Change machine

A former colleague describes her as "easy to connect with – she's got none of that stuffy nature you imagine goes with the territory".

Goss arrives at meetings with notes in hand, only to speak off the cuff, inspired by what she sees and hears at the organisation she is being paid to advise. She admits to surprising even herself when making speeches: "I know what I'm going to say, but then end up saying something else by the time I get there."

She is an organisational change consultant. To use her official, and rather grand, title, she is director of national and local services development at public sector consultant the Office for Public Management. What this boils down to is troubleshooting for management in the public sector, helping organisations develop strategies, improve leadership skills and rethink the way they work. Clients such as the Cabinet Office, local authorities and the NHS have come to Goss for advice on how to connect with local communities and implement change. This often means heated discussions and tense meetings as she tries to shake up stuck-in-the-mud systems and managerial structures.

But this kind of confrontation is no problem for Goss. A former colleague recalls how she relishes the challenge of bringing unruly meetings into line and Goss freely admits that this is correct: "I like difficult intellectual problems and I'm even more excited when I've got lots of people who don't agree with each other so part of the problem is how to win all these people round."

Growth without change
Goss' work is gaining increasing attention, not least because departmental restructuring, mergers and group structures are perennial issues in housing, but also because of the National Housing Federation's rebranding exercise and the debate over whether housing associations are social businesses or public sector bodies.

On the latter two issues Goss is typically blunt. "The social housing sector hasn't punched its weight for over a decade," she says. "The movement has grown vastly, but hasn't changed the way it thinks fast enough to cope with a changing environment.

"It must establish itself as a sector of independent social businesses committed to social outcomes. The rebranding is a good, important, initiative and there's now a huge opportunity for change."

Goss became interested in political studies and local government as a student and, inspired by the theory, put it into practice in 1977 as a researcher for the London Housing Aid Centre, working under Nick Raynsford. Five years later, she became a Labour councillor for the south London borough of Southwark and was the first chair of the council's women's committee. "Looking back, some of the things we did were really daft," Goss says, somewhat sheepishly, of what she calls her "right-on days". "But," she adds, "a lot of things that were considered completely mad then, like equal opportunities, are now mainstream."

Although Goss works across public sector organisations, she has a keen interest in housing and believes design, rather than management, will top the housing agenda in years to come. Here, her learning philosophy of keeping her eyes and ears open to the people around her has given her inspiration from a somewhat surprising source: "When I asked my daughter what sort of house she wanted to live in, she said 'I want it to have glass all around'. That really surprised me. But it proved that our housing needs have changed: 19th-century houses were built to conserve heat, but now that heat's relatively easy to obtain, people want more light. We want to live in well-designed homes."

The social housing sector hasn’t punched its weight for more than a decade. It has grown vastly, but it hasn’t changed the way it thinks

Goss is concerned about the impact of a single housing inspector on the Housing Corporation's role. "We're going to have to make sure the regional bodies work together. The Housing Corporation has a crucial role to play in this because they've got knowledge and expertise that works on the ground.

"I don't think it matters hugely who does inspection, but the corporation's responsibilities in regulation, market-making and organising and funding delivery programmes successfully must carry on."

She also worries that the public sector is over-regulated while the private sector doesn't face the same scrutiny.

Embracing the private sector
"New forms of organisations are needed to provide social housing that combine the entrepreneurial spirit of the private sector with a commitment to public goals," she says. "We have been very unadventurous in this respect. People tend to think you have to go to either a private-sector company or a government department when, in fact, both are pretty inadequate at providing for complex customer needs."

Public-private relations are an issue currently even closer to home than usual. On 1 August, the Office for Public Management merged with the Public Management Foundation, a charity, to create "the UK's first not-for-profit public-interest company", the very type of third-sector innovation about which Goss is so passionate.

Brokering partnerships is one of Goss' major roles. She is especially proud of one she helped forge in the early 1990s between the health and local authorities in west London as a reaction to the problem of Aids. "Because it was a new problem with no baggage, the people involved worked cross-boundaries years before all this stuff about partnerships and developed a joint commissioning strategy that revolutionised service provision in west London," she says.

So, what's the key to managing change successfully? "A common mistake is driving several change initiatives down from the top, none of which ever finish, resulting in employees thinking 'oh, this is just another one. If we duck long enough, it'll go away'," warns Goss. "The only way to break that is to get at the underlying patterns of behaviour.

"People change when they've decided on their own that it's a good idea, not because somebody tries to make them.