Knowing Where You Are
The Secret Life of Chaos, a television programme presented by Professor Jim Al-Khalili, describes the extraordinary self-organising capacity of cells to develop to a complete human being and to all of nature. The mathematical equations that govern this self- organisation are quite simple and yet result in order and chaos, patterns and the unpredictable, from the spots on a cow to the ridges on desert sand dunes, from the fractals of a lung to storms and tornadoes. To create order and beauty and function, feedback is essential. At each stage of development, the output from one equation forms the input for the next cycle. The organisms self- correct and self-develop.
The same principle is true of organisations: the greater the feedback, the more it and each person in it will respond and self-correct. Feedback matters. It is a discipline on the other end of the pipe: if governments put garbage in they will no longer be able to spin their way out of that decision. If their delivery is poor, they will no longer by able to duck and dive their way through years of underperformance before some accountability appears – usually fleeting. It will cut many needless arguments in areas such as welfare, where the objective is not either/or but how much and how. Feedback cuts the pointless, the fruitless, the unintended, the perverse, the ideological, and forces their abandonment. It means we do not have to wait years for public pressure or a media campaign or a change of government to do what needed doing all along. It focuses minds on priorities and on efficiency, and cuts out managerialism and proceduralism for their own sake, thereby saving money and taxes. It highlights issues – like unfit people – and compels change.
Imagine no more flying blind, no secrecy, removing the invisibility cloak, sharing knowledge. Imagine using strong and transparent feedback loops to stimulate improvement, open information systems promoting accountability to the funder – to you and me. Imagine the leap from ‘Have you delivered the right procedures?’ to ‘Have you delivered the right results?’ Imagine the savings in overheads and administration and annoyance as results takes the place of layers of management and buckets of procedure. This should be the future.
It serves another vital purpose: feedback that is public educates the electorate, dents my prejudices and yours, and infuses democracy with intelligence.
Ignorance of the Result is No Defence
Feedback is not a private matter between the Public Sector Organisation or its private equivalent and the ministry. Transparency is essential to good government. Secrecy is only needed for war.
What types of feedback would be needed to make government work? Think about what types of feedback are used by organisations working in the competitive world. They are many and various precisely because to survive and to prosper, organisations need to know what is going on in many ways: sales, income, profits, costs, customer satisfaction, time to market, staff morale, supplier relations, brand image, advertising effectiveness, IT performance, etc., subdivided by product, geography, division, or however the company is structured, with external analysts comparing performance within and across industries.
Government will need a similar volume. Bear in mind it is spending 40% of GDP, and therefore could reasonably be expected to be producing 40% of the feedback. The cost of this government ‘results industry’ will be significant – but a fraction of the cost in waste and inefficiency that comes from not having it. The very best investment a parliament can make is in feedback.
Feedback is necessary for anything and everything done by or for the state: legislation, regulations, statutory duties; policies and programmes; and all public sector services and organisations, including the government private sector. What would that look like?
Legislation, Regulation, Statutory Duties
‘Does this legislation work?’ is a good place to start, and how well or how badly.[1] League tables of legislation would take each Act, ascribe a purpose to it, assess to what extent the purpose has been realised, and estimate its costs to run – both for government and for non-government in the shape of individuals and organisations. Such estimates would be broad brush, not matters of precision accounting, but good enough to work out whether a law is worth keeping.
The league table would place those laws with the highest result-to-cost ratio at the top. The bottom half would then be the place to consider abandonment. In some cases the answer will be screamingly obvious – i.e. the law is a total waste of time and money – in other cases it will take some thought or further investigation. Each law abandoned would save money and complexity both for government and the public. Alternatives to ineffective legislation would be found: in Australia, littering was successfully tackled through subtle communication, peer pressure, and campaigning, rather than a failed law.
In some cases, a law is ineffective because the means of enforcement are flawed. The appropriate course then would be to change the enforcement method rather than to abandon the law, if different means of enforcement would work. Planning breaches by developers and builders are a case in point. The US uses a ‘parking ticket’ approach: when a developer breaches a planning condition and an enforcement issued, non-compliance results in a fine. If it is unpaid, it increases.
Rigorous examination of each law would also throw into sharp relief where a field of law overall has gone astray. London is said to be the libel and divorce capital of the world. Does this tell us anything about the legislative health of these two fields? Chancery law is too complicated to be understandable (and is ultra expensive to apply) – what is its purpose, and is it fulfilling it? Family law is still adversarial and not inquisitorial, held in secret, and presumes that a legal process can resolve the complexities of family life. The same questions should be posed. Employment law has become an expensive minefield courtesy mainly of a judiciary without relevant knowledge. Again, what is its purpose, and is it achieving it? Is there a better/cheaper way? We sign contracts as long as the Bible to buy a piece of software. Why? Etc, etc, etc.
The case for a wall-to-wall assessment of these areas of law is absolute. All of these problems have existed for a long time. Essentially nothing changes, I think, for four reasons. First, the judiciary periodically has to fight off the government of the day attempting to reduce their independence. The judges become habituated to resist change. They are obviously right to maintain their independence, but not to resist change. Second, the legal profession believes that all of life is reducible to a legal process. It is unable to see beyond its own profession and the many other ways of resolving a dispute. Third, the legal profession has a huge vested interest in the status quo. It is a high-pay, high-status, and high-power career with limited accountability. Fourth, few people outside it understand it sufficiently to mount a credible challenge. Internal reform will not happen, particularly with so many representatives in government. What would a ruthless examination of results find here?
As with legislation, so with regulation – every one should be similarly vetted regularly for its value and cost, and justified (or not) by its benefit versus cost. In some cases of poor value, the regulation would still be needed but the cost of application would be reduced. Much regulation should be applied through well-designed and easy to use websites.
Statutory duties of public bodies would be reviewed periodically to check whether they remain appropriate in today’s circumstances. Climate chaos should, but often does not, change the priorities of all those public bodies with some remit for the environment, from national parks to ecology monitors.
Policies and Programmes
Take a policy, any policy, and ask if it is achieving its objectives. Unbundling the local loop, child poverty, vetting, safeguarding, disability benefit, fishing, cycling safety, money laundering, watchdogs for trading standards – any policy or programme large or small. There are thousands, some long forgotten and still going. Start with the easier to assess and the more likely to be having little effect, or those operating indiscriminately.
Let’s have a think about what this might mean for a country’s policy on welfare, for instance. What would a ruthless examination of its results against its objectives generate? Well, what are its objectives?
The first step is to disentangle the insured from the needy from the fraudulent from the demotivated from the perversely incentivised from those who will always struggle from those who would benefit by being trained from the dependent victims of the welfare state. People classified as being in need will have various motivations, not necessarily good. They may take undeserved assistance from the state, or not support themselves at the earliest opportunity, or be motivated to not support themselves by the benefits, or take something that is not theirs. The notional sanctification of all poorer people neither accords with reality nor does them any favours. Improving people’s lives has rarely resulted from permanent benefits. Universal benefits will always be regressive in their outcome.
What then might be the results we are intending? Sufficient income during job transition arising from the bad luck of enforced redundancy? How long for? Is fairness the test? Or job availability? And where? Sufficient income for those who will always struggle – people substantially physically or mentally disabled? Education and training and thus a job and a sound economy through tying benefits to courses? These segments are relatively straightforward. But what about teenage pregnancies? Too low a level of support may mean the child has less life chances, or worse. Too high and benefits are motivating childbirth and population increase.
And what about those whose underlying benefit dependency has more to do with their own psychopathology? Is this a case of a victim mentality? And how will money help or even cure that or improve this person’s life? A crash course in cognitive behavioural therapy might achieve better results. Giving people a purpose – building their own home, training in a skill, working on the land, specific support and mentoring – may well be the way out of benefits.
Naturally this is pretty complicated. My purpose here is not to design a new welfare system but to start down the road of clarity of purpose and the ruthless examination of results – all without coming at the issue from polarised histories.
Government Bodies
For government bodies of all sorts a broad assessment of performance by every stakeholder would provide prima facie evidence of a well-run or poorly body. The best example of this method is the PROGRESS Process developed by the charity Antidote to improve schools. This involves pupils, staff, and parent surveys using an online reporting tool to describe their experience of the organisation, and using the data that emerges to have conversations with each other to develop an explanation about what it means and a strategy for improving things. Every school should engage in this sort of process every year. League tables of GCSE results are too blunt an instrument and, unlike the PROGRESS Process, do not point to solutions as well as to the problems. Confidential reporting prevents the syndrome of the untouchable but largely useless head, too.
All government agencies should find out how their stakeholders experience them and be held to account for responding to the findings. Board members would then have the judgement of the people and organisations they are there for, and not some partial airbrushed data from management in the annual review.
We can learn from the Internet here, which continues to develop its capacity for non-governmental moderation and regulation, built into business models. The more obvious examples are the feedback from consumers, for example on eBay, which acts as probably a more effective control on sellers than any government regulator. Such feedback is open to misinformation through such novelty metaphors as ‘astro turfing’ and ‘sock puppeting’, but countered by ‘stack overflow’ and technology message boards. Care has to be taken in their design.
Would regulation built into the business model have done a better job than the Financial Services Authority, the Bank of England and the Treasury at exposing and controlling the scams if banking products had been sold over the Internet? EBay is built on maximum transparency. The banking system is built on maximum opacity. This world hides behind commercial confidentiality and competitive advantage. This is largely nonsense. The intriguing question is how can the mechanisms of effective business-model-based regulation from the Internet be applied to the banking industry – at much lower cost, of course, than current institution-based regulation.
Regulators would be part of this stakeholder assessment also, along with all bodies substantially funded by government – charities and the government private sector of those companies contracted to undertake public sector operations. Where individuals are the objects of the policy, then feedback is needed on them, and the agency concerned would record it. The criminal justice system is the most notable absconder here. The presenting circumstances, the offender history, the sentence given, and the reoffending or rehabilitation record are needed both to determine whether the treatment has achieved the result, and to better select future sentences for other offenders. This would be a learning system, aimed at improving the effectiveness of the CJS in reducing reoffending.
Instant feedback provides the information for staff to act upon quickly, for the authorities above managements to pick up on when necessary, and for the public to see their experience of government expressed accurately, not suppressed nor spun. At present, poor performance only becomes an issue about which something may be done well after the event. Effective feedback is continuous, not isolated. I am reminded of the toilets on a ferry from Holyhead to Dublin. As you leave, a press-button panel invites you to score the loos as good, OK or poor. Simple. It does not require a questionnaire of varying design quality to be completed and posted somewhere. It is real time and avoids the time lag of days or more before urgent cleaning is undertaken. One feels under no social pressure either to give feedback or to avoid it. Many bureaucracies would improve through instant visible feedback. A simple press the button on exit – good, bad, average- would be relayed straight back on such services as airport passport control, train travel, and the Fort William roadworks. I wonder what a ‘ticker tape’ display of results would look like in the House of Lords open areas, or above the entrances to town halls across the country.
A variant on instant feedback would centre on feedback forums. These would open in order to take a specific failure, for example a late train or repetitively late trains on the same line, and identify the root causes and thus the solutions. Such forums would be built on a blame-free environment and the duty of straight speak.
Of all this feedback, little would be based on performance indicators as the public sector has come to experience them in the last thirty years, and much more on answering the question ‘What happened?’ – what happened when a food regulation was changed; what happened when the corporation tax rate was reduced? However, performance measures do have an important place – but they should not be a matter of politics, nor of ignorance and insufficient training.
To watch UK governments zigzag with performance measures and targets over the last decades is to observe a dysfunctional classroom. We have had the following and all points in between: no measures (this is simply foolish – we need to know, for example, parent and pupil satisfaction with a teacher, passenger satisfaction with a train line); lots of measures (inevitable with so many services); targets (by and large self-defeating, as the New York mayor Rudy Giuliani concluded in the 1990s – they distort); dumb measures (as per Labour’s introduction of quantity-only measures for operations with no reference to quality – meeting a target of 100 hip replacements, even if they became infected or had to be repeated, represented success); indiscriminate measures (offences brought to justice by the police score a teenager with cannabis equally with a gangland head with a crack-cocaine empire); and ‘what gets measured gets done’ (partially true – but as the sign hanging in Einstein’s office at Princeton said, ‘Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.’)
The political classes argue and stumble over performance measures from a position of ignorance, prejudice, and psychological need. After thirty years of their experiential learning, still too few of them have a coherent or balanced understanding of the role of measures in organisational performance. Is it too much to ask of our politicians that this, amongst other core knowledge, be an entry criterion to government? SATs for politicians?
Good feedback lets everyone know what happened: what did we do, how well did we do it, has anyone benefited. Some results will be 100% clear-cut, some fuzzy, but even the latter reduce the uncertainty and aid decision-making.
The next question is who should command this body of feedback.
The Resulture
Three separation of powers are taken for granted in modern discussions of government and implemented in many constitutions throughout the world. To prevent one branch from becoming supreme, protect the ‘opulent minority’ from the majority, and to induce the branches to cooperate, government systems that employ a separation of powers need a way to balance each of the branches. Typically this was accomplished through a system of ‘checks and balances’, the origin of which, like separation of powers itself, is credited to Montesquieu. Checks and balances allow for a system-based regulation that allows one branch to limit another, such as the power of Congress in the US to alter the composition and jurisdiction of the federal courts.
Just as powers are divided between the judiciary, the executive, and the legislature, so the vital missing separation essential for any government to succeed is the ‘Resulture’. The Resulture would be the part of the system of government responsible for feedback, its role and powers enshrined in a Fourth Separation of Powers in a tamper-proof constitution. Feedback of results and outcomes is not a matter of politics but a matter of fact. This cannot be a job for the executive – it would be rating itself, and this has no credibility nor track record. The task needs to be independent of the executive, and would be the responsibility of the second chamber – commonly termed the Senate or in the UK the House of Lords. Thus the second chamber would be the custodian of the public’s experience of government and of all public sector bodies, here to represent the citizen. The second chamber would thus gain a clear, unambiguous, and vital role. It would need to get organised in order to exercise the necessary powers to ensure accurate, independent feedback exists.
The various existing ‘independent scorekeepers’ of statistics and outcomes from crime, to GDP, to debt, to unemployment, to tax yields, health, and immigration would form part of the Resulture, responsible to the second chamber, including:
- NICE, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which produces vital feedback on medical treatments and procedures, and is something of a feedback role model.
- ONS, the Office for National Statistics, whose independence and remit has developed successfully over the last ten years.
- NAO, the National Audit Office, that would have to develop some of its ineffective legacy methods to bring it up to standard, or be restricted to financial auditing only. I had a number of interactions with them and the previous Comptroller and Auditor General to think about and develop more effective methods of improving government performance than their zero harm gladiatorial exhibitions at the Public Accounts Committee (including some of the proposals here, like legislation league tables). Nothing happened.
- Existing feedback agents, i.e. universities, think tanks, and independent institutes that get commissions from public funders and usually produce good to excellent information but with somewhat random targets.
None of these bodies would ever be staffed by the Civil Service, and would have no connection with them. Each would hire and develop its own fit-for-purpose staff. Independence of feedback is not possible with common staffing. It is noteworthy that the Freedom of Information Act has become an excellent feedback mechanism, but we should not have to prise results from an unwilling government. It should produce them, and want to. In a design for successful government, FoI should be unnecessary, but clearly must remain and be strengthened if needed, for now.
Accounting standards, a key determinant of accurate information, would be a Resulture role too, including Golden Rules on debt. The second chamber would become a hive of activity and information, fulfilling this role for the people and for society, the ‘ticker tapes’ of results pouring through. Once you are monitoring and using feedback you really are performing a vital role in ‘running the country’. Indeed, the role is as important as the executive and the legislature.
The Resulture would also have the role of recommending abandonment of a body, programme, regulation, law, etc. The executive’s role would be to decide. The House of Lords would become energised with a sense of achievement rather than a sense of importance.
As part of our new system, we need to decide from where the members of the House of Lords or second chamber would come, and this is covered in Chapter 11, ‘Fit People’.
Similar although far smaller scale arrangements would operate for real local government with comprehensive coverage and independence.
Once feedback mechanisms are embedded and functioning, much will change in the public sector simply because results, and particularly trends in results, will be visible. No longer would a government or initiating minister be able to ignore non-performance and failure, or hide behind partial statistics or spun anecdotes, or defend the indefensible. The ambience in Parliament should shift away from adversarial ‘proving’ right and wrong by whatever means, and towards some collective inquiry and endeavour. With results doing the talking, in the early days much needless activity and procedure would be dropped, and zero-outcome legislation, regulation, statutory duty, central instruction, programme, initiative, and policy abandoned. Savings would be substantial. Government would become less complicated. Public sector bodies would start to look outward to the results as judged by others, and become less internal and less ends to themselves.
Politicians will hate this discipline of feedback based not on political jousting but on real outcomes – until they see its value. The news media will hate it too. Corporates will lose power and become more competitive. We will get better government. The irony is that feedback is a strong discipline on governments and parliaments, but it also buys some immunity for politicians from vested interests, powerful lobbies, and the news media. And it buys real power in that more is actually changed for good rather than central hyperactivity. For the public as citizens and consumers it buys results for us and for society as a whole and a lot less cost.
‘Government by Results’. Sounds rather overdue.
[1] The House of Lords is moving in this direction, albeit with the glacial pace of reform Westminster considers normal: ‘We recommend the appointment of an ad hoc post-legislative scrutiny committee to examine the Children and Adoption Act 2006 and the Adoption and Children Act 2002, to report in a timely manner, so as to allow for evaluation of the committee’s work before the end of the 2012–13 Session.’
