Making time to make a change

"Here comes Edward Bear now, down the stairs behind Christopher Robin. Bump! Bump! Bump! on the back of his head. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming down stairs. He is sure that there must be a better way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment to think of it.“[1]
 

How often are you so full of busy that you can’t think?
How difficult it is to make space though.
David Allen (author of Getting Things Done [2-3] ) recommends booking time out, a few days at a time and then a day every so often, to sort through the paperwork.  That’s a serious risk (imagine telling colleagues “I’m off to do my filing”?) and unless you are rigorous, I’m sure anybody like me would find it squeezed out by other priorities.
Ricardo Semler (Maverick [4] ) has a different technique.  His view of filing is that you only file what you know you will definitely need – contracts and so on. If something else is important, then someone else will have a copy!  Of course this only works if you are the only one who throws everything away – I often find I’m the only one with a copy left!
But that’s just trying to make space to get organised – what about time to think and be creative?
We’re told (and I’d love to know how “they” found out) that Richard Branson spends 5 minutes every hour with his eyes closed just “thinking”.  Peter Thompson recommends getting up an hour early in order to visualise the day (which allows plenty of time to be creative and even to imagine the scenarios you’d really like), and a number of people have said this works for them. Many corporate boards book “away days” to create strategies, and it certainly works in the corporate world.
I think the issue for Public Sector is much simpler than this – the key deliverable for the customer (population served) is often the 24-hour, 365-day services which are really pretty mundane.  So most attempts at taking time off for strategy and planning end up either discussing the mundane services [5] , which don’t really change, or being very self-indulgent and doing esoteric team-building-y things.
Being creative for the Public Good
When do your best ideas come to you?  In the bath?
When out running?  When you put aside time for it? The best ideas often turn up when you aren’t expecting them.  The most polished, most diplomatically acceptable, when you put aside time. This means creating space in every day to be able to capitalise on those ideas and turn them into something – not race in and tell your staff to “implement this brilliant idea I had” and then wonder why, a week later, they didn’t understand how brilliant it was and how well it would work, but actually implementing them yourself and nurturing them into existence.
References

Milne, A.A., Winnie the Pooh. 1926.
 

Allen, D., Making it all work : winning at the game of work and the business of life. 2008, New York: Viking. viii, 305 p.
 

Allen, D.D., Getting things done : the art of stress-free productivity. 2005, London: Piatkus. xiv, 267 p.
Semler, R., Maverick : the success story behind the world's most unusual workplace. 1993, New York, NY: Warner Books. 335 p.
 

Blunden, F., Frances Blunden on the burden of NHS bureaucracy, in Health Service Journal. 2009, HSJ.co.uk.