Strategy
David Archer and Alex Cameron believe that better collaboration can help build a stable foundation for a future UK rail strategy
T
he Rail Technology Strategy (RTS), published in December last year, is a brave and far seeing document. In aiming to create a framework for the development of the mainline railway across the UK for the next 30 years its scope is rightly ambitious, for without a route map like this it’s going to be very difficult for the rail industry to plan a course through a shifting landscape of changing political priorities, increasing customer demands, complex funding models and daunting environmental challenges.
Key to the RTS approach is a call to work now on establishing the ‘enablers’ of such a long-term strategy. This is not just about enabling technology, but also about creating the financial and management framework that will be needed to incentivise the radical changes that the strategy envisages and building the cross- industry relationships that can sustain it. The need for this to be a whole-system strategy and the requirement for greater industry collaboration comes across loud and clear. Steve Yianni – the chair of the
Technical Strategy Leadership Group that was responsible for developing the RTS is quoted as saying: ‘We cannot work on one part of the system without affecting another, so we know that our approach has to be holistic, from the way the track
relates to the trains and the trains to the signalling. By working together as an industry we have already unlocked opportunities for innovation – and the potential to develop more has been recognised.’
Building sustainable collaborative relationships to support innovation across an industry is a notoriously difficult enterprise – just look at how the
electricity supply industry and the health sector have struggled to embrace new players with radical ideas – but there is an emerging body of evidence on what helps and what hinders such long-term collaboration.
A useful analogy is a three-legged
stool, a simple structure that is stable even on rocky ground - but cut away any of the legs and it falls over. When we are talking about creating a base for sustainable collaboration the three legs are:
* good governance of the collaboration
* efficient operational process that links all parties
* collaborative leadership behaviours at all levels.
To define these terms a little further:
• governance means the formal ways in which the overarching purpose of the collaboration is agreed, how long-term objectives are set, accountabilities are defined and joint decisions are made. In the case of the RTS, the Rail Delivery Group could represent an important new component in this cross-industry governance. But a collaborative relationship built solely on formal governance is often inflexible and slow to respond. People stick to the letter of the contract and
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