Creating the space for effective co-production based, power sharing

By Richard Field and Clive Miller – Independent consultants

Co-production is more than a practice innovation. It’s a total shift in the way the world is understood to work. This is the bedrock on which the new set of working relationships, with power-sharing at its centre, will be built.

Co-production understands that services do not produce outcomes. Instead it is what people and communities do alongside organisations that together produce outcomes. This has always been the case but has either not been recognised or taken into account in conventional practice. Hence the opportunity for people and community to be effective co-producers with practitioners continues to be missed. The result has been both the ineffective and inefficient use of the collective assets of people, communities and organisations.

What is now needed is large scale change that uses the learning from the many examples of innovative co-productive practices to completely transform all conventional practice to being co-production based. This is not a theoretical musing. Wholesale ‘re-imagining of social care’ is already starting to happen in places as diverse as Somerset, Thurrock and Wigan.

It works by devolving power:

·       A new relationship - ‘re-defining the relationship between councils and residents. For example, the Wigan Deal.

·       Community anchored support - ‘A clear sighted commitment to foster development of services and support, often small-scale, which is anchored in the community’.

·       Permission - ‘Senior managers creating a permissive framework that creates the expectation and provides support for practitioners to work in imaginative person and community-centred ways’.

At whatever scale co-production is being introduced, if power sharing is to become a reality it will also require a new ways of exercising power, including a new model of leadership with its own unique set of terms and conditions. SCIE trustee Alex Fox identifies some of them:

·       What. Stop believing in ‘heroic leadership’ the ‘inspirational leader who turns around a troubled organisation’. This is the opposite of the power sharing culture that underpins co-production.

·       Who. No diversity, no power sharing

·       What. ‘Co-production can only work where there are people with lived experience in a position to co-produce’.

The context within which power sharing takes place has a major impact on its outcomes. Hence the commissioning process also requires wholesale change. The many different individual innovations that comprise asset-based commissioning show what is needed.

Now is the time to bring them together as a connected set to deliver the new model of power sharing, at scale.  

Three key shifts will be:

Focus and how outcomes are perceived to be produced

Collaborate with people and communities as equal decision makers.

A fundamental shift in the relationship between commissioners, people, communities and suppliers.  

None of the above will happen unless there is system-wide change in both practice and commissioning. True co-production.