Category Archives: performance

268 – Local government history – repeating, rhyming or informing?

Posted on by

900 words (10 minutes reading time) by Colin Weatherby

Image

I believe that it is important to understand how we have gotten to where we are today if we are proposing to make changes, simply so that we can benefit from past learnings and avoid repeating mistakes at the expense of the community. I like to see evidence backing a proposal that commits significant community resources to doing something.  Call me old fashioned (and people sometimes do) but I figure it is what a careful professional does.

Having always worked with public infrastructure, I know decisions made today have ramifications for another 50 to 100 years. No one builds a road or plants a tree thinking only about the next 5 years. I have cursed short cuts made decades ago by my predecessors when I have been required to sort out difficult problems. My approach is typically characterised by colleagues as time wasting in their haste to get on with trying out the latest management fad and, potentially, just doing wrong things righter.

This post is an attempt to unpick what has happened in Victorian local government to get us to where we are, and understand what it means for what councils should do next. My concern is that councils faced with the failure of existing approaches, as evidenced by the imposition of the rate cap (effectively a taxpayer revolt!), will then double down in doing the things that leaders know how to do. If it is not history repeating, it will at least be rhyming as Mark Twain observed. Better still, it is neither and it becomes informing.

Continue reading →

267 – Professor Joseph Drew – Analysis of Financial Results

Posted on by

880 words (10 minutes reading time) by Lancing Farrell

The mean and median of the data set for all NSW councils

Professor Joseph Drew has posted another enlightening video on his YouTube channel. His analysis of 15 years of council data in NSW shows worrying increases in expenditure on staff, materials and depreciation. In fact, ‘worrying’ is an understatement. The situation is becoming catastrophic. Yet, no one seems overly worried in the Premier State.

Professor Drew has committed to producing the same data for Victoria. Maybe there will be more of a response from the Garden State. As every gardener knows, you have to observe what is happening and make timely interventions for a garden to succeed.

One of the challenges Professor Drew’s video has highlighted for me is the relatively low level of executive financial literacy and knowledge of statistics and data. This might explain the lack of response to the data from local government. Professor Drew goes to great lengths to explain the importance of measures of central tendency and the difference between the available measures. In particular, he is looking at the mean and standard deviations of the data set, and the median .

Are you digging out an old text book or searching on Google yet?

Continue reading →

264 – ‘What on earth is a paradigm shift?’ – Centre for Public Impact

Posted on by

400 words (5 minutes reading time) by Colin Weatherby

I have been experimenting with Microsoft’s ‘everyday AI companion’, called Copilot. I asked it to analyse the podcast ‘What on earth is a paradigm shift?’ by the Centre for Public Impact.  I am not trying to second guess the great work by Lancing Farrell, simply to show how some new technology works!

This is what it came back with:

The podcast ‘What on earth is a paradigm shift?’ by the Centre for Public Impact (CPI), is a  conversation between Adrian Brown and Professor Toby Lowe, who are both part of the CPI team. They discuss the concept of paradigms and how they apply to public service and systems change.

Here is a brief summary of the podcast:

Continue reading →

263 – System governance is the key to shifting the local government paradigm

Posted on by

850 words (9 minutes reading time) by Lancing Farrell

The need for a new paradigm in local government in Victoria has been mentioned in a few posts recently (see 241 – Rate capping – the final words (from our future), 253 – Minds Change: My Journey to Transform Local Government Performance, and 261 – Reinventing Local Government). Model collapse, as described by Carole Parkinson and Tim Whistler, signals the end of an existing paradigm. This raises critical questions about the current paradigm in local government and the need for change. A recent podcast in the Reimagining Government series by the Centre for Public Impact, ‘What on earth is a paradigm shift?’, discusses paradigms and provides insights and practical tips for those wanting to bring about transformative change.

Defining Paradigms

The podcast features host Adrian Brown and Professor Toby Lowe from the Centre for Public Impact, Henk-Jan Dekker from the International Centre for Environmental Research and Development, and Jessica Studdert from think tank ‘New Local’. Drawing on the work of Thomas Kuhn and Margaret Masterman, a paradigm was defined as a ‘grand explanatory narrative for how a part of the world works’.  It operates on metaphysical, sociological, and exemplar levels, shaping perceptions of what exists and what should be valued. Understanding how paradigms work is crucial for those seeking systemic change in local government.

Continue reading →

261 – Reinventing Local Government

Posted on by

600 words (7 minutes reading time) by Lancing Farrell

I recently acquired a ‘new’ copy of the 1992 book ‘Reinventing Government – How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector‘ by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, a work that wielded significant influence globally in its time.

The impact of Osborne and Gaebler on world leaders can be discerned through the timing of policy changes, public declarations, and the alignment of advocated principles with the reform initiatives undertaken by these leaders. Some explicitly referenced the book in speeches, policy documents, or interviews, revealing its profound effect on their perspectives. In other instances, reforms closely mirroring the book’s principles suggest a potential influence. The book’s impact must be viewed within the broader context of prevailing ideas and reforms during that period.

Continue reading →

259 – Model Collapse in Local Government: A Performance Measurement Dilemma?

Posted on by

700 words (8 minutes reading time) by Tim Whistler

In the world of artificial intelligence (AI), the concept of model collapse is a well-recognised challenge. Now it is potentially reaching into my everyday life if my Spotify-generated daylist starts to select songs from a previous daylist! Yet, my concern isn’t confined to personal playlists, and it should be echoing through the corridors of local government and raising questions about what performance measurement actually tells us.

Carole Parkinson’s question at the end of her footnote resonates with me: How can we detect model collapse in local government? It may well be a moot question, and model collapse is simply an explanation of the current situation, as one of Carole’s colleagues suggested.  This should become apparent if ChatGPT’s methods to identify model collapse in AI are accurate. Five seem particularly relevant for the local government context:

Continue reading →

258 – Model Collapse or Cultural Evolution? Mental Models and Victorian Local Government

Posted on by

700 words (8 minutes reading time) by Carole Parkinson

In many aspects of human endeavor, the belief that successive generations inherently improve holds true. Take sports, for example, where each Olympics sees records shattered by athletes who are better selected, trained, and conditioned than their predecessors. This continuous improvement is driven by a powerful incentive for each generation to surpass the achievements of the previous one.

However, this upward trajectory doesn’t always apply universally. In the realm of artificial intelligence (AI), there’s a phenomenon known as model collapse. Without diverse human-generated training data, AI systems risk malfunctioning if inundated with AI-generated content. The first generation of AI benefits from decades of human ingenuity, but as subsequent generations draw from their own created information, the pool of new ideas dwindles, resulting in a homogenised output.

Continue reading →

254 – Hacking your bureaucracy

Posted on by

850 words (9 minutes reading time) by Colin Weatherby

As regular readers will know, we are partial to a good book that throws some light on the issues facing local government. The idea that knowledge of theory should underpin practice, or that learning how others have solved the problems you face can provide useful insights, is, unfortunately, not always valued as much as it should be

My latest read is an interesting book.  ‘Hack Your Bureaucracy – Get Things Done No Matter What your Role on any Team’ is presented as a ‘how to manual’ of tips and tricks to work within bureaucracy to, unsurprisingly, ‘get things done’.

Continue reading →

253 – Minds Change: My Journey to Transform Local Government Performance

Posted on by

600 words (7 minutes reading time) by Lancing Farrell

Have you ever had that eureka moment where something you were trying to understand is suddenly made crystal clear to you? That’s exactly what happened to me after reading David McRaney’s thought-provoking book, ‘How Minds Change – The New Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion.’ This enlightening read gave me reason to revisit some past posts on improving local government performance. In reading the book (and this is deliberate by the author) I was led through Piaget’s stages of assimilation and accommodation, before eventually reaching a Kuhnian paradigm shift. My epiphany was realising why organisational change is so hard.

When I looked back at my earlier posts, I realised that my growth as a leader commenced when I first saw work as a system. At the same time, I genuinely believed that I needed to become the architect of better approaches. I had an academic background, experience of travelling overseas to broaden my outlook, and a relentless passion for my work. I thought that if anyone could revolutionise services, it would be me.

However, this view eventually transformed into a more holistic and community-oriented perspective as I started to see the work as a ‘frog’ system, not a ‘bike’ system. You’ll need to read my previous posts to grasp the analogy, but in essence, I transitioned from a thinking I needed to be a one-man show and lead others by giving them better ways, to a more participatory approach where everyone is engaged in finding improvements.

Continue reading →