Child: Family: PlaceIgniting passion and involving citizens in co-production and service design

Total Place – Croydon

• Co-led by Croydon Council and NHS Croydon, involving other LSP partners including VCS

• Improving children’s health and wellbeing, through focus on prevention, from conception to age 7

• As a concept Total Place is very embedded across the council and its partners e.g. older peoples services, offender management, domestic violence, potentially libraries, healthy living…

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Croydon’s specific activities

• Generating insights – We researched what works and why

– We listened to Croydon parents: powerful ethnographic insights, wide range of partners, families, parents and children

– We mapped current spend and activity across organisations

– We listened to frontline practitioners

– We followed the customer journey: case studies (in our publication) www.croydon.gov.uk/totalplace

– Barbara Herts, Total Place Director: barbara.herts@croydon.gov.uk

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What we learnt: Igniting Passion

• Don’t assume a shared starting point exists

• Don’t underestimate the power of organisational identities and loyalties – service identity and not solutions

• A big organisation – keeping its feet on the ground

• Greater than sum of the parts, a powerful journey…..

• An interest in the citizen is common to us all

• Passion is released through emotional, empathetic connection with service users/non-users

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Deliberately choose new ways of working

• You don’t get this through working in the old ways• Creative spaces intentionally opened up to ignite

passion:

“The quality of what went into the design of the workshop clearly enhanced the quality of what was created during the workshop”

• Reflection

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ThePublicOffice

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Wy involve citizens in design of system?

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Listening directly to citizens

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• authentic

• family-centred

• arresting

• learning is about real lives, not about services

• remarkably honest and rich insights

• We are embedding these skills through training and practice: co-design and prototyping

• Importance of testing on the ground in the most imaginative way possible

• Learning and evaluation

What does it feel like when innovation takes centre stage?

• New sense of disruption• New challenge to old orthodoxies, silos and

the things which make us feel secure• New language, new narrative• New demands on leadership – throughout the

system• New energy and excitement, and new

potential…

It’s just the way we do things round here...

“Total Place has given us a different way to work together that we will use in the future beyond February 2010... We are now in a place where we can make significant differences to our services and to people’s lives. The opportunities are immense – we are learning to be different together” (Senior Leader, Croydon 2010)

Discussion Questions

• How important is ‘igniting passion’ within the context of needing to make cuts – and make them fast ?

• In what way would I, my team, my organisation have to work differently if we were to commit to citizen involvement in service design?

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Discussion

• Resist defining the end product/model too soon

• Programme still needs to be disciplined• Strong neighbourhood mgt structure

locally• How much does difference matter• More success and excellence but also

more failure• Explicit and transparency conversations

is key

Notes from the discussion

• Prototype will experience failure and success

• Safe and honest environment – regular reflective environment inc. CEO

• Develop learning capabilities as well as reflection – e.g. Resistance and fear of being exposed so you can use the learning usefully

• More organisational patience for deeper interventions – stick with it (not snorkelling) 16

Discussion Notes

• Identify someone to hold the ring of uncertainty – both internal leaders as well as external facilitators

• How do we know whether we have succeeded or failed – we tend to measure against old models

• Its about working differently nor about service design

• How do we determine whether our financial investment is working

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Discussion notes

• How does it work when you are imposing obligations rather than providing a service

• We might invest in peer to peer investment rather than a service

• Facilitate the development of social networks

• Decommission and recommission – its not just about services

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