“Every block of stone has statue inside it
and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it. I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him
free”
Michelangelo di Lodovico
Buonarroti Simoni (1475-1564)
The
most famous sculptor of all time, Michelangelo, must have known a thing or two
about long-term planning. His
works of art often took many months or years to accomplish and were feats of
craft as well as works of art. His
thoughts on the subject confirm – as we must surely have known- that sculpting
a piece of stone is not a matter of hacking bits off piecemeal in the hope that
the result sort of works, but that the artist’s vision coupled with the
physical realities of the material are both crucial parts of the process.
Similarly,
there are two ways of tackling a local authority budget in an era of
austerity. Either you can do the incremental
hacking, reducing the size of the budget year on year but trying to keep it more
or less the same shape, or you can
try and ‘see the angel in the marble’ and reshape the budget over time to
create something new and maybe even better. Not many people would dispute that the second approach
is preferable.
It’s
not just a question of the budget, of course. The budget is nothing more than a financial model of
the organisation, encapsulating the outcomes you want to deliver and the
allocation of resources over time which, if properly managed, will accomplish those
outcomes. As an aside
(although really it’s a subject for another piece) it is surprising how often
you find that the budget does not model the organisation. If the same bits of the budget
overspend or underspend year after year, that’s a sign that the budget and the
real world are out of alignment.
When that happens then either the budget or the delivery model needs to
change.
If
a budget is a model of the outcomes expressed through resource allocation then
there are three bits every budget process needs to consider. Essentiallly;
-
What are the outcomes we want to achieve?
-
What is the delivery model that will get out to those outcomes?
-
How shall we allocate resources to achieve the delivery model?
In
an organisation with ample funding, this is the order you would logically always
do it.
Every
planning process starts from ‘now’
- the shape of the block of marble you see in front of you. Michelangelo would not have been
able to get his seventeen foot high statue of David out of a six foot cube
however hard he tried. Even the
best have to accept their limitations.
Where
to start is a matter of choice: although experience may tell a good sculptor to
begin in one place or another. For most local authorities, after seven
years of funding cuts, the
availability of money is the limiting factor, so it might make sense to start with the budget – as long as you
are confident the budget does in fact model reality. Alternatively – as many authorities are now doing – you
could start with the outcomes, throw away all assumptions about the delivery
model, and work out what’s the best way forward, ending up with a budget that
expresses a new paradigm.
The practical difficulty with this is that the existing delivery model
can be hard or expensive to change. Often the choice of approach is a matter of what works
politically. Whichever corner of
the block you chisel at first, the result should be the same, as long as
budget, delivery and outcomes are all part of the process.
Whatever
way you go it is clearly the wrong approach to keep hacking away without first
visualising the angel in the marble.
No comments:
Post a Comment