Canadian Government Executive - Volume 22 - Issue 7

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4 / Canadian Government Executive // September 2016
Deliverology as Routine
Almost exactly mid-way in writing his How to Run a Government So That Citizens Benefit
and Taxpayers Don’t Go Crazy (2015), Michael Barber put down his pen and savoured
a moment. He then wrote the passage where he describes the scrambling around 10
Downing in anticipation of the first campaign for re-election in 2001. The Blair govern-
ment was looking for new ideas and new solutions, and the issue of crime made it onto
the agenda.
Barber, the father of the “Deliverology” approach to ensuring government perfor-
mance, recalled the frantic search for new approaches and knew he needed to get out
of it in order to focus. It was then that he asked to carve out of the Prime Minister’s
Office the “Delivery Unit” that made his fame. The idea of that institutional novelty
was precisely to ignore the hubbub, to achieve routine: “routine reporting, routine data
collection, routine monitoring, routine problem-solving” as he put it. It was the prize he
reached for desperately: the idea of achieving the extraordinary “ordinary.”
Barber described the beauty of “government by routine.” It has clear priorities, a
specific idea of success, careful and intelligent oversight, a reliance on hard data, a
grounding in “honest conversation” that prizes regular contact between any given
department’s nerve endings and its decision-making centre. It is, in other words, the
dream of any public sector leader. Barber depicts a government that is in such routine
control that it is boring. He even goes to some length (never boring, that) to describe the
structure of this briefing notes to the PM.
Barber even says he wanted boring meetings—boring in structure but lively in content.
Barber favored regular, relatively brief meetings that focused on no more than two items.
He wanted candid conversation, so the number of people attending had to be kept to the
minimum. There was no time or room for grandstanding or for those who triggered it.
Critical to the success was the unimpeachability of the data—and those who challenged
it would be chased away. What he desperately hoped for was a collaborative atmosphere,
one that engendered genuine discussion on the continuous validity of objectives and
outcomes and on the adjustments in policy and programs that needed to be made en
route. Barber called these meetings to “stocktake.” They were designed to be part of the
ordinary, yet they were critical to ensuring that state of affairs. These meetings were the
parents, not the offspring, of his approach to improving government’s ability to deliver.
Well conceived, well led, these meetings become the battlefield for anticipated problems,
not for current crises. Heaven happens in ordinary time.
As the government continues its journey towards applying this management ideal, this
month’s Canadian Government Executive features three articles that tackle the challenge
of “deliverology” from three distinct angles. Warren McCay and Courtney Brown exam-
ine the contribution internal audit can make in moving the bureaucracy towards better
data collection. Jessica Sultan and Claude Miville-Dechêne, for their part, look at how
the procurement process can contribute an extra layer of vigilance. Craig Szelestowski
contributes five distinct strategies that can be borrowed from the very influential “Lean
Movement” to lead the way towards the Holy Grail of “ordinariness.” David Zussman
concludes with a pithy insight on the “Results” approach of the Trudeau government.
That ordinariness can become nothing but a wishful thought by a cyber-attack. In this
issue, two articles examine strategies in dealing with material no one sees. John Weigelt
of Microsoft Canada describes how a few governments in his experience have strategized
to make use of the “cloud” in linking its systems and data—two vital ingredients in mak-
ing the state hum. I take a look at the Government of Canada’s rampart against cyber-
crime, the Canadian Cyber Incident Response Centre and what it has done over the past
five years in ensuring that the Internet on which we all depend maintains its integrity. It
has become, after all, one of the vital ingredients of routine in this country.
See you on 5 October at the CGE Conference on Deliverology in Ottawa. It is going to
change your mind about things (see the ad on page 31).
editor’s note Patrice Dutil
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