The New Synthesis
New book: Modern welfare management is not an either-or: Either manage the shop and produce more for less. Or create innovation and resilience. It's both-and, is the essence of a new synthesis of welfare management that many municipal boards are currently focusing on. Here you can learn more about what they're talking about.
THERE ARE CERTAINLY ONLY a few managers who have not experienced sleepless nights over the welfare equation: Save a few percent on the core service, make citizens co-producers of welfare and motivate the professional employees in passing so that the task makes sense to them. Of course, without any slip-ups in the process. This is a bit of a caricature of the task that public managers have been dribbling around with for almost ten years: fewer resources, greater societal complexity and ever-increasing expectations from both politicians and citizens for world-class welfare. At the same time, there must be no mistakes, documentation must be in place and budgets must be adhered to.
"We saw it with the refugee situation, where there was a burning platform: We moved together across the silos - schools, job centers, daycare, social services, real estate, etc. - Kristian Dahl, Business Director, LEAD
Both right and left hands must lead
How exactly to cut the cake is a topic of ongoing debate in the public governance and management debate. One of them is called 'The New Synthesis' and is based on an international research project spearheaded by Canadian researcher and former senior manager Jocelyne Bourgon (see fact box).
Danish Kristian Dahl, business psychologist and founder of the consultancy LEAD - enter next level, has transferred the project to a Danish context. We presented it briefly in What's hot in Offentlig Ledelse 3/2017. And now Kristian Dahl and Jocelyne Bourgon have published the book The New Synthesis for Public Value Creation in the 21st Century. In short, 'The New Synthesis' is a simple model - the authors call it a framework - with two axes and four endpoints that both intersect and complement each other. Kristian Dahl explains the synthesis as follows:
- The challenges we now face in the welfare state - declining resources, increased complexity and new expectations from citizens - mean that public leaders need to have both hands in their pockets. They can't lead with only the right or left hand. By this, he means that leaders must master both traditional and modern virtues of public administration.
- With the right hand, they need to master compliance, the classic civil service virtues of keeping their store in order, implementing and enforcing legislation, adhering to budgets, etc. At the same time, they need to perform - deliver more for less, optimize and streamline. And with their left hand, they must be able to emerge - i.e. innovate welfare together with others through co-creation and co-production, find new solutions and use technologies developed outside the public sector. And finally, they must be able to create resilience - help strengthen society's robustness and ability to adapt and handle crises, new movements and unforeseen events, says Kristian Dahl.
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Leaders must enter the opportunity space
These four virtues or strategic focus areas - performance, emergence, compliance and resilience - together create a balance between classic governance and co-creation on the transverse axis and public and civil outcomes on the vertical axis. So far, so good. But how do leaders find that balance?
We call the synthesis of the four strategic focus areas a facilitating framework that leaders can use to explore how previous systems and practices can coexist with the new competencies required to be prepared for the future, says Kristian Dahl. He calls the spaces that emerge at the intersection of the classic and modern virtues a 'space of possibility'. And this is where leaders can find room to explore and find new solutions.
This gives them an expanded action palette both strategically and operationally. For example, when making a decision on a given issue, you can look at the four areas in the 'new synthesis' and ask yourself: What does this problem require of us in terms of compliance? Where are our strengths and weaknesses? The same goes for performance. How can we bring co-creation into the solution - and create resilience?
The danger arises when the autopilot is engaged, for example in the event of a crisis. The left hand typically goes back into the pocket very quickly, while the right hand steers. Many of the problems and challenges we face require us to think laterally instead of vertically. Joint actions make us stronger, we must lift together, and this is both a governance and leadership challenge. But we saw it with the refugee situation, where there was a burning platform: We moved together across the silos - schools, job centers, daycare, social services, real estate, etc. The refugee task succeeded precisely because we worked in a different way than we usually do.
However, Kristian Dahl points out that this requires that politicians are included in the thinking about what public welfare is. If politicians are not involved, it will just be something we play around with.
The story behind 'The New Synthesis'
In 2006, Jocelyne Bourgon, a former senior executive at Canada, the OECD and the UN, initiated a research project that has since involved over 200 senior executives, politicians and researchers from Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, England, Brazil, Singapore and New Zealand. Her research question was: How do we manage the public sector so that we can continue to deliver the same or better welfare in a time of fewer resources, increasing demands and complexity? Kristian Dahl has since explored the question with a particular focus on the Danish public sector. The answers from the participants have led to the development of 'The New Synthesis', which is built around four focus areas:
1. Staying on top of things - compliance: The first thing the participants pointed out was that public sector leaders and politicians have a classic, but crucial, task in ensuring continued mastery of the classic virtues of public servants. It makes no sense to talk about innovation or other more popular management concepts if you don't have your own house in order. Participants also pointed out that it was crucial to maintain and develop the public sector's ability to ensure compliance with the law in society through the exercise of authority. In line with this, the implementation of new legislation is therefore a central theme.
2. More for less - performance: Next, the participants pointed out the crucial importance of having a continuous focus on optimizing and streamlining the way the public sector meets political ambitions. This is typically done from slightly different angles:
- A management and cost-cutting logic where you set key goals for the organization, reduce the budget and let the organization adjust between the two.
- A production optimization logic, often inspired by LEAN.
- A professional evidence strategy where you de-privatize the space of the professional and try to ensure that the professional, based on a common standard, does what works best professionally in the core service. However, an important point was that internationally, public organizations were often measured on too narrow organizational goals and thus unintentionally stimulated the production of solutions that ignored broad societal needs.
3. Innovating welfare together with others
- emergence: This has two dimensions. First, participants pointed to the crucial importance of the public sector developing platforms and spaces for civil society to become co-producers of welfare. In terms of governance, the big question here is: How do we make others producers or co-producers of welfare? How can we get people other than ourselves to contribute here? Or deliver what we do - perhaps just in a different way? Likewise, the participants in the research project pointed out that it is crucial to strengthen the public sector's ability to broadly involve several different parties in the co-creation of public policy and strategy. And that in the future, it will be crucial to continue to strive for innovation and to increase our ability to find and use new solutions and technologies that are often developed outside the public sector.
4. Resilience: Across the participating countries, a picture emerged that continued prosperity is increasingly dependent on society's ability
to learn to adapt to new situations and deal with crises, disasters and unforeseen societal movements. The essential question for top leaders and politicians is therefore: How can we strengthen society's ability to manage and recover from significant crises and challenges? How do we strengthen society's ability to adapt to change? Resilience is typically approached from a number of different professional angles: From a psychological perspective, the focus is on how to strengthen people's ability to overcome stresses and risk factors in life. From a political science angle, the focus is on how to ensure flexibility and readiness for change in society. From an environmental and climate perspective, we work on how, for example, cities can be geared to handle increased population growth, while at the same time dealing with an often more extreme climate and heightened expectations for energy efficiency improvements.
