Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
Clay Shirky, quoted by Kevin Kelly, suggested by Martin Stewart-Weeks
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!
Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web
And so it is with service organisations. Managers assume that standardising work cuts costs, yet when they study their services they find that standard processes prevent the system from absorbing variety — put simply, it makes it hard for customers to get what they want, and the organisation consumes more resources as a consequence.
Worst-case thinking means generally bad decision making for several reasons. First, it’s only half of the cost-benefit equation. Every decision has costs and benefits, risks and rewards. By speculating about what can possibly go wrong, and then acting as if that is likely to happen, worst-case thinking focuses only on the extreme but improbable risks and does a poor job at assessing outcomes.
Last week I illustrated my post about the mergers and demergers of Whitehall with a very bad picture of a very neat illustration of the timelines of government departments in tube map style. Steph Gray responded to my plea for help in finding a cleaner version of the picture and linked me up with its custodian in BIS.
So I now have a high resolution version, though it came with a health warning, not guaranteeing complete historical accuracy – which turned out to be important shortly afterwards, when Patrick Dunleavy left a very helpful comment pointing to a more rigorous treatment of the subject, albeit one not so visually striking and covering only the last twenty years.
This is the BIS-produced diagram which was in my earlier post (click on it to see a larger version):
This is the diagram Patrick Dunleavy pointed out to me, taken from Making and Breaking Whitehall Departments: A Guide to Machinery of Government Changes by Anne White and Patrick Dunleavy and published by the Institute for Government just last week – and clearly worth a thorough look in its own right (again, click on the image to see a slightly larger version):
And finally a splendid bonus in the form of a tongue in cheek extrapolation by the BIS team of departmental changes out over the next century and a half:
So now we know where we have been and where we are going. Nothing can possibly go wrong.
Your first design may seem like a solution but it is usually just an early definition of the problem you are trying to solve from.
Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web
The UK structure of government has the aura of great longevity. Prime Ministers have succeeded one another, the great offices of state have the outward form they had the century before last. There is no truck with a fifth republic – or a fifth anything else – here.
But behind that facade of stately permanence, the structure keeps changing.
Her Majesty may by Order in Council—
(a) provide for the transfer to any Minister of the Crown of any functions previously exercisable by another Minister of the Crown;
(b) provide for the dissolution of the government department in the charge of any Minister of the Crown and the transfer to or distribution among such other Minister or Ministers of the Crown as may be specified in the Order of any functions previously exercisable by the Minister in charge of that department;
(c) direct that functions of any Minister of the Crown shall be exercisable concurrently with another Minister of the Crown, or shall cease to be so exercisable.
And she does.
The picture below shows how departments have split and merged over the last few decades (it’s a poor quality mobile phone picture I took at last year’s Civil Service Live – if anybody knows a source for a proper version of this image and its pair which projected forward over the next few decades, please do let me know Update: high quality images kindly provided by the good people of BIS and included in a new post here).
But the fact that it happens a lot doesn’t make it an unalloyed good thing. The National Audit Office notes ascerbically:
Central government has always reorganised, even though its fundamental activities change little.
The Institute for Government has seven lessons for a new government, the second of which is pretty blunt:
Don’t reorganise departments on a whim – build institutions to last
The creation of a new department is a powerful way to signal a change in direction and grab the headlines, but machinery of government changes do not come cheap.
More importantly, in most cases it takes at least two years for the new organisation to settle and three or more for the expected benefits to begin to flow through.
So, before playing around with the map of Whitehall, the next PM should be sure they have strong rationale for the change, and be prepared for morale and productivity to drop – especially in departments that have been frequently reshuffled in the past.
The force of this advice is only slightly diminished by the Institute’s map of Whitehall which places the Cabinet Office in Dartmouth Street, the Department of Health in Victoria Street, the Northern Ireland Office in New Palace Yard and the Department for Transport half way along the platform of St James’s Park Station.
What some of us are used to calling ‘machinery of government’ changes have a rather brisker feel in the private sector where it is known as M&A. Notoriously, many company mergers destroy value rather than creating it – which doesn’t seem to have any effect in reducing their numbers. But it does mean that there has been a lot of attention paid to the questions of how value can be maximised and of where the pitfalls are.
Apparently that’s rather less true in government. As the NAO observed in their report:
Central government bodies are weak at identifying and securing the benefits they hope to gain from reorganisation. There is no standard approach for preparing and assessing business cases setting out intended benefits against expected costs. By not identifying anticipated benefits clearly, public bodies run the risk of carrying out reorganisations unnecessarily. More than half of reorganisations do not compare expected costs and benefits of alternative options, so there can be no certainty that the chosen approaches are the most cost effective.
There are of course many challenges in managing the bringing together of organisations. Cultural issues are often particularly long running – it’s not unusual to be able trace fault lines back to the differing cultures supposedly merged years before. From outside, that might appear an entirely trivial problem for government - the civil service is, after all, homogeneous and in a single line of business. Except that it isn’t. The cultural variations between government departments may or may not be small in absolute terms, but that doesn’t stop them from being quite big enough to be an impediment to smooth integration and collaboration.
Other issues may be shorter term, but a more immediate and more immediately frustrating obstacle to effective merger. I remember a colleague who had been closely involved in the birth of DEFRA finding the complexity and cost of the apparently simple task of integrating two email systems out of all proportion to what anybody had expected or prepared for. More recently, another colleague in the thick of another merger felt overwhelmed by the process of moving people from jobs in two predecessor organisations into roles in the new organisation which, he felt, had stopped him from focussing on his real job for several months. It is the accumulation of those issues which, I suspect, have as much to do with the medium to long term success of organisational changes as the policy, political, or operational logic which drove the decision in the first place.
It’s not all gloomy though. Here as in many areas there are new opportunities. Steph Gray’s account of how he and Neil Williams found themselves in a newly merged department one Friday and had created an integrated website for it within 72 hours has a sense of urgency and achievement not always associated with the coming together of new IT systems. And yes of course to start with that was just a thin layer sitting above the two existing departmental sites, but within a few months Steph was able to report the completion of a radical and comprehensive integration project.
It’s that sort of practical experience which has the potential to make a real difference to the speed and effectiveness of integration. So back to the private sector: is there anything that the mixed experience of M&A can tell us about the mixed experience of machinery of government?
There’s a new report out on the parallels between private and public sector restructuring which strongly argues that there is – and that even in apparently hard edged areas such as IT integration, the technical challenges are not the real issues:
Three crucial lessons stand out from our conversations: the need to focus on creating value, not just cutting costs; the importance of being able to connect the very top of the new organisation to its front-line staff; and the role of decisive, sometimes dictatorial, leadership.
Source for Consulting, the company which produced the report is running a free seminar next month to launch it formally, which could be rather useful to anybody who unexpectedly finds themselves merging – or demerging – bits of government.
[Anybody tempted to follow those last links should know that they are not quite as disinterested as most of the stuff I point to - the Source report was written by my wife. But that doesn't mean it isn't good. Quite the contrary.]
I wrote yesterday about whether the idea of civil servants staying silent would remain viable in future election campaigns. Patrick Butler has now reflected back that thought more elegantly than I managed:
Purdah looks less workable now, when social media – Twitter, blogs, Facebook – is so universal. It is easy enough to silence the departmental tweets. But what about the individuals-who-also-happen-to-be-public-servants, who, in their private lives use social media to comment, discuss and argue (non-impartially) on the issues of the day, including politics. When, for example, are they tweeting in their capacity as civil servants and when as private individuals? (the same question might be asked of journalists).
But actually, I have just realised, we may already closer to that point than it may first appear. I have just looked at the stats for this blog, which run back to September last year when I moved from typepad to wordpress. Traffic grew month by month from September to March. It did then fall back in April – but to the level it was in January, leaving April as the third busiest of those eight months, despite there being very little new material. In other words, the back catalogue has begun to take on a life of its own – unwittingly, I continue to speak even when I thought I was being silent.
That in turn means that the idea of being more guarded in a an election period itself becomes questionable. People have been reading what I wrote months and years ago: the readers may have had the election in mind, but the writer certainly didn’t.
This has been my fifth election as a civil servant. In two of those elections I was in the thick of things. But this is the first in which I have felt personally constrained, with the near silence on this blog over the election period being one indicator of that.
I don’t think that has much directly to do with the rules governing civil servants in the pre-election period. As I wrote when the election was called, there was a need for greater care during the election period because of heightened sensitivities, but I didn’t altogether share the view that civil servants should, as a matter of principle remain silent.
For me, at least, something a bit more subtle has been going on. Not surprisingly, many of the people I engage with through twitter, many of the bloggers who stimulate my thoughts and ideas have fallen into two main groups: those who have been silent, and those whose primary focus has been on the election. I am in both those groups – and I suspect I am a long way from being the only one. But the reason I am not joining those online conversations is not directly because there is an election on, but because not discussing party politics or political controversy in public is part of the deal for many civil servants. Most of the time it’s very easy just to find other things to talk about. During an election campaign – particularly one with huge uncertainty about the outcome – it isn’t.
That in itself isn’t new, of course. But there is a huge practical difference between a quiet chat with friends over a drink and online conversations which are visible to the world.
The resulting silence hasn’t gone entirely unnoticed:
I am really looking forward to the Local & National Gov folk being back tweeting & blogging soon! I miss you!
Janet E Davis
janetedavis
And in reply to that, Sarah Lay astutely noted:
@janetedavis Or has normal purdah silence been seemingly amplified because we all talk more the rest of the time now on here etc?
sarahlay
sarahlay
This time round the traditional rules and the new means of expression have managed to co-exist without too much difficulty. But we are all going to be back in another few years, and another few years after that. Next time more people might be more reluctant to close down part of their lives for the duration of the election. Next time there may anyway be fewer people comfortable with the traditional constraints of civil service expression. Next time there will be a generation becoming more prominent who have a visible online identity and history from which they may not be able to separate themselves even if they want to. Next time – or perhaps the time after that – civil servants may be less invisible, less silent and less disinterested.
Alongside all of that – and potentially amplifying it further – norms of engagement and participation will continue to change in the wider society and polity. Civil servants are necessarily part of that, they cannot stand outside it.
And if that were to happen, the whole idea of what it is to be a civil servant would start to change, with implications which go far beyond a handful of blog posts. So perhaps it’s time to start thinking about the next election before the polls have closed on this one.
Update - I have added a footnote to this post in a supplementary note. We may already be closer to the new world than suggested here.
Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web