An update on the OneTeamGov Leeds movement and fortnightly meet-up, which takes place every other Wednesday.

OneTeamGov is a movement about improving public services and changing the way we work. In many ways, it reminds me of the Global GovJam. There are loose structures, guidelines, principles. The culture makes people feel safe. Safe to share, collaborate, try new things. No one organisation owns the events. There is freedom to create the future together. The simple act of different people coming together triggers new actions from new connections — new meet-ups, new moments.

The Leeds movement

Leeds OneTeamGov meet-up started in November 2017. Sharon had been to a London meet-up and thought we could do that in Leeds. Read more in Sharon’s post: A year[1] since the first OneTeamGov breakfast in Leeds — the story so far and what next?

Meet-ups ran in different locations and from September 2018 to February 2019 they ran at Leeds City Council. We then moved to Platform (by Leeds train station) as many people find it easier to get to. We also ran a Leeds Digital Festival social and visited DWP at Quarry House.

Meet-ups only last an hour and are not always easy to get to for everyone, so we experiment. Rochelle from NHS Digital and I ran a OneTeamGov User Research Unconference that came from a need identified at the meet-ups. As Rochelle said:

“People, irrespective of organisation or experience, are struggling with the same issues and as a group, we can be a great support for each other.”

Defining moments

This year, people have written lovely things about Leeds meet-ups. This helps us define our value and shape how we might develop future meet-ups.

In January, Azrael, a fast streamer and analyst working in HMRC’s Cyber Security Team at the time, wrote Working together across government and beyond. Azrael spoke of the value of the meet-ups for individuals, teams, and organisations: “It’s through individuals, through us, that our organisations are connected. To bust silos, we have to build bridges.”

In June, Helen, a Data Scientist at the Food Standards Agency, wrote about attending the meet-ups in One who what now? “It embeds a confidence and a resolve to bring about change and look for ways to make things better, and a commitment to positive practices such as working in the open, and including everyone in the conversation,” said Helen.

In July, Tracey, a Business Analyst at DWP Digital, shared Networking as an introvert which reflects on Wellbeing Camp and Leeds meet-ups. Tracey feels comfortable at meet-ups and is making new connections with Leeds City Council. Said Tracey: “This has emphasised the need to share and reuse what we know with others to enable more joined-up services for people.”

Future meet-ups

What comes next is up to the group. We plan to visit HMRC, NHS Digital, and hold events at different times and places. Check out OneTeamGov Events for information about meet-ups, and invite friends and colleagues who might be interested. We welcome feedback for future meet-ups  —  and thank everyone involved so far.

Published on OneTeamGov Medium

NHS Digital is transforming health and care services in a fast-changing digital age. You can read more about this on their blog as they ‘work out loud’.

NHS Digital delivers national IT, systems and infrastructure from its Digital Delivery Centre in Leeds – a working space that clearly speaks to its values. A visit to the Digital Delivery Centre this week provided insights into these values and what makes teams work well. Here are five top takeaways.

1. Collaboration is enabled

When you enter the space, it is striking how open it is and how people are enabled to collaborate. Teams that need to collaborate co-locate whenever possible and there are breakout spaces where people can work together. There is a reliance on guidelines and standards, so having the right people in the space and enabling them to connect is essential.

2. Agile working works

Teams work in an agile way. This means they build products/systems/software rapidly in short ‘sprints’, releasing developments as soon as possible so that they can be tested and developed further. It is important to ‘fail fast’ so that teams can quickly exclude anything that doesn’t work well. Crucially, ensuring people who are empowered to act can come together to make decisions leads to more efficient ways of working.

3. Openness makes things better

There are large whiteboards in the space for working out loud. This allows teams to hold stand-ups (instead of longer sit down meetings). It also means it is easy to understand what everyone is working on. People gather around the boards sharing knowledge and experience while collaborating on the problem in hand. Dashboards are also visible so everyone can see progress.

4. Cross-disciplinary teams deliver

Teams are structured around expertise for the work that needs to be done. This includes a Spotify tribe/squad type model for cross-disciplinary teams. Cross-team working is key to effective collaboration and ensures systems and services are joined up.

5. Focusing on user needs is fundamental

User research and co-designing with users are vital because teams must know that they are delivering the right things with minimum waste. Visible on the walls and whiteboards are detailed personas. These reveal insights into people who use the services and makes clear their needs. Designing using prototypes to get early feedback and working with real people ensures user needs are met. 

There is much any team can learn from these ways of working.

Thanks to Emma Harvey, head of product at NHS Digital, for hosting a tour for our group from the University of Leeds.

Leeds Poverty Truth Commission launched in 2014 to explore the question: ‘What if people who have directly faced poverty were involved in decisions about poverty?’

I first got involved with Leeds Poverty Truth in 2016 as one of 20 or so business and civic commissioners. Being a commissioner with Leeds Poverty Truth is a year-long journey that involves monthly meet-ups and various other interactions with testifying commissioners who have lived experience of poverty. Sometimes the full Commission meets. Sometimes we meet in small groups or we meet spontaneously as individuals. Most meet-ups take place at Ebor Court in Leeds, followed by lunch. But meet-ups have taken place everywhere from Leeds Civic Hall and Leeds City Council Chamber to the offices of Victoria shopping centre and Leeds Business Improvement District. Other times there have been exploratory visits to places such as the Real Junk Food Project supermarket and LS14 Trust community cafe.

Being a commissioner is not only about meeting with others in places in and around the city. It is also about the changes that happen in and around us as individuals. When we started on this journey there was an emphasis on listening. And, in one of our first meet-ups, we learnt about four levels of listening: downloading, factual, empathic and generative, as defined by Otto Scharmer. Listening is important because the degree to which we listen is proportional to the changes that can happen. Here, some of us learnt that we sometimes don’t listen as well as we could.

Each year the Commission presents its findings and the findings of the 2016-17 commission will be presented this autumn. Individuals and organisations will then seek to embed the learning into their practice. Ahead of this, I have been reflecting on my own learning to date. Here are my top four takeaways…

1. Relationships are key to positive outcomes

Having spent time getting to know everyone, my first takeaway is about the importance of relationships. Notably, how relationships require trust and how trust builds over time. One time we did an exercise called Mapping Leeds which involves commissioners pairing up to explore the city through each other’s eyes. As we walked we talked about what we saw and how it made us feel. We noted our sense of place and any real or perceived boundaries. And we discussed our observations together as a group. The key learning was about the importance of empathy and recognising that relationships can change ourselves and our cities.

2. There is a place for structure and spontaneity

The journey of being a commissioner is structured into four stages: engagement, exploration, experimentation and embedding. Engagement sets the scene and tunes your senses for what follows. For example, we shared stories, poetry and visual art created by testifying commissioners. We set out a shared vision to collaborate and unite to explore solutions to poverty, locally. Exploration involves various exercises so that we can get to know one another and the issues. For example, we met with the DWP to share experiences and discuss services. We are now at the experimentation stage. This is about spontaneously testing things and failing fast in ways that we can build on. We have not yet reached the embedding stage but this will be essential to delivering positive outcomes.

3. Everyone is an expert with wisdom to share

Everyone involved with Leeds Poverty Truth has learning to offer, everyone is an expert. There is wisdom to share, everywhere. Sharing our stories, thoughts and our journey has brought us all closer together on a very human level.

A few favourite quotes heard during my time with the Commission include:

“We can do big things in a small way”

“Not everything starts with action, sometimes it starts with thoughts and ideas”

“It’s like a pyramid and people don’t know what’s going on at the bottom of the pyramid. One person cannot see it all…”

“People give a face to the facts”

From conversations between commissioners the following themes emerged:

• Poverty is no longer a thing you can keep quiet about
• Transactional to transformational
• Economy of hopelessness
• Individually tailored responses
• Confidence building
• Humanising

And from these themes, we have gone on to test several experiments.

4. It is powerful to prototype the future, together

My favourite stage so far is the experimental stage. We are now collaborating to prototype the future, together. Earlier in the process, we created a ‘living systems’ map of Leeds to explore what makes strong communities. This led us to understand that experiments must be flexible. They must happen in the right place. We learnt that fear separates and that institutions need to be more mobile. How communication can be a blocker and one-to-one communication is powerful. We learnt that communication is a two-way process, that it is often the ‘receiver’ of the communication who really communicates…

We are now working on three experiments: a jobs app, a vehicle to share stories, and a service design experiment. Other experiments being considered (pictured above) include college food banks, various ‘junk food’ type services, and co-creating communications using ways of working inspired by Leeds GovJam, as recently experienced by members of Leeds Poverty Truth. We do not yet know how these experiments will turn out, but they are already making us think, feel and act differently when it comes to the complex issue of poverty.

The lessons learnt and relationships developed at Leeds Poverty Truth will extend way beyond this blog and the term of this year’s Commission. So, I highly recommend being a commissioner if you get a chance. There are also other ways to get involved to help the movement.

Find out more about the Leeds Poverty Truth Commission