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

Delusion and Diversity

@VenessaMiemis asks "If most people are self delusional, what's the point of qualitative research?" @CoCreatr retorts "What if we are all self-delusional and need proof by qualitative research to become more accepting of it?"

Of course organizations are self-delusional - some more than others. The interesting challenge here is to distinguish between evidence-based policy (which forms policy based on the evidence) and policy-based evidence (which collects evidence to support a given policy).

"Yes", says @CoCreatr, "organizationally the difference between fundamentalism and curiosity". He points to a presentation by Seth Godin on Curiosity.

Without curiosity, people in organizations tend to use research (both qualitative and quantitative) to try and promote their own delusions and/or undermine the delusions of others. So there is a dual purpose for research.

This is why diversity helps. If there is a broad variety of delusion, then there is at least the possibility of enough evidence emerging to create sufficient cognitive dissonance for cherished delusions to be questioned. Whereas if everyone shares the same delusions (commonly known as "groupthink"), then cognitive dissonance seems much less likely to occur.

By the way, the "diversity" agenda usually focuses on achieving a fair distribution of age, gender, race, class background, etc., as well as avoiding various forms of unfair discrimination. Sometimes this is justified not only on ethical grounds, but also because it is thought to increase the likelihood of cognitive diversity - different attitudes, personality styles and belief systems.

But the correlation between externally visible diversity and cognitive diversity looks more tenuous nowadays than it might have done in the past. If you assume attitude, personality style and belief system depends solely on the colour of your skin and the number of X chromosomes, then you might exaggerate the differences between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. (As the popular song goes, I wonder who's Kissinger now? See my post Relationships Based on Self-Interest from January 2009).

Talking of presidents and would-be presidents ... In his 1967 book on Organizational Intelligence, Harold Wilensky praised President Roosevelt for maintaining a state of creative tension in the US administration. Wilensky reckoned that this enabled FDR to get a more accurate and rounded account of what was going on, and gave him some protection against the self-delusion of each department. Roosevelt could still get a degree of cognitive diversity from a bunch of white men with similar education. Think what he could achieve today.

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Related Blogs

Relationships built on self-interest (January 2009)
What is the Purpose of Diversity? (January 2010)
Organizational Intelligence and Gender (October 2010)
Delusion and Diversity (October 2010)
More on the Purpose of Diversity (December 2014)


Links added 12 December 2014

Britain in 2010

In January 1991, the Policy Studies Institute (PSI) published a report called Britain in 2010. In 12 May 2010, contributors to the original report and other policy researchers gathered at the RSA for a seminar called Back to the Future, to take a retrospective look at the report.

How should we judge this report?

• accuracy?
• relevance?
• practical effect on policy and governance?

How did PSI expect people to use its future projections? How did people actually use them? What effect did the existence of these projections affect outcomes? For example, to what extent were predictions self-fulfilling or self-refuting? To what extent did these projections help to reframe the political agenda?

Malcolm Rigg identified four criteria

• useful numbers
• important issues
• helpful conceptual tools
• making sense of the whole
  

Let's start by looking at the numbers. How reliable are such numbers, and if not reliable what use are they?

Policy-makers might argue that the relative numbers are more useful than the absolute numbers. If we know what commodities and capabilities are going to have greatest value in twenty years time, then that should influence our long-term development choices. If we assume that transportation costs are low, then we can expect certain types of work (such as manufacturing) to migrate to low-wage parts of the world. If services then become more expensive than goods, then cheap labour will move to those cities where people can afford them, and in their private lives even politicians (who should know better) are tempted to pay cash or turn a blind eye to their lack of documentation. The challenge for futurologists is not to identify these links, but to work out their cumulative effect over many decades.

But as Terry Barker pointed out, numerical predictions are sensitive to the pace of change - timing and inertia. Imbalances can build up, so it is not hard to predict that some collapse or readjustment will occur at some stage, but the exact scale and timing of this event is almost impossible to predict accurately. (This is rather like predicting earthquakes and volcanic eruptions - we know roughly where they are likely to occur, and we may even be able to assign a probability to an event in a given time period. but we cannot be certain.) And numerical predictions are also sensitive to extremely small differences in starting conditions. For example, tiny differences in relative prices can have a cumulative effect after many years - thus the manufacturing cost advantage of China over Europe has resulted in a significant global shift in economic power over the past twenty years, to an extent that was not fully appreciated in 1990.

So that's an important issue that failed to emerge from the numbers. Another important trend that was overlooked in 1990 was the rise of the internet. Obviously there was some interest in the socioeconomic potential of various technologies, but much of the attention at that time was focused on workplace technologies such as robotics, perhaps over-influenced by a belief in the economic primacy of manufacturing.

At the start of the seminar, Jim Northcott had mentioned the issue of policy inertia - taking a long time to shift strategic thinking to accommodate changing circumstances and demands - and suggested that policy makers were slow to abandon the assumptions of the cold war. But the economic importance of manufacturing, and the naive belief in the value created by financial services, could also be regarded as a form of policy inertia.

In his talk, Malcolm Rigg looked specifically at housing - an area that can easily slip below the radar of policy debate. Malcolm pointed to the enormous waiting lists for social housing, suggested this was because housing policy moves much slower than housing markets, and argued that therefore housing policies needed to be more flexible. But this assumes an acceptance of housing goals, whereas the defacto policy (POSIWID) is clearly to use waiting lists as an instrument of policy. Malcolm also mentioned the actions of Conservative governments (Heath as well as Thatcher) pushing through policy decisions that resulted in increased house prices and increasing housing shortages.  But policy analysts should not discount the possibility that governments might wish to influence housing markets for (short-term) political advantage.

Ben Martin talked about the relationship between forecasting and foresight. This is about creating the future, not just predicting it, and links to Fred Steward's insistence that reading current signs and trends had to be combined with articulating societal goals. Ben also talked about the parallels between policy studies and innovation, which implied that policy studies should be driven by a specific demand for policy insight, and mindful of the absorptive capacity of the client organizations.

Fred also spoke eloquently about the need for a new kind of evidence-based policy, based on practical experiments and learning-by-doing. Matthew Taylor endorsed this, and spoke of the importance of what he called civic invention - practical social action rather than merely sending pamphlets to ministers. This marriage between innovative thinking and practice is entirely compatible with our vision for the Next Practice Research Initiative.

Coming back to the numbers question, I was struck by the limitations of making forecasts in terms of traditional metrics such as GNP or growth, and I wondered about the role of policy studies in getting society to think in terms of more sustainable measures of well-being. In my question to the panel, I invoked the memory of Donella Meadows, and suggested that shifting the metrics counted as a more powerful leverage point in her model. Apparently John Kay (the economist and author of Obliquity) is currently working on this question. I look forward to seeing the results.