The recent white papers – Building Britain's Future and on education – once again focus on systems, structures and strategies. It's all just so 1970s.
Back in 1982 the best-selling management book of all time - In Search of Excellence - used the approach being pioneered by McKinsey & C0, called their 'Seven S' framework. Actually, there was a much better explanation of this in a less well known book – also by McKinsey people – published a year earlier called The Art of Japanese Management (by Pascale and Athos).
What was new in their approach was to emphasise that just tinkering with strategy, structure and systems rarely produced the desired results. That approach had dominated the 1960s and 1970s. The other four 'S's' – shared values, staff, skills and above all style (culture) – were crucial to making things actually happen. This is bit like the recent fashion for distinguishing between 'hard' and 'soft' power in international relations and leadership (Joseph Nye).
While New Labour has sometimes seemed to 'get it', mostly it has fallen back on Whitehall's default position – when in doubt, change structures, call it a strategy and pretend you have created a new system. It doesn't and hasn't worked, but here we go again. More changes to structures, systems and strategies.
Not that there aren't 'hard' bits of the system that need changing, but they are not the ones that get changed. Even if they were, they are only 'hygiene' factors – they need to be got right but won't by themselves make much difference; they permit (or inhibit) success but don't produce it.
To really change public services – 'transformational' change in the current fashionable jargon – requires a step change in the public's compliance with policies and confidence to participate in 'co-production' of social outcomes. That means a real change in the culture of public services, which won't be achieved by some feeble attempts at granting 'entitlements' to people who will largely be uninterested or unable to avail themselves in them (except for the usual pushy middle-classes that is).
It seems highly unlikely that New Labour could exercise 'soft power' in this way anymore anyway. Changing cultures – which requires consistent campaigning over long periods and getting out there to actually lead rather than sitting in Whitehall offices issuing white papers – also requires credibility. New Labour has lost far too much to be any good at soft leadership, at least not without some major renewal.
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