From compliance to service

To Cardiff to day to spend a day talking about complexity in local government, with an emphasis on partnership. The Bay area of Cardiff provides a contrasting architecture with yesterday! The picture here if the Millennium Centre with its wonderful combination of slate and bronze. A very different picture from the turn of the last century when my family lived in Bute Town and the police would only enter the area in pairs. Now its one of the best waterfront environments of any city in the world, I managed to find time to get to Craft in the Bay which has a great collection of contemporary Welsh art. I found a retirement present for one of our first ever network members – I’ll post the picture after I have presented it next week.

I used more or less the same slides as I did yesterday so if you want the slides go to that blog and follow the link. I had a bit more time so included a SNS exercise, and expandied on some aspects relating to collaboration. One of the pleasing aspects of the day was the passion in the audience (some I more than reciprocated) about the need for a change from think of government as a compliance orientated process, to an impact based service (in the many old and new sense of that word. Teachers rewarded for inspiring pupils not for filling out learning plans, focusing on patient health rather than triage systems based on waiting time being but two examples. Also heartening to see my own country starting to lead in the application of complexity theory to government, something for which the University of Glamorgan should take much credit. We also got news during the day that the Welsh Audit Office had agreed to run a series of pilots using SenseMaker™ which was very encouraging.