APPLAUSE
Good morning everyone, thank you for inviting me, it's a pleasure to be here.
You're perfectly correct, I did spend
three years of my life, in and out of Whitehall, doing an observational study
of the UK civil service.
But, in the course of that,
I promised the civil service faithfully, that this was curiosity research
and they were very sweet, and they indulged me
in doing curiosity research, and I was not obliged
to produce anything that was, 
in inverted commas, relevant,
nor did I produce anything that could even remotely contribute
towards an impact statement,
but of course, at the end of the book, everybody instantly says,
but why didn't do x, x, x?
And one of the x, x,x's is 
what lessons can you learn
from doing an observational 
study of the British civil service
which helps us to improve the way the British civil service actually performs?
So I thought it was a good question, 
that I'd have a go at
my stab at an answer for it.
And what I want to do this morning 
is actually talk about
what lessons can we learn 
for public sector reform
by using observational research methods
and then what are the pros and cons of using such research methods?
It's going to be fairly anecdotal
I prefer to be sort of casual in lectures, I don't like reading papers,
but anybody who does
like reading papers,
there is actually a full length paper, and if you give me your email address,
I will flick it to you, 
or you can download the copy
off my website, 
if you feel so inclined.
So , enough of the preliminaries,
Public sector reform, er...
the paper actually goes 
through all the various reports
and does the dutiful academic 
thing of noting
all the similarities between the reports, and as far as I'm concerned,
is the truly tedious part of the paper,
but I did have to do it, 
and I'd prefer not to have to talk about
the truly tedious part 
of the paper this morning.
I'd just like to say that I think there are three recurring themes
in public sector reform 
over the last two or three decades
and they are that we've had a lot of emphasis on evidence-based
policy making, 
of rational based policy making,
the terminology varies slightly, but evidence-based policy making will do
as a shorthand expression.
Secondly we've had various 
bouts of managerialism.
It's a generic concept, it covers a whole series of different kinds of reform,
I think there is a common strand which almost continuously, since Fulton
there has been, in managerialism, a big stress on some version of performance management
Some of you in the audience might even remember,
Fulton and accountable management,
or such fashionable nostrums 
as management by objectives,
but performance management 
is a recurring theme in this,
And latterly, it's not quite 
so evident in the early decades,
we've had much more emphasis 
on choice and delivery.
Running through all of this, is this notion of economic rationality,
of means-ends analysis,
and, as far as I'm concerned, one of the problems with the reforms,
there isn't any fit between the reforms,
and what is actually happening 
in everyday life
in British government departments.
and I want to unpack that assertion.
The way I did it was, I spent two years in and out of the departments
in the jargon of the anthropologists it's called yo-yo research,
where you  move into several sites at several different passgaes of time,
I had over 500 hours of observation there,
I had regular and repeat interviews
with 37 senior civil servants,
ministers of state, secretaries of state
I managed to persuade then that the usual standard
half-an-hour interview wasn't really going to hack it this time, lads.
I needed, you know, and I did...
Ministers, I got the minimum of two hours,
some  of the permanent secretaries I got up to seven or eight hours of interviews with them.
because they got used to seeing me around, so at the end of the day,
they'd have a glass of whisky, and Id be sat there panicking, thinking have I got
enough tapes to record this as they got into their cups and started talking and talking and talking.
But on top of that, they were really very good at,
obviously I couldn't attribute the information they gave me,
bu they did give me the committee papers, the minutes,
and all the other documentation which was relevant
to the various committees and meeting that I went to,
So in effect, I was probably the oldest
private secretary in the British civil service
because effectively, that's how they pigeonholed me
or coped with me being around
and in fact I quite deliberately quite early on
decided that I was actually going to pretend to be a private secretary
ans I dressed like them, and I went out to the W.H. Smith's
and actually bought the notebook that they all used.
so that I actually looked like they do,
so I wasn't noticeable,
And after the first few weeks,
the permanent secretaries got bored with the joke of
'Here's my personal Professor, Rod Rhodes,'
introducing me to the meetings,
and of course, instantly changing the dynamics of the meetings by doing that,
thank you very much!
But after three weeks they got bored with that game and just ignored me,
like they ignored their private secretaries, which was excellent.
So, I think I got a good insight into what it was like
The ministers were a bit more precious,
a bit more aware of their self-importance, well they're very aware of their self-importance.
Most of the time they would allow me there
for example, Estelle Morris was very, very good
about access at what was a very, very difficult time for her
because I was there at the events
which eventually culminated in her resignation.
I was allowed into various meetings where she was clearly
a very, very upset woman by all the crap that was going on around her,
and tolerating me, in those circumstances, I thought was very good.
So I think the civil service and ministers were really excellent with their access,
And I think I got a fairly good picture of what life was like
in the civil service at that time,
which is the second Blair parliament.
One important point there which probably should be stressed,
is up to the Iraq war, Blair did take a lot of interest
in what was happening in, for example, education,
as a result of the Iraq war, it became very, very clear
Blair lost all interest in education
He had other things to think about,
So I was actually in a situation where the prime minister at that time,
was not targeting particular departments,
was not getting involved in their particular policy making,
and that might of skewed the results to the extent that,
the departments had a tad more autonomy from the prime minister
than might have been true at other times.
So I note that sort of, in passing, as a possible odd circumstance
but frankly, for this kind of research, that is one of the problems.
You go in intensively, for a particular period of time,
It's hard to know how typical that period of time is,
of all the other periods of time when you could have gone in
and done that kind of work.
But nonetheless, I'm just trying to be straight about it
so you can see the kinds of problems that might arise.
Now then, the picture that comes out
I can't possibly summarise in a short lecture when I've got other things to do,
The thing I want to emphasise, is that I think I found
A storytelling political administrative elite.
And there are two points about that, first of all storytelling is something I'll talk about later,
but they do it all the time.
'Have we got our story straight',
is an expression that you get regularly from them
whether they're appearing before a select committee
going to do a media press conference, or whatever else,
it is they have to do that particular day,
bu the phrase that I really want to stress
is political administrative elite,
and I freely admit that I'm going all the way back
to Heclo and Wildavsky and 'The Private Government of Public Money',
in which they argue that ministers and their permanent secretaries,
should both be seen as political administrators.
The opposite sides of the same coin.
They think that the notion that the minister's got one set of duties
which are completely separate from the permanent secretary who's got another set of duties,
is an idea that they are trying to undermine
and get at the idea that they're both in this mess together.
And they live or die by their ability to support one another in it.
And in my experience, the three ministers that I followed closely,
were indeed extremely close to their permanent secretaries,
when I say extremely close, I mean professionally,
I often don't think, as one of the civil servants said to me,
I don't have to like him,
what I've got to do is get a good working relationship with him,
which is what he did, 
and in that sense they were very close,
and that was for me, the dominant characteristic of it.
And so often we get this ministers versus civil servants
kind of motif, imposed on civil service reform,
and it just wasn't the way they behaved in their every day life
when I was observing them.
Now that is the theme I want to pull out of the fieldwork
because it's going to recur at a number of points, and what I've done is
drawn five lessons from the fieldwork,
which I think say something that is relevant to anybody to who wants to try and reform
the U.K. civil service.
And the first of these is coping and the appearance of rule
and not strategic planning.
Strategic planning is a never-ending source of
bafflement to me, I clearly lack something, I'm clearly thick
some dimension of my brain doesn't function properly
I mean you've probably got these mission statements and strategic planning in your home universities,
and, you know, you smile when they land on your desk.
All right? You could weep. That would be the other possible reaction.
But what you don't do is take them seriously.
You know it's the top brass wanking around yet again
with some other stupid document which is going to have no effect
on the way you're going to do your job.
Why do you think it's any different in the civil service?
Because it isn't.
Because, you know, I actually went along to a big conference they held at Chelsea football club,
where the top brass got all the middle level managers
along to discuss the new strategic plan.
And what do think the first thing the middle level managers said to the top brass?
It was 'why is this the first time you have consulted us?'.
I mean, you know, at that sentence, at that point,
surely they realised  their strategic plan was dead in the water?
and they spent two years doing it.
And they had a top team put together at the top of the civil service.
And I don't think the civil service unusual in doing that.
I think that's exactly what universities do.
We get a top team based around the DVC research,
or the DVC academic whatever,
 who come up with some flashy document at the end of the process,
Maybe they came round and did a quick interview with
a head of a unit, whatever the unit happens to be called nowadays,
and that's it. Thirty minutes in politics, and they know politics.
Wow! Underwhelmed is about the only conceivable reaction to these documents.
And that was the reaction of the heads of the management units.
They just did not see how this affected the work of the HMUs,
Strategic planning was a no-no for them.
What most of them were really concerned about was coping.
How the hell do we get though
today, tomorrow, this week, this month?
and the further up the hierarchy you went,
the more prominent that characteristic became.
Because their job was actually to domesticate
a very, very unruly life for the minister.
In fact the phrase that I latched on to for this was 'rude surprises',
That the life of the minister, the permanent secretary and the top brass in the department
is made up of rude surprises, so how do we deal with them?
In fact, what the top of the civil service is doing,
what the departmental quarters, as I like to call it
at the top of the departments are doing,
is actually coping with the various demands and stresses and strains.
And I have to say, you really do have to be there,
too just appreciate the effects of the media
on the top of the department.
I have been known to leave the television on all day
because there's a Test Match, and I've got it on Radio 4,
and a wicket falls, and I charge downstairs from my study
to see the wicket, and then I go back to work again.
They have these televisions on Sky News
or the BBC 24 hour news, all the time.
and they turn the sound down , and it's always there.
Every day on the minister's desk there are cuttings
from, you will assume, the national newspapers,
so they can see how the print media
are responding to what's happening.
But it isn't just the national newspapers
It's any regional newspaper in the U.K.
where their responsibilities, the responsibilities of the department,
are being commented on.
 And a wad of paper this size lands
on the permanent secretary's and the minister's desk
and the personal private secretary's desk every day.
I mean, the media is an all intrusive factor of their life.
So they have to cope with it, and I think the goal
if you've got to have a strategic objective for what's going on here,
the strategic objective is willed ordinariness.
That's what they want to happen at the top of the department,
They want willed ordinariness where there are no rude surprises.
And where they can get on with the various tasks that they have to do.
So that's lesson number one.
Lesson number two is institutional memory, not internal structures.
Again, university is a wonderful example for me, because
at times it just sounds if you're picking on the civil service
and what happens there,
whereas this kind of idiocy is occurring in universities at the same time as well,
structural reorganization.
Oh joy of joy, oh...
we've got a new vice-chancellor
What will the new vice-chancellor do?
Well one, we'll get a strategic plan,
and number two we will get...
an internal reorganisation!
I currently work in an academic unit,
because that's what we've just been reorganized into.
And apart from a lot of flurry, it's achieved nothing whatsoever,
nothing changed, I haven't changed one iota the way I behave at that University
and nor have 99% of my colleagues.
And the same thing happens in the civil service.
when they get reorganizations.
But, turning to my colleague Christopher Pollitt,
in his recent book, he noted that
If you want o do some damage to institutional memory, what would you do?
How's about introducing a new I.T. system?
Then may be we'll have an internal reorganization.
Then maybe we'll adopt the latest management fad, and implement that.
Then maybe we'll try to encourage a lot of turnover of staff
and get some new blood into the department.
What nobody happens to notice in all of this
is you've got the drip drip drip erosion of the institutional memory of the department.
And it it is really important that we don't do that.
One department I went into,
I mean my visits were all over the place for a variety of reasons,
I went back after a year to one unit,
and out of seventeen people who were in it,
sixteen were new.
The only person who wasn't new was a relatively young filing clerk.
And of course you'll forgive me, I'm not being, at least I think
I'm not being sexist, she was the lowest of the low.
Because she also got to make the tea, and was basically the
departmental court's minion.
And an issue cropped up,
somebody said 'what did we do last time?
To a resounding silence.
Because of course, for everybody in the room, there was no last time.
Because they weren't there last time.
 And they didn't know where to go and look to find where last time was!
So what happened is the secretary gets very, very brave and actually speaks,
almost unheard of, and says I know where the file is
LAUGH
And all of a sudden, she's the most important person in the unit.
Because she actually is the last bit of institutional memory which is left,
Also, please remember files is not you and me,
you know, the single filing cabinet in the corner with four drawers,
we're talking about a British government department, the filing system
is a very large room, with a large number of files in it, etc
I mean, you need to know the system.
Wandering in there, to say now what should I look it up under,
pre-supposes you actually know what categories it's organised into.
but she did know what categories it was organised into, she could find the documents for them,
And it isn't just the public servants who have to write the memo to the minister,
Ministers, for example in DEFRA,
when it was merged from three separate units
were going spare, because there was no institutional memory.
'Why don't you know what you did last time?'
was a current motif that was going on there.
That why on earth would you want
to erode the institutional memory of your organization?
I have a lot of difficulty in imagining why you think that is a sensible policy.
I don't think they intended to.
But I certainly think it was a dramatic consequence of
all the kinds of reforms I've just itemised out of Chistopher's book.
And it happened in my three departments.
It's almost as if there was a tacit agreement, that one of things we really must do, guys
is erode this place's institutional memory.
Now, in my terms, that institutional memory is the department's collection of stories.
It's the stories that they tell one another as they think about current issues, and current problems,
and also, it's the stories they tell the new recruits
when they join the organisation.
They are absolutely central to the socialization
of new staff when they come in.
I interviewed one permanent secretary who had been
parachuted in from outside the civil service.
and he said it took him two years.
He said he made so may mistakes, it wasn't true,
because he had no idea how things work around here.
The collective folklore, which everyone else knew,
he's never met before and he had to be introduced to it,
He said I opened my mouth to change feet so often, it wasn't true.
It's a particular claustrophobic little world,
because of all these rude surprises, they can get very inward looking,
If you don't know how this claustrophobic little world,
this cocoon works, then you've got a real problem it trying to change it on day one,
because you just get it wrong.
And that was what was happening a lot of the time,
and that's what I submitted was happening with a lot of these reforms.
Storytelling I've mentioned two or three times already.
Seems to me something we really need to pay much more attention to
and it certainly seems to me a much more significant factor
than e.g. evidence based policy making.
Because evidence based policy making is just one story.
It's one way of telling the story to ministers.
I'm not saying it's wrong.
All we need to say is that it's only one way of doing it
Now what are the other ways of telling that story?
And if you go around departments,
I'll tell you one obvious fact that departments all too often ignore,
is that what they think is the same story about a policy,
is different.
The top level in the departmental court
to the middle level managers, to the staff in the field who are delivering the service.
And you've got three contending stories within the same department,
about what is going on, and how we're actually implementing
this particular policy.
I mean the staggering thing is the extent to which many senior public servants
do not consult lower level staff
when designing implementation programmes.
You are lucky if they go below level six and seven
if they even go down that far,
because there's a kind of separation
between the top of the department and lower levels
and again, just think back to your universities,
I mean, how often do you see your top brass?
The DVC research zooms in
to tell you about what going to happen under 'ref'
and do a ra-ra speech to get you all on side etc, etc.
Try not to yawn too obviously, as you sit there bored for the next 40 minutes etc.
And then he goes, she goes away and hopefully doesn't come back for another year.
And you've got that kind of divorce between
the top policy makers of your institution
and all the people who are actually going to make the changes happen,
if the change is going to happen
and the government departments are just like your universities in that respect.
You've got that divorce, and bridging that divorce
is one of the major problems.
Shared stories is one of the ways of doing it.
Now I know it sounds a bit like another exercise in academic whimsy,
so I was tickled pink to discover
that prestigious places like Harvard business review
now carry regularly articles
which are attempting to say to managers
this is the way in which your should tell stories to you staff
because stories are seen as the way,
first of all creating a shared image of what the organisation is about,
a way of legitimating the policies that the centre is actually making,
a means of socialising new entrants who are coming into the organisation,
and storytelling is... I suppose it's a bit strong to say it was
becoming fashion in business management
who knows what the coming fashion is going to be in business management
but certainly it is an increasingly prominent strand
and a relatively new strand,
in which storytelling is seen as an invaluable tool
to actually help managers do their jobs in those organisations.
So I don't think it can be dismissed
as academic whimsy.
I think there are some serious questions to be asked.
For example, how many stories are there in this organisation?
 To what extent is there a shared story about what we're doing and why we are doing it?
And by a shared story I do not not mean
I hope you got, the strategic plan, all right?
That is not the shared story, that's one version coming from section of it.
What do the people who work there have in common?
Observation is a great way of actually getting at what they have in common.
But also the civil servants are very good at comparing stories
and you sit there and listen to them
and you suddenly realise they've got their own little vocabulary for this
something is 'sound', all right?
What the hell does that mean?
 I'm not saying they're wrong,
and I'm not saying the criteria doesn't work, all right?
Just that I'm an outsider, and I don't know what it means.
And we need to unpack those kinds of criteria
They use words like judgment, he's got good 'judgment'.
They'll use the phrase, they still use the phrase
god alone knows why,
because it's such a post... yes minister, etc, i mean it's just a joke phrase,
they still talk about somebody being a good chap,
and I actually heard one, only one to be fair,
one personally actually talking about there being a good chappess
but what you're getting here is implicit, tacit understanding
of what constitutes a good story
and therefore the basis for making the decision within the department
We need to unpack categories like 'sound',
so we can actually find out what they mean in the heads
of the people who are using them.
and frankly, without being rude to anybody in the room
or anywhere in the country, I don't think we ask those questions
Now, if we want to reform the civil service,
and if we want to get better decisions
in the jargon of the evidence-based people
surely we should understand the decision premises of the people making the decisions.
And we're nowhere near them.
We assume that the means-end rational analysis model
and its decision premises are appropriate
when in fact I suspect that my little example
of 'sound' is much more important when it comes to deciding
whether a story is good or bad.
And sometimes the criteria are ones that would make the evidence-based policy people cringe.
'Will it run' is another one.
now by will it run, they mean a whole range of things
A. Will we get good press?
B. How will the parliamentary party react to it, and so on.
Now, what it seems to me, if you are doing research on stories
we need to know what all these relevant criteria are,
We need some understanding if there's a hierarchy of these criteria
We need to know under what kind of circumstances they are going to be implied
And we want, at some point, to be able to say do they work?
Do we actually get good stories coming out of this particular process
or actually is it a very inward looking
self-regarding and poor stories coming out of it?
And I don't think anybody could answer those questions
given the research that's been conducted on the British civil service so far.
Traditions. We've got contending traditions.
Just in shorthand, because I don't have time to do more.
One of my surprises in this project was the way in which
the old 19th century liberal constitution
was alive and well in British government.
I had no idea, I mean I'm an academic
I'd looked at British government and laughed at ministerial accountability
I mean everybody knows the Finer article etc.
about the ministerial accountability only applies
when the prime minister decides it applies
is normally the way we understand it.
It's no the way the civil servants understand it.
And it's not the way in fact, many ministers understand it.
They still believe in the old 19th century constitution
and they do it to the extent they will have
a parliamentary questions unit which will have twenty people in it
and which the parliamentary questions will take priority
Over any other business.
That's staggering!
You've got a major educational crisis on your hand
What do you use your staff resources for?
Answer: preparing a reply to a back bench MP's question in parliament.
Some people might think, heaven forfend
that that was no the best use of their resources!
Bu tin fact maybe they should concentrate on th crisis and not on the parliamentary question
But they are inculcated in the belief
that parliament matters and you must give
if not a complete answer to the question that has been posed,
at least an answer which is accurate
in so far as it goes, to the question that was proposed
So lies of omission are probably just about admissible
lies of commission are definite no-nos when it comes to doing PQs.
So, you've got that Westminster tradition, you've got the managerial tradition
and that comes in various guises,
and you've also got what I would call a networking tradition
which is the civil service doing its diplomatic representational function out and about.
You've got the professional classes within the civil service
with all the languages that they use
We've broadened the basis of policy analysis in the British government
so we've now got information coming in from think tanks
from academics, from all different kinds of sources
all talking in different languages, all coming from different traditions
And one of the skills of top civil servants it seems to me
is that they're polyglot, they can actually speak most of these languages
most of the time. They don't often get caught out.
I don't think the top of the civil service, most of the time
really believes that managerialism is the solution.
to the problems of British government.
They don't mind being better managers. They've no objection to that.
But it's not the panacea it's often presented to be.
But they speak it beautifully!
They are fluent in managerialism.
They can...put them in any context you like,
and they will talk it with a straight face
and you wouldn't spot the seams as they slipped between the different...
they are so good at this particular skill, now then
it might sound trivial, I'm being slightly flippant in my tone of voice as I say it
I'd hate to envisage a civil service where they couldn't actually do that
The idea that they couldn't take these several languages from their disparate sources
and turn them into a story which their minister will get
that just seemed to me to remain an absolutely central skill for top civil servants
er, but I don't know if any attempt to make that skill
...central. When we talk about the skill set, you know we've had all this
new skills for management for the civil service for nearly a decade now,
it's not in there. It's not part of the skill set you're supposed to have.
The word polyglot, or multi-lingual never occurs,
because this kind of thing is, you know, it's common
it's understood, in fact what it is, is it's tacit
and nobody actually articulates it, or brings it forward.
And finally, the politics of implementation.
It seems to me to be absolutely crucial
top down policy making is just running into so many problems
because they do not consult, and they do not get the information that they need
from the lower levels of the hierarchy, in particular
but from other public sector organisations as well.
The Conservative government, in its recent
you know, the review, the White Paper that came out, SIGH
talked about how we are going to delay policy announcements
until we have sorted out policy implementation problems.
I really suffered, when I got to that phrase
I couldn't actually believe that anybody had written it.
So a minister who is probably in the job for, let's say
he's a long stayer, and he's there for two years,
is actually going to delay his announcement
whilst his top civil servants scurry around
spotting snags. Ministers know that civil servants
have got to spot snags. They still get very irritated by snag spotting.
They don't like it.
So civil servants scurry around spotting snags
and he doesn't, or she doesn't get to make the grand announcement
You know, they're thinking of their biographies, their history books
their standing in the party, their role in parliament.
whether they'll get promoted in cabinet. And they're going to wait
whilst their civil servants spot snags?
It is not going to happen. It is just nonsense.
And moreover what needs to happen is they need to talk
and listen to the several voices within their own department
What can you learn from the street level bureaucrats, if you like?
Government departments have street level bureaucrats
Those street level bureaucrats have an influence on the way policy is delivered
For godsake, let's at least talk to them,
let's know what stories they tell, but we don't do that either.
OK, so pros and cons to conclude.
I love, absolutely love, the Thomas theorem.
Which goes, you'll just have to forgive the language, but it was written in the 1920s,
in which he says, if men define situations as real
they are real in their consequences.
I think that is wonderfully true of civil service reform in British government.
If people believe certain things,
and even if you don't accept their beliefs, nonetheless
it greatly influences the way that they behave.
And we have to take into account people's
understandings, their webs of belief about what
the civil service is doing and what reforms do and do not work.
Secondly, I think we need to recognise that
the civil service is made up of contending traditions.
There is no agreed story.
What you have got is a whole series of groups within
and to some extent without the civil service,
coming forward with their understandings about what is happening.
If you are going to give anybody advice about
how to reform anything, you need to know
these contending traditions and how they bump into one another
and the dilemmas that follow.
One of the dilemmas that follow from this, it seems to me,
is the civil service actually isn't the right target
that what happens all the time in civil service reform
is it bumps into the relationship, underlined three times,
between the civil service and the minister.
And they both have a vested interest in not having
a clear, publicly stated set of objectives
and roles about what each is doing.
Ambiguity suits both of them.
Moreover, I go all the way back to
the former Permanent Secretary of Defence, Cooper,
who actually said ministers don't manage,
they don't come into politics to be managers,
it's not part of their objectives, it's not what they're in the business for.
I think that's right. I mean if I was a permanent secretary or a minister,
and somebody said to me, we've got to have management reform,
I'd smile sweetly, I'd do what I was being asked to do,
but it  wouldn't be where the action is,
The action would be with the Bill which is about to go through Parliament.
The action would be with whatever the crisis is we're facing
at this particular point in time.
Every minister I talk to, management was at best
a secondary consideration.
You were actually quite lucky if it got to be secondary.
because in my opinion after making a difference
i.e. 'what policies can I get on the statute book?'
There was the 'what is my standing?'
What is my standing in parliament, what is my standing in the party?
'What's my standing with the Prime Minister?' would be number two.
The idea that somehow management is going to take over from those priorites
I think is just a tad mind-defying,
You know, it just doesn't... it isn't common sense to think it's going to happen
Another advantage of this kind of approach is surprises.
I never expected to find storytelling.
It never occurred to me. I didn't go in even with the category in my head.
You know, it's not as if I'd read Gabriel's book on storytelling
in organisations and went in looking for it.
I didn't even know there was this private sector management literature,
I just walked into it, and there it was.
I didn't expect to find the 19th century constitution still alive.
OK, every academic caught on British government I had ever taught,
had been a harangue of the outmoded and outdated nature
of the British constitution, and how things like ministerial accountability didn't work.
And that was wrong. I mean, they are alive, they are well.
Oops, why does it always stick when you want to turn over straight away?
Right. Symbolic politics.
It was absolutely clear to me that what ministers do
a lot of the time is symbolic politics.
The phrase I use is 'the appearance of rule'.
Er, there are a tranche of ministers for whom
for whom the appearance of rule is all.
I mean, they love the car, the chauffeur,
the red carpet, the little congregation of people who
meet them at the front door before they go in to give their speech etc etc.
They're addicted to it. 
One of them showed off in front of me.
I'm sure, it was a 'he' of course, did it deliberately.
We got upstairs back into the ministry.
I was allowed to drive in the car. SUCKS TEETH.
One of them was very upset, was very cross because he get a secondhand one.
He didn't get a new one, so he was furious.
Er, and he sent the private secretary all the way back down to the car
to get his coat. And then half an hour later you can guess what they did.
They went back down to the car, and got in the car and went to their next appointment.
It was purely for my benefit to show he'd got all of these minions
whom he could direct and send around.
So symbolic politics is quite important.
And civil servants buy into this, you know.
They actually think their ministers are important.
Right now, sorry I don't have time to go through all the er...
the pros, but I do think that surprises, and getting under the skin
and looking at these every day realities is important for understanding,
then you've got problems with the approach.
One problem, which I run into all the time is relevance.
You can't generalise from this kind of data.
It's a lauded way of putting it because generalisation in this context
invariably means statistical generalisation.
Of course I can't make statistical generalisations.
I can make general statements.
So if you don't like me using the word generalisation
I will make general statements, and one of the general statements I will make
is that the webs of belief and practices,
in the British Civil Service are a key influence
on the outcome of civil service reform.
Now that is a generalisation.
So if you don't think I can generalise then we're clearly going to have to agree to differ.
Er...
The other one is... it's a really hard one this,
if you look at the literature on applied anthropology
they will tell you that when it is used by managers, they hate it.
Because what it does is exposes the several voices within the organisation
and actually leads to disputes and contests within the organisation.
When I write this paper, I get criticised
for 'description becomes justification'.
Therefore I am supporting the civil service in what it's doing.
And I don't think I am.
I think what I am doing is saying to would be reformers
look guys, if you want to change the way the world
the way the world works, step one is to actually understand
how the world works, and your understanding of it
as portrayed by evidence-based policy making managerialism and choice,
does not bear much resemblance
to what happens within the departments.
There's some overlap but not a lot.
So, if you want effective reform,
start with institutional memory, start with better criteria for storytelling,
start with the kind of things I've been talking about
not with e.g. evidence based policy making.
Er... there is a problem with what I do, that's time.
My lot were lovely to me.
I mean three years, wandering in and out of the civil service,
most of the time with no constraint as to
when and where I actually went doing curiosity research.
It's almost an academic's dream to be able to write that kind of a brief.
If you are doing this to help the civil service do a job
clearly you can't have that kind of timescale.
Now, one of the problems with observational fieldwork
is you go where you are led
and you just have to take you time to see what is happening
within the organisation.
There are ways round it, for example there are, believe it or not
obviously in the United States,
teams of anthropologists who go into private sector organisations
and they split the observation up, and a dozen of them
will go and saturate the organisation for a month, and then out.
OK, so there are ways round the time thing, but ultimately I do think
there is a problem with observational research, if you want it to be applied
in that it is actually quite a time consuming method
and it doesn't really do quick and dirty.
And then finally, of course, there's the elite.
Applies... less of a problem as you move down the hierarchy
but at the top of the hierarchy with this kind of research, you do have a problem
and that problem is that they are all powerful.
Er, sorry, if they don't want you to do something
they just say no, and it sticks.
If they don't want you publish something 
they just say no, and it sticks.
Er, now then, for most research
it can be a problem when you're doing British government
but it's particularly acute here, again I was lucky
only a couple of people refused to give me interviews,
I only had a couple of little stoushes
over what I could and could not say, for the most part everybody
didn't care, to be perfectly honest, which was really good,
I was quite happy they didn't care.
But nonetheless, there is that issue there with this kind of research
Who owns this research? Just how far can you go in making it public?
And then finally, in terms of the problems that we get
with this, is these people are so powerful,
they can actually change the way they behave.
It happened. A silly little example
I asked for the permanent secretary's diary
to do a diary analysis of how he spent his day.
and I did it over a one month period
just to demonstrate to him that it wasn't anything that was going to threaten his existence
and he looked at it and was absolutely horrified.
He did not realize he was spending 30% of his time
on the corporate activities of the civil service.
Going to the perm sec's meetings, and things like that.
And so he probably called his diary secretary in,
and he starts reading his diary of these engagements
to stop doing it, so he's in the department more often.
Now then, that was not my intention. LAUGH.
I did not want him to do that.
Another example of exactly the same thing
er, principle private secretary had the desk facing
the window that looked out over Westminster Abbey
Now, I thought it was a little odd that she should prefer the view
to her colleagues.
And I just simply asked, why are you, is the office organised in this way,
And she said, 'oh it's such a lovely view',
but she clearly thought about it over the weekend.
and when she came back in on the... the next time I go back
it wasn't the following Monday, of course she had changed her desk. LAUGH
and it was... and the rest of the office bloody 'ated me!
LAUGH
Because they didn't want her to be looking at 'em.
because when she looks at them she can supervise them.
They thought it was bloody brilliant she was staring out the window! LAUGH
So you've got to be careful, it's the kind of research where
observer influence is all too easy,
er, and mistakes are made.
Now I think the importance of this kind of research is we have spent...
'68 was it Fulton?
And we've spent all the time since trying to reform the British civil service.
with varying degrees of success.
I mean some reforms have stuck, some of the time
in some cases, but it's not what you would call
a successful track record, by any means.
Is this because the civil service is corrupt,
venal, incompetent, stupid?
In my opinion the answer to that is no.
I don't think the reforms have stuck,
because I don't think the reforms fit.
I don't think the reforms fit, because ministers
and civil servants have got a vested interest
in having willed ordinariness
in putting political management at the top of the agenda
and in seeing management as being subordinate and subsidiary
to their major concerns, given the jobs that they do.
No if you want civil service reform, it seems to me,
what you've got to do is actually persuade
ministers and permanent secretaries to change
their relationship.
And that seems to me to be a really big ask.
Because until you change that relationship,
I don't think the other beliefs and practices
in the court will change, because everybody will see
that the permanent secretary manages for willed ordinariness
and takes care of the minister, that's the priority.
If that's the priority, why would you argue
You are not going to. So I think storytelling, although it may sound
as I say, sounds like academic whimsy,
offers an alternative way of getting into the issue of how do we reform the civil service
And it gets into it because this is what the observational method does par excellence,
it actually gets at the beliefs and practices of people
doing their everyday jobs.
And if you don't get at the beliefs and practices of people
doing their everyday jobs
I think you instantly handicap any attempt to reform the civil service.
Thank you.
APPLAUSE
