Selected quotes

“The idea of complexity helped us explain why outcome based performance management [is failing]” - 3:09

“Outcome based performance management … and New Public Management … is conceptually flawed” - 6:21

“We needed a new paradigm” - 6:41

“You’ve got a crackpot idea about doing something fundamentally different. How do you persuade people to pay you to do it?” - 7:15

“Is it ok to talk about complexity?” - 10:02

“When we first started out on this path, people explicitly told us not to use the language of complexity because it was off-putting” - 10:48

“…dismantle … the idea of randomised controlled trials” - 13:40

“Delving into the conceptual ideas which underpin this help to really get to grips with some of the failures of the existing forms of public management” - 13:59

“The concept[s] that underpin complexity provide that fundamental challenge which was lacking before” - 15:05

“I’ll see your health economist, and I’ll raise you a physicist!” - 15:40

“In a complex system we must be humble about any knowledge claims we make” [Quoting David Byrne] - 18:54

“To operate successfully in a complex environment … you needed to trust the people who were doing the work because you needed to create the space for them to respond appropriately to the ever-changing detail of the context in which they were operating” - 21:03

“It turns the purpose of management upside down” - 22:24

“It’s really hard to make the time to build relationships and do the really human scale things that enable this stuff to flourish if you’re trying to operate within a management system that is fundamentally based on the ideas of New Public Management” - 23:27

“There’s an increasing comfort with some of the language and ideas of complexity” - 24:54

“Even just two years ago, people were saying to us, ‘Don’t speak that language. You’ll frighten people.’ Now, we have the language of complexity spoken back to us.” - 25:21

References

A Whole New World — Funding and Commissioning in Complexity - 2017

Exploring the New World - Practical insights for funding, commissioning and managing in complexity - 2019

Radical Help - Hilary Cottam - 2018

Toby Lowe - Bio

Toby is a lecturer at Newcastle Business School and his bag is the funding, commissioning and performance management of social interventions. His stick of Whitley Bay rock has got complexity written the whole way through it. Over the past couple of years he’s been involved in a hugely interesting research project applying complexity ideas to social interventions.

Toby Lowe’s profile and details of his research work on the Newcastle University website

Embracing Uncertainty - Toby’s blog on complexity-informed management