Part of the way in which partnerships intervene in the ecology of our public service systems is as a check on fragmented conceptions of need and how to respond to it. In a paper presented at ISPSO in 1986, in New York, Jim Krantz and Tom Gilmore describe:
‘… the current distinction between leadership and management (which) often results in a split that constitutes an attack on the critical function of leadership to link means and ends. This unconsciously produces ….a debilitating “segmentalist” culture that inhibits innovation and adaptation to emerging novel circumstances’.
We can see an analogue for this split in partnerships – between strategy (as vision) and delivery (as performance). The prevalence of ‘silo thinking’ (a glamourised – perhaps phallic- way of describing segmentalist thinking), is countered by the drive for ‘joined up thinking’ and ‘joined up policy’. In the light of the need to reduce levels of public expenditure – the dreamy achievement of ‘better for less’ – this way of conceptualising the relationships between needs, ends and means is gaining an edge; since ‘my’ reduction in services through a (to me) rational cut in funding, will create perverse, and unforeseen demands (and costs) for ‘you’, delivering something elsewhere in the system.
Many partnerships try – at least in the early stages of their life cycle – to ‘tackle’ causes, rather than symptoms. Their aspiration – and part of their rationale as a partnership, rather than a ‘single’ service, is that they are able to solve a different type of problem, not deep so much as entrenched – widespread and intractable , multi faceted and made up of 1000s of forces all interacting simultaneously. This is where – and why – some of the principles of general systems thinking have been popularised, and begun to be used in joint work between partners. I think that there is a significant tendency to fantasise around this aspect of partnership working – reminiscent of the practice of ‘drilling down’ to the ‘real issue’ discussed in Tony Blair’s ‘The Journey’, where he insists that this is how ‘you get a grip’ (of problems, of reality, of terrorism etc). Arguably, he was in the ‘grip’ of his own drilling down.
Facing need in ways which resist fragmentation depend on degrees of intimacy – on each of us seeing one another as we really are, and both of us being able to ‘bear’ that.
Slingshot