Leading for the long term

I rediscover this short paper by Geoff Mulgan about innovation in government every now and again. It’s packed with insight and this bit in particular got me thinking:

Over the last 30 years, governments have learned a lot about how to be more efficient, and about how to take customers more seriously. But now they need to learn a new set of skills: how to innovate and serve the public, not only by being competent in the present, but also by being ready for the future.

So why is the “long term” so hard to manage? Here are three ideas and a quote from President Kennedy to show us what leading for the long term really looks like.

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Sign painters vs the machine

Couldn’t resist posting this trailer for a documentary about American sign painters. They’ve just about survived the arrival in the 1970′s of the technology that’s made it cheap and easy for anyone to print massive ugly signs ever since. Pleased they have. I like the idea of the average English high street being transformed by swapping bland shop hoardings with this sort of thing. In fact – where did design figure in the Portas Review?

Looking back at LIBOR

Do you think that, as a profession, bankers are best presumed to be:

  1. “knights”: public spirited altruists?
  2. “knaves”: self-interested egotists? or
  3. “pawns”: passive recipients of other people’s help?

The answer has a decisive impact on how an industry is regulated. What was astounding about the LIBOR scandal is that, for one of the most important financial benchmarks in the world, bankers were presumed to behave as knights when there was every reason to expect the opposite.

LIBOR was set by simply repeating what bankers said about the willingness of other people to lend them money. Yet separately, the same banks stood to lose or make a great deal of both money and confidence depending on what LIBOR rate was published. Taken together, abuse should have been expected to be autocatalytic - a natural outcome of the way the system was structured.

Almost as bizarrely, the prominent ideas about how to reform the system (e.g. reporting actual market data and increasing the number of players who get to set the LIBOR rates) all appear pretty obvious. So perhaps we should have been following the philosopher David Hume’s advice all along:

In contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest. By this interest, we must govern him and, by means of it, notwithstanding his insatiable avarice and ambition, co-operate to the public good.

As I write this, the Government is legislating to take the regulation of another industry, the press, away from a system that treats journalists less as knights capable of policing themselves in the public interest and more as knaves. But whatever their wrongs, at least we are not bailing out journalists as if they are pawns.

How the US chose its Cold War strategy

We should insist on this on more of this sort of thing: planning done right – studiously, competitively, explicitly. And note:

As policy cycles continue to accelerate and policy timelines are shortened, it is worth remembering that a policy which most textbooks now summarize in two sentences took six years to mature and forty more to implement.

Beyond “what works”

Hot on the heels of the College of Policing being named as the UK’s “what works” centre for crime reduction, this week saw the publication of new guidance on the handling of missing persons reports.

Having been tested through a formal pilot with three forces, the guidance is a practical example of a systematic approach to exploring which interventions work, and then using this insight to reform services. But it also highlights three challenges linked to the “what works” agenda and to wider police reform.

First, it highlights the need to scale-up the level of R&D capacity that’s focussed on policing. A key enabler for this will be forces’ success in selecting and then championing the operational challenges they need the research community to treat as priorities.

Second, ideas need to be cultivated before they can be evaluated. For example, this week’s missing persons case shows how local initiative responding to a front-line problem and was grown successfully into a national response. There are plenty of practical methods to help organisations develop ideas from staff, users, data, suppliers and elsewhere. There’s never been a better time to put these into practice.

Thirdly, all organisations face the famous ‘innovators dilemma’. That is, it’s easier to make incremental improvements that address today’s priorities than it is transform services to meet the bigger challenges of tomorrow. HMIC have highlighted the example of the Ambulance Service where, once, its employees played a role similar to specialist taxi drivers. Today, exceptionally trained paramedics arrive using a range of platforms, equipped with effective technology linked to hospitals to assist diagnosis. By taking the hospital to the street, fewer (but more qualified staff) deliver a preventive approach that has lowered demand and improved outcomes.

So as momentum builds behind the ‘what works’ agenda, so too does the importance of a radical approach to innovation.