Easier INC

If traditionally commissioners have...

Then commissioning in the new world will require them to...

• Specified scope and outcomes at the outset.

• Treat scope and outcomes as emergent.

• Approached implementation as a pilot or project, where a model is conceived, tested and evaluated (in that order).

• Favour action-learning over implementation, where viable operating models are an outcome of continuous experimentation and where evaluation is baked into that process.

• Measured success against predetermined goals.

• Develop new measures and learning mechanisms as goals and focus emerge and evolve.

• Maintained a safe distance to assure independence and objectivity.

• Work hand-in-glove with citizens, communities and providers as an integral part of the process of discovery, interpretation, prioritisation and action-learning.

• Used accountability to locate and leverage responsibility with providers.

• Emphasise mutuality, shared sense-making, collective endeavour and shared responsibility.

• Based evaluation and performance management on what providers can directly control or assumed that providers have material control over delivering what matters.

• Maintain a collective and evolving understanding of what really matters across communities and networks, enabling interdependencies and system dynamics to be discussed and translated into shared action for improvement.

• Aimed to produce generalisable findings and models that can be scaled and spread to anywhere.

• Aim to produce context-specific understandings about what has worked here and why, in order to inform ongoing innovation.

• Acted as the arbiter of what matters, assuming authority over evaluation and rendering definitive judgements of success or failure.

• Act as the guardian of shared principles and values, engaging citizens, communities, providers and provider networks in coproduction, enabling learning and differences in perspective to come forward and be understood; to act as system stewards.

1.

STOP 

Current roles, measures, contracts, issues, etc are put to one side in order to step back and see a bigger picture. What is the valuable difference the world needs that you could be capable of achieving together? How can you frame a common purpose?

2.

LISTEN

What matters to each of you about how this purpose is delivered? What would get you excited and engaged? What do you value? What would make you anxious and what would you need in order to feel safe in exploring a different way forward together?

3.

LOOK

What is happening today and why? How does this relate to the common purpose that’s been defined and to what you have identified matters to each other? What practical challenges does all of this suggest that you will need to work on together?

4.

TEST

How will you take practical steps together to test something new? At what scale? With what urgency? How will you discover through action how to deliver your common purpose while winning together?

5. 

RESPOND

What have these tests of change revealed about the potential to work differently together? What’s worked and what has got in the way? How can people, process, structure and infrastructure now adapt in order to scale, spread and accelerate what’s worked and to resolve what hasn’t?