Audit Commission
In 2010 the Audit Commission published a report on long-term financial strategy at local authorities in England.
The Audit Commission came to us through Anecdote, our partners in Australia who also acted as critical friends for us on the project. Our task was to find the stories that leaders don’t normally tell in formal settings – the first hand, private accounts that illuminate the collective, public discussion and move people to new actions and attitudes. We also needed to do this with sufficient rigour to bear scrutiny by a demanding, investigative, organization intolerant of fluff and new-age methods.
In particular we were to look for stories about leadership and governance, prioritization, allocation of resources, handling of conflict and preparation for a tighter financial environment.
These stories were to be set alongside the findings from the Commission’s more formal case-study fieldwork. So an important aspect of our brief was to cast our material into forms that would grab the attention of and engage other local authorities.
what we did
We ran workshops with cross-cutting groups of elected members and officers and we supplemented these with one-to-one interviews. We made voice recordings of all the sessions.
Once we’d had all the workshop-session and interview recordings transcribed, we loaded them into kobble, our narrative database, and chopped them up into meaningful fragments. In order to surface stories and themes, we tagged each fragment. Short stories are captured in single fragments, longer stories are made up of a series of fragments.
Our work yielded quite a treasure chest of stories and experiences and we had to choose where to concentrate our effort. We decided to focus on relatively short stories to complement the Audit Commission’s more lengthy case studies.
what the Audit Commission got
What finally emerged were:
- seven essays, each comprising a series of stories, each with a picture and a set of notes
- a set of slides for use in presentations by the Audit Commission
- a timeline and ‘story cube’ to illustrate how the material can be used to initiate conversations in a workshop or meeting session.
