One of the difficulties for pioneer co-producers is that they often seem to fly in the face of the way public services have been developing over the past generation.
They rely on face to face influence when the trend has been virtual. They appeal to general skills when the trend has been increasingly specialist. They believe in ordinary skills, amateur in the best sense, when the trend has been increasingly over-professionalised.
Most important perhaps, co-production relies on the idea that the users of services, and their families and neighbours, are a vast untapped resource – when the trend has been to regard them as drains on an overstretched system.
Because of this, co-production represents a seriously different idea of the future of public services. It also, it seems to me, represents a challenge to the prevailing view about how organisations work best – a different, and a better, understanding of efficiency.
I’ve been involved in these debates now for more than a decade and I kept on running into the same ideas, which seem to flow from co-production – they are where co-production ends up. New rules for running organisations, public and private (in my opinion).
That is why I’ve put it all down in a new book
The Human Element: Ten New Rules for kickstarting our failing organ...These are the rules:
The ten new rulesRule 1: Recruit staff for their personality not their qualifications
Rule 2: Dump the rulebooks and targets
Rule 3: Put relationships at the heart of organisations
Rule 4: Demerge everything
Rule 5: Obliterate the hierarchies and empires
Rule 6: Give people whole jobs to do
Rule 7: Chuck out the big IT systems
Rule 8: Give everyone the chance to feel useful
Rule 9: Make organisations into engines of regeneration
Rule 10: Localise everything
They are not co-production, but they seem to be implied by the co-production movement. What do you think?
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