We have spent decades designing institutions, drawing hierarchies, moving boundaries and deciding which box should own which part of a person’s life, when citizens do not experience their lives as a sequence of departmental interactions and wicked problems do not arrive pre-sorted according to our organisational charts.
A person experiencing insecure housing, poor health and unemployment does not particularly care where the council’s responsibility ends, where DWP begins, which part belongs to the NHS or whether a voluntary organisation has been commissioned to provide support. They experience one set of circumstances, while the public sector asks them to navigate multiple front doors, repeat the same story, provide the same evidence and understand distinctions that exist for our administrative convenience rather than theirs.
The complexity belongs inside the ecosystem, not with the citizen.
Healthcare provides a useful way to understand this, not because it has solved every problem of federation, but because the public already understands the idea of moving between a GP, hospital, pharmacy, community service and specialist provider as part of one health journey. Public services need to develop the same ability to follow a person through an ecosystem of housing, benefits, social care, employment, health, education, justice and community support without pretending those organisations are the same or requiring the person to join them up.
The unit of design in the next operating model is therefore neither the system nor the organisation, it is the outcome we are collectively trying to achieve around a person, family, community or place. Organisations remain distinct, locally accountable and professionally responsible, but they operate through shared foundations that allow them to coordinate as an ecosystem rather than exchange fragments at the edges of separate systems.
An ecosystem cannot be built by one heroic organisation with the answer, any more than transformation can be sustained by one heroic technology leader keeping impossible machinery alive through memory, ingenuity and a layer of duct tape. Most of us have known the person who understands the unexplained server in the corner, knows why the plug socket must never be switched off and carries years of undocumented organisational knowledge in their head, and public services have often continued functioning because those people cared enough to hold far more than anybody else realised.
That model of expertise was shaped by the same local technology estate as everything else, and it cannot be the workforce model for what comes next. The future no longer belongs to the lone technology hero who understands one organisation’s entire stack, because no individual and no organisation will own the whole ecosystem. It belongs to teams able to work across organisational and professional boundaries, learn together, experiment safely, adapt as evidence changes and bring different forms of expertise to different parts of the problem.
The people we need will combine deep specialism with the ability to work in systems they do not control. They will need to understand data, architecture, commercial models, service design, policy, ethics, cyber security and communities without pretending any one profession can replace all the others. Leadership will move around the ecosystem depending on who holds the knowledge, relationship or capability needed at that moment, which means being able to contribute without always controlling, to follow as well as lead and to recognise that accountability for an outcome does not automatically confer ownership of every part of the answer.
Technology teams, services, policymakers, commercial professionals, suppliers, communities, national bodies and places are all part of this collective endeavour. We need regional communities of practice, shared experimentation, reusable learning and workforces able to move ideas and capability across institutional boundaries without forcing people to leave behind their local knowledge and relationships.
The future workforce is not less human because the technology becomes more intelligent. It is more dependent on the things humans do well, including judgement, trust, curiosity, adaptation, negotiation, relationships and the ability to make sense of uncertainty together.
If regional orchestration is to be more than an attractive phrase, regions need to be able to organise and buy around outcomes as well as individual organisations buying products. We need effective, safe, lawful and transparent ways for councils, health, central government, community organisations and suppliers to come together around a shared problem, invest collectively and procure when the desired outcome can be described but the complete answer cannot sensibly be specified before the work begins.
Procurement is doing what it was designed to do. It creates structure, manages risk, protects fairness and provides a defensible process around the use of public money, all of which remain essential. What it was not originally designed to do was support open-ended problem solving in which several organisations contribute different parts of an answer, learning and iteration matter, and the route towards the outcome changes as evidence emerges.
That does not mean abandoning rigour or asking the public sector to purchase vague promises. It means locating rigour in the right places, defining the outcome, guardrails, standards, legal responsibilities, data protections and measures of success clearly while creating room for suppliers and public services to learn, experiment and adapt within them.
Instead of defining the whole answer and asking the market to reproduce it, regions should be able to buy contributions to an evolving ecosystem. Success should be judged not only by whether a contract delivered what was specified at the beginning, but by whether people’s lives improved, reusable capability was created and the wider region became more able to solve the next problem without starting again.
This is government as an ecosystem rather than a hierarchy, not removing accountability or pretending structures no longer matter, but recognising that hierarchy alone cannot organise the relationships needed to solve complex problems. The purpose of the common spine is not to control that ecosystem from the centre, it is to create enough coherence, trust and interoperability for thousands of organisations to make different decisions while still acting as parts of a connected whole.
