Might one of Boris Johnson’s first acts as prime minister be to renovate the offices in No 10? According to his new senior adviser, Dominic Cummings, one simple way to improve the UK government is changing the spaces where decisions are made. If Cummings gets his way, out would go the polished wood tables, fireplace and ticking antique clocks. In would come banks of screens, predictive computer models and untested cognitive tools. Downing Street could look like more like a Nasa control centre than a stately home.
And that’s not all he would change. Cummings has gone so far as to suggest one of his primary motivations for involving himself in Brexit was the once-in-a-half-century opportunity it would allow to fundamentally reform the British state. Over the years, he has repeatedly criticised Whitehall as achingly slow, blindly driven by the news cycle, staffed by ineffective conformists, oblivious to evidence, and out of touch with advances in technology. He thinks the civil service is staffed by “hollow men” who are incapable of thinking wisely about big problems and acting on them.
So Cummings’s ideas about reforming government are bound to excite some and anger others. But to understand properly his vision of the future of government, it is best to take a sober look at his thoughts. He has some good ideas, but his vision for the future of government also has dangerous flaws.
Since being the chief strategist behind Vote Leave, Cummings has withdrawn from public life to spend time reading and writing. His ideas about how to reform government can be found on his fascinating blog. In his most recent post, he outlines a range of solutions for transforming Whitehall. They include building high-performing teams, using forecasting tournaments, conducting “pre-mortems”, creating “red teams”, harnessing new data-visualisation techniques, utilising computational models and drawing on some recent thinking about mega-projects.
Many of Cummings’s ideas for reform are good. His idea of running forecasting tournaments to make tough decisions is backed up by perhaps the best available recent study of forecasting out there. His suggestion of conducting pre-mortems by getting decision-makers to imagine the project they are working on has being a colossal failure is frequently used by everyone from fire-fighters to central bankers. His proposition of creating “red teams” that explicitly challenge the dominant point of view is also a great way to encourage an organisation to question its own assumptions.
However many of Cummings’s ideas for civil service reform sound great on a blog but are likely to prove disastrous in practice. The first of these ideas is redesigning the space in which Whitehall decision-makers work. Cummings is keen on creating “seeing spaces” that resemble the control room of a nuclear power plant. These might look cool in an action film, but they will not be so cool in reality. Research on open-plan workspaces shows they are terrible. They make employees more stressed, less engaged, less productive, less likely to share ideas and more likely to act unethically and make bad decisions. Surrounding decision-makers with dozens of screens streaming real-time data will create a high-pressure environment where people are overloaded with information. If this happens, the quality of decisions generally deteriorates.
It’s also worth remembering that a similar plan has been tried before. After Gordon Brown took over as prime minister, he visited Michael Bloomberg, who was then mayor of New York. During his visit, Brown was impressed by Bloomberg’s office. The mayor sat in the middle at a control desk and was surrounded by screens and advisers. On his return to London, Brown tried to replicate Bloomberg’s control centre in No 10. I suspect that this office redesign was one of the reasons behind Brown’s downfall. It meant the introverted prime minister was constantly surrounded by people and overwhelmed by information. This made him constantly on-edge, grumpy and increasingly indecisive.
The second questionable idea Cummings has for civil service reform is a wholesale change in decision-making tools. Cummings thinks the stacks of papers, red boxes and PowerPoint slides are hopelessly outdated. New tools – such as real-time computer models – are needed. These models will give decision-makers a clear understanding of complex sources of data. But there is a significant danger that key staff will start to mistake their models for reality. If this happens, they will begin to overlook information not contained in their models and ignore the assumptions which are built in. This is what happened in many financial institutions before the 2008 crisis: bankers started to believe their own models and became blind to significant risks that were not included.
The third questionable idea is his reliance exclusively on tight-knit teams of highly intelligent individuals. Getting a small group of smart people to make key decisions seems reasonable. But such groups are often over-reliant on models and become disconnected from on-the-ground experiences. Furthermore, they typically make decisions with little consideration of the difficulties of implementation. One of Cummings’s touchstones for reforming the civil service is the Xerox Parc research institute during the 1970s. This invented such breakthroughs as the graphic user interface, laser printers and the ethernet. However, most of these ideas were never picked up within the company as the engineers at Parc were disconnected from the daily realities of the rest of the business.
The idea that high-tech firms and hedge funds are the appropriate analogies for civil service reform is fraught with danger. Looking at Silicon Valley companies may bring in new ideas and cutting-edge practices. But it is based on a common mistake: what works in one sector will also work in another. Researchers have repeatedly found that this simply isn’t true. Cummings’s ideas about decision-making might work in sectors where processing data and pushing the right button is crucial. But in government, implementation of decisions is the crucial part. Having complex seeing-rooms staffed by super-smart people, all kitted out with the latest data-visualisation tools is unlikely to help government with the hard work of implementing its policies.
• André Spicer is professor of organisational behaviour at the Cass Business School at City, University of London
