Report from CSES Spotlight Event, 15 April 2021
In April 2021, CSES held a 'spotlight' meeting to discuss the role that trust plays in stimulating and enabling new partnerships between users and providers. Specifically, the event explored the role of trust in the context of emerging trends in the four sectors of focus: healthcare, planning, digital economy and education. This follows directly from the Covid recovery roundtable hosted by CSES and Essex County Council in October 2020.
The event concluded that:
- There is a clear case for multidisciplinary collaboration, and there is appetite among the group to establish a more formal model for this.
- Each sector's issues are connected and cannot be considered in isolation. Any collaborative initiative must adopt a "whole system" approach.
- Diversity and inclusion are not simply "nice to haves"; they are essential to getting things right. Whilst the existing stakeholder group is relatively diverse, the model that we adopt to bring about action must be fully inclusive.
- To achieve the necessary levels of system integration, inclusion, diversity and participation, trust among the parties is essential.
Specifically, the following were identified as critical to achieving positive change:
- The need for an informed partnership between user, authorities, charities and industry.
- The value in taking a 'system of systems' approach to optimising related services (e.g. health and social care or housing development, integrated mobility, community-based energy provision and education of public-family-student).
- A means by which genuine multi-disciplinary teams can be assembled and motivated into ongoing collaboration.
- A realistic and reliable smart lab that can simulate and evaluate options, yielding cost, speed and impact benefits.
CSES is exploring models for such multidisciplinary collaboration – that might achieve the above and be sustainable – with strategic stakeholders to establish how we might take this forward.
In parallel, we will be holding a spotlight event on the topic of inclusion, which is one of our established spotlight topics, on Thursday 22 July (16:00-18:00 TBC). We will explore how to ensure that inclusivity is built into the model for collaboration, how to harness science and technology to reduce (rather than increase) inequality and how our work can therefore tackle deprivation in the region.
Further details will be posted on our website in the coming weeks. If you would like to find out more or be part of this conversation, please join us in July or contact the President.