It is an uncomfortable fact of public service innovation that reducing costs requires decommissioning existing services as well as creating new ones. That is to say, you need to close things down as well as starting things up.
Sarah Gillinson has written before in this blog about the deep emotional attachments we feel towards (some) public services. Many people tend to dismiss these attachments as sentimental and therefore beneath serious consideration. However, it is worth bearing in mind that it is very easy to be dismissive about other peoples’ attachments to services. It’s different when it’s a service that you use.
This point was brought home to me rather forcefully last weekend. On Saturday, my partner and I cycled to Crystal Palace, as we do fairly regularly. And, as is our custom, we went to the wonderful deli, Good Taste, for a coffee (made, incidentally, from Volcano coffee beans, roasted a few minutes away in West Dulwich).
However, we arrived at Good Taste to discover that they’d got rid of their coffee counter, because it was making a loss.
Now, as it turned out, this was no big deal for us. A new cafe (called Bambino Volcano) had opened up in a vintage shop less than five minutes’ walk away. It served volcano coffee, and, it must be said, had better seating than Good Taste. For its part, Good Taste is now getting fresh local meats, and possibly opening up a butcher’s counter where the coffee counter used to be. So Good Taste is delivering more of what it’s best suited to deliver, and I’ve got a more optimal coffee provider in Bambino Volcano. This is good news all around.
And yet.
I miss my coffee from Good Taste. I just do. Partly, this is explained by drug fixation – as Dr. Tom Stafford observed in 2003,
Just as preparation of heroin for injection is done with reverential care, so many coffee or tea drinkers insist on their preferred method of brewing with a precision bordering on fanaticism.
But there’s more to it than that – there’s memories of banter with the barista, and of strolling around Crystal Palace, going to the garden centre, visiting the Bookseller Crow, all linked up with the Good Taste Coffee.
A fair portion of our mental worlds (or mine, anyway) is built up of remembered narratives woven around significant events and locations. That’s not a matter of sentiment, it’s a matter of intellectual infrastructure. This is why decommissioning is an emotive issue. And while it shouldn’t ever stop us from decommissioning (I’m pretty sure Good Taste made the right move by ditching the coffee counter), it’s worth taking people’s emotional responses seriously.
[Somehow this piece turned into a bit of Crystal Palace travelogue - which wasn't deliberate, but Crystal Palace is an excellent place to stroll around on a Saturday]
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