1. Cross Sector Leadership Exchange Leading into the Future ~
Collaborating through Complexity
4th – 6th July 2017
Manchester Fire & Rescue Service

2. Programme Director Housekeeping: Twitter feed @CSLeadership_Ex
Professor Keith Grint
Wicked Problems and
Leadership Solutions
Housekeeping:
Breaks
Facilities & Evacuation
Phones
Syndicate directors
Twitter
#CSLE2017
Programme
Accommodation and Networking Dinner

3. Programme Aims
Examine the pressures and priorities of service delivery in relation to health inequalities, poverty and crime
Reflect how particular sector challenges equally affect other sectors and how joint solutions can be formed, identifying common ground
Explore and learn with other leaders the complex and wicked problems facing public services
Expand political skills to help build alliances to achieve cross sector objectives, rather than ones dominated by self-interest
Develop enhanced networking skills in order to foster cross sector collaboration

4. Introductions & Contract
Your main leadership challenge
Your ‘contract’ rule(s)

5. Making Collaboration work – lessons for policy and practice

6. Dr Pat Oakley
The Long View
Horizon Scanning and the political landscape through a mental health lens

7. Syndicates
Reflections – The ‘so what’ Link to qualities & behaviours

8. Networking Dinner

9. Leading into the Future ~ Collaborating through Complexity
‘Cross Sector Leadership Exchange
Leading into the Future ~
Collaborating through Complexity
Day 2

10. Political Acuity
Charlie Phelps

11. Political Acuity
Questionnaire
Can be 360
Honest reflection

12. Political Awareness (Hartley J)
Personal skills - particularly the ability to understand the motives, interests and influence of others;
Interpersonal skills - including the ability to influence others, to make people feel valued, and to handle conflict;

13. Political Awareness (cont)
Reading people and situations - the ability to recognise both overt and underlying agendas is at the heart of political awareness
Building alignments and alliances - requiring managers to recognise differences, but to forge them into collaborative actions

14. Political Awareness (cont)
Strategic scanning - the ability to undertake long-term planning and think about longer-term issues that may affect an organisation

15. Developing political awareness
Development of political skills has been highly dependent on learning by experience. 88 per cent report that learning from mistakes has been very or extremely valuable in developing their political skills; 86 per cent highlight experience gained in the job; and 85 per cent highlight lessons learned from handling crises.

16. Developing political awareness
Informal observation of senior managers – whether offering good or bad examples of the use of political skills – is viewed as a common development route.
Exposure to alternative organisational and societal cultures appears to be beneficial for the development of political awareness skills.

17. Developing political awareness
Observation, reflection and questioning enquiry of one’s own behaviour (and the behaviour of others) when dealing with politically sensitive situations is viewed as critical.

18. Political Acuity – Coaching

19. Wellbeing and Mental Health
Gregor Henderson
Public Health England
National Lead
Wellbeing and Mental Health

20. The challenge of Wicked Issues for system leaders

21. What is a wicked problem? Ted Talk

22. Professor Keith Grint Wicked Problems and Leadership Solutions
Do different kinds of problems require different kinds of change?
1. Critical Problems: Commander
2. Tame Problems: Management
3. Wicked Problems: Leadership

23. Problems, Problems, Problems
Critical Problems: Commander
Portrayed as self-evident crisis; often at tactical level
General uncertainty – though not ostensibly by commander who provides ‘answer’
No time for discussion or dissent
Legitimizes coercion as necessary in the circumstances for public good
Associated with Command
Encouraged through reward Commander’s Role is to take the required decisive action – that is to provide the answer to the problem

24. Problems, Problems, Problems
Tame Problems: Management – Tame and Wicked Problems (Rittell and Webber, 1973).
Problems as PUZZLES – there is a solution
Can be complicated but there is a linear solution to them
These are problems that management can (& has previously) solved:
The problem of heart surgery is a Tame problem. It’s complicated but there is a process for solving it & therefore it has a Managerial Solution/Answer
Launching a(nother) new product is a tame problem
Management’s role is to engage the appropriate process to solve the TAME problem
Heifetz: Technical leadership

25. Management as a Science
F W Taylor’s engineering:
the application of science to achieve the one best solution
Problem
Solution

26. Wicked Problems have no simple solution because:
Either novel or recalcitrant
Complex rather than complicated (cannot be solved in isolation)
Sit outside single hierarchy and across systems – ‘solution’ creates another problem
They often have no stopping rule – thus no definition of success
Sometimes the solution precedes the problem analysis
May be intransigent problems that we have to learn to live with
Symptoms of deep divisions – contradictory certitudes

27. Have no right or wrong solutions but better or worse developments
Uncertainty & Ambiguity inevitable – cannot be deleted through correct analysis – Keat’s “Negative Capability”
Heifetz: Adaptive Leadership
Problems for leadership not management; require political collaboration not scientific processes - role is to ask the appropriate question & to engage collaboration

28. 2003: FBU fire strike: reduced fires

29. crisis tame wicked Differentiating Management, Leadership & Command
Command: just do it (it doesn’t matter what you think)
Management: déjà vu (I’ve seen this problem before;
I know what process will solve it)
Leadership: vu jàdé (I’ve never seen this problem before;
I need to get a collective view on what to do about this)
tame
wicked

30. Increasing uncertainty about solution to problem
Leadership: ask questions
Wicked
Management: organise process
Tame
Command:
provide answer
Critical
Increasing requirement for collaborative/
compliance resolution
Coercian/
physical:
Hard power
Calculative/rational
Normative/
emotional: soft power

31. How to work with wicked problems

32. The 10 Properties of
Wicked Issues
Ritter, HWJ & Webber, MM, 1973

33. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem
Wicked problems have no stopping rules
Solutions to wicked problems are not true or false, but good or bad
There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem
Every solution to a wicked problem is a ‘one shot’ operation; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial and error, every attempt counts significantly

34. Wicked problems do not have an exhaustively describable set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan 
Every wicked problem is essentially unique
Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem
The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways
The planner has no right to be wrong

35. Re-designing the system -
‘Cross Sector Leadership Exchange
Re-designing the system -

36. Leading into the Future ~ Collaborating through Complexity
‘Cross Sector Leadership Exchange
Leading into the Future ~
Collaborating through Complexity
Day 3

37. The Whole Story
Joss Gaillemin

38. Next Steps
Individual reflection and actions
Evaluation