Pity the poor chief executive. In post for ever-decreasing amounts of time, over-burdened by inspection systems which, somehow, never seem quite right, and facing new and diverse challenges, with increased development and migration pressures in many authorities.
The floods and hot summers of the last five years are becoming regular events. And a more polarised society makes local consensus harder.
We have a funding formula that never delivers the beef, with populations who need and expect services and ‘care’.
Add to this mix local politicians of incredibly-varying capacity and experience, and on top of all of this complexity, there’s more information than ever to process and absorb. Who’d do it? SOLACE’s conference in Cardiff this week looks at these challenges.
My own take on it is that two issues stand out. First, all these conflicting pressures highlight the need to become ever-better at filtering information, and looking for local trends which can emerge to bite you, and identifying inefficiencies.
Data is now in abundance, and we can commune electronically any time or place, but we are only just beginning to make better use of it. I think we will.
My local council, Southwark, now scans community electronic forums to pick up on environmental problems, and acts immediately. In my own world, Ipsos MORI’s analysis of neighbourhood data is now able to do things we would have found impossible just five years ago.
So, for example, looking at your neighbourhoods, why not use the data you have on real incomes, house prices, national insurance numbers and census information, as well as your local surveys, and map out what’s happening.
Ipsos MORI’s latest analysis for London Councils shows how the greater the income diversity in a neighbourhood, the higher the level of satisfaction with quality of life – but the greater the range of ethnicities in the same areas, the lower.
What does this type of information mean for local development plans? Advances in technology give us ever-greater abilities to see relationships and patterns that were not apparent before, and get on top of trends in our own organisations .
Second, all of this complexity means that people who can knit together these numerous issues and package them into a compelling narrative for the council they serve will be in demand.
The skill of effective story-telling has been in demand for millennia, but remains key. In Ipsos MORI’s work for the IDeA last year, we found a clear link between chief executives’ behaviours and CPA scores.
I only have to run an organisation of 250 people, but I learned much more from talking to 20 local government chief executives about their management style than I did from permanent secretaries.
What was remarkable among the best was how very different people had all arrived at an appreciation of the need for building a shared narrative, setting the tone and trusting others. Not administration, detailed plans and hierarchies of control and command.
Among the less successful group I spoke to, the one who said, ‘At the end of the day, it’s just a job’, and the one who made their head of policy wait downstairs to see them, even though their office was next door to theirs – have both ‘left’ their authorities 12 months later.
The increasing demands on chief executives further emphasise the need for time spent building a shared narrative and set of values, even when hard numbers are screaming out for attention. As IBM chairman, Lou Gerstner, puts it: ‘If I could have chosen not to tackle the culture head-on, I wouldn’t have.
‘My bias coming in was toward strategy, analysis and measurement. Yet, I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game — it is the game.’
It’s rather like NASA in the 1960s. The apocryphal story is that when President J F Kennedy visited the toilet, he met a cleaner. ‘What do you do at NASA,’ he asked? ‘Sir, I am working to put a man on the Moon!’ came the answer.
The best people meeting at SOLACE this week build the same sense of purpose. n
Ben Page is managing director of Ipsos MORI
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