🔨 The Cummings paradox: Why smashing the system made it work worse

In this week’s interview, Amy covers:

1. The “dystopian, divide and rule feeling” in the civil service

2. Why Dominic Cummings’ “reign of terror made the system work a lot worse”

3. And why it’s a bad thing that if “you suggest big, bold, radical ideas… people might think you're a bit loopy”

And three things we’ve got coming up:

1. [Webinar - today] How to build a policy-focused newsletter

2. [Training]: Communicate to Persuade

3. [Training]: Generative AI for Policy Communicators

Please do hit reply and let me know the good, the bad, the ugly.

Tom

The shared troubles of civil service reform

For The Human Handbrake, I interviewed 20 public service reformers—prominent ones, from ex-permanent secretaries to local authority chief executives to civil society leaders–and I asked them what it was like trying to get the system to change.

The most surprising thing about what they said is how little I’ve been surprised. Lots of this work feels less like revelation and more just recognition; someone giving a name to a colour that you've been seeing your entire career. 

The rules within the civil service around not speaking publicly, around impartiality and objectivity… They are there for good reasons, but they contribute to this almost dystopian, divide and rule feeling, that you can't talk about your shared troubles.

Over-managing is a logical response to a highly complex, risk-laden system

Throughout the political system there is this focus on blaming individuals. I don't think that really gets at the problem. 

There are huge numbers of very talented, very committed people in government all over the country. The problem is that the dysfunction in the system is a reflection of the really weird and difficult operating environment that all these people work within. 

The civil service, and politics more generally, is a very risk-laden environment: political risks, fiscal risks, delivery failure… It is vastly complicated. The human response to that feeling of overwhelm is to clamp down into the safer space of over-monitoring, over-managing things. 

The way we solve that…

It leads to a very strong argument for a more devolved government. You can have much better, saner responses to risk if you're closer to where delivery is happening on the front line. 

Do I think this is an argument for a smaller state? If you talk to any civil servant, and I've talked to a lot of them, many will concede there are parts of government where there is a lot of ‘bloat’. But they also say there are many parts in government that are completely underpowered relative to the ambition of ministers. 

It's important to be precise and nuanced about that conversation: there will be some places where smaller and more dynamic teams are really important, and others where you really need to get the ground covered better.

Yes, let’s change the system, but working with it, not against it

Dominic Cummings has had this fascinating impact on the civil service and on Whitehall reform. The aggressive way in which he took on the system massively widened the Overton window for what feels possible in terms of changing Whitehall. 

Partly because I think people are so grateful that it wouldn't be Cummings implementing it, they are now much more comfortable with reform that’s not as aggressive and destructive.

I agree with Cummings that there is a lot that needs to be changed. But I think his method–smashing up the system–is impractical. Government needs to go on. You can't tear it down and try to rebuild it on the move. It's like the car mechanics on a Ferrari trying to dismantle the parts whilst you're also still trying to win the race.

The irony is that when Cummings was in government, his reign of terror made the system work a lot worse. People felt their jobs would be on the line if they did something that wouldn't please him, which made them even more invested in hierarchy and all the things that Cummings didn't want.

Let’s evolve the system, but go with the system. As in, work supportively and respectfully with civil servants, and let's embolden them to be a bit braver about reform and more radical.

Money is not always the solution

Policymaking and the policy discourse hasn't changed a huge amount since the New Labour era. You see a lot of the same kinds of debates about policy areas and the same sorts of solutions continuing to be suggested. 

But we are in a different world. That means we need to think about different ways to respond, and think about levers other than ‘let's put X amount more money in this service.’

There are some services or some parts of government that really need more investment than they're currently getting. Money remains a massively important lever in the government's armoury. But it’s not the only thing.

I'm doing some work on children's mental health, for example, and a lot of the debates have been about how much money the UK’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service should get rather than what is making our kids sick and what healthier childhoods look like.

Yes, it’s hard to build relationships, but they really matter

Whitehall is a black box, and it's hard to figure out how to build relationships with people on the inside to see how they’re thinking and therefore how to pitch them. 

But…the currency of politics and influence is relationships. And obviously, there's massive problems with that, given that relationships are patterned by privilege. But it is the reality of human nature that relationships drive a lot of behaviour. 

What that practically means is that cold emails saying ‘here's our new report’, but you've never spoken to the person who's receiving it before, are unlikely to work. Find some kind of way to connect to the person you're sending it to. Find a way of having a conversation with them as a fellow human, rather than it just being a cold interaction. 

Similarly, try to contextualise your policy asks within an attempt to imagine where the person receiving it is coming from, which is likely a huge nexus of trade-offs. What are going to be the things that are really stressing them out? How can you be sympathetic to that in what you’re going to say, or how you’re going to say it? 

Do we value the things that will deliver?

Imagination and creativity are not necessarily valued in the very clever, scientific, think-tanky worlds and civil servant worlds, you know? There's a lot of pride in certain quarters in those spaces in being very objective, very rational, very sensible. 

If you suggest big, bold, radical ideas, there's a lot of self-censoring that happens because you feel people might think you're a bit loopy. But that’s probably where we’re going to find the ideas that really work in this different world we’re in.

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