Launching leaders
Directory of Strategy
In a time where the policy debate is becoming increasingly strained, and the country is more divided, it can be tempting to always call for more consensus. But healthy debate and disagreement are vital, and we need new ideas and outside perspectives in Westminster. It’s why Re:State exists, to promote bold ideas for remaking the State.
But the job of critics is easy, compared to the hard work of delivering the change that is needed. Particularly when those changes are new, and risky. “The new needs friends” concludes Anton Ego, the restaurant critic in the film Ratatouille. Having been civil servants, we know from experience how hard it is to change Whitehall in practice.
So at Re:State and Newton, we’re rolling up our sleeves to get stuck in and help.
Last week we launched our Re:State Leaders Network, with our partners Newton, with civil servants from eleven different departments. It’s the first session of a year-long programme of events we’re running for a small cohort of civil service leaders, drawn from across the country.
Cat Little, Permanent Secretary of the Cabinet Office and COO of the civil service, joined us for a launch event to discuss the future of leadership in the civil service, and the opportunities and challenges current leaders are grappling with.
We wanted to launch the network for five main reasons:
- Whitehall needs to be reimagined. The institutions of the civil service are accidents of history. A grade structure born out of military systems in the 1900s, a generalist senior civil service from a time when you could expect any senior official to be able to work in any role across government, and ways of working which evolved from passing memos up and down the chain of command to Ministers. We can’t use 19th century tools to solve 21st century problems. If we were to design it today, around the ways of working of high performing organisations, we would start from a very different point. Our Re:Imagining Whitehall research programme is developing a model for the future of the civil service, rooted in today’s needs rather than the past.
- Leaders are delivering through sustained crises. The historian Adam Tooze describes this period as a “polycrisis” – a set of interlinked crises which overlap and compound each other. Often, officials think in terms of ‘getting through’ the current crisis, then making changes in a period of stability afterwards. But the odds of that stability coming any time soon are vanishingly small. Indeed, many Whitehall success stories, like the Vaccine Taskforce, were born out of a crisis. Leaders need to sustain innovations like that, which are built outside the normal ways of working that government has in ‘peacetime’, through an ongoing set of crises.
- Navigating optimism and uncertainty. Whitehall could be standing on the precipice of a positive future, where new technologies like AI let it deliver better public services in radical new ways. Or it could face more crises, instability, and declining faith in public institutions. The future will probably involve a mixture of both. Leaders will need to give teams a sense of short-term stability, without misleading them about how much it could change. Its operating context is already radically different to what it was when we worked in Whitehall, and that pace of change will surely continue.
- The tension between incrementalism and radicalism. For individuals in the civil service, often it feels like the only option is to try and start small, and make change incrementally – by taking it one step at a time. Grand plans are often frustrated by the complexity of systems like government, and fall apart before they can ever be delivered. But incrementalism isn’t delivering the pace of change required – indeed, it’s easy to find that the incentives make it hard for incremental efforts to make any progress. The public’s appetite for reform of the State, though better services and more manageable public finances, demands nothing less.
- Recombinant thinking. The kind of innovations which Whitehall needs are never found by staying stuck in the same patterns and ways of working. Leaders need to get outside their normal routines and be exposed to new ways of thinking, from other sectors and areas of life. One of our core aims at Re:State is to be that kind of voice in government, one that draws on perspectives from outside SW1 and brings people together.
More than anything, we need new ideas, and civil servants need spaces out of the day-to-day pressures of Whitehall to develop them. New ideas are part and parcel of leadership – nobody wants to be the apocryphal French Revolutionary leader who said “there go my people, I must find out where they are going so I can lead them”. Ideas can go out of fashion in Westminster – it is popular to say that we have enough of them, and what really matters is delivery. But when ideas don’t seem to be deliverable, we need new ones. We want the Leaders Network to create the space for that thinking.