The new Labour government in the UK has ushered in a new approach to running the country: “mission-led government”. It has its intellectual roots in the economist Professor Marianna Mazacutto’s work, and delivery experience in Camden, development banks, and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. Missions are not just about changing what government delivers, but are also a serious commitment to changing how government works. But what does this mean for leaders in the civil service who are charged with making this change happen?
Leaning into the messy
The thinking behind mission-led government is in opposition to New Public Management (NPM). To exaggerate for effect, NPM sees the world as a machine: a production line of processes with each organisation in the line neatly performing its task. Government sets targets for each task and therefore each organisation along the production line, and together, the machine delivers the intended outputs which lead to the outcomes required.
Mission-led government recognises that the government is trying to tackle big, complex, interconnected, messy challenges in a complex, interconnected, messy country which is part of a complex, interconnected, messy world. People don’t behave uniformly, predictably or rationally; organisations don’t either.
Rather than try to get the world to conform to our clean models, the new government’s philosophy leans into this messiness, resulting in a different approach to changing the country: mission-led government. It focuses on a small number of ambitious long-term goals (missions), which inspire people across society to come together to contribute to them, in a whole raft of ways from policy interventions to innovation competitions to behaviour change campaigns. Together, they will realise the decade of national renewal that the new PM has promised.
This new approach won’t turn our conception of public sector leadership on its head, but it will need leaders to be adaptable, deploying a whole range of leadership behaviours determined by the situation:
1. Inspiring people for the long term and delivering in the short term
Missions are inherently big, bold long-term goals. For example, as the PM has warned us, the UK can’t become a global green super-power overnight. At the same time, government still has to deliver, particularly the “first steps” the PM has set out. So Whitehall leaders simultaneously need to inspire their teams with a compelling vision of the ambition, whilst delivering the nuts and bolts of government in the short and medium term. Crucially, the first steps should be symbolic of the wider change they aim to bring about, building the delivery narrative towards the longer term goal.
2. Collaborating across government and across the eco-system
Missions are the north star for the whole of government, and the apparatus of government is being re-orientated towards delivering them. That means leaders across government need to work better together, thinking mission first, department second, breaking down the silos that so often hamper change. That is a significant shift. But more fundamentally, mission-led government is humble about the power of central government to make change happen alone. It does not think – as some might have once – that you click your fingers in Whitehall and suddenly something in the country changes. Rather, the missions approach suggests those organisations closest to citizens are the ones who should get stuck into solving every-day problems, because they know citizens best.
So central government will be working in partnership with others to make change happen. That means working with local government, business, unions, the third sector, and citizens as collaborators and partners. Leaders will need to be adaptable to play different roles in the eco-system: sometimes as a convenor, sometimes as a problem solver, sometimes as a funder, sometimes as an enabler, sometimes standing back and letting others lead.
3. Leading multi-disciplinary teams
Mission-led government draws from user-centred design thinking employed by the Government Digital Service and other digital-first services. It seeks to shorten the feedback loop between policy design and delivery, iterating as we go. It wants to dial up the contribution of often-underused (and arguably under-respected) disciplines like public engagement, user research, data analysis, prototyping and behavioural economics.
Leaders must bring together practitioners and experts from these different backgrounds – sometimes from within government, but also from without – to work together to solve problems. And more than simply convening these different experts, leaders have a role to help people of each discipline contribute in the right way, amplifying, translating and making sense of these disparate contributions.
4. Creating accountability whilst leaving space for learning
In a messy, collaborative world, with multiple actors, accountability is shared. That makes it inherently hard to measure. That, plus the fact these big ambitious goals are hard, means that there will be mistakes, problems and failures. This is a feature, not a bug. But whilst it is easy to extol the virtues of learning-by-doing and embracing innovation and failure, it is harder to do, particularly in the glare of the media and public scrutiny. In response, leaders must develop a new accountability framework taking into account the requirements of the role of accounting officers and accountability to Parliament. They must also be purposeful in creating space for innovation, be brave about taking risks, and learn lessons from mistakes.
Being a leader in a mission-led government could seem like living in a paradox: being able to focus both on the short and long term, collaborating across Whitehall and the ecosystem, working with data and emotions, and being accountable and comfortable with failure. But, like mission-led government, they recognise the messiness and complexity of making change happen. To be successful, Whitehall leaders will need all the leadership modes at their disposal, and the skills to identify which mode suits which scenario.
