A rough blueprint for reforming centres of governments.
Read the full report here:
If governments sometimes aspire to be the brain of their societies, the central teams and units within national governments aspire to be the brains within the brain. Many include some very clever people, and their organisation has become ever more sophisticated – with Cabinet Offices, executive offices, planning commissions and units. Some are tightly organised, while others are closer to the model favoured by leaders such as Roosevelt,1 with competing agencies and power centres, blurred boundaries and often duplicate roles. None are as neat as the classic corporate organogram, and there are important reasons (discussed later) why they shouldn’t be.
But a striking message from people working in centres of government is that they work less well than they could.
It’s become conventional wisdom that governments need to cope with more complexity, faster information flows and feedback, and constant communication. But a close look at centres of governments shows that there has been relatively little serious innovation in recent years. There are many promising ideas, from Scotland to Singapore, Australia to Scandinavia, as well as pockets of innovation within big governments in London, Washington or Berlin.
But good new approaches don’t spread easily, and how centres of government are organised owes more to habit and tradition than anything else. As a result the hearts of government in the UK, US, Germany, Japan are strikingly similar to a few decades ago. There is an outer sheen of social media, media management and open data – but daily life is largely unchanged.
In itself that’s not a problem. Innovation isn’t intrinsically good. But failure to adopt better alternatives matters if it contributes to underperformance, poor decisions and poor execution. It matters if decisions are made with no one in the room who adequately understands the issue being dealt with; if governments fail to communicate what they are doing and why; if they default to superficial media spin over strategic substance; or if they exhaust themselves with urgent not important issues.
Here I suggest 12 clusters of proposals inspired by observation and experience of the leading edge of government reform, drawing in particular on new approaches in some of the world’s most highly regarded governments.2 The paper is deliberately short, prescriptive and sharp – in practice each element has to be adapted to local circumstance. The core thesis is that the centres of government could be leaner, more intelligent, and better networked, and that this would result in a higher likelihood of impact and fewer unnecessary mistakes.
Commenti