What state transformation requires: a turning point in the UK and learning from "pothole politics"

With the incoming new Prime Minister in the UK, Andy Burnham, transitioning from a mayor to national-level leader, and against the backdrop of the early success of “pothole politics” in New York from a public engagement perspective, creating a wave of national-level races following this political stance in the US, we’re revisiting what these kinds of sweeping changes require.

"Pothole politics": in 1970s Baltimore, facing high taxes and crumbling infrastructure, with low public trust (sound familiar?), William Schaefer was the incoming Mayor, who would later become the Governor of the state of Maryland. (Maryland is one of the smallest US states, but with an economy still 20% of the UK's national GDP now, which is important context for comparisons between US and UK policymaking).

He hyper-focused on the detail of how the municipal services delivered (or didn't) in their roles, and in particular on potholes, abandoned cars etc. He toured parts of the city himself to ensure that improvements that citizens asked for were being delivered. Through this, he created a tangible and strong sense of trust and reciprocity with voters - which helped him deliver a larger political project of transformation at scale.

The point of "pothole politics" isn't that you focus 'on' potholes, it's that in a context where public trust in institutions is low, you win some of it back by proving you can deliver on the things people tell you they want to be fixed in their everyday environment, as a precursor to gaining their trust and confidence that you can deliver on larger political or economic goals you set out. (And here’s more on why potholes are a smart, anti-polarising topic to choose, from which we can learn much here in the UK).

Mayor Mamdani with a literal pothole: fun story - when asked by the CEO of Cambridge City Council how to engage citizens and renew trust in local government 4ish years ago, I said "fix all the potholes in a month and sign your personal name to each one in paint, with a number to text to fix it". Great minds :D

One of the frequent themes in political discourse both in the UK and the US is how "you can't do" new, radical, or structural things, because of politics, or because the voting public won't tolerate anything but comforting fictions. What Mamdani's project in New York is showing is that it is possible to challenge this orthodoxy, if you build public trust from the ground up (literally, in the case of potholes), by setting out what you are going to do, and doing it, visibly, with people. What this means for larger, transformative agendas is that it's not about the storytelling alone - or charisma - though those are important: it's about having a coherent plan for bridging the promise/action gap so common in what large institutions, be they government, academic, companies, or others, say - vs what they do.

In some ways, this is "easier" at the local level, as accountability, ie the tangible evidence of progress on your plan, is closer to home. But the trick is to figure out how this principle - of delivering the "small" stuff as a reciprocity intervention, to deliver on trust building with people, where they are - works across the complexity of a country (a physically small, and centralised country - so this is much easier a project in terms of challenge in the UK than in many other countries in which we have worked, incidentally).

All of society work - based on evidence of progress

To transform business as usual (that isn’t working) into a different and more effective approach for the 21^st century, the civil service, local government, the “quadruple helix” (govt, plus private sector, academia, and civil society), and all of society – this requires a greater level of learning, work, and engagement from all of these groups, and critically, all of us as citizens as well. Not just saying, but doing.

Many people are quite rightly pushing back against endless think pieces cluttering the airwaves saying something along the lines of “Andy Burnham will be fine as long as he does exactly what I say” and if it doesn’t work “he didn’t do it right”, invariably by people who haven’t built the solutions they are suggesting, and who don’t stick around long enough to see the hard yards of when the changes and innovations they recommend hit the messy reality of what transforming a state really means.

So what do we do instead, given the ubiquity and apparent power, despite no tangible progress from listening to, these takes? And how can we address our lost decade of worsening problems in the state here in the UK (and in the US), leading to the urgent challenges we can all see around us?

Not just the "what" but the "how"

We at the Curiosity Incubator | Accelerator for Good have written before about the problems of survivorship bias – using only the data of examples that “survived” ie succeeded – in our sector’s reliance on nice stories written by people who didn’t do the work, ie case studies.

But the breaking down of how stuff works (and has worked, or not worked, before) is critical to understanding how we can build, quickly, better. Mamdani explicitly cites "pothole politics" as the new version of "sewer socialism" (which has a really fascinating history, here's the wiki - but absolutely terrible branding) and signals his understanding that to get people to trust a political philosophy that has a hot button, very negative history in parts of US culture, you have to gain trust by delivering on the things people care about and can see, first.

Increasingly, citizens aren’t willing to wait around for those in charge to learn the obvious and hard lessons of setting out on a new path without any map or plan, and falling at the immediate and obvious hurdles (people want solutions, not policies). So new approaches to how to rethink solutions in government are urgently needed.

Andy Burnham was in the first cohort of the Harvard Kennedy School Bloomberg programme, so he has had an accelerated learning experience of not just “what” but “how” in government, including how to break down "case studies" ie examples into learning and building exercises rather than storytelling or policy inspiration alone.

[Key health warning though: the Bloomberg approach has its flaws - its worldview presumes everything is or should be like a megacity conurbation and that tech is always a scaling solution for good, ie some of the same problematic thinking as in Test, Learn, Grow’s conception and execution (that’s something for another blog). But the building blocks at least exist and Burnham has learnt them, in a cohort with 25+ other countries’ mayors - a richness of comparison and learning we sorely need more of in the UK].

The peerless innovation in govt savant Jorrit de Jong looking dapper in the Bloomberg classroom at Harvard Kennedy School

New territory in government: where to start and rules of thumb

To get us started, here are some rules of thumb of what we have found worked (and what definitely didn’t work), for a project of transformation here in the UK - or in the US, with similar and accelerating state capacity challenges – from our experience in over 40 countries so far.

You don’t have to be a Harvard (or MIT, like David Miliband) graduate to know this stuff – in our experience, Brazil’s ENAP is best in the world at this; and we have found in our work that countries in the global south are much further ahead in assessing and working on state capacity than our experience in the UK and US.

And most often, you don't have to know the fancy theory to be able to build good work: it's frequently people at the Place or organisation level, trying and retrying to build solutions that know the most about 'what works'. Some things to think about in terms of the intellectual humility required for learning and change, and what kind of knowledge is practically useful.

1. Capability: for this major shift of power to work, people at an individual level, up to teams, departments, and whole of govt, need the capabilities to do work differently. Everyone agrees that the current state of play isn’t working; yet the blame or reason for that is located outside of themselves. Start at home: build your personal efficacy, quickly, first. Quick exercise: mentally map where the blockages to getting done what you need to get done are, and instead of giving up or saying “we can’t because”, identify how you personally can get around those barriers. Without permission, without budget, without extra anything: just you, yourself. You will be astonished what you can actually achieve if you just get started and put your whole focus, and social and political capital, into it.

   
   

2. Learning from what didn’t work: We were asked about pre-mortems as a building tool in our work with the Cabinet Office and colleagues– and pre-mortems can be great: if you regularly do post-mortems of how eg crisis situations went. And then change your approach to work, learning the lessons from those. But if, as current civil service practice goes, you don’t do this as a regular and serious part of your ongoing work, you are then doomed to repeat the exact same errors, the next time a crisis or any additional challenge crops up. Given we are in polycrisis territory, we can no longer afford the fiction that we just return to “business as usual” without learning, changing, adapting – and in some cases, deprioritising as well as reprioritising, what happens.

   
   

3. Responsibilities, not just rights, in civic space: it’s very in vogue to jump straight into participatory forms of government practice to signal how ‘in touch’ we are. But without a coherent and serious ability to deliver the change that participatory forms of government would create, this isn’t just ineffective: it’s unethical. Ditto “national” “platforms” that recreate the top down “scaling” of tech products whilst masquerading as consensus-building participatory formats. You can’t build a “better” Amazon by copying Amazon’s exact formulation and hoping that how it’s built is somehow divorced from what it does, you have to build something genuinely different, from and with, the ground up. Equally, devolving solutions design responsibility to citizens is not a great idea: people know the most about the challenges they are facing, in their lives – but designing solutions is primarily your job, not theirs. “North star” stuff, where we create a fiction that the government will change its policy direction based on a design sprint, is not just misleading, it’s an unethical practice. If we collectively can’t deliver a change, we shouldn’t suggest that we can, in a convening with citizens, it wastes not just their time, but their trust – and we need to be honest with ourselves and with people about what’s possible, and what can (and can't) be built, together.

   
   

4. Knowing who knows what, and 'how', and who is bullshitting you: we talk about ‘hallucinations’ from AI tools, but it’s instructive to get back to the original meaning of this phenomenon: someone (or something) confidently bullshitting us. A very enlightening conversation recently with someone in the policy sphere led to this statement: “but we don’t really know why anything works in policy though”. This floored me, but it was very instructive. Yes, this is all a continual process of learning, but knowing how to strip down new solutions suggestions to their essential components and do a thorough bullshit-o-metre approach to test them for what is structurally sound vs not is central to success of new endeavours. Telling which things are based on something and can be built, vs lovely-sounding jargon that doesn’t mean anything in a practical sense, is increasingly urgent. (This is of course linked to the learning points: if we don’t know what the building blocks are, and we don’t learn, either from other countries, levels of govt, sectors, or from our own past actions, then we are a bit stuck).

We’ll see what the next few months brings – overall, grappling with the building blocks of solutions creation for and with people, where they themselves are, on things they care about - not by policybros who write nice-sounding prose, but by people who have built those solutions, where they are – is critical.

Critical to learn from, to understand, and to amplify, to grapple with what is needed to transform our weakened state into something clear in its ability to serve its people and work with them on better ways forward for us all. Onwards!