Hierarchies to networks

Today I finally got around to reading this excellent Feb 15th blog post from Clare Moran, David Buck and Nour Sidawi that focuses on the boundary between informal networks and formal organisational structures. It’s great, I strongly encourage everyone to read it and I can’t wait for the others in the series.

I also found myself browsing through Twitter and encountered this tweet from John Cutler that, for me, immediately struck the same chord.

As I’ve pointed out to a few people recently, almost everything I do these days feels like it’s somehow connected to developing a community of interest. Over at HackIT we are building communities around service design, data, technology and a number of other areas. As we have a large number of ongoing simultaneous projects taking place, like any local government IT team, this is the only way to handle our cross-cutting dependencies and build up our catalogue of reusable components without having to implement a rigid top-down “programme office” style of sign-off driven planning.

Outside of work I’m spending some time thinking about, and working with very smart people on, ways to foster groups of interested people around the following topics.

• How do we replicate the success of the cross-gov Slack in the international space?
• How do we enable the creation of local-gov built and supported multi-tenant digital services?
• How do we enable government staff to have access to the same cloud based productivity software they would at home?
• How can we connect people wanting to advance things in the Digital Attribute Exchange area?

Critical to all of the above is the key point from the blog post and the tweet. How can we reach across boundaries, whether from an informal group into a a formal one (whether that’s a standards body or a hierarchical government organisation) or between two informal groups or two formal ones.

Smarter people than me will be able, I’m sure, to point me to a lot of literature on this topic. I’ve had a crack at reading The Wealth of Networks but my brain didn’t make it past chapter two. As an aside, the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard is doing more excellent things in relation to my areas of interest than I can keep track of.

One thing that does appear obvious is this is an issue at many scales. At the smallest scale it’s about how to manage a small number of teams to make sure there isn’t duplication of work without introducing a lot of potentially blocking overhead. At the biggest scale it becomes about democracy. How can all of the conflicting communities of interest that represent different wishes for state allocation of time and resources or updates to the law interface to the highly ossified way government is organised?

In the middle of the scale we have how the civil service is structured. For some time now I’ve been one of the many people calling for a new Northcote Trevelyan style report into how the civil service should be restructured to reflect the new ways of working and new attitudes of citizens and staff in the twenty first century. Many, perhaps most, of the things civil servants are doing now reach across organisational boundaries. Yet, almost every day, I hear about issues due to siloed data, service design that stops at the edge of the department and policy discussions that only reflect the desires of the Minister who controls that small specific section of the Social Contract.

There have long been formal communities in government, such at the Policy Profession. However, it’s difficult to see how much these organisations have achieved beyond offering structured training and a network for people who wish to progress in their careers. What we see instead is a recent proliferation of a large number of informal communities of interest made up of members who not only want to share issues and best practice but really want to work together to do things. They are creating the new delivery bodies that are needed but that the current structure of government simply doesn’t exist to facilitate.

It feels like we’re at the start of something big. A relatively small but ever growing conversation beginning in places like GovCamp and the cross-gov Slack but slowly picking up steam. It’s time to start actively discussing what would happen if we moved from the Victorian-style factory-model that is used as a template for government organisational design today to one that’s majoritively based on communities of practice that can be quickly built to address a specific need but also sustain the outcomes over a long period? How can we move from hierarchy thinking to network thinking?

This would require a colossal change so I don’t expect this to happen soon, if at all. It would require wholesale across the board changes, for example to how staff have a relationship with government, with the vast majority of civil servants belonging to a general pool of staff rather than a mission-specific organisation. Naturally it would also mean difficult decisions about how to fund work, how to allocate and measure risk and, perhaps most importantly, about senior decision making and accountability in a world with far more fluid borders around responsibility.

Thinking about this at all of its possible scales is fascinating. I’m still a long way from retirement yet but in recent days I’ve started to have a crazy notion that there may be a Phd in this one day…