Pat McFadden’s big idea that could transform the British State
Senior Researcher
Last week, we argued that delivering the Government’s Plan for Change would require fundamental reform of the State, and that this should be based on a “serious attempt to understand why and how public services are failing”.
This morning the minister heading up Cabinet Office, Pat McFadden, seemed to agree, arguing that to make a success of last week’s Plan, government would need to be “relentlessly curious” about the right answer and “Reform the State itself”.
He also presented a big idea that could inject much-needed innovation into public service delivery. Namely, that Whitehall should more often set outcomes without being prescriptive about the ‘right’ way of pursuing them.
As he said, the most successful examples of innovation in the private sector occur when people get on with the work of building things — before precisely working out what needs to be built. The question for the State should not be ‘how do we get things right first time?’, but instead how do we ensure that in a week, a month and a year from now, things work better than they did before?
Government should set the direction, and maybe give the public sector a compass, but “not an exact road map”.
Below, an excerpt from our paper Mission control making exactly this point.
The process of writing a white paper, publishing it, and hoping things change, is no longer sufficient. As McFadden put it: you “cannot kill complexity with cleverness”. Hear hear.
On the one hand, as he says, this is about a change in the way the government addresses problems. But it is also, fundamentally, about our appetite for risk, and collective fear of failure. On this front, politicians have to be clearer about risks they are willing to tolerate, granting officials the freedom to experiment, but for its part, there are also ways Whitehall can attract more disruptive thinking.
McFadden focuses on “test and learn teams” which will operate in partnership with local government and comprise experts in policy, data and digital, and staff from frontline public services. He also points to an overhaul of civil service recruitment, and a rethinking of (often jargon laden) civil service job ads in favour of “what’s actually needed to do the job”.
As McFadden puts it, if the State is recruiting a coder, the critical question is whether someone can code. Our paper, Making the grade, argued exactly this: that ‘behaviour’-based assessments should be scrapped in favour of skills-based testing and prioritisation of relevant experience. His call for “creative thinkers, innovators and disrupters” to serve a “tour of duty” and work towards missions is also an especially welcome one: mirroring recommendations from Mission control to enlist specialist and disruptive talent from outside government to support mission delivery.
If there’s one way government can act “a bit more like a startup”, then Pat McFadden’s emphasis on setting an ambitious goal — and empowering people to take different approaches to achieve it — is a very good place to start.