Success factors #2: The Goal Programme for civil service reform

1. The Goal programme and early signs of impact

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In 2016 the Goal Programme for Public Service Reform and Innovation (funded by Atlantic Philanthropies) invested £10 million in nine strategic sectoral reform exemplar projects in Ireland and Northern Ireland. It sought to encourage systemic change in public services in order to improve outcomes for people using public services. The Centre for Effective Services (CES) delivered the programme in partnership with seven government departments in Ireland and Northern Ireland. The CES is an independent, non-profit, all-island organisation set up in 2008 that aims to connect policy, research and practice, in order to help agencies and government bodies design and plan services in health, social care, education and services for young people.

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An evaluation led by the Institute of Public Administration (IPA) was published in 2020 (Boyle et al, 2020).

“There is now a group of public servants thinking and acting differently and working in new ways. This would not have happened without their participation in the Goal Programme”

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This conclusion from the IPA’s evaluation goes to the heart of the characteristics of successful civil service reform. 

The Goal Programme sought to build capability by providing external support to a number of exemplar projects.

“[Goal] should focus on a number of existing large-scale sectoral reform programmes which are ‘ready to go’ and use these as a platform for embedding new ways of working in the public and civil service.”(Boyle 2018, p3)

 

Figure 2. Revised logic model for the Goal programme

 

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Source: Boyle, R et al 2019, p18

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The nine Goal Programme projects were:

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1. Developing Evidence and Knowledge Management (Department of Health, Ireland)

2. Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing Pathfinder project (Department of Health, Ireland)

3. Building Collaborative Working Practices (Department of Education and Skills, Ireland)

4. Using Data to Inform Policy (Department of Education and Skills, Ireland)

5. Reform of Youth Funding Schemes (Department of Children and Youth Affairs, Ireland)

6. Evaluation Training for Civil Servants (Department of Children and Youth Affairs, Ireland)

7. Leadership Development Programme (The Executive Office, Northern Ireland)

8. Children and Young People’s Strategies (Departments of Education and Health, Northern Ireland)

9. Embedding Innovation (Department of Finance, Northern Ireland)

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The evaluation was carried out in 2019. Whilst for many projects it was still quite early to be able to judge any lasting impacts and benefits they provided some initial findings (Boyle et al, 2019, pp224-30). They concluded that the Goal Programme has been successful in helping staff engage in new ways of working. And there were signs of participants repeating and extending the use of techniques into their teams and networks. 

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• Greater collaboration and improved engagement were seen to have been achieved by several projects:

• There was evidence of new routines and different ways of thinking being replicated or extended:

• There are signs of lasting change in how leaders think and behave – in particular the value of focusing on outcomes that require collaboration:

 

2. What were some key factors that explain success?

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Though my role directly advising one project (the Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing project in Ireland) and later the chance to observe two other projects (the Leadership development project, and the Children and Young Peoples strategy - both in Northern Ireland) as part of the team that evaluated the overall Goal Programme, I could explore the extent to which these three projects appear to have produced a lasting change in how some civil servants think and work.

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Four factors in their success stand out:

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1. An iterative and permissive approach to project identification and scoping

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There was a pragmatic, iterative and adaptive approach to developing these projects in particular, which allowed for engagement, co-design, and to handle significant changes in the context for specific projects. 

These three projects were not off the shelf and ready to go or just needing some additional capacity. Instead they were possibilities which needed scoping and co-design with external support. As a result of the process of development and iteration they all had strong senior support - and a high degree of ownership and commitment by the project teams.

The evaluation considered this flexibility and pragmatism to be fundamental to later success (Boyle et al, 2019, p43) 

You have to start where people are at... actually for them to get their heads around any kind of reform and innovation, that was already a leap because they were trying to keep the show on the road. (Boyle, 2018, p2)

A Goal Programme approach is particularly useful when there is scope to shape and design the project and use external expertise to plug gaps rather than as an extra pair of hands. In other words, this type of approach works best when the desired outcomes are reasonably clear but where the means of getting there need exploration and clarification. (Boyle et al, 2019, p11)

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2. Projects on high priority cross cutting outcomes that demand new ways of working

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Projects were sought that focused on a real issue of concern to the public, with cross-organisational boundaries, or ones that address serious capacity (Boyle et al, 2019, p46). And whilst the leadership development programme was less obviously in this category it had a very strong focus on cross cutting outcomes which in turn connected their strong ownership of the paused Programme of Government.

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When projects focus on the needs of service users and compelling issues of public and policy importance, but where the way to achieve desired outcomes is unclear, they lend themselves to the use of collaboration tools and outcome measures that can be transformative. This can encourage project participants to look across government from the point of view of the user as a driver of change, going outside the boundaries of routine practice. Using collaboration tools and outcome measures can facilitate transformative change (Boyle et al, 2019, p46)

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Whilst some other goal projects did not fall into this category, they still made valuable contributions to improving business as usual. But as such offered less insight into the challenge of building transformative capability. 

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3. Projects that are connected with conducive elements of the organisational and leadership context

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In Northern Ireland the leadership development programme had a strong focus on collaborative leadership, system stewardship and outcome focused policy making. Senior leaders across the whole organisation were reflecting on their personal leadership practice and behaviour and how it could better support collaboration to deliver cross cutting outcomes. The outcome focus reflected the recent development of a draft programme for government which had strong ownership across the senior civil service. The team working on the Children and Young People’s Strategies saw these two aspects of their context as instrumental to their progress: providing them with priority, authority and leverage for their work.

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In Ireland, the wider context was helped by the Civil Service Renewal Plan, launched in 2014. It was an unusually clear and focused reform plan that amongst other things sought to open up recruitment to civil service jobs to those outside the civil service – echoing one of the most impactful UK reforms of the last 30 years. It also created a number of pathfinder projects designed to model new ways of delivering whole of Government projects. One of those pathfinders was the Young People and Mental Health project. This pathfinder was further helped by having the sponsorship of a deputy secretary general who had been recruited from outside the civil service and was very supportive of the need to do things differently.

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4. Projects that are designed to create or adapt ‘enabling routines’ which civil servants ‘learn by doing’

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Too many projects simply substitute external capacity for the lack of the right internal capability. The most impactful Goal Programme projects I observed made excellent use of external support to facilitate the adoption and adaption of new transformative routines. These routines included open policy making, structured problem solving, collaboration and outcome focused policy making. Although some of these routines were not new to participants, it was the first time they had explicit permission and support to apply them on high priority projects – and were easily able to access additional external support.

 

All three of the projects had significant levels of ongoing external support from CES and their associates, who helped shape the scope of the project, and then co-designed and co-delivered key elements of the project with the project team. 

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A critical factor in the choice to apply new tools and methods in one project illustrates the reality of how organisations acquire new routines. The project lead for the Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing project had learned collaborative and structured problem solving tools through her experience in the Strategy Unit in the UK Cabinet Office and whilst working on secondment with the Institute for Government in London. She saw the opportunity to draw on additional support from the Goal Programme in order to help a pathfinder project learn and use those tools. 

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The value of experiential learning of new routines as opposed to more conventional policy analysis or classroom training is reflected by the comparing the respective impacts and follow through of the Youth Mental Health project with the Building Collaborative Working Practices project. The latter carried out much valuable work collecting and codifying good practice - and developing Excel based diagnostic tools. However at the time of the evaluation there was still not a settled model for how to enable civil servants to acquire and apply the insights that had been developed through the project.

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In contrast the team that supported the Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing Pathfinder project designed their project to equip the team to use transformative collaboration and problem-solving tools. After the first pathfinder they commissioned further training for core staff in the facilitation and collaboration tools used in that project. Those staff then immediately applied these methods as they designed and delivered a second Pathfinder looking at Sexual Assault Treatment Centres – a Ministerial priority. They drew on an adviser from the first pathfinder to provide some additional coaching and support at key points in the project and to facilitate reflection and learning sessions for the project team. The pathfinder approach is now at the heart of the practice of the Policy, Strategy and Integration team in the Health Department.

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Since the first pathfinder a Health Service Executive participant from the project commissioned and led a pathfinder style project on public health promotion.  The Department for Children and Youth Affairs (also a participant in the first pathfinder) has commissioned their own pathfinder style project on parenting support, drawing heavily on the advice of colleagues in Health, with further support from CES. 

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The Department of Health has set up a thriving cross departmental network for collaboration and facilitation practitioners. Their investment in team training allied with learning by doing has enabled them to sustain the approach even without the presence of the original champion and leader of the pathfinder approach.

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3. Conclusions

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The Goal Programme and some key projects within it display many of the characteristics of successful reform efforts which helped transform capability in the UK civil service and elsewhere.

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The likely impact and sustainability of civil service reform interventions depends upon the extent to which:

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(1) Interventions are designed explicitly so that multiple civil servants experience and learn new, transformative routines which they adopt as their personal practice such that:

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• How they think and how they see their role is different – because they have a better understanding of different perspectives in the systems they work in, and see the impact that government has – they know better what works and what doesn’t.

• How they work has changed. They are more open, collaborative - going beyond conventional departmental and service boundaries. They have broadened the methods and techniques they use to collaborate, make policy, solve problems and innovate.

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(2) There is a sufficiently conducive political and organisational context which:

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• Defines impact and success of the reform intervention in terms of longer-term priority outcomes that cut across civil service departments, functions and boundaries.

• Encourages a diversity of backgrounds and experience amongst civil servants.

• Encourages and supports civil servants to learn about what working and what is not.

• Provides an open, honest culture that supports and welcomes constructive challenge with a focus on improvement rather than blame.

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The most impactful reforms and exemplar projects in the UK and the whole of Ireland have acted as capability factories. 

And as the early adopters of new routines rise through the organisation and take on new roles, they become advocates and teachers of the routines and practice they have acquired.

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This is how organisations learn and build the capability they need to succeed.