Social and economic change Systems

Slowdown Papers

Dan Hill – Medium

Diagram showing Corona efforts absorbed and overtaken by more systematic improvements to resilenceMost writing on strategy is brisk, terse, focused. It tends to the abstract and the impersonal. The author is a creature of intellect but not of imagination – and sometimes is an institution or a group rather than being an individual at all.

So this collection of essays is striking in form as well as content. They are highly personal, they are expansive, at times even meandering. At one level, they are a series of personal reflections, starting with the Australian bush fires, moving through the coronavirus epidemic, to the greater challenge of climate change and on to the social and economic state of the world – and the language we use to describe all that, which itself powerfully constrains how we think about it. But this is also – and above all – systems thinking on a grand scale.

The existence of the coronavirus and its direct impact on human health are matters of biology. But pretty much everything else about the virus and its consequences, both immediate and for the longer term, are social and economic – and so intensely political – issues. It is always true that we have choices about how we think about those kinds of issues, but it is a choice rarely exercised in the practical world of public policy making.

Government agencies in almost all countries tend to use only one or two models with which to formulate policy. Further, they rarely gather evidence and analyses on different competing assumptions, or contradictory models, and then tend to build capabilities around the existing underlying models, rather than cultivate new approaches, potentially exposing previous judgements. This would tend to suppress nuance, but also inhibit the exploration of new trajectories.

In that, of course, there will continue to be much uncertainty, bringing to mind the line that:

Democracy is the form of society devised and maintained by those who know they don’t know everything.

But to know we don’t know everything is to know something very important, and is an opportunity – even an obligation – to examine and seek to understand the wider system as a step towards influencing its direction. These papers demonstrate some of the breadth which will be required and some of the opportunities for positive change we could collectively choose to take.

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.

Government and politics Systems

Introducing a ‘Government as a System’ toolkit

Andrea Siodmok – Policy Lab

This is the framework for Policy Lab's new Government as a System toolkit.

It’s been fascinating to watch the iterative development of Policy Lab’s synthesis of how governments get things done. It has now mutated into something bigger and more ambitious, nothing less than a toolkit for developing and managing government as a system

Its centrepiece is a grid of 56 actions, mapped by approach to power and by position in the design cycle, There’s a huge amount of thought and experience baked into it, giving the potential to be a really valuable tool for framing issues in systems thinking terms.

This is an image showing how the Double Diamond innovation process maps across the whole system of government action.

From that perspective, there may be almost equal value in a second diagram, which expands the double diamond model into a chain of gems which map to the columns of the action grid.

But it’s important to recognise what this isn’t as well as what it is. It is a toolkit which is helpful in thinking about government as a system, it is not itself a depiction of that system. The grid is not a map, as the post at one point implies; rather it is a key to system maps as yet largely undrawn. An atlas of those maps, of various scales, complexity and precision would be a thing of wonder, but it is not an atlas we yet have – or probably could ever have, bringing to mind as it does Borges’ one paragraph short story, On Exactitude in Science. That’s not to diminish the power of the key and the approach, but it does very much reinforce the point that this is a toolkit, not a solution.

It will more interesting still to see where this might go next. This version is government as a system. The direction of travel points to a view which will increasingly be more about government in a system.

Democracy Systems

Taking a systems view of democratic design

Catherine Howe

Catherine Howe applies systems thinking to democracy in seven short sharp minutes. Don’t watch this for the production values – there aren’t any – but for a lot of thought neatly packed into a rather small space.

Democracy is

us figuring out as humans how to make the least worst decisions collectively

That definition combines extreme modesty with extraordinary ambitions, and very deliberately says nothing about democracy as representation. This is the broader, systemic view, built round three themes – networks of different scales (and so the network of those networks, and how people participate in them); design, of processes and structures; and the central importance of power and how it is distributed.

There’s no attempt to offer a solution. But better questions are always a good step towards better answers.

Policy and analysis Service design

A catalogue of things that are stopping change

James Reeve and Rose Mortada

Following Simon Parker’s challenge that nothing can change until we change the rules inhibiting change, along come James Reeve and Rose Mortada drilling down a level to explore how policy, politics and delivery come together in fundamentally unproductive ways to make change harder. The intermediate output of policy is neither good policy (because it hasn’t been tested against reality) nor a good input for delivery planning, because too often the elements which make policy work good – not least imprecision and uncertainty – are stripped out before a delivery team is asked to make sense of them.

This post focuses on the civil service, but the issues are much wider ones (though the political yearnings for certainty do tend to make things harder). And in one sense the answer is trivial: blend policy and delivery together, build shared respect for different skills appropriate to different problem spaces, resist the temptation to wish away politics, and perhaps above all:

the policy should never be considered done until the outcome has been achieved

Trivial does not mean easy, of course. There’s nothing new about the problems described here and there are no glib solutions on offer. But there are great insights from the lived experience of trying to do it better infused with realism about the scope and pace of change.

This is the first of a three part series – part 2 and part 3 are well worth reading as well (with an interesting difference of tone between the first two, written pre-COVID-19 and the third written while it is in full spate).

Social and economic change

Nothing can change

Simon Parker

Nothing can change. We have huge systemic problems, but many things are as they are, and it is foolish to assume that intentional change will deliver intended effects.

But of course that’s not true. Things can and do change. Things are as they are because it suits enough people, with enough power, for them to be that way. Change is fundamentally a political enterprise.

What’s inadvertently interesting about this post is that it was written at the beginning of March and already feels like something from another age. If anything, the assumption in public discourse has flipped. If it is possible to create a hospital in days, if it is possible to change patterns of work and life radically and rapidly, if it is possible to bring national and international focus on a common overriding goal – what then can there be which is not possible?

But the answer is still fundamentally the one underpinning this post. We can do those things. We could do many other things which are radical changes to the way things have been done – but only if the assumption of insurmountable complexity is broken. A month on, that suddenly seems much more possible. But so it has seemed in other crises, there have been other dawns beyond other darkest hours. There will be unprecedented opportunities ahead, but they will need to be seized if they are not to fade away.

Systems Technology

Computer Files Are Going Extinct

Simon Pitt – OneZero

Files have been a unit of organisation for written information for generations. For a rather shorter period, they have been a unit of organisation for digital information. But after a few years in which the metaphor retained at least some connection with the underlying reality, computer files are abstracting themselves to vanishing point.

So what, who cares? Well at one level, none of us need care, that’s almost the point. At another level, those who have lived through the revolution in personalised computing can gently mourn – as the author of this post does – the loss of a way of organising and understanding information, and the sense of familiarity and control which comes with it. But as the author also recognises, all this starts to get really interesting when we recognise files are skeuomorphic (as is much of the language we use to talk about them).

But there is a more serious point too. However much we choose to abstract, in the end, the data is somewhere – and often in several somewheres. Nobody wants backups, as the old adage has it, but everybody wants restores. But the more our data becomes less apparent, less vulnerable to hard drive failures and laptop thefts, the more it becomes vulnerable to subscriptions not paid and services closed down.

This blog post has some characteristics which make it appear to be like a file. But it isn’t, it’s an entry in a database dressed up with some scripts. Its default state is not to exist, a state postponed by the application of money and electricity, but a state it will inexorably reach.

Democracy Ethics Government and politics Uncategorised

Things Fall Apart

Mark O’Neill

There is an almost universal belief, no less strong for being almost as universally unspoken, that the UK political system is an exemplar of stability and moderation. There is a related belief, near universal among those most affected by it, that being a non-political civil servant is unproblematic, precisely because of those characteristics of the wider political system.

Those beliefs have been pretty resistant to evidence. Reflections on civil service ethics generate little interest. The remarkable resignation letter of a British diplomat in the USA cracked the facade, but the crack is already healing. This post takes that resignation as its starting point for a deeper examination of the fragility of civil society. It is short and pointed; alarmed but not alarmist. It sets a challenge. It is not clear where an effective response to that challenge will come from.

Government and politics Organisational change

A Manifesto for Better Government

Adrian Brown – Centre for Public Impact

This in some ways a follow up to Adrian Brown’s previous post, but it stands firmly on its own merits doing exactly what the title suggests. It starts with three beliefs, derives seven values from them, and from that combination asserts six principles for action. There’s room for debate about whether these are precisely the right three, seven or six – and that would be a very good debate to have, while at the same time rather missing the point.

Dominant metaphors change over time – often quite a long time. For a century or more, the machine, and more recently the computer, have been the dominant metaphor for systems and organisations, and even for people. That metaphor has not been unchallenged of course – the agile manifesto, of which this is a no doubt conscious echo – can be seen as an attempt to do exactly that. This manifesto is based much more on networks and relationships and, crucially, a view of knowledge which places rich understanding at the periphery of the organisation, closest to its external signals, rather than at its heart. A system operating on those lines would be both more resilient and more responsive and there is much which is highly attractive in the manifesto.

It does not address the perennial hard question of political organisational change. It is easy – relatively – to have a vision of a better future. It is much harder to work out how to get there from here. But that should be taken not as a criticism, but as an important challenge to everybody interested in better government.

Government and politics Systems

On being and doing in Government

Adrian Brown – Centre for Public Impact

What should government do? And, how should it do it? Those are two critically important questions, which fortunately get a lot of time and attention – even though it’s not hard to argue that they still don’t have good enough answers. But there is a third question which is at least as important, but which gets much less attention: what should governments be?

It is that question which is at the centre of this post. One reason why it has not had the attention it deserves is that a generation or two of public servants have been brought up not to notice it: the New Public Management paradigm that efficient delivery is pretty much all of what it’s about has become so pervasive as to be invisible. And that’s unfortunate in that it is neither value free (how could it be?) nor, as it turns out, is it a very good way of making governments work. NPM (and other strands of thought) are right that government does not exist for the benefit of people who work in it as politicians and officials. Its insights and methods have a place. But systems operated by and for humans need to have humans at their heart, and to recognise that it is the relationships and values those humans have which makes those systems work effectively – or even perhaps at all.

Data and AI Policy and analysis

Data as institutional memory

Adam Locker – Medium

There’s more to this deceptively self-deprecating piece than meets the eye. Fragmented data cannot support integrated services, still less integrated organisations. Deep understanding and effective management of data are therefore not a minor issue for techie obsessives, but are fundamental to organisational success.

As so often, the diagnosis is simple (which of course doesn’t stop it being hard), acting on that diagnosis is complicated, and even harder. This post brings the two together through an account of making it work on one part of government.

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.

Service design

What is a Customer?

Bob Marshall – Think Different

The question of what a customer is (if anything) in the context of public services is one to be approached with trepidation. The bigendian battle has been rumbling for decades, occasionally flaring up into active skirmishing, without ever quite being resolved. One of the main reasons for that is that all the relevant words – customer, user, client, and so on – have a range of connotations, with proponents tending to focus on one set and opponents on another.

Yet another definition won’t solve that, though this one might have a better chance in the fight than most. A customer, this short post suggests, is:

Anyone who receives or anticipates receiving something (e.g. a good or a service) from someone else.

Perhaps the time has come to turn the problem round. Instead of picking a word and arguing about its definition, perhaps we should pick a definition and argue about which word best encapsulates it.

Democracy Government and politics

Civil servants civilly serve

Stefan Czerniawski – Public Strategist

A first time entry in Strategic Reading for this apparently well-established blogger, this post looks at the ethical issues civil servants and civil services should – but largely don’t – consider if the chain of democratic legitimacy for the actions of government is broken or weakened.

The post ducks the core question of whether the tipping point has been reached and indeed implies that there will be a strong, but dangerous, temptation to acknowledge it only with hindsight.

But nevertheless this is one which civil servants and others interested in the health of the political system should read and reflect on – and ask themselves whether and when they may need to act.

Democracy Service design

Just enough Internet

Rachel Coldicutt – doteveryone

This is a thoughtful and important piece which challenges one of the pervasive myths of digital services, and particularly digital government services. More, it argues, is not intrinsically better, for a number of overlapping reasons. Collecting more data than necessary carries costs – human and ecological, as well as financial and technical. In making that argument it challenges the naive equivalence between public and commercial services, and the assertion that the former are somehow failing if they do not ape the latter – summarised in the splendid line

The fact that neither NHSX or BBC R&D will send a rocket to Mars this year does not mean they are not innovative. It means they are not in the rocket business.

Ethics Systems

The Moral Economy of Tech

Maciej Cegłowski – Idle Words

This is another piece which isn’t new but which provides some good provocative food for thought, on how applying a computer programming perspective to problems which are fundamentally social can – and does – lead to unfortunate results. It’s written by Maciej Cegłowski, who brings elegant erudition to an unlikely range of subjects, in this case how an approach based on controlling closed systems breaks down when confronted with messily indeterminate systems, with a scattering of provocative one liners which combine challenge and simplicity, such as

Machine learning is like money laundering for bias.

We have to stop treating computer technology as something unprecedented in human history. Not every year is Year Zero. This is not the first time an enthusiastic group of nerds has decided to treat the rest of the world as a science experiment. Earlier attempts to create a rationalist Utopia failed for interesting reasons, and since we bought those lessons at a great price, it would be a shame not to learn them.

One Team Government Organisational change

Enabling collaboration across the public sector

Pia Andrews – The Mandarin

Pia Andrews has long been a powerful voice and a practical exponent of doing government better, not least doing government better in ways which confront and address the difficulties caused by the structures of governments themselves.

This article is a great summary of some of that thinking. Much of its power comes from the recognition that government is fundamentally about people and their relationships with each other, and that that is true as much of people within government as it is of the people that governments serve. Vertical organisational structures can easily be and often are barriers to collaboration and dampeners of motivation, reinforced by a concept of leadership derived from functional management. But none of those is immutable, and a combination of fresh approaches to teams and leadership internally with a readiness to look at the needs of the people governments serve more holistically has real power and potential (greater than either one considered in isolation).

Policy and analysis Service design

Most of government is mostly service design most of the time. Discuss.

Matt Edgar writes here

Unusually for Strategic Reading, this post earns its place not by being new and timely but because it has become an essential point of reference in an important debate. It makes a very powerful argument – but one that is slighly undermined by the conclusion it draws.

It is a measure of continuing progress in the four years since the post was written that the proposition that service design is important in government has become less surprising and less contentious, as well as much more widely practised. It is a measure of how much more needs to be done that the problems described are still very recognisable.

So it’s absolutely right to say that service design is critically important for government and that much of what happens in government is better illuminated by service design thinking. But to assert further that that is most of government most of the time is to miss something important. Much of government is not service design and much of what is service-related is an aspect of a wider public purpose. The function of many government services is only in part to deliver a service, even where there is a service being delivered at all. So the five gaps which are at the heart of this post are all real and all can and should be addressed by service design approaches – but they are not the only gaps, so a solution which addresses only those is at risk of missing something important.

Service design

Defining services

Kate Tarling and Matti Keltanen – Services and service organisations

The question of what a service is is both eminently straightforward and impossibly difficult to answer. This post does a great job of demonstrating the straightforwardness, in five pithy elements of a definition, but in fleshing out each of the five points, it also demonstrates the impossibility.

The problem is not that the definition being put forward is wrong or unhelpful. Quite the contrary. It is that drawing the boundaries of a service requires huge understanding, empathy and insight – and even then is unavoidably a matter of judgement rather than the consequence of the precise application of rules. It needs to be big enough to be clearly about satisfying a need rather than conducting a transaction; it needs to be small enough for it to be practically and organisationally possible to make it better. It needs to be sufficiently self-contained to be addressed as a single challenge, and sufficiently broadly based to avoid the construction or reinforcement of silos and the associated inefficiency of duplication. And across all of that – and more – we also need to be clear about the role of government and about whether that role is inherent or arbitrary. Back in the primordial dawn of digital government, a decision was made not to offer a government change of address service – on the grounds that when people move it’s never just government they need to notify, and that in any case the real service was something closer to ‘moving home’. And for that, government is not the service provider – but then nobody else is either. Perhaps we are driven to the slightly uncomforable conclusion that even with all possible understading, empathy and insight, a service is still defined, at least in part, by what a service provider says it is.