Designing a services commissioning model with Barnet Council

By Joe Heapy

Just before Christmas 2008 the Assistant Director of Strategy at Barnet Council, one of the 33 London boroughs, approached Engine to discuss an ambitious internal programme he was responsible for planning. The objective was to understand what the role of the local authority should be when there is considerably less money going into local government.

Called Future Shape, the programme began by recruiting 70 people from across the Council and from local partner organisations such as the National Health Service and the Police to form seven co-creation working groups each with a different brief.

The plan was to propose a set of strategies that addressed everything from how the Council used the properties that it owned to how they offered customer service around transactions with the Council.

Engine was asked to design and facilitate a programme of work to re-design the way the Council commissioned people centred services for the most disadvantaged in the Borough - the one to two percent of people living in Barnet who cost the Council the most money.

There was a great deal of consensus about what should happen for this group. The greater hurdle was that there was no clear understanding of what currently happened.

Engine developed and ran four sequential workshops to design and prototype a new commissioning model for public services in the Borough with a particular focus on those most disadvantaged. Barnet described the objective as the design of a commissioning vehicle.

Designing an organisation
The workshops structured a process to envision, model, plan and communicate a new commissioning model for services. The process was informed by a review of the literature on disadvantage from which we translated several good pieces of theory into tools. We made sure that the group didn’t stop when they got to the big idea.

We facilitated them through a process of detailed design as well as identifying issues around implementation and strategies in response. We also worked with the team to identify people and organisations that were critical to progressing the model and constructed a proposition for each of them.

Putting the stories of people’s actual experiences at the centre of the methodology was really powerful. It did the job of focusing thinking and overriding any objections to change or collaboration and other organisational challenges. We worked with low-income families, children permanently excluded from school and young people leaving care who were not currently in employment, education or training.

We developed 6 ethnographic studies with families and individuals. Studies were over a whole day and were undertaken by an Engine social researcher in participants homes and local areas.

A lifeline extracted from one ethnography

With the consultancy OPM, we developed life-costings for 4 families in Barnet. Life-costing is an analysis of the costs to the state of supporting someone through their life. The families we met were expensive. Costs included those for direct service interventions, for example a social worker, legal proceedings and other costs.

When you extrapolate forwards you can also estimate the cost to the state in income tax revenue for those who are likely to be what governments call ‘unproductive’ - or a burden on the state. The ethnographic studies and life-costing were used to develop an insight report and materials for workshops.

We ran a series of exercises to model how a selection of current systems work in Barnet. The team used a series of techniques including system modeling using Lego. These enabled the group to begin to develop a palette of techniques and signifiers to support the modeling of a new system.

Finding a way to represent current systems of commissioning

The vehicle model
Through a series of exercises the group designed 3 separate system models to address disadvantage. The 3 system models reflected different levels of system interaction and Engine brought the models together and worked to refine their design and further embed the system principles.

The resulting single model specified a top-level framework for citizen interaction and community development. This was supported by seven system platforms, defined by the system principles and refined by platform principles. We went on to develop the features and specification of each platform or capability.

Summary of the vehicle model

It was important that the group could have a very different kind of conversation and tackle the problem in a very different way. Engine developed the analytical skills and drawing skills of the team as part of the process. And we introduced aspects of system thinking as accessible exercises for the group.

Using the insight and outputs from the group, Engine worked with Barnet Council to develop a report that was presented to Cabinet. This report included a further synthesised model of the Vehicle (version 2.0).

Summary
• According to their own assessment, the team were able to get further than they could have got through their usual modes of working with each other.

• Most powerfully, we kept the service user always front and centre through a range of activities.

• We skilled the team as we went along, pausing to prepare for each next step. We also focused on telling a very clear and compelling story at the end. The team were keen that the output would be very different from the usual policy report.

• In the next phase we hope to work with Barnet Council to prototype aspects of the commissioning model. The focus will be on developing an understanding of what needs to happen at the system level. Well look to prototype some of the capabilities identified in the model.