Iconoplastic - a made up word for an important idea

Making change survivable for the people who lead it

When I was young, I thought change would come from brilliant people having big new ideas. This was convenient for me because I often had big ideas.

The longer I worked in policy the clearer it became that very few big ideas are new. However clever a notion you’ve dreamt up, chances are it featured in a government review in 1974, but never happened, or got tried and cancelled in favour of a different big idea. So I started to believe that change comes from the top: from setting the right incentives and rules to diffuse the big ideas. This was convenient for me because I liked being in charge of things.

Then I took a leadership role in a large bureaucracy and I realised that change is far more than ideas and rules. It’s more like building a Lego Death Star: painstaking work assembling thousands of tiny pieces, trying to keep the end vision in mind when all you’ve got is a series of grey lumps.

This was inconvenient for me because this kind of work - altering how real people do real jobs - is a way of making enemies. And like most people, I want to be liked.

Why change matters

We live in a disruptive age: frustration with the status quo; an ambient conviction that there must be a blob or a deep state blocking whatever it is “the people” want. And while trust cannot be rebuilt solely through public service reform, it certainly cannot be rebuilt without it. If a government can’t show that what people vote for has any relationship to what actually happens, politics becomes theatre at best and nihilism at worst.

We can all see that change is too slow. Too many excuses, too much paralysis. We are very good at explaining why things can’t be done and hopeless at orchestrating how they might be.

Launching the NHS 10-year plan, Wes Streeting observed that the NHS has more pilots than the RAF. As it happens, a deficit of pilots is a real concern for the RAF, but let’s stick with the main point: pilotitis.

Our bureaucracies are stuck. We want novelty, so we create a small bubble outside those rules in which a new way of doing things is possible. But even if it succeeds there is no mechanism to translate that new way of doing things into the system at large, because the system is just as stuck as it was at the beginning.

Instead we just pilot things again, or pilot something new because it give the minister a new thing to announce. We’ve built a culture that knows how to conduct reviews, commissions and pilots, but is hopeless at orchestrating the messy, risky work of actually doing things, let alone creating a politics of patience to make space for that work.

Iconoplastic

I’ve made up a word to capture where I think we need to get to: iconoplastic.

Everyone knows what iconoclastic means: the impulse to smash up our institutions. It’s a pervasive urge in our politics right now.

Plastic is not just the stuff that kills turtles. It’s also the root of the word plasticine, because in materials science plastic is the opposite of elastic. Something that’s plastic will deform when squeezed, and it won’t bounce back. It stays changed.

That’s what our institutions need to become: radically change-able in ways that stick.

There’s a lot of great writing out there about how to do this. I have been involved a little in Demos’ work on public and civil service reform. I admire Re:State’s work on health, local government and Whitehall systems. I’m enchanted by James Plunkett’s writing on bureaucratic reform and wholly persuaded by his argument this week that sclerotic professions and academic disciplines are holding us back.

But whatever your list of things that need to change: someone needs to do the change part. Someone needs to wrangle the ugly grey lumps of Lego into shape. My focus today is on how we make those jobs into ones that people can bear to do.

Three horizons

Many of you will be aware of the ‘three horizons’ model for thinking about change, developed by the International Futures Forum.

• Horizon One is the world as it is today: the institutions, norms and incentives running the show.

• Horizon Three is the visionary future: the radically different world the innovators and dreamers can see.

• Horizon Two is the messy middle: the space of transition, where today’s systems begin to bend and make room for tomorrow’s ideas.

In my experience, each horizon comes with its own psychodynamics, and that’s a big reason why change gets stuck.

The first horizon rewards control. It has clear lines of accountability, metrics that can be counted, dashboards that can be updated. Success here looks like competence: meeting targets, closing budgets, staying off the front page. You spend your time with people who are like you: focused on keeping things on track.

At the third horizon, by contrast, the reward is freedom. You can imagine without consequence, design without delivery. You can convene salons, publish papers and prototype prototypes. This is where imagination lives and big ideas grow. You spend your time with people like you: those willing to sacrifice stability for agility and make up their own rules.

The second horizon is different. It has no comfort to offer. It rewards persistence, negotiation, and disappointment. You have to constantly judge what rules can be bent and which must be rewritten. You have to listen to the defenders of the status quo without becoming one of them, and talk to the visionaries without being seduced by purity.The bureaucrats find you irritating and the reformers find you disappointing. You spend your time with people who are not like you.

That’s why, I think, so few people choose to stay there.

Some learn to keep their head down, play by the rules, and climb the bureaucratic ladder.

The most reform-minded retreat to the third horizon, where the air is cleaner and the conversation more flattering.

In other words, it’s not just bureaucracies that resist innovation. It’s innovation that resists bureaucracies. Proof if you need it: a few months ago I had the privilege of attending a conference on the government’s (great) Test Learn and Grow programme, designed to accelerate place-based public service reform. The word ‘Grow’ was missing from half the slides in the presentation.

X Curve

Another way of making the point comes from this image, created by colleagues at University of the Arts London for a project on climate systems. It’s the ‘X curve’ - a model of systems in transition.

The conflict of the second horizon becomes so obvious the designers put pink lightning in the middle of the picture. But who wants to work in a place where lightning keeps striking?

If you feel like you already do work there, you might enjoy this video, made by an Australian outfit called Ecologi, that brings the experience of working around pink lighting to life:

Making the middle joyful

Iconoplastic institutions would be alive to the world around them. They would learn in real time, not in decade-long cycles of reviews and rewrites. They would expect reform as a normal feature of organisational life, not a crisis response. They would create psychological safety so that dissent, experimentation and small failures aren’t career risks but sources of collective intelligence. And perhaps most importantly, they would hold on to purpose - a sense of what the institution is for - while being endlessly flexible about how that purpose is fulfilled.

And all of this would be enabled by the people who work there. Instead of silos and hierarchies between the first, second and third horizon thinkers, teams would bridge, adapt and learn from one another.

Change jobs in iconoplastic institutions would be the place where our best people go, not where our bravest people burn out.

How do we get there?

1. Be clear that transition is happening. It’s not a challenge to the day job, it is the day job. The people piloting new ways of working need actual routes into the machine: a way to build capability rather than just evidence. We should design innovations and pilots so they can scale into the bureaucracy if they work, even if that’s at the expense of perfect purity.

2. We need to change a huge amount about the rules that dominate public sector employment relationships. The practical and financial costs of restructuring, reordering and redesigning public institutions are far too high: the days of fixed and permanent job roles are coming to an end.

3. Leaders need to hold the bridge themselves, not delegate it. When leaders stay at the comfortable edges, glad-handing the radicals on one side while demanding the bureaucracy keep everything smooth on the other, they leave the middle to do all the translation alone. Leaders who want transformation have to show up themselves: spend time in the messy conversations, take heat with the people who get shouted at, and model publicly the political patience they expect privately from others.

4. The radicals have work to do too. Purity is intoxicating - no constraints, no compromises, no trade-offs with people who don’t “get it”. Yet most change that lasts requires compromise and collaboration with people whose priorities will never match your own. If you’re not going to work in the system yourself, at least take time to understand what the people who do work there are grappling with.

Together, we might even come up with something better to build than a Death Star.