Why we need greater freedom & responsibility

We have over 160,000 charities spending nearly ï¿¡50bn, working with some of the most vulnerable people and socially critical topics. Entrusted by government, philanthropists, volunteers and the public to do good. 

And we’ve had a bruising few years in the public eye- crisis at Oxfam, collapse of Kids Company, scrutiny over the culture at Save the Children. The repercussions have been felt across the voluntary sector.

I founded and now run Frontline, a social work charity building a movement of social workers and leaders to bring about dramatic change for the most vulnerable children and their families. A large part of our work is in recruiting and developing social workers to work in child protection- often working alongside families where violence, substance misuse and mental health issues are present. Our world is full of watchers, regulators and inspectors. There's the Health and Care Professions Council (soon to be Social Work England), Ofsted, the DfE, the Charity Commission, and the Office for Students to a name a few.

No doubt influenced by me as CEO, our conversation about regulation can often trigger a sharp intake of breath. Meeting agendas packed with risk registers and compliance checks can leave us feeling spent. References to safeguarding concerns can freeze us in panic.

In truth I think we in the third sector are holding some anxiety about ‘regulation’ – contending with the need to find the right way to respond to risk, promote transparency and ensure accountability and oversight. Our conclusions when contending with these dilemmas can, too often, be to create a new rule, another system or a hire to an extra role. These answers feel tangible. We can control them. It feels like we’re acting.

But are these the right answers or are they a delusion? Is it possible that by constraining people, often taking away responsibility, we are fuelling the need for yet more regulation? I may not be preaching to the converted but these are questions I have started to wrestle with and I’m not the only one.  

Frederic Laloux in his book Reimagining Organisations wrote about Teal organisations, those “organisations inspired by the next stage of human consciousness.” Grand stuff! He points to Buurtzorg the Dutch nursing organisation with over 10,000 nurses, no managers, very few rules and a back office function of 50 people. Then there’s Netflix with its famous one word “act in Netflix’s best interests…” expenses policy and focus on hiring talent and rewarding average performance with a severance package. Aaron Dignan, in the book Brave New Work, has described these types of organisations as complexity conscious (recognising the difference between complicatedness and complexity) and people positive (that we should hire for talent and trust people).

All share a common and growing attitude to rules. That we should have fewer but better rules and that we should do away with universal processes or policies responding to poor behaviour or performance from a minority. The now slightly retro early naughties management guru Jim Collins captured all of this well when he wrote:

Few successful start-ups become great companies, in large part because they respond to growth and success in the wrong way. Entrepreneurial success is fueled by creativity, imagination, bold moves into uncharted waters, and visionary zeal. As a company grows and becomes more complex, it begins to trip over its own success—too many new people, too many new customers, too many new orders, too many new products. What was once great fun becomes an unwieldy ball of disorganized stuff. Lack of planning, lack of accounting, lack of systems, and lack of hiring constraints create friction. Problems surface—with customers, with cash flow, with schedules. 

In response, someone (often a board member) says, “It’s time to grow up. This place needs some professional management.” … The professional managers finally rein in the mess. They create order out of chaos, but they also kill the entrepreneurial spirit. Members of the founding team begin to grumble, “This isn’t fun anymore. I used to be able to just get things done. Now I have to fill out these stupid forms and follow these stupid rules. Worst of all, I have to spend a horrendous amount of time in useless meetings.” The creative magic begins to wane as some of the most innovative people leave, disgusted by the burgeoning bureaucracy and hierarchy. The exciting start-up transforms into just another company, with nothing special to recommend it. The cancer of mediocrity begins to grow in earnest.

So I believe that if we want to address the problem to which regulation is often the answer then we need to give people working in the voluntary sector more of two things simultaneously: freedom and responsibility.

Building organisations with less bureaucracy, increasingly talented people, fewer rules, more autonomy, crystal clear expectations, lots of constructive feedback, deeply responsible colleagues, high expectations of one another and a low tolerance of poor performance (you can read our full culture document). I firmly believe that this is the approach that more organisations need to take but it poses a direct challenge to the conventional wisdom in regulation.

At Frontline we’ve spent the last 18 months removing lots of rules but we’ve also become much clearer about where better but fewer rules and regulations are needed. We categorise them in three ways:

1. Simple processes that help talented people do more great work; processes that are simple and regularly questioned; that help maintain speed, improve service and drive innovation and responsiveness. For example, simplifying our appraisal and objective setting process to be quicker and more outcomes focussed.
2. Processes to prevent widespread disaster; for example, we have a responsibility to handle personal data with great care. Similarly, checks on those we hire are critical for safeguarding children and vulnerable adults.
3. Ethical and moral rules; for example, dishonesty, discrimination or harassment are intolerable. If someone is a bully or lies then they should be out.

That sounds clear and simple but when you ruthlessly apply these tests to the existing stockpile of policies you realise just how many rules we’ve created in work and in life that are actually based on a lack of trust.

My argument is that the safest response and best guarantee of success in handling risk, encouraging transparency and improving governance is to counter-intuitively give away more freedom to people and expect more from them. Promoting this kind of culture at Frontline is work in progress and certainly not the only path to take.

But given what we’re learning about organisations and human behaviour, we all have a duty to ask these questions however difficult the implications may be: How do we regulate in a way that is complexity conscious and people positive? How do we use regulation to instil greater freedom and responsibility?  

The best place to start in making change happen can be in asking the right question. I hope we can also start to share more answers for how we create systems that give people more freedom and responsibility (if you have any then please share them below!).

This article is an adapted version of the opening speech I gave to the Voluntary Regulation Conference 2019.