Liberals should beware ‘deliverology’ guru: Rick Salutin

2016/04/30 2 Comments

Rick Salutin’s contrary note to deliverology, not without merit for the caution it brings (similar note to David Reevely’s: Ontario’s experience shows serious flaws in ‘deliverology’ governance):

For me, the scariest signal yet sent by the Trudeau government was bringing English “deliverologist” Sir Michael Barber, to their Alberta cabinet retreat, to tell them how they’re doing. They imported a British con man who was a perfect accessory during the Blair years, and — now that slippery Tony is gone, replaced by the rawer, more authentic Jeremy Corbyn — he moves on to the colonies. Barber has delivered his spiel in Australia, the Punjab and Maryland. Are we impressed to be in that company?

It’s an early warning sign that the Trudeau folk are starting to believe their own BS. I’m not particularly against BS, everyone in power deploys it; the danger point comes when you start gulping it yourself and not just spooning it out to others. That’s when the vultures start swanning around the retreats.

CBC’s Terry Milewski interviewed colleague Rosie Barton, who was on site, re: the scam. Rosie seemed dubious but said the Brit told his marks they were doing rawther well. Terry, sounding like a true rube, i.e., someone who has no idea that’s what he is — or a candidate for Private Eye’s pseuds corner — said he counts on Rosie for hip terms like deliverology. It’s about as fresh as the 500 channel universe. I happen to own a copy of Barber’s Deliverology 101, from 2011. I won’t say I read it, it’s not really meant for that, but I sort of flapped through it once. It’s loaded with charts, checklists, bullet points: nobody reads these things but they’re meant to make you feel like a practical, can-do type, not someone who wastes time on books — a profile rife in the upper regions of education administrators, who happen to be Barber’s natural habitat.

I’ve avoided defining deliverology because it doesn’t actually exist. It’s just mouthfuls of verbiage. Barber told Paul Wells of Maclean’s, at an earlier cabinet retreat, that he’d been recruited to “the prime minister’s delivery unit” in order to rescue Blair’s government. “It’s not tremendously exciting, but it’s really important, getting the priorities, the definitions of success, the trajectories, the data” — I should’ve said gobfuls of verbiage. You could do a close analysis of his language to show how vacuousness is literarily constructed but it seems to hypnotize people like Wells, who views himself as deeply skeptical. If a Canadian talked in such vapours, Wells would shred him. What is it — the accent?

But of course, as Donald Savoie notes extensively, a lot of what government is good at is “mouthfuls of verbiage.”

Source: Liberals should beware ‘deliverology’ guru: Salutin | Toronto Star

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Meet Sir Michael Barber, the political delivery man: Wells

2016/02/20 Leave a comment

Good profile of the delivery guru, advising the Government.

Given the ambitious nature of the Government’s platform, and the likely need to make some difficult choices given fiscal and other realities, will be interesting four years hence to see what worked and what did not:

Since he left the Blair government, Barber has honed these ideas into what he calls “deliverology,” the art of ensuring governments meet their goals. He’s become a global consultant spreading the gospel of deliverology to governments as far-flung as Australia, the Punjab, the U.S. state of Maryland, and to Ontario under the province’s former Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty. When a large number of McGuinty-era Ontario staffers moved to Ottawa to work for the Trudeau Liberals, Michael Barber could not be far behind.

And so it came to pass that, during a three-day retreat for Trudeau’s cabinet in St. Andrews, N.B., in late January, Barber was in the room with the ministers for almost the entire time. Trudeau has appointed Matthew Mendelsohn, the former director of an Ontario think tank, as a senior public servant responsible for “results and delivery.” Mendelsohn’s job is modelled on the position Barber held with Blair.

Perhaps it is no surprise that Barber, the object of such ardent affection and attention from the new Trudeau crew, is equally impressed with this young Canadian government. “What they were saying was, ‘We know that often, including in the Blair case, it took a whole term for a new government to learn the disciplines of delivery and then get it right in the second term,’ ” Barber told Maclean’s. “ ‘But we want to get it right the first time.’ ”

The obstacles facing any new government are well-known. First, the usual constant barrage of unforeseen events. Second, the pressure to come up with new ideas rather than checking to see how the old plans are working out. Tony Blair was a sucker for a new idea. In his new book How to Run a Government, Barber calls Blair’s first-term administrative style “government by spasm.”

The alternative to spasm is an attempt to install a routine. A new government asks itself a series of basic questions. “One is: What are the priorities?” Barber asks. “The second is: If you succeeded in delivering a given priority, how would you know? What would success look like in 2019, at the end of this mandate?” The third question is, “How would you know at any given moment you’re making progress toward your goals?” This leads a delivery-oriented government to develop a set of indicators—usually publicly available and thus, if they’re heading in the wrong direction, acutely uncomfortable for the government. How many kilometres of roads have been paved to date, how many megatonnes of carbon went into the atmosphere, that sort of thing.

“It’s not tremendously exciting, but it’s really important, getting the priorities, the definitions of success, the trajectories, the data, the routines to monitor progress, and then the ability to solve problems as they arise,” Barber said. “Because however good you are at planning, you’re not going to get it right. The real world never works out exactly as you anticipate. So having routines to correct and adjust the plan all the time is important.”

One element that helped bring Barber and Trudeau together is a common sense that ambition should not be a bad word in government. “There are times when doing little seems to work, and underpromising and overdelivering seems a good option,” Barber said. “But that’s certainly not the analysis of the Trudeau government, and certainly not the prospectus that they put to the Canadian people during the election. They said, ‘Actually, Canada needs big change, we want to build an inclusive, diverse Canada, we want some renewal of faith in democratic institutions, we want to reduce climate change, we need a big infrastructure upgrade.’ These are big challenges.”

Source: Meet Sir Michael Barber, the political delivery man

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