Public Services 2.0

Everything is "2.0" these days.  Maybe too many things.  We might well be reaching the point where "2.0" can claim the dubious honour of joining terms like "strategic" and "transformational", words whose often subversive meaning is being steadily eroded by a mixture of laziness and cynical co-option by those dedicated to everything except what those words really mean in order to defend the status quo.

But this recent piece from renowned UK thinker and provocative analyst of public innovation Charlie Leadbeater, based on a larger draft paper from his consultancy Participle, opens up a "Public Services 2.0" discussion that is worth dwelling on - http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/jul/01/public-services-reforms.

These are some brief extracts:

"The fiscal crisis has fully exposed the current model of public service reform - invest, modernise, set targets, review performance, eliminate failure - as having run out of steam. Public services may be more efficient, but all too often they are not joined up, leaving the people on the receiving end bewildered by what one elderly woman, who was being visited by four occupational therapists, described to me as a blizzard of services...

Giving people a right to more services might not be the right starting point, however, because it is not what people want. Radical public services innovation will only come from a markedly different starting point. The key will be to redesign services to enable more mutual self-help, so that people can create and sustain their own solutions...

The best way to do more with less is to enable people to do more for themselves and not need an expensive, professionalised public service...

For most of the last decade, we have seen public services as systems and standards, to be managed and rationalised. Instead, we should reimagine public services as feeding the relationships that sustain us in everyday life."

So what is the implication?  It is partly about the fact that, increasingly into the future, we don't need the public service, at least for some of the "public purpose' work we need to do, in its current form or operating according to its current model.  In that sense, it seems to me that the call is for those aspects of traditional approaches to the public sector to wither away.

But it is also partly about the fact that we still need a strong and effective public sector , but one that is capable of operating according to a very different DNA.  So the point is not to get lost in the debate about 'big' versus 'small' government and not to adopt a reflexively defensive position that seeks to protect the current public sector model at all costs.  The point is to accept that some of that model does, in fact, have to disappear, and the systems and processes (and perhaps some of the people) along with it.  But it remains true, as Charlie himself argues, that sometimes 'old fashioned' services are indeed necessary and should be designed and delivered with great skill and imagination...as they are in many instances already although clearly not in all cases.

Reimagining public services, bringing a design ethic to bear on the task that Charlie has sketched...these are demanding tasks.  But his point seems unarguable.  Pressing on with the same kind of 'service delivery' machinery and reflexes doesn't make sense.  We need to try something new and we need to approach that challenge with more energy, enthusiasm and readiness to change than is sometimes the case.