Help me improve my performance before it’s too late, please

June 29, 2010 by
Filed under: Credit crunch, Public policy 

I am due tomorrow to give the keynote address to the annual conference of the Centre for Public Scrutiny. Actually, it’s only me calling it ‘keynote’. This is a private joke going back to 1996 when part of my job for the Labour Party was to enforce the rule than no shadow minister should make any spending commitments. It didn’t take long for people to get the message, so the enforcement job soon became nugatory. All except, that is, for a very fastidious, and more than slightly self-important, junior spokesman.

I remember one Friday night having to go back to Millbank at almost midnight because the shadow minister was insisting that I check his speech. No matter that I assured him I trusted his judgment: being such an important figure making such a newsworthy speech, he feared that any gaffe would grab the national headlines and jeopardise the General Election (in truth, he could have run naked through the streets shouting ‘I’m a teapot’ and made not a dent in Labour’s prospects).

So it was that I left my dinner party and found myself standing in a deserted Party HQ as the fax machine started to churn out the very lengthy speech. There was something so ‘Pooterish’ about the wording of the front page that I have kept it to this day:

‘Keynote address to the Gwent Community Safety Conference (morning session)’.

Anyway, back to my big moment tomorrow. I am finding it a bit challenging to get back into speech mode after my annual lecture, so I would be grateful for any advice.

My current thinking is that formal scrutiny and accountability will be subject to a fourfold assault:

1. On grounds of efficiency, deregulation and decentralisation the Coalition Government is committed to dismantling much of the apparatus of target and inspection, see for example the abolition of the Comprehensive Area Assessment.

2. Deep public spending cuts will make many public services feel like battle zones with services and staff fighting for their survival. In such an atmosphere not only will corners be cut, but those who complain may be seen as unrealistic or irrelevant.

3. Devolving power to individual services providers, users and communities and giving them a greater right to run their own services can be seen as an alternative form of responsiveness and empowerment to that offered by the sometimes blunt and bureaucratic methodologies of formal accountability.

4. The opening up of public information, for example the COINS database on public spending will offer more opportunities for ‘DIY’ scrutiny and accountability. There may indeed be an argument that accountability can now be left to the whistle blowing of public spirited or anti-establishment individuals.

All of which leads me to conclude that the champions of scrutiny need to strengthen the links between this concept and two others: evaluation and deliberation. Scrutiny must be seen, on the one hand, to offer a more rounded and in-depth exploration of performance than can emerge from on–line data mining. While, on the other hand, scrutiny needs to be linked to more participative forms of decision making so that it is less about questions like ‘why was this done?’, ‘how did the service perform?’ and ‘who is to blame for failure?’ and more the basis for better decision making about future policy.

Most of all – and regular readers won’t be surprised to hear me say this – we need to get behind the tendency for scrutiny and accountability to reinforce the idea that service outcomes are simply a reflection of the performance of politicians, managers and staff. A more forward looking and participative model of scrutiny enables the focus to move towards asking ‘what do we – the public service provider and the wider community – need to agree to do together to protect and improve service outcomes?’

I am making the speech in 22 hours so if no one gives me helpful comments and I flop I will make sure to share the blame with you, my dear readers.

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8 Comments on Help me improve my performance before it’s too late, please

  1. Nick on Tue, 29th Jun 2010 11:59 am

    2. I wonder if it would be practical/possible to make sure that the relevant business cases are disseminated with the questions asked. This could reveal the tradeoffs that were recognised in the decision making process. This way the anti-establishment types will start to complain about the quality of information decisions are based on which strikes me as a more productive place to be htting.

    I have a feeling, as someone who often whips together options paper in my day job, that the knowledge that they are reasonably likely to be publicly viewed will encourage greater rigour in doing them. I can’t decide whether this is a good thing or not. On the one hand decisions get fully fleshed out, on the other huge amounts of time are wasted piling together paperwork for decisions that have in essence already been made.

  2. Jake on Tue, 29th Jun 2010 12:28 pm

    3. Loved the anecdote, Matthew.

    The question that grabbed me the most from your outline was how to make scrutiny the basis for better decision making about future policy.

    Given the dismantling of audit and inspection and the emphasis on opening up information so service users, citizens and civil society groups can do their own scrutinising, what’s the full value of formal and scrutiny and accountability? What can it do that that Big Society scrutineers can’t?

    This needn’t be a defensive retrenchment, or defending scrutiny behind a web or processes and bureaucracy, but opening up the question of what sort of relationships and networks does formal scrutiny and accountability need to build with those external groups to make it more effective?

    That’s partly about deliberation and evaluation, but also about formal scrutiny taking advantage of its position and expertise to focus on whole systems and planning ahead. And this means asking more interesting and more long term questions than ‘who’s fault is this?’

  3. Betapolitics on Tue, 29th Jun 2010 12:33 pm

    4. One very important theme is reconnecting people with the decisions Government makes. By the end of Labour ‘Government’ had become this distant creature which created a large number of mandatory targets and processes that were not always seen as always being connected to peoples experiences. We are the ones who are impacted by the delivery so we must be able to scrutinise as we see fit.

    As you point out, scrutiny should be about encouraging all of us to take responsibility for services that are delivered. To do this central Government has to devolve power locally and make sure that institutions that get public cash are transparent in how they operate. I’m sure the Coalition Government is hoping that this ‘transparency’ will get people to realise that choices have impacts, such as higher taxes or less resources elsewhere, thus they are more forgiving of cuts that are made.

    How will the Government do on this? It is encouraging that they are pursuing transparent spending and trying to make NHS Authorities more connected with local communities through elected boards. But on the flip side the Erick Pickles announcement that the Government would ban bin taxes is pretty regressive. Surly it is up to councils to decide how to dispose of waste, and if they make unpopular decisions then the local electorate can let them know. The jury is still out on how real devolving scrutiny will be.

  4. Paul Evans on Tue, 29th Jun 2010 1:25 pm

    5. There’s one aspect of this that seems a very obvious opportunity, but I rarely see it being suggested.

    The value that participative decision-making can add will be greater if the main focus – what people are being asked – is to collaborate on describing the problem rather than requesting an outcome or attacking some opponent or other.

  5. Will on Tue, 29th Jun 2010 1:44 pm

    6. I’ve some experience working in the public sector on large business cases, performance frameworks and analysing ‘business intelligence’. Here follows a few observations arising from this work.

    Numerical Targets tend to be designed ‘top-down’, the data shoehorned into spreadsheets or IT systems and then bundled up into reports or dashboards. These are released at regular intervals to steering committees, who in turn often have an obligation to publish them.
    This results in a performance assessment regime that is attributive (“Why has your department done so badly this month?”) and mechanistic (reports are read but the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of the measurement process itself is not debated).

    I have tried to persuade many people against the mechanistic culture of scrutiny because it seems to do several things:

    1) Discourage experimentation and innovation in service delivery – those being measured are unwilling to fail and be seen as below average

    2) Encourages the devising of behaviours that produce the right numbers without necessairily working towards the spirit of the required outcomes.

    3) It can obscure an important truth: very often the dynamics of an organisation’s internal working mean that driving change in one area affects others. The existence of these trade-offs is usually ignored when developing performance frameworks and it can hamstring those charged with front-line delivery.

    And I do have two alternative strategies to attributive, mechanised performance measurement.

    Firstly, placing an emphasis on measuring the subjective satisfaction of service users and not objective measures of delivery performance. This would require a policy change.

    Secondly, moving to a ‘discursive’ form of steering committee. What I mean by this is encouracing leaders to scrutinise a disparate body of evidence on a regular basis, to hypothesise and debate the contents, and so hypothesise possible interventions. I think that this sort of environment stimulates creativity amongst mangagement and builds an understanding of organisational dynamics. This would require behaviour change (more difficult than a policy change!)

    Good luck tomorrow.

    Will

  6. John Hayes on Tue, 29th Jun 2010 3:28 pm

    7. Can you get away from the dilemma that if you take away the basis for measuring performance you impact accountability – whether or not we are interested in outputs or outcomes. Performance management is all about accountability whether it is to managers, shareholders or the public.

    So performance management systems do encourage game playing (in both public and private sectors) and need to evolve to remain effective We know that. The extent of the investment you make in them also has to reflect the risk you are managing. We know that as well. The baby is now, however. been thrown out with the bathwater and, given the cuts, reductions in accountability are coming at a very convenient time.

  7. matthew taylor on Tue, 29th Jun 2010 6:25 pm

    8. These are great comments. Thank you Will, Paul, Nick and Betapoltics. I will freely use your ideas and try to remember in my speech to encourage people to come to my site and see the full versions.

  8. Sue P on Tue, 29th Jun 2010 9:16 pm

    9. Can I lob in two extra comments?

    a) Scrutiny groups/boards could reflect more effectively a microcosm of the programme they are scrutinising, so that the multiple stakeholder perspectives on notions of effectiveness, efficiency and outcomes are heard and reflected

    b) Scrutiny should be aligned to actually delivering purposes and outcomes. Too often the role of scrutiny is to CYA*, so that such groups exploit all the reasons NOT to be innovative, creative and risk taking, claiming big scary words like ‘probity’ and ‘governance’

    I chaired a large 25 member stakeholder NHS Board in Wales before the latest re-organisation – and I think these two points helped us interrupt the unhelpful patterns in more traditional boards and also to practice some new, more involving and purposeful ways of working together.

    I think these two points offer some structural responses to your last question.

    Good luck – have fun!

    *popular political acronym ‘cover your arse’

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