Proposition 4 — People are empowered when the system is responsive

When you open your structures, whether it’s a service or a government, to receive feedback — you become better able to listen and pick up on signals that a system is failing or that the needs of the people are changing. You are increasing the richness of the information you are receiving, and it is becoming more deeply democratic.

This means that we need to think harder about how our structures can become more responsive. What new forms of decision-making or democratic practices allow for more regular involvement. In a workplace this perhaps means looking at more decentralised structures or flatter hierarchies which allow for more regular participation in decision making. In government this means building in ways within a service where people can provide feedback or make changes as things are implemented. In political structures this means more regular participation and potentially experimenting with new forms of democratic practice.

How might this work in a service? Let’s go back to our example of the Universal Credit Survivors Group. By assembling, they are increasing transparency of the system and thus increasing their own power to navigate. Imagine if the government department responsible for the system, not only consulted with them in its design to begin with (as suggested above) but also had an arrangement with the group where the admins could send explicit feedback on their top issues with the system and suggest changes? Dynamic feedback on a system enabled through technology where the state develops new ways to interface with people actually using its services directly. This requires us to imagine a very different kind of state we have been used to, as Hilary Wainwright argues “One damaging result of the narrow understandings of knowledge typical of the original architects of the welfare state was that public services were delivered paternalistically, without the participation of those involved in either their delivery or their use.”

More Responsive workplace structures

In the workplace a more responsive company structure would put democracy at its heart. Workers would have more agency over decisions about their work and collective control over the way the company was run. This can often result in more decentralised, smaller collective management structures supported by a wider shared infrastructure. An example of how this is working is in the social care sector. The Buurtzorg model of community nursing, developed in the Netherlands, is instructive. The organisation is a network of self-organised local teams of nurses who work together to establish their own models of caring in the community. They set up their own offices, decide on décor and get it up and running. The setting up of the office helps build individual autonomy and team bonds –it also means that they are doing more varied work. Management in each team is shared and so it’s consensual. Burtzoorg’s structure is flat — they employ coaches to manage the teams, but they are more like mentors and are responsible for 50–60 teams so don’t over manage. The motto is “How do you manage professionals? You don’t”. Buurtzorg provides shared learning resources and chat rooms across teams. These communities provide peer support and knowledge sharing which helps the distributed teams to identify any common problems and share solutions. There are no measures of formal targets imposed from the centre which means more time can be spent with patients. This model has been shown to get much better outcomes for patients, lower sick leave, lower turnover and higher job satisfaction.

These more decentralised structures are how many democratic and decentralised campaign groups currently operate. For example, Extinction Rebellion, an emerging protest movement, work through a holacracy model. Self-organising circles or teams emerge and then meetings are called where representatives from each team are invited. This ensures different parts of the organisation can remain in touch with each other and necessary information can be shared ensuring the whole organisation remains connected.

Democractic Innovation

How might we apply this to our political systems? Currently the main way our system or power stays in touch with people below it is through elections, once every four or five year people are able to express a view by checking a single box from a number of pre presented options which feel increasingly hollowed out shallow propositions for promises that will undoubtedly never be kept? Surely we can do better? How can we build more responsive systems? Does this mean different forms of democracy? That are deeper than just one election every few years? Innovations in democracy are happening across the world where governments both local and national are beginning to experiment with new forms of democratic engagement, many utilising new technologies.

One of the most successful has been the vTaiwan project. This was established by a civil society movement called g0v, at the invitation of the Taiwanese Minister for Digital Affairs. It followed g0v’s major role in the 2014 Sunflower Movement protests; started over a controversial trade agreement with China. The process was designed as a neutral platform called POLIS to engage experts and relevant members of the public in large-scale deliberation on specific topics. vTaiwan’s achievements to date include: a crowdsourced bill successfully passed through parliament on Closely Held Company Law; the resolution of a disagreement between civil society activists on the topic of internet alcohol sales; and the ratification of several items on ridesharing (Uber) regulations.

Our current form of representative democracy must be supplemented with other forms of democracy such as deliberative and participatory democracy. As we move to an increasingly complex age we need new forms of decisions making. The Brexit crisis illustrates this perfectly. The constitutional deadlock which parliament found itself in was created by a conflict between representative and direct democracy being played out through our MPs and their individual decisions. Some prioritised the duties of a representative over that of the direct wishes of the people, others went with the direct democratic mandate and others called for more deliberative forms like Citizens Assemblies to be used to break the deadlock. This crisis illustrates a deep need for broader thinking around what kinds of democracy our system currently employs and whether they are still ultimately fit for purpose? It will require experimentation and curiosity as we work out which decisions are best made at which level and how we resolve conflicts between different forms.

This is kind of experimentation happening perhaps more widely on a local governmental level. For example the Fearless Cities network of over 50 cities worldwide which includes places like Madrid and Barcelona are experimenting how to incorporate participatory and deliberative democracy into their decision-making processes.

Responsiveness in public services: The state as facilitator

Yet responsiveness doesn’t just operate on the democratic level it is also about the responsiveness of services on an individual human to human level.

It can be as much about empowering individuals and being responsive to their actual needs rather than a faceless service that demands things are done in a prescribed way which often can lead to a problem becoming worse not better. Rather than empowering our most vulnerable through a system that is responsive and flexible to their needs, too often our services can become at their best faceless, remote, distant and at their worst neglectful, cruel and dehumanising.

There is an increasing appetite for an alternative approach which is being discovered from the ground up. Many councils are currently pioneering these kinds of approaches on the group through small but vital experiments. For example, an interesting anonymous blogger talks about a pioneering approach his team takes to dealing with people who are “tangled and trapped”. Using council tax debt as an indicator of deeper problems, they take a bespoke approach to each case, focusing on working flexibly and collaboratively with different services to make the changes that are likely to actually change the circumstances of the individual. He tells the story of Juliet and of Mary. Mary fell through the gaps of a system that demands self referral, her neighbours having tried to tell someone about her increasingly deterioration into poverty and harm.

“The system as it stands was incapable of finding and helping Mary but the people in it are capable of all of the things we need to do to help her. No-one got stuck wondering what to do. The social worker, police officer, deep clean specialists, neighbour etc were all brilliant, especially when they just focussed upon Mary. For all of its waste, we do not have a significant skills problem in the wellbeing ecosystem. Nor do we have a huge compassion problem, at least not at the front line…We can demonstrate that the people in the system are already capable of not only saving Mary’s life but turning it into a one where she has a chance to thrive. It is remarkable and remarkably simple, at least in this case.”

Similarly, Juliet was facing a complicated set of circumstances where different “services” were actually creating more problems and where a simple change in her housing situation made all the difference and allowed her the space to start to untangle her own situation. As the blogger explains it must be the goal of services “to see these threads by understanding rather than assessing people. They don’t ask “How much of what I do can I do to you?” but instead ask, “What does a good life for you look like?”. This helps to identify and pick away at the threads, in whatever order seems right for them. Once one thread is ‘loose’ it becomes easier to pick at others and after a little while, the citizen joins in, loosening the threads and breaking free.”

This kind of change requires a shift in how people working in public services see their roles. We need to have less of a focus on short term metrics and more of a focus on longer term and broader outcomes. This requires a focus on systems change rather than simply working on siloed projects and requires a similarly collaborative culture. This changes how people working in public services see their role. Instead of being simply service providers they become people who interface with different systems, working to create communities and spaces where people thrive. As Anna Randell from Collaborate explains this taps into many public servant’s deeper motivations:

“Places are stretching the boundaries of their authority and playing creatively in the vacuum generated by a government that remains myopically focused on a single issue. They are taking their intrinsic motivation to do better by local people as their starting point, unpicking old assumptions, behaviours and ways of working and creating the future state right here, right now.”

We must continue to encourage these kinds of experiments and curate and start to understand their results to think about how they could be applied to the wider state’s architecture. The welfare state was built by Labour for people. It was our new architecture for economic redistribution. In a world where people want more power, we must again rebuild it to suit our communities’ changing needs. We need to move from seeing the state as merely a provider of services to the state as a facilitator. It should play a coordinating, adjudicating and responsive role. As Hillary Cottam argues in her book Radical Help:

“Our once brilliant welfare state is out of kilter. A future Labour government cannot invest any further in services designed in and for an earlier time… we face new problems: Stan’s loneliness, the epidemic of chronic illnesses that absorb 70% of hospital expenditure but cannot be cured; migration; a fragile planet. These are not problems that can be solved by industrial systems of command and control. These problems are not so much new as different in nature. They demand a fresh approach rooted in open collaboration, which requires new systems designed for participation.”

This cultural thinking has a necessary technological corollary. To achieve this kind of revolution in governance, we will need systems and software that allow for this level of collaboration and responsiveness. Much of this thinking is cohering around the idea of “Government as a Platform”. Indeed as Richard Pope Senior Fellow, Government Platform Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation argues:

“In computer science, there’s an adage called “Conway’s law.” It is named after computer programmer Melvin Conway, and it says that: organizations which design systems . . . are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. Government is this idea writ large — with services designed around the organizational structure of government rather than the needs of people. This means a family looking to move house, someone recovering from an illness or someone looking to start a company, will have to deal separately with many government agencies. Some people fall through the gaps, and you have to ask: what that does to those people’s trust in the state? It also leads to a monopoly of provision — a one-to-one mapping between department and services, which often means it’s impossible for other parts of government, or companies and charities, to build complementary services.”

What could this look like?

• Investment in a government network to grow new forms of public service innovation at the local level — this network is collectively funded and members divide the funding equally based on their achievement of reaching out (?)
• A democratic review and for the government to experiment with different forms of democracy — i.e. using a version of Polis for decisions on climate.
• Government to experiment with a democratic engagement exercise convening people around a big picture future generations act or bill.
• Incentives introduced for workplaces introducing flatter hierarchies
• Move towards outcome focused targets in public services, data can still be collected for short term results but performance is measured by outcomes. Ie destination measures for schools.
• Incentives for collaboration — changes to government commissioning models to ensure that is at the heart of bids for funding.
• Giving public sector workers more autonomy in their work. This to be incorporated into training etc.
• Exploring and implementing ideas in “Government as a platform”

Proposition 5 — People are empowered when they are equally able to participate.