The Jenga approach carries public services to the edge of collapse

The first instinct of many local authorities to cuts has been to adopt the Jenga Principle to reduce costs.   The problem is this is not a sustainable solution.

Many people will be familiar with the game of Jenga ®.   Fifty or so wooden blocks are stacked into a tower and the idea is to withdraw the blocks one at a time without the tower falling over. It sounds simple, but it is surprisingly compelling.   The game works because wooden blocks, even if they are engineered to be the same size, are all slightly different, so when they are built into a tower there are always some that are loose, and others that bear the weight of the tower.   

The critical thing is that as the game progresses the centre of gravity of the tower changes, so a block that was loose a couple of turns ago, and was consequently withdrawn, might later turn out to have been crucial to maintaining the integrity of the tower as it’s weight shifts and ….whoops! Game over.  

And in case the boys and girls at Jenga get cross with me for using their registered trademark to make a point, let me just say that the game is enormous fun for players of all ages.

There is a useful analogy here for the way organisations behave when cutting costs.   The temptation is to go for the easy targets- the loose bricks.   In our latest round of public sector cuts, deleting the posts of senior and middle managers has been a common recourse, as has doing away with temporary workers and cutting back office functions in general.     Voluntary redundancy is another Jenga Principle stalwart, especially in the public sector where we tend to pride ourselves on workforce-friendly employment practices and don't like telling people they are not needed. 

There is nothing wrong with this approach up to a point, but there are clearly limits to the extent to which it can work.  In the real world situation, just as in Jenga, it isn’t possible to say with certainty when the tower is going to collapse for want of a crucial piece. At times, an external influence can precipitate a collapse; say, when someone puts their drink down heavily on the table. 

As time goes by, however, it does become increasingly evident that the organisation/ tower is not as resilient as it once was.   As the game progresses, players become more risk averse, taking much longer over their moves,  prodding the tower gently to see what happens, desperately looking for the next ‘easy win’.  These tactics are fine in Jenga but it is exactly the wrong thing to be doing inside an organisation, because in times of change risk management is called for not risk aversion, innovation not more of the same.

Authorities that have done the Jenga Principle to death need to identify the risk and move on.   The mistake, of course, in carrying the Jenga approach too far is to assume that the organisation needs to stay the same shape but with fewer blocks in it.  The alternative approach is to rebuild the tower using fewer bricks.    In practice this means rethinking the way we delivering services and redesigning  service delivery and customer interfaces around more efficient models.  This can either be done as you go along or in one go, although the scope and complexity of local authority services I think tends to favour the incremental approach.   

This might be called the ‘Tower of Hanoi’ principle after the puzzle that requires the player to move the tower from one point to another in the fewest possible moves without putting a larger block on top of a smaller one.

One thing is certain. Whether organisations adopt the Jenga approach or the Tower of Hanoi principle, the next phase will be harder and more towers will be in danger of collapse.  It will take all the skill of public sector managers to prevent that happening. 

Making Room for Innovation in the Public Sector

We all want innovation in the public services- it’s an essential recognition that the world in which most of our public provision came into being has gone, perhaps never to return.

Several commentators have drawn attention to Schumpeter’s creative destruction theory and its applicability to the current situation.  Creative destruction is the theory of the market that shows how entrepreneurs displace old-fashioned and unprofitable activity in a process that continually creates new markets and closes off obsolete ones.

We have seen this happening this week with the electrical retailer Comet formally entering administration, frozen out reportedly by internet shopping. In the media’s eyes, Apple has been labelled as the main 'creative destroyer'. 

The theory of creative destruction doesn’t apply perfectly in the public sector, because here it is usually the same organisations who have to do both and creating and the destroying.  As we know it’s a whole lot more difficult to shut down bits of your own organisation- there are psychological, emotional and cultural barriers in play as well as the inevitable costs.

What is more, users of services in the public sector have both a louder voice and a reason for expressing it.  It is unlikely there will be too many placard-waving protesters outside the local branch of Comet, but contrast that with the closure of a local library or leisure centre.    And yet curiously my local branch of Comet always seemed to be so much busier than the library.

Libraries are a good example  of how creative destruction applies – or doesn’t apply – in the public sector.  Local authorities have been reinventing their library ‘offer’ over recent years and in addition to the traditional book lending and reference libraries, many now provide CD and DVD lending, internet access, adult learning and even a café. Some are even getting into lending e-books.  You might say that innovation is not the problem so much as mission creep - which would be fine if local authority budgets were expanding to keep pace but presents a problem when they are not.  

But before I fall a victim to the militant wing of CILIP (for the uninitiated, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals), let me just say that I am using libraries only as a convenient and familiar example of a wider issue.  

Two years ago, NESTA suggested that the way to creative destruction in public services was to focus on outcomes, changing funding to incentivise delivery of results, reforming procurement and commissioning to deliver outcome-based specifications and introducing lighter touch inspection arrangements to facilitate.   

It cannot be wrong to ask ourselves what exactly we are getting with the services we provide, but none of these solutions address the fundamental issue that ultimately closing things is a matter of political leadership. This week we saw Stoke City Council leader Mohammed Pervez on BBC4 grappling with this problem as he set out to close old peoples’ homes, libraries and the city farm in order to preserve Sure Start children’s centres in his city.   He came across as a serious and concerned politician doing his best with a difficult situation, but he knew as we did that this was just the start of the attrition.  

The point is we can be as innovative as we like in the public services, and we frequently are,  but the logic of the market does not apply in the way it did to poor old Comet.  The problem is learning how to turn off those services that no longer offer value for money while persuading people that it’s the right thing to do.   It is the destructive bit of creation that’s almost the bigger challenge.