Success factors #1: Civil Service Reform in the Real World

During my time at the Institute for Government I managed to create some room to do research that not only allowed me to reflect on the reforms I had worked on myself, but also to look more widely at previous highly successful reforms from the late 1980’s onwards.  The key output of that research was Civil Service Reform in the Real World (2014) . 

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Together with my co-researcher Nehal Panchamia I investigated the factors that explain successful civil service reform in the UK. We analysed four reforms seen as more or less successful in the past 25 years to understand what lay behind their success: 

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• Next Steps (1987-97) 

• Bringing In and Bringing On Talent (1999-2002) 

• Public Service Agreements and the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (1998-2010)

• Capability Reviews (2005-12). 

 

Each of these is internationally admired, often copied and adapted. Together with an additional review of a wider set of past and current reforms, we developed a framework for understanding civil service reform and identified the key factors that lift or drag down a reform at various stages of its life.

 

What does ‘success’ look like?

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These reforms are seen as a success, albeit to differing degrees, because they introduced beneficial changes that survived the rise and fall of the leaders, teams, structures and programmes that constituted the reform itself. We identified six areas where the reforms were seen to have left a positive impact by those we interviewed for the research:

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1. A stronger sense of personal responsibility and accountability for delivery – whether of policies, projects, programmes or services.

2. The use of objectives, performance indicators and measurement to make progress transparent. 

3. More open competition for senior roles and greater diversity of the Civil Service. 

4. Greater value placed on the quality of leadership and management. 

5. A more outward-facing organisation connected to other organisations, perspectives and ways of thinking to inform the policy development process.

6. Learning and adopting new ways of working, which outlasted the reform that introduced them.

 

But opportunities to accelerate, refresh and embed these reforms were routinely missed. This is partly because senior officials and ministers do not see it as worth their while to support a reform agenda associated with their predecessors. But more fundamentally it reflects the fact that there is no permanent function in government responsible for absorbing learning and building on what has gone before. Even in those rare circumstances when attempts were made to rethink, refresh and develop the reform, efforts were often thwarted by difficulties in managing crucial transitions such as a change in leadership at the official or political level. Consequently even the legacy of these more successful reforms represents an underachievement.

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Why do some reforms succeed?

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The single most important finding of our research is that success depends on awareness, understanding and insight. In each of the reforms we explored, leaders understood the context and environment in which they were operating, set the ambition accordingly and had the right leadershipand reform design in place to drive desired changes. For example, a reform that fundamentally challenges the federal structure of the Civil Service will need to be designed in a completely different way to a reform that aims to introduce some beneficial changes, but only in a selected number of departments or areas (see our framework for understanding civil service reform, Chapter 2).

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This is, of course, easier said than done. Most officials tasked with getting a new reform up and running have little time to stand back, think and reflect on what their key goals are, the degree to which these goals challenge the existing paradigm, and what may help or hinder progress. As a result, most reform initiatives do not even take off, let alone have a desired impact when implemented.

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So how did those leading the most successful phases of the reforms we look at overcome this default tendency? Our cross-cutting analysis identified 10 factors that lift or drag down a reform at different stages of its lifecycle. These are not prescriptive lessons, but offer insights and examples of effective models and practices to those starting out on a new reform agenda or attempting to refresh and reset one that is already under way.

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Prepare and take-off

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• Clarity around the reform idea and purpose. Achieving clarity of purpose is an obvious prerequisite for success. This involves creating a shared analysis of what the problems and challenges are. This is essential not only for establishing the need for reform, but in garnering wider support and engagement in design and delivery.

• Personalised leadership. A committed senior leader, who is seen to really own the reform idea, invests personal time and sticks with it, will send a signal that reform is important enough for officials to respond to. Leaders also need to have the leverage and permission to drive reform through. Although seniority can help with this, the leader must already have established their credibility, connections and ways of working within Whitehall. 

• The right degree of political support. Being attuned to the concerns, interests and priorities of politicians is critical to making a sound judgement about the extent of political engagement required to make progress. It is important to remain aware of how political involvement can also hinder efforts; it may therefore be necessary to ‘disconnect’ the reform from particular politicians or parties. 

• Ambitious while connecting with departmental priorities. However ambitious and far-reaching the reform is, leaders must test and improve the design so that it chimes with the prevailing interests, concerns and priorities of officials rather than challenging them directly. This is not a ‘nice to have’, but is critical to designing the right operating model, governance and incentives to drive desired changes.  

• The support, or at least permission, of the Treasury. The Treasury can electrify, undermine or suffocate any reform; many see it as the missing leader of civil service reform. Active involvement may not be necessary, but the Treasury certainly has to ‘allow’ reform in order for it to happen. The time required to engage, persuade and reassure the Treasury should not be underestimated.

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Deliver and refresh 

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• A dedicated and diverse team to drive the vision and the model. A dedicated unit should be established to drive the reform effort, but it must have the freedom and permission to develop the right reform design. Quality not quantity matters. Small, mixed teams containing people with experience, skills and connections outside Whitehall, as well as career civil servants, can strengthen the reform design, while maintaining focus, energy and momentum.   

• Balancing compulsion with collaborative values. Leaders’ and their teams’ values and way of working are critical to combating the default assumption that they are ‘just another central unit’ that chases progress, but adds no value. Displaying empathy for departmental challenges and working hard to address them in a collaborative way, while laying down firm rules, is critical to enhancing the credibility of the reform.

• The right use of accountability and governance. Counterintuitively, formal governance and programme management arrangements can act as a barrier, rather than an enabler of reform. Instead, personal accountability of ministers and officials for progress against reform goals must be integral to the reform design to encourage buy-in and action.  

• Managing critical transitions. The continuation of a reform is highly dependent on its ability to weather significant transitions such as a change in leadership. A strong, competent central unit can provide stability during these periods, but there are critical moments when opportunities need to be seized in order to refresh, reinvent and develop the reform.

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Embed, limp on or close down

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• Building a lasting coalition of leaders around reform. The personal authority and credibility of a leader is critical to a reform ‘taking off’ early on, but the failure to broaden ownership to a wider group of civil service and political leaders at later stages can sow the seeds of decline. Leaders and their teams must actively develop a collective leadership coalition around the reform to prevent it from limping on, tailing off or being discarded.  

 

What are the implications for today’s leaders of reform?

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The report is a story about how individual reforms can succeed. The case studies are full of rich insights, lessons and examples about how past leaders overcame some of the difficulties of reforming the UK Civil Service. The framework in Chapter 2 can be used by today’s leaders to take stock of individual reforms and challenge how well set they are to succeed. It exposes critical gaps and offers insights and examples from past reforms of how those gaps can be addressed. Annex 2 sets out how to do this in practice.

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However, all of these reforms end in failure of one sort or another. Most reform interventions have a shelf life and need to be reinvented – something that is rarely done well. We have seen time and again how incoming leaders, anxious to build their own reputation, grab the opportunity to invent something new rather than building on and improving what came before. 

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The result is a history of erratic, episodic and incoherent reform attempts, often unconnected to a broader vision about how the Civil Service should operate. The underachievement of swaths of reform over time (as opposed to individual reforms at a particular moment) seems to be the result of three systemic issues revealed by this, and previous, Institute research.

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1. Leadership is too personalised and fails to survive crucial transitions.

2. The role of ‘steward of the Civil Service’ is underdeveloped and somewhat contested.

3. There is an absence of a corporate leadership team to engage today’s and tomorrow’s leaders in developing a shared narrative of what the future Civil Service needs to look like and what is required to get there.

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Taken together these issues describe a historic failing of institutional and corporate leadership. Any minister or official wishing to lead successful reform will need to overcome this weakness. Our report Leading Change in the Civil Service looks at the state of departmental and civil service reform after five years of austerity, and reinforces our conclusions that corporate leadership must change.

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That will be the hardest reform of all.

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