The liberated method: a transcendent public service innovation in polycrisis

Smith, Mark, Hesselgreaves, Hannah, Charlton, Ron and Wilson, Rob ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0469-1884 (2025) The liberated method: a transcendent public service innovation in polycrisis. Public Money and Management. ISSN 0954-0962 (In Press)

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Abstract

Interventions in line with the complexity of people’s lives require a different approach to innovation that orientates problems from the position of citizen’s lives—not the problems’ ‘fit’ with the existing expertise, capacity, and service remit. Many of these problems and crises are wrongly categorised as ‘poverty’, ‘mental health’, ‘health inequalities’, or ‘homelessness’. This article describes the development of the ‘liberated method’ (LM) in public services in Northumbria, UK, as a public service innovation. It contributes to the relational public service literature by drawing in public service innovation theory to express relational practice as novel, implementable, developmental, and demonstrable of public value. Utilizing these theories together enables an analytic take on the Liberated Method as a means of offering transcendent public service reform. The approach demonstrates how embedded evaluative practices enable the planned emergence necessary for services to respond more coherently to life complexity.