Weeknotes S1, Eps 10 ‘The 21st Century Wicked Economy’ and Series End…….
By: Paul Frainer
Tags: Economy, Local Government, Collaboration, Social Innovation, Urban Planning

More like ‘Fortnight Notes’ again but if I’m honest this is just the way it’s gonna be with the miniscule amount of time I have for these; “He says,” perched on the edge of the sofa, on the early Saturday morning coffee break whilst ferrying children to swimming/karate or whatever else is current!! (any content is good content, right?!?). Don’t worry though (I hear your collective sigh of relief!) I won’t be terminating the #weeknotes journey at the end of series 1…. They have been far to valuable a tool in my reflection and open working to stop now…

I will try and do a mop up of my thoughts on Series 1 before Christmas, stay tuned….

Being a full 2 weeks since my last musings, I have 5 moments for this blog;

One… Monday 11th Marco Picardi joined our team, another great placement from the public practice team. Marco has joined the team to work predominantly on our North East Cambridge Innovation District Area Action Plan. He has enormous experience as an urban planner in delivering complex international master-planning schemes and its a real testament to the public practice model that we can bring these types of bespoke skills into a local authority planning team to ensure the place shaping we are working has the very best minds helping to bring social, economic and environment innovation to our building places of the future. Marco is our 4th Public Practice placement from as many cohorts and the success of our partnership with Finn and the team is really gathering pace.

On a human note, its always really good to welcome new faces into the team especially those who share many of the same values and passion of our existing group. I managed to get some time set aside to chat with Marco and grab coffee and begin to learn a little bit about him, we share the same Italian heritage so not just planning we have in common!

The power of understanding the global picture on place making

Two… Wednesday 13th I attended a small roundtable session run by Linda Christie and Professor Duncan Maclellan. I’d recently spoken with Linda on the research she is doing around this in conjunction with Places For People and its an area I have a huge and passionate interest in. The workshop was a wrap up of the work so far and it was really interesting to see some of the ‘wicked challenges’ we share in understanding the intrinsic links between having a safe and secure roof over our heads and economic prosperity.

You would think this is a reasonably obvious statement but it is clear (certainly IMO) we do not have a functional economic system which assimilates place, local economics and social impact at the heart of how we measure success. Without detracting from the huge amount of hard graft put in by those who work across sectors, the many moving parts, services, governance and (immovable structures) are disjointed at best and more often than not ineffective, and significantly reduce the opportunities our citizens and communities have to provide a positive contribution. Instead our world is often completely focussed on failure demand, which is ultimately far more costly in both social and economic terms and unsustainable as we continue to encounter new and complex modern day challenges including climate change.

I will keep you posted on how the research progresses, and it is linked to some of the work I am looking to explore in our plan making journey for Cambridge. This also is intrinsically linked to a wider network of skills and colleagues who perhaps traditionally have not worked together to collaborate on these issues which I’ll pick up later in the blog.

Three….. I can’t not mention our Greater Cambridge Shared Planning Service away day on the 18th. I’ll keep it brief as I tweeted quite a lot about it on the day. All I will say was that it felt like a real line in the sand moment for the team as we finalised coming together as two local authority planning services into one team of not inconsiderable size c.140 people.

Its been a really long journey to even get us to this point and we know the really hard work of aligning systems and process, developing a new shared culture and attitude and managing our parent councils distinctive aspirations in a brave new world is still to come. I do feel though to get the team together to celebrate this moment, award individual over and above successes (with Alpaca awards….. Don’t ask!!!) and feel solidarity from our Chief Execs who attended to hand out the awards, was a great point to reset, restart and progress. Big thanks to all, but especially our event organising team in Jane, Heather, Cat, Vicky and Jenny.

Four and Five….. These go together as they were two meetings I had on Friday (21st) and really linked to the ‘wicked economy’ issues I mentioned earlier.

First meeting of the day was with Guy Clifton at Grant Thornton. I met with Guy through my work with SOLACE and we shared details at the summit in October. I am interested in some of the work Guy and his team are progressing in a couple of areas; Both around the placemakers leadership program that is in its infancy in partnership with a strong communities focussed organisation in Collaborate CIC, and the Vibrant Economy Indexing work that starts to approach the measurement of economic wellbeing with more qualitative measures in order shift conversation from GVA/GDP as the sole (limited) metric. This is not only refreshing and progressive, but also for me shows an intrinsic understanding of fundamental requirement for all of us to embed a co-designed participatory approach we MUST scale up if we wish to shape a much more inclusive, healthy, open and secure future for our communities, especially the increasingly uncertain and volatile political, social, economic and environmental landscape we are in.

Second meeting on Friday was in much the same vein, and was fantastic to finally meet f2f Owen Garling, a colleague working down the road in Cambridgeshire County Council, managing the many facets of their transformation journey. I have been acquainted with Owen for some time in the digital ether so its always good to finally get a coffee in.

Owen is progressing so really innovative work at Cambridgeshire and has a healthy passion for changing the world too… In local government we are well known for silo working and often don’t see the value (join the dots) in certain areas because they are not directly related to the immediate (or historic) working we are undertaking. This requires a substantial cultural paradigm shift, as organisations, like communities are interconnected in much more nuanced ways than the sum of their services, and in order to begin addressing the systems issues that exist we need to work with the whole system — not just those bits we understand!

Transformation is a great starting point for me as these teams often are seeing and trying to understand complex service problems across a wide range of areas so are often tapped into the relationships, and interactions that are critical to many issues.

In two tier government systems it is vital to build strong relationships as there are so many vital moving parts which have the potential for transformational impact if we can build a more coherent ‘hive mind’ to supercharge our collective experience, skills and most importantly passion to change for improved public outcomes.

Pods…. This week was all about the BBC 4 Intrigue Series ‘Tunnel 29’ the story of escape from East Berlin into the west in the early 60s…. Amazing story of courage and innovation. A stark reminder of the very different places many of our European cities were during that period!

Also loved hearing our South Cambs new Chief Executive Liz Watts on the LGIU Pod series… I love some of the stuff this series covers, but especially great to hear Liz talk place shaping at Northstowe New Town and the power of our emerging Local Plan and the opportunities that good inclusive growth can bring.

Books…. Nothing new, still tying to get time to finish Hilary Cottam’s Radical Help.. But Panto rehearsals have somewhat got i my way….(Don’t ask!!!)

See you for a wrap up before Xmas.