It's not that simple - CMJ Strategies

How do we…

🧩Increase access to jobs for lone parents by providing free childcare when there isn’t enough good quality childcare available?

🧩Deliver public services that join up seamlessly around the user while respecting individual rights to privacy and data protection?

🧩Hold schools to account for how well children do, while keeping the system simple enough for parents and young people to understand, without creating harmful pressures and incentives for teachers?

🧩Help our children stay safe online when we can’t keep up with how the technology is developing, let alone our children’s ability to use it?

🧩 Tackle the threat of terrorism while protecting our fundamental freedoms as citizens?

These are some of the policy and implementation questions I’ve grappled with working in, and with, governments around the world. The problems are complex, not just complicated: there are no instruction manuals or simple answers. It’s not a puzzle where all the pieces will fit together if you just try hard enough. You need to make trade-offs and manage a whole lot of uncertainty. And everyone’s watching.

I wrote recently about the ways in which leadership in the public sector might be different to elsewhere. The experience of coaching the Executive Leadership team of a large Local Authority in the UK right now is certainly reinforcing my sense that the scale, complexity, politics and struggle to prioritise in government presents a combination of challenges unique to public sector leaders.

Most leaders have to answer big and difficult questions, with decisions weighing heavily on their minds. But while many may talk about the value of mistakes for learning, innovation and growth at work, the tolerance for getting things wrong in the high-stakes, publicly exposed environment of the public sector remains pretty limited. So, how do we equip ourselves to navigate the complexity of the things we’re responsible for? Here are a few initial suggestions:

🗺️Get out and about. Leaving your office (or screen) is not just good for networking. It’s a critical aspect of leading in complexity. The more that you share yourself, your stories, views and ideas with different people and parts of the system, the better you will be at feeling your way through the inter-dependencies and connections that exist between what you do (or advise political leaders to do) and what might actually happen in real life. This is both physical and virtual – getting out of the social media and other bubbles you usually inhabit to really shift your perspective on things. This seems so obvious. But it can be so easy to get sucked into an internal focus and come to think of external engagements as photo ops (at worst) or a way to ‘manage stakeholders’, rather than really listening and building relationships with them to deepen our understanding and improve our decisions.

🧮Weigh the facts. Don’t underestimate the importance of getting to grips with understanding and using different kinds of data and evidence. That may mean putting aside old hang-ups about ‘not being good at maths’ and making sure you get the training and support you need. Do you know what the data is really telling you? How confident can you be about that confidence interval? Can you look under the bonnet of a piece of research to see if what you’re about to do with its findings stacks up? I know we think that when we get really senior we can’t be experts in everything and instead need to surround ourselves with people who are, but I would argue that on data and evidence you need enough of a grounding to know what questions to ask and how to interpret the answers you get.

🛟Engineer safe spaces. Leading high-stakes work usually means it’s difficult to share your uncertainties or mistakes with people who really understand the context. Even if you’ve been able to build enough trust with your immediate team to be open about what you don’t know, there will be limits on how much you want to share with them – especially early on in your role. People tell me time and again how having a group of supportive peers or a trusted mentor or coach has been essential for them to be able to fully explore their worries. Sometimes this will just be about being able to vent – to be seen and validated. Other times you may want a sounding board for your choices, or questions from people who really ‘get it\’, which allow you to test your assumptions and deepen your thinking. I know some groups that have carried on Action Learning Sets years after forming them on training courses because they provide such a valuable safe space for reflection and calibration. Don’t leave this to chance – you need it.

🐾Keep your feet on the ground. The power of these positions can become intoxicating too. Even if you’re not striding down a corridor with the power-brokers like something out of the West Wing, just sitting in a key meeting knowing that what you say could affect the lives or livelihoods of thousands of people, could go to your head. Make efforts to keep yourself grounded and humble. This can be anything from putting yourself into the position of a novice, seeking out those moments of awe seen in the mastery of others (I’m learning to read music right now and, as with many things, am enthralled by how much more easily my 10-year-old does it) or asking yourself and your teams regularly, ‘How could we be wrong?’

What helps you lead in complexity?