8 November 2023. Public services | Cows
Liberating public services. // What happens if we give up cows? It’s not that simple. [#512]
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1: Liberating public services
Jon Alexander pointed me to a fascinating piece of service delivery work being done by Changing Futures Northumbria, in the north east of England. It comes with a striking chart, from a blog post by Mark Smith, showing the interactions with a particular user, ‘Brian’, over 14 years, before and after a change in delivery model.
(Source: Better Futures Northumbria)
Jon’s summary on LinkedIn:
Before, in transactional (I would say Consumer) paradigm: 9 years of multiple disassociated “services”, 400 interactions per year, total cost to taxpayer of £2m+ and counting, no real end in sight…
After, in relational (I would say Citizen) paradigm: 12 months, 161 interactions that started with listening, cost of a few thousand pounds… and this person is now “building a life with a community”.
In a public sector delivery environment where—after 13 years of UK government austerity—councils are operating on bare bones, this kind of impact, and these kind of savings, is both remarkable and valuable, so of course I went to have a deeper look:
We engage with those who are experiencing multiple disadvantage in a fundamentally different way to normal services, which we call the ‘Liberated Method’. Rather than having a predefined, limited set of service offers, we are led by each individual’s answer to the question ‘What matters to you?’ Our work is bounded by just two unbreakable rules - we do no harm, and we do not break the law. Beyond these rules, we go wherever the work takes us.
Sitting behind these two rules are five principles:
Understand, not assess:
The existing system is essentially a series of specialisms connected by referral pathways and eligibility criteria... Understanding starts with a blank sheet rather than a checklist that you might find in an assessment. It starts with “what matters to you?”
Person sets the scope
This is basically saying that nothing is out of scope. Whatever weird and wonderful things people are into (although, see ‘Stay Legal’!), this work takes you there.
Pull for help, not refer and close
Referrals are the means by which people are moved on from one professional to the other. We will not do referrals by choice. Instead, we ensure the caseworker ‘holds’ the case and invited the specialist in (instead of passing them on).
Decision making in the work
Front line staff are often disempowered, even though they generally understand what matters more than anything... Operational teams should learn to pull for advice, not permission. Leadership need to learn to respond to this in as close to real time as they can.
No time limit, it takes as long as it takes
Many specialist services in the system stop supporting people for a number of reasons - pressure related to arbitrary targets and KPIs means people are discharged from services before they are ready... during the time we are operating we do not close cases unless a person requests it.
The underlying model is summarised in this diagram: from ‘navigation’ to ‘relationship’.
(Source: Better Futures Northumbria)
Of course, this demand-led approach isn’t new. It was pioneered in the UK by John Seddon, whose Vanguard consultancy built this model of user-centred demand-led delivery. If there’s a theme to Seddon’s work it’s “beyond command and control”. The management writer Simon Caulkin explained their findings in an article that was also shared on the Vanguard site:
The results of creating joined-up services were startling – benefits paid in days rather than weeks, housing repairs done at the time and date specified by the tenant, moving a hospital’s stroke performance from worst to near best, dramatically lowering local crime rates, to name just a few. But in each case solving the apparent problem revealed bigger ones lurking behind.
So typically organisations that were committed to making this model work rewired their systems to so they reflected the issues their users were identifying to them. This sounds expensive, but in practice it was cheaper than the existing model:
(A)lthough cost wasn’t the priority and the amount was impossible to predict in advance, overall costs fell as a consequence of providing a service that met people’s needs. The (counterintuitive) lesson is that bad service is much more expensive than good, because of the huge cost of rectifying mistakes and failure. To rephrase the learning (even more counterintuitively): managing cost pushes cost up, while managing value does the opposite.
When I was at The Futures Company, and the UK (Conservative-Liberal) Coalition government arrived in 2010 with its clear intention to cut budgets, my colleague Alex Oliver and I wrote a piece suggesting that a more system-focussed approach to service delivery would be a way of squaring this circle—delivering more for less. As it happens, I came across this the other day. It was called ‘The Effectiveness Agenda’.
From efficiency to effectiveness
... Effectiveness is about moving beyond the language of ‘efficiencies’, ‘saving money’, or even ‘cuts’ and improving user outcomes through innovative solutions while avoiding unintended outcomes.A deeper understanding of what drives attitudes and behaviours of current and potential service users, across a number of levels, often reveals unexpected barriers to – or opportunities for - change.
Of course, our short paper had no effect whatsoever. Cuts were made to systems and they just kept on doing less with less.
Of course, this all speaks to a number of issues, but the biggest one is how organisations change. If you operate in a ‘command and control’ organisation you have a group of measures that are focussed on cost and other KPIs such as contact frequency and so on. So the first issue is one of mindset—and even disbelief.
The cost/KPI driven organisation will look at the five principles above and simply ‘know’, in the face of a whole raft of evidence to the contrary from places where versions of it have been implemented, that it will unleash unlimited demand, drive up cost, and overwhelm the the organisation.
And managers in such organisations typically find it impossible to trust their front-line staff, even though their staff know much more about their customers, and often about the organisation, than the managers do.
But despite this pessimism, there might some glimmers of light here. In the book Leading Change, which is “a guide to whole systems working”, they have a ‘change equation’:
(Source: ‘Leading Change’)
D is the current level of dissatisfaction with the status quo; V is a more attractive vision of a better future; M is a method or practical first steps towards the future; and P is the pain and/or the cost of change.
In the face of awful services that are already cut to the bone, D is high. Potentially things like the Northumbria project and the work by Vanguard offers both an attractive vision (V) of a better future and (M) the first steps towards it.
If I were an incoming Labour government dealing with the swingeing impact that austerity has had on public services, I might think this was a risk worth taking. But I’m not holding my breath. Because if any two groups believe in the 20th century model of command and control, it is mainstream politicians and their senior civil servants.
2: What happens if we give up cows? It’s not so simple.
At Grist, Naoki Nitta conducts an intriguing thought experiment: what happens if we just give up cows? The rationale for this is that they are a huge contributor to climate change. 940 million cows worldwide are responsible for nearly 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions.
Solutions currently mooted include reengineering cow gut microbes using gene-editing so they don’t burp so much.
(A California cow contemplated its future. Photo via Cathy Haglund/Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0)
There’s more data than you need here on America’s addiction to beef and dairy, but Nitta cuts through this:
There’s a fundamental disconnect, though, between our growing demand for animal-based protein and its enormous carbon footprint. Producing a pound of steak generates nearly 100 times more greenhouse gas than an equivalent amount of peas, while cheese production emits eight times the volume of making tofu.
In the US, their cattle are responsible for 4% of emissions, but just getting rid of the cows would only reduce US emissions by 2.6%. This isn’t to be sniffed at, since that amount of emissions is the equivalent of three times of all of Portugal’s emissions, but it turns out that just getting rid of cows is complicated:
With no livestock to feed, the acreage now used to grow silage and hay could be replaced with food crops. Yet because higher value fruits and vegetables require quality soil, specific climate conditions, and ample water infrastructure, most of that land would be limited to growing calorie-heavy, hardy broad acre crops such as corn and soybeans — a system change that would add its own climate impacts.
The cows also make their own contribution to making fertiliser, whose artificial versions involve energy intensive production and produced substantial amounts of methane. In addition,
Cattle also help keep agricultural byproducts — from fruit peels and pulp to almond hulls and spent brewery grains — out of landfills, reducing the carbon output of crop waste by 60 percent .
And while a cow-free agricultural system would produce more food—likely 25% more—the resulting diet would be missing some nutrients:
That abundance, however, would come with deficits in essential nutrients , as plant-based foods tend to fall short in vitamin B12, calcium, iron, and fatty acids… Food insecurity is often tied to caloric sufficiency, but doesn’t always reflect nutritional needs, particularly those of vulnerable populations. Pregnant, lactating, and elderly women , for example, are susceptible to anemia and low bone density, mainly due to inadequate iron and calcium intake.
And in some of the future of food workshops I’ve done recently, livestock farmers and others have argued the case for livestock farming on both of these grounds: as part of a stable mixed farming regime, and because red meat is an effective way of delivering some important nutrients.
Meanwhile, reducing cows’ burping habits is top of the agenda in the US. Diet might help:
Several dietary supplements have been shown to minimize bovine bloating. A twice-daily garlic and citrus extract can cut emissions by 20 percent, while a red seaweed additive can inhibit them by as much as 80 percent without impacting animal health or productivity or imparting detectable flavor to the resulting proteins.
But of course every solution has problems. The seaweed would need to scale, it’s found in tropical waters, it would need a supply chain and so on. As Nitta writes:
developing a supply chain robust enough to serve tens of millions of cattle with a daily intervention leaves a trail of unanswered questions regarding effective farming, processing, and distribution techniques.
Which takes us back to tinkering with the cows’ digestive system. Here cattle are getting the best possible service, since Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna—she won the prize for developing the CRISPR gene editing tool—is leading the team:
The recently launched project aims to identify the offending gut bacteria through metagenomics, another breakthrough technology that maps the functions of complex microbial communities, then restructure their DNA to produce less methane.
The idea down the line is that you’d give calves a supplement that would enable their bodies to keep on re-creating the genetically modified “microflora” that reduce their emissions. The researchers think that this is likely to be scalable and affordable.
But reading the article, eating beef, in particular comes down to the same two issues we see everywhere in climate change discussions.
Issue 1: we could get by on eating a lot less than we do now. And actually this is happening, even in America:
In the last two years, the majority of Americans have upped their intake of plant-based foods, with almost half of millennials and Gen Z-ers regularly eating vegan.
Item 2: as with every other type of emission, a relatively small minority is responsible for a large share of the total. In the US, 12% of the population eat half of the nation’s beef. Looking at the link, they are more likely to be male, and more likely to be 50 to 65.
On the other hand, unlike flying, high levels of meat consumption in the US are associated with lower income levels, at least over time. So this might be one of those areas where a credible carbon price might have an impact.
j2t#512
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