Ashcombe Council: mandating change in a low-trust organisation

The mandate would fail, and the reason is structural rather than cultural. In a council, the operating model is executed by middle managers who control rosters, casework allocation and the informal rules staff actually follow. A mandate that they do not understand or accept produces compliance on paper and drift in practice - and in children's services, drift is a safeguarding risk, not a service-quality nuance. The 'requires improvement' rating means the regulator is already watching execution, not announcements.

Why 'communicate harder' is the wrong lever: the complaint is not insufficient volume. Staff learned of team changes from a newsletter, and a formal dispute exists over consultation. The problem is sequence and channel - decisions are being announced before the people affected have been engaged, which in a unionised public body also creates legal and industrial risk. More broadcast makes the sequencing problem louder.

What to do instead, in order:

1. Fix sponsorship before messaging. Three unfilled workstream leads and a board that has met once means the programme has no decision-making spine. Appoint accountable leads and set a real board cadence; a message from an unstaffed programme is not credible.
2. Segment stakeholders by influence and impact. Unions and middle managers are high-influence, high-impact; they need genuine two-way engagement before decisions, within the statutory consultation constraints, not after. Residents and staff need clarity on what changes for them and when.
3. Make the case concrete and local. £28m is abstract; 'what this means for your team in April' is not. Use the children's services improvement as the shared purpose, since it is the one goal that is not contested.
4. Stage the operating model. Implement in tranches with a defined pilot area, published decision criteria, and a route for staff to raise problems that is answered.

Realistic constraint: the financial deadline is real. Sequencing within it is possible; pretending there is no time for engagement usually costs more time later in disputes and rework.

What the board should see:

• Financial delivery against the £28m, split between confirmed savings (decision taken, budget removed) and planned savings (assumed, not yet secured). Mixing the two is how programmes report success while the gap stays open.
• Statutory and regulatory position: children's services improvement milestones against the regulator's requirements - this is the constraint that outranks cost.
• Service performance for the affected citizen-facing journeys (assessment timeliness, caseload per social worker, contact resolution), because cutting cost while these deteriorate converts a financial problem into a statutory one.
• Delivery health: workstreams with named accountable leads, decisions outstanding and their age, and the top risks with owners.
• Workforce signals: vacancy and turnover rates in critical roles, dispute status, and a staff confidence measure with its response rate shown.

What the board should not see as headline measures: count of communications issued, number of engagement events, 'percentage of staff aware of the programme', or a single aggregate 'programme RAG status'. These measure effort and conceal the trade-offs the board exists to make. A single RAG also lets 11 workstreams hide behind an average.

Handling the survey evidence. A 22% response rate with 61% disagreement is directionally useful but not a precise figure; report it as a signal alongside qualitative evidence and set a target response rate for the next wave. Say this out loud to the board - it protects the credibility of the measure and stops the programme from being judged on a number that cannot bear the weight.

Cadence: monthly delivery and finance; quarterly on service outcomes and workforce. Outcome measures lag, so the board needs an early-warning set (caseload, vacancy, decision age) that moves first.

Immediate response. Treat the dispute as a governance defect with a clock on it, not a communications problem. Confirm with HR and legal what consultation is statutorily required and by when; pause any decision that prejudges the outcome of that consultation; and establish a scheduled, minuted engagement with union representatives where proposals are shared before announcements. Pausing a specific decision is usually cheaper than defending a process failure, and it protects the April timetable more than proceeding would.

What it reveals - three things:

1. Change was designed as an announcement, not a sequence. The all-staff email as launch, unfilled leads, and staff learning of team changes from a newsletter indicate no stakeholder analysis was done, or it was done and ignored. In a unionised environment the representatives are a high-influence stakeholder whose early involvement is a design input, not an approval step.
2. Middle managers were bypassed. They are the delivery mechanism for an operating model. Excluding them guarantees passive non-implementation, and it also explains the 61% survey result more than any attitude problem among staff.
3. The programme has no feedback loop that could have caught this in week one. The dispute is the feedback; arriving through a formal channel means the informal ones were not working.

Corrective design. Build a stakeholder plan that pairs each group with a named owner and a defined form of involvement (inform, consult, co-design), and set the rule that affected groups hear about decisions before the newsletter does. Add a standing item at the programme board on consultation status and workforce risk. Then test it: if the next announcement of comparable impact reaches staff through their manager first, the loop is working. Treat the dispute resolution itself as a milestone with an owner and a date.