- guardian.co.uk, Wednesday June 13 2007 00.02 BST
- The Guardian, Wednesday June 13 2007
This matters because, from NHS improvement to climate change, the challenges facing public service leaders today are not about numbers, but relationships. They are about delivering improvements and, more challengingly, about involving citizens as active partners - engaging their energies in improving their own healthcare, or making their neighbourhood a more pleasant place.
New relationships will not be built solely through creating more markets and consumer choice, important though these might be. In a recent collection of Demos essays, we argue that the next phase of reform has to be based on collaboration - persuading different parts of government to focus more effectively, and finding new ways for the state and its citizens to work together.
Collaboration is easy in principle. We achieve more together, and the theory suggests that if we mix clear goals, trust and a dash of accountability, we can persuade people to work together. Public servants, by and large, see their job as making a positive social difference, so they will be happy to do whatever they can to help citizens. Some of the best local strategic partnerships and school federations show what we can achieve when different parts of the public sector come together. Experiments involving service users in redesigning NHS offerings have delivered compelling results.
Of course, collaboration is much more difficult to achieve in practice. From a central government perspective, collaboration can seem a limited tool because it cannot be forced on people. From a local perspective, collaboration can be frustrated by social workers not wanting to work with doctors, say, or by the different targets and demands placed on different partners.
As that suggests, we need to make it a lot easier for local public service leaders to work together. Ministers need to recognise that we need more effective local joint working to address complex problems like public health, and we also need to allow local collaboratives to experiment more in solving those problems. For example, we do not know how to solve child poverty, so we have to let local agencies find out what works.
Three policy changes would help. The first is that the government should promote collaboration between frontline public servants and the people they serve - the public should routinely be involved in designing the services they receive. Luton and Dunstable hospital, in Bedfordshire, for instance, has been experimenting with "experience-based design" techniques that use the stories of service users as a way to create better experiences for them.
Second, ministers should encourage the emergence of a new generation of "system leaders", those heroic individuals who deliver excellent services, but who are also capable of leading networks of other organisations to meet bigger goals. Public service training and development should prioritise these skills for future managers.
Finally, central government needs to get much better at collaboration. Gordon Brown's idea of cross-departmental public service agreement targets is an important first step, but we can go further. In Finland, for example, the government sets three to five major outcome goals for each parliament, and then convenes a network of ministers and civil servants to coordinate delivery.
Following Finland's lead might offer a way to cross the barriers between central and local, people and professionals, that stand in the way of progress.
· Simon Parker is head of public services at the Demos thinktank
· Email your comments to society@guardian.co.uk. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication"
