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/ Canadian Government Executive
// March 2016
T
wo phrases by the new prime
minister have captured the imag-
ination of Canadians. The first,
perhaps likely to have a short
half-life, is “sunny ways,” echoing Sir Wil-
frid Laurier. The second was “because it’s
2015,” updated this year to “because it’s
2016,” as reminder to Canadians of chang-
ing times.
Canadian government executives need
to be sensitive to those phrases because
they are messages on how the government
expects to be seen. But a more important
phrase – one word – should be on their
mind: Deliverology. This government ex-
pects to deliver on its main goals, and gov-
ernment executives must make it happen.
There’s uncertainty of exactly what de-
liverology means and how it will be car-
ried out. A unit is being put in place in the
Privy Council office to oversee it. But for
those lucky enough to have read
Instruc-
tion to Deliver
, Michael Barber’s fascinat-
ing account of how he delivered deliver-
ology in Britain, a sense of its likely main
features can be gauged.
The title was drawn from the words of
Tony Blair on June 8, 2001, a few hours af-
ter he won the landslide victory that gave
him a second term. He told the British
people that he interpreted his victory as
“a mandate for reform… an instruction to
deliver.” Blair had seen how government
worked from the inside, as prime minis-
ter, whereas Justin Trudeau best knows it
from his father grappling every night with
the briefing books he took home. But both
understood that a government’s mandate
for reform will only be fruitful if there is
an engine of deliverology.
Blair asked education reformer Barber
to set up shop a few feet from the prime
minister’s own office, heading a crucial
new Delivery Unit that was intended to
prod, push and monitor progress on a few
crucial priorities the public service was
expected to implement. Previously, after
Deliverology
Dr. Barber Has Landed
Blair’s first victory, Barber had been asked
to set up a Standards and Effectiveness
Unit, which was to be the engine room for
driving Labour’s school reforms. Negoti-
ating his pay, he asked that it be directly
linked to the performance of 11-year-olds
in literacy tests. Naturally, the system
couldn’t cope with that proposal, but he
did manage to help shake it up, steadfast-
ly pushing for improvements, and those
literacy scores did rise.
He was to get another reminder of en-
trenched bureaucracy – and what he
would be up against in his next job – when
his nascent Delivery Unit placed an order
for six new cups, saucers and teaspoons to
serve coffee to its guests. A simple request,
it would seem – but not easy to deliver to
him. After six weeks, and many polite but
insistent follow-up phone calls from one
of his staffers, a huge cardboard container
was finally received. It was almost entire-
ly filled with an over-abundance of soft
packaging; lying at the bottom of the huge
box were just six teaspoons and a solitary
saucer.
Cups and saucers, however, were not in
his instruction to deliver. Blair accepted
Barber’s advice to be very focused, con-
fining the unit’s impetus to four depart-
ments – Health, Education, Transport
and the Home Office – but also limiting
it to just a few specific, high-priority ele-
ments in those departments. “This tighter
focus brought vital benefits. It required
the prime minister and government to
identify – and stick to – a set of priorities,
something which had not happened ei-
ther in Blair’s first term or many previous
governments. It also meant the Delivery
Unit could be small and flexible and avoid
becoming “a big bureaucracy overseeing
an even bigger bureaucracy, which would
risk Kafka-esque absurdity,” he wrote.
Indeed, when one departmental official
asked him contemptuously to predict to
the nearest hundreds how many employ-
ees the newly announced unit would have
at the end of that term of government,
Barber replied “zero,” and stuck to it, with
35 to 40 employees throughout his tenure.
Blair also bought into Barber’s insistence
that the prime minister tie his time and
prestige to the effort. Formuch of the prime
minister’s term, including periods when he
was overwhelmed with the fallout over his
Harvey
Schachter
foreign policy adventure in Iraq, Blair at-
tended, and chaired, the regular “stocktake”
meetings in two-to-three-month cycles, at
which departments accounted for the prog-
ress they had made on priorities. “For the
ministers involved, while they obviously
implied a threat, the stocktakes also pro-
vided an opportunity to explain, discuss,
resolve, engage, and/or enlist the prime
minister in their agenda,” he notes.
Blair was using the unit in pursuit of
what he called “enabling government” –
government that helped people to help
themselves in a period of ever-rising ex-
pectations. For Barber, a central element
was to avoid being subservient to “produc-
ers,” industry or professional groups with a
stake on an issue, and instead to serve the
consumer. Blair was trying to shift the fo-
cus in the civil service from policy advice
to delivery outcomes, project manage-
ment, and the ability to take risks. Later,
Blair even integrated this thrust with crisis
management, deciding after the hoof-and-
mouth disease crisis to apply the same
emergency all-hands-on-deck response by
government in that instance to a few se-
lected issues, such as crime.
Barber feels there are thousands of peo-
ple in government bureaucracies whose
job it is to complicate matters. Govern-
ment, of course, is a complicated appara-
tus. But a countervailing force is required –
people who will simplify, bringing people
back to these five fundamental questions
his unit asked:
• What are you trying to do?
• How are you trying to do it?
• How do you know you are succeeding?
• If you’re not succeeding, how will you
change things?
• How can we help you?
Also fundamental to him were short-term
wins. Barber says the modern politician’s
dilemma is: You have to have a long-term
strategy, but unless it delivers short terms
results nobody will believe you.
The departments all set targets. But in-
terestingly, Blair not only knew the impor-
tance of pressuring to achieve those targets
but also when to lay off. As the government
approached achieving its target of a maxi-
mum of four hours waiting in emergency
rooms, Blair urged Barber not to press
religiously for delivery of it on every site