By Norman Strauss
Published comment by Norman Strauss on an article by Sir Jeremy Heywood, UK Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service, in Civil Service Quarterly.
Norman writes,
Yet again a senior Whitehall functionary - no less a one than the cabinet secretary - persists in viewing challenging policy problems through yesterday's conventional wisdom lenses. He has no idea that its legacy may both no longer work and could well be positively toxic. He exhibits ill-informed complacency by believing that things are now well under control and that present plans will work well.
The reasons he cites for his confidence that all is well with his world are neither systemic nor strategic. How can members of the current neutral system possibly create original strategies that wrong-foot competitors' thinking, in what look like being lengthy, hostile and punitive negotiations? They are not complex as they do not involve difficult or ambiguous concepts. But they are massively detailed and will require the discovery, compilation and analysis of a wide variety of disparate factors. This is not work that ministers can do as there is just too much of it. The civil service must therefore lead, strategise, envision, create game plans and win over rival negotiators if the deals are to help future UK trade. Why do I think he and indeed they cannot do this well? Concisely put, it is because we neither have a systemic nor a strategic meritocracy running our governance.
Previously, both Brexit and Chilcot have demonstrated that bad Governance can lead to national humiliation. But it is noteworthy that the country's humiliation was NOT caused by the country's citizens at large, but resulted from the flawed operation of a system of government that was presumed to be highly effective, if not superior.
There are in essence just two arms of day to day central government, which make up the heart, brain and spirit of that governing system and embody its currently creaking ethos and values; Westminster and Whitehall. We need a diverse, multi-disciplinary and specialist Royal Commission to analyse the forces that led Whitehall to make the constitutionally bankrupt errors of not exerting its fundamental moral purposes of honesty, integrity and objectivity, in the case of both Brexit and Iraq.
I interpret a modern governing system's primary constitutional purpose as ensuring the meritocratic - and thus efficient, effective, systemic, coherent and integrated - execution of governance, in spite of politically motivated - and thus often non-objective - ministerial diktat. So our national humiliation was caused by Whitehall's shortcomings - as represented by both cabinet ministers and civil servants - in tandem with a broken civil service ethos and operating culture. Many other factors contributed to showing up our nation, but a legacy of impaired governance is the key to the failures.
It is time we learned the lesson that, without deploying both systemic and eco-systemic meritocracies and their requisite skills and talents, the governing system that impacts all our lives is dysfunctional. Ministers, both by their nature and background, have little conception of organisational, cultural, strategic and meta-systems leadership; it is to the continued shaming of the Cabinet Office that neither have they, as judged by results.
It is time to change the system and the way it trains and motivates itself to stay ahead of the game. The present Civil Service Leadership might start by defining its responsibilities to citizens, rather than rambling on dogmatically about its own values, neutrality and traditions. They have clearly lost touch with present and future practical realities, let alone essential strategic leadership capabilities.
Government is an intellectual abstraction that, to function well, must identify, learn and leverage the appropriate highest order visionary, conceptual, knowledge-building, problem-solving and creative skills; so as to cause ideal and informed progressive practice when it is most required; not, after a major setback has occurred. That is the basis for radical constitutional, moral and operational reform of our malformed and now imperfect governing system. Will no political party set the system to rights and commission a redesigned governing system that allows for emergence, or do we need a new institution, or political paradigm, or major disaster to set the ball rolling?
Published comment by Norman Strauss on an article by Sir Jeremy Heywood, UK Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service, in Civil Service Quarterly.
Norman writes,
Yet again a senior Whitehall functionary - no less a one than the cabinet secretary - persists in viewing challenging policy problems through yesterday's conventional wisdom lenses. He has no idea that its legacy may both no longer work and could well be positively toxic. He exhibits ill-informed complacency by believing that things are now well under control and that present plans will work well.
The reasons he cites for his confidence that all is well with his world are neither systemic nor strategic. How can members of the current neutral system possibly create original strategies that wrong-foot competitors' thinking, in what look like being lengthy, hostile and punitive negotiations? They are not complex as they do not involve difficult or ambiguous concepts. But they are massively detailed and will require the discovery, compilation and analysis of a wide variety of disparate factors. This is not work that ministers can do as there is just too much of it. The civil service must therefore lead, strategise, envision, create game plans and win over rival negotiators if the deals are to help future UK trade. Why do I think he and indeed they cannot do this well? Concisely put, it is because we neither have a systemic nor a strategic meritocracy running our governance.
Previously, both Brexit and Chilcot have demonstrated that bad Governance can lead to national humiliation. But it is noteworthy that the country's humiliation was NOT caused by the country's citizens at large, but resulted from the flawed operation of a system of government that was presumed to be highly effective, if not superior.
There are in essence just two arms of day to day central government, which make up the heart, brain and spirit of that governing system and embody its currently creaking ethos and values; Westminster and Whitehall. We need a diverse, multi-disciplinary and specialist Royal Commission to analyse the forces that led Whitehall to make the constitutionally bankrupt errors of not exerting its fundamental moral purposes of honesty, integrity and objectivity, in the case of both Brexit and Iraq.
I interpret a modern governing system's primary constitutional purpose as ensuring the meritocratic - and thus efficient, effective, systemic, coherent and integrated - execution of governance, in spite of politically motivated - and thus often non-objective - ministerial diktat. So our national humiliation was caused by Whitehall's shortcomings - as represented by both cabinet ministers and civil servants - in tandem with a broken civil service ethos and operating culture. Many other factors contributed to showing up our nation, but a legacy of impaired governance is the key to the failures.
It is time we learned the lesson that, without deploying both systemic and eco-systemic meritocracies and their requisite skills and talents, the governing system that impacts all our lives is dysfunctional. Ministers, both by their nature and background, have little conception of organisational, cultural, strategic and meta-systems leadership; it is to the continued shaming of the Cabinet Office that neither have they, as judged by results.
It is time to change the system and the way it trains and motivates itself to stay ahead of the game. The present Civil Service Leadership might start by defining its responsibilities to citizens, rather than rambling on dogmatically about its own values, neutrality and traditions. They have clearly lost touch with present and future practical realities, let alone essential strategic leadership capabilities.
Government is an intellectual abstraction that, to function well, must identify, learn and leverage the appropriate highest order visionary, conceptual, knowledge-building, problem-solving and creative skills; so as to cause ideal and informed progressive practice when it is most required; not, after a major setback has occurred. That is the basis for radical constitutional, moral and operational reform of our malformed and now imperfect governing system. Will no political party set the system to rights and commission a redesigned governing system that allows for emergence, or do we need a new institution, or political paradigm, or major disaster to set the ball rolling?
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