American voters last week elected thousands of business owners and everyday workers to school boards, city councils and even Congress. I suspect many of the newly elected are asking themselves, “Now what?”
They will soon realize governments, unlike businesses, can’t stop doing something just because it’s inefficient. People expect services from government even when they’re difficult or expensive to provide. As a result, the things government must do often distract from what leaders want to do.
Sir Michael Barber has spent the past 25 or so years working through this problem. Barber was an education professor in London in 1997 when newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair asked him to help with school reform. Blair grew so impressed with Barber’s work that in 2001 he asked the professor to form a team to make sure Blair’s other priorities got done amid the everyday work and surprise crises.
People in other governments and places like the International Monetary Fund soon noticed the effectiveness of Barber’s team, known as the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, and began copying it. After leaving government in 2005, Barber’s career veered in a new direction as the face of a movement that came to be known as “deliverology.”
“Like a lot of things in the world, it’s not conceptually complicated. But doing it with rigor and persistently over a period of time, when there’s crises happening, that’s difficult,” Barber told me in an interview late last month.
Barber started a consulting business after leaving government in 2005 and has written several books on deliverology. He visited Minnesota about a decade ago for an education conference sponsored by St. Paul’s Bush Foundation. He’s a fan of a book on government finance by Peter Hutchinson, Minnesota’s finance commissioner in 1989 and 1990, and has given copies to British leaders.
Two months ago, Barber returned to the fray as new Prime Minister Keir Starmer tapped him “to drive forward delivery of the five national missions,” including reviving economic growth and updating the country’s venerable National Health Service.
“Getting a policy right is often really difficult, but it’s only 10% of the challenge,” he said. “The other 90% is making it happen. Even when you’ve got the policy designed well, making it happen is a whole other kettle of fish.”
