Mike Bracken is a founding partner of Public Digital, a global digital transformation consultancy helping governments and large organizations thrive and survive in the internet era. Together with colleagues at Public Digital, he coauthored the book Digital Transformation at Scale: Why The Strategy Is Delivery.

Mike was appointed Executive Director of Digital of the UK government in 2011 and its Chief Data Officer in 2014, where he created and led the Government Digital Service (GDS). After government, he sat on the board of the Co-operative Group as Chief Digital Officer.

Before joining the civil service, Mike was the Digital Development Director at Guardian News & Media. In his executive career, he has grown several technology companies and occupied C-suite roles in a variety of sectors in more than a dozen countries.

His nonexecutive portfolio includes Lloyds of London, the world's leading insurance market, and the Omidyar Network, a philanthropic investment firm. Mike also advises the Inter-American Development Bank and is the Honorary Professor at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at University College London. He was named UK Chief Digital Officer of the year in 2014 and awarded a CBE.

Mike Bracken is a living legend in the digital government circles. Everyone knows him or knows about him for the work he and the splendid people around him did in setting up the Government Digital Service in the UK. They have defined what good looks like in this practice globally perhaps the most. Not to mention the earthquake they caused in Her Majesty's government, even if for too short of a while due to politics.

He is like the Obi-Wan Kenobi in this field—I dare not say Yoda, as Mike does not seem to be aging—spreading deep thoughts and “war stories” each time he speaks. Mike indeed has done deep, deep thinking about digital services, about the machinery of government, the culture and institutions of it.

He seems the mildest of lads, even soft-spoken at first—until he really starts speaking his mind and you realize from his words that this man has a fire inside him. This fire is the deep-rooted personal drive for truly improving government and going to battle with its worst manifestations, to truly make lives of people around us better even a bit.

I am still amazed that Mike is talking to me at all! By a complete address mishap, I stood him up when I was due to meet him the very first time at what was the initial rollercoaster of early GDS days, when getting to his schedule was very hard to near impossible. He must have waited for the rookie from Estonia for close to an hour, and this sort of a stunt on my end could have easily ended the mateship before it even had a chance to start. Instead, this too-short chat from way back in Whitehall led to many more whenever our tours have collided around the world.

—SIIM

How Did You Become a Digital Government Leader in the UK?

The short answer is because a group of people more wise and worldly than me thought it would be a good idea.

I have a long background in civic tech and internet advocacy from outside of government, helping organizations like mySociety¹ and advising the government on the possibilities of the internet. At the same time, I had a long private sector career. I had mixed results at a wide number of roles: product manager, a COO, technologist, and a lot of senior leadership roles. I had worked in fifteen countries and had had a lot of business responsibility—far too much—at a young age as I was one of the first of my generation to understand what the internet meant. I was at the stage of my life where I was getting into board-level positions. I was in my early forties, so probably approaching the zenith of my career in terms of having twenty-five years of internet-era experience.

Through the 1990s and 2000s, there were a series of very-high-profile failures of enterprise, waterfall-style technology programs in the UK public system. A political space was opened up by a bunch of people including Tom Steinberg and Rohan Silva around the center of government, and they started to quietly lobby for a different way of doing things. It was given a lot of stimulus by Martha Lane Fox, who was the government's advisor on internet matters and the most stalwart supporter one could wish for. A truly amazing woman who became a great friend to many of us. She wrote a report that we helped to draft, in which she called for a radical change or revolution in leadership and the way of doing digital things in government.²

Most credit goes to Francis Maude, who became the minister for the Cabinet Office and backed the radical new way of working. Government Digital Service (GDS) is his legacy, and the UK reputation for digital government belongs to him. Tom Loosemore, my colleague and the intellectual founder of digital government in the UK, lead the way by starting up a team of fifteen or so people doing a small alpha version of what GOV.UK and a government service could look like. That enabled the government to talk to me about what the changed digital leadership role could look like. Then my own government offered me this role and I thought, “I have to do this, because I will not get a chance again.”

Ian Watmore, who had run the first e-government unit in 2004 and who went on to serve as the civil service commissioner, recruited me. He was staunch in his support and helped me through the Whitehall minefield with great aplomb.³ My predecessor Chris Chant was so skillful in guiding me around the elephant traps for a year and did so much to set the scene for necessary reforms to come. Kathy Settle and Tony Singleton were Whitehall insiders who sustained the nascent GDS and gave us the necessary antibodies to survive. Some of the civil service leadership quietly prepared the ground for digital leadership. Melanie Dawes helpfully secured our domains from the reach of powerful departments before we even arrived. Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, eased my path to the top tables.

There were many more. Leadership in that system needs support and toleration. Being asked to be the leader of the group of people I respected the most was such an honor.

In Addition to Honor, What Was Your Motivation or the Reason behind Such a Thought?

Professionally I believed that our system of government and the behavior of the state at its center had lost its way. The opportunities provided by the internet, namely its capability to improve the performance of our government in a digital era, had been almost completely ignored by our political and civil service class for decades. There was such a large prize on offer, and it was clear inside and outside the system that change needed to happen. Also, the reforms were largely nonpolitical. Everyone likes better services, at less cost, with happier users.

My motivation was also a very personal one. I am a survivor of one of the largest miscarriages of justice in our country, the Hillsborough disaster.⁴ I spent decades coming to terms with how the institutions of the state, including the media, police, and judiciary, colluded to protect corrupt officials from truth and justice. A culture that allows that to happen must need reform.

My motivation was intensely personal because I wanted to improve the state and extremely opportunistic professionally because of the skills I have. My skill, if I have one, is to use the internet at scale to change institutions. Now I was suddenly presented with an opportunity to do that at the heart of government. If my motivation had been only professional, I would not have taken the job because the chances of successful reform of this system were very, very slim.

Why So and What Were Your Hesitations?

When one is trying to change an institution, whose leadership is both set against the change that you are bringing and is also hugely adept at repelling any change—that is a very hard ask. The organization should want to change, but it did not.

It did not understand the opportunity, nor did it experience the worst outcomes of the status quo. A remarkable number of our political and civil service class are not required to use the services and policies for which they are responsible. Either because they do not need to, in the case of claiming benefits, or because they can use intermediaries like accountants and solicitors, in cases like paying tax. That lack of accountability and empathy with users is a toxic mix, and present in the center mainly. Most government employees work with people to deliver services, usually in low to medium paid roles and outside of Whitehall.

In short, my hesitation was that although I had no doubt that the machinery of government could be rapidly improved by internet-era reforms, I was less certain that the Whitehall hothouse would tolerate such reforms. In 2011, it was nearly twenty years since the browser was invented and thirty years since the internet, yet the government organization still maintained that the networking culture of the digital area was not worthy of its attention.

That was the stance of people who wanted to retain a power structure. If you set yourself up to change any power structure, you know you are in for a hell of a fight, regardless of what support you have.

You Came in Knowing the Hardships; What Were Your Conditions for Taking the Job?

In a soft but consistent way, I made sure we had very hard powers. We were the advocate of the user. We had veto powers over spending, we had powers to close things down, like contracts. We had powers of reporting to Parliament on delivery. In some cases, we could take critical national infrastructure and run it if we felt it could be done better.

More prosaically, our powers included some ability to hire outside of traditional job roles and salary bands, to communicate openly not via the political communication system, and to engage directly with users. We were of the center of government, and we and others in the Efficiency and Reform Group made that a powerful center in ways which had never existed.⁵ This was one of Francis Maude's great reforms.

We never wrote down a list of our powers. Had I done so, no one would ever have granted them to me. So, the minister, cabinet secretary and the Efficiency and Reform Group (ERG) made sure the powers were either manifested in other ministers' power or the financial power, or that we had veto power over their decisions. I started off with very few and somewhat ambiguous powers if you looked from public view.

That is why our team was tolerated and patronized for two years within the civil service. Only once we started delivery at scale and change happened far too often and quickly for the incumbents to deal with it, the pushback started. By that time, I was the head of the technology profession, the chief data officer of the UK government, and the head of its digital services. So, I had an awful lot of powers, but with power comes great responsibility. One of my responsibilities was to fend off the leaders of a system that wanted to remove those powers, often explicitly.

What Task or Expectation Did Politicians Give You for the Role?

The expectation of the new administration of British politicians was, I think, that we cannot continue to be so “un-internet.” After thirteen years of Labour government, the coalition politicians had grown up in opposition using the tools of the open internet, just like any member of the public. They expected Gmail and Wi-Fi. When they saw government IT of the time, they simply refused to use it. Only a system with that appalling quality of internal technology could continually fail to deliver digital and technology services to the country.

So, there was a huge desire for change, and this made managing expectations difficult. Although politicians were largely happy to resist the critical voices in their departments because GOV.UK was raising the bar for the whole of government, many of them wanted us to make an app or fulfil a policy for them. Numerous times I was asked to widen the GDS mandate into National Health Service (NHS) or fix an already broken IT system like the universal credit in 2013, when the sensible thing to do would have been to recognize it as a failure and start again.

Sometimes we recognized the need and stepped in. The chancellor was most demanding in 2014 when he needed a multichannel advice service launched in support of his new pensions policy.⁶ Sadly, he was invisible later when his Treasury rejected funding for GDS and government-as-a-platform in the budget review of 2015, which led directly to my departure and the stalling of the digital government reforms overall more importantly.

Making these big calls, selecting winning projects, and avoiding obvious routes to failure became a sixth sense. But it did mean on occasion speaking truth to power, telling ministers that their much hoped-for policy was actually in tatters, and showing them that the message from their own department or agency was often inaccurate.

There certainly was no expectation that GDS would turn into a success story. There was also no expectation that GDS and the Efficiency and Reform Group would take on the incumbent technology suppliers and end up taking £4 billion out of the IT supply chain as taxpayer savings. People's expectation was initially probably that we might make some pretty poor websites somewhat nicer.

If That Was the Case, What Sort of Ambition or Objective Did You Set for Yourself?

Tom and I were extraordinarily clear with each other that we were there to change the functioning of the machinery of government. And by doing that we aimed to change its culture. We understood fully that if we change some of the operating models or some structures, they would simply be changed back the moment we left. What we had to do was to change the operating cultures, because it is cultures and people that change institutions.

I do not really care to this day what was the size or shape of GDS, or even its mandate. The size and budget argument just prevails the internal Whitehall culture of winners and losers. Although the country wants better and joined-up services, much of Whitehall spends time arguing about power dynamics and which part of a bureaucracy should do x or y. The political legitimacy of this model, presided over by the Treasury, must surely be questionable at best. A civil service reform bill must be one of the necessary actions of a future administration.

What I care about is the eight thousand or so people whom we trained and developed to show and demonstrate that they could deliver services in a different way. They are never going to go back to signing five-year contracts with outsourcing it all to suppliers and then sitting there writing policy papers.

Did You Set Yourself Any Concrete Objectives, Too?

I did and then changed them halfway through.

In the UK, we do not have a tradition of fixed election periods. When we started, there was a coalition government, which was very unusual. This government also for the very first time had implemented a fixed-term election cycle in order to maintain the coalition. It meant that for the first time, ministers could now make long-term decisions because they knew they would be in the position for a long time unless they messed it up. That gave us a runway.

With this context, we set out to do some long-term change. We said we would go after making digital services great with GOV.UK as the single point of access to government services, with transformation program of twenty-five major transactional services, and building an institution out of GDS. Then we would start to take on some of the incumbent and legacy stuff, opening the culture a bit, and an awful lot of IT reform.

The aim in the second parliament became to take on what you would call the middleware of government, the platform stuff. This way a simple truth would emerge that you just do not need very large government departments to operate the services that they do, pushing paper around to operate government.

I Know You Have Considered the First Hundred Days to Be Crucial When You Start in a Leadership Role Because That Is When You Will Be the Fastest. What Was Your Plan for Your Hundred Days?

Tom and I had been thinking about all this for twenty years. mySociety was an organization starting to think outside-in about what government services could look like in a quite benign way. I also had spent most of my life with institutions that were struggling to adapt to the internet era whether it be in retail, finance, communications, or media. And then finding ways to hack around bureaucracies so that cultures could grow. After Hillsborough, I had spent an awful lot of time thinking about the structure and the operation of institutions and how cultures could go so bad as they had been in the UK.

So, yes, in the first hundred days, we made a lot of decisions and made them very quickly. Things like to create a series of digital leaders across government as a mechanism for making decisions outside of parliamentary authority. That is strategically a very interesting thing. For instance, when we started, people would say, “Well, to do all that stuff, you are going to have to deal with the CIOs. I would be like, “Why? Why do CIOs make the decision of the boards?”

The departments and agencies had two power centers. First the IT one led by CIO, usually in thrall to big IT vendors and system integrators. Second was policy and communications people who like to control the message, the narrative, and write stuff and basically are control people.

Both of them had governance structures of their own across government. In the digital space we closed down both. Establishing overall communications and design team, led by Ben Terrett, Emer Coleman, and Russell Davies, with talent from different disciplines was a hugely important first-hundred-days move. I also started not turning up to meetings and not submitting papers, but instead communicating in blog posts, YouTube videos, and so on. We essentially started communicating to public sector workers all over the system rather than having internal, endless discussions in Whitehall.

We got the cabinet secretary to write to every head of department, whom I then went to see in their own board meeting and told them what we were going to do in GDS and how they would be included. Some permanent secretaries collaborated, several objected, most were disinterested. One even wrote holiday postcards throughout my presentation.

Nonetheless, they were told their part in it and asked them to nominate within thirty days a director or director-general who would be the digital leader and gave them a role description for that person. This elicited two sorts of responses. Some of the smaller departments saw the wisdom in that and that at last something would get done. One said something like, “Oh, just tolerate them; they are just kids in jeans, just making websites.” A decision he regretted sometime later when pleading for help with his flagship policy.

Setting this governance model up was the first thing. Plus getting hold of common design, getting hold of the domain and finding out what on earth we had as a baseline. Some very basic things like counting the number of services on offer, getting some data about the transactions. In an organization without a functioning delivery center, no one had done that before.

Another one was starting to work on an efficiency report very quickly, to start to look at what was the financial size of the prize on offer in IT reform. Andrew Greenway and Richard Sargeant did the deeply unsexy work of validating the service data and creating the efficiency modeling so we could estimate the size of the prize.

All these things were the fundamental building blocks for the future power structures that we created. We got away with it because this was time toward the end of the first year of a new coalition government. Everyone was still looking at where the politicians were going. We paid absolutely no attention to politics, we were just getting on with reforms and we had a minister who had our back.

What Were the Priorities of Your Work from Then Onwards?

We selected probably ten to twelve individual things that we would kick off at once, and it was a period of intense work. I have never worked so hard.

It was the governance, the creation of GOV.UK, the common design principles, setting up the GDS, cutting through the preexisting IT contracts, bringing in spending controls. I could go on. Many people were not interested in the machinery of government, but we were deeply interested in it.

I went to Francis (Maude) after thirty days and said if this is going to work, I need to be in your office every week minimum. I was not going to write a digital strategy, although we ended up writing one at the end of 2012. Tom wrote it, and I am very proud of the strategy because it was full of hard targets. We had by then confidence to show our hand.

But at the start, I said to Francis that if I write down what we are really thinking, we would be out of government in five minutes. What we would do was follow a strategy of radical change of machinery of government by delivery of services and working practices that would create a new coalition between government and users. We explained that if we stopped and asked the leaders of the system for permission, then we would get pushback and delay. So, we were just going to get on with it. We called this “The Strategy is Delivery.” The minister was delighted.

Although we would have conversations repeatedly where we would show a better service by literally showing a video of a happy user using a better service or showing a better financial outcome, and the senior people would ask, “Yeah, but what about the department?”

I would asked, “What about it?” “Well, this means a change for us.” The point is that we had to literally demonstrate to them that we would be delivering better public services than they were currently. It was so clear that the desire to protect the perceived sovereignty of the department was more important than the needs of the user. When Francis Maude stood up in Parliament and said that future reforms would recognize this and put the needs of the user first, I knew our mandate was secure, and we had won his trust.

Did the Departmental CIOs Ever Stick Around?

In the UK, the model of outsourced, multiyear deals to a small number of vendors was so prevalent that the role of the CIO was often synonymous with someone whose core skill was contractual relations. We had to change that model, and that meant bringing in people who could change the model, who understood technology, and who could grow and sustain digital teams.

For every progressive, technocratic CIO, or similar, the government had many who were two years from retiring, did not know anything about internet-era technology, liked to go and watch a rugby or cricket match with an IT supplier, and wanted to sign a ten-year deal. They were just a different decade and they had to go. Anyone who was any good at technology would not come into government before because they could not get anything done technologically. The reason is that suppliers owned the market, defined the rules.

Changing the technology leadership groups was painstaking work. In 2013, we took on veto powers for hiring, as we had to stem the tide of CIOs and technology leaders looking for end-of-career sinecures. Many left in this period, and the work that Liam Maxwell and his team, plus the work on spend controls and the wider ERG group on contract negotiations, meant that we were changing the cozy relationships among CIOs, government procurement, and the supplier landscape.

These reforms were truly fundamental to improving government technology and efficiency, and it is an indictment of the previous technology culture in government that Parliament's scientific group back in 2011 wrote a paper about the central government IT supply chain and titled it “A Recipe for Rip-Offs.”

How Did You Change the Supplier Scene?

This was so difficult, and GDS was only a small part of the story. To change from one way of working we had to demonstrate what good looked like, to show why the change was necessary. That was the role of GDS, which was one part of the ERG setting, Francis Maude's reforming team in the middle of the Cabinet Office. The wider ERG was tasked with helping departments spend more efficiently to achieve better outcomes, and its remit included property, commercial negotiation, fraud, technology, and digital, plus procurement reform.

At this point 84 percent of government IT spending was going to seven organizations. It is called an oligopoly and it is one step short of a cartel situation, with companies writing their own procurements. We started looking at those contracts. I sent a nineteen-year-old to one department meeting in Swansea to ask the supplier and the CIO three questions. The CIO actually commented that “they have sent someone who knows what they are doing.”

The Parliament had set us the moral ground for radical change, and we started doing it. It was a team effort: with Liam Maxwell leading in GDS, plus ERG boss Stephen Kelly, and commercial lead Bill Crothers all tackling vendors head on about the current contractual arrangements. We started breaking up the contracts, making new ones, brought in spending controls, built the marketplace for a new type of supplier. We started to show people how to do it differently. We had a real breakthrough as the CIOs were departing and some of the younger people in their departments were ready to do things a little differently, getting proper infrastructure agreements in.

The supply market at first looked whether we would actually be sticking to our guns. Then you saw some of them change, but some of them decided to take the government on and that was a mistake. We had companies lobbying that I and others should lose our jobs. But we had the backing of a resolute minister, even when the companies were lobbying other ministers. The subsequent reforms including the digital marketplace brought thousands of SMEs into the government's supply chain and fatally weakened the multiyear, enterprise IT arrangement.

How Did You Build Your Team?

The team built the team.

Tom was there before me. He set up the GOV.UK alpha version team in December 2010. I went to see them and that is when I agreed to go in for the government role. I joined in May 2011. I spent at least half of my time that year sitting in a nice restaurant on the South Bank⁷ and talking to people I had known for twenty to thirty years who would really care for the government. Persuading them to take pay cuts and come do this thing in government.

I had key roles in mind for GDS. I then went and got people who I knew I could depend on. People who had done this, who had been around the block.

The second thing happened, too, which is that we started working in the open. People were looking at the interesting things we were doing like GOV.UK and GDS as an institution, and for the first time, talent started to run at us.

I really did not want to bring too many people into government, I needed only some people who would do it right. People like Mike Beaven, who went on to lead the digital transformation of the twenty-five biggest public services from 2013 to 2015, I doubt would have ever been given the opportunity to demonstrate their change credentials at such scale. Once I got to a position of being able to look in the eyes of twenty people, I then knew we were going to be alright and even with the full force of pushback from departments starting at that point.

My God, we got some talent, and they were self-organizing. My job was to be the shield to the things we kicked off, to do the firefighting. I had utter confidence in Tom and everyone's ability to set them up in teams that delivered and only occasionally had to step in. I made several mistakes in the operational setup, until Stephen Foreshew-Cain came in as COO and professionalized and managed the entire operation. That is a testament to the talent we had: that I had the confidence to focus outwards rather than at the internal design of GDS.

How Did You Convince People to Join You?

Because the mission was to fix the government, to improve the government. How many times in life do you get a chance to do that? Not in the American sort of way of saluting the leader and going on a “tour of duty.” More in the very British way that things are dysfunctional, and we should do something about it.

The open communication, building communities of practice, working on stuff that matters; all of this convinced people more than I ever could. A couple of people we persuaded to join, notably Leisa Reichelt, after they came to our attention for being constructively critical of some of our ways of working. In Leisa's case, she did not think we were doing user research as well as we should have been. She was right, so we asked her to join us in fixing it. Which she then did with aplomb.

What Kind of Culture Were You Trying to Have in the Team?

The culture I wanted was a combination of civic tech and the open internet culture that I grew up on.

I was an internet researcher before the web existed. I had seen early the emergent culture of the internet that was an engineering culture and how networked it was, how supportive it was of each other, how focused it could be on societal or governmental outcomes. I am a child of that internet, not the platform internet of Google or Facebook.

However, I also came from the political background where the government policy of the day toward our community at Merseyside was called “managed decline”; can you believe it?⁸ So there was great unemployment, great social unrest, and high levels of community engagement, high levels of self-support. I had that culture, too. I still do, I hope.

Now, put these two things together. I wanted a sort of nascent internet culture for the government outcomes. To some degree, this culture had always been in part of the public service as a subculture with some nonconformist public servants. I wanted a lot more of that.

What Slogans or Mottos Did You Push for the Team Again and Again in This Regard?

I said things like “look sideways” to get people to work together and collaborate. These were simple statements to implore people to work collaboratively for the good. Also, to focus on delivery—that was “strategy is delivery.”

Tom rightly pointed out that we needed to industrialize all that in a communication system. Ben Terrett, Russell Davis, Emer Coleman, and others came in with a combination of communication, design, also visual design skills to amplify and deliver the messaging.

What Were the Other Ways You Reinforced the Culture?

At monthly or quarterly events, we would get the teams together, and they were quite sizeable teams after a while. Every team had to get on stage and present what it was up to in five or ten minutes. There is no hiding in the open, and judgment of delivery in this way was no hierarchical exercise. It was not about what Mike thinks—the team had to stand up in front of peers and prove to each other if stuff was or was not delivered. That is the sideways pressure I wanted, which leads to peer support and asking for help. I did not want any hierarchical culture at all. I needed to be a visible leader, but I did not want this to mean another one of the crazy structures like the other departments.

Another thing I wanted people to do was to move around from team to team. I did not want any of the teams going native and literally have people sitting together. Of course, this brings some frictions but by and large these frictions are better than having silos.

I was doing a weekly video or doing events like Sprint, where we annually brought the government together to push the messages and show the work.

As much of the work that I, Kathy Settle, Mike Beaven, and others were doing was out in the departments and managing pushback across the Whitehall, I was very keen that there were visible moments when the teams saw that they had top cover. One came early on when visiting department leaders came to GDS on a tour in the run up to departmental sites moving to GOV.UK. The representative from the all-powerful (in Whitehall terms) Ministry of Defence asked to know when we would be sorting out her conflicting legacy IT issues, only to be informed that this was her job, not the people creating the services for the future. This form of visible leadership was so necessary in the early days of giving the organization confidence and support.

What Steps Did You Take to Empower This Awesome Team to Deliver at Its Best?

I did not want people to waste time. I was in a hurry to change things; I knew I could go any day. I did not want to read reports, so I rarely asked people to write them. If I wanted to know what a team was doing, I took a look at the actual services they were working on or in the blog. Or walk up and say, “Can I have a minute? How are you doing?” Government does need its bureaucratic reporting for admin and governance. We had that done in the backend and it was very, very small.

The formal mechanisms we put in place were really supportive even if teams did not recognize them as such. This included the service standard, the manuals, the spend controls. These stopped our teams of really talented delivery people having to do the hand-to-hand combat with departments that actually did not want to change. From such meetings and works I or others were able to go in later and clear out the issues with the department executives. It meant that the team was able to get on with the delivery at the same time.

How Did the Political Relationships Work Out for You?

Francis Maude is a remarkable man for his ability to manage me. I am not easy. I do have, understandably, profound mistrust of institutions. He realized that, and he also recognized very early that conventional management of officials was not going to work on me—with me submitting a paper every month, to be read by another official and there might be ministerial comments on the margin. I was in his office several times a week and we chatted. He invited me to meetings with colleagues to expose me in a protected way to the wider political system.

I remember wondering to myself if he was really into our mission, because he was going to have some difficult meetings with IT suppliers, many of whom probably were politically aligned to his party. He never flinched. He did more to uphold the value for money of public service in the UK than any minister I have ever seen, inside government or outside.

It helped because we were delivering. Other governments even were walking up to our ministers on international visits and saying what UK was doing digitally was amazing. And you know, if you are a top-level politician in a country like ours, all you get is criticism usually. Suddenly, even at constituency meetings people were coming in to say “thank you for making digital services easier and simple.” All the optics had changed.

What Were Your Failures or Things You Regret?

I think I burned people out. I held people to a standard of personal engagement and effort that I held myself to, which was unreasonable. Often, we had quite young people, and some of the behavior I overlooked in the name of the achievements they were making was unsupportable.

I dread to think, but I suspect there might be some individuals who had a tough time, and I could have done more to help them. I was too keen to look at the greater good for everyone than to dive into those individual issues.

Could You Have Avoided Your Own Exhaustion?

I could have taken my foot off the gas, become a permanent secretary, be part of the evolution, part of the club. It is not in my makeup; I cannot change that. So, it was a conscious decision to not take the foot off. Also, this would have meant complacency. This sort of unwillingness to look at difficult problems and not take responsibility is the very thin end of a long wedge.

Do You Think You Managed to Instill Some Culture Change in Civil Service At-Large, Like You Set Out to Do?

I did not set out to change the whole thing; it is too big. What I set out to do was to allow some people a bit like me to see government as a place where they, too, could do anything. I am delighted when I see government departments today hiring service designers on their boards. People like Janet Hughes now running huge change agendas in agriculture and Tom Read running the GDS itself.

There is a whole new category of roles in government for service design, content design, user research, all shades of technology roles from front end to DevOps and architecture. Hundreds and hundreds of different types of people now get a go at running our government, even in small ways.

We did not break the caste system of the policy group who are self-selecting and do or look a bit like the politicians, the group who have been running the space. But it is inevitable in the very long term that if your system has enough people in it, who come from a different background, some of them are going to end up running the show. That is my hope. Even if the jury's still out on that.

If you look at COVID-19 times now, take a look at what worked and what did not work in government. It is the doers that worked. The people who know how to get stuff done.

You Said That You Knew from the Start There Was Going to Be Pushback and Struggles Ahead. Did You Start Doing Something Very Consciously to Make Sure That What You Are Starting Would Last?

We did a number of things. We had to create the conditions where people—in the media, the system, and in the user cohorts—would be vocally unhappy about the status quo, as many of them had given up hope of ever seeing change.

I have a reputation of being too openly critical or challenging, which might be part of my character. I was always very careful not to criticize the individual. Whitehall has many great characters, and most people are trying to do a hard job in tough circumstances. What I criticized was the monoculture, the homogeneous nature of the institution, in ways that I hoped would lead to positive change.

Actually, we had to do something loud to point out how broken things were. This way it became very hard to go back to old ways of working. We were extremely explicit for quite a long time very loudly about how lousy the things had been.

We also showed a different outcome, credibly. In the world of public policy, there is a dominant economic model or view that says public servants should not back winners or invest in any risk. Let the market provide. In the UK, we had left to the market the health, tax, borders, benefits, and pension systems. We paid billions and left the market to it and our services were scandalously inefficient and mostly did not work in the internet era. People and businesses up and down the country paid for that with their time and money, and the millions of failures to receive services undermined trust in our democratic and political system. Now, a small number of focused people with a real and knowledgeable grasp of the internet did a better job for a fraction of the price. It is hard to take that away.

Several of our works were aimed to be timeless, too. If you go back to our blog posts and read them, they were written to not degrade easily. We used the tools of the open internet to make stuff last. We were writing manuals for public servants for how to do their jobs. We were writing service standards that baked in those ways of working into the common practices. These were designed to last, and they have lasted very well. Those artifacts are more important than any policy papers because they exist today, and they exist in the open. Even when the mandarins remove them, as they are doing now, there remains a historical record of what good looks like.

What Was the Push That Made You Leave after All?

I was unfortunate with the political circumstances and the succession to Francis Maude when he had decided to leave. We knew there would be an election in 2015. The pushback to our reforms got worse at the start of 2014, and it was becoming clear to me I was not going to do a second parliament, as the support from the new civil service leadership and the new minister was just not there. I just could not sustain the cover for all these reforms.

Some top people at Treasury and key critics in departments whose failure to deliver flagship policy had become obvious decided that these reforms threatened their power base, and they were going to push back despite the obvious benefits the work brought. There was no coalition of politicians willing to spend political energy on the reform of civil service, and the chancellor and Number 10, the power base at the heart of the system, were otherwise engaged when it came to ensuring our funding and powers.⁹ It would have taken an hour's conversation, or less, from the chancellor to discuss, but his officials stuck to the line that he was not supportive. A line which Number 10 reversed immediately after I resigned.

Also, we had planned the second parliament term to be about government platforms and the ministers were simply not attentive to the issue. Downing Street and the chancellor did not get involved to support the platform play. So, I left but in a high-profile way to shame the government into supporting the business plan, budget, and strategy that it turned down weeks before. They had just spent a lot of time telling everyone how brilliant we were digitally, and then the head of digital goes and walks out and says they are not backing it anymore.

Nonetheless, GDS was in great shape. Stephen Foreshew-Cain was bringing a more managerial and balanced style after years of frantic remedial work. My exit had magically made funding appear for the platform program, and GDS and other departments were maturing their digital talent teams.

I would have preferred to have left in a quieter and more managed way. I felt I did not get chance to say how honored I had been to provide leadership, and how supported I had been in the role by so many.

Would You Ever Take This Job Again?

A decade later, I would not take it now. I had two children whilst doing this job and have small kids now. When I left the role, all aspects of my life were exhausted.

What Are the Skills Necessary to Do This Sort of Job Well?

One needs to have failed. A lot. You need that experience, and I had a lot of it. One needs to have experience at delivering digitally, at scale, to users in their millions, and one has to have complete trust in, and honesty about, the capacity of your teams.

The other thing is that you need to have an astonishingly thick skin and trust your own intuition. And you must be part of a team with the same goals. Reform is a team sport.

What Are Your Bottom-Line Three Recommendations from a Leadership Point of View for Anyone Doing a Similar Job? What Does It Take to Achieve Excellence in Something Like the GDS and Your Work?

It always depends on the context, but I would say that governments are a manifestation of the culture of a nation. With Public Digital, we have helped thirty-six different countries with their digital transformation so far. We see the same patterns everywhere, but that does not mean there are one-size-fits-all answers, the generic “solutions” that get peddled by so many consultancies.

The first recommendation is that whatever culture you leave behind, it should look more like the culture that you would like your country to have. Along the way, you may win or lose or have some success or some failures on the rollouts of a system or a service. Yet, the long-term win is making your government more open, accountable, transparent, democratic, and a bit like you.

Second, everything is about the team. The most important team is the team around you, inside and outside of work. Do not neglect either of those. The friends, the family, the people whose voices and experiences made you the person who took this role are just as equally important as the officials and politicians and suppliers whom you will deal with during the working day. So, do not lose touch with yourself when you go into these big institutions.

Third, get out before you become too tired or when you do not achieve much. It is OK, that is life, move on, do something else. Do not hang around. If you are someone who wants to genuinely improve stuff and it is not improving, then go find something else to do. But be easy on yourself—not everything is going to be improved. If the line of improvement is gradually rising, that is OK.