Book review: Living Council

Living Council author: Jens Gemmel von Dollinger.

I met Jens at the LGPN South conference back in November and, having spent a good portion of the day chatting about all things local gov, I failed to realise he was the author of the book I’d just bought!

After a busy few months both at work and with the family, I finally managed to pick up this book and read it – and I have quite fallen in love.

I started with a trusty highlighter and post-its to mark out the bits that stand out… but found myself pretty much marking up the whole book!

Resonate: to produce a positive feeling, emotional response or opinion

I found what Jens says resonated with me on multiple levels – my own vision and thinking of what a council should look like. That is:

‘A council that ‘breathes with its community, sees prevention as a default not luxury, treats data as insight not surveillance and redesigns itself around people not paperwork’.

As the wise Jo Cumper once said, the term local authority is all wrong. We shouldn’t be an authority, authoritatively telling residents what do to – we should be working in partnership to improve lives and places.

That’s the second point of resonation. There’s so much in this book that is what we’ve been trying to bring to our new DDaT service, in terms of our role in the council and our culture. As Jens says:

“Outsourcing. Once hailed as the holy grail of efficiency, outsourcing was supposed to deliver better services at lower cost. And when it failed? We ‘in-sourced’ everything. We swung the pendulum from ideology to ideology, forgetting that governance, culture and purpose matter more than who signs the payslip.”

And that’s why we’ve not seen in-sourcing itself as the answer to our problems, but the opportunity that gave us to make changes in our purpose, governance and culture that has seen the positive results we have.

Leading transformation from within

The last resonation is what we’re trying to achieve at Luton: leading transformation from within. A digital strategy not about buying a new CRM or launching a chatbot, but:

re-imagining services around user needs
empowering staff with tools that work
using data to drive decisions
creating a neighbourhood model
focusing on prevention first
structuring our service delivery around needs, not structures, with our three corporate OKRs
using data so we are powered by insight, because, to quote Jens again: ‘breathing without intelligence is just hyperventilation’

I’ve been excited by the things we’re doing in Luton since I started here, but reading this book took that up a notch.

But its not just what we’re doing right that resonated, but some of the challenges too.

“We’re drowning in data, and yet still starved of insight. If your strategy says ‘be innovative’ but your budget process says ‘fill in this 40-page form to get £5k,’ people will follow the process.”

Jens’ book says that to deliver a Living Council, we need a new kind of mindset: