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Suffolk and its surrounding partners have been pressing ahead with the Total Place agenda outside the national pilots' programme reports Andrea Hill. "So we brought in a project agitator who jarred our thinking, a conceptual catalyst who was a whole systems and creative thinker, and who combined the ability to listen attentively with the confidence to be challenging – not an easy task with so many chief executives in the room..." The idea of Total Place could create synergies and savings in public services and deliver solutions almost inconceivable in the current approaches to service transformation. The challenge for organisations seeking to embrace this new approach will be to resist over-managing the outcomes, over planning the approach and stifling creativity and trust which more than any other forces will be the engines of change. Here in Suffolk and Norfolk we have been working with Improvement East who had the foresight to develop place based partnership working. We have worked alongside the Leadership Centre to develop leadership of place work across county areas. Our success has been testament to our shared commitment, not least because it coincided with local government review, something which is inherently competitive. Our approach to Total Place – the lives we lead, the leaders we need – has involved taking down organisational boundaries and creating trust. Collaboration unleashes energy. It is easier to share than it is to defend. Both our chair, Cllr Richard Stay and I have experienced first hand the damage to collaborative partnership working of competitive bidding processes based on organisational and territorial boundaries in our case through previous rounds of local government review. We wanted to prevent a repeat of that. It is a tribute to the political leadership of both Improvement East and Suffolk that our councillors had the vision to develop a new style of whole system working and to see the potential for rolling this out across the region. This project set out with three key objectives: first, to develop real trust between leaders across Suffolk; second, to find genuine efficiencies across organisations by collaboratively redesigning services from a customer's viewpoint; and third, to engage with the public in unusual ways, to enable them to be part of the transformation of their lives. In practical terms, this has meant bringing together 22 chief executives – from all of the organisations that one way or another impact on the lives of local people – who now meet regularly and look at ways in which we can work better together, something that's not easy working alone. So we brought in a project agitator who jarred our thinking, a conceptual catalyst who was a whole systems and creative thinker, and who combined the ability to listen attentively with the confidence to be challenging – not an easy task with so many chief executives in the room. And it meant challenge – not just our thinking but the way we behaved. Behaviour is culture. In truth, it is not easy to learn new behaviours that have served us well in the past but many of us stuck with the discomfort because we believed in new possibilities. We believe Suffolk is a forerunner to Total Place but we won't be endorsing a toolkit. We would counsel against adopting a project-driven product that can be downloaded, plugged in and played in any town hall. This is a philosophy. It starts with trust and builds from there. All the same, the lessons we are learning in Suffolk and Norfolk are transplantable. This has been a learning experience, not least for me. It's important to resist pushing forward independently of partner organisations. In the early days, my energy and enthusiasm manifested itself in forcefulness and intolerance to a slow pace. Moving forward is a shared activity. As leaders we have all had to build a ‘trust bank'. Positive collaborative and sharing behaviour builds credit with partners. Negative behaviours, whether intentional or not, mean withdrawals. The rules are simple: if you make more withdrawals than you have credit, ruin soon follows. So we have all worked hard and now have ‘professional friendships' built on deep trust. It's now time to take the message out. Shortly, we will host an Innovation conference. We are bringing together 300 people from across the county. The brightest minds, the movers and shakers who will be exposed to a day of new ideas, solutions and thinking. We are, in effect, incubating a social virus, one that we hope will infect the Suffolk DNA and liberate the social capital that will transform the lives of the people who live here. We are tapping into Suffolk Talent. We will publish a Collaborative Cookbook. It will show people how to behave the changes in their organisations and communities. A cookbook metaphor is powerful – we can all assemble the ingredients but cooking and creating are active and very personal processes. Things taste differently in different places because of subtle but important local differences. Lives We Lead is helping us to confront some uncomfortable truths. Our current organisationally separate interventions are not yielding the results people need. We neither work well together nor in the interests of the people we're here to serve. It's time to work differently, spending less money whilst liberating more staff and community talent. Of course, we would never have started from here, with all public sector organisations facing tough times. But here is where we are. This is a watershed for public services. If we can liberate ideas, help others realise their dreams, find ways of doing things that we'd never have anticipated, and if it helps us secure a better future, then this approach will be a success. Andrea Hill is chief executive of Suffolk CC and chair of the executive advisory group of Improvement East

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WHITEHALL

Building up our trust bank

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