CECAN Webinar: The Human, Learning, Systems approach to managing in complexity

Presenter: Dr Toby Lowe, Senior Lecturer in Public Leadership and Management, Newcastle Business School

Webinar Overview:

The webinar views the challenge of creating complexity-informed evaluation by seeing it as a public management challenge. How can public management adopt a more complexity-informed approach? The session will outline an emerging complexity-informed approach to public management: the Human, Learning, Systems (HLS) approach. The HLS approach involves public services responding to the variety of human need through bespoke service provision, using learning as the engine for performance improvement and stewarding the health of the systems which produce social outcomes.


Human

One of the three key tasks of managing work in an HLS way (including funding and commissioning of work) means creating the conditions in which people can build effective human relationships.

This means understanding human variety, using empathy to understand the lives of others, recognising people’s strengths, and trusting those who do the work. Variety, Empathy, Strengths and Trust (VEST).


Learning

In complex environments people are required to learn continuously in order to adapt to the dynamic, ever-changing nature of the work. In complex environments, there is no simple interventions which “works” to tackle a problem. “What works” is an on-going process of learning and adaptation.

It is the job of managers to enable staff to learn continuously as the tool for performance improvement. This means using measures to learn, not for reward/punishment. It means creating the conditions where people can be honest about their mistakes and uncertainties. It means creating reflective practice environments between and across peer groups.

This requires funders/commissioners to fund for learning and adaptation, not for “results”.



Systems

The outcomes we care about are not delivered by organisations. They are produced by whole systems – by hundreds of different factors working together. The final job of managers is therefore to act as Systems Stewards – to enable actors in the system to co-ordinate and collaborate effectively - because that it was will enable positive outcomes to emerge.