Total Place

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New leadership report from Professor Keith Grint

Local Government Leadership (formerly the Leadership Centre for Local Government) commissioned Keith Grint, Professor of Public Leadership and Management at Warwick Business School, to deliver a report on how Total Place fits within the broader academic literature on leadership and change. This final report, Problem, purpose, power, knowledge, time and space,  follows the interim findings released in May.

The report draws some provisional conclusions from Total Place. It is based on a reading of documents and interviews with key stakeholders and participants, and locates the initiative within a wider body of academic literature on leadership and change. At this point, (July 2010), the empirical data remains illustrative rather than definitive because the nature of the initiative precludes any final conclusions.

The bulk of the report is concerned with establishing the academic context for this new localism and suggests that the following issues remain critical to any future success:

  1. The problem of problems: precisely what kind of problem is it that the Total Place approach seeks to address?
  2. What is the purpose of the organizations and people involved in this: what is their Public Value?
  3. Why do mechanical metaphors of organizational power fail to explain how organizations can be changed?
  4. Why is the local nature of the knowledge so important to change?
  5. Is time an opportunity or a problem when trying to change organizations radically?
  6. What, precisely, is it about the local nature of space that makes Total Place such an important model for rethinking public services?

Read more and download the full report.

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