This paper articulates the observation at first hand of a fascinating process as local government within the Northern Irish context, long locked in a very specific set of circumstances, has engaged with reform. An overt coercive requirement for change, particularly in structural terms, came from the Northern Ireland Executive and the British Government. Between 2013 and 2015, 26 previously constituted local authorities had to merge to cover larger, more similarly sized regional populations. An internal change management strategy emerged from amongst the local authorities themselves, orchestrated and coordinated by a highly idiosyncratic organization, the Local Government Staff Commission of Northern Ireland. This organization rallied an entirely voluntarist assembly, effectively a diagonal slice from across all existing authorities’ staff and elected members, to design and then implement a large scale change intervention around citizen-focused local government practice. Largely informal and non-hierarchical in nature, the set of change initiatives paved the way and eased an eventual successful transformation. This model represented a fully ethical attempt to generate a humanizing rationale for change, firmly embedded in an HRD focused approach. This paper will report in detail the sets of initiatives and the thinking and methodology behind them, to demonstrate more widely the effectiveness of change considered and carried out from an inclusive rather than a hierarchically governed ethos. More recently, the learning derived from the change strategy has itself started to play a new role, as the new authorities, and more particularly their new Chief Executives, have signaled some degree of collaborative return to both the findings and the process of the change strategy. Tasked with constructing the Northern Ireland Community Planning Foundation Programme, envisaged as the device that will drive collaboration, sharing, partnerships, customer focus and efficiency, the authorities are beginning to grapple with entirely new and wider remits for action. This shift from structural to innovative behaviours has kept alive the memory and learning of the inclusive and collaborative change project, and the continued existence of the Local Government Staff Commission itself confirms the importance of a collaborative, orchestrating honest broker.
Northern Ireland represents a very specific environment where for a variety of historical, cultural and political reasons, the full panoply of modern democratic governance discourse, consisting of partnership, outsourcing, multi-agency, customer focus, NPM, NGO, third sector, has been late to arrive. Given this, and the call within the panel for “more ‘in-depth empirical studies of the change process within various public contexts … [examining the] … change interventions and the roles and behaviours of those involved in change processes [and] more comparative studies of the management of change’ (Kuipers, Higgs, Kickert, Tummers, Grandia, & van der Voet 2014, 17).”, this paper should provide a valuable contribution to the debate around the ethics and effectiveness of who controls change and how humanizing transformation may be brought about.
Organisational change and the organisation of public sector work
