043: Sir Michael Barber on the science of delivery in politics

Returning from the Summer, this week I'm talking to Sir Michael Barber, the man who Tony Blair appointed to create and then run his Delivery Unit at No. 10.

While not overt, there's lots of behavioural science going on here: creating repeatable routines, fear of and resistance to change, influencing and persuading intransigent individuals. A great part of Michael's work after all is understanding people, with all their biases and preconceptions, and then reorganising them.

Show notes

• What Scafell Pike walk teaches you about problem solving
• Why did Tony Blair ask Michael to set up his Delivery Unit?
• What was the civil service doing before the introduction of the Delivery Unit?
• Changing real people’s lives in a very visible, meaningful way
• How boring and radical government must hang together
• Why delivery is like a soap opera as well as a documentary
• The importance of a guiding coalition in government to make policy happen
• Government by routine vs. by spasm
• Buy-in is overrated, or why you don’t need it at the beginning
• Reaching irreversibility
• How intrusive press blurs the line between transparency and privacy
• Excuses that ministers throw up to resist change
• What Michael advised Boris Johnson in 2019
• The next frontier in Delivery – using real-time data

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Podcast music: Tamsin Waley-Cohen's Mendelssohn's violin concerto