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Public Petitions Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Official Report 437KB pdf

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Current Petition

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Public Sector Staff (Talents) (PE1423)

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I welcome you all to this meeting of the Public Petitions Committee. I remind everyone to switch off their mobile phones and electronic devices, because they interfere with our sound system.

Agenda item 1 is PE1423, on harnessing the talent of public sector staff. We previously agreed that we would have a round-table discussion on the petition, which is the first such discussion in this session for the committee. All the witnesses are very welcome, and I thank them very much for giving up their time to come along to speak to us. Obviously, we want to learn more about the petition from the Unreasonable Learners, and about current management practices in the public sector.

I ask people to make their contributions through me so that the meeting can be managed. We have around 45 minutes. Obviously, we have a number of very experienced and talented witnesses. I ask everyone to introduce themselves.

I am a Labour MSP for the Highlands and Islands region.

I am a Scottish National Party MSP for South Scotland.

I am the chairman of Gael Ltd in East Kilbride.

I am from the Improvement Service.

I am a member of the committee.

I am from Queen Margaret University.

I am the MSP for Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley.

I am from the Unreasonable Learners.

I am an MSP for West Scotland.

I am the head of bargaining and campaigns for Unison Scotland.

I work on workforce development in the Scottish Government.

I am an MSP for Central Scotland.

I am from the Scottish Government’s organisational development, leadership and learning division.

I am a Glasgow MSP.

I thank you all for introducing yourselves. Just for the record, I ask that my membership of Unison be noted. Obviously, Dave Watson is the senior officer with whom I currently deal.

I should welcome back Jim Mather, who was an MSP and is a well-kent face from the Scottish Government in the past. You are very welcome, Jim.

I ask Gordon Hall to briefly run through some issues to do with the petition. The key point for me is what you hope to achieve through it.

We are dealing with very broad and complex issues, which I am trying to simplify into one major issue. I have reflected that in my handout.

We are observing that very good people are putting great efforts into all kinds of projects throughout the public sector and in the private sector, but we need to move away from application of methods and new structures to consideration of how we think—not only how the individual thinks, but how the organisation thinks. If we apply new structures and methods from the existing thinking, all we will do is repeat the problems that we already have. Albert Einstein had a famous phrase about that. I do not know when he died—perhaps in 1940, so it was said pre-war. Everybody has said the same as him ever since, of course: that change happens at the thinking level, not the doing level. If people continue to do from the same thinking, very little will change.

The Christie commission identified large areas that we should address but did not address the thinking that has created those problems or the thinking that is necessary in order to move forward. As Jim Mather keeps saying, the two have to go together. I am trying to create that balance by concentrating on how we think. The second diagram that members have recognises that we cannot do that in bits and pieces. Our experience over the past 20 or 30 years is that although we have had excellent projects, the whole has not learned from them, and with time the status quo has come back and eroded the progress that has been made. Therefore, we need to think about how we will change thinking or enable thinking about the whole, and not just for individual projects.

What is the Scottish Government’s view of the petition?

The petition and the substance behind it are of great interest to the Scottish Government and much of the theory and thinking that underpin it have been influential within the Government. Our difficulty is in trying to work through what action we would take on the back of it.

We have a lot of work under way. The thinking behind the petition is influential in some of the improvements and more experimental approaches that are becoming more and more embedded in how the national health service thinks. At Government level, we are trying to bring that through within our own structures. My responsibility is for civil servants and their learning. We have done a lot of work around systems thinking, which is now embedded in the way our civil servants learn. The outcomes-based approach encourages people to work across the system and to engage others in the system to think about possible solutions. I chair a collaborative leadership group of people who have been brought in from across the system. That group is all about trying to bring such ideas and concepts through into our ways of working.

I have a huge amount of sympathy with the theory that underpins the petition. The question is how we take it to a whole-society level. We are trying, across the piece, to engage with partners in different systems and with communities to take that forward. Is there something that we are missing or have not yet struck upon?

A lot of the research that underpins the petition is familiar to us. We have been taking forward such work for some time.

How do we change the way that the public sector thinks and operates?

I suspect that trade unions are probably more in the “doing” category than they are in the “thinking” one, so Gordon Hall would rightly pick us up on that. However, I agree with the petition’s underlying approach.

Gordon Hall mentioned the Christie commission, to which I was an expert adviser. Although it may not be clear, the commission was focused on writing a relatively short report, so it did not include a huge amount of background thinking, but it considered the issues that are addressed in the petition, which underpinned its recommendations.

I notice that it is not often quoted—it is not in the briefing papers for the meeting—but the Christie commission highlighted systems thinking as a way forward for the public sector. That was not an accident. I will illustrate the point in a practical way with one story. While the Christie commission was doing its work, we went to a large local authority and ran a round-table discussion with revenues and benefits—including housing benefit and council tax—staff. That local authority had taken away most of the staff from the sharp end and put them into a shared service centre. I explained systems thinking to that group of staff, told them about John Seddon and what he does, and asked them whether it rang any bells with them. They said, “Oh absolutely, Dave.” The front-office person told me, “We used to deal with 80 per cent of inquiries when people came through the door. Now, we deal with 20 per cent of inquiries at the door and punt the other 80 per cent off to a shared service centre.” The staff from the shared service centre said, “Yeah, they come to us and most of the queries that we deal with are because someone hasn’t got something they wanted. We punt things around and they get lost.”

Most of us would recognise that from any call centre operation. We all know that that is what happens when we ring up a power company or a television company, but we persist with the view that, if we lump everything together into a big factory somewhere, it will somehow be more effective and more efficient.

That is a practical example of the fact that, if we redesigned the work and worked out what was necessary to deal with the customer’s or service user’s demands first time, we would design very different public services from the current thinking that is imposed by management consultants who come in with a “Blue Peter” approach—“Here’s one we made earlier”.

It is an interesting petition. As a follower of Seddon’s view of command and control, I am sympathetic, but some questions were raised in my mind, even when reading his book “Freedom from Command and Control: A Better Way to Make the Work Work”.

First of all, are leaders born or are they made? Your leaflet quite rightly points out that

“we need leaders to provide direction”.

The second point is to do with the management culture. This is not just about management culture; it is also about how we change our society’s culture to be more participative and less divisive. That said, we have an agenda at national level—the national performance framework. How do we feed that agenda through? How do we encourage all levels of the public sector to achieve national outcomes—I will not say “targets” or “goals”—as we wish?

My last point is about systems thinking, which is important. I have been involved in manufacturing for a lot of years and have lately run up against continuous improvement processes and quality circles and systems such as lean, Six Sigma and kaizen. I never see those mentioned in the public sector. That is what we are addressing. How do we encourage improvement of our processes from the bottom up?

Thanks for that. I am looking for a victim to answer that question. Jim Mather looks like a good subject.

I think that leaders are tutored. We want to see more leaders mentoring and bringing people forward and so on. On the point about societal changes, it is absolutely fundamental that we have a strong society with people participating at all levels.

On national outcomes, perhaps we could change politics if we had enough statistical process control charts on Government desks and the Government was monitoring everything from hip operations to the level of unemployment and feeding that information back into the process.

As far as the manufacturing sector is concerned, Seddon is quite clear—he thinks that we should be more about method and thinking and less about tools. The genius of Seddon is that he has taken systems thinking from manufacturing and applied it to the service sector, while recognising that the service sector is different. Services are about activities; they are intangible and require trust relationships, communications and so on. What is different about services is that the variation comes in the punter—in the case that is being dealt with—whereas manufacturing tries to squeeze variation out of sub-components of its products. Seddon says that we have to handle that variation. That is why, as Dave Watson correctly said, the back office shared services approach does not work. We need to try to nail things at the point of contact. Seddon also says that we should not look for savings in procurement or in scale and that the savings are to be made in flow—in end-to-end times and how quickly we get the job done.

Last year I went down to the City of Lincoln Council and spent a month there looking at what they were doing on housing benefits, housing repairs, void lets, planning, building control and controlled adult social care. I was watching the Vanguard method in action and the best example was adult social care. Previously, it had been taking the council 1,189 days to have a shower put in on the ground floor of an elderly person’s house. They got that down to 25 days, so there was a big impact on the person and on their family. That means keeping a person at home four years longer and their not having for that time to go to a residential home, a nursing home or hospital.

I would like to put on the record that my Seddon awareness came from Tom Tumilty—a civil servant who slipped me the book “Freedom from Command and Control”, for which I continue to be grateful.

On leadership, the leader in the new world—if I can call it that—is a systems designer. He is not one of the decision-makers or one of the people who can inspire people; he is the one who designs the systems to enable people.

John Seddon and others are successful because they concentrate on designing the system with the people—with the customer—in mind. They think systems-wise and they respect people highly. They do not want to control people; they want to enable them. The leader is the systems designer, so in terms of the leadership of the group of people at this meeting, I hope that we can design a system to answer Nicola Richards’s question about how we involve the whole of society in thinking about how we move forward.

10:15

My experience in business was that all discussions had to come to a practical conclusion. I am struck by Nicola Richards’s comments. I have immersed myself in the content of the petition, and two expressions from my childhood come to mind: “Trying to catch a bar of soap in a bath” and “Playing tag with a fox”. This is a petitions committee, so the petition must result in something practical that we then do. We can all identify examples, and we can all sympathise with the underlying concern of the petition and recognise it from our own experience. However, what should the committee ultimately seek to do as a next practical step?

Maybe the second step is to facilitate a dialogue across the whole of our society. A lot of people within our society are already systems thinking. If we can connect them to create a critical mass, we will start moving forward. I am again arguing what I said earlier—doing it in bits and pieces has not worked over the past few years. You are right in saying that it is a bit like a bar of soap, but that is basically what we are trying to get to.

The first stage in the committee’s leading this is to look at how the public sector thinks. If we can do a study on how organisations think, that is a basis on which you can move the process out into the whole of society—and it is happening in the whole of society. We are starting to realise that the old ways are not producing wellbeing and effectiveness in our society. There is beginning to be discontent within society, so we should try to accelerate the process so that we are talking to the whole of society. “Facilitating dialogue” is the technical term for it.

Mention has been made of the Christie commission and what we can take out of its findings. Unfortunately, and particularly in times of cutbacks in local and central Government, silo thinking seems to become more entrenched. Instead of delivering front-line services, the management structures seem to close in on themselves and take away front-line services. Dave Watson and Jim Mather gave good examples of where, if the right front-line services are delivered, that is preventative spending that saves money.

What do Dave Watson and Gordon Hall think we can learn from the Christie commission? How do we see those practical solutions being implemented at local government level? That might also be a question for the Improvement Service. It is about delivery of front-line services and trying to get back into the process the thinking that preventative spending can make savings at the front line. It is not about shutting down front-line services.

The Christie commission has set up a different kind of conversation among public services more widely and, in my experience, the silos are starting to break down more. Once we start to talk about outcomes, that takes us away from asking what is our service provision and what is yours and towards asking how we can work collaboratively. With the statement of ambition around the community planning partnerships and so on, there is a thrust towards the public sector working even more collaboratively to achieve outcomes with communities, rather than doing things to communities. Christie was very strong on that. I have the sense that there is a greater appetite and willingness to work together collaboratively to achieve outcomes. There is an acceptance that that is how we have to work and that individual organisations do not have the answer.

Gordon Hall is probably right about the lack of underlying thinking. I read a range of reports about change in the public sector, and there are bits of Christie and bits of systems thinking that come out of that. However, there is still a strong belief in the heroic leadership models that Chic Brodie talked about. Time and again, I read Scottish Government and other reports that are all about leadership involving Richard Branson-type figures who come rushing in to save us; in reality, they do not.

That is the wrong model because, as Jim Mather said, the difference from manufacturing is that most public services are delivered by people. What we therefore need are enabling management styles and the people stuff. To be frank, report after report and proposal after proposal—whether for adult care or any other big changes—includes perhaps only three little paragraphs about the workforce in a 60 or 70-page report. It is as if those involved say “We’ve got this great thing. We’re going to merge these people and going to move things around.” Then they say “Oh! There are people who are going to have to do this, at the end of the day. Let’s stick in a few paragraphs about the people at the end.”

We need to do something else in order to find a practical way forward. Government can help by using a broad framework approach, particularly in respect of some of the people issues. Someone said earlier that turkeys do not vote for Christmas. However, we can create frameworks that allow people to innovate. The health service is a good example of that. Many big changes have been made in the design of health services because there is a framework that allows staff to suggest better ways of doing things in the knowledge that they will not be made redundant the next week as a result of coming up with the innovation. Such a staffing framework creates an atmosphere and environment in which staff can innovate.

I compliment the work that has been done and the initiatives that have been taken. However, we also need to look at the barriers that prevent such things from happening. A command-and-control culture creates a massive barrier for all the work that Dave Watson and the rest of us have talked about. We therefore need to think about what stops us from moving forward.

It is clearly leadership at the front line that matters rather than strategic leadership. The critical factor is that the people who deliver services should engage with each other. Nicola Richards suggested that the main problem is about how we change society’s culture and thinking. Are there examples of that from other parts of the world? What mechanisms are available to us to initiate culture change? To what extent can Parliament and Government assume responsibility for that?

I have recently reread the book “The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone”, which discusses the importance of reducing inequalities and ensuring that everyone has a stake in our society. Can I have some thoughts on those pretty wide-ranging questions?

I will bring in Richard Kerley first, then Janet Whitley.

Thank you for that. [Laughter.]

I will make a number of observations that will not really answer Adam Ingram’s question, but I will come to that. I have been bedevilled for a long time now by various observations when working in public services, as I still do, and since I became an academic. One of them is the manifest experience of seeing some very good islands of practice in virtually every public service organisation with which I come into contact. However, I emphasise the phrase “islands of practice”, because they often float in a sea of—to say “mediocre” would be harsh—indifferent practice. There is often considerable resistance to both scaleability and dissemination across the entire system. Jim Mather gave an example that one can find in a number of public organisations, whereby the organisation achieves X—“X” might be completion of an appendectomy, installation of a shower, or assessment of special education support within three weeks—and the outcome is good over perhaps a five-year period. The question is: “Why aren’t the rest of you learning from that?”

I think that there are two or three reasons for that. One is that there is a considerable degree of what I would call non-competitive competition between public bodies. If you go and talk to people in one of the local authorities in the area that you represent and ask them in passing, while chatting, what they think of South Ayrshire Council or East Ayrshire Council, they will say, “Oh, no. We can’t learn anything from them.” That attitude is hard to break down. It needs to be challenged.

The second factor is that we often confuse areas of public service activity that are actually far more heterogeneous than we think they are. We talk about public services as though they are all the same. There is a place for command and control and for mass procurement. If I were running a local authority and I wanted to acquire 5,000 water glasses, I would expect the variation and tolerance on those to be according to Six Sigma, and I would go to the cheapest provider of that glass, as this Parliament did with its glasses—it probably got them from the Czech Republic or somewhere like it.

One has to build in the variation factor, which requires a lot more reflection than action. This is where I sympathise and agree with Gordon Hall. I say to Jackson Carlaw that we are focused on “doing”, but sometimes one has to say, “Actually, there is no immediate conclusion here. We need to throw a stone in the water and come to an absolute outcome.” I could come to some sub-outcomes for this committee—

That is not really the purpose of this committee.

I understand that. When I first spoke to a committee clerk one of my queries was, “What are we trying to achieve here?”

The committee is the water into which this petition has thrown a stone. I hope that you will speak to other ���˿��� about this and reflect on the issues when legislation or proposals come before you.

Another petition might serve as an example of what we are talking about. It deals with an issue that I have been keen on, which is the provision of insulin pumps throughout Scotland. There is a clearly laid-down Government policy on the issue, but there is massive variation from one health board to another. I know that it is a cliché, but I can think of no better phrase to describe that than “postcode lottery”. The unfortunate fact is that someone on one side of a border who requires an insulin pump will get it but someone on the other side of that border will not. At one level—perhaps I am being naive—that seems totally unfair. In respect of who is in power, it is frustrating for the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing to find out that the health boards are not doing what they are required to do. This committee is investigating the matter. I will say no more than that, other than to mention that we are visiting the Western Isles soon to have a more detailed discussion about it.

Petitioners come before us and say, “We cannot understand why there is a laid-down Scottish Government policy but the service is not available where we live.” That is one of the frustrations with which we have to deal.

It might be helpful to bring to the attention of the committee some of the work that the Scottish leaders forum has taken forward on such workforce issues. Of course, like others, I have a lot of sympathy with the points in Gordon Hall’s report, and I am not suggesting that the work of the forum is a panacea that will solve all issues.

The Scottish leaders forum brings together about 300 chief executives from across public service. It has had a lot of interest in workforce development issues. Recently, a workforce development group has started to do specific strands of work to address issues that have come out of the Christie commission report, and to address the issues about culture, attitudes and behaviours that we have been talking about, in the context of public services. Workstreams are moving forward with deliverables and outcomes and have involved quite a lot of consultation and involvement across various public service organisations. I mention that in order to point out that some practical action is being taken through that route, beyond that which others have mentioned, to try to address specifically the culture change that the petition is concerned with.

I am conscious of Jackson Carlaw’s point about focusing on what we can do as a committee. The petition urges

“the Scottish Government to review the considerable research into the thinking that underpins the approach to managing the contribution from staff that has been undertaken over the past decades”.

Does the Scottish Government have a view on that specific aspect?

10:30

We reviewed the research through some of the initiatives that Jim Mather and others put in place during their time, right across the organisation, and there has been an interest in systems thinking. I do not see a huge amount of additional value in reviewing the research again. We draw on Jake Chapman and systems thinking and a lot of that is used in the organisation to underpin things. If I was thinking about how we would apply resources, I would struggle to see reviewing the research as a valuable next step.

That really is the key point for us.

I want to pick up on culture change, which Chic Brodie and Janet Whitley raised. The observation that comes from the practitioners that we deal with in my work with the University of Strathclyde is really quite interesting. There is a disbelief in culture change and a belief that culture change is too hard and cannot be made to happen on its own. However, having a new purpose can drive culture.

An example would be telling a planning department that its purpose is to approve good projects and, the corollary, to disapprove bad projects. There would then have to be measuring of the end-to-end time that it takes to come to decisions. Measuring would start a process in which the number of jobs that a planner has open at any one time could be cut. A front end could be put in to handle the interrupt calls that come in, and there might be greater clarity on applications so that there would be fewer mistakes and referrals. Planners might do much less multitasking. Although women are better at multitasking than men, multitasking does not work, because there is just too much overhead. Once there is a purpose, it can drive the culture change and there can be ownership of it.

I am very keen on Nancy Kline, who says that people think only when they talk and that they prefer to thinking to obeying. Talking to planners about purpose and getting them talking can give them a sense of ownership of something to the point at which it is actually implemented.

Thank you. I ask members to keep their questions reasonably short.

I should clarify that the systems that I mentioned were in the context of manufacturing, but my point was that they do not just apply there. The key element is to generate participation. On the idea of a systems designer, I sort of demur. The key thing is how we encourage participation in the formulation of processes and policies, particularly with things such as the proposed community empowerment and renewal bill and procurement reform bill. That is why I asked about leadership, because leaders have to understand and accept that.

The local authority in the area where I live has the sub-banner “Service and People”. Janet Whitley talked about the 300 leaders in the Scottish leaders forum, who are chief executives from local authorities and public bodies across Scotland. Richard Kerley referred to islands of good practice and good delivery. How do we ensure that local government and central Government instil that good practice? That comes through systems design at local level. What Deming did with the manufacturing industry in Japan after the war showed that, if the right tools are given to the right people at the front line, they will deliver, and deliver well. We need to ensure that the lessons about how that is delivered are replicated and used.

Unfortunately, when there is a top-down approach, people still end up thinking in their silos. They think about command and control rather than innovation and development taking place from the ground up. I would be interested to find out whether the Government thinks that the Scottish leaders forum gets to the root of how services are being delivered locally by people on the ground, not how chief executives or senior managers think that they are being delivered.

Jim Mather gave the example of the time taken to fit a shower going from more than 1,000 days down to 25. As elected members, every time we approach a local authority on behalf of a constituent, we are told, “No, that can’t be done,” yet if we speak to someone in a local office, they say, “We could do that.” The problem is that the management tell us, “We can’t do that.” We need a can-do culture, rather than a cannot-do culture. I would like to find out how the Government is reflecting on good practice that is happening on the ground.

Would either of our guests from the Scottish Government wish to make a brief comment on that? As we are a little tight for time, I ask that you keep it sharp.

I can make a quick start on that. The role of the Scottish leaders forum and the chief executives is very much about the commitment, but the participation and the work involve staff at all levels from different sorts of organisations. That is central and key to the success of what comes out of the workforce development activities. An example of a work stream is the one on community asset-based workforce development, which is a specific strand of work to involve communities in the design of workforce development interventions for the people who deliver services. It is a case not only of involving staff at all different levels of the workforce, but of ensuring that there is a clear commitment to involving communities more widely in determining the workforce development needs.

I will bring Mr Hall in after we have heard from other committee members.

I note that the papers that Mr Hall provided us with prior to the meeting contain some good examples, such as the comparison with the interdependence of the parts in a motor vehicle. He gives us a wealth of references to research by people such as John Seddon and Tom Johnson, which I hope that we will get hold of soon. He also refers to the Finnish education system, which significantly outperforms the systems in the United Kingdom and the USA. Our education secretary has been over to Finland to investigate that success story.

However, although Mr Hall has given the committee a number of good examples, he has not provided us with an example of a country that we could point the Scottish Government to where the change from command and control has happened or where the concept that he favours has been implemented or embraced. Perhaps he could address that point.

If any other colleague wants to come in, please let me know.

I do not think that any other country has taken on quite such a big challenge, but the idea is, “This is Scotland—we can do it.”

To go back to what John Wilson said, there are loads of islands of very good practice. The problem is that we have not been learning from them. Such good practice has been around for the past 20 or 30 years and we are not learning from it. That is the big challenge that we have in front of us. There is not a shortage of effort or of good people, but we do not learn from the good practice.

Could we develop what Nicola Richards was talking about? Would it be possible for the guests at today’s meeting to get together and come back to the committee with a proposal for how we address the whole? It is the whole that needs to be addressed if we are to get round the problem of not learning from the islands of good practice. Could we do that? Would you be happy with such an outcome?

Perhaps that is something that the witnesses can discuss offstage. From my point of view, I think that it would be a very good idea.

I want to ask Richard Kerley about the islands of good practice and the fact that there is a lot of bad practice throughout Scotland and the rest of the UK. In your experience, is it sometimes difficult for the best practice to be translated from one local authority or health board to another? Is that the issue? We know what the good practice is, so why cannot we ensure that everyone raises their game?

The phenomenon is more pervasive than that. It is not simply one that exists between local authorities, health boards and other organisations; it can often exist within those organisations overall and within individual units. As well as observing as a participant, I have spoken to a number of doctors about the extent to which nurses, other support staff and doctors observe different practices in different wards and clinical divisions of the same hospital. They will comment quite freely about the fact that in X unit the staff are encouraged and motivated and there is open discussion, whereas in another unit there is a culture of not challenging or discussing what is laid down. The same is true in different local authorities.

You asked how we can extend and develop the good practice. I have one fairly simple suggestion. When I go to the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities award ceremonies I find them a bit glitzy. Jackie Bird—I hope she gets better, by the way—or someone like that is always there and there is an element of people drinking too much and being self-congratulatory. However, those events tend to throw up observations about unit-level practice led by a bunch of men and women in Cumnock, Dalmellington or wherever. I look at those examples of practice and think, “That is good, but why are they not shared more widely?”

That touches on a slightly different consideration of leadership. On occasion, there needs to be shared leadership—whether from the leading people in local government, their organisations, the Parliament or ministers—that draws good practice to the attention of a wider body of people and pushes it more so that it is not noticed only by the people who are at that ceremony that night and those who read about it in the following morning’s paper. People need to be asked what they are doing about that.

On occasion, there must be collaborative leadership, which involves drawing people out and encouraging them, but, sometimes, leadership just involves kicking some people. You can do both by contrasting the bullying approach with the other approach.

All the lessons of leadership that I can see from the research that Gordon Hall refers to, which goes back a good while, involve variation and contingency in leadership. Sometimes people need to be told, “Here’s something good that is happening. What is your reaction to it? Don’t just poo-poo it and look the other way.”

That is an interesting point.

The Christie commission produced a lot of good examples. Obviously, people can always argue that something that works in one place need not necessarily work elsewhere, but the underlying ideas are worth thinking about.

The difficulty with the heroic leadership model, which is still the pervasive one, is that the emperor’s new clothes principle applies as well. Essentially, people just say, “Oh, yes, yes, we’ll do that.” The public and private sectors are riddled with that attitude.

I attend many discussions with various senior managers in the public sector about particular projects. I say to them, “Have you really thought about systems thinking for this project rather than listening to a management consultant who has given you something that they have produced in 20 other places?” They say, “Oh, I think systems thinking is a great thing, Dave. We must do more of it.” So I say to them, “But you’re not doing it here,” and they say, “Aren’t we?”

The point that I am getting at is that large numbers of senior leaders simply do not get it. That applies in the private sector as well as the public sector. Fifteen years ago, I was involved in negotiations around some of the shambles in the private sector that everyone wishes they had not become involved in now.

There is a point about the underlying thinking. If we could change things so that people had an understanding of that, we would at least be on the first page of a solution.

I am at the point of winding up this discussion.

We need to be clear about what the petition is calling for—I think that I mentioned that to our Scottish Government colleagues.

I believe that Gordon Hall pointed the way forward when he suggested that the guests that we have with us today should meet elsewhere and come back with a paper that we can consider in more detail. I hope that all our guests will agree with that—I see that Jim Mather is nodding. That would be useful to us.

I am sure that all committee members agree that this is an interesting area and that there is a lot more to do on it. I would be keen for the clerks to read the Official Report of this debate, analyse all the comments that have been made and come back to us with suggestions that we can take forward.

Clearly, the Scottish Government is key. I am sure that it has considered the issue of research. We have had feedback from Dr Richards on that point.

I agree with that suggestion. Part of the consideration might concern pilots of good practice. Is there a council with a known competitive position that could put together examples of good practice in a way that would enable us to see how they work? If that is effective, the translation to other areas would be quite simple.

I will not oppose the suggestion, but I am distinctly lukewarm about it. I think that the petition should be closed. The Scottish Government has told us that it has considered all this. There is a danger that, in an attempt to give effect to a solution, we try to translate a sentiment into—ironically—an institutionalised approach. That is the antithesis of the approach that we have been discussing. That is my reservation.

Thank you for your comment, Mr Carlaw. I believe that you made your views clear at the start as well. Nevertheless, it would be useful if the clerks could produce a paper that we could consider at a future meeting. Obviously, the suggestion that you make would be one of the options.

We have had a good and stimulating discussion—our first round-table discussion. It is excellent that we are talking about improvement in the public and private sectors.

I thank everyone for coming along. We look forward to hearing from you again. I am sure that Gordon Hall will co-ordinate the response with all our other guests.

I will suspend the meeting for five minutes to allow our guests to leave.

10:45 Meeting suspended.

10:48 On resuming—