Commissioning: Systems thinking
Ravi Chandiramani
Tuesday, November 28, 2017
Finding the right solution for complex children's services problems requires new tools and thinking, says Richard Selwyn.
The way children's social care functions is complex, with a range of factors influencing outcomes for children and young people.
Children's services leaders have recognised that sophisticated approaches are needed to understand and manage these complex challenges.
There are two main approaches to problem solving: reductionist and systems thinking. Reductionist thinking is where a problem is broken down into small parts, each is solved, and then put back together. This is the problem-solving approach that we are most familiar with; for example, solving maths or science questions in school. Reductionist thinking also underpins how we design management teams, government departments, or even how we help families with multiple professionals solving bits of an outcome, and putting the family back together. This would be fine if we didn't have complex problems to solve.
Systems thinking is about taking a wider look at all the services, resources and people that influence and interact with outcomes, and the relationships between them. A good example of applying systems thinking is the model used to support a family in the Troubled Families programme. A keyworker develops a relationship and works on an action plan with the family, then co-ordinates professionals to achieve the outcomes in the plan.
The Troubled Families programme is both cheaper and more effective, and many of the problems in commissioning, market development and service design are best tackled using systems thinking tools. The diagram above shows the range of options we have to make savings in government, from salami-slicing (just cut X per cent from every budget without worrying about the impact) to solutions that start to look at the whole system. It is not easy - emerging approaches to savings are more difficult to implement, risky and take longer.
There is an evolution in the public sector, from reductionist to systems thinking. But what is most interesting is where systems thinking takes children's services commissioning. Too often, when faced with a difficult funding problem, a salami-slicing approach is taken when what is needed is investment in early help. We still live in a predominantly reductionist world, so the opportunities to come up with solutions to complex problems can be limited. Here are a few tips to get there:
1. Start with the child's outcomes
This is where systems thinking comes from, so if you can put the outcome and child's views at the centre of service design then we're more likely to come up with a systems thinking solution.
2. Don't rely on contracts or blunt performance targets
Most targets do not describe outcomes, they describe transactions. There's the old saying that you don't fatten a pig by weighing it - make sure you and providers are focused on what is of real public value.
3. Build relationships with partners
Children's services do not deliver the vast majority of children's outcomes. We are predominantly an acute safety net and most outcomes are delivered by (in order) parents, the community, schools and other partners such as housing, health, police and the voluntary sector. We can't use reductionist approaches to make partners behave in ways that benefit children's services - so we need to commission through influence.
4. Do small things
Look at pilots from behavioural economics, examples include building compassion into services, empowering staff and providers to be more autonomous, and giving management information to frontline teams to create a learning culture.
5. Make early help cashable
This is the big one. We need to focus early family support on the things which give a financial return (within two years) and measure it. This sounds like a really un-systems thinking approach but shows how we need to deliver both the immediate and longer-term challenges in parallel.
Since 2010, children's services departments' budgets have reduced by 40 per cent in real terms. Local authorities have restructured, frozen posts, salami sliced and taken all the low-hanging fruit. The only way we will continue to improve children's outcomes is if we start using all the resource in the system and work with partners to design a new era of service models.
- Outcomes & Efficiency: Leadership Handbook, including the Seven Surprising Truths on systems thinking, is an introductory text for the national Commissioning Academy. It is available free on Amazon.
- Richard Selwyn is a member of the Association of Directors of Children's Services resources and sustainability policy committee @rjselwyn