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A new era of system leadership
As published in Re:State's collection of essays Re:Think
Let’s play the ‘what if?’ game, and look at the confluence of recent events over the last few decades where technology and the state intersect, and imagine different outcomes.
What if:
In 2007, the UK and Europe rejected the Google acquisition of Doubleclick on the grounds of anti-competitiveness in an emergent market. The UK’s position in adtech and marketing industries was strengthened, and we went on to grow our international reach in digital commerce while reducing the monopolisation of personal and public information.
In 2012, in light of a series of technology failures across health and the wider public sector, we committed to putting small businesses at the heart of our digital strategy, incubating thousands of new digital companies across the UK, and creating new value in public procurement. New digital frameworks with preferential awards to sovereign, open source and interoperable players paved the way for a resurgence of AI, technology and digital markets, shaped towards public needs and providing financial stimulus away from the South East.
In 2014, the UK Government stepped in to stop Google acquiring Deepmind. Instead, it took a golden share and created a guaranteed market for its new public-oriented machine learning specialist, which goes on to lead health technology and Covid-19 response, creating a UK-based hyperscaler to rival the US platforms. It opens its innovative works under general public licenses, creating a legacy of public and private AI research and innovation for the UK.
In 2015, building on the financial and user-facing success of the GOV.UK and other platforms like Notify and Pay, the Treasury doubled down on these platforms and invested £400 million to create a dozen more Digital Public Goods. These platforms, for payment, forms, data management, information sharing, identity and data registries, go on to remove hundreds of billions of pounds of public procurement spending over the next decade. In addition, removing much of the UK’s dependence on legacy, closed technologies and reducing Whitehall’s stifling departmental barriers to change. Instead, the UK is home to a world leading culture of public oriented technologists and data scientists once again.
In 2021, learning the lessons from the Covid-19 crisis response structures, cross-party agreement was reached that the Whitehall command and control structures must be overhauled. Departmentalism is reduced, open and interoperable standards are deployed militantly, and the Green Book approach to funding failing technology programmes is finally removed, replaced by an iterative funding model built on feedback loops and team delivery.
In 2025 as the shocks from the US trade policy reverberate around Europe and beyond, the UK is able to turn to its own platforms, data management, and private technology markets shaped to provide competition and innovation. As the BRICS nations start to share common technology platforms based - Aadhaar in India and Pix in Brazil most notably - the UK is able to cleave to a new world order of technological capability, with the UK’s data and digital sovereignty assured and its technocratic public sector now exporting and supporting the drive for digitally-driven growth across Europe and beyond.
Well, perhaps.
We can only deal with the world we have, but time and again it is clear that outcomes could have been different, and are in part knowable, if only there was an informed interest in the systems at play. But interest like that has been mostly absent when it comes to technology and digital issues, and for better or worse we live in a technocratic age, so understanding systemic outcomes is table stakes for governments.
To reimagine the Civil Service model yet not dispose of its cherished values – independence, truth to power and so on - is possible. We need to see it as an actor in a system rather than a machine of its own right. Currently, the demand for control, for Green Book slavishness, the false certainty of multi-year programme approaches, is not producing the necessary results that citizenry and politicians desire.
Departmentalism, the bindweed of modernity, is not the cause but the symptom of a lack of system thinking and situational awareness. Process trump's prediction and discounts learning and experience. More than half a million, largely generalist public servants point to a systemic failure to reform.
We need to think about the State not as a machine, but as a system of interdependence that is woefully set up for a digital age. Rather than ask which desks to reshuffle in Whitehall, or hold long inquiries into arcane economic theory, we need to act and reform key components of the system’s design.
I welcome Re:State and look forward to seeing how its work drives positive feedback loops in and outside of government: resetting incentives and constraints; re-designing information flows to give public sector actors situational awareness; external change agents and where to intervene in a system to enable change. It may sound esoteric, but any complex system needs clear goals and a mindset to deliver. And it needs leaders capable of imagining different futures, as they will be informed by the state of the system, not limited by the system's Victorian constraints.
My imaginary near past on the tech/regulation axis was not all that farfetched. All of those issues were visible, some even partly resolved. What was missing was leadership capable of gearing whole systems to deliver that change, rather than leaders demanding false certainty from imaginary machines which were never designed for interconnected, digital economies and societies.
It’s time to start again and restate the need for a modern state, starting with system leadership, not silo management.
Written by
Mike Bracken
Founder