Ramstad: How a British education expert showed governments can be run better

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.”

At the center of his ideas are five questions that can apply in any setting, starting with what you are trying to do and how. The third and fourth questions cover knowing how the work is on track and what will be done if it gets off track.

Knowing how something is working out requires collecting data, but data can be misleading or be used to sidestep accountability for a decision or strategy. The people carrying out strategy need to reinforce data with firsthand visits to the people a policy is supposed to serve.

“Having data is much better than not having it,” Barber said. “It doesn’t tell you what to do. … Human judgment is important.”

The other part of knowing whether the work is on track is assessing it regularly. He described how the Delivery Unit had one-hour standing appointments twice a month with Blair, with each meeting an update on one of his four priorities. That set a regular cadence for the agencies responsible for the priorities.

“Because you know there’s another (meeting) in two months, you’ve got a routine that says to the department or ministry let’s try and get this done or fixed by the next one,” Barber said.

The last of the five questions was whether his office could help. Wary of the prospect for inter-agency spats, Barber and his team initially made a list of all the things leaders of other ministries may dislike about them and “promised not to be like that.” And so the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit always stayed small, around 40 people, kept out of the spotlight and never said a bad word about anyone who fell behind.

“We said we don’t want to create a delivery bureaucracy,” Barber said. “We want a small, flexible team that is completely persistent, could never be distracted and will always be helpful and give the credit outwards.”

One reason I reached out to him is because Minnesota’s state government, following a watershed year of lawmaking and spending in 2023, is in execution mode. Local governments are also under pressure to get things done and many school districts are squeezed between new state requirements and shrinking revenue. The state’s elected leaders could use some ideas about delivering value to Minnesotans.

Another reason is America’s left in recent years became captivated by a slightly different concept called “deliverism,” the notion that if you deliver economic improvements through policy actions then people will vote for you. Many deliverism devotees were surprised President Joe Biden’s success at righting the economy after the inflationary burst didn’t translate into popularity with voters.

They shouldn’t be, Barber said. Politics is about more than getting work done well.

“Whoever thought elections were purely about delivery?” he asked. “There’s lots of ways you can make a mess of being a political party in government that don’t relate to delivery.”

Barber’s ultimate measure for success should be familiar to anyone in business: whether government is obtaining better value for taxpayers’ money.

“You can be cynical about some politicians, but most of them went into politics because they want to make other people’s lives better, and delivery does that,” Barber said.