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Dear scrutineer,

The WOW factor

Published 3 months ago • 2 min read

I know it’s hard to make time, but now it’s spring, are you giving any thought to how your committee will get started in the next municipal year? And have you considered having a conversation about how everyone might work together?
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Maybe it’s not a priority and I can understand that. You might have elections and inductions and then there is committee memberships, setting dates and work planning. A lot to do!
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And maybe there’s no obvious need to think about team development for the committee. After all, the members know what they are doing, and they work together well. Right?
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On the other hand, I think it might be a useful thing to do.
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For example, I know committees in the Welsh Parliament have done this. Taking time out, with a facilitator, at the beginning of a parliamentary term to talk about their purpose and their ‘ways of working’.
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I mean, team development is important for other types of teams, so why not for scrutiny committees?
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I was reminded about this when re-reading Peter MacFadyen’s book, Flatpack Democracy, the other day. Do you know it? It’s the story of how independent local residents took control of Frome Town Council in Somerset. It includes a section on how they developed their own Ways of Working (WOW), also with a facilitator, so they could be clear about their ethos and how they could discuss things constructively together to achieve the things they wanted to achieve.
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Go give you a feel, here are three examples from their WOW:
- Preparedness to being swayed by the arguments of others and admitting mistakes.
- Relative freedom from any overriding dogma or ideology which would preclude listing to the views of others.
- Trust, confidence and optimism in other people’s expertise and knowledge.
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Another prompt for me about this came at this year’s Centre for Governance and Scrutiny (CfGS) Annual Conference. There was a wonderful workshop, hosted by Sarah Fenn, where participants were invited to combine their ideal ingredients into recipes for scrutiny. One thing that I noticed (apart from the decorated cakes and chef’s hats!) was how many of the ingredients were values such as honesty, respect or curiosity, for example.
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My reflection on this is that, as far as I know, scrutineers don’t really spend any time talking about their values and how these values might shape the things they do.
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So, I do wonder if this be something useful for scrutiny committees to think about at the beginning of the municipal year. Perhaps asking questions like ‘how would we like others to describe us as a committee?’ And having settled on meaningful values asking ‘what might we be doing that would demonstrate these values to others?’
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And yes, it is hard to make time for these types of conversations but I suspect they do make a difference - even if it’s just saying out loud some of the things that committee members might have known instinctively anyway.
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After all, it can’t hurt to have a little of the WOW factor can it?

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Oh, by the way, if you want to add a comment or see if anyone else has commented, I have also put this reflection on LinkedIn here.

Dear scrutineer,

Here are some reflections that I hope you will find helpful. They are mainly about local government and parliamentary scrutiny, but I hope that these ideas are useful for the wider scrutiny collective. Yours, Dr Dave Mckenna

Get reflections like this straight to your inbox. I also share them on LinkedIn.

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