Dominic Cummings, senior adviser to the U.K.'s Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, is seen as determined ... [+]
Word has it that Dominic Cummings, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s influential adviser, has made Andrew Grove’s seminal 1983 book High Output Management required reading for the Civil Service. If the Johnson government is serious about delivering real change, that should perhaps be just the first title on a long reading list. For those like Cummings who are set on shaking up the U.K.’s institutions, texts by the visionaries of Silicon Valley and other innovators are inspiring stuff.
But another book — one that slipped out earlier this year — is also deserving of attention. Its author, Hilary Cottam, like Cummings, is convinced that much of Britain’s State does not work. However, the prescription she puts forward in Radical Help is rather different from one based on management reform. Indeed, she suggests that making the Welfare State more businesslike is to head in the wrong direction. Pointing out that the originators of the system — Sir William Beveridge, author of the report on which it was based back in the 1940s, and his associates, including Sidney and Beatrice Webb and R.H. Tawney — were at least partly responsible for one of the key criticisms of it, that it was impersonal. This is because — as Cottam puts it — “the prevailing wisdom was that neutral, depersonalised transactions would be key to levelling opportunity and combatting poverty.” It was felt that an impersonal bureaucracy and detached professionalism were central to the success of the scheme. Only later, adds Cottam, did Beveridge realize that he had made a mistake in designing people and their relationships out of the welfare state. In a later report, he argued for a greater role for individuals and communities in helping to deal with social problems.
That report was not nearly as widely read as the original. But Cottam uses it as the starting point for her proposed revolution. With the U.K., and indeed many other wealthy countries, facing problems not envisaged at the end of the Second World War and with a simultaneous hunger for change and acknowledgement that neither the institutions nor the attempts to reform them are working, she says Beveridge’s work looks far-sighted. “His insight that solutions start with people and the relationships between them marks the starting point of a potential future path, a place from which we can begin to reinvent and design systems for this century,” she writes.
Importantly, the book is not all about theory. Instead, its core is the series of pilot studies — “experiments” in her words — that she has carried out in education, health, care for the elderly and the like with the aim of creating more people-centred outcomes. One of Cottam’s frustrations — which she probably shares with Cummings — is that so much effort in the public sector appears to go into managing the system rather than changing anything, in particular improving people’s lives.
Clearly, the intended audience is those involved in running public services. But the calls for greater collaboration, more open and inclusive leadership, relationship building and the ability to stick to a vision while making incremental steps towards it all ring true for businesses, too. So maybe the public and private sectors have more in common than is normally accepted. And maybe it would be better for us all if politicians and their advisers learned that and set about encouraging them to work together properly.
