Chapter 5

Preparing the ground

After they join together, a new digital team should spend a few months operating under the radar, getting on with building things. Politicians and senior executives alike can be tempted to launch their new initiatives with great fanfare before they have anything of substance to show. A new digital institution should avoid this at all costs. The time to break cover is after you have shipped something. You must be able to show, not just tell.

The other advantage to holding back on a big launch is that it gives a team more time to prepare for the increased exposure that going public will bring – both within the organisation and to the outside world. Each step a digital team takes towards gaining more visibility increases its influence, while sharpening the risk of damage if something going wrong. You need to be ready for the power and responsibility. It is good for the stakes to increase, but steadily.

No matter how good your delivery team is, the people in this small group are not who should be worrying about the organisation’s future. Their focus must remain on shipping early versions of products and services that meet user needs, and making sure they get better as a delivery team. To do that, they will need cover from the paperwork, plaudits and protestations that could slow them down.

In governments and companies operating on a large scale, there are three layers of people that are essential in protecting the quality and pace of delivery.

Political cover

Ministers decide. That is the crux of their job. They may spend plenty of time on other things; as parliamentarians, constituency cheerleaders, and (in some cases) broadcasters across the nation’s media. Their time on the government payroll, however, is mostly spent selecting a preferred option from the steady parade of menus put in front of them by their advisers and officials. Having extricated themselves from this treadmill, some ex-ministers belatedly realise that they didn’t have time to do a scrap of original thinking themselves.

Inertia is the most powerful force in government. Left alone without political direction, government departments don’t stop doing things. By default, they maintain whatever holding pattern was left behind by the previous occupant of the minister’s chair. If there is no active political hand on the tiller for a long period of time, officials simply get on with preparing an unending pile of options papers, in anticipation of every possible question they could face in the event of a minister who is not lazy or distracted turning up.

The biggest card a minister seeking to influence society can play is to overcome that inertia, and change the momentum behind a particular issue. In the minister’s view, the bureaucracy’s unchecked efforts might be moving too slowly in the right direction, have ground to a complete halt or be heading down the wrong path.

In theory, new ministers arriving in office could adjust all the dials on the departmental dashboard, and completely shift the organisation’s focus and emphasis. In practice, ministers cannot pull all the levers at once – the machine will simply seize up and refuse to move. Ministers must therefore be selective about where they choose to apply their effort. The physical and emotional energy to do this even once shouldn’t be underestimated. Politicians are lucky to get the chance to pick more than two issues where they can change the weather, and making a success of them both requires being luckier still.

For a digital team to exert enough influence to transform how a government works, the sponsoring minister must consider its success as one of her very highest priorities: number one or two. If she does not choose to spend her political capital on it when things get difficult – and is seen by the organisation not to be spending it – then those happy with the status quo will know they can see the threat of change off without too much bother.

This leads on to the second important quality of good political cover: stability. This, unfortunately, is rarely in anyone’s gift but the prime minister or president – and often not even them. Ministerial reshuffles tend to be made for party political reasons, not those of government effectiveness. However, the chances of a digital team embedding itself in the wider organisation are far higher if the political sponsor is secure in their post for several years. Anything less than three years is likely to be insufficient.

The reason for this is obvious. If government ministers are transient figures, anyone with objections to what they are trying to do can simply run down the clock. Delay tactics can be deployed very easily in an organisation that on its best days moves with brick-like fleetness. Regular changes in political leadership tend to set the digital institution back to square one, especially if they happen early in its life. This is partly as a result of the lack of awareness most politicians have of the web. If a new political boss walks in every 18 months with no clear idea of what digital is or what you’re trying to do, you spend the first six months of every term making the same basic arguments. Just at the moment they become effective supporters of the team, they’re replaced.

A third component of effective political cover is which department the minister is responsible for. Putting responsibility for the first digital team under a minister with a specific policy remit – like justice, say – risks boxing it off. Government departments often believe they are special, and in various ways different from their sibling institutions. Attaching the digital transformation agenda to a specific ministry allows others to say: ‘Well, that’s all well and good, but it wouldn’t work here. Tax is completely different to justice. It’s tax! Be reasonable.’

The ideal political cover, therefore, must generally come from a minister responsible for a central ministry. In the UK this was the Cabinet Office; in other jurisdictions, it is often the finance ministry or prime minister’s office. In all cases, the institution needs to have the political expectation that it can operate across departments and policy areas, and practical levers to shape departmental behaviour.

Different countries cut their central departments into different pieces, with different power dynamics and leverage over departments. Sometimes the whip hand is determined by the political occupants of the ministerial jobs, other times it is the institutional weight of the organisations themselves. However weak a British Chancellor might be personally, the Treasury will almost always be the first among equals in departmental terms because of the power it has over allocating money. In any case, the political support for a successful digital team needs to be sat in a powerful and aligned centre.

Political cover should not be seen as a necessity for setting up successful digital teams only in governments. Very similar rules operate in large businesses, albeit with the word ‘political’ read with a small ‘p’. Corporates are as burdened with legacy and inertia as governments. Just like ministers, chief executives have a finite limit of places on which to focus their energy and momentum. Like government, executives are regularly shuffled to shore up alliances and sideline threats. Like government, it is extremely difficult to transfer transformation from a business unit to the whole organisation – a strong centre is better placed to work across the group.

Chief Digital Officer

No matter how well placed and enthusiastic your political cover, it is something to be used sparingly. To run the digital institution day to day, you need the right leader on the ground. For them to have a chance of success, they need to be given the right mandate.

There is a very good chance that the right candidate for this job is not currently in your organisation. The role of the Chief Digital Officer (CDO) is that of disruptor-in-chief. Even for an incumbent with a very strong personality, that task is not an easy one. To succeed requires them to openly ask uncomfortable questions about the expectations of an organisation they have already forged a relatively long and successful career in. To some extent, they need to challenge the legitimacy of their own path to win seniority and trust. That’s hard to do with credibility. All new CDOs must have the right to ask what seem to be very obvious questions of their employers, because sometimes these turn out not to have good answers. Incumbents may not be given the opportunity to look with truly fresh eyes.

Hiring your CDO from outside carries its own risks. Most large organisations can recall at least one experience of being burned by bringing in outsiders. Often there is fault on both sides. In the UK government at least, there is often the assumption – on both sides of the public/private divide – that a robust injection of corporate best practice is all that’s needed to provide a shot-in-the-arm to a lazy, moribund Whitehall. For their part, government officials justifiably resent the idea that someone with no experience of their world can turn up claiming to know all the answers. The more adversarial bureaucrats among them often fail to resist the temptation to make life harder for their new colleagues than it needs to be. More often than not the business people (and, unfortunately, they are mostly businessmen) come prepared for draughts, only for the five-dimensional chessboard to come out. They sprint into the quicksand, with the more tenacious among them guided towards it by senior officials.

Wherever they come from, the prospective CDO must be disruptive without the expectation that the organisation they are joining is (a) full of people who are basically idle and incompetent, and (b) what worked in their old job can simply be cut and pasted into their new one. We have seen several corporate titans turn up in government with exactly these preconceptions, and fail. Talking to their predecessors is a good move for the CDO-elect to make.

Having a clear, open-minded impression of the organisation they’re joining is an essential prerequisite for any new senior leader. However, the new CDO must balance a lack of prejudice with a very clear vision for how the organisation should change. The risk of being pragmatic to a fault is that the strong culture of the place you walk into will envelop you entirely. If they don’t have something to aim for from the minute you begin the job, the CDO is always likely to be playing catch-up.

All this points to the kind of experience a CDO needs. The best candidates for the role are not necessarily those who have cut their management teeth in digitally native organisations, companies like Google and Amazon created during the internet era. Some executives from these worlds may have only ever worked in a culture largely responsive to the new expectations that the web has set for consumers, citizens and employees alike. Digital natives will not have had to pick fights over uprooting legacy, nor are they necessarily paragons of the working practices that will transfer smoothly into your existing organisation. The leaders likely to most flourish in transforming government will be of the internet era, but understand what preceded it. They have changed the direction of organisations operating with significant amounts of technological and human legacy. They will have replaced old tools and old thinking without killing the company.

The nature of this kind of experience implies a few other essential qualities. They will have a good working knowledge of the technology of the open internet. That doesn’t mean they have to be hackers, but they should be able to explain what actually happens when you click on a hyperlink, and what API stands for. They should also espouse the working practices outlined in earlier chapters – agile teams, iterative development, openness – and have proved themselves willing to stick by their staff when times get tough. This last characteristic is perhaps the most important of all.

How senior your CDO needs to be really depends on your organisation’s instinct for hierarchy. Most large, old organisations – and all government bureaucracies – still set great store by grades. When government officials introduce themselves to one another, it is typical for them to say, ‘I’m the Grade 7 from the Department of Pencils.’ Name, rank, serial number; this is the agreed shorthand for how most bureaucracies convey authority. The grade of your CDO actually matters less than their ability to get access to the team’s main political sponsor. Nonetheless, for smoothing the path at the official level, pulling rank still matters. Ideally, the CDO needs to have a seat at whatever board level determines the biggest decisions about how the organisation manages itself. In business, that means being on a par with the likes of the chief operating officer or chief finance officer. In government, that typically means they need to rank on a par with the officials charged with running departments. We didn’t manage this in the UK, partly because we didn’t realise quite how important it was before we started, and partly because some senior officials were decidedly unkeen on the prospect after we did. Other jurisdictions, such Ontario and Peru, have learned from our misstep.

A basic and obvious-sounding point is that the digital institution’s leader should be one job, done by one person. In governments and corporates, board-level responsibility for the tasks a digital leader should be expected to handle tend to be scattered far and wide. Accountabilities cut across multiple people and departments. When things go awry, it is unclear who should be carrying the can. The need to combine various jobs and sinecures into a single role can be a useful bargaining chip when negotiating the seniority of the post before the CDO post is advertised.

As a quid pro quo for taking on such a big job, the CDO needs to be given tools that give them a fighting chance of success. When companies and governments make marquee digital and technology hires, defining this mandate and landing it within the organisation is often the missing piece. The best CDO candidate in the world isn’t going to get much done with just their great job title.

The first CDO should therefore have unequivocal responsibility for all public-facing digital services on the internet, and the power to direct all government spending on digital. These two powers underpin the CDO’s ability to drive change through an organisation at scale. Exactly how to deploy those powers will come later. We talk more about this in chapter 7.

Given the leader’s importance and mandate, it may seem counterintuitive to hire the first delivery team before the CDO turns up. In practice, that tends to be the right sequence of events. Most CDO candidates worth their salt will already have plenty of attractive offers on the table, most of them better paid and less exhausting than a post transforming your organisation. They won’t want to join you unless you can prove you’re serious, and one way to prove you’re serious is to have a high-quality group of people already inside the tent delivering high-quality work. However friendly and enthusiastic the politicians wooing them may be, any decent CDO will run a mile from having a day 1 team only composed of policy fixers.

That is not to downplay the fixers’ importance. Very little will get done without them.

Bureaucratic hackers

If the product team covered in the previous chapter is your first team, your second team is the bureaucratic hackers. It isn’t easy to classify in precise terms what the hackers do, partly because the ground they cover is so wide. In the simplest terms, the hackers are the people who clear a path for the digital delivery teams to deliver the best possible services for users, unblocking the things that would slow them down and avoiding any traps.

Governments and large old companies acquire a lot of baggage. Getting things done in big organisations, especially at below the personal connections that exist at executive levels, often requires a special blend of dogged determination and verve. It also means knowing the unwritten rules of an organisation, be they complicated processes, the right people to talk to or the appropriate etiquette for approaching certain questions.

While the digital team is there to act as an agent of change for the organisation, that does not mean it has carte blanche to be ignorant of the current rules, much less rip up or ignore them all. If you go back to first principles, many of the most frustrating aspects of working in a bureaucracy – the paperwork, the delays, the acronyms and language – are grounded in perfectly reasonable intent. Often there are very good legal, security or moral reasons lying behind the way things are. The problem arises when wise intent is smothered by many layers of abstraction. As experienced hands within the organisation, the job of the bureaucratic hackers is to the get to the bottom of the intent behind the rules, explain this to the digital incomers, and ensure that the new teams follow them to everyone’s satisfaction. Over time, the hackers can steadily push for replacing the rules and processes for alternatives, on the basis that the digital institution has now proven (rather than just claimed) that they are simpler, clearer and faster at meeting the original intent.

There are many different areas where an ability to go back to first principles in the interests of speed are of invaluable aid to the digital team. These range from the small things – knowing which corporate form-filling exercises are non-­negotiable, and which can be safely put to the bottom of the pile, for example – to fundamental enablers of digital transformation: buying products and services from suppliers and other activities brigaded under the world of procurement; recruiting, rewarding and managing the performance of staff, plus the other challenges of HR; understanding what security protections are proportionate, and who is a trusted arbiter of that trade-off. You can’t safely challenge the prevailing way these things are done without understanding the reasons why they work that way in the first place.

In government, the ability to understand and navigate the arcane world of policy and winning ‘clearance’ is paramount. If you can’t get agreement to things that need to be signed up to by the whole of the organisation through official channels, you are effectively stuck as a digital team. Equally, if you manage to do this at a far higher pace than is typically expected, you won’t achieve the pace of delivery you need to prove the benefits of digital transformation. There is a huge amount of skill and emotional intelligence involved in getting this right; knowing how to engage ministers’ private staff, which committees you must go to, how the papers should be written, to whom you speak to square off beforehand, when to make your pitch. The work of the GDS’s bureaucratic hackers was less visible and often less heralded than the public-facing services that reached users. It shouldn’t have been. Their work often anticipated the most dangerous blockers before they happened, and quietly fixed those that were unavoidable.

The best bureaucratic hackers are calm, angry people. Not uncontrollably angry people – directionless rage at the organisation you work for is not a productive state. Nor do you want people who feel weary and defeated, those who have seen all the organisation’s dysfunctions before and conclude: ‘Well, it’s typical, but what can you do?’ You need intelligent, canny people who have worked for the institution long enough to know that it could be a lot better than it currently is, and are passionate enough to challenge the things they believe are holding it back.

First 100 days

Having done the groundwork to form a protective shell around a rapidly moving delivery team, the three to six months that follow are the period when the digital institution can move at its very fastest. The team should move so quickly that by the time any potential objectors have noticed the biggest changes, there’s no longer a discussion to be had.

Pretending that changing the way government operates is like a military campaign is a little silly, but there are some common strategic traits. Though you often hear of careless haste in conflict, strategic skill has never been associated with long delays. And claiming territory – or, to be more precise, claiming a mandate to be the legitimate decision maker on certain parts of government business – is something you have to do quickly, preferably before anyone (including yourself, sometimes) has recognised the implications. In an exchange that went down in early GDS legend, a government chief information officer of long standing dismissed the new digital team as ‘tinsel’. Without a clear mandate behind it, he might have been right.

One of the more endearing qualities of organisations with long-fixed rules and conventions is that, provided you turn up to meetings and speak with a firm, polite tone, most people will assume you know what you’re talking about, and have been given permission by some higher power to get on with doing the things you say need to be done. In some bureaucracies, a burst of decisiveness can be as refreshing as it is unexpected. ‘That woman seems to be very sure that this board needs to be closed down, and if she says the boss agrees, I suppose we’d better pack up.’ This superpower is a time-bound quality – people eventually work out what you’re doing, and really dig their heels in – but it is invaluable early on. Use it to clear as much nonsense out of your way as possible.

The primary objective for the CDO’s first 100 days, having brought together digital delivery teams with bureaucratic hackers, should be to clearly set the team’s future mandate in a way that sets a course for tackling the structural barriers to digital change, and make sure the wider organisation knows that this is how it is going to be. The new CDO should prioritise a small number of tasks to get things moving the right way.

Setting the right culture

Culture is a strange mix of conscious decisions and unpredictable alchemy of people thrown together. Getting it right brings huge benefits; getting it wrong can spell disaster. The UK government’s digital culture was often summed up by the symbols that every visitor remarked upon: the bunting hung all over the office, the stand-up meetings where presenters faced heckling for failing to explain any acronyms, the cakes, the jeans, the monthly GDS all-staff meetings to celebrate successes. The same recipe was later taken out to government offices all over the country, where digital teams fought with estates managers over whether putting sticky notes on walls represented a health and safety risk – and won. Culture manifested as workspaces where someone was more likely to walk over and ask a question than send an email. From the start, the GDS deliberately set a difficult cultural tone to the organisation it was part of – it was proudly (and some said arrogantly) different, open and combative. Nobody could miss the fact that the digital institution was setting itself apart. That didn’t always meet with approval, especially when digital teams were criticised for lacking empathy with those working in a more typical bureaucratic world. Work hard to create a culture, not a culture war.

Defining and recruiting the digital institution’s leadership team

Just as hiring a product team quickly is generally impossible to do through the normal routes, your standard recruitment processes are unlikely to be adequate for finding other leaders. Establishing the norm early on that you will reshape the standard process to get the people you need, legally and openly, is important. The big medium-term advantage of doing this is setting a precedent for other departments to use the same loopholes you have created. Others will appreciate you creating a space that allows them to bring in better people, provided you make it as easy for them to use as you.

Bring disparate threads and teams together

Large organisations often end up with several separate teams working simultaneously on very similar issues. This is inefficient, but the more insidious productivity problem is worse: duplication stokes a kind of perverse competition, endless ‘coordination’ meetings and turf-war arguments.

In organisations not yet comfortable with digital working, the chances are that several teams will have responsibility for different bits of the digital and technology agenda. Restructuring those teams to put them under one roof with one leader and line of accountability cuts through much of this noise. The GDS was an amalgam of six different teams spread across three different departments. The CDO mustn’t let perfect be the enemy of the good when pushing for consolidation; big organisations and governments will always be fragmented. Focus on removing the obvious doubling-up.

Move all delivery teams to co-located accommodation where agile working is easily possible

You know how sometimes you turn up at a new place and just instantly fall for it, knowing that however long you spend there won’t be enough? Your digital team’s office won’t be like that. The GDS’s first home looked like what it was: an unloved government building with no single owner, filled with desks bound for charity clearance and decorated by distracted contractors out of whatever materials could be justified in the event of a trouble-making Freedom of Information request. As long as it has desks, walls, windows and a good internet connection, everyone can fit in it, and you can make reasonable changes whenever you like, that will do – provided co-­located teams can work together.

Writing a ‘Hello World’ blog post43

Government officials are not expected – or even allowed, in many cases – to talk to people from the outside world, and journalists in particular. Companies concerned about commercial confidentiality tend to impose similar restrictions. All interactions with the press must be made through a designated communications team. The aim of that team tends to be ensuring that the team says as little as possible, and, if forced to speak, that it is not saying anything too interesting. Talking to people in an open and relatively approachable way is part of doing digital properly, so getting agreement to run separate digital channels and post information without several layers of clearance is a must. Most senior officials and executives will instinctively feel this is an unnecessary risk. Persuading (and then showing) them otherwise should be high on the CDO’s first agenda, making clear that the blog is the team’s primary internal and external comms channel.

One reading of this list risks painting the new CDO as the drunk who walks into an unfamiliar pub and takes a swing at the whole bar. In an ideal world, there will be no need for any arguments at all. A well-judged charm offensive might win the day. If you’re lucky, other corporate functions like the HR and finance teams that these five tasks bump up against may be delighted to come onboard and test out a different way of doing things. They may have wanted an excuse or the permission to do so for years, but weren’t lucky enough to get the fortunate circumstances that have landed in the digital team’s lap.

However, it’s likely that only a lonely handful in each function will be exactly the angry types you’ll need for scaling up your bureaucratic hackers. There’s a reason organisations haven’t already sorted out the problems the CDO is trying to overcome. In the toughest cases, an entire division will hate you for challenging their orthodoxy, and fight every step of the way. In this scenario, compromises are inevitable, but not capitulation. Giving in is dangerous; if your digital institution fails to get reasonable control over your hiring, workspace, communications, structure and purpose, the room you’ll have for manoeuvre in the months ahead will be far more limited.

In parallel with these ‘hard’ steps that give several unequivocal messages to other functions in the organisation, the first 100 days is also the time for a CDO and the collective digital team to establish the peer relationships that generate soft power. Holding face-to-face meetings with all the top officials and ministers who will be key partners in the first year is a must for the new CDO.

Of course, one of the best ways to win friends and influence people is to give them things they want that they’ve never been able to get before, especially if it makes them look good. The GDS enjoyed an early coup when it built Prime Minister David Cameron an app that allowed him to show off about the success of Tech City at a major conference – and by implication show that his officials were capable of keeping pace with the start-ups. Finding out exactly how to please your future trickiest customers is not a bad way of spending your first few months.

Winning friends internally is far from enough though. Much more importantly, it is now time for people outside the bubble of your organisation to start seeing the difference.

Summary


43 This blog post from Hillary Hartley, the Chief Digital Office of Ontario, is a great example: https://medium.com/ontariodigital/hello-ontario-f11c4e0a847