Toby Lowe

Toby Lowe is a visiting professor of public management with the Centre for Public Impact. He and his research team have used complexity theory to create a critique of New Public Management approaches, particularly highlighting the problems created by attempts to use Outcome-Based Performance Management (e.g. Payment by Results) in complex environments.
Presentation summary:
The “New Public Management” (NPM) approach to public management – summed up in the 3Ms: “Markets, Managers and Metrics” – creates an inhospitable environment for social pedagogy and other learning-based approaches to public service. This presentation will explore why the NPM approach fails in complex environments, and what an alternative approach to public management - a Human Learning Systems approach - looks like.
It will explore how Human Learning Systems creates the space for public service in the real world by focusing manage-ment practice on emergent learning, and will ask how social pedagogy might be used to help learning across complex systems of care and support.