Ok, full disclosure: we don’t actually dislike people who work on projects, and in fact, some of our best friends are proje….
In this blog, we want to explore the tendency to overemphasise structural approaches to casework and transformation programmes. Our own recent research highlighted the tendency in the public sector to avoid putting in place the very things needed to deliver success. Instead, we see short-term, restrictive and inflexible structural responses recruited, which limit the space for emergent and creative solutions. These emergent and creative solutions are needed to respond to complexity. Importantly, the cultures and approaches that enable these emergent and creative solutions also tend to create the spaces for people to feel engaged, enabled and empowered in their roles, leading to improved productivity and a sense of well-being – people feel valued and valuable.
Change happens at many levels. It could be a grand scheme to reduce waiting lists by implementing efficiency-promising technology. Equally, it could be a small intervention with a young person to affect behaviour change. Either way, what’s required is clarity around what we’re trying to achieve; a clear plan or strategy to achieve that vision; a structural response to deliver that plan/strategy; and an active engagement and enablement of the people involved to own the vision and make it happen.
What our research evidenced, though, was that all too often, we’re good at setting out the vision but pay far too little attention to how we expect it to be achieved, with a lack of goals and steps to help people make meaning of the vision. The result is a tendency to rely on overly simplistic conversations about structures that will supposedly deliver the required change.
We’ve all sat in meetings where the agenda is dominated by ineffective discussions about governance and project management paraphernalia. Or the focus of the project/programme is on some fantastical technology that will fix all our organisational ills. Similarly, job descriptions and person specifications tend to be littered with language that implies a working relationship with project management artefacts is sufficient to deliver success.
All these experiences lack a concern and commitment to ensuring that the people involved, whether as providers or consumers of services, are at the forefront of the approach to change. Instead, these structural responses serve to limit the space people can occupy, alienating them from the process of change and rendering them subjects or units of measure rather than leaders and owners of the solutions needed for sustained and meaningful change.
Instead, we call for, and work with partners to achieve, a focus on ‘enabling structures’ that create the space for people to come together in professional social networks, share their knowledge and experiences, and generate new, emergent thinking that facilitates new plans, policies, and practices.
Now, this isn’t to suggest that structures are unnecessary—absolutely not. Instead, we need to re-emphasise the vision and focus on structures that are aligned with the strategy's requirements and enable the engagement and empowerment of the people involved. When structural responses to change and service delivery are considered, we must ask, ‘How are these aligned with the vision, strategy, and the needs of the people delivering and accessing this initiative?’
Unfortunately, we often see the opposite – ‘How are people responding to the needs of the governance and project management arrangements?’
Experience shows us that this approach often fails to deliver the desired outcomes of the work and tends to alienate the people involved, causing disengagement and burnout and leaving service user needs poorly met.
Therefore, we create recruitment approaches that emphasise building relationships and seek to know, understand, and nurture the people involved on both sides of the delivery interface. We also develop project approaches that see the vision as a thread running throughout the whole process, informing the strategy and engaging the people involved. We also develop structures that enable these three elements of programme delivery.
One such enabling structure is our collaborative knowledge networks, which create spaces for people to engage, challenge, and support each other and collaborate through interpersonal interactions. By definition, governance arrangements become enabling and empowering, placing decision-making and reporting within the relationships that drive change. Equally, project management tools are identified and defined by the people involved and are focused on measuring, monitoring, and reporting the outputs and outcomes of these social interactions and their alignment with the vision being sought.
The result is enhanced ownership and leadership in pursuing the vision and greater commitment to successfully realising outcomes and impact because these are the product of people’s own efforts.
Project management for its own sake…? We’re all very familiar with the shortcomings of this approach.
Olaitan, P. (2025), "Who works! from fragmentation to coherence through collaborative, constructive communication", Journal of Integrated Care, Vol. 33 No. 5, pp. 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1108/JICA-12-2023-0097
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