" Innovation comes from our capacity to collaborate creatively."
(Charles Leadbetter. "State of Loneliness" The Guardian.)
I was in two important meetings this (long) morning which essentially might be said to have turned on whether each of those present believed that creatively collaborating was or was not the way forward to the innovation we seek to bring about at Paces Campus.
Observing that "Giving people a right to more services might not be the right starting point", Charles Leadbetter then proposes that "Radical public services innovation will only come from a markedly different starting point. The key will be to redesign services to enable more mutual self-help, so that people can create and sustain their own solutions. The best way to do more with less is to enable people to do more for themselves and not need an expensive, professionalised public service. Enabling people to come together to find their own, local solutions should become one of the main goals of public services. Services do a better job when they leave behind stronger, supportive relationships for people to draw on and so not need a service."
When Mike Chitty (@mikechitty) tweeted today "Am I the only one thinking a National Care Service is a really bad idea. Care is an emotional relationship - not a professional service", he was clearly not alone in raising the question.
Charles Leadbetter goes on "There are good reasons for putting relationships at the core of effective public provision." This essentially was the message too from a consultant, Ann Menzies-Blythe, who worked with Paces a couple of years ago: she stressed the importance of internal relationships and communication - of learning to talk supportively to ourselves first.
And, in this socially networked world, I am prompted to imagine that mutual "creative collaborations" which put relationships and the building of relationships at the core of effective services and marketing are the way not only to deliver innovative services but maybe also be the way to survive the blizzard of public services cuts that are on their way.
In which case, those who do not see the value of creative collaborations are doomed.