nine - Doing consultancy and transforming public services

Summary

This book has explored prospects for new approaches to empowering people in organising and delivering public services. The empowerment approach to consultancy is based on a critical view of contemporary organisations and management, and relies on a new prospect for the shape of public services and the way they are led and delivered in the 21st century. This chapter explores prospects for the further development of this approach.

The focus of previous chapters has been on achieving significant change, and we use the term ‘transformation’ to refer to this.

The transformative agenda in public services

The positive goal for the future of public services is to create modes of delivering them that empower the staff working in them as well as the citizens receiving them. Using the terminology of the economist, it is concerned with working on the challenging and complex goal of achieving the opposite of the four features of the ‘uneconomy’, which is unfair, unequal, unsustainable and making people unhappy.

The case for innovative consultancy concerned with bringing about change is rooted in the notion of transformative activity, which is not only desirable, but necessarily rests on three linked ideas.

• 1. Change is endemic in society as a whole and in public services as an aspect of society. It is a permanent feature of society in which many major functions of government and the economy are becoming globalised. However, globalisation is not a universal and inevitable feature of all aspects of life. The typical young person with higher qualifications cannot expect to enter a profession in their early twenties and remain in a secure job until retirement. It is more likely that after a decade the half life of their degree will have expired and a fresh round of learning will be necessary (Lynch, 2001, p 60). Lynch describes this notion of ‘accelerated lifestyles and experiences’ as increasingly typical of the professions, since ‘the body of professional knowledge will be modified and changed as society changes, and as fresh and innovative demands are made of the profession’ (Lynch, 2001, p 61).

Public bodies concerned with further and higher education must respond to these challenges, reflected in the changing nature of the educational requirements that students are expected to meet.