City of Playford - Transitioning a local Government Authority from Level IV to V

Speaker A When we were preparing for our speech today, I guess had a couple of options about what we might talk about and one of those being implementation. But I figured by this stage of the conference you've probably heard a lot of implementation stories. So we'll cover that a little bit. We'll probably gloss over the top and I'm happy to take questions, more detailed questions at the end. But I think the real story for Playford is more around this issue of the transition of the organization from what is traditionally in local government, probably level four organizations to what we believe in at Playford is now more around level five organization. I want to talk about that journey and I want to talk about why I think that's probably occurred. Just a quick on where we are, where we're from. So city of Playford is in Adelaide, which is the capital city of South Australia, just to the northwest of Melbourne and sort of west of Sydney. For those of you who know those two capital cities a little bit more, that's where Place is located in proximity to the central business district of Adelaide, just to the north in terms of population 80,000 people at current present time and the land area 133 sq mi or 345 km��. So a rather large council in terms of our context, in terms of area I'm going to just go through I got a few pictures about Playford. I really wanted to show what actually happens in Playford. I think pictures are probably the best way of doing that. What's behind me is a youth centre that we have called the Northern Sound System. One of the issues that we really struggle with in our environment is that we have a lot of our youth leaving school very early, not completing school, not completing their education. The Northern Sound System has become a really good outlet or a focus point for youth in the area and is widely known in both our local area but also across our state as being a center for excellence, if you like, for encouraging the artistic side of what young people can do if they're not more academically inclined. If you can just see, and it's a bit hazy on that screen up in the top right hand corner is a picture was taken recently. We had those of you from the Commonwealth, we had the Royals come out, we had Kate and Will come and visit us. They were very keen in terms of visiting the city to see the things that were related to youth. So they were very, very impressed with the Northern Sound System and some of our local youth actually performed for them in that venue and they found that to be very stimulating. We also run an Aqueduce, a fairly large swimming precinct that's fairly common in a lot of local government areas. The building on the bottom of this slide is a building which is currently under construction. There's only three in Australia that have a set up like this. We're actually looking at new business models for how we integrate different service providers to actually look at generating jobs in a local area, which is a particular challenge for us in our part of Adelaide. So that building is currently under construction. As I said, it was one of only three in Australia of that nature. This slide's really to show some of the more service delivery orientated things that we do on your left hand side is picture of some wetlands. We have a very large aquifer storage and recovery system. I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with that kind of technology. We're in the driest state and the driest continent in the world. So we have very big water issues in terms of making sure we have enough water available. We use aquifers so we capture the water, we inject it down into the ground for storage and we pull it back out when we need it, particularly during the hot periods. And we have a reticulation system that carries that water around the city. So that's what those pictures are about. On the other side of the slide is a picture of some of our infrastructure, which is another one of our challenges, is that a lot of our infrastructure is now 50 or 60 years old and is coming towards the end of its life. So we've got a real issue occurring at the moment with how do we deal with that given also in the context of we also have a lot of growth occurring in some newer areas who've got brand new infrastructure. So we have a community issue developing where we've got the long term ratepayers of the city who have now got infrastructure which is falling apart, and then we've got the brand new residents of the city who have got brand new, shiny infrastructure. And there's starting to be a bit of a tension that's forming around those two things. The last slide I want to show, just by way of some background is also the work we do around our community and healthy eating. We have a lot of issues in our community with people not being making good choices around what sort of foods they eat. And particularly we focus on making sure that children are getting good meals before they go off to school each day. So we run a couple of shops that are actually targeted at nutritious eating. We run some courses out there for parents who can come along and work out how to buy a cost effective nutritious meal and actually create that so that they can send their families off with a good meal. So I haven't got any more slides today. That was it. I really wanted to just talk to you more about what we're doing. Adam's role this morning is really just to give his external perspective on what's been happening at Playford whereas I'll give the internal perspective. So Adam's going to jump in from time to time. As I said earlier, most local government, really, in the South Australian context and probably more broadly across Australia, are really level four organizations. They have their local area that they look after, their sphere of influence and their sphere of thinking really doesn't go much beyond that. And for that reason that most of those organizations are structured accordingly. Playford's a little bit different. We actually have a different view to how we deal with our organization, led largely by our visionary CEO, who Andrew spoke about in his introduction, who he met some time ago. Our CEO looks at things quite differently, and today I really want to talk about how that journey has unfolded for us over time. So what's different about playford? So the things that are different for us is that we've developed a community plan with our community. Lots of organizations, lots of local government organizations, just focus on their planning and what they actually have to deliver. We've actually gone out and facilitated the generation of a community plan, which is where the community aspires to be in 30 years time. So to be clear, it's not a 30 year plan for our organization, it's a 30 year plan for our community. So we've gone out and we facilitated that. We've engaged the relevant stakeholders and we've now pulled that together as the community's aspiration about where it would like to be in 30 years time. I'm not aware of any other councils in Australia that have one of those. There might be, but there certainly wouldn't be very many. That's something different that we do at Playford. The other thing that we've done, I guess, in responding to that, is we've created a ten year strategic plan. Most strategic plans of local government organizations tend to be five years. Our election cycles are four years. It's very hard to get anything done beyond that period of time due to the election cycle. We've got a ten year strategic plan, and the ten year strategic plan for our organization really seeks to respond to the 30 year community plan and talks about where do we need to go as an organization in the next ten years to start contributing towards the delivery of that longer term community plan.

Speaker B This was one of the points where we had one of the initial discussions when people first start to see about the levels of work and the time span concept, okay, 30 year plan, people start doing the math, therefore we're level seven. But hang on, we can't be seven levels. That seems crazy and trying to work through what that means. And that's where we started to draw that distinction between we might be trying to get somewhere, some sort of future idea, but the actual work itself wasn't going for anything more than ten years. So drawing that distinction, one thing we often describe it as is dragging that right column in Excel and then clicking on it, and then just pulling it all the way across until you get to 2070, that doesn't suddenly make your level of work go up. That's not actually work. That's just called extrapolation. Whereas if you can say to someone what's it going to look like in 2016, and they can articulate it, what's it going to look like in 2018, they can articulate it, what's it going to look like in 2032, so you can see we now know the work hasn't gone there. That's kind of an idea. So that's one of the things that we do when we help clients. It was good to be able to work through that with Play. It in terms of the difference between the idea versus the actual work that was required.

Speaker C I'm just curious from that perspective, because who does your local infrastructure planning, for instance, where the city is expanding to how the infrastructure adjusted? That where hospitals are going up, major roads are going up, electrical kind of power supply units. Is that not beyond ten year kind of planning?

Speaker A I guess the tier of government that does that in our environment is the state government. So they have a 30 year plan, which does exactly what you're talking about. So the other thing that Playford does is or the other approach we take is we take the approach with a government of Playford, meaning that we actually seek to play all the role that a government would play in a state context without trying to deliver some of the state services. Our CEO likes to say we stick our nose into everything, which is true. So if there's a local issue, rather than saying, well, that's a state issue or that's a federal issue, we take the view that we're going to stick our nose into it on behalf of our community and become advocates. If we don't have an active seat at the table, we'll become an advocate for our community, and we generally try and get a seat around the table if we can. And there was a very recent example for us, general Motors Holden, who have a car manufacturing plant in our city, been a long term large employer of people in our region. The announcement was made fairly recently that that will be closing down in 2017. There's obviously lots of issues that come from that, particularly for a region which is already struggling with unemployment. So we've taken the position that we actually want to seat at the table. With respect to that, it's not our issue to resolve that. General Motors Holden, who are based in the US. Have made a decision that locally they're going to close one of their plants. We're not going to change that. But what we can do is talk to the various tiers of government about what should be done to make sure that the transition from the past to the future is well managed. And interestingly, the preliminary discussions around that seem to indicate that our perspective as a local authority is more visionary than what the state and federal perspective is. All they're worried about is putting the people who will be displaced into new jobs, which is definitely a portion of it, but we're saying, hang on, what happens after that? What's the next industry? What are we doing to build more job security in the longer term? So that's an example about where we stick our nose into everything.

Speaker B That was the other way we could tell that what we were dealing with was an organization looking to get to level five. So not just the time span, but the fact that we're now talking the language of intent, that comment that Tim had made that we want to be the government of playford, that says what we are, that's declarative we are this so that says that we're actually working now with a five level organization. So not only did we have a time span, if you look at the nature of the work, the nature of the decision that Tim had made there, the Sam's boss was this is what we are going to be. That now requires a five level organization if you're going to be delivering work of that nature. So it correlated with both time span and using the nature of the work, which showed us that we're looking to create a level five organization.

Speaker A We're also developing a fairly unique business model. We have four business units, two of them are more traditional in terms of a planning function, what's happening in the future and a delivery function in terms of what's happening today. We've also taken our other two business units which are really around our asset management and our corporate service delivery. And we've said well, maybe they're better off actually if they're separated from the organization and become their own organizations of a kind and we actually ask them to actually act more commercially. So at the moment they're being funded by the ratepayers of the city. We're saying, well, there's lots of potential asset that we could leverage off from there, whether it's service provision through corporate services or whether it's managing our assets and trying to actually use them more as a commercial entity that actually support themselves financially. That's quite unique. Again, in the local government context, there's certainly no one else in South Australia doing that. I think it's fairly limited across Australia. The last factor I want to talk about in terms of I guess what's different from us is there's 600 councils I think in Australia and we're the 12th fastest growing in Australia in terms of population growth. So that 80,000 I showed before is projected to double to 160,000 in the next 30 years, which is quite rapid growth. Some of the councils which are higher than us tend to be in the CBD areas where we're seeing a lot of people moving back into CBD areas. So the only council in South Australia that's got a faster growth rate than us is our actual city council right in the middle, where people are moving back and living in apartments in the city, et cetera. So that's what's happened. In terms of the story of what's different about playford, we now need to talk about, I guess, the structural change. So how do you set up your organization to deal with that? And Adam's already spoken about moving to the five levels of work. We went on quite a structural journey. So when this started, probably for our CEO two and a half years ago, there were some pressing issues that he needed to deal with at the time. Now, I know he'd become exposed to Ro at that time, but it wasn't in his mind the right time or he didn't think he had the time to actually implement levels of work and requisite principles in a more detailed way. So instinctively he sort of had a go at it himself and he created the four business unit model and he then developed a concept which really came out in terms of saying we will have kind of two types of managers. We'll have people managers and we'll have the technical specialist element. It's fair to say that that didn't work out well, but we understand why and I might get Adam to talk a little bit about it in a moment. The people managers tended to do well around the people management things, the leadership type skills, but they didn't have the knowledge, skills and experience to add value to the level below them when it came to the technical elements. The technical specialists obviously added value with respect to the technical elements of the roles, but then they didn't bring with them necessarily leadership skills. So we found ourselves in a real issue where some areas were doing really well on the technical side, some were doing really on the leadership style, but across the board it wasn't working particularly well. And we were starting to realize the issues around that. It was around about this time that we had our first conversations with Andrew more seriously and Adam around how do we actually sort our structure out? You want to talk about the situation.

Speaker B Of having the idea of people managers and specialists? I get quite frustrated when I hear or I see any requisite consultants, see a situation which doesn't make sense to us, and you sort of do the almost the arrogant laugh, what were they thinking when they're doing that? Because if you can't see all the colors in the spectrum, you can't see all the colors. If you've never seen requisite stuff or that sort of thing, you don't know that what you're doing is not necessarily going to work. We might know this stuff so we can see some of the natural flows that are going to come from such a structure, but that's good luck to us. There's lots of stuff we're dumb at. Don't ask me to improve process in your business. For example, guys like Ben and Ben would see a process rolling out like that and they'd think it's absolutely insane. I'd probably think it's good. So I make sure that when we see issues or situations that are not requisite, that we don't act in any sort of arrogant way. The situation, as you can probably predict, is the people. Managers who were good at managing people, if they didn't have the technical knowledge, couldn't add value from that point of view to ask those smart questions, the technical managers, the mistaken assumption that was sitting underneath was that leadership some sort of I must be great with people type skill as opposed to leadership's. The act of being clear on where we need to go, assigning clear work, in other words, something that a technical person can do if they're willing to learn it. That was the underlying assumption that was incorrectly made by Tim at the time. But Tim as himself, as a person, is extremely warm. He's extremely connecting with his people. He has the ability to get people on board. And I think what he needs to be given amazing credit for is despite this structure, which caused some pain, people kept working for the organization. People never lost their faith in playford. So to actually have a CEO who can keep people on board like that just shows you the importance of the human element. If we don't have a requisite structure, the world doesn't end. But it does require a huge amount of emotional intelligence and ability to connect with your people, to just keep them on board. I mean, if you've got guys like Sam leaving the place, then you've got a real problem. But the point is, guys like Sam and other talent in the business stayed because they had enough faith in Tim that he would eventually come to somewhere that would work.

Speaker A So during that process of the People Manager experiment, as I call it, we ended up taking a level of management out of the organization. We then sat down with the working journey and looked at, well, how do we make this requisite? Guess what brought a level of management back into the organization? Not the same level, though. I think the level we took out, at least in terms of how we had it structured, was probably a higher level of management. When we put it back in, we really put it back in at the front line to really turn on those frontline service delivery areas and ultimately creating for us a very requisite five level.

Speaker B Structure, deal with some tricky stuff in terms of the names of those people as well.

Speaker A We did because we took the layer out initially. We went and reported to effectively what is our board, our elected member group, that, hey, good news. We've taken out a layer of management so you don't have to worry about all those management costs. That was a difficult conversation when we then brought it back in. So to get around that a little bit, we actually have called that frontline management a frontline coordination role. But they've got management accountabilities, so they are genuine managers, but they don't walk around with a title saying management and that's the reason why. So I guess that's just an example where sometimes you need to be flexible in terms of your implementation to deal with your local circumstance. That was very much one of those scenarios for us. The other thing I want to talk about before I move away from structure is now that we've got our structure in place, we're really trying to turn it on and get the best out of it in terms of looking at capability. So we very recently with our friends at Working Journey looked at the capability of our level threes in the organization. We've done some work around getting some in house capacity to do some assessment at some of the lower levels of the organization. And when we get back from this trip, we're going to be moving into what will be our first people day, where we actually take the capability of the organization and as an executive group, we look at it and start to have the conversations about what should we be doing to retain the capability in the organization and maneuver it to where we get most value. And that's really turning the structure on. It's one thing to have it in place, it's another thing to actually work with it to make sure it gives.

Speaker B You its best and there's a challenge there. It's one thing we find in common with our clients that sit in about the 200 up to 1500 sort of size. It's that real understanding of what general management work is and what that work at the senior manager or at level three is. In Australia, there's often the case where you've got the general managers working hard to try to make processes work better and they're going home pretty tired from a day's work thinking, I'm tired, therefore I earn my money because I'm a general manager and that's what they know. And until you've actually had the opportunity to have good people working for you in terms of good meaning, capable at their role, not good humans as in capable of doing their role, you don't get that experience. You remember Ron was talking about how the big moment he had, he was in a session last night where he put people who had the right level of capability and he suddenly realized he could ask them to do stuff and they would actually do it. He didn't have to go and do it. And I think a lot of Australian general managers and it might be the case internationally if you've never had that experience of having people who are fully competent at that level three thinking you're in there fixing stuff yourself instead of doing that work, rather than thinking, how do I get this better? You change your thinking to what do we need to be better at? And that's a big jump. And I think the challenge that's sitting there for Tim and then with Sam and the other people on the executive team is what does the nature of that general management work look like? Now Sam can see it and you want it, so he's put in a massive effort to make sure that he has the capability under him, so he can do that work it, but it's going to take a little bit more time for the others to really see this is what work at my level truly looks like.

Speaker A So I want to talk a little bit about my journey in terms of coming to Ro, firstly to Playford and then to Ro. So I used to work in another local government organization in our state. It was a lot smaller. I'd really outgrown my role. I was looking for what was next and playford had always been in my mind. I knew Tim through local government, being fairly small in South Australia, I knew that he was a different kind of character and I was really attracted to that. And I actually worked pretty hard to get into the organization over a twelve month period and finally was able to secure a role there. At the time, I didn't really know what drove that so passionately, but I understand now that that it was there was the opportunity for me to actually use my capability in a role which is going to test me more. A true general management type of role, which is where the challenge is for us as an organization in local government terms is you can go to general manager roles in other local councils, which really are probably more level. Three roles, but they call them general management roles, whereas in playford it really is a genuine level four role which requires genuine level four work. As Adam just said. So that was my journey to get into playford in terms of Ro. We had the first workshops and if any of you who were here last night would have heard me comment around our initial experience, which was Ro was too restrictive for our free thinking CEO, there's no way he was going to go for this. And Andrew ran the first workshop and we were just talking about this sort of 15 minutes ago, and it's the first time we've spoken about it, Andrew, since that time we walked away saying, hey, we really like that stuff, there's no way Tim's going to go for it. And Andrew only told me just before he walked away thinking, hey, there's no way Tim's going to go for that. So what happened is it sort of lulled down a little bit. I know Tim went away and in tim's natural fashion. He said, While I'm away, you guys sort out what you want to do. So I remember sitting around the table with the executive group and we started to look at picking at bits that we actually thought Tim might go for in terms of requisite principles. Didn't take me too long to realize that that wasn't really a great idea and that we're talking about a work system here and a work system where you need to have all the components together picking bits and pieces whilst so you might get some value, you won't get the full value of turning it on as a system. But where it really hit the road for me was when Adam came in to do some further work with me around my business unit and my structure. And it just happened to come at the right time, I think, for me, I was getting really, really frustrated that I couldn't get things working, no matter how much effort I was putting into it. I sat down with Adam and within probably an hour, he had me hooked in terms of how we can actually turn this thing on and make it happen. It wasn't long after that I went to Tim when Tim came back and I said, tim, this Ro stuff is really good. It's going to work for us, make me accountable for it, and I'll drive it through the organization, which is what's happened ultimately. So Tim and I work really well together. Tim's happy to do the work he needs to do as the CEO to make sure the organization understands that this is important and he's happy to let me implement it in the way that I think is most suitable, and that working relationship's working quite well.

Speaker B Sam's quite easy to work with from the point of view of he has a really logical mind. He doesn't bring ego to be ready to say, yeah, I've heard about this stuff before, and here's my idea, or here's my personality testing that I've done, and I think it's the same as yours, or something like that. So Sam's open to learning and he gets it really quickly. And he did have that desire to, I've got to fix this stuff up because I'm going to go insane, because he was, at the time, being forced into working through level two and three while having the capability to work at four. So you were hurting, I guess, simple way to put it. So Sam was in all the conditions were in place that he was open. So it doesn't take long to go through the concept of, so if we can get the guys underneath you that you can assign them things that are going to take 18 months, two years, and you can just say, Fix that, that's your job. And then your job becomes, work out what you want fixed next. How does that sound? You can say to someone like Sam, well. That sounds pretty good, but Sam's got that sort of logical mind that can line it up. If you don't have that sort of logical mind, it would be a different experience. But then maybe we'd have to start talking about, this can really make your people come to life, or, or this can be a way that other things can happen. So we found it's been a different experience. There's four executives on Sam's, one of four executives plus Tim, and it's been a different experience with each executive. One of the other ones who's quite how would you describe this guy? He's got sort of long, flowing hair, a goatee, he drives a ute or a truck, as it would be called, yet he's got a sort of a financy numbers type background and he loves a bit of theory. So he sort of didn't seem to be grab bring onto it at all. And then we're in a meeting room with him and he's got one his new finance director in and the finance director says, yeah, I like some of this stuff and I've got some other things I'm going to use, so I might not use all of it. And this guy says, you don't get to choose whether you use it, mate, any more than you can choose. I'm just going to put furniture onto the ceiling and it's just going to stay there, it's going to fall down because this is the laws of physics. And I wanted to give this general manager a hug. I'm like, oh, man, that's unbelievable. Now, of course, in terms of implementing it, he's done bits of it. So this guy loves theory, he loves the concept. He's actually kind of, in a weird way, a bigger fan than Sam, but Sam has a way of being able to say, this is what we need to do next. So it's been an interesting experience above the whole thing. There's been Tim, the visionary CEO, who's basically sort of cotton onto the idea of this stuff will allow me to do my vision stuff. So please, Sam, make it happen. And that's basically been the way that it's worked in the organization.

Speaker A I think the real learning for me, the bit that really got me early on was I was operating in a managerial hierarchy where the levels of management were just another level of escalation for the issues today. And I think there's a lot of that that goes on in organizations, particularly in local governments. So if you're working at the third or fourth level, particularly if you're in a service delivery environment, you just become the third or fourth level of dealing with complaints and issues. But that's not what the real work is. And it was when I had the what really turned it on for me was when I understood, well, that's actually not my work at level four. My work is to set up a system that deals with that. My work is to focus on what I need to do, which I was trying to do, but it's hard to do that when you're dealing with the issues that are being escalated from today. And that was the thing that really got it for me and I think that's probably lacking in a lot of organizations. So I'd just like to sort of finish up with talking about so what's actually happening in playford now as a result of this, what are some of the success stories and also what are some of the challenges? One of our success stories is we run an efficiency and effectiveness program which is actually that big piece of work. If you remember what I said about structure, that was what was getting in the way of us doing Ro probably two and a half, three years ago is our council gave us a 9% reduction in operating cost target over five years. We thought probably 5% was probably what the target should be. But of course they thought, no, we want to put some higher measures in place. So they set us a target of 9% over five years, which for us translates to about $9 million. So we have to pull $9 million out of our business whilst retaining service levels. So it's not you can't cut services to take the money out. That would be easy. We need to deliver the same services in five years time as we were at the start of the program, for $9 million less. So that's been our challenge. We're now at year three and we've taken $5 million out of the business and maintained service standards, which is a really good news story. So two years to go, we have another $4 million to find and it's getting harder because we've picked some of the low hanging fruit. But that's some of the success story that we've got. Another interesting thing for us is our CEO before Ro was really interested in, and still is in organisational democracy, and he's been involved, or had the organization involved in a survey which is done by World Blue. You can Google it and have a look at it. So World Blue is an assessment of organizational democracy. There's a whole lot of questions that are asked of staff, whether it's a democratic organization and we believe we're the only local government in the world that has participated in this survey. And in terms of their assessment of whether you're a democratic organization or not, we were pretty close. We were just under the bar that was set, which is quite important to our CEO. He's very interested in us achieving that goal. One of the other things that I guess we've implemented is Ro itself as a system. It's in local government terms, it's fairly unique. I'm not aware of any other local government, certainly not in South Australia. I'm not sure about Australia. I don't think there would be many local government in Australia that are using Ro. So there's some of the good things which have been happening out of having this sort of organization set up and the capability working. Some of our challenges, and again, I spoke a little bit about this in a session last night, is around how we interrelate with what is effectively our board, which is an elected group of representatives. So we have 16 elected members, 15 elected members and one mayor. And they're elected by the community for a four year term to serve the community. So they become our board. So they're the ones that actually sign off on the strategic plan. They're the ones that allocate the resources to the organization. My assessment is that the capability amongst those 16 individuals probably ranges in level of work capability from say, level one to maybe low level three. That would be my guess. Now remember, you've got a CEO who's definitely working at level five. There's that whole issue around what kind of value add is that board providing or what kind of support is that board providing to the CEO? That creates a lot of frustration. Our CEO is out there trying to drive where the government of playford? Where are we going in ten years time to deliver on the 30 year community plan? They're focused on what's happening next week because I need to deal with those low level issues. That's a real challenge for us and one that got the conversation started about it last night. And I'm sure it will go for some time. I know Andrew and Verena have been doing a lot of thinking and there's lots of conversations going on about what does that mean? How can we actually make these situations better? There's no easy solution to that one, but that's a real challenge for us.

Speaker B Organizationally and there's an interesting way to view it. You saw Ron this morning. He was talking about your basic systems theory where you have your in throughputs and outs feedback loop. But he mentioned the importance of the environment and when you've got elected members who they're not necessarily in that classic adding value sense like a board. You could actually view them as part of the external environment. In other words, they're going to come up with some weird stuff that they're going to ask the organization to do when you're trying. I remember being on a committee of my local sporting club and I wanted to come in to talk about how we're going to attract more juniors, which attracts parents, which attracts revenue, which keeps us alive. And I come to the committee meeting all fired up to think we're going to discuss this. And I remember the president of the club said, that's nice, Adam. Now are we going to put the lost property box in the bar or in the committee room? And I went and that was me in a little local club. Imagine what Sam has to do dealing with that sort of stuff for a living every Tuesday night. So one way to actually be able to handle that is you can treat it as an external force and the more resilient you can make your organisation the better you're able to handle the weirdness when it comes at you probably not the strategy you put in front of the elected members. This is how we're going to handle your weirdness but it can actually be an effective way to be able to get that done and I think the organizational democracy point is a really interesting one because that can make the tension in a Requisite practitioner oh my God, what's going on? But our prediction is this as the organization implements more and more of the Requisite principles, the Democracy score will just go higher and higher because what's org democracy about in the concept of it you have a say in your future, you're involved, you're connected and all that sort of stuff. And as we know, requisite sets up a situation of not managers say, do not talk to me, I assign you tasks. Requisites about receiving best advice and then making decisions and people knowing that what decisions are theirs to make and which ones they just offer the advice on. And so we think that the democracy score will go higher and higher because it's designed around the same ultimate objectives which is engaged employees feeling like they actually have control over their work.

Speaker A So I really want to finish up now and I really want to finish on this note and that is that City of Playford could easily be a level four organization and that would be very normal in our context. We could easily just do those basic things that the community asks of us but because we've got a CEO with the capability that he has, what he's done over time is grow his role to suit his level of capability and look at the benefit that the community gets out of it. If you go back to those slides, many of those slides wouldn't exist if we were just running a basic level four organization. So attracting capability, letting it, freeing it up and letting it be what it is can bring out about great community outcomes and I think that's really the story of Playford. So thanks a lot, happy to take some of your questions if you've got.

Speaker D Them a couple questions. One is I was curious about this program here, your restriction program. Does the city subsidize it?

Speaker A We do, yeah but there's also some funding that comes from state and federal seers as well.

Speaker D So my question is this if you were a consultant and you were working with a level four governmental type of organization, would you encourage them to develop a longer term plan like a 30 year plan? I worked with the community once and we developed a 45 year plan but this was before I knew about levels of capability but would you do that? So that's my question.

Speaker A I think the answer to that is it depends. It depends on what that organization is facing. And I tried to paint the picture a little bit about the challenges that we face in terms of the growth of our city, the socioeconomic conditions of our city. Those sorts of things really force, I think, us into a position where we need to be thinking that way. There are plenty of other councils in our environment that don't have those sorts of challenges. They're very steady in terms of growth. They don't have some of the more social issues to deal with and I'm not sure that for them, it's necessary for them to try and grow that perspective. So I think it depends on the environment in which you work and we just happen to have a lots of things coming together which mean it becomes opportunity for us and if we don't take it, it could be detrimental in the longer term.

Speaker C Deal with a larger public sector that is said not to.

Speaker A Lots, lots. The usual frustrations that you experience with everybody. One of the challenges that he has is he's trying to be the government of playford. They're not necessarily being the government of South Australia, and that's really difficult. And sometimes when he says, hey, I want a seat at the table around the General Motors Holden issue, they look at him to say, well, why? It's not your issue. And they're right, it's not his direct issue. But he does have a potential to play a role and that's really frustrating, particularly when some of the work we're doing seems to be a bit more visionary than what the work they are that they're doing. Been ahead of 17, 1717 years and.

Speaker D Gone through a number of iterations of different mayors, but I think has now political awareness into how to manage those kind of relationships.

Speaker B The current mayor is how old?

Speaker A How old is the current mayor is 30 years old.

Speaker B So he's 30 years old. So if you think of the growth curve, the chance of being 30 years old and working through level six right now is pretty close to zero. So that means that's just a definitional thing which is the nature of government and that's one of the things that gets handled.

Speaker C Mayor, mayor and kind of senior official in the city.

Speaker A Absolutely. And I think he's certainly at the higher end of capability amongst the group. I suspect he's potentially at level three, maybe high level two would be my estimate. I'm not a professional in terms of that. It's just my judgment on what I see. Having said that, he's still very much a politician. He's still very much focused on the elections that we've got coming up in October and that won't change once we get through that. He might lift his vision for a period of time and look out, but we will only have a window of probably three years to make some significant change. So it's very much a challenge for the CEO to work with the mayor. And you're right, that's a very important relationship. And, look, they certainly work hard at that. And I think it works okay.

Speaker D It'll deem important, and that really wins you.

Speaker A That's a really good observation, and that's exactly how I see it. My business unit is the one that has most of the dealings with making sure that today is operating well. And I always talk to them about it in those terms, is if we do what we do well, then we've got half a chance of looking into the future. If we don't, we'll never get to the future. Thank you.