Strategy

A measure of value for digital public service delivery

Richard Pope

The quest for a measure of value of digital public services has been running pretty much as long as the quest for valuable public services. Many attempts have been made to pin down the measure, but often with rather lop-sided results. With characteristic elegance, Richard Pope has distilled it all to three factors – and critically makes the point that they need to be balanced against each other. My one quibble with the three he has chosen would be to suggest that ‘capabilty to operate’ needs to be understood more broadly than his brief definition implies. It is the service – in all its aspects which needs to operated, not just the digital team constructing the technical components. But with that broader interpretation of the third axis, this is a useful tool for framing – and addressing – a perenially important question.

Futures Strategy

Performing a Project Premortem

Gary Klein – Harvard Business Review

Projects of every kind go horribly wrong in a bewildering variety of ways. Despite that, the instinct to assume that the act of planning is sufficient to ensure that assumptions are borne out and that delivery follows a smooth path can be overwhelming. But there is great power in assuming the opposite: if we examine early on some of the ways in which the project might have gone horribly wrong, in time to think about how the risk might be mitigated, the chances of successful delivery are enhanced.

That’s the idea behind a premortem – not waiting until the project is dead before performing the autopsy. At root it’s a simple risk management technique, its power is in making it easier for people to liberate themselves from optimism bias.

This is not a new article, it is the definitive account of the method, and having tracked it down to share with a colleague, thought it worth sharing here too. I was first introduced to it by Naomi Stanford, who has an interesting blog post contrasting premortems with devil’s advocacy – the former is a distinctly (if curiously) more positive approach.

Government and politics Innovation Strategy

Government Digital Service: Our strategy for 2021-2024

Tom Read

Strategies always intend to say something about the future. They rarely intend to say much about the past, but almost invariably say more than they first appear to.

There are of course debates to be had about whether this is the right strategy for GDS to have for the next three years and about whether GDS is well positioned to deliver that strategy even if the strategy itself is the right one. But here it is worth reflecting on a slightly different question.

We now have a quarter of a century of experience of digital government. This strategy builds on foundations which are deep, if not always entirely solid. Or perhaps it is better to think of its being built on archaeological strata, history which shapes and informs the present, even if much of that history has been lost and forgotten.

From that perspective, one of the things which is most striking is how stable the strategy has been over decades. The five missions GDS has set itself for the next three years would have been recognised – and enthusiastically endorsed – by their predecessors of twenty years ago. That holds true to quite a surprising level of detail. Joined up ‘whole services’, such as having a baby or preparing to retire, are an aspiration for the future – just as having a baby and pensions and retirement were two one of the first ‘life episodes’ built for UK Online at the turn of the millennium.

That prompts two thoughts. One is to repeat some words I wrote as gov.uk was first being turned on. Another decade later, they still ring true:

The innovation of gov.uk does not lie in the concepts it embodies. What is striking is not how new those are, but how little different from the ambitions of a decade ago.

The second is to ask whether that tells us anything interesting. The point here is not to wallow in nostalgia or suggest that the past was a better place. It wasn’t – not in this respect, at least. Instead, it’s an opportunity to think over a longer timescale than we usually do, a kind of long now of digital government. And from that perspective, being agile suddenly looks fractal. That whole twenty year view can be seen as a single set of iterations, a minimum viable product becoming less minimal and more viable each time round – as ever, it’s not iterative if you only do it once.

That recognition should, perhaps, makes us both more ambitious and more humble. If it it is going to have taken us the best part of 25 years to create an effective, joined-up having a baby service, that is surely many years too long. Ten years from now, five years from now, there should be a more distinctive strategy because the current (and long standing) ambition should have been achieved. But since it has taken so long, it becomes the more important to be highly aware of the systemic constraints and enablers of change. There have been times in its past when GDS’s self-belief has outstripped its ability to operate in a complex and conservative system. It has to understand its environment if it is to maximise its effectiveness in changing it.

It is a pleasing curiosity that we got the strategy right a long time ago, but it matters more that the conditions of success for its implementation were far weaker then than they are now. The strategy is not delivery, but delivery is the test of strategy that matters. The strategic challenge for GDS is to make its strategy redundant.

Strategy Systems

The (il)logic of legibility: why governments should stop simplifying complex systems

Thea Snow – Centre for Public Impact

The ability to abstract, to stand back, to see the large pattern obscured by the detail is an important and powerful one for any strategist. It is also a very dangerous one.

It is too easy to impose a pattern or to assert structure which is not really there. If we abstract from messy reality, we may be able to get rid of the messiness, but in doing so we are all too likely to lose contact with the reality as well.

To acknowledge that, to recognise complexity and accept the uncertainty which it brings, is not a sign of weakness or intellectual inadequacy. On the contrary, strength and resilience – in reality and in the understanding of reality – come from accepting and embracing messiness and the strengths it brings.

This post celebrates complexity and the constraints on knowledge it imposes, and a world in which ‘I don’t know’ can be the most powerful thing we can say.

Organisational change Strategy

CDO Chat – Kit Collingwood

Kit Collingwood and Dave Briggs

This video conversation is modestly billed as a CDO chat, but is actually a master class in strategy development and application. The approach is deceptively simple. Two people who bring both depth of experience and thoughtful reflection range over everything from rapid mobilisation in the face of a pandemic, through the vital importance of using data effectively, the challenges of dealing with dominant vendors, creating a team with the right balance of expertise and humility, and giving that team the support to design and build services which meet the needs of people outside and inside the organisation,

But what makes all that good strategic watching is the place of the strategy itself in bringing coherence and setting direction. Kit makes a powerful case for the place of simplicity and humility in strategy. This is strategy not as grand vision or teetering on the cutting edge of technological innovation, but as a clear exposition of things which need to work well and the steps to be taken to make that happen. Beyond that, it is a mechanism to bring focus to accountability, which is perhaps the greatest strength of this approach.

Kit claims in passing to possess but not to have read Rumelt’s Good Strategy/Bad Strategy. Similar ways of framing and addressing strategic questions are though apparent in her approach, which perfectly embodies his three characteristics of a good strategy.

Strategy

Even overs: The prioritization tool that brings your strategy to life

Jurriaan Kamer – The Ready

It is a truism that if everything is a priority,nothing is a priority. It’s obvious when a ‘prioritisation’ meeting ends up with a longer list of things which it is essential to do than it started with, or when nobody is willing to make the decision to stop the activities which everybody has agreed are less urgent or less important.

But there is a more insidious failure to prioritise, which tends to sit a level below that. It’s less about which projects take priority over which other projects, much more about which characteristics we want to nurture and champion. This post applies a deceptively simple, but very powerful too test: would we want to do one thing even over another good thing – where it really matters that the second thing is genuinely desired and desirable, not just the first.

There are always trade off choices to be made. Forcing them to be explicit can be a real source of strategic power.

Presentation and communication Strategy

Maps vs Lists

Matt Ballantine – mmitII

The tension between the appetite for clarity and certainty and the messy impact of the vicissitudes of life runs through every project, every programme and every strategy there has ever been. Some try to manage that through detailed precision, creating something very strong but potentially very brittle. Others embrace uncertainty, prioritising flexibility and responsiveness and eschewing the temptation to specify everything in advance.

This post expresses that tension by contrasting a map-based view of the world with a list-based view. It’s a simple but powerful way of illustrating something important, not least that many people have a clear preference for one or other of those ways of capturing their understanding of the world and the progress they want to make through it. As someone who, like Matt, has a strong liking for maps, it rang true for me, but the post might also help lovers of lists appreciate why not everybody shares their enthusiasm – and the core argument is that mappists and listists need to make sure that they have found ways of conveying information to each other.

And there’s a lovely point of detail about ‘roadmaps’, which are not maps of roads and are usually not maps at all.

Service design Strategy

Applying digital to everything

Janet Hughes

The internet is a rich complex system. One of the side effects of that is that good things bubble to the surface of the information soup with apparent randomness, to be seized on before they sink back down again.

This video presentation from 2019 is just such a good thing. It is a bravura exposition of the power of user-centred design in a policy-dominated culture and environment. Its strength is not so much in the individual thoughts, powerful though those are, as in their weaving together into something which is both a rich picture and a powerful manifesto for change.

The original audience were clearly digital people who needed to understand that policy people were not weird, incompetent or malevolent, but this is perhaps even more powerful in explaining to policy people  why user-centred design should be seen as a powerful and empowering way of doing things, rather than as an incomprehensible threat from uncomprehending digital people.

The whole thing is 30 minutes and well worth watching, but there are two gems which are worth pulling out. One is the best one liner from a presentation which isn’t short of them:

The medium of choice for communicating between policy people and delivery people is the hand grenade.

A triangle labelled on its corners and sides: 'rules' on the side from 'now' to 'everywhere', 'discussions' on the side from 'everywhere' to 'by agreement' and 'experiments' on the side from 'by agreement' to 'now'The other is a triangle, originally by Chris Yapp, about the implementation of change. We would all like change to happen now, everywhere and by agreement – but that’s not possible. Choices have to be made about which of those to prioritise, and those choices constrain (and are constrained by) choices about the means to use. It’s a lovely example of a very simple picture being a distillation of a very rich thought.

Strategy

We’ve published our first digital strategy at the Royal Borough of Greenwich

Kit Collingwood

There is nothing special about the digital strategy for a London borough, which makes this one very special indeed. It is very easy for such strategies to be focused on technology and to see the world from the perspective of service providers – and as a result to be rather impenetrable to the reader who might just want to know how their life or their environment might be made better. This one pulls off the trick not just of approaching the problem the right way round, and of expressing the strategy intended to respond to it clearly and succinctly.

This post describes how that strategy came about, distilled and abstracted from the crucible of pandemic response, and more deeply human as a result. That too should not be very special – but of course it is.

Government and politics Social and economic change Strategy

The path from crisis

Matthew Taylor – RSA

A matrix to help distinguish between one-off crisis actions and interventions that have longer-term potential, and between innovations resulting from new activities and those enabled by putting a hold on business and bureaucracy as usual.It is easy, but not in the end very productive, to worry about how we got into a crisis and to pin the blame as we choose. It is harder, and very much more productive, to look at what the crisis has forced us to do and to ask how we can discard that which was of only short term utility while keeping and developing that which shows promise of longer term value.

This post provides a really useful framework not just for thinking about the difference between what we have needed to do in the crisis and what we may be able to do beyond it – neatly summarised in the matrix. But it goes beyond that to reflect on what is capable of making potentially radical change more robustly sustainable. The answers to that come not just in institutional change and adaptation, important though those opportunities are, but also from an approach to public engagement and participation which has the potential to provide the foundations necessary for better decision making more generally.

Could the crisis be a turning point, rekindling our belief in progress? It has reminded us that it is not hope that leads to action as much as action that leads to hope. It has underlined our common humanity while encouraging us to empathise with our less protected and advantaged fellow citizens. It has, I sense, made us intolerant of the unreason and cynicism that underlies so much populist rhetoric. […]

The crisis is forcing us to think differently and to act differently. Perhaps the most profound shift would be if we were ready for a different kind of leadership.

Government and politics Strategy

How should government manage big risks – pandemics to financial shocks?

Geoff Mulgan

Another Geoff Mulgan post, but a very different one from his reflections on the imaginary crisis, which spanned continents, philosophies and centuries. This one is a rigorously pragmatic account of how governments should manage risk effectively, using the UK as a case study and drawing on Geoff’s own experience of working in government.

There is much to reflect on in the post, but one of the points which comes through very clearly is the need to accept apparent short-term inefficiency, in the form of many kinds of excess capacity, in order to maximise overall long-term efficiency and effectiveness. There is of course an important debate to be had about how much of what kinds of capacity is worth paying for, but if that debate takes place in a political environment in which short-term cost efficiency is valued above all else, it is not likely to end in the optimal place.

Governments can’t avoid being the insurer of last resort for high impact risks. It matter to all of us that the premiums are kept paid up.

Preparing for risks is costly. It takes people and resources away from immediate priorities. But ultimately protecting people from risk is the heart of what government is for, and good bureaucracy manages risk systematically. Indeed, times like this remind us why boring, competent, reliable and forward-looking bureaucracy is so vital to helping us live our lives freely.  They worry so that we don’t have to.

Futures Strategy

A Failure, But Not Of Prediction

Scott Alexander – Slate Star Codex

At one level, this is about why we didn’t see COVID-19 coming. At another, it is using that as a case study of a whole class of decisions which depend on making judgements about uncertain futures – which is to say most of the ones that matter. The problem is not a shortfall in prediction skills, which is just as well because prediction is a tricky game. It is instead presented as a shortfall in probabilistic reasoning skills, which in turn relates to the classic risk management scales of likelihood and impact. Low likelihood, high impact events matter a great deal – which is why the insurance industry exists. If there is a 10% chance of an imminent global pandemic, it is well worth investing in mitigation, even if it turns out that the pandemic fizzles out – which is why it made sense to stockpile large quantities of flu vaccine in 2009 which turned out not to be needed.

But, slightly less explicitly in the article, there is another step which is essential before any of this becomes useful, as opposed to merely interesting. Probabilistic reasoning can be a good pointer to action, but it has succeeded only if appropriate action is in fact taken. So perhaps those showing greatest wisdom back in January and February were not either those who dismissed what was happening in Wuhan as far away and unimportant, or those who jumped immediately to proclaiming imminent global catastrophe – but those who saw from an apparently moderate risk, an immediate need to take precautionary actions.

There is, of course, a political dimension to this as well. Back in 2009, the then French Health Minister was heavily criticised for the money spent – money apparently wasted – on one of those vaccine stockpiles. She is quite rightly unapologetic, but it’s another reason why understanding the concept of risk and its mitigation is important. As Alexander observes,

Uncertainty about the world doesn’t imply uncertainty about the best course of action!

Strategy

The Imaginary Crisis (and how we might quicken social and public imagination)

Geoff Mulgan – Demos Helsinki

If we cannot imagine a better future, we cannot hope to be able to create one. And that’s a problem if

few in politics can articulate in any detail a world in the not-too-distant future where society would be better. There are policies; soundbites; vague aspirations: but nothing remotely at the level of ambition of the past.

This post and the much more detailed paper which sits behind it tackle the problem – or the crisis – of insufficient social imagination. Social imagination – variously abstract, practical, theoretical and tangible – has been a dimension of human thought and activity throughout history. But somehow our collective ability to sustain and such feats of of imagination fall short or what they once were and now need to be.

As many of the examples cited in the paper clearly show, it can take a very long time for ideas to permeate from imagination to reality and many never make it. We do not read More’s Utopia as either a description of the society he lived in or as a prescient account of the times which were to follow. Hari Seldon has no place in this story (though the world-building techniques of science fiction writers may do). The recognition that ideas which subsequently become central and powerful start on the periphery certainly shouldn’t surprise us and probably shouldn’t worry us either. There may be a need for greater concern that the mechanisms by which those ideas get closer to power and are adopted and incorporated have somehow become attenuating as a by-product of wider political and institutional changes.

But the positive message here is a really important one. Imagination is at once a powerful tool and part of the essence of what it means to be human. We should cherish it, nourish it and respect it.

Strategy

MoJ digital and technology strategy

Tom Read – MOJ Digital & Technology

The Ministry of Justice digital team has long exemplified many of the best characteristics of digital in government, getting on with doing good things without making a song and dance about it.

So it’s no surprise that their approach to creating a strategy embodies those same characteristics. In about a thousand words, this post makes clear what is to be done, why it matters, and how they will make it happen. Your strategy is probably longer, but it’s worth asking whether it’s better.

Strategy Systems

In which I am a bit over this digital transformation business.

Catherine Howe

It’s a pretty safe rule of thumb that whatever Catherine Howe is thinking about now, the rest of us will stumble onto at some point in the indefinite future. So if she is over the digital transformation business, we need to wonder where the zeitgeist will manifest next.

One of the more provocative definitions of technology is ‘everything which doesn’t work yet’. Similarly, we will know that mapping as a technique and transformation as a goal have become normal when we hardly need to talk about them, any more than we talk about the mature technology which is around us and so hardly needs to be spoken about. But that, as this post starts to explore, merely clears the ground for deeper and harder questions. The search is on for a theory of change to shape the search for answers.

Strategy

Universal Laws of the World

Morgan Housel – Collaborative Fund

Rules of thumb are useful things; partly because they avoid the need for original thought on every occasion and partly because they can help avoid the risk of being over persuaded by one’s own arguments. This modestly titled post is a slightly random collection of laws, some more rigorous than others, some more widely familiar. No 5 is new to me but seems to encapsulate something important, which could be expressed even more pithily as ‘all change is irreversible. And No 11 is one which people with tendencies to strategic abstraction should chant ritually whenever they come together.

(found through Ian Leslie’s gloriously eclectic newsletter, which is always packed with gems)

Innovation Organisational change Strategy

Culture is our strategy

Emma Stace – DfE Digital and Transformation

Delivery is hard. Delivering consistently and with high quality is harder. Sustaining that over time without damage to individuals, teams and the wider organisation is very hard indeed.

In the short run it is often possible to over deliver, but there is a price to be paid. Getting that right is not, of course, about organisational structures or project plans, it is about people and the shared culture of their working environment – or about ‘trying hard to strike a balance between delivery now, and delivery tomorrow’.

This post approaches that question from the perspective of recognising and nurturing culture. But there is also a strong parallel with the concept of organisational debt (itself derived from technical debt), the recognition that failing to keep the organisation’s structures and processes in line both with its changing internal needs and with its external environment stores up problems which might be avoidable for a time, but cannot be avoided indefinitely. Or to put it differently again, culture as strategy is one of the ways in which teams and organisations can better manage strategic drift.

Strategy

Russell Davies’s strategy advice

Anna Shipman – JFDI

A simple list of a dozen points about how to do better strategy making, from somebody with real insight and experience. They won’t all be right in every context, but they are all worth thinking about – to be treated more as provocations than as prescriptions. There’s also a plug for Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, which is an excellene book, though its ideas are even better expressed in the shorter, sharper article version

Service design Strategy

A brief introduction to digital government

Eddie Copeland

Digital government is both something and nothing. It is something because there’s no denying that people use the phrase and think they mean something by it. Digital technologies are a distinctive driver of change in modern societies and economies and they make things possible that would be otherwise harder or not feasible at all. Filing cabinet government. carbon paper government and even mainframe government are all very clearly different from digital government. And yet digital government is nothing. Precisely because digital is everything, calling something digital doesn’t add much to understanding, but draws attention to the technology, which is simultaneously vitally important and not the thing which really matters.

But given that the phrase is not going to go away, some clear-headed thinking about what we should understand by it and how we should apply is highly desirable. And that is precisely what this paper offers. It’s a draft open to public comment, so very much still evolving, but it’s already a useful overview. It neatly and successfully avoids the traps of equating digital with technology and digital uniquely with service design, but is slightly less successful in avoiding the suggestion that digital is done by digital teams.

Innovation Strategy

Jumbo

BBC

pilots looking and pointing at a 747Fifty year old documentaries are not the staple of Strategic Reading, but this one is an intriguing insight into thinking about the future – a future which has of course become our past and present. It was made just a few months before the Boeing 747 went into service: the physical plane was very real, the implications for wider service design were very uncertain.

There’s an intriguing clip early on where the head of the Royal Aircraft Establishment observes that over the then half century of passenger flight, planes had doubled in size every ten years. The 747 fits that trend perfectly. Extrapolating to the next century, muses the Director, that would imply planes carrying 10,000 people. And you can hear in his voice both confidence in the trend and doubt about its implications, battling for dominance.

Half a century on, we know that it was right to doubt – the 747 was in some important ways on the inflection point of the growth curve. Planes haven’t got faster or higher or more comfortable since then, and they haven’t, with the brief and apparently aberrant exception of the Airbus 380, got any bigger.

That brings Herb Steins’ great line to mind, ‘If something cannot go on for ever, then it won’t’, and that in turn is an important reminder that in thinking about the future, it is unwise to assume that exponential change is unconstrained and indefinite.

Meanwhile, stay with the documentary to stumble across the world’s only vertical take off passenger plane, developed at the same time as the 747, but never quite attaining the same dominance of the skies.