13 Ideas for getting Government moving again - part 2

Last week, I offered six ideas to get Government moving more quickly.

Here’s the final seven of my Baker’s dozen:

7) Challenge Every Process

So often Whitehall is about Doing It The Right Way.

Challenge it when it’s not helpful.

When designing things for the public, it’s essential to consult them.

But does that have to mean a Consultation, with a capital C?

Consultation processes often generate far more heat than light.

Can co-creation forums be a better means of consulting?

Can running A-B experiments? [this is when you test different versions of product or wording on thousands of people and see which gets better responses]

Can running a Fake Door test? [this is when you create the ‘front door’ to a new product or service digitally to see how people react to it, without actually incurring the expense of creating the service]

These are all ways of understanding what the public thinks.

8) Learn How to Iterate

Very few of us live our lives by planning everything we’re going to do in enormous detail and then executing that written plan.

Imagine if I wrote a plan for the year that included this:

“On the 17th November 2027, I’m going to win an innovation contract with Great British Railways. That evening, I’m going to complete redecorating the dining room.”

Of course we don’t!

Even if I’d very much like to support Great British Railways with their innovation (and, if their future leadership team are reading this, please note), I don’t have the agency to plan at that level of detail.

Even where I do have the agency, like redecorating the dining room, it’s ludicrous to forecast precisely when I’ll do it in eighteen months’ time: what if my mum gets ill?

No, far better to say that my overall goals are that I do interesting work that matches my skills and knowledge, and that the house is kept to a decorative standard that maintains value and that my wife and I like.

At the moment, I expect that working for GBR and redecorating the dining room might be ways of achieving those goals but other, better ones may occur.

In the short term, though, I’m making sure I keep up-to-speed with rail industry reform and saving enough to redecorate a room each year.

In the same way, in our organisations, we must know what we’re trying to achieve, but we don’t have to decide everything up front.

It’s actually far more efficient not to. I previously wrote this blog post which uses the analogy of a journey to Cornwall to try to make this point. I’m still not 100% certain whether the analogy works, so please tell me if you think it does.

If you want some confidence that this is something that the Government wants to happen, then just look at the “Test, Learn and Grow” programme launched by the Cabinet Office earlier this year. They are absolutely explicit that they want projects to start with end users, build something small and iterate from there. But it’s a skill Government needs to learn deliberately.

9) Learn what an agile and innovative organisation looks like

Organisations that are good at this stuff have norms of behaviour. Some of these are quite subtle. I described some of them in this series of blog posts.

This is where I can do a plug for my day job: I’ve spent a long time working on what makes an organisation agile.

Because you need a cheesy acronym, I’ve called it the RACE² model, but other cheesy acronyms are available.

But if you want it to add up to RACE (twice), then the list looks like this:

• Resources

• Authority

• Culture

• Expectations

• Recognition

• Agility

• Customer Connectedness

• Empowerment

Within each of those, there are norms of behaviour that collectively make a place move at pace.

I can help you learn what they are - and identify how close you currently are to perfection with each.

10) Don’t Rely on Consultants

The British public sector sometimes struggles to delegate accountability to empowered and competent officials because they sometimes don’t exist.

That’s not because the official is incomptent but because there’s no-one there at all.

The knowledge and skill that would make for a competent official have been repeatedly outsourced to consultants, with the result that the official who’s commissioning the work struggles to validate it.

As the consultant doesn’t have the authority, the result is that the decision is made by default as opposed to proactively.

Here’s my cut out ‘n’ keep guide for when to use consultants (and when not to)

11) Avoid decision-making by committee

There are certain decisions that need to be made by defined groups: frequently, Boards.

They are comparatively rare.

Otherwise, there is no requirement in law that committees need to make decisions.

Committees slow things down (simply down to scheduling) and will generally moderate a decision down to a lowest common denominator of groupthink (whatever everyone’s least uncomfortable with).

So be cautious about delegating to a committee, as opposed to a named person.

12) Create a Quango

Don’t we all love a Quango?

No?

Oh.

Quangos have an unfairly bad reputation. Keir Starmer seems to have a particular down on them.

The term stands for QUasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisation.

For some reason, if 500 people work as central Government civil servants, they’re lost in the roundings.

But if their work is hived off into a dedicated body to do the same work, suddenly they’re a waste of money.

However, Quangos have a useful role, in enabling public sector organisations to renew their culture.

Transport for London isn’t a true Quango as it’s not owned by a Government department, but the moment it replaced London Regional Transport in 2000 was a moment of huge cultural renewal for transport in London.

Even though it was the same people doing the same job with the same roundel, TfL was born with a more entrepreneurial, agile, innovative culture. That was set by its first Chair, Ken Livingstone, and reinforced through the people he appointed.

The creation of Great British Railways is another such moment. It’s absolutely critical that GBR is born with the agile and innovative culture it is going to need.

Its creation is a once-in-an-organisational lifetime’s chance to create that culture.

The current Government has a schizophrenic attitude to Quangos. Wes Streeting is scrapping the Quango NHS England and moving many of its staff into the Department for Health, while Heidi Alexander is creating Great British Railways and moving staff from the Department for Transport into it.

In general, Quangos can be more agile and flexible than central Government and don’t deserve their bad rep.

13) Don’t be too collaborative

We’ve ended up in a world in which collaboration is seen rather like green vegetables: the more the better.

In reality, it’s like coffee: a certain amount enhances performance but too much is actively harmful.

The public sector is a collaborative environment. But that means that multiple internal stakeholders have vetoes by default.

At the start of any piece of work, define those people who need to be involved and be explicit that this is it. Try to limit the number of those people to single digits.

Why? Well, with 6 people involved, the number of lines of communication between project team members is 15. That’s manageable. Imagine six dots. Now draw lines between them. 15 lines. That’s ok.

But with 10 people, it’s 45 lines.

And with 20 people, it’s 190 individual lines of communication! (you try drawing that!)

It’s a culture change but, hey, all of this is a culture change.

So, there you have it - my Baker’s dozen ideas to get Government moving faster.

The first six were in last week’s post.

What do you think?

Worth a try?