Social Investment

1/7/2024

I’m excited to hear about the new standalone Social Investment Agency.

One aspect I particularly like is its focus on emergent practice. This focus extends the original idea and clarifies whatever the Social Wellbeing Agency has been doing.

Emergent practice is important for four reasons.

First, I know that some of you think that the poneketanga is entirely rational and that when ministers decide on a strategy, officials go away and implement said strategy, and only that strategy.

I hate to tell you, but that’s a myth: it’s a myth whose origin lies in the bedtime stories policy advisors with no delivery experience tell themselves.

Most delivery and operating models muddle along incrementally, learning how to implement the government’s strategy.

Ultimately, strategy is shaped by and emerges from practice: sometimes, the original strategy is realised, and sometimes, it isn’t. If we are honest, most realised strategies combine the original intent and what is learnt through the delivery process*.

The second reason I am pleased to see social investment focused on emergent practice is it has the potential to cut through the tendency of the poneketanga to use its ‘official’ documents as somehow representing reality and innovation.

The ‘official’ documents are constructed to reinforce the assumption that practice in the line agencies or by third-party providers, e.g., whānau ora providers or private health providers, somehow lags behind the poneketanga or is not as advanced as the theory.

By emphasising emergent practice, the new approach to social investment not only centres implementation but might just give us the breakthrough and reduction in compliance costs we have long needed.

Learning from outcomes-based delivery is a much more efficient proposition than controlling an input from afar.

The third reason I am excited about the focus on emergent practice is that if you know anything about delivery, you know that most providers (state and non-state) are already managing outcomes in the most interesting, innovative, and unacknowledged ways.

The daily work of front-line workers is a culture of learning and adjusting. This differs from the theoretical work of constructing data sets, for example or negotiating to draft a cabinet paper.

By focusing the social investment function on emergent practice, the Minister for Social Investment has framed the practical work of frontline learning for outcomes as more important than the discursive back-office reasoning and positioning.

This has been a long time coming. And it is a surprise to me that other than the Whānau Ora Commissioning Agency and myself, others are consciously quiet, which probably tells you a lot. Those who produce inefficient and ineffective impacts can see the writing on the wall. If you don’t believe me, look at the original Managing for Outcomes guidance published in 2002/03, particularly the Pathfinder project. This shift has been two decades in the making.

The final reason I am excited about this approach is that it might also help to strengthen the purple zone. If you follow my blog and my thinking, you will know I think the purple zone is weak. Not the people – the institutions and the incentives. The purple zone is weak because emergent and enacted practice is an afterthought.

That is a huge problem in today’s context. Governance is the most difficult it has ever been. A focus on emergent and enacted practice is the very thing that can recontextualise our public policy discourse because it puts delivery theory and implementation at the centre of cabinet decision-making.

Let me give you an example: instead of having endless debates about business cases, gates, and theoretical discussions about strategy, in a world of emergent and enacted practice, officials and ministers will be having conversations about medium-term investments in particular towns and rural areas in a world of emergent practice. Those conversations would be about cross-agency service delivery models. They will be about devolving particular functions and powers to communities and local institutions. Cabinet Committees will oversee the learning from pilot programmes so they know where they need to get Parliament to agree to regulatory and rule changes. They would discuss how to support a particular office in running their ‘workarounds’, especially where those ‘circuit breakers’ cut through the head-office noise.

It is my contention that a public policy advisory and investment system focussed on learning from emergent and enacted practice has very different conversations than one having theoretical and conceptual conversations unbundled from implementation, impact and the ethics of both.

I finish this post where I began. Almost every conceivable combination of political parties has wanted to see some combination of the following: a significant improvement in underlying productivity and economic performance; a significant improvement in the position of those who are poorly served by the education, health, employment and justice sectors; a healthy, sustainable and productive environment; and higher quality public services while holding tax rates and reducing public borrowing and debt. These big cross-cutting issues have eluded previous governments.

For the first time in some time, I think if the Minister for Social Investment can implement her articulated vision for social investment and sustain the focus on emergent and enacted practice, we might, for the first time in decades, see officials and ministers push through the inertia and gridlock of our policy advisory system and finally let emergent practice lead on outcomes.

*This is why I was critical of the prescription in the coalition agreements. That level of prescription displaces the ability of the public and private sector service delivery models to learn, innovate and adjust. You can have a prescription, but it comes from the second or third wave of learning.