How to make change happen in government

Steve Hilton, David Cameron's one-time policy adviser currently on mid-term sabbatical in California, has given Stanford students some frank insights into the workings of Government.

• The Prime Minister sometimes opposes the measures his own ministers put forward. He often finds out about these policies from the radio or newspapers.

• Only 30 per cent of what the government is doing is actually delivering what we are supposed to be doing.

• It’s a brilliant system for paper-shuffling people to be in control.  The bureaucracy masters the politicians.

I just wanted to make a few comments about collective intelligence and the role of the policy adviser.

Some Prime Ministers and Presidents have had an extraordinary ability to get through large quantities of paperwork and master the critical points. Cameron has many strengths as a leader, but this doesn't seem to be one of them. As a consequence of this, he is effectively leaving journalists to perform a filtering function - thus he pays attention to an issue only when it is drawn to his attention by the media, and of course, this delayed attention may cause some irritation or embarrassment sometimes. Perhaps a more diligent policy adviser should have picked up some of these issues earlier?

In the system we may infer from Hilton's description, journalists are not only performing a filtering function but also a sensemaking function. There is clearly a difference between the way a policy looks in some bundle of government papers and how it looks when it appears in the media. Again, we might have expected a diligent policy adviser to have anticipated how policies would appear to the public.

But it seems that the politicians and their advisers don't control the volume of paperwork they are given to wade through. In his seminar, Hilton dramatically produced a pile of paper one foot high (representing four days committee output), prompting gasps from students. "The idea that a couple of political advisers read through all this and spot things that are bad, things that are contradictory, is just inconceivable", pleads Hilton.

Of course it is, say members of the previous government including Damian McBride, Gordon Brown's former political press secretary. Which is why the previous government had a greater number of political advisers, and a coordination process (known as the "grid") allocating a manageable number of pages to each. McBride acknowledges that the grid sometimes resulted in leaks to journalists, and suggests that Hilton may have downgraded the grid in order to reduce these leaks, but argues that the grid was a key mechanism for effective government and that the problems Hilton complains about are an inevitable consequence of abandoning this mechanism.

It may also be a consequence of regarding the civil service as a malignant force, trying to pull the wool over the politicians' eyes. (This was a great theme in the original "Yes Minister" series, but has turned into a tired joke in the 2013 series.) Edward Pearce stands up for the independence of the civil service, and complains that it is Hilton who is unrepresentative and unelected.

When Hilton talks about "delivering what we are supposed to be doing", this presumably refers to some kind of top-down strategic plan, formulated before the election and presented in the manifesto. But this raises some important questions about the relationship between strategy and execution, and the possibility for strategies to emerge and evolve during execution.

Which in turn raises some questions about government as a learning system. Recent governments (including Blair's New Labour) have had a focus on delivery, which emphasizes single-loop learning - getting better at achieving a fixed set of goals. However, this has to be balanced against double-loop learning - changing the goals to fit changing circumstances.

In an earlier analysis of New Labour and Delivery, two MORI analysts argued that delivery and achievement was at least partially subjective and rhetorical.

• "Delivery" is not keeping your promises, it is convincing the public that you have kept your promises.

• What matters is not what you promise, but what the public understands by those promises, and what expectations they arouse.

Hilton clearly agrees about the importance of external communication. He encourages his students to think about how policies can be "branded", and suggests that policies often fail not because they weren't very good policies in the first place but because they are poorly presented. That might be true, but it is also a common excuse: politicians genererally find it easier to admit to errors in presentation than to errors in policy.

Which part of this ecosytem has the longest memory?  Presumably the civil servants. And which part has the shortest memory? With some honourable exceptions, probably the media. According to one theory of change, when there are several subsystems operating on different timescales, it is the slowest system that controls the whole. And the Purpose Of the System Is What It Does.

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Roger Mortimore and Mark Gill, New Labour and Delivery (IPSOS MORI May 2004)

PM’s aide exposes No 10’s lack of control (Sunday Times, 13 January 2013) (subscription)

John Harlow and Eric Kiefer, Shoes off, feet up, the dude lifts lid on No 10 (Sunday Times, 13 January 2013)

Patrick Hennessy, David Cameron finds out about policies from the newspapers, reveals Steve Hilton (The Telegraph 13 January 2013)

Damien McBride, Whither the Grid? (13 January 2013) Why did the Grid Wither? (14 January 2013)

Edward Pearce, The Unelected (LRB 25 January 2013)

James Tapsfield, Prime Minister often finds out about policies from the radio or newspapers, says former advisor Hilton (The Independent 13 January 2013)

Richard Veryard (ed), Fragile Strategy or Fragile Execution (Storify, December 2012)

Nicholas Watt, David Cameron's ex-policy guru Steve Hilton criticised over policy remarks (Guardian, 13 January 2013)


updated 25 January 2013

Memory and the Law

Rebecca Fordham writes:

"Many experts are challenging the view that eyewitnesses recounting what they saw is the best way of tapping their memory. Some think brain scans could be the way forward." [Memory Mixup, BBC News Magazine, 17 June 2008]

We already have technology that is supposed to detect discrepancies between what the witness remembers and what the witness says - it's called a polygraph or lie detector. Now we apparently need another technology that detects discrepancies between what the witness consciously remembers and what is buried in the witness's unconscious.

The lie detector has been controversial ever since its invention, and features in a Chesterton story called "The Mistake of the Machine". (Of course it is not the machine that makes the mistake, as Chesterton's hero Father Brown points out, but the people using the machine who misinterpret its output.)

• Chesterton and Friends: Lie Detectors
• David Wallace-Wells: The Big Lie (Washington Monthly, April 2007), via AntiPolygraph.org

Of course humans sometimes lie, and sometimes this can be detected by the polygraph, but that doesn't make the polygraph an instrument of truth. (For that matter, people sometimes blurt out secrets under the influence of alcohol or torture, or get artistic inspiration under the influence of mind-bending drugs, but none of these are reliable instruments of truth either.)

And human memory is sometimes unreliable, but that doesn't make the brain scan an instrument of truth either. Constructing evidence from the unconscious contents of a brain is no more reliable than constructing history from an archaeological sift through a mediaeval rubbish tip. It may be possible, and may yield some intriguing results, but the results are always speculative and uncertain.

Meanwhile, our "common sense" understanding of the brain and its contents is probably less accurate and less coherent than our understanding of mediaeval waste disposal. That's why psychoanalysts make more money than archaeologists. They do, don't they?

Update

"India has become the first country to convict someone of a crime relying on evidence from this controversial machine." [Source: New York Times, via Bruce Schneier]


Related posts: The Dashboard Never Lies (February 2020), Lie Detectors at Airports (April 2022)

See also

Sarah Scoles, Polygraphs Aren’t Very Accurate. Are There Better Options? (Undark, 25 March 2026)

Intelligence or Fear?

Bruce Schneier has drawn some security lessons from a recent scare on a flight from Sidney to Los Angeles. Shortly after take-off, the air crew found an airsickness bag in the toilet, interpreted the word "BOB" scribbled on the bag as a bomb threat, and decided to turn the plane back. Schneier's account was published in the Sidney Morning Herald and reprinted in his CryptoGram newsletter (August 2004).
We can analyse this incident in terms of organizational intelligence, as follows.

perception monitoring	A member of the crew found the bag and noticed the word "BOB"	Good observation
communication	This finding was shared with the pilot and other crew	Enables collective response
appreciation sensemaking	The word "BOB" was interpreted as "Bomb on Board"	Schneier points out that there are several more likely interpretations.
reasoning action	The captain decided the risk was serious enough to turn the plane around and land back in Sydney.	Schneier writes: "Even a moment's reflection is enough to realize that this is an extreme overreaction to a nonexistent threat."
learning	The Australian transport minister blamed the person who wrote on the bag, calling him "irresponsible at the least and horrendously selfish and stupid at the worst".	Schneier writes: "Irresponsible for what? For writing his name? For perpetuating common flight-attendant slang? It wasn't the writer who did anything wrong; it was those who reacted to the writing."
	Prime Minister John Howard praised the crew for their quick reactions, diligence, and observation skills.	Schneier writes: "I'm sorry, but I see no evidence of any of that. All I see are people who have been thrust into an important security role reacting from fear, because they have not been properly trained in how to sensibly evaluate security situations: the risks, the countermeasures, and the trade-offs."
knowledge memory	Now every wacko in the world knows that all he needs to do to ground an international flight is to write "BOB" on an airsickness bag.	Schneier writes: "Somehow, I don't think that's the outcome any of us wanted."

Further comments and examples in Schneier's blog (October 7, 2004).