Two terrific but flawed books about public sector management have been published recently.  

The first ‘The Blunders of our Governments’ is co-authored by Professor Anthony King and Professor Ivor Crewe.  The second ‘Why Government fails so often – and how it can do better’ is by a Yale Emeritus Professor called Peter Schuck.

I wrote some notes on both below but the similarities between them are so striking that it is worth highlighting them: 

-          Both are excellent and well worth a read; as you would expect of such impressive authors, the content is rich and the analysis is thoughtful and provocative

-          Of the two I much preferred Crewe and King’s partly because the examples are closer to home and partly because it is written in a very accessible style – it was genuinely a pleasure to read which is no mean feat

-          But both have annoyingly negative premises which colour the analysis and unfairly reinforce negative stereotypes about the public sector

-          This is all the more exasperating because both talk fleetingly about the successes of the public sector and how important it is to acknowledge these successes….before going on to spend 95% of their books slicing and dicing the failures

-          The solutions proposed by both books are interesting – again more so in Crewe and King – but mostly complicated to implement (e.g. demands for cultural change) 

-          My summer wish is that the distinguished authors write sequels which capture and analyse the successes of the public sector; this would be a helpful antidote to the over-played narrative of the incompetent public sector to which their books have contributed 

‘The Blunders of our Governments’ is a wonderful book partly undermined by a dismal premise.

Let’s start with the good stuff.  It is a fantastic canter through some of the most interesting public sector projects of the last thirty years.  The book takes complex topics – for example Britain’s exit from the ERM - and makes them easy to understand and very readable.  And their reflections on the systemic reasons why government finds it difficult to manage projects and their suggestions for how to deal with them are challenging and applicable beyond the realms of Whitehall to the wider public sector.  So I would heartily recommend this book to anyone with an interest in public life.  

What a shame, then, that this excellence is compromised by being presented within such a negative framework. 

I have two problems with it.  First of all, it reinforces the mistaken prejudices about the public sector’s incompetence.  Near the start of the book, the authors suggest that ‘The successes of governments are apt to pass unnoticed or else be taken for granted. They should not be.’  Quite right too.  And then they proceed to list some of the successes that governments have had in recent times.  This takes up thirteen pages.  The blunders get the remaining 412 pages of the book.  This is not a recipe for helping people notice government successes.

Second, 'blunder' is an emotive and problematic word.  Any good organisation will tell you that it wants people to make mistakes.  If you are not making mistakes then you are not innovating and taking risks.  The challenge is to distinguish between silly mistakes (blunders) and justifiable mistakes.  But there are plenty of shades of grey.  As they acknowledge in the book, it can be difficult to tell when politicians have really blundered because like the rest of us ‘politicians live in an unpredictable and sometimes intractable world….They may just be unlucky.’  
Often therefore the blunder is very much in the eye of the beholder.  And it is hard to escape the conclusion that once committed to writing about blunders, the authors are inclined to see them everywhere.  To my mind, the bulk of the cases highlighted in this book actually sound like understandable mistakes made by highly intelligent, well-intentioned people making big changes in very complicated areas.   

Let me give you two examples: first, the mis-selling of pensions in the 1980’s.  In response to radical but largely sensible legislation private companies mis-sold pension (or to put it another way lied) to hundreds of thousands of workers who lost millions of pounds (read the chapter for the full description!).  The case for this being a blunder – in the book’s terms – rests on the charge that these problems were ‘clearly foreseen by at least a few observers’.  The book goes onto quote three such observers.  Were these observers leading economists at the time?  Or leading pension experts or even leading journalists?  No, they were all opposition Labour politicians.  My guess is that you could find such opposition on almost every piece of government legislation ever delivered.  Ignoring such advice offered by your political adversaries hardly counts as a blunder.  The reality is that it was a very complicated change which was ultimately worth making but which produced ripples which nobody could reasonably have been expected to anticipate.  

The second concerns the Individual Learning Accounts, or as the book calls the episode ‘The great training robbery’.  Again this seems to have been a bold and innovative programme – just the sort of thing we say we want our governments to try more.  It encouraged people outside formal learning to get more education by giving them financial inducements to buy their own courses (again it’s worth reading their chapter for a fuller description!).  The book describes this as a ‘well-nigh perfect example of a policy blunder’.  Like the mis-selling of pension it became vulnerable to widespread fraud which the politicians had failed to anticipate.  They also appeared to fail to heed the warnings from pilot studies – a legitimate charge to bring against them.  But what makes this example irksome is that the organisation charged with delivering the scheme, Capita, was from the private sector.  Somehow, the book implies, the government should have foreseen the different types of fraud that were likely to arise from this wide-ranging, complex and ambitious scheme – even when the private sector company with experience of such schemes could not.

In summary, the book is troubling partly because it adds lustre to the lazy stereotype of the incompetent public sector and partly because it will make the public sector yet more cautious about innovating and taking risks.  I hope that the authors make up for it soon by writing 'The successes of our governments'.

Peter Schuck is an Emeritus Professor at Yale and has just published a book entitled: ‘Why Government fails so often – and how it can do better’

In tone, ‘Why Government fails so often’ feels more accessible for the academic than the general reader (it is long on ‘normative assumptions’ and short on pithy anecdotes) which is a shame as much of the content is useful for practitioners.  Despite this it is well worth a read even if many of his American examples cover unfamiliar terrain for the British reader.

But the assumption at the heart of it – that Government fails frequently – is troubling.  It reinforces the damaging stereotype of the incompetent public sector and does not stand up to the academic rigour espoused in the rest of the book.

What is Schuck’s evidence for the frequent failure of Government?  That the public has lost faith in it.  This assertion is supported by a series of opinion polls showing a rapidly declining level of public support for federal government.  Shuck gives us five reasons why the public might have reached such a conclusion.  These five reasons* are an interesting and fairly rum bunch but in no way definitive.  I would add at least two more reasons – first that the public is ill-informed on many of the issues dealt with by Government (for example levels of immigration, crime and teenage pregnancy) and secondly that the public has no means of fairly assessing how well or badly the government performs tasks which are far more complicated that those completed by the private sector.  Both these reasons suggest that we should treat public opinion of how well Government is doing with caution rather than use it as a basis for a full scale assault. 

Schuck does briefly discuss the successes of Government – in short, that by most measures the United States is one of the most successful countries in the history of the world – but rather than explore and champion these remarkable successes he goes on to focus on the large scale programmes which have not succeeded.

As a British reader I also found it striking that Schuck – a self-professed Democrat – puts the market at the centre of his narrative.  ‘Even a relatively well-crafted policy is vulnerable to powerful market forces’, he argues.  ‘Policy makers cannot readily bend these forces to their will without introducing new distortions which nimbler more incentivised better-resourced market actors can often exploit to their advantage.’  Similarly in a long section on cost benefit analysis Shuck puts enormous faith in the ability of policy makers to be able to put numerical values on what they plan to do and what they have done: ‘a program should maximise net benefits and also be cost effective’ he advises without really offering any advice on how to do so when the outcomes (a word he rarely uses) are inherently nebulous. 

When it comes to answering the second challenge – how Government can do it better – the solutions are vague and, as he acknowledges, difficult to implement.  His first proposed remedy is cultural change, his second is constitutional reform, and for his third category he lists a number of aspirational goals.  Some of these goals are worth serious consideration – for example requiring policy makers who propose expenditures to identify offsetting reductions in other areas – but I found others less helpful, for example asserting that Government should avoid moral hazard without suggesting how it might do so in practice.

Perhaps the self-acknowledged difficulties in implementing many of these remedy provide the most eloquent answer to the book’s challenge: there are failures in Government because it is just so darn difficult to do well.  Unfortunately the title of the book and the thrust of the analysis risk leaving the impression that the Government is wilfully and consistently incompetent and should just buck its ideas up.

*Shuck’s five reasons are:

1. The federal government does in fact perform poorly in a vast range of domestic projects

2. Our legislative process is highly dysfunctional by almost any standard

3. Americans perceive a gap between ‘the democracy of everyday life’ and democracy as practised in Washington

4. Prosperity may have raised public expectations and demands

5. Americans harbour the conceit that we the people are not responsible for the government’s failures, which are instead caused by alien forces in Washington 

Having been seduced by the hype around big data, I’ve been trying to work out how it might and might not apply to the public sector.  So for the last couple of months I have read every book, spoken to banks, insurance companies, local authorities, central government, the big suppliers and the small companies making a name in this space. 

And here are some emerging conclusions:

In one sense big data is nothing new – ever since the Romans conducted a census to aid tax collection in Britain, governments have been using data about citizens to help them manage more effectively.  In slightly more recent times, the public sector, and particularly local authorities, has made increasingly sophisticated use of datasets to segment customers and provide more targeted and more efficient services.  Big data is an extension of this sort of analysis.

And yet in another sense it is.  Many conversations about big data start by asking ‘what is big data’. My answer is that it is a useful catch-all phrase to describe the new tools we have which allow us to store and analyse more data, more quickly, and more cheaply than ever before.  The two benefits of this which excite me most are:

·       Greater opportunities to fish; in the past you would typically test a single hypothesis – for example that truancy is related to crime – and gather two datasets and run them against each other.  Now you don’t have to have a grand hypothesis because you can run multiple and large datasets against each other – all you are looking for is a pattern which you can then attempt to explain.  In statistical terms you are looking for correlation rather than causation – at least initially – and this makes life a lot more interesting

·       Less anxiety about ‘perfect data’: because you can search across so many datasets and because you are looking for patterns rather than definitive answers you can afford to be (a bit) less fussy about the data

The public sector (and particularly Local Government) is perfectly placed to take advantage of big data; the public sector has lots of data about the public – and lots of very personal data about, for example, income, health, lifestyle.  Mining this data appropriately and legally could yield massive dividends.  Moreover, typically this data has been stored disparately (different databases, different languages) and messily.  In the past these challenges have prevented effective data analysis - big data techniques can help overcome them.

However, the results so far have been underwhelming; disappointingly I have yet to come across any dazzling examples of big data analysis yielding massive dividends.  New York City is widely lauded as the most advanced in its use of data but the improvements they have made – better identification of: unstable manhole covers, buildings vulnerable to fire, restaurants which dispose of cooking oil illegally -  are marginal rather than transformative.  Is big data a game of incremental improvements rather than exciting large ones?

And the appetite for doing more is currently limited amongst public sector bodies and suppliers; possibly because the results have been underwhelming most organisations appear to be at the sage nod stage (‘this looks interesting’) rather than the action stage.  This is unsurprising perhaps in public sector bodies who want compelling evidence before investing time and money, but I was disconcerted that the offerings from suppliers are so cautious.

Even though the barriers may not be that high; I have yet to come across a barrier that seems insurmountable around big data.  Issues to do with compatibility and cleanliness of data are much easier to overcome than they used to be.  Issues of ownership around data and governance can be troublesome depending on the personalities and context but should always be soluble.  And although the legal side is not crystal clear yet (admittedly this is the sort of statement that sends shivers down the spine of legal departments) the ability to use aggregate data for the greater good makes it likely that courts will view careful efforts of public sector bodies favourably. 

Conclusion?  

At a time when public sector organisations are looking for an edge to help them save money without reducing services, investigating the insights that could be gleaned from big data with relatively low cost and low risk seems like an obvious thing to do.

Postscript: I and some colleagues are working with a handful of local authorities to do precisely this sort of investigation.  We will be testing some specific hypotheses using whatever datasets are most easily accessible.  Hopefully there will be some useful and interesting results to share at some point.

From Policy Network - 'The dangerous denigration of public sector management'. Three reasons why public sector managers are as important as private sector managers for economic recovery.

From the Guardian - 'Four ways to fix the ruptures between politicians and civil servants'.  Some marriage guidance counselling.

From the HSJ (requires registration) - 'The ultimate guide to public sector management'.  The understated headline speaks for itself.

From The Guardian - 'Why private sector advice isn't always good for the public sector'.  

From Public Servant magazine - 'A much more challenging gambit....'.  This summarises the main arguments from the book and recruits Gary Kasparov as the symbol of public sector management.

From Public Sector Executive magazine (requires registration) - 'Four public sector management tips'.

Two articles from Ethos Magazine 
1. 'What can the public sector teach the private sector?'
2. 'Making the connection - using the public sector mission to manage more effectively'   

Judges are an unusual breed of public sector manager.  But most of the key lessons from my book apply just as well to them as to any of their public sector colleagues - and in one area in particular.

‘Who judges the judges?’ is a constant philosophical and managerial refrain.  And, at least from a management point of view, the answer is nobody.  Of course judges are accountable for the judgements they make: the decisions and the reasoning behind these decisions is available for anyone to view and they are open to legal challenge. 

But in other respects the feedback they receive is negligible.  Formal – or even semi-formal – appraisals are largely absent in the judiciary, and, for the time being, completely absent as far as I have been able to ascertain amongst senior judges.  There are understandable reasons for this.  It could be embarrassing if details of poor assessments were made public and more fundamentally it can be difficult and potentially compromising to assess the quality of the work that they do. 

However, like other public sector managers who have complicated jobs with hard to measure outcomes, judges should make especially strenuous efforts to seek feedback.  By doing so they will improve their performance and they will feel more accountable to their colleagues and to the public.

Fortunately, judges are not short of potential sources for such feedback.  They can ask the barristers who appear before them, the court clerks who work directly for them, the jurors who are managed by them, and even the defendants and witnesses.  Perhaps most pertinently they can seek feedback from their fellow judges who will probably not be short of an opinion or two.  

And what might they ask for feedback on?  In some instances it might relate to the process of making the judgments themselves but it should also concentrate on more prosaic matters.  Did the judge create the right working environment?  Was the judge efficient in handling paperwork and meetings?  When did the judge communicate well or badly?  What are the examples of good and bad interventions made by the judge?  Do other judges do things that they could learn from?

There are of course some challenges to this approach whether with judges or other parts of the public sector.  It might be too time consuming, it might be hard to get honest feedback and in some cases the feedback may be too sensitive to share or write down.  But these are conquerable challenges when weighed against the importance of finding a way to assess and improve performance.  And the drive to conquer these challenges should be particularly strong in a public sector environment in which clear accountability is often so hard to achieve.

I have just delivered a session on my book as part of a strategy training day.  Nothing unusual in this except that it was a training day for managers in the charity sector organised by the estimable Firetail consultancy.

 
Although there are many similarities between managing in the charity sector and the public sector (fortunately for my talk) I was struck by one socking big difference in the discussion that followed.  
 

Charities suffer a double whammy - they have the commercial pressures of managing in the private sector and the complexity of managing in the public sector.  This is the toughest of both worlds.

 
Like private sector organisations charities are in a constant cycle of selling to funders.  Even larger charities with long term commitments (and some long term funding) cannot escape the daily grind of thinking where their next slug of money is coming from.  For a charity manager the pipeline, business development, marketing plan, and managing relationships with existing funders all loom far larger as day to day concerns than for their public sector counterparts.  

However, unlike a business their primary focus is not on making money but on delivering often complex social outcomes which rarely have clear success factors.  As in the public sector there is rarely a single easy to measure success criterion to ease the management tasks of developing a strategy, setting targets, assessing performance and motivating people. 

 
This combination has consequences in a number of areas:

-          Performance management; charities must satisfy the performance management needs of their funders and their own operations.  In a world in which funders demand (often ludicrously) specific impact measures the two may not be the same.  It is challenging to be clear about the differences and attach the appropriate weight to the right measures in the right circumstances.  
 
-          Culture and skills; every charity needs to deliver on its core charitable mission whilst being ruthlessly avaricious in the way it approaches fundraising.  These two objectives may not always be easy bedfellows particularly when it comes to pay-scales, training, values and recruitment.
 
-          Sector competition/co-operation; one of the lovely things about working in the public sector is that (in theory) you can share information about costs, performance or process with your peer group.  The dynamic is different in the charity sector.  There will be cut-throat competition in fundraising and then  benefits to be gained from joint lobbying or sharing best practice and resources when it comes to delivery.  It can be difficult to achieve the balance of ensuring that the cut-throat competition element does not pollute the positive possibilities of working together.