It’s hard to become good at a job. It’s even harder in frontline, high-pressure, high-risk roles.

We can learn from effective colleagues. But doing so is tricky. Frontline public services see high turnover: colleagues soon move on, get promoted, or quit. Spotting who is truly effective – who to emulate – can be difficult. If we do find a skilled mentor, learning from them may still prove challenging. Experts act rapidly, fluidly, and intuitively: they may not be able to explain exactly what they are doing and why it works.

As a result, much of our improvement comes through trial and error. This is slow: we only learn to deal with situations as they arise. We don’t know how to improve – we lack a menu of options. And our errors can have serious consequences, for us and those we work with.

Codification

There’s an alternative. Someone needs to write down – to codify – how to do the job well. They must:

  • Find people who are really good at the job
  • Identify what they do and why
  • Describe it in a way that’s meaningful to others

For frontline public servants, a codified guide to effective practice makes a big difference:

  1. Instead of guessing how to deal with a situation, they can study how others have dealt with it.
  2. Instead of trying to picture these strategies, they can see them modelled.
  3. Instead of wondering why good practice works, they can see it explained.

Codifying good practice makes it easier to spot, to discuss, and to adopt.

The best example comes from teaching: the book Teach Like a Champion.

Doug Lemov observed teachers in whose classrooms poor students achieved great results. He analysed their work, naming the steps they take and carefully describing how others could follow in their footsteps. Teach Like a Champion makes becoming a better teacher far easier. It provides a common language around effective teaching. This helps us discuss effective practice, let’s us practise, test and adopt new strategies, and guides trainers and leaders. Little surprise that it has gone through three editions and sold over a million copies.

But most public services have lacked similar guides, until now.

Codifying effective prison work

I’ve worked with Unlocked Graduates to codify effective prison work in Leading prison landings: The Unlocked guide to jailcraft.

Unlocked has spent a decade refining a range of effective strategies for prison officers. Now, we’ve written these up in a single guide, making them usable for officers – and mentors, trainers and managers.

We want to make it easier for prison officers to get better. To do this, Leading prison landings includes:

  • Four guiding principles for effective prison work
  • 24 strategies prison officers can use to achieve four big goals: maintaining effective presence, preventing and addressing conflict, promoting change, and sustaining themselves
  • Clear guidance, bringing each step to life, including examples, explanations, potential pitfalls, checklists, and suggested next steps to implementation
  • Video models showing each strategy at work

When good practice gets written down, some fear it will become a straitjacket, turning professionals into robots. But if we can’t learn from others – if we don’t know how they succeed – we can’t act as professionals. For new officers, seeing these strategies named and explained is invaluable. Mastering them gives prison officers a repertoire of effective moves. They can use this to act as skilled professionals – choosing strategies to meet the challenges they face; tailoring how they apply them to their goals and personality.

Conclusion

Prison officers do vital work. It’s in everyone’s interests – officers, prisoners, and society – that they are as effective and skilful as possible.

When we codify effective strategies, we make it easier for public servants and their workplaces to improve. Teachers have enjoyed codified guidance for many years.

We hope that Leading prison landings will make becoming a better prison officer easier.

And we hope it will inform the work of improvement of frontline public services more broadly.

Further reading

Leading prison landings: The Unlocked guide to jailcraft

In further posts on the book, I share the principles of effective prison work, summarise the 24 strategies, and (will) show the impact they can have.

I previously discussed the value of codifying effective teaching practice.