How might collaboration unlock success for local government reorganisation?

Local government collaboration

The saying goes, ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together,’ and we couldn’t agree more. Collaboration is often one of the catalysts for achieving sustained success in complex challenges, at scale. We’ve seen this first-hand in projects with Oxford City Council and Buckinghamshire Council.

But, what does local government collaboration mean to public sector servants, and what are the challenges that a good outcome will help to overcome?

Last month, we invited stakeholders to join a practical workshop to identify and address some of the current challenges in local government. It was a great session, attended by representatives from as far as a municipality in Sweden.

Current challenges in local government

When it comes to facing complex challenges, it’s important to understand what is happening and what frustrations people in the system are experiencing. In discussions with our workshop participants, we uncovered three key challenges in local government.

1. Resource constraints—the bottom line is that budgets are tight and teams lack the time and capacity to spend on building relationships and aligning on joint projects even if they show promise.
2. Disparate responsibilities—frequent role changes across departments, varying levels of training and expertise, or unclear responsibilities mean that there can be a lack of trust or uncertainty in what can be expected.
3. Incompatible tools, methods and processes—local authorities are often faced with the challenge of incumbent ways of working, compounded by restricted or incompatible digital (or analogue) systems and siloed data.

How might collaboration unlock success for local governments?

1. Enabling knowledge sharing and reducing wasted effort—the pressure to deliver on efficiency is commonplace. Learning from peers can help us understand what's working for them and to avoid costly mistakes.
2. Opening opportunities for pooled budgets—sharing a common challenge, and working together to identify or implement mutual solutions can open the doors to achieve better impact.
3. Consistent services without the lottery postcode—learning from one another, working together to help the public access and experience services in a consistent way, irrespective of geographical boundaries.

Practical tips for building a collaborative future for local authorities

When it comes to complex challenges, being able to identify micro-actions is a great starting point for making tangible changes with safe to try experiments, or zero-to-low risk actions that could potentially be scaled for bigger success.

Our workshop with the different local authorities revealed some exciting opportunities summarised below as practical tips for building a collaborative future.

Connection and communication

Start by leveraging the power within your human networks. Make use of shared digital spaces e.g. local government Slack channels to openly ask questions and share insights. Seek out a support buddy, or create informal support networks with peers in similar roles at other local authorities. A simple but effective step is to share organisational charts so that people know who their counterparts are, and will ultimately feel more confident in reaching out to others.

Lean on standardised building blocks

Collaboration is far easier when everyone starts from the same page. Organisations such as the Local Government Association are making great strides in centralising key resources, i.e. training materials, process maps, and service design frameworks. Adopting consistent principles and standards across local authorities will help create a common language, level the playing field in terms of skills and make it much simpler for you to share and adapt work from your peers both within and between authorities.

Work in the open

Local authorities can tackle issues of duplication by committing to being more transparent. Shared libraries or repositories where data, recent project summaries, and future roadmaps are made accessible—are key to facilitating this. In doing so, you can spark opportunities for partnership that might otherwise have been missed.

Locked-in doesn’t mean locked-out

Many local authorities are locked-in to existing supplier arrangements, resulting in inconsistent technology stacks between them. This can make coordinated implementation of new initiatives difficult. However, even if supplier arrangements remain unique to the local authority, the thinking behind it doesn’t need to be—organisations can still learn from the successes of others to build underlying strategy and roadmaps for success. Strict contractual arrangements don’t prevent stakeholders from being a constructive part of the conversation.

Champion a new way of working

Senior leaders at the top must actively encourage a culture of curiosity and experimentation where teams feel psychologically safe to try new things. This means not adding to an already full workload, but instead giving permission and time for individuals and teams to dedicate themselves to new ways of working. Critically, they should advocate for ring-fenced, long-term budgets that look beyond reactive or quick wins in compressed time periods, e.g. not within weeks or months, and give strategic collaboration the stability it needs to succeed.