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Episode Transcript
Lisa: So back in 2016, Cornerstone started a journey of transformation. What was it that catalyzed or triggered that decision to start doing things differently? Where did that come from?
Edel: Cornerstone, as you’re probably aware, is a social organization. We’ve been operating in Scotland for nearly 40 years and have a great reputation for delivering on our charitable purpose, which is enabling the people we support to live a valued life. With all the recent turbulence really in the social care market in the UK, mainly because of austerity and the severe cuts to public funding, like a lot of major care provider organizations, we spent the three years prior to 2016 doing all we could to respond to those changes without having an impact on the care and the quality of care that we provide.
So we got to the end of a three-year business cycle and we were obviously looking forward to the next three years. We had done every piece of cost-cutting efficiency saving, you know, everything that you could possibly think of to keep the show on the road and not have an impact on quality. And there really wasn’t very much room to do very much more.
The catalyst was a conversation I was having with my board about our budgets for the next year, and we were debating whether we could afford to pay our social care workforce a living wage. By a living wage, I don’t mean the living wage which of course used to be the minimum wage. I mean a living wage as per the Living Wage Foundation. And Cornerstone in its history has always paid, as a minimum, the living wage.
So I just went home that night and was feeling pretty downhearted about everything and thinking: do I want to be the CEO of an organization that can’t afford to pay people that do this most amazing of jobs, that should be so better valued in society, a living wage? Something has to change.
And so we took the decision, with some funding for Cornerstone, for me and some colleagues to take three months out of the business. We undertook some study visits to different parts of the world, and we did a lot of desk research and a lot of reading. We were seeking out successful business models, and not just in the health and social care sector.
We visited organizations like the Southwest Airlines example in America and Timpsons here in the UK. We had a good bit of time to have a look at all the different ways you can run a business, to see what might suit our needs, our culture that we were trying to create, and more importantly, what might help us address some of the challenges that social care sector faces—which is primarily probably recruiting and trouble with staff retention. Once people come into the industry, low pay, low valued, low skilled jobs (which they’re not, but that’s how they get defined), and severe restrictions on contracts, which were making it difficult for us to meet our charitable purpose.
We could deliver our contracts well, but we weren’t doing all those amazing extra things that really help people to live their lives. So we were trying to address a number of problems with the new strategy. And following that period of research, Local Cornerstone, as we call it, the new model Local Cornerstone, was born.
Lisa: What did you learn from that three months sort of research discovery period? Because it sounds like a really good exercise for any kind of leadership team to do, or any organization to do. What was your kind of main takeaway from doing that?
Edel: It was massively worthwhile. And funnily enough, when I speak about Local Cornerstone and our experience at conferences and events, one of the things I always get asked is: “My goodness, you were allowed to take three months out of the business?” Because most organizations, particularly in the delivery of public services, just wouldn’t have either the capacity or the resources to do that.
So we know we were fortunate, but we learned so, so much. I mean, we produced as an end result of that three months, a pretty weighty document with all the different things we learned and all the different variances of options that we could follow, and the pros and cons. So there’s a big report as a result of those three months.
But we learned a lot about how employee engagement and this principle of genuinely trusting people to do a good job, whatever sector you’re in, really makes such perfect sense. And yet, for some reason, so many businesses treat their colleagues as if, you know, they’ve had their brains removed at work. This whole task and time approach, and very hierarchical, top-down—so alien actually when we stop and think about it. So that was probably the biggest learning.
We learned also a lot of things that we didn’t want to do, particularly in our trips to the States. Although we saw some very good practice over there, we also saw some things happening culturally within healthcare and social care businesses that we wouldn’t want. So we learned huge amounts from all our visits, and Local Cornerstone really is a combination of the best things of everything that we saw and heard and felt. Feelings were a really strong part of this. You can feel the culture of an organization sometimes when you’re going to visit.
Lisa: And then having completed that kind of three months of research and curated all of your lessons and insights from that, what was the next step then in creating this new model?
Edel: Well, we had a small project team initially of just three of us, and we kept things pretty confidential because we didn’t want to be drip-feeding information to the business, which would probably have caused anxiety. People find change difficult.
So the first thing to do was, once we were pretty confident that our research had come up with a way forward, we undertook an exercise around risk. Because when you do anything transformational, there is of course an element of risk. If there wasn’t, everyone would be doing it.
We also engaged initially with our key stakeholders, because if we hadn’t got some of those people on board or those organizations on board, this would have been a non-starter. So I’ll give you an example: the Care Inspectorate, which is the Scottish equivalent of the CQC. If we had gone to see them and presented Local Cornerstone, and they had said, “You know, this just doesn’t fit within the regulatory environment,” we just wouldn’t have been able to go on board. The same with our 19 commissioning health and care partnerships. Would they support us through delivering on their contracts to try this new model in their area? And we got the buy-in from people at the Scottish Government because just having their sponsorship gets us off to a good start.
And then the other critical thing we had to do was convince our board of directors that this was the way to go. And although they were very receptive to the proposals and instinctively thought this was worth doing, there wasn’t enough detail in the plan. So once we had the green light, we created a much bigger project team—26 people, working from memory. And they were people representative of all elements of the organization, or different pay grades and different jobs, different departments in different areas in terms of geography.
And we created eight work streams, and each work stream looked at one particular part of the proposal. So finance, for example, all the HR implications, communication, risk. I’ll resist the temptation to reel them all off, but there were eight different ones. And they were much more focused and intense pieces of work. And that took us from May 2016 to October 2016, when, by this point, we had a really sound and robust strategy. We’d done all the financial workings out to make sure it was doable, and we had a very big project plan with a big change. And it was then, in October 2016, that the board signed it off, and that it was then that we started to communicate the plan to our wider workforce.
Lisa: Yeah, I love that you involved people from all different areas of the business, on different pay grades, because I think often organizations implement these kinds of changes in a top-down fashion, which seems kind of counterintuitive if the idea is to have more of a bottom-up culture, to have more of a self-managing culture. So I love that you did that.
Edel: We were joking—had our time again, we would probably involve even more people. We were trying to keep it confidential because we didn’t want to go to engage the wider workforce until we had a really well thought through plan where we could answer all the questions. The last thing we wanted was to create, you know, instability and anxiety.
But actually, with hindsight, some of the secrecy around that project team had that very same impact. People were starting to get worried about, you know, what was going to be announced at the end of the project phase. And although the strategy’s pretty high level, and everything we’ve done since to try and implement it has very much been about local communities and colleagues working at every level of the organization being involved, I think the time spent—we could have got the involvement piece at the beginning even better.
But I take your point. You really can’t lock the senior leaders and the board in a room and come up with a strategy that’s all about trust and empowering your staff. You have to involve everybody to make it a success.
Lisa: Yeah, so on that note then, what, once you had kind of approval from the board, how did you then start engaging, you know, the wider organization and start to implement or devolve the organization?
Edel: Well, the first thing we needed to do, of course, was to communicate the plan. So we had a very large organization. That depends on who you’re comparing us with, but we’re a significant size: 2,000 employees, we support 3,000 people, we have a turnover of 40 million just for specific context, and we operate right across the country from the Scottish Borders up to the north and up into Orkney.
So the very first thing we needed to do is to communicate this strategy and why we needed to change, what would the key principles of the strategy be rather than the detail of it, and obviously what and how we wanted people to engage going forward. So we had 34 roadshows that we held around the country, and I personally—people felt strongly that the CEO should be giving out the message. I think I did all but two, though I was pretty exhausted during the period October to December, but in a good way, because I did get the chance to speak to almost everybody that works for us.
But it was important that we did these roadshows at times that suited the workforce. We’re a 24-hour business, so doing them all during the day wasn’t going to work for some people, so we did some evenings and so on. So that was the first thing: communicating. And in addition to the roadshows, we’d give everybody a booklet, a strategic booklet, so they got to have their own copy. We set up a frequently asked questions page, and some people said it had all come as a bit of a surprise, and why didn’t we tell them earlier? But my answer to that, of course, is you have to tell people something for the first time. There’s always a first time. And we wanted everyone to hear the message for the first time, rather than it having a drip effect.
So that was the first thing we did, and then we had to start the restructuring because in order to implement a flat structure, the coaching culture, you know, everything that was in the strategy, had to completely reorganize the organization. And it was imperative that we got the right people on the bus. This was good enough in terms of change management, but if we didn’t have people who were 100% bought into the vision and this new way of working and this new culture, then it was never going to be a success.
So the first things we did was recruiting to the key positions. So we lost, you know, nine or ten layers of management, but there were roles for people to be coaches, to be branch leaders. We’ve structured our business into 26 business units that operate like franchises. We needed a new leadership team. The very first thing we had to do was to go through a really robust, non-compromising recruitment process to make sure that everybody with a seat on the bus was 100% aligned with strategy, facing in the right direction, and willing to work as a team.
And that was quite difficult. We lost some very loyal, long-serving staff who are great people, but they either didn’t buy into the vision, or they found the non-hierarchical kind of coaching approach to work just too difficult either to understand or to get on board with. So that was a tough time.
Lisa: Yeah, I know that there’s a huge piece around restructuring the organization and in creating this sort of branch structure and more kind of coaching roles and stuff. But I know that you’re also really interested in and passionate about the culture piece. So I’m wondering, what have you done as an organization to support some of the more human aspect around, you know, the mindset shift that’s been required, or different ways of being together? How has that played out?
Edel: Yes, it’s a really, really great question because, of course, you can’t change the culture of an organization. And culture is something that is living and breathing, and, you know, is evolving all the time. And so, although we—those of us who have been most involved in the project have had a very clear idea of what the culture needed to be to support the change, you can’t make it happen. You can’t write that in a plan.
And it’s because it is the hearts and minds stuff, as you’ve just described. But there are certain things that we could do. So, for example, if you take all of our central services, which now come under the banner of One Team, they’re cross-functional and central. So these are people working in jobs like finance, technology, HR, central roles.
We invested time and resource in customer service training, because if they’re central, and we’ve made it very clear by repeating this message, their job, their only job, is to provide exceptional service to their teams and their branches who do support. And so under the old system, and a lot of businesses are the same, things are controlled at the center. You know, the people who make the HR decisions are the HR team, not the teams operating in the community. You know, the technology guys will have a budget, we understand that, and won’t buy you a tablet if you don’t have a strong business case for asking for a piece of technology.
So those are the sorts of cultural shifts we have to make at the center. We have a big campaign running, which carries on now, called “How can I?” Nobody’s allowed to say “no” or “I can’t help.” Whatever their job, if someone comes to them and needs some support, you’ve got to try and find a way of, you know, helping them and making it a good outcome.
We also introduced a new role to the organization, two posts called Advice and Support Coordinators. They came up with their own job titles. They have a campaign slogan which is just hashtag #AskAnything. And they are really important because they’ve provided sort of a firewall between what the business needs and what the teams need, because we need the teams to be freed up to spend as much time as they possibly can with the people we support—not doing paperwork, not filling in forms, not responding to requests from the business to give us data.
So the Advice and Support Coordinators are there to own any requests, any problem, any query, anything that the teams have, and they take ownership of it and they go away and they sort it out. So that means the teams and the little communities are not spending time on unnecessary business activities, which, you’ll know, will be commonplace in a lot of organizations. That’s not to say teams don’t have to do some paperwork or it’s all done using technology.
Those were some examples. We reviewed all our policies and procedures because in a very regulated industry, people are not always trusted to do the right thing. I mean, we have a laugh because one of our policies was a weather policy, and it actually stated in it: “If there’s a thunder and lightning storm, do not take someone in a wheelchair to the top of the hill.”
I use that as an extreme example, but again, it’s not that’s not unusual in businesses of our size, where something goes wrong once. I don’t think that ever even happened, by the way. You know, somebody writes a policy, and in the end, you know, you get to a point where we had a policy on how to drink water safely. We had a policy on how to write policies, would you believe?
So in terms of culture change, we needed to send a really big signal that we were trusting people in the communities who know the people they support to do the right thing and to deliver our charitable purpose. So we reduced all of our policies and procedures massively, not just in the number that we have—for example, we had 52 HR policies, we’ve now got 7—but we also put most of them onto one piece of paper. Bullying and harassment, for example, which we have to have because of regulation, is one line. It just says: “Bullying and harassment will not be tolerated in Cornerstone.” You don’t really need to say anything else, but a lot of companies, as we did before, had 17 pages on bullying and harassment and flow charts and so on.
So that’s another really big signal that, you know, we’re freeing you up to make your own decisions. People authorize their own expenses anymore. People don’t have to have their expenses approved, they just put them in the system. It’s transparent, including the CEO’s expenses. But in the old days, everyone’s expenses had to be signed off by a manager. In some cases to do that, people authorize their own annual leave.
These are just some examples of things that we’ve been able to do quickly that send a message that, you know, the culture is changing, and people can actually, you know, can actually feel it. But the biggest impact has been the coaching culture. So we have team coaches, but even if you’re not involved directly with the team of coaches, we invested a lot in training. So we all now take a coaching approach to everything that we do within this business, absolutely everything.
So there’s no command and control, there’s no, you know, work performance management in what we would imagine in a typical business. It’s hard, and I find it hard myself—you don’t get to be a CEO without doing a bit of telling people what to do. So we’ve all had to really work hard at this.
But there’s a whole different culture just emerging in the organization where people feel free to make decisions and to do the right thing and to use their initiative and creativity. It’s quite, it’s quite amazing to sit back and watch it happen, actually. Still got a long way to go.
Lisa: Yeah. How has it been for the teams kind of going from, you know, having to get permission for certain things and kind of reporting to a centralized function to being much more responsible and autonomous? How have they found that?
Edel: Well, some, of course, have found it very easy to do. Others have found it more challenging. And we’re not 100% into self-managing teams yet. We’ve got, I think last time I looked at the numbers, we were on about 40, 14. So we’ve still got a way to go on that.
We made it voluntary at the start. We obviously didn’t make it voluntary to engage with the strategy, and we didn’t make it voluntary to use the new technology, to opt in and out of the new structures or anything like that. Of course, it would never work. But in terms of going into a Local Peer Support Team, as we call them, we made that voluntary because I felt really quite strongly that you can’t force people to work in this way if they don’t want to. They’re not going to make a success of it.
And so what we found, which is very typical in change management, is that you had a third of your workforce who were up for it straightaway—excited, inspired, you know, our pioneers—wanted to get going. We had a third who were prepared to wait and see how the first teams got on, and then they would take a little bit of time to decide if it was for them or not. And then, of course, you get the third, sadly, who are not going to buy into the change. And over time, you know, most of those people leave the organization and go and work somewhere else, which is which is fine. This has to be for them.
So because we started with our pioneers and the people who were raring to go and wanting to make it a success, what we’ve incentivized them, there’s a pay increase if you’re working in one of them as a team member. Then they’ve all, on the whole, found it a very positive experience. But as we create more and more teams, we face challenges.
The main one, I’d say, and this is a question probably more for a team member than for me, but the main one I’d say is just the removal of an immediate line manager. Because if there is conflict in a team, if problem must get solved on Friday evening, shift needs to be covered, there was always one person who was accountable and a person to go to, you know, to complain about things. And of course, they’re not there now. It’s a collective team responsibility.
The individual person might still be there, but of course, it’s their job not to be that team leader. And so I’d say that’s probably the biggest challenge for the most of the teams. But I’d say, on the whole, and we’ve gathered a lot of stories and evidence to back this up, most of them are flying.
And what’s funny is they’re making decisions in communities for the benefit that people we support—actually, they could have made them under the old system, but they didn’t know they could. They didn’t feel they had the commission to, or they just didn’t have the time to, or they just thought it was someone else’s job maybe to come up with all the ideas.
They’re beginning to gather lots of absolutely fabulous stories about where local teams are working with people in local communities and making amazing things happen just because they’re allowed to. So again, the whole process is being evaluated independently by University of Strathclyde, and we have appointed storytellers in residence as well. We’re capturing these stories. So by the end of year three, should have a pretty good record of the difference it’s making and the impact.
But it’s not all smooth sailing. I mean, there are obviously, you know, some teams who can’t manage conflict well between themselves, and that’s what the coaches come in. And there are some upskilling issues because if you were a support assistant or a support worker, then you wouldn’t ever have had to do some of the jobs that would traditionally be done my team leaders. We don’t need whole teams of team leaders, but we certainly need the team collectively to understand their regulatory requirements, you know, the health and safety things they have to do, the reporting.
And in some areas, our teams have just, you know, started, and they’ve had their team training and their insights profiles and their coaching input. But what they haven’t had is that practical input—these are the day-to-day things that are now your responsibility collectively. And we learned that lesson pretty quickly and put that into the training. But on the whole, it’s very positive, and the feedback we’re getting is that the colleagues are much more engaged and more motivated, and they’re enjoying using their initiative.
Lisa: I guess I’m interested as well in terms of the people who previously had management type roles, and also for yourself as CEO, what have been some of the challenges in terms of, I guess, unlearning old habits? Like you mentioned there about as a CEO, it’s pretty common to have moments of telling and things like that. And to move to a sort of coaching culture, has that been challenging to sort of rewire some of those habits?
Edel: Absolutely. And I’ll speak personally and on behalf of the organization. That’s probably one of the hardest things. And it’s done out of a desire, obviously, to do the right thing, if that makes sense. It’s not that anyone who’s in any of the new positions that we’ve created is resistant to trying, but some of it is old habits die hard.
What’s great about the new culture, though, is that we’re encouraging people to give feedback. That’s all part of the coaching culture. So there is a little joke within this organization that’s what would have been called in the old days, the CEO interfering—they now use lovely language and they tell me that I’m adding value. So that’s a code word for, you know, “We know what we’re doing, let us go on with it.”
So it is difficult to change. I mean, I was never a bossy boss anywhere. I don’t think so anything I was always collaborative. But, yeah, when you’re under pressure, when there are time scales, when you’re being held to account by your regulators and you’ve got to get things done, that’s when I personally slip, because suddenly it’s got to be a phone call to someone saying, “I need you to do this today.”
But one of the things we’ve done to aid that process is we’ve created something called the Cornerstone triangle. Because initially, when we were talking about self-management, some people misunderstood that as basically they were just going to be left, you know, just to do whatever they wanted, which of course is anarchy.
And so the clarity we’ve come up with is the triangle. So on one side is competence, and that covers things like, you know, are you competent to the job? Do you have the right experience? You have the right qualifications? Do you have the right tools, the right training? So obviously, before someone is in a team, we need to make sure we’ve recruited them, trained them well, they know, you know, they have the tools to do the job.
The second side of the triangle is about clarity. So we believe our job as leaders is to provide people with the clarity. So this is what we want you to achieve, these are your boundaries within which you have to work, and the rest, you know, you have freedom to do how you want, as you see fit. And then the third part of the triangle is the autonomy piece, because you can’t have autonomy without the competency and the clarity.
And that’s really helped. So if I’ve got any concerns that something’s not going on, or, you know, people are not working to the standard level that I require, if you actually visit the triangle, it’s very easy because they’re either not doing it because they don’t have the competence or skills, and therefore you need to give them more training, or they’re not doing it because they don’t have clarity of what you expect from them.
If you simplify things, it makes it a lot easier. In the olden days, you could go from support assistant or support worker to team leader, service manager, you know, you could work your way up. And now, because we’re bringing people in at equal team member level, upskilled, they’re getting paid a better wage, aren’t valued for what they do, you could argue if you work in a flat structure organization, there isn’t any career progression. So that’s probably the biggest issue we don’t really have an answer to.
The only answer is, if you think, but nurses and teachers, for example, when you graduate and you become a teacher—and I’ll say, not all teachers want to be deputy heads or headmistresses—but on the whole, you get your value from your profession because you’ve reached a certain point. And that’s what we’re really trying to recreate here. We want social care practitioners to be paid the same as graduate entry nurses and social workers, who don’t feel that they need to keep climbing up some ladder to either earn enough or to get the value that they should get from doing a great job. So that’s part of this whole endeavor, just to create that type of value within the social care profession.
Lisa: I love that triangle of competence, clarity, and autonomy. I think I can see how helpful that is in terms of seeing what’s getting in the way or what’s needed if something’s people aren’t sort of stepping in, or if something’s not working out.
Edel: And it’s simple. That’s still a big part of this change program—keep it simple. As you know, we’re really trying to take away all the unnecessary complication of our business processes and the way we do things, make everything as simple as possible, definitely.
Lisa: I know that obviously you’re quite inspired by Buurtzorg. I know that that’s one of Jos de Blok’s main kind of messages, is keep it really simple.
Edel: Yeah, yeah. I mean, one of the study visits that we did in that three months was to Buurtzorg. We thought we’d discovered them. We didn’t realize that the whole world was wanting to be visiting them. And yes, I’ve met Jos on a number of occasions now, and him and his colleagues have been a huge help to us.
We’re not replicating the Buurtzorg model. We need to be clear about that for obvious reasons. But massively inspired by Buurtzorg. Within Local Cornerstone, you will see, you know, a lot of the things that they do really well, like the coaching culture, flat structures, the self-management. So we’re hugely grateful to them, not just their time, but for how willing they were to share their great company with us. And we really enjoyed our study visit over there.
Lisa: So what’s next for Cornerstone? What what can you see are areas that you’d like to develop further, or kind of current challenges? How do you see the future?
Edel: Well, we’ve still got so much, you know, fair way to go just in implementing this three-year strategy. We should have the whole organization working in a Local Peer Support Team and have all our technology implemented and, you know, everything done and dusted by the end of 2019. So there’s still got a fair bit to do, and there are some ongoing challenges, but nothing that we really feel is insurmountable.
So there’s two next stages, if you like. The one that we’re currently in, so well through year two, it’s about the external influencing. We really want to affect systems change in social care in the UK. We want to transform social care in the UK. So a lot of our time and energy in year two, with funding from Big Lottery Scotland and the Burdett Trust, is about how to influence systems change.
So we’re working on a number of commissioning tests with health and care partnerships, looking at how services are commissioned differently so we move away from trading in hours of care, and we genuinely give teams and the communities, you know, the freedom to do what’s best for the people that they support in a very person-centered way. That’s very exciting.
We are hosting a lot of study visits ourselves now from across the world. Just last week I was in Newcastle, going to be in Cambridge tomorrow. But we’ve had visitors from the Basque Country last week and people coming Australia. I could go on, but there’s lots of opportunities for us to share for other organizations and other people who want to try and work differently and to do that.
And then the other big agenda item in terms of future is social franchising. And we’re working at the moment on looking at licensing and franchising for Local Cornerstone, to see if there are opportunities that other organizations can take all our learning and to apply that model to their organization. So not to copy something exactly, because every company is different—they will have their different cultures and their different way of doing things—but we’re looking at how we license the elements of Local Cornerstone so that we have a package, if you like, that we can offer to other companies if they want to improve things within their businesses.
And there’s some opportunities at the moment in rural communities in particular, where local communities want to provide care and support to their elderly population. And because of the rural nature of these communities, it’s often the case that no provider, you know, it doesn’t make commercial sense. And local authorities and NHS struggle with recruiting. So we’re supporting some communities themselves.
So we’re not providing the care and support, but we’re providing support to the community to set up a team—a mix of paid and volunteers in those cases. And we give them access to coaching, or we pay more. We obviously support training. So all of that is naturally happening without us ever really writing it down in a plan. And I think that’s what the future holds for us. And with so many opportunities thrust for others to do something similar to what we’ve done, that we’re really eager to do it. But we want to do it in a not overly controlled way, but in a way that protects our interests too.
Lisa: It seems like there are more alternative models for healthcare kind of popping up, and to me it seems quite hopeful and encouraging. What is your take on the landscape of the healthcare sector and, you know, all of these people coming to visit Cornerstone, for example? Do you feel optimistic that real change can happen and sort of spread?
Edel: I do feel optimistic. I’m a naturally optimistic person anyway, but there is something happening out there. If I say out there, meaning the broader public service delivery commissioning NHS landscape. And it’s driven really by the last few years—the last few years of austerity—and there’s an absolute recognition that with an aging population and, you know, less public money, that something has to change.
People have been saying that for years. I’ve got to so many conferences and meetings and events where everyone says it’s a crisis in social care and something’s got to change. And that was really the catalyst also for starting this while we were fed up, really, of having these conversations. And we were waiting for everyone else to change. We were waiting for the commissioners to give us more money, or the government, you know, make some sort of policy statement, or for somebody else to do something. And in the end, we decided, look, someone’s got to try something. So let’s be brave and try something differently.
But what’s been interesting is the response that we’ve had. Not only is it flattering, but it’s really encouraging. And the fact that all 19, for example, of our commissioning authorities—none of them have said, you know, “Don’t try this in our area.” And the Care Inspectorate and the Scottish Social Services Council is supporting us. The government’s supporting us. So there’s a real appetite for innovation, and there’s a real appetite, I think, to embrace change, which we wouldn’t have had, you know, three or four or five years ago.
So I’d like to say that we timed this perfectly, by design, but actually, the timing’s just being perfect, almost by accident. The fact that we’ve got, for example, you know, seven authorities coming on board as part of the commissioning tests gives you an indication that there’s a willingness to do things differently. Three years ago, we suggested to our commissioners that they come to a workshop by Cornerstone on commissioning, they probably would have laughed us out of the room, whereas, you know, when we set up the workshop, we had to go to a bigger venue, we’ve had so much interest.
So I’m pretty optimistic that if enough people get together, use their creative energies positively, and are prepared to take some risks—there’s definitely some risks in this—then we can really make a difference.
