David Boyle's Blog, page 67

The unexamined trolley wheel is not worth pushing

Some years ago now, I sat down to write a book about public services, partly because I was so angry with the way the Labour government had subverted them - making them more expensive and less effective - and partly because I hoped to provide an agenda for Nick Clegg, in case he ever became leader of the party.

The trouble was, I was too angry.  I had to re-write the book twice before it was finally coherent enough to be read, which it is being now, I'm glad to say ( The Human Element ).  By then, Nick Clegg had become deputy prime minister.

Ah yes, the travails of an author's life.

I mention it now, having read the interview yesterday with Jeremy Browne in the Times, because I wonder if my rage at the last government for their public service record was a sign that my wonky trolley (as he put it) veered to the left or that it veered to the right?

The wonky trolley metaphor is Jeremy's not mine.  All parties have a few wonky wheels, but then so do we all as individuals.  Some of us veer of left or right at the slightest provocation.  The unexamined trolley wheel is not worth pushing, but - having examined my own wheels pretty closely - I still can't see which way they veer.

Maybe it is obvious to everyone around me, and they daren't tell me, but it isn't obvious to me.

We have to be kind to Jeremy Browne, who hasn't finished his deprogramming after his escape from the clutches of the Home Office.

He is right that the Lib Dems will be making a mistake if they paint themselves too much as outsiders in the coalition - they haven't often got their own way, but there are achievements of recent years they will want to share the credit for.

I know, it won't be the bedroom tax, or subsidising Chinese nuclear companies.  But if there is nothing Lib Dems are proud of, then their tactics would be quite different - and some of what they are proud of is not going to be their achievement alone.

He is also quite right that the Lib Dems have the occasional wonky wheel.  Some undoubtedly veer to the left, whenever the party starts worrying about private ownership instead of scale and flexibility and humanity.

But it worries me far more when it veers in a corporate direction - suspicious of what people and communities can achieve on their own account.  When it puts safeguards ahead of community enthusiasm (free schools).  When it prefers centralised solutions to local ones (nuclear energy).

But they also have another wheel that, rather than veering, just stays completely stuck - so stuck that you might imagine it veers the trolley to the right.  It is the wheel marked economics, and for some reason - even when they put on their glasses - many Lib Dems are unable to see it.

I've wondered often why this is.  I think it is because, when socialists are naive about power and can't see it as a problem, liberals tend to be naive about money in the same way.  They somehow see it as outside their responsibility - isn't Captain Mainwaring dealing with that? (No, he's been replaced by risk software at regional office).

This is not a criticism of Danny Alexander, who has been very effective, but his responsibility is saving money, not shifting the way the economy works.

But the real problem with the trolley metaphor is that assumes the right path for a Lib Dem trolley is rigorously central, turning neither this way nor that, as if Liberalism was about compromise.  Whereas the truth is that the absence of the Liberal tradition in UK government for a century has been a tragedy for this country and the world.

No, the problem with the Lib Dem trolley, as far as I'm concerned, is not that it veers one way or the other (though it does), but whether all its wheels are working - and, above all, whether it is designed to move in a Liberal direction in the first place.

It isn't just bankers' bonuses - it's ALL bonuses

The European Union's financial services commissioner Michel Barnier has warned of the UK's isolation on the issue of bankers' bonuses.  It is true that, of all the aspects of Europe that annoys the Conservatives, it is this issue which has taken George Osborne to the European Court of Justice.

But the real problem isn't really capping bonuses - though that may have been the most possible of all the political alternatives - but of paying bonuses at all.  And not just bonuses to bankers, but bonuses to pubic service managers and everyone else.

I say this partly because of my scepticism about reducing complex tasks to simple numbers, but also because of reading Michael Lewis' classic The Big Short.

This book is destined to become the non-fiction classic of the sub-prime crisis, following the handful of traders and financiers on Wall Street who could see what was about to happen.

At every level, in the disaster that destroyed the world's banks, the behaviour of staff was dominated by bonuses related to narrow targets.

The mortgage sales teams were only interested in how many mortgages they could sell, not whether they could ever be repaid. The bond departments were only interested in packaging up new bonds, packed with mortgage debt, rather than whether or not the debts were sound.

Even the ratings agencies were dominated by targets, by how much they could earn from the bond departments, rather than whether the bonds were accurately rated.
And here's the problem: bonuses over-simplify jobs, sometimes disastrously.  Just like targets, bonuses persuade people to focus on reaching simplified numerical targets which can't possibly sum up the complexity of the broad objectives they really need to strive for.

They are also easy to game.  Like targets, bonuses narrow complex objectives down to impoverished output figures.  They sacrifice broad improvement for narrow outputs. You might as well replace highly paid human beings with extremely expensive machines (hence the picture above).

They also fall foul of Goodhart's Law (when numbers are used for control purposes those figures will always be inaccurate).
So, yes I would cap them.  It would reduce house price inflation in London, which is exacerbated by bank bonuses.  But I would go further: I would tax all bonuses at 90 per cent.

All bonuses boulderise and subvert.  Everybody's.  Our companies would be better managed as a result and so would our services.

Why politicians love monopoly

I don’t mean Monopoly, of course, a game designed originally by land tax campaigners to raise the issue – but the threat that comes to our economy and well-being from allowing companies to build up a stranglehold on their market.
Why don’t they get it?
Environment minister Owen Paterson is an intelligent enough fellow, yet he ranted on this week about opponents to GM crops as “wicked” and as a “dark shadow”.  For a moment it appeared that he didn’t understand what the objection is.
So in case he is reading this (hello, Owen!), here is a guide to what the economic objection is to GM crops as the only way to feed the world:
1.     The evidence that monoculture is the only way to feed a growing population depends on peculiar, monocultural surveys of crop growing in developing countries, which ignore everything unless they are the main product of any farm – giving an agri-business of view of what is actually the sheer diversity of small farms, and encouraging a wrong-headed and large-scale solution.
2.    Most evidence (Amartya Sen, for example) also suggests that small-scale farming is considerably more efficient than large-scale farming, certainly when it comes to how much is produced on marginal land.
3.    Diverse, small-scale farming – on which so many lives depend – becomes increasingly difficult if farmers can’t share seeds, which they are forbidden to do using GM technology, driving many into ruinous debt.
4.    Ten companies already control three quarters of the global seed market.  Monopolies drive up costs.  Costs create poverty.  Poverty creates poor diets and vitamin deficiencies that so-called ‘golden rice’ is supposed to put right.
The technology itself may be healthy enough – I don’t know, I’m not a scientist – but this isn’t about science; it is about economics and the likely effect of increasing the power of the seed company oligopoly on the world market.
A generation ago, it would have been obvious – partly because the Liberal warning against monopoly was stronger – that this would have increased poverty.  Why not now?
Why do politicians ignore monopoly in the energy market (but fiddle about trying to reduce green levies)?  Why do they ignore monopoly in the media market (but fiddle about trying to regulate)? 
Why don’t they see that it was Amazon and Google, two semi-monopolies, which failed to respond to their criticism about paying tax – and Starbucks (not a monopoly) which did respond?
But if I'm honest, I may have a clue about the answer.  Conservatives welcome monopolies if they have been legitimately created, because they fetishise the laws of the market, even when markets fail.  
Socialists welcome monopolies because they have an old-fashioned and fatal attraction for strong, centralised authority, which explains perhaps why Blair and Brown preferred a few monopolistic retailers - they felt, rather naively, that they were easier to control.
Do we really believe that handing ownership of seed technology to a handful of global corporations will make them easier to control?  
If GM is ever going to work, it has to create more competition in the market, not less - and more diversity, not less.  It has to specifically help small farmers.  If it helps small farmers now, then it does so despite the growing monopoly involved, not because of it.  
Now, Owen, am I really wicked to say that?

The art of not devouring our children

I remember, years ago, maybe even as many as 20 years, I happened uto come across a copy of the Green Party’s newspaper.  I was interested in party newspapers at the time because I had just accidentally become editor of Liberal Democrat News.

The Greens' equivalent included an article on the front page explaining that the party was in the midst of a financial crisis, and they were therefore making their fund-raising department redundant.

It was a wonderful example of how politicians of all kinds (and not just politicians either) get fatally muddled between short and medium term objectives.

It didn’t matter that this was, at the time, a very small political party. They still got muddled.

The same muddle feeds into decisions like closing community support schemes for mental health, and then wondering why demand for beds starts to increase, and all the other failures to prevent that bedevil public services in the UK.

I thought of all this, reading Nick Clegg’s very sensible comments about green energy yesterday. It ought not to need saying, but of course reducing funding for green energy now will leave us that much more dependent on foreign fossil fuels in the future.  Unfortunately, it does need saying.

For some reason, the government is reviewing its green levies on the grounds that we need to bring down people’s rapidly rising bills. If that was the only reason for the rising bills, they might have a point – but they are not.

Like the Green Party’s fundraising department, making the fund-raisers redundant would cut costs for a while – but then multiply the problems.

Energy bills is Exhibit A. They are rising partly because the supply market is a semi-monopoly, very hard to break into, and partly because of our continuing dependence on fossil fuels which are increasingly expensive.  Of course, it is partly also investment to try and make us more independent in the future - and to bring down bills then.

Cutting the green levy would mean slightly cheaper bills now, but only at the cost of increasing them in the future, for our children.

But Exhibit B is more discouraging. This time, the Lib Dem side of the coalition stays silent.

As David Cameron and Ed Balls both seem to agree, everyone should have the right to own their own home. But instead of hammering out a policy package that might bring house prices down in the southern half of England and the other hotspots, the Treasury puts in place the Help to Buy scheme.

Most economists seem to agree this will raise house prices in the medium-term, though not always for the same reasons.  Prices are now rising at 0.5 per cent a month, which all adds up...

The point is that, if you make mortgages more affordable, by extending mortgage terms or calculating income in new ways, or by subsidising the deposit – but still fail to do anything to bring down the prices – then they will rise.  Of course they will: it is a classic example of inflation - houses will always be too scarce, so more money will always make prices rise.

There used to be a policy mechanism to keep them low, but they abolished the Corset in 1980, and I tell the strange story in my book  Broke: Who killed the middle classes? .

So yes, Cameron and Balls are right. People should be helped onto the property ladder – but not at the expense of their children, who will be condemned to a life of dependence on the whims of landlords, paying exorbitant rents because these are linked to property prices too.

There has been comment from the direction of the Treasury that we are not in fact in the middle of a house price bubble.  This may be true compared to 2006 (it may not too), but we are still in a gigantic and ultimately ruinous house price bubble that has lasted three decades.

If average UK house prices rise in the next 30 years as they did in the last 30 years – thanks to Help to Buy and whatever follows it – then the average home will cost £1.2m.  A disaster for our children.

A disaster for governments too, because they will have to keep on subsidising deposits to keep up with the rises.

For some reason, as well as getting muddled about short and medium term objectives, politicians seem to get confused by anything that stretches back beyond the previous government's term of office.  If there isn't someone to blame, perhaps, it isn't a problem.

It is easy to be rhetorical about this, and wring hands in despair.  But the system encourages short-termism.  We've known that for years.  But when it seems likely to solve my problems temporarily at the expense of my childrens' lives later, I start to get cross.

So will other parents.  This isn't a technical issue, it is an issue about looking after our children's futures.

The American radical optimist, and what he implies for us

We don’t have anyone quite like Gar Alperovitz in the UK. He is both a Washington insider, a thinking journalist and a political academic.

He is compelling and inspirational. I have watched him hold an audience in the palm of his hand, speaking without notes for over an hour, in a small rural town hall on a snowy night in Massachusetts.

But he is another rare thing: he is a radical optimist in the great gridlock that is American politics, now apparently shut down for all eternity.

His new book What Then Must We Do? sets out how a new economy – mutual, local and innovative – will underpin a new future for the USA, which will be every bit as revolutionary as the original Declaration of Independence.

For the USA, you could also read UK – the same prescription applies here. For Alperovitz, it is an approach that has the potential to break through the logjam consensus around economic solutions that patently no longer work.


This is New Economy Week in the USA, run by the New Economy Coalition, to which I have been distantly involved in giving life, and Gar is a board member.  The week's slogan is: ‘A Just And Sustainable Economy Is Emerging. Let's Make It Visible.’

This is how he puts it:

"I don’t think we here are talking about projects alone, I don’t think we are talking only about entrepreneurship, I don’t think we are talking only about impact investing.  I think we are talking — and I sometimes wear a historian’s hat — I think we are talking about laying down the foundations. … We are establishing the pre-history in this work, step by step, of the possible great transformation."

This is interesting.  Back in 1999, my colleagues at the New Economics Foundation described the similar shift that was happening here, but achingly slowly, as the 'new economy'.  It conflicted somewhat with the similar way of describing the dot.com boom going on at the same time, and it was earlier in the process.

But Alperovitz goes further.  He sees this potentially game-changing sector emerging, not despite the logjam in politics and the economic downturn, but because of it.
Simply because the normal channels for achieving change have seized up, then this combination of mutuals, local banks, social enterprises and local government 'social value' procurement, is beginning to flicker into life.  The only thing that can stop it is if conventional politics and economics recovers, and that seems unlikely.  It is a win-win situation.
He describes the birth of this movement in an article for The Nation as the disastrous moment in 1977 when Youngstown Sheet and Tube closed down in Ohio, putting 5,000 steel-workers out of work.  A plan by a steelworker called Gerald Dickey came within a hairsbreadth of re-opening the plant under the ownership of the previous employees, but the Carter administration unravelled before it could work.
Yet the debate and publicity around the idea was so widespread that Ohio is now a kind of Ground Zero for mutual enterprise, providing a democratisation of the economy, and also - as it happens - a broadening of the tax base in the rust belt.
I think he is onto something, and it is the same here.  The emergence of a mutuals and social enterprise sector has to be local, so it is held back by the absence of local banks in the UK, but the ice is cracking and - as long as the economy fails to deliver for most of us - it will continue to develop.  
It is a potentially life-giving kind of economic development, and - if it goes far enough - it will change everything, driving out conventional Right and Left.
More on why we need a new kind of enterprise in my book Broke.

Targets culture and the spirit of '52

"We're sick and tired of your voice in this country," Stanley Holloway tells the bureau-crat speaking from the loudspeaker in the Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico, released in 1948 in the midst of a Labour government dedicated to the 'spirit of '45'.

Holloway plays a salt-of-the-earth type whose ambition is to build a playground on the local bomb site.  You might have dismissed such an insult from any other character in the film, but it carries weight because it comes from him.

Those who currently wrap themselves in the Spirit of '45 forget how quickly and how resoundingly the public rejected that mixture of suffocating, detailed, bureaucratic control that hung over from the war, but also seemed to go hand in hand with the spirit of the Attlee government.

It is no coincidence that the Ealing comedies often seemed to include Whitehall characters who, though not tyrants, were horribly stuck.

I was thinking of this yesterday afternoon, which - because of the incessant rain - involved watching the 1952 film The Titfield Thunderbolt again.  I can now almost recite it.  It is one of the most underrated of the Ealing films, and there is a sub-plot about the humanising of the town clerk.

But there is also another symbolic Whitehall figure, the railway inspector from the Ministry of Transport (Mr Clegg), and here - although I had watched this many, many times before - my attention perked up.

This was the man who sits measuring things and making his calculations on his forms, while he misses entirely the fact that the train he is inspecting has broken free from its engine, and is being pushed along the track by crowds of local people.

Both films were written by T. E. B. Clarke, one of the only Brits to get a screenwriting Oscar, and you can see the kind of way his mind worked: both films are, in their different ways, hymns to what we once called the Big Society - they are about communities taking local institutions into their own hands.  And in both cases, Whitehall is a major threat.

This was fascinating to me because I realised that the targets debate is not a new one.  Even under Attlee, we had targets in public services, and - just like they did under Blair and Brown - they bore remarkably little resemblance to what was actually happening.

I have a friend who was a teaching assistant some years ago and had to put up with the form teacher (also an Ofsted inspector) hiding in the stationery cupboard for most of the year, while the school rose rapidly in the league tables.

But something has changed since 1952.  We are in much more confusion about how much the numbers relate to reality.  In 1952, it was obvious that they didn't.  Now, after being battered by New Labour and McKinsey and PA Consulting, and all the other apologists for targets, we are less inoculated against it.

There were black holes in public services in 1952, from the geriatric wards and mental health services to the secondary moderns.  But what about the rest?  If people could tell the difference in those days between target statistics and reality, we might imagine that - at their best - 1952 services were more effective than they are now

They certainly relied more on face-to-face dealings with professionals, which are able to deal with variety far better than IT systems.  That is the proposition - how can we tell?

More about incessant and obsessive measurement in my 2001 book The Tyranny of Numbers.

Why framing doesn't work

"We are now fully into the swing of things and [REDACTED] is a busy learning hub.  We have a number of clubs operating before and after school and some of our enrichment visits have already taken place..."

So begins the latest newsletter from my children's primary school, and there is a problem here.

I don't know what a 'learning hub' is, and - even having googled it - I'm none the wiser.  'Clubs' I understand, but for 'enrichment trips' I think this is little more than what we used to know as good old 'school trips'.

Does this slavish devotion to jargon matter?  Well, I think it does, because it is imprecise - because it gives the impression that something new has been described: some new idea or institution that deserves management time, when actually something new hasn't been described after all.  It's the same old same old.

Which brings me to the irritating contagion of a new buzzword in political circles, called 'framing'.  Actually, it isn't new at all: it is a highly complex set of social science concepts first coined in 1972, and thanks to George Lakoff - a cognitive linguist with an interest in metaphors - it has been in American Democratic Party circles for ages.

Metaphors are important, because they set up a political argument for success or failure.  But there is a problem in practice.  Because it doesn't doesn't really mean much more than tweaking a few mild metaphors.

The UK left has been particularly gargling with the idea, but - despite all the effort - the huge framing imperative tends to be conjuring with rather familiar metaphors (otherwise the old left gets suspicious) or new kinds of description (basically, another mind-numbing kind of political correctness).

I have a theory about this.

The problem seems to be that, once again, the technocrats have taken over.  Campaigners seem to believe that this is a form of calculation, that all they need to do is to move ideas around in some calculated way, whereas - like any other kind of endeavour - it requires a burst of inspiration.

I have a feeling this is why we get so many clod-hopping attempts at 'framing', especially on the left.

 They think it is a technical matter, and they are nervous about anything too new. See for example this recent critique.  "In a civilised society, the answer to Unspeak is not more Unspeak," said Steven Poole, and he's right.

The campaign I was involved with which really 're-framed' the debate was the Clone Town Britain campaign from 2004 onwards, which successfully re-set the terms of the debate about small shops as an aesthetic issue - and had huge impact as a result.
It involved no systematic consideration of 'frames' or anything like them.  It stemmed from a moment's inspiration by my friend and colleague Andrew Simms.  No attempt at framing, not even any mention of framing, no re-arrangement of very familiar phrases in a slightly different order.  
It was something new, and I have a horrible feeling that the whole business of framing in practice gets in the way of anything very new at all.  It may in fact be a blind alley.

Why we should all have been artists, actually

I've respected Andrew Marr's writing for years, since his days as a columnist on the Independent on Sunday.  

To be honest, it is that print journalism that I remember.  Broadcasting is so ephemeral that it is really hard to remember more than a few snatches.  I wonder if that is one of the reasons why he revealed that he wished he had been an artist.

This is not how the technocrats see things, of course.  They prefer to label people definitively so that they can count them, but most of us break out of categories and I believe most of us also hanker to create.

I've written three novels (see Leaves the World to Darkness , for example) and rather too many poems for the good of the world.  But the fact that I managed it gives me great satisfaction too.  I have produced physical books (yes, the website of The Real Press needs updating, but I have lost the code - a shocking revelation).  Yes, I want to create too.

I know conventional economics suggests that we hanker to consume.  I think we also hanker to produce, and more of us are finding ways to do that.

This is not a new idea.  Alvin Toffler came up with the concept of a pro-sumer in the 1980s.  But it is beginning to happen, with artisan foods and Etsy and creative writing workshops until we are knee deep in them.

And this is also the antidote to the inhumane idea that we should be one thing, and the failed economic doctrine of comparative advantage, where one place in the world specialises in making radios and one place carrots, and the rest of us get poorer.

The truth is that we are creative, diverse people, and the more we produce as well as consume, the more money money will flow locally as well as internationally, and the more we will claw back a little economic self-determination.

Well balanced economies require both, and preferably near to each other - even better if we are both doing both functions.

The silence of the lambs

"What's sad, baffling and dangerous is that the attacks now come not only from governments but from other newspapers too. We need newspapers willing to do their job, rather than those ready to cheer on the self-interested deceptions of the powerful."
So says the editor of El Pais in defence of the Guardian this morning, after its mauling by the Daily Mail yesterday.  Nick Clegg also says that: "There is a totally legitimate debate about the power of these technologies."  Quite right.
But where are the other voices from the UK defending the right of the press to ask difficult questions?

I remember, it was the scandal at an animal lab called Huntingdon Life Sciences that made me realise the urgent truth of Lord Acton’s famous dictum about power.  Secret filming in 1997 revealed that some of those who worked there were systematically cruel to the animals in their care, secretly punching dogs in cages.

It was never really explained why.  Just because they could, apparently. It happens again and again, in hospital scandal and care home scandal. When people are given unfettered power over others, there is a tendency for contempt to creep in as well, and priorities tend to get confused.  Power corrupts.

That is why the Guardian’s revelations of some of the information leaked by Edward Snowden was important to me. Here was a huge security apparatus, operating on both sides of the Atlantic and without the knowledge of the cabinet, and without proper oversight, authorised by themselves to crack the codes of the internet providers to listen and read.

Nobody, least of all the Guardian, has denied that interception needs to happen and to happen secretly.  But watch security staff in operation and you will see why this activity needs to be overseen.  Left to themselves, there is a tendency to concentrate - not on the really dangerous stuff - but on those who question them or fail to look sufficiently compliant.

These things matter.  That is why the USA is now moving to bring it under some political control, without which experience shows things tend to unravel.
So what are we to make of the pompous, not to say portentous attack, in page after page of yesterday's Daily Mail on the Guardian's editor Alan Rusbridger?

No evidence is offered that the Snowden revelations have actually damaged national security, except the word of the new head of MI5.  And since he and colleagues are using strangely high-flown political rhetoric - "the worst blow to British intelligence ever" - it isn't wholly convincing.  What about Philby?  
But when one newspaper, which had previously been standing up for press freedom, launches such an attack on a fellow newspaper editor, you might expect other journalists to ride to his defence.  Or perhaps someone in the Labour Party.

Not a bit of it. They seem cowed in the face of the Daily Mail, and their claim that somehow press freedom means only asking the difficult questions they approve.  A deafening, slightly fearful, silence has descended.
The Mail also has the BBC in its sights, which has also been bizarrely silent on this story throughout.  But the real story emerged at the end of an equally portentous Mail editorial yesterday, which said this about Rusbridger:
"As for his paper's attack on us over the Labour leader's father..."
It appears that yesterday was also about the interest the Guardian took in flurry of excitement after the Ralph Miliband attack last week, reminding readers of the Mail's support for Mosley and Mussolini in days gone by.  
Yet Ed Miliband is among the silent lambs now.

Outcomes, McKinsey and King Canute

Some years ago (2005, in fact), I was asked by the Environment Agency to review their new indicators, as we used to put it in those days.  They all seemed very sensible but one, in particular stood out.  It was the indicator which specified the number of centimetres the sea levels have risen.

There was a true outcome measure, at last.  I knew I would recognise one if I ever saw one.  Yet it was also a measure they had almost no power to affect.

It was as if King Canute had set it as a priority indicator for his own government (hence his picture here).

Most management consultants still talk about outputs and outcomes as if they were absolute categories, as if an outcome was a concrete thing beyond argument.

Nothing could be further from the case. What is the outcome of the NHS for example? The number of patients successfully treated? Or is it the health of the population? Because those are diametrically different ideas and require different measurements and probably different institutions altogether.

Outcome measurements assume that our institutions should be permanent. They are about organisational control. They don't let us imagine whether we might be better off with different institutions instead. There is a whole continuum of potential outcomes, none of which are definitive - except possibly sea level rises, but even then I have my doubts.

All these measures, outputs and outcomes alike, are susceptible to the little boy's question in the Emperor's New Clothes.  Yes, the sea levels are still low, but is the environment safe?  Yes, the school league tables are rising, but is their education any good?

At one end of the outcomes continuum, they are little more than the simple purpose of existing institutions. At the other end, they are usually outside the control of institutions anyway.

I know this is shocking to some people.  What, you don't believe in outcomes?  The jaw falls open.  But, no I don't.  The whole idea is a wrong-headed attempt to rescue clapped out targets from the wastepaper basket.

I've subjected you to this small rant because I have been sent an article by the management consultants McKinsey, who are after all the consultancy most associated with this nonsense.  And, staggeringly, it is still pedalling this old stuff.  It is called Delivery 2.0.

I long to take them by the scruff of the neck and point to our public services, hollowed out by the business of assigning measures to a handful of 'deliverables', and setting up elite delivery units to browbeat officials - and gargling with measures which, by their very nature, are one-dimensional, bowlderising, distorting and rendering ineffective.

Yet here is the McKinsey Museum Piece:

"It’s a cliché, but it’s true: what gets measured gets managed. Performance improves when it is managed. Internal performance management should begin by assigning accountability for outcomes to individuals. Once accountability is established, performance dialogues—regular conversations about each goal—are essential. One prime minister reviews the progress of six priorities every week; every six months, he holds a face-to-face performance dialogue with each minister.  These conversations must be based on standardized, clear management data (ideally available online) that can be reviewed and managed in real time. And the dialogues must be reinforced by rigorous evaluation and consequences (good and bad). Many governments are constrained in this regard; they may not be able to reward great performances with bonuses or condemn bad ones by firing the perpetrators. But they can publicly acknowledge outstanding people, promote highfliers faster, and move laggards to lower-profile roles."

What I find most enraging is that McKinsey seem unaware of Goodhart's Law, which explains why this approach has failed so miserably: a measure used to control will always be inaccurate.  However useless frontline staff and their managers may be, they will always know how to finesse the data.

In fact, this kind of approach makes finessing data their absolute priority, and far more important than delivering a good service.

McKinsey are desperately behind the times here.  The governments and organisations that can embrace complex interconnected objectives, by operating as close as possible to the frontline, are going to inherit the world.  Those which try to subject them to the McKinsey approach are going to slap themselves on the back and wonder vaguely why nothing works.