What can eyeballs teach us about change in public services?

23.07.2010

Being able to see is pretty important in Darwinian terms. Put bluntly, it's a lot easier to avoid getting eaten if you can see the predator coming.

But has the evolution of the eyeball got anything to teach us about change in public services? Stick with me on this one.

We have just launched the third in a series of reports with nef about co-production - a way of working with the potential to transform public services. At heart it's a simple idea: let's organise public services "with people" rather than doing services "to them".

It turns the traditional model of public services on its head. No more the passive consumer who gratefully receives the benevolent gift of the state. When professionals adopt a "co-produced" approach, they start with the aspirations and capabilities that a person has. They connect people who need support and their families to each other and the communities they live in. It achieves much better outcomes at far lower cost.

The reports and video of the event are all online here - but, what has all this got to do with evolutionary biology?

Co-production is an innovation that was created at the front line. Over the past year, we have found hundreds of examples where pioneering public servants and community workers had overturned the model of public services that has dominated since the welfare state was first constructed. They didn't call it co-production. It just seemed to them to be better than the way that they had been told to do things before.

What's really interesting is that, in many cases, they seem to have developed their approach independently of each other. In different places and at different times, co-production emerged as a solution because it was fundamentally more effective than the default position.

According to evolutionary biologists, the "camera eye" (that's what you've got) also evolved in different places and at different times. Something they call "convergent evolution". The premise is pretty simple - if something is a really good idea, natural selection means that it gets replicated.

Which brings me back to the challenge of making change happen in public services - why hasn't co-production already spread across services?

It highlights the selection problem in our public services.

On co-production, NESTA and nef are plugging the gap. We're intervening to make sure that these radical new approaches are spread.

We also need to think about how we change the system so that good ideas spread more naturally.

Y9UB9S23CZ4S