Local Government are the Systems Thinkers - The time to act is now

Tim Hobbs | CEO | @tim_hobbs_lab

‘Systems Thinking’ is decidedly in vogue - but many working in local government have been thinking in systems for decades (maybe they just didn’t know it). Now is the time to intentionally embrace this way of thinking: to make the most of the current scarce resources, but given all the political promises, to prepare for when the economic tide turns.

So what is systems thinking? It is an approach that considers the whole, not just the parts, and how those parts interact. In simple systems, these interactions can be predictable. But in local government there is a lot going on, interacting in different ways. This can mean the behaviours and outcomes of a system are not always predictable. Consider a flock of starlings, with lots of individual parts moving together to produce unpredictable swirling patterns in an autumn sky. The behaviours and outcomes of local government are not dissimilar. ‘Systems Thinking’ can help us consider the unpredictable, and often unintended consequences, of our actions – before we take them.

Our years of working with local government children’s services departments have made us familiar with some recurring themes, or what in the systems thinking lexicon are referred to as common system ‘archetypes’[1].

Falling into “the archetype trap”

One such archetype is downward spirals. I imagine readers may have seen that putting resource into one part of a system, then having to compensate in others, means more resource is subsequently required where you started. An example is when you increase placement spend, which forces you to reduce resources for prevention. This then leads to the greater escalation of needs and more children entering care, leading to higher placement spend. This ‘shifting the burden’ behaviour often leads to resources going into the symptoms of the problem, diverting attention away from the causes, which further exacerbates the symptom.

Another classic example of this is in the recruitment of agency staff to plug short-term gaps. This often leads to multiple social workers for families, which means needs are addressed at a slower rate, and causes a lack of cohesion and team working among social workers. This influences their stress and the quality of their interventions. These effects, in turn, lead to more children in the system and fewer social workers, increasing caseloads – the very issue agency workers were brought in to address. Situations like these are called ‘fixes that fail’.

This certainly can be seen in the UK. In England, government spending on wider children’s services has been slashed by 56% from 2009-2010 to 2017-18, with Children’s Centres taking a significant hit from council spending dropping by 62% over this period[2]. At the same time as these cuts to wider youth services are taking place, children’s social care spending has increased, with extra cash injections rising by 410mn to cope with the “immediate pressures[3] in both adult and children’s care – such as the nine per cent of referrals to children’s social care rising 2009/10[4] - and that’s not even mentioning those with “high needs” who are not receiving appropriate support[5]. This then has a knock-on effect with a very real cost. In fact, the estimated cost of intervening too late, according to the EIF, is nearly £17 billion per year, or £287 per person. Councils’ share of the bill is £6.4 billion, with the NHS picking up £3.4 billion and the Department for Work and Pensions £2.7 billion[6].

The ‘fixes that fail’ archetype often exaggerates and leads to other system archetypes or behaviours. For example, many local authorities often have to compete for a small pool of social workers or agency workers. They try to attract social workers through higher pay, which is often counteracted by an increase from surrounding local authorities leading to a rising rate of pay and competition similar to the arms race. This is an ‘escalation’ archetype.

What can we do?

Local government is the epitome of a complex, adaptive system. There are all sorts of dynamics at play that create these – and many other - system behaviours or archetypes.

Identifying and acknowledging these complex dynamics brings with it the risk that we reach the nihilistic conclusion that everything is so messy and interdependent that we should not even bother trying to intervene or exert any influence. We think this is an unintended consequence of systems thinking: that it can endanger paralysis, or lead to lazy conclusions that we should just trust the system to reach some sort of positive natural equilibrium.

For those willing to deeply consider their roles within these complex environments, systems thinking can create connections, relationships and appreciations between different parts of the system, helping better understand knotty problems, develop strategies and consider intended and unintended consequences. It can lead to action, not inhibit it.

Where we fit in…

At the Dartington Service Design Lab, we’ve been working with local authority children’s services to create 'learning labs'. These bring stakeholders together from across local systems – parents, practitioners, managers and senior leadership – to explore the dynamics at play in their systems, to co-design hypothetical or data-driven simulation models and to test and learn in an iterative, systemically informed way. It certainly does not provide ‘the answer’– but it does bring new rigour to identifying possible actions, and thinking through their consequences. This has been true for so many of the councils we’ve worked with, particularly in our Children in Care work with Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council, Derbyshire County Council, North Tyneside Council, and Blackpool council.

We’ve found this way of working critically important in the context of scarce and stripped-back public systems. We also think that as the glimmer of light appears on the horizon, and more resource slowly starts re-entering our public systems, that we need to be just as careful and judicious in how we make our decisions and allocate resources. While certainly welcomed, an influx of resource to a system requires careful thought and planning, to avoid falling into avoidable traps. Systems thinking can help us more carefully consider how to rebuild or redesign, our public systems for the good of those that they serve.

[This blog was first published on themj.co.uk website December 18th, 2019]

[1] For a further introduction and examples, read Daniel Kim: https://thesystemsthinker.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Systems-Archetypes-I-TRSA01_pk.pdf

[2] https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/performance-tracker-2019/children-social-care

[3] Hammond P, ‘Budget 2018: Philip Hammond’s speech’, speech at the House of Commons, 29 October 2018.

[4] Association of Directors of Children’s Services, Research Report: Safeguarding pressures phase 6, Association of Directors of Children’s Services, 2018, p. 34

[5] Hobbs T, Morpeth L, Ellis D and Tobin K, Matching Children’s Needs and Services: A case of three circles, Dartington Service Design Lab, 2019.

[6] https://www.eif.org.uk/report/the-cost-of-late-intervention-eif-analysis-2016/