#CouncilCulture: How can we really shift the relationship between councils and citizens?
A new collaborative innovation project from the New Citizenship Project aimed at breaking the gravitational pull of business-as-usual in local government
As COVID-19 swept through the United Kingdom and the country went into lockdown, something extraordinary happened within the realm of local government. In their tens of thousands, council officers up and down the land defied the constraints that had long confined them, broke through silos, hierarchy, and bureaucracy, and embraced a new spirit of possibility, urgency and community collaboration. Virtually overnight, councils joined hands with community organisations, mutual aid groups, small businesses and committed individuals to provide essential services and support to those most in need. Groceries and prescriptions got delivered. Homeless people got a roof over their heads. Schoolchildren got laptops. It wasn’t always perfect. But stuff got done.
The resilience, resourcefulness and initiative displayed by local councils during those trying times should have cracked open an entirely new way of working with people and communities. But instead, we have largely slid back to business as usual. What would it take to rekindle that spirit and harness its potential to shape a brighter, more citizen-led future?
Citizens solve problems
COVID-19 may have been largely tamed, but the need for councils to do things with people, and not just for people, remains pressing. It may not always feel that way. But for councils struggling to get to grips with shrinking budgets and rising expectations, breaking out of a “customer” mentality and investing properly in “citizen” relationships can solve problems and deliver real impact — including cost savings.
Kirklees Council is a great example of how putting active citizenship at the heart of local government generates tangible value. Since 2018, the council has undertaken 27 “Place Standard” conversations with almost 10,000 participants across 17 wards, involving at least two-thirds of the borough’s councillors. As a result, budgets totalling £7.8m have been re-aligned to facilitate and support place-based working, and place-based engagement has influenced £7m of capital investment in small town centres. The council’s civic crowdfunding programme, Growing Great Places, has raised a total of £364,600 from almost 2000 backers for 37 successful local projects, with an 88% success rate. This represents a 2.5x leverage rate on the council’s own pledges.
This shouldn’t be a surprise. It’s in the places where we live that citizenship becomes real for most of us. At New Citizenship Project, our work with Kirklees Council, the Government of Jersey, and others, has brought home to us just how much people care about the places they live, work and play, and how important it is to feel a sense of agency in relation to your surroundings.
But while we’ve had some great success with this work, ultimately we believe something is pretty profoundly stuck.
What’s holding councils back?
The problem isn’t a lack of good theory or models. A lot of smart folk have been naming and trying to catalyse this shift for a long time. Our friends at New Local call it Community Power, and talk about a shift from state or market paradigm to community paradigm; the Centre for Public Impact talk about Human Learning Systems instead of New Public Management, and call for a shift from a delivery mindset to an enablement mindset; Collaborate talk about the Collaborative Society; the Institute for Local Government has done some great work on the 21st century public servant… and we at New Citizenship Project talk about the #CitizenShift, stepping out of the Subject and Consumer Stories and into the Citizen Story. But I think if we’re honest, we’ve all struggled to make it stick.
In the New Citizenship Project team, we’ve been taking some time to reflect on this recently… and the more we think about it, the more we feel like it comes down to that old beast of organisational culture. But we don’t mean that in an abstract it’s-the-culture-so-what-can-you-do sense.
We reckon there are three composite parts of a Council culture, three ingredients in what you might call the cultural recipe — and now we’re looking to build a group of councils to work with us, test this recipe, and see if we can cook up something different. Those three ingredients are what we call Narrative, Rituals, and Totems.
Narrative: “spotting the story”
The narrative refers to the story the council tells itself as an organisation about what it is, and what role it is playing in society. This helps to name and distinguish what councils want to move towards, and crucially what they want to move away from.
To start making this more practical, we talk about “spotting the story”, almost as a game you can play. If you ask yourself how each of the different stories shows up in your organisation, you can begin to pay attention to the impact that has — and that’s a great starting point for change.
To give a sense of this, you can see the Subject Story show up in pomp and circumstance, in hierarchy and paternalism; it is carried by language like “Local Authority” and “officers”. The Consumer Story manifests in the idea of councils as “Service Providers”, and keeps people unconsciously trapped in a mode of doing things FOR people. The Citizen Council shows up when you’re working WITH people, not just FOR them…
Totems: symbolic shifts
Totems are prominent manifestations of the narrative: the symbolic projects which embody a culture. When a council headquarters has a big, highly visible “Customer Service Centre” at its entrance, for example, that sends a pretty powerful signal to both staff and citizens as to what the role of the council is — and one that can be difficult to override no matter what else you do.
A totemic approach to shifting culture can be powerful too, though. There are several examples out there of councils reinventing parts of their offices as libraries and cafes, powerful Citizen alternatives to the Customer Service Centre. Our work on Jersey’s Climate Conversation is another example: this saw us support the Government of Jersey to run a major participatory democracy process to develop an all-island response to the climate emergency. In doing so, it expressed a very different relationship between citizen and state in Jersey, in a way that has catalysed much wider change.
“Big ticket” interventions like these can be very powerful. But the big risk is that these projects get absorbed into the existing siloes and structures, procured as one-offs rather than really shifting the Narrative. As such, wider changes need active cultivation too. This brings us to the third ingredient in the cultural recipe. It is the humblest, but probably the most important.
Rituals: “sweating the small stuff”
Rituals are the day-to-day routines, practices and symbols that embody the idea of what the work of an organisation is — that express the narrative and make it real — and are often so ingrained as to be invisible.
The work of revisiting council rituals is deeply practical, often unglamorous, and can even seem trivial — but it is vital. We sometimes think of it as “sweating the small stuff”: it’s about paying attention to what’s going on in the day-to-day, and questioning what the implicit impact of those things is. To bring this to life in the council context, here are a few questions you might want to ask yourself:
- What are the measures of success? If you measure and report efficiency of service delivery, for example, this clearly embodies the idea of the council as a service provider. What if you measured citizenship instead? (This challenge lies at the heart of our work with Kirklees Council.)
- How present are local citizens and places inside the local authority? We’ve seen endless council offices with no photographs on the walls, and no physical presence of local citizens. What if you blurred the lines, perhaps holding a regular webinar where a senior manager or councillor interviews a local citizen to learn from what they are doing?
- What language and imagery needs to tell a different story? All sorts of things come under this heading, from brand identities which are still often heraldic coats of arms (powerful Authority symbolism) to job titles. These are a personal obsession of mine, things like “Head of Democratic Service”: since when is democracy a service?!
Making the recipe
No one of these three ingredients will deliver culture change alone. Without totems, rituals are too incremental and gradual for the speed of change this moment demands. Without rituals, totems too easily end up as just procurement projects, managed in silos, without truly penetrating the culture (we’ve seen this several times with councils commissioning one-off Citizens’ Assemblies, for example). Without paying attention to narrative, it’s impossible to see the possibility of either rituals or totems.
If councils can consciously put them together, though, we think this could make up a powerful recipe for cultural reinvention — the kind of reinvention that might actually be able to make the theoretical models a reality, and allow councils to break the gravitational pull of the ways of doing things we all know we want to leave behind.
To test this hypothesis, we’ve been plotting…
We’re looking to convene six councils — ideally representing a range of scales, remits, regions, urban-rural, etc — to work with, build on and challenge these ideas over the course of a year-long inquiry, with the ambition of creating resources together that can then be used by the wider sector. The template for this is a process we call Collaborative Innovation, one we’ve already run in several other sectors, and which allows us to keep the cost of participation as low as possible for maximum impact.
There’s some great theory, a lot of emergent practice, and recent memory of very different ways of working out there — and the prize is huge, both in terms of financial savings and more importantly, civic impact. The challenges aren’t going away, but even in the face of these, our hope is that this project might represent a way to shift the story once and for all.
If you’d be interested to know more about this, please get in touch via info@newcitizenship.org.uk, or find us on twitter. We look forward to hearing from you!
