How do you think more widely, with your hair on fire?

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How do you think more widely, with your hair on fire?

It’s probably the leadership challenge of our time.

Today, I was due to speak at the Local Government Procurement Expo

Personal circumstances (complexity!) meant I had to change plans last-minute, and I’m very grateful to m’colleague Andrew Humphreys for stepping in. As we worked on the presentation he’s giving this afternoon, I thought about the challenge — for procurement professionals, and everyone, of what I have tended to call ‘thinking on a bigger stage’.

It’s hard enough, these days, just to think.

Never mind the ‘polycrisis’: climate catastrophe, genocide, hate, crumbling infrastructure, degraded trust and institutions. The challenges are closer to home: do you commute to the office to sit on Teams calls all day, or stay at home (inflated energy prices) and do them on a dodgy internet connection with the cat constantly demanding attention. Do you focus on the recruitment gaps you’ve got, or worry about your colleague who’s clearly still suffering from Covid-related trauma?

Procurement colleagues have the uncertainty of the new Act, with *all the extremely good and valuable guidance. Maybe they want to try again to really make social value work. Or think about the new DfE guidance on interim children’s social workers, government challenging care providers on profits, their desperately creaking Tender Portal, whether enforcing contract penalties on the waste provider will make them go out of business, whether the profitable leisure contract should be brought back in-house. And how much is it their job to worry about the property investment portfolio?

Phew — yeah. No wonder people go back into their professional silos!

‘You can’t touch me, I’m a simple robot bureaucrat enforcing the law’ feels like a *really* tempting place, faced with all of that.

Now here comes Benjamin — or Andrew — with ‘thinking on a bigger stage’.

Taking us away from fighting the fire in front of us, inviting us to:

* step back, look upstream, and ask: *why is this happening at all*? And look downstream — what are the implications?

* look at how we’re framing the problem — what perspectives are we taking, how are we coming at this? What other perspectives are at play? What’s our ‘identity’ here? Is that right?

* consider ‘levels of recursion’ — systems within systems, each influencing the other, consider larger and smaller scales

* think longer-term: how are we influencing the way things work here? The market, people’s willingness to volunteer or go to the gym, the decisions of social workers to finally retire. Are we solving today’s bottleneck while planting the seeds for tomorrow’s crisis?

These bigger questions are vital for innovation, and necessary if we’re ever going to get out of the pressures. To think on a bigger stage, we need to ask bigger questions. How do you find the time, the energy the space to do some of that?