🤯 How to make government work

In Alison Griffin’s Policy Unstuck, she identified five barriers to change: decision-makers don’t know about the problem; they don’t care; vested interests are too strong; there’s no bandwidth; or your analysis is wrong.

On the back of Henry’s comments below, perhaps we should add a sixth: nobody is project managing it to fruition.

It points to the very real, and very mundane, reason why so many things—in every kind of organisation—are never delivered.

But Ali’s barriers assume you at least know what you want to achieve. I am not convinced that is always—or even often—the case. I remember Cast from Clay being asked to bid for a piece of work. We asked what the client wanted to achieve with the budget, to which the response was: “We don’t know, we just need to do something.” Perhaps not the best use of budget.

It’s not an isolated incident. The lack of clear strategy manifests in organisational documents that lack objectives, or metrics that target noise rather than signal—like the common goal of ‘media hits.’

Media hits are a useful tactic to securing political interest, but a short burst of news articles rarely changes policy. The hard work of getting something through a government system, as Henry describes below, is not solved by a headline in The Times.

Today’s interview explores how to make things happen within government from the perspective of a political appointee. It’s based on an article Henry recently wrote which is definitely worth flicking your eye over.

Enjoy,

Tom

P.S. a warm welcome to the recent influx of Canadian subscribers.

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You think you know what a political adviser should do, but…

Some people have misconceptions about what the role of an adviser should be.

Obviously, you have policy advisers and communications advisers, and the names give it away. But actually, I found that one of the most valuable things an adviser can do for their minister is to project manage things through the department.

You can't guarantee that stuff will get delivered unless a minister or an adviser is project managing it. That skill set isn’t necessarily found in a communications or policy professional. The dream combo is someone who can do policy and comms, but also has the ability to project manage something through the department.

I don't want to overplay it; lots of people have very impressive operational experience and management techniques. This is really basic stuff: keeping to deadlines, holding people to account to make stuff happen, and unblocking things to move forward. It’s not rocket science.

If special advisers find it hard to work cross-department…

The brutal truth is that if you want to actually get something done in government, you want to do the stuff in your department, that you can control yourself.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t do cross-governmental work—when you sit in Number 10, that is all you do. But the number one thing you hear people say in Number 10 is how frustrating it is to get anything done.

When you’re in your department and you have control over the spending, you can actually do stuff. If you have a list of things you want to do, prioritise the things you can do that don’t require going elsewhere. You’ll achieve much more, much quicker. 

Take on some cross-governmental stuff, sure, but go into it with your eyes wide open that it’s going to be much harder.

The power of a forcing function

If you said, “the Secretary of State is going to do a speech on potholes on this date, and he needs something to say that includes progress on all these things,” you can use that as a forcing function to make the system work.

The beauty of the Bletchley AI Summit as a forcing function was that it was prime ministerial level, and we had leaders of other countries coming. We just had to make it work.

I don’t buy this idea that you can’t create forcing functions in areas seen as less sexy. If the government makes an area a priority, then it will happen.

But it’s about the hard work of not just saying, ‘I really care about this,’ but coming back to it every single week. And doing not just one forcing function, but three: a speech here, an event here, and a report there.

Too often it’s, ‘Oh, I made a speech, that means everything’s done,’ and surprise, surprise, nothing actually happens.

Hands up who wants to get shouted at?

Politicians care about making new losers for obvious political reasons.

Civil servants care about it because you have teams of people whose sole job is to engage a specific sector, and so they have lots of relationships with stakeholders.

If we do something that annoys those stakeholders, their job literally gets worse. It’s painful for them to walk into a meeting and explain something they themselves don't necessarily like. Of course, you want to do the thing that makes your stakeholders happy and makes your job easier.

That doesn’t mean that stakeholders dictate the rules.

Of course stakeholders don't want you to do certain things, but you've just got to do what you've got to do. You have to make the argument, be brave, and get on with it. 

If politicians want to get something done, they can get it done. The UK State can do a bunch of stuff if the prime minister and the team around them want to make it happen.

Thank you to the 93 readers who have referred a colleague.