Andrew - this is a fab call to arms if nothing else for current civil servants, of which I’m afraid I’m one at a mid-career level (and one of those history grads, sorry).
I joined the CS about six years ago and have never bought into the institutional logic of “well that’s the way it is” which has often pervaded my time in Whitehall. I am not technical but have read about a lot of the basic principles of GDS, Universal Credit etc and yet so often seen them die at the rolled eyes of SCS in other policy areas. Attempts to do things differently are still strangled at birth.
I’m SO up for a project of civil service improvement - please message or put me in touch with others thinking about this. I think half of your royal commission - on the problem to be solved - could be completed over a weekend. We have Fulton, Maude, Cummings, the IFG and more all providing a similar diagnosis. What’s needed now is a network of actual people inside and out who can start advocating for some of this stuff and pushing for change.
I was recently reading Grove’s classic High Output Management. Personally I think you could expand the ‘functions’ envisaged by John Manzoni in his time in government to create the genuine heft of a permanent horizontal CS - analytical, commercial, delivery focused - and then the politics come in the form of more vertical mission units based around cross cutting issues. Kill departments or at the very least make them subordinate to the mission units. My two pence at least…
Thanks for taking the time to think out loud. We have a window of opportunity in California with the governor's race so this is very timely out here. Beyond civil service commissions, I would look at structural reforms of actually consolidating institutions. The bonfire of the quangos in the UK seems like one example. We have had several efforts in that direction, the most successful of which likely would be Governor Brown's abolition of redevelopment and then reconfiguration through other tools.
Personally I have switched back and forth between central government and big mature private-sector orgs (which sometimes have similar vices), and I agree with so many points. There are huge opportunities.
But the difficulty is getting so many stakeholders to agree to process change. When you have spent ten years following a process, that IS the way to do things, that's what we've always done, anything else wouldn't be The Process...
There's a lot I agree with here, as someone who worked in the civil service for many years, albeit not since 2005, and has followed it closely since. But I do think the Royal Commission idea would need to be implemented in a way that foreshadowed the dynamism and efficiency of the new civil service it's intended to herald, rather than taking the traditional approach.
It seems that the last Royal Commission was over 25 years ago - Lord Wakeham's into the future of the House of Lords. But if we look at modern day public inquiries, which are probably the closest parallel - they are taking longer and longer to report, with no clear evidence that they are better than those of 30+ years ago. Three to four years is the average. I fear that a modern day Royal Commission would be even slower. Northcote-Trevelyan may be a good precedent here for a fast review, in that it was commissioned in April 1853 and reported in November that year - so not much more than six months. Publication was not til February 1854. It helps that it's only 23 page long, which I don't think is a realistic precedent!
I'd be curious to know how to instil the appropriate sense of urgency into any change programme (or whatever its called). I read Kate Bingham's book on the vaccine taskforce and it's clear that she had enough "protection" at the highest levels to enable the team to succeed. As a VC she was used to ambiguity, problem solving and failure. That helped plus the drive that is essential to build something from scratch. I'd also add that while change is often top-down the battles within it are fought at the middle manager level (or equivalent) so you really need people who can subvert the bureaucracy to more positive ends.
"most importantly, a desire to deliver this kind of radical change for its own ends rather than as a convenient vehicle for their personal or political advancement". Why? Capable people who get things done are often also ambitious (if these qualities are really distinct at all). Motivation seems beside the point, as well as being unobservable. You say that there's a consensus in the civil service about the need for change (apart from in the dreaded Treasury) - so good intentions are clearly not what is lacking.
On a separate point, on what plausible conditions would Reform (and the Green Party?) sign up to a Labour-instigated Royal Commission? And if they don't, what political legitimacy would it have? And if it didn't have that, what could it achieve?
Compelling diagnosis, and the emotional case for state capacity reform lands well. One pushback though: much of what looks like bureaucratic stalemate actually reflects democracy negotiating real competing interests. The 'approval processes' often exist because someone got hurt in the past.
More importantly, the real resistance to effective government rarely comes from bureaucrats. It comes from wealthy incumbents who have learned to capture regulatory and political processes to protect their position. Taskforces with limited transparency don't bypass that capture — they just accelerate it, with less recourse for those least able to fight back.
The question any reform proposal needs to answer isn't 'how do we move faster?' It's 'who gets unblocked, and who gets bulldozed?'
On a secant, I'd recommend checking out Children of a Modest Star. Many of our pressing challenges like the compounding and cascading impacts of the geologic scale climate shifts condensed into a human lifespan are planetary in nature and require realism at that scale... dare to dream with courage: https://www.amazon.com/Children-Modest-Star-Planetary-Thinking/dp/1503637859
Andrew - this is a fab call to arms if nothing else for current civil servants, of which I’m afraid I’m one at a mid-career level (and one of those history grads, sorry).
I joined the CS about six years ago and have never bought into the institutional logic of “well that’s the way it is” which has often pervaded my time in Whitehall. I am not technical but have read about a lot of the basic principles of GDS, Universal Credit etc and yet so often seen them die at the rolled eyes of SCS in other policy areas. Attempts to do things differently are still strangled at birth.
I’m SO up for a project of civil service improvement - please message or put me in touch with others thinking about this. I think half of your royal commission - on the problem to be solved - could be completed over a weekend. We have Fulton, Maude, Cummings, the IFG and more all providing a similar diagnosis. What’s needed now is a network of actual people inside and out who can start advocating for some of this stuff and pushing for change.
I was recently reading Grove’s classic High Output Management. Personally I think you could expand the ‘functions’ envisaged by John Manzoni in his time in government to create the genuine heft of a permanent horizontal CS - analytical, commercial, delivery focused - and then the politics come in the form of more vertical mission units based around cross cutting issues. Kill departments or at the very least make them subordinate to the mission units. My two pence at least…
As with “The 𝘏𝘰𝘸 We Need Now”, this is well worth reading.
An absolute banger! So much to dig into and glean from there. Thanks for the CustomerFirst head nod.
Thanks for taking the time to think out loud. We have a window of opportunity in California with the governor's race so this is very timely out here. Beyond civil service commissions, I would look at structural reforms of actually consolidating institutions. The bonfire of the quangos in the UK seems like one example. We have had several efforts in that direction, the most successful of which likely would be Governor Brown's abolition of redevelopment and then reconfiguration through other tools.
What a superb essay!
Personally I have switched back and forth between central government and big mature private-sector orgs (which sometimes have similar vices), and I agree with so many points. There are huge opportunities.
But the difficulty is getting so many stakeholders to agree to process change. When you have spent ten years following a process, that IS the way to do things, that's what we've always done, anything else wouldn't be The Process...
There's a lot I agree with here, as someone who worked in the civil service for many years, albeit not since 2005, and has followed it closely since. But I do think the Royal Commission idea would need to be implemented in a way that foreshadowed the dynamism and efficiency of the new civil service it's intended to herald, rather than taking the traditional approach.
It seems that the last Royal Commission was over 25 years ago - Lord Wakeham's into the future of the House of Lords. But if we look at modern day public inquiries, which are probably the closest parallel - they are taking longer and longer to report, with no clear evidence that they are better than those of 30+ years ago. Three to four years is the average. I fear that a modern day Royal Commission would be even slower. Northcote-Trevelyan may be a good precedent here for a fast review, in that it was commissioned in April 1853 and reported in November that year - so not much more than six months. Publication was not til February 1854. It helps that it's only 23 page long, which I don't think is a realistic precedent!
Anyone interested in the frustrating slowness of public inquiries might be interested in this blog post, which I wrote recently: https://freeblogger.substack.com/p/slow-public-inquiries
I'd be curious to know how to instil the appropriate sense of urgency into any change programme (or whatever its called). I read Kate Bingham's book on the vaccine taskforce and it's clear that she had enough "protection" at the highest levels to enable the team to succeed. As a VC she was used to ambiguity, problem solving and failure. That helped plus the drive that is essential to build something from scratch. I'd also add that while change is often top-down the battles within it are fought at the middle manager level (or equivalent) so you really need people who can subvert the bureaucracy to more positive ends.
"most importantly, a desire to deliver this kind of radical change for its own ends rather than as a convenient vehicle for their personal or political advancement". Why? Capable people who get things done are often also ambitious (if these qualities are really distinct at all). Motivation seems beside the point, as well as being unobservable. You say that there's a consensus in the civil service about the need for change (apart from in the dreaded Treasury) - so good intentions are clearly not what is lacking.
On a separate point, on what plausible conditions would Reform (and the Green Party?) sign up to a Labour-instigated Royal Commission? And if they don't, what political legitimacy would it have? And if it didn't have that, what could it achieve?
Compelling diagnosis, and the emotional case for state capacity reform lands well. One pushback though: much of what looks like bureaucratic stalemate actually reflects democracy negotiating real competing interests. The 'approval processes' often exist because someone got hurt in the past.
More importantly, the real resistance to effective government rarely comes from bureaucrats. It comes from wealthy incumbents who have learned to capture regulatory and political processes to protect their position. Taskforces with limited transparency don't bypass that capture — they just accelerate it, with less recourse for those least able to fight back.
The question any reform proposal needs to answer isn't 'how do we move faster?' It's 'who gets unblocked, and who gets bulldozed?'
On a secant, I'd recommend checking out Children of a Modest Star. Many of our pressing challenges like the compounding and cascading impacts of the geologic scale climate shifts condensed into a human lifespan are planetary in nature and require realism at that scale... dare to dream with courage: https://www.amazon.com/Children-Modest-Star-Planetary-Thinking/dp/1503637859