Social research for social policy

Not too long ago, I wrote about how we need to get better at using social research in order to underpin our predictions of policy and process success. Polly Toynbee writes today in The Guardian about the general failure to use a rich source of social research. Citing the hectic pace of politial change…

Weighed down by experience, ministers now rarely exude that optimism. Everything turned out to be more difficult than they thought. Social change is slow and hard, the most intractable problems often progressing only with small improvements in each generation. The political timetable in the 24-hour news age turned out to be too fast for academic research. If a minister commissioned the work, by the time the researchers were in the field a reshuffle would move him or her to an utterly unrelated department. The next minister, with their own agenda and new special advisers, would barely know about it.

I’m not always sure that it’s Ministers (or Councillors for that matter) who need to know about the details of social research. In an interesting overheard snippet from David Cameron and Barack Obama during his London visit - they both agree micro-management of the process is the wrong thing, it’s about listening to advisors who know about the detail and then bringing their political judgement to bear (I’ll leave it to you to decide what you think about the political judgement of either or both).

And Polly Toynbee also (unwittingly?) illustrates part of the problem - the politics of research. She complains bitterly that “sociology was so defamed during the Thatcher era” yet dismisses Economics as some kind of mechanistic number crunching and puts down “nudge” theories as “blindingly obvious”. Social researchers of all kinds do have political axes to grind and being the child and wife of academics, I’m all too familiar with how ideological orthodoxy can take over university departments colouring approaches from methodology to interpretation.

But none of these problems are excuse enough to avoid gathering and using evidence about what works in the murky world of policy formulation. Linking into academic research and creating and understanding our own local data will be increasingly important. Comprehensive Area Assessment includes “Does the organisation produce relevant and reliable data and information to support decision making and manage performance?” as a key line of enquiry. We’re going to have to get sharper at analysing and using the rich sources of knowledge that are so often overlooked.

August Communities of Practice Round-Up

Each month we do a round-up of key activities in the Policy and Performance Community of Practice. You first need to be registered on the IDeA sponsored community of practice platform - www.communities.idea.gov.uk before accessing these links.

Growing and growing more useful

We held a great event on community development at the IDeA offices on 1 August. You can find all the slides and information from the day here – including links to how we might develop the community further. Add your views, too.

A CoP code of practice? I’ve borrowed (stole) from the civil service and the BBC on creating a code of practice for participating online. It’s pretty light touch and it’s strictly voluntary for us, but if you comply with these simple guidelines I don’t think you could wrong when posting online about professional matters.

The Policy and Performance Community of Practice won the “Top of the Cops” award in July for having the highest percentage of local authority representation. We received some very nice biscuits, that we have enjoyed on your behalf. Read more….

Share your experience Can you help? Supporting local government improvement – this month’s hot topics and requests for information:

· Monitoring the performance of contractors – involving citizens and being creative?

· Communicating change: How can you tell if your communications are effective during a major change programme? What have you done?

· Supporting vulnerable people – a whole families approach? Examples please.

· How are you reporting the National Indicator Set?

Getting ready for CAA The Comprehensive Area Assessment community of practice recently joined Policy and Performance as a sub-community. We’ll be bringing CAA readiness discussions into this main community working with Nick Easton from the LGA and Mandy James who leads the IDeA’s work on CAA. As a start, we’d like to hear your views on the Audit Commission’s CAA consultation. You can find all our community CAA resources here.

In the sub-communities

Performance Management

Performance measures for performance teams. I’m sure all of us who work in corporate teams have faced this conundrum. We tell people to measure their performance, but find it notoriously difficult to measure our own. What do you do?

Community mergers – I’m proposing that we merge the Policy and Performance and Performance Management communities of practice. This would be after a few improvements are made to the way that topics can be grouped and themed. What do you think?

Customer Insight

The LGA and IDeA have commissioned new guidance on customer insight and understanding communities, partly to help councils in their CAA readiness but more broadly to illustrate how councils can use this key improvement tool to deliver better outcomes. You can shape this guidance by acting as an online reference group. Answer a few key questions or share your own insights.

Events

· Local wellbeing conference 9 September. Hear from a range of eminent speakers (James Purnell, MP, Dr Martin Seligman, Professor Richard Layard among others) and about the groundbreaking activities led by South Tyneside, Hertfordshire and Manchester. A few places are still available.

· Influencing and preparing for CAA – 10 September

· The information challenge: do you know your community? 22 September – find out more about customer insight and get ready for CAA at this LGA conference.

· CoP member Dominic Campbell will speaking about cyber citizens and collaborative councils at Web 2.0: Practical applications for business benefits, 1-2 October.

Documents

A step by step how to on posting to the discussion forum and turning on alerts.

Blog posts of note

The Big Town Plan on television – A beautiful bridge, but where does it lead? – Ingrid Koehler

Disconnected citizens – is community empowerment the solution? – Vicki Goddard

Differentiated use of social media – how will “youth trends” affect how we communicate and do business? – Adrian Barker.

Next stop - The Sun

Who’s writing the headlines for LGA  these days? 

Councils issue safety warnings as trampoline injuries jump

and

People left exposed by lap-dance legislation

Great stuff!

And, of course, both of these are serious issues.  Particularly the lap dancing.  It’s not just about topless servers and tassles, it’s about communities being able to shape their own areas.

You won!

This morning colleagues from the IDeA’s Knowledge Team arrived with a fancy assortment of biscuits and a trophy to hand to the Strategy and Development Team.   The Policy and Performance Community of Practice (CoP) was recognised as “Top of the CoPs” in July for having the highest percentage of local authorities represented in any community on the IDeA sponsored community platform.  Obviously, we couldn’t have done it without you - the members of the P&P community.

It was more exciting than I would have anticipated, I was genuinely thrilled.   Vicki Goddard and I had our pictures taken (I knew I should have looked harder for a clean shirt this morning, so I won’t share those shots with you.)  But here’s a picture of the trophy in front of bouquet of roses (those weren’t included in our prize)

and a shot of some of the biscuits that you can enjoy virtually -

The Big Town Plan

Being a local government junkie, of course I couldn’t miss the first in a four part series by Kevin McCloud called The Big Town Plan.  It centres on design and regeneration in the Yorkshire town of Castleford (Wakefield MDC).

I love McCloud’s gushing enthusiasm for design and the difference it can make in people’s lives.  Kudos to Channel 4 for producing a programme about the process of regeneration and stumping up some seed money for the project and sticking with it over a period of four or five years from concept phase to delivery.  Congratulations to architect Renato Benedetti for designing and constructing a visually stunning pedestrian bridge (the first project featured in the series).  And special recognition should go to the community champions who persistently pushed for the project as it (inevitably) hit snags along the way.

Yet somehow watching the show, I was left with a feeling of unease.   I wasn’t quite clear of the purpose of this bridge (albeit beautiful) that connected around 300 homes to the town centre.   I watched community champions embrace a project that seemed doomed from the outset.  A floating bridge on a raging river with force enough to dislodge barges and transport minis underwater?  Sounds like a bad, unsafe idea to me.  The council officers and the Environment Agency thought so, too.  But the community champions had been given power to decide and they chose to go with the firm who worked with and listened to them.  In one scene, I witnessed a glum council officer pleading reason and then backing down in the face of strident opposition by a community champion.  I had unpleasant flashbacks to my council officer days and all those consultation meetings where I was berrated by, often understandably, angry citizens.

Maybe the community champions were right, though.  The original design had to be scrapped - but the more expensive fixed bridge that took its place was more beautiful and more sound - and it was designed by the originally chosen architect.  The one who listened.

The programme last night left me with a sense that this could well be a great white elephant, a bridge to nowhere - which is a shame.  It was a classic case of reporting on process and outputs, with little real regard to the outcomes.   Reading more about the project on Channel 4’s website showed how the bridge project fits into the bigger picture of regeneration and re-development for the area:

‘Many people couldn’t see the point of having a new bridge,’ says Wendy [Rayner, one of the community champions]. ‘Now it’s become a focal point. People come to take photographs of it and from it. They bring their kids and eat sandwiches on it. It’s bringing people in from outlying areas. Once you’re across and by our houses, you’re out into open fields. You can follow the river round to the bird sanctuary and nature walks.’

Now, thanks to a clean up program by the Environment Agency and local volunteers, the river water is clean enough for trout and salmon (bringing one seal upstream in search of supper earlier this year!).

Although the bridge marks the completion of the schemes that make up Kevin McCloud’s Big Town Plan, for the townspeople it is just the starting point. Peter Box, Leader of Wakefield Council says: ‘It’s lifted people, and given us far more confidence about ourselves. It’s the beginning of a further 15-20 years of regeneration over 3-4 miles of riverside, including housing offices, leisure and marine facilities. There’s a new focus on the whole town, a huge amount of house building, more investment coming in and people fighting over the same areas for development.’

Hopefully, in the remaining programmes there’ll be a greater focus on how the project has changed the community and changed lives.  You can read more about the whole series on David Barrie’s excellent blog.

Evidenced based advertising (and its policy implications)

Not too long ago, I saw an advert on tv for some kind of wonder cream designed to make you look (younger/slimmer/more radiant).  The voice over stated authoritatively that women said it was practically magic in its effects.   Except that they didn’t.  I read the small print that flashed ever so quickly on the screen and not even a majority of the cosmetics company’s own sample agreed that the product actually worked.

Where do they get the cheek? I thought.

Considering that most people won’t have looked at the small print and apparently shockingly few people have a good handle on percentages, they might normally get away with it.  (Hopefully the Advertising Standards Agency came down on that one).

In local government, we have the opposite problem. 

A future of intelligent searching?

More discussions today of ‘the knowledge society’.  Also some differing experiences of my own knowledge work which left me wondering about future development.  First, within a few minutes, I found the date of the first pilot peer reviews by searching my own records, (because I happened to be involved in one).  Secondly, I got a list from Google of sustainable community strategies containing the word ‘happiness’, and could then bring them up on screen and read the context.  The sorts of thing that would have been impossible a few years ago.  Then I spent 30 or 40 minutes looking for a list of the struggling authorities which had received intensive support, without success.  The difference is that the first two tasks were simple word searches, while the third required more understanding (and perhaps reflects my searching skills, or lack of).

That led me to wonder about the future of the semantic web (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web).  This is a way of structuring information to make it easier to find.  One of the problems is catering for the wide range of possible content in human knowledge, but it could take off in more restricted areas (such as aspects of local government?) sooner than it is more widely available.  And after that, at some point artificial intelligence will presumably start to understand human language directly.  How long will this take?  Five years for a semantic web?  Twenty, 30 years for understanding language?  And what impact will it have for ‘knowledge workers’ of which there are quite a number in local government?  Will this displace mental labour in the way machines displaced manual labour?  And leave us time for more leisure and the higher pursuits of life?  Just like the introduction of machines did?

Differentiatied use of social media?

Steve Dale gave a passionate entreaty to engage with social networking or get left behind, at last week’s Policy and Performance CoP event (see his presentation at http://www.communities.idea.gov.uk/c/12404/doclib/document-display.do?backlink=ref&id=835907) and talked about the age distribution of people’s involvement.  In depth research (i.e. what I’ve picked up from my kids and a few friends) however suggests that take up and use is quite differentiated.  My son and daughter are both away travelling (round Europe and Indonesia respectively).  My son texts at great expense. My daughter communicates through facebook.  Neither seem keen on email.  My son used to communicate through MSN, but that seems to have fallen out of favour.  When I mentioned my blogging to friends recently they cautioned against exposing yourself on-line and all this dangerous facebook stuff.  There’s pretty wide awareness nowadays of the various aspects of social networking, but in the last few days I’ve come across people who know bits, but not about, say, wikis or second life or RSS feeds.  And of course there is loads I’m still learning about.

So when councils are thinking of how best to communicate with people there are still a lot of bases to cover.  Will that change, and start to focus round a few key areas, or is differentiation the continuing name of the game?

Does Regulation Work?

‘Regulation’ has come up in several separate meetings today, and particularly the role of inspection in improvement.   A common theme was the wide variety in the types of inspection of councils and council services.  The Audit Commission has an independent status, but others report direct to government departments.  They vary in how and when they inspect (blanket coverage, risk based etc.) and their role in intervention.  And they vary in how far they are about protecting the public, informing the public, driving out failure or promoting improvement. 

 There doesn’t seem to be a massive amount of evidence of effectiveness though there is some (including inspected bodies saying it helps).  It’s something we’ll be doing more work on, but if anyone has any particular leads, I’d be glad to hear from them.

Confidence in sharing

Some of those who fancy ourselves big time into blogging and social media are a little bit down on codes of practice.  Maybe we see ourselves as mavericks, laws unto ourselves, hep cool cats who don’t need nobody to tell us the score.  But the reality is, how roguish can you really be if you use social media to write about local government?  Dominic Campbell (who admittedly seems to strike a cooler profile than I do) regrets the introduction of a social media code for civil servants:

Unfortunately, the moment that pen is put to paper and guidance is created, no matter how effective and light weight, things change and often for the worse. Guidance removes the freedom for people to think for themselves and results in situations where people download confidential files onto disc and send them through the post. Until civil servants are trusted to think for themselves, mistakes will continue to happen and the latent creative potential of the collective civil service will remain untapped, no matter how much guidance is created to give permission to behave to the contrary.

I tend to agree with Dominic actually and have always relied on common sense, but the workplace reality may be a bit different.  And sometimes it’s hard for me to remember how nervous I was when I first started blogging using my professional identity.

Another part of our workplace reality is that we work in political environments.  Councillors often have their well meaning efforts turned into political ammunition.  Officers aren’t spared either.  I’m sure we’ve all worked with councillors who seem absolutely great, committed, and easy to work with.  But next thing you know, they’ve dropped you or a colleague into it in a full council session over a misunderstanding, an honest mistake or just for working on an initiative dreamt up by the “other side”.  Not everyone’s like that, but hey, that’s politics.  And if only nice people were elected, the council wouldn’t exactly be a representative body, would it?*  So we do have to be careful and aware.  

But that doesn’t mean we can’t share, and maybe a blogging code of practice would help give people the confidence and guidelines not  so much to contribute, but to fall back on if they need to.   An ability to say, if anyone should ask, “Hey look, I complied with the civil service code.   The Government wants us to blog.” 

At our community of practice development event (see all about it here on the CoP, behind a free registration wall), the issue of confidence came up several times.  I asked a participant if she thought having a code would help.  She thought it would.   So in that vein, I propose the civil service code of practice for participation online and the BBC’s social media guidelines.  They’re both common sense, concise and they’re not contradictory (mostly).  I like the BBC’s approach to acknowledging that people do use different identities online and so long as you’re not blogging about work that’s ok.  I’ve put the full text of both on this wiki page in the Policy and Performance Community of Practice, so that we can comment or modify the code for our own local government needs - if we so wish. 

______

* a paraphrased quote from the great Molly Ivins.