Changing Minds

After stepping aside as chief executive of OPM in the middle of New Labour’s second term, I was head-hunted by Accenture, the international systems integration company, to create and run a new global research centre which would focus on “public value”.

I did not coin that term, public value – nor did Accenture. In fact, my friend and colleague Mark Moore, a Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, had done that (despite others’ subsequent claims) more than a decade earlier. Mark defined public value as the contribution that public organisations make to improving social outcomes in a collectively desired direction, not just for customers and users, but for citizens and taxpayers and public representatives more widely – no easy or straightforward task.

I had met Mark at Harvard in the mid-1980s while I was studying best international practice in public management as a Kellogg Foundation Fellow. At the time, Mark was writing Creating Public Value, which was to become a bible of public management. We found ourselves to be simpatico quickly and continued working together for years; I became an adjunct lecturer at the Kennedy School in the early ‘90s and Mark subsequently served on the board of OPM’s Public Management Foundation.

When I was approached by the head-hunters, I saw the Accenture role as an opportunity to further develop and test my version of public value – “managing for social result” – on a global stage, with committed resources and plenty of examples of good practice in hand, and with lots of international learning to be done. So I agreed to join the firm and to help create and direct the Institute for Public Service Value (IPSV).

Assembling a small team, our early discussions focused on Mark’s work and on what precisely “public value” means to those on the receiving end. It was fine for managers, service professionals, consultants and academics to expound on the beneficial outcomes of public services, we observed, but the question remained: is that what recipients, customers, service users – the public – actually support, feel and enjoy?

The new IPSV team decided that one of our first efforts would be to find out just that.

Over the next three years, IPSV worked with Accenture’s international offices to gather locally representative citizens in 17 cities around the world to define what public value means to them. London was our first city, moving on in year one, 2007, to include Sydney, Singapore, Berlin, New York, Paris, Madrid and Los Angeles. During the next two years, our Global Cities Forum included Oslo, Toronto, Tokyo, Rome, Dublin, Johannesburg, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro and New Delhi.

To set the public service agenda for discussion, we researched local newspapers over the previous six month to identify three key public service issues at that time and in that place. In London those included health and education; in Sydney, where a road tunnel had recently collapsed, transport was a key concern; in Mexica City, disaster preparedness was high on the list; and in Rome and in New Delhi, public safety was a key concern.

In each city, we structured a debate, between citizens, service users and taxpayers, employing an old OPM deliberative practice and donning participants in coloured T-shirts, each representing one of the three debating roles. After encouraging each subset to develop its stance on the key local issues, we asked participants to share their disagreements agreeably (apologies to Alastair and Rory) and to develop a common set of principles that should guide local government’s creation of public value in relation to their own key service needs and issues.

The reports on all of these events were made available to participants and to local officials and we subsequently met with local leaders to discuss the ramifications. But my enduring memory of Global Cities Forum is of an agreeable disagreement that happened in the New York City Forum.

At the beginning of the day, New York participants – in an ice-breaking session prior to any structured exercises and before putting on T-shirts – were asked to freely discuss what they thought were the most important things for their local government to address. The table of people that I sat in on as an observer included a middle-aged man who argued vehemently for more investment in public education – more investment, of course, requiring higher tax receipts, which New York City collects on top of state and national income taxes. But another younger participant objected sharply: “I don’t have kids, and I don’t plan to have kids. Why should I have to pay for your kids’ education?” he demanded. The two men couldn’t agree.

The day of deliberation wore on, through structured peaceful arguments between citizens, service users and taxpayers, and into the agenda-setting afternoon session of compromise and fashioned agreement. At the end of the day, we asked participants to help us construct a combined list of priorities for public value creation that we could share with New York City’s mayor (Michael Bloomberg, at the time) and with top municipal executives.

Almost immediately, a hand shot up – from the morning’s objector: “Given the need for new jobs and skills in this city,” he said, “I think the most important thing for the city government to do is to improve the local education system in order to prepare young people for the future,” he declared.

“Wait a minute!” countered the father with whom the younger man had earlier debated. “This morning, when I said education is the most important thing for government to invest in, you told me you didn’t have kids and said you shouldn’t have to pay for my kids’ education.”

“So…,” responded his earlier opponent, after a short pause and calmly, “you’ve changed my mind.”

Voilà!

People can change their minds, and people can change other people’s minds as well - through agreeable disagreement, through evidence and through experience. If we are to empower local people, to find Mark’s “collectively desired direction”, we need to create opportunities for more peaceful debate, for more evidence to be shared, for more reflections on experience and for more changing of minds.

Hearteningly, some public leaders do seem to get that. We recently have seen, for example, UK cabinet member Lisa Nandy courageously acknowledge: “I’m not afraid to say when I change my mind, and I have changed my mind about that [the role of the monarchy]” after her experience of having worked with members of the royal family on domestic and international issues. She wasn’t going to dogmatically prevent her learning from changing her ideas or her values.

We need a lot more “unafraid”. Creating public value, a social result that is meaningful to local people, requires the engagement of local people in sharing experience and in changing minds. That means engagement with some neighbours with whom we may strongly disagree – indeed, with some who may present views, like racism, misogyny or rejections of equality, that alienate or repel us. Yet, only through engagement in agreeable disagreement can we learn from each other, can others learn from us, and us from them.

That all requires listening, patience, and the courage to be able to change their – and maybe even our – minds.