I mentioned in my weeknote of 5 January that I’d had a really great reconnection conversation with Carl Haggerty of Devon County Council this week.

We’ve known each other through our work for around 20 years, and I’ve always found chatting with Carl insightful and invigorating. We founded LocalGov Digital together around 2012, and our conversation this week did include us reflecting on the circumstances of its creation and original purpose as well as what we understand of the network now (as we both observe from outside mostly).

As an external processor – I form my best understanding through verbalising (or writing) my thoughts – the space held in this conversation led to a couple of hypothesis beginning around networks. I’m going to use this post to delve in to first of those – how moving from informal to formal can change the type of collaboration happening.

Carl has also committed to blog his reflections on our conversation so will be great to see where his thoughts went and I’ll update here with a link to that post in the future.

Reflecting on collaboration, culture, and networks

Before diving in to the two areas I hypothesised on, on the fly, during my conversation with Carl a caveat.

These are personal reflections and musings, and are based on rejoining the local government sector after a few years doing side quests elsewhere. They are emerging thoughts based on current observations, and are not meant to in anyway diminish the effort and works of those more actively involved in LocalGov Digital, the sector, or the work.

As mentioned above I tend to gain understanding of my thinking by verbalising or writing so what you read here is not only emerging thoughts but me ‘thinking out loud’. My understanding and opinions may well change as we go and I am very aware that I am working at the limits of my existing knowledge, outside of my core area of expertise. If there’s similar thinking in these areas which already exists please get in touch and let me know!

Right, onward…

Does formalisation stop innovation?

This was identifiably one of those moments in a conversation where I am forming thoughts on the fly as I speak the words. I can’t recall exactly how we got to that moment in this conversation but I believe we were piecing together between us what we knew of the current purpose and activity of the network we had co-founded more than a decade ago, LocalGov Digital.

While this hypothesis used LocalGov Digital as an example (and see the caveat in the previous section) the reflection took in broader personal experience and observation of the sector and type of work Carl and I have found ourselves drawn to or pushed toward at various points.

In our conversation I proposed 3 groupings in a collaborative network, suggesting they follow on from each other in a linear path without the whole of the activity in the preceeding step being halted by moving forward. There are benefits and limitations at each stage.

I’ve sketched out this collaborative network model on Miro and explore each step in a little more detail here too.

A diagram showing a proposed collaborative network model with 3 stages. It gives bullet pointed lists or features, benefits and limitations for the instigate, organise and formalise stages. The information in this diagram is expanded upon in the post.

Agitators or instigators

We – loosely – talked about ‘agitators’ or ‘Instigators’ as a grouping. We have both identified as members of this group to greater or lesser extents at different times. It’s fluid, and can form online or offline. We both shared recollections of how it felt and the practical impact of being ‘agitators’ finding a tribe through Twitter back in the 2008-2012 era.

At the time, and I think hindsight holds up this view, the informal self-organised grouping of individuals from across the sector felt as if it were acting from the edges of our organisations in, offering a different set of skills and thinking to established tech-first approaches, and increasing our influence through collective power. We were learning from each other, implementing what we’d learnt, and then sharing back.

It was forgiveness over permission, it was anti-corporate and non-hierarchical, and led to lots of innovative approaches and some of the groundwork for what is now established best practice for user-centred design. There was a tangible energy as well as cameraderie. It felt hopeful and as if we were part of making a real difference.

It was also messy, risky for us as individuals within our own organisations, and frustrating at times. Self-organising needs individuals who can take responsibility for different aspects of managing a group while also having the energy to do the work which connected the group in the first place. And there was a risk of exclusion too – a vocal and closely knit tribe doesn’t always look inviting even when they’re saying all are welcome.

It relied on us sustaining our own momentum and that (with the results of our work) being enough to break through the established ways of working.

Enter the next grouping…

Organise

I think both Carl and I have always recognised that ‘agitator’ movement would have been highly likely to fizzle out or remain small-scale revolutionary on the outskirts if we hadn’t been organised. We’d have been pointed at by organisations as doing ‘cool’ stuff but ultimately kept from making real impactful change because the thinking and doing the collective did was too threatening to established contracts, suppliers, and structures.

When Sarah Jennings, then of the Local Government Association, led on organising us toward what became LocalGov Digital it was with a view of compromising far enough to become a recognisable entity in the existing structure to enable more of our thinking and work to take hold. LocalGov Digital, in some sense, was an attempt to bypass our organisation’s and sector’s immune system to allow new ways to be truly transformative and impactful.

And that worked – it really did. The network grew, and the steering group under Phil Rumens fostered collaboration on some really useful products for local government. The Digital Standard (learning from GDS who had been able to forge ahead at a scale we had potential for but didn’t reach as a group), work by Simon Gray on usability dashboards and more (and their work and thinking continues to challenge the status quo in the best ways – do check out their BigTown project), the ‘fix the plumbing’ type work. Really great stuff which remains useful.

The danger with trying to be recognisable enough to not be a risk is that you can get assimilated and become what you were trying to change or you become a group which is perceived as exclusionary and therefore miss out on attracting or retaining individuals (a general comment, not specific to LocalGov Digital).

Formalise

This grouping most closely resembles a traditional structure, with hierarchy, close governance, and is more likely to be about surety than experimentation.

While the influence at this stage is likely to be larger, and perhaps with funding available, with that comes a keener sense of ownership ‘we made this’, a natural slow down due to having processes to follow, and a greater emphasis on return on investment (whether that be money, time, effort or trust).

Risks are perceived more highly at this stage and there may be less appetite to take them. There is a greater chance of ‘group think’ too as individuals either assimilate and are held together by the process as much as a common interest or aim, or drift away through self-exclusion (at best) or disenfranchisement (at worst).

In short, there is far more politics (with a small p) once things become formalised and there is as much risk of the work being pulled back from being innovative toward something more familiar or buried so as not to pose a threat to the status quo as there is of ambitious groundbreaking work being amplified by greater influence and proper funding.

There is also a risk – whether realised or not – that once funding stops or the wider organisation with the ownership changes shape then the momentum is lost. The energy dissipates and, perhaps, it is then reliant on another organic bubble of agitators starting things up or taking things back.

So what?

There is no real so what for this observation right now. Perhaps this is wildly off the mark, or maybe it reflects more mature thinking done by those with more experience of collaborative models, organisational change or other disciplines relevant here.

My emergent thought is that innovation is most likely to flourish at ‘agitate’ but would need to ‘organise’ well for a chance to gain large scale traction and sustainability. For me there seems to be far more risks than benefits in the traditional structures offered by ‘formalising’ in the way which seems most common in this sector.

Formalisation can mean scaling occurs – there’s enough industry disrupting companies to show us that (AirBnB, Uber etc) – but I’m not sure local government keeps enough of the courage, innovation, hunger and recklessness of the agitators to get there.

For me it’s been interesting to explore my own understanding and has given me some pathways to go off and learn more about. If you have thoughts on this I’d love to connect and chat about them.

Shall we connect?

I’m looking for conversations and opening my calendar for opportunities to connect across 2024.

I’ve added a few slots to my Calendly so if you’d like to have a short chat then please take a look. If you’re a vendor please check out the latest news on my employer before grabbing a slot – these conversations are not an opportunity to try and sell to me. And if you do work at the same organisation as I do reach out on Teams so we can say hello!

If none of the dates or times work for you then drop me a note via one of the ways on my get in touch page and let’s see what we can arrange.