. Effectively, partners will be going in different directions, not creating something which we can truly deliver together.
- Perspective - don't assume that your local authority’s perspective is the same as the partner's perspective. There is a common assumption that a local authority has their finger on the pulse and that we're going to come up with the right set of solutions. The whole point of a collaborative partnership is to get under the skin of what's going on in the community to try and understand that problem, using co-design and co-collaboration.
- Advocacy and leadership - the other element of our learning was that the partnership needs to be led by someone who is an advocate for all the partners. There will perhaps be a rush to appoint somebody as the chair of the group - actually, is that the most important thing when you're creating that partnership?
- Common narrative – there are always blocks that prevent partnerships from working, including self interest, preconceptions, lack of understanding and lack of creative thinking about solutions. Solutions such as building a common narrative to broker the right relationships can help to solve these issues.
- Diversification of partnership – working with the same group of voluntary or private sector partners, means that we often end up getting the same singular message coming back from these groups. Having a broader diversification of partnership, and membership of partnerships, will allow us to get the true message from communities.
- Understanding our communities - we need to understand our community talents, skills and resources, particularly to bolster resources and the impacts of a lack of diversity of representation.
Pigs, chickens or diners’ theory
Taking people on the journey and having a long term plan, along with a set of achievable milestones along the way can really help. The ‘pigs, chickens or diners’ theory, which classifies typically three character types in a partnership context is one way to assess the different types of partners. The pigs are those who are completely committed to the project and prepared to die for the cause; the chickens are those in organisations who are committed, but more pragmatic about success; and finally, the diners are those who support the project if it serves their own interest.
When designing your sustainable partnership, it is important to start to think about classifications and ensure the right balance in the group. Think about the pigs! These are the partners who are totally committed to the project and are often leaders.
Engagement with local private sector businesses is also a really important consideration. We know that UK and multinationals are looking post Brexit for opportunities within the UK to support their corporate social and environmental responsibility agendas, and we're actually proactively looking around for those partnerships.
So how can you leverage their resources, their intellect and energy to create partnerships that deliver on local challenges?
Levelling up needs to transcend government terminology to create pride in place - shared understanding by the public and private sector would help generate that. The voluntary sector is an invaluable partner to help measure the pride and impact on people.
You can read more about the Partnerships session on the EiPL blog
Carolyn Reid – Norfolk County Council, Norfolk investment framework approach
Building on the need for an evidence based approach and the desire to work collaboratively, Carolyn talked about the Norfolk investment framework approach.
The Norfolk investment framework was set up with the vision to drive growth in the Norfolk economy for the wellbeing of all residents. The underpinning evidence base identifies the key challenges that need to be addressed in order to unlock barriers to growth and achieve that vision.
In establishing a framework to deliver long term impact, Norfolk County Council reflected on the barriers in the system that have compounded some of the challenges to growth. These have included short term funding, competitive bidding rounds, multiple funding streams competing for the same clients, and a general lack of joined up and strategic thinking in the way that funding has been delivered. This, coupled with the restrictions that come with the funding around specific targets and timeframes for delivery, are often unrealistic and don't help us to address our longer term challenges. Some of these sticky issues are more expensive to deal with, and actually take an awful lot of time and effort to achieve the desired results. Essentially, it was felt that that a new approach was needed.
A framework approach
Building on years of experience of managing economic programmes at Norfolk County Council, we decided to develop a framework approach that would take a longer term view. This would help us to shape future funding streams, rather than being reactive to funding streams as they come online.
Experience of managing the £315M cross border Interreg France (Channel) England Programme supported our ambition to think big. Norfolk County Council have some great examples of developing large scale strategic targeted interventions, including a project called TIGER, a collaborative project led by UK Energy Catapult. This demonstrated an ability to drive down the cost of tidal energy, leveraging further funds, helping to inform, shape and influence the UK’s development of the tidal energy sector. We wanted to take that scale of ambition and transfer that into a framework for any future investment for growth in Norfolk.
We were able to apply disruptive thinking into the framework. We didn’t want the focus to be on money – instead, we started by identifying the change that we need to deliver with a view to shaping and identifying how we will work collaboratively to draw down the funds, in order to deliver change.
Testing the toolbox
All of this happened in parallel to the levelling up agenda launch and at the start of the EiPL programme, so it was a perfect time to test some of the toolbox. Once the evidence base was tested, we were able to distil it down and apply four ‘grand challenges’ for Norfolk using the evidence-base and applying some disruptive thinking. The ‘grand challenges’ are the four key things that we need to do to achieve the vision and include a number of thematic objectives under each grand challenge that will help us to deliver the change. All interventions will be targeted towards making a difference in those focused areas.
Throughout the process we have engaged with a wide range of stakeholders across public, private and voluntary sectors and used feedback to inform the process. The team have been encouraged to be open to challenge and to reflect that in the way that we are working.
Benefits of working with the EiPL cohort
A wider benefit that came out of sharing the development of the framework with Excellence in Place Leadership Programme has been the objective support and challenge from the cohort from other local authorities facing similar challenges. They have been able to provide valuable feedback, informing our approach using their knowledge of best practice.
There was widespread agreement within the cohort that short term, restrictive competitive funding pots, that are not adapted to delivering longer term outcomes, has a negative impact on our communities. This is a message that we can all buy into. We should all be influencing and lobbying government to provide longer term funding that encourages local areas to collaborate rather than compete against each other for funding, ensuring that any interventions work for the long term benefit of the businesses and communities we serve.
Find out more about the Norfolk Investment Framework..
Neil Gibson, EiPL Facilitator
Finally, Neil Gibson concluded the session, saying it was critical for strong leadership to be at the helm of levelling up. We need to apply disruptive thinking and equally need great data and insights – we can’t do it without it.
Neil also announced that Amey has decided to support an ongoing masterclass approach based on thought leadership – watch this space for further information!
Further information
- The ADEPT Excellence in Place Leadership programme is sponsored by Amey, who pioneered this approach within the highways sector in 2018. ADEPT and Amey continue to collaborate and are currently delivering the third programme during 2022.
- Further information on EiPL can be found on the EiPL programme pages.