The story

The case study story is about a small project in an English county council where consultants were brought in to develop an approach to a county council service.

For those who don't know, county councils are run by the public servants and the elected members or councils represent the electorate. County councils provide services such as

• education including schools and art galleries,


• care services such as adoption, social services and may be care homes,


• development services such as waste disposal,


• community services such as parks or libraries,


• resources such as estate management, encampments, transport and roads.

The basic brief was to consider the future of the service but was driven by budget problems.

The consultants visited all the branches of the service, listened to the service assistants and then produced an internal report. The operations managers incorporated the consultants’ advice into a long technical document that became the county council’s report. Some components of the report had repercussions, for instance one component advised closing eight branches, which would save over £200,000.

The elected members took the review to public consultation. People objected to losing the service and they found a totally different approach to the way those branches were run and consequently kept five of them.

The consultants’ recommendations were not totally implemented; the political process changed the outcome.

Accountability for the apple

I can imagine a scene in Paradise, the walled garden surrounding the apple tree, the core lying on the grass, the serpent slipping away, while Adam and Eve account to God for their decisions and actions.

"She did what the consultant told her."
"The consultant advised me to do it."

You see, an interaction exists between these components:

• Paradise to be lost on accounting for the wrong actions,
• the stakeholder eye of God watching the actions,
• the two client managers and
• the consultant.

It looks to me like a system, but that's because I went to John Martin's seminar on Emergence, and this idea struck me when he was describing gardens as systems like the one at Bagh-e-Shahzadeh at Mahann in southern Iran. The surprise is even when they exist in the middle of a desert,