Be involved in the future of justice, not just the past

I was delighted when asked to contribute to the Summer Edition of the Academy for Justice Commissioning bulletin by guest editors from West Mercia Probation, one of our forward-thinking customers. We agreed I should write about how to thrive and grow in a changing criminal justice system, and you can read that piece here.

The article talks about change at a personal, organisational and systemic level. As part of my preparation for the article, we did more work than could be presented in the article itself. For example, we deconstructed a typical multi-agency meeting and illustrated why those interactions are so crucial, but we also shone a light on how the system must change. As a start, calculate the benefits, costs and consequences from the series of events below for a typical multi-agency initiative:

1.      To maximise the outputs of a multi-agency meeting (pick your topic) all agency specialists need to attend every meeting, which is planned well in advance to cater for everyone’s busy diaries (which of course change on the way). 
2.      Shortly before the meeting, it’s a rush through emails from the meeting coordinator to check on last month’s actions, which were of course sent with the typed minutes a couple of weeks after the last session. (Mild panic sets in for a practitioner when a previous promise is not yet delivered!)
3.      Each participant prints or writes down the sensitive but relevant work from his or her local case management system (remembering to keep it safe whilst travelling).
4.      Everyone in the meeting has their books and pens to make notes, ready to log them back in their case systems later if they get time (bearing in mind this is the first example of what we might describe as constant repetition).
5.      Every individual has to be on their ‘A game’ as there is nowhere outside that room where that information and dynamic sharing is in one place (remembering there is no longer coffee and biscuits to fuel the mind). 
6.      People are focused on listening for updates and actions from the many stakeholders in the room (but after the first few updates, the memory or note-taking suffers).
7.      The group then needs to find the connections and insight from the collaboration to make better collective decisions and take ownership of the next actions.  (And they note their own interpretations of that in their books.)
8.      Participants then return to their offices, refocus their attention on their priorities and await the formal minutes and actions arriving from email some time later.  Emails and phone calls may continue during the next month, and the cycle goes on.

Consider the challenges of multi-agency coordination – the interactions and the work required to simply get a group of professionals together in an attempt to make the system work. It is highly inefficient, but generally effective, thanks to the people involved. However the costs are high, and the risks are also significant with many well-known tragedies seen as a failing of multi-agency working.

This example may be a slight parody to engage the reader and incite emotion, but it’s not far from what happens in many instances. Imagine that scenario 2000 times over in a small community, and you can see why we need to change the system. Sitting around a meeting room to get updates and make connections is not the best use of collective time. Building relationships, planning and making better decisions is. And that, too, can be accomplished in much less time without the same constraints above with a solution like pam enabling better results and new ways of working.

Penning work in notebooks and printing paper is neither secure nor shared effectively (internally or with partners). We all know the stories of sensitive information left exposed. It’s beyond duplication to then add those notes back to multiple local systems, but it’s a hard habit to break. Many users are also measured on the accuracy of their case records. Working on email is embedded as standard practice when collaborating with others, because nothing else has existed until now. It is hard to sort the signal from the noise when you have multiple copies of emails and aren’t able to see everything. Minutes and documents delivered some time later are hardly dynamic and reflective of the real-time nature of agency work where subjects (e.g. offenders or families) change their status frequently. Working without an elegant multi-agency structure leaves chaos, and it’s one of the reasons we have developed a specific version of pam as an IL3 restricted platform.

The system just about works today because of the people and their passion, but it is the overall system infrastructure that is flawed. For this reason, I and many of our customers advocate a more holistic approach to change beyond single-agency transformation. I’m excited about how we’re contributing to that future whilst celebrating and retaining what works from the past. Look out for more announcements soon on this subject and how we can help your community’s commissioners and service providers benefit from new ways of working.

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