Book Review: The Value of Everything by Mariana Mazzucato

A few weeks ago I received an email from Stewart Fast. Stewart is a fellow public servant and wanted to share his review Mariana Mazzucato's The Value of Everything.

He can be found on Twitter @S_Fast_ and on LinkedIn, his review is below (Thanks Stewart!)


The Review

Mariana Mazzucato’s “The Value of Everything” provides a compelling critique of economic assumptions of value-creating activities, innovation policy and the role of the public sector. At this moment of extraordinary government investment and intervention in the Canadian economy to withstand the COVID-19 pandemic, Mazzucato’s arguments for more recognition of the role that government plays in not only regulating markets, but in creating them are timely.

The book’s main argument is that many activities regarded as value-creating are in fact value-extracting with some nefarious consequences for societies. In a highly accessible fashion, Mazzucato documents a change in economic norms to narrowly regard value as anything that can be priced. As a result, many activities (e.g., financial services, specialty drug sales, Uber) that would be seen by classical economists as creating no new wealth and engaging in unproductive rent-seeking behaviour are instead immensely profitable activities aided by government policy. She uses this distinction to good effect throughout the book showing perverse examples such as huge increases in the price of drugs not invented by the companies that are enjoying the profits.

Mazzucato dedicates a sizeable portion of the book to “financialization”, or the spread of financial practices and attitudes into the “real” economy. She notes that until the 1960’s national accounts considered financial activity as outside of the production sphere and adding no value to GDP. In current assessments banks make a positive contribution to GDP calculated in part by the difference between lending and borrowing rates. While recognizing that financial services are important to the functioning of the economy, Mazzucato questions whether the intermediary function of financial institutions can truly be thought of as creating value.  After all, the mortgage backed security market that led to the 2008 financial crisis was generating substantial interest payments and thus was tracking as GDP growth before being ultimately revealed as deeply problematic.

As a public servant working in research funding and science / innovation policy, I found Mazzucato’s extended assessment of financialization particularly provocative as it relates to corporate investment behaviour. She critiques the practice of maximizing shareholder value of publicly traded companies through share buy-backs which have the effect of increasing earnings per share. Earnings per share has become a measure of corporate success but chasing earnings per share in this fashion may be occuring at the expense of investment in plant and equipment and R&D. She cites evidence that investment rates for publicly traded companies under pressure to maximize earnings per share are substantially less than privately owned companies.

The challenge of how to increase business investment (expenditures) in research and development (BERD) has long been a priority for Canadian science and innovation policy-makers. The Superclusters initiative and a wide range of R&D support programs all aim to address this, yet Canada continues to rank lower than the OECD average in BERD. The Council of Canadian Academies 2018 report on the state of R&D in Canada comprehensively documents low BERD and suggests part of the reason is a high proportion of low-tech sectors in Canada. Mazzucato’s observations point to another possible factor at play. Perhaps Canadian industry is maximizing shareholder value through short-term financial strategies rather than long term investment in R&D.

The final chapters of the book advocate for a reorientation of the current innovation narrative to recognize, celebrate and advance the role the public sector plays in risk-taking and developing new technologies. This message will be familiar to readers of her 2013 book “The Enterpreneurial State” reviewed previously. Mazzucato returns to those arguments stressing that it was government, not private-sector, investment that led to key technologies including GPS and touch-screens at the foundation of whole new sectors. She advocates for the state to reap some return from successful investments and for state investment in infrastructure, R&D and in risky technologies especially in times of austerity.

My only real criticism with Mazzucato’s book is that it is light on analysis of her proposed solutions. We are told for example that policy-makers should broker deals that generate symbiotic private-public partnerships through state investment banks focussed on long-term finance to support risky endeavours, or that the price of drugs should be made to reflect the overall input from state supported research and not force the taxpayer to pay twice. Yet, there are real-life instances of government action for both of these examples. What can we learn from those efforts?


In “The Value of Everything”, Mariana Mazzucato has once again thrown down a challenge for readers to see government in a different light. While some may quibble with her assumptions, the overall call to look deeply at what value means in our economy is compelling. In this time of unprecedented public investment to face the challenge of COVID-19, the importance of government as a lender of last resort, a funder of life-saving discoveries and an economic stimulator is clear. Even skeptics may begin to look more seriously at Mazzucato’s invitation to recognize, celebrate and advance government as a risk-taking innovative co-creator of markets.

Impossible Conversations: Smart Citizens, Smarter State

Smart Citizens, Smarter State makes the case that governments are woefully under-using the knowledge, expertise, and talents of their citizens - and that bridging that gap is “the future of governing.”

Author Beth Simone Noveck has been at the forefront of changing trends in government and governance for a while now. She’s the Director of NYU’s Governance Lab, and led the U.S. Open Government initiative as Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the White House from 2009-2011.

Having been at the forefront, she draws on a variety of case studies and examples of how government got to novel solutions through more engagement with the public, which covered a broad spectrum of models:

• Crowdsourcing: gathering ideas, suggestions, or feedback on ideas from a broad base of participants
• Citizen engagement on policy-making: involving people in decision-making through online townhalls, discussions, surveys, polls, or other approaches
• Collaborative coding: getting a variety of people to work together to build open-source software
• Citizen science: creating technological platforms through which people can contribute to research, like mapping star fields, taking photos of sea level rise, or measuring PH in a river system
• Public challenges: posting a monetary prize for the first person or organization to design a solution to meet a particular technical, scientific, social, or governance challenge

To add to those models (some of which were covered in her 2009 book Wiki Government), Noveck lays out the concept of “technologies of expertise,” which go beyond the platforms that allow governments to communicate back-and-forth digitally with citizens and into models that help government officials not only find specific types of experts, but also proof and demonstration that those people actually do possess the expertise they claim to. For instance, Github is a website that hosts code repositories, but it also tracks users’ actions and how much they contribute to different coding projects. Or, this proof can be offered through reputation (e.g., eBay ratings), certification (e.g., online education programs), or badging (e.g., Code Academy).

So is this the future of governance?

Nick Charney

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Overall, I enjoyed Noveck’s book, though there were a few chapters that where more US-centric and thus less germain to the Canadian experience (but one can hardly hold that against her). Here’s a few insights from the book (including page numbers) that I think are worth sharing, followed by my commentary.

1. We have no good mental models for what smarter institutions look like -- i.e. the next iteration of governance (page 30), which leads me to conclude that we are slowly negotiating what those look like through ongoing societal discourse within and about the nature of democracy in a globalized world. Indeed many of these conversations have permeated our political discourse as of late (e.g. US election, Brexit, North American Leaders Summit, etc).
2. There’s a lot of discussion about the role that professionalism plays in crowdsourcing in Noveck’s book (page 48) and I’d like to sit her down with Cult of the Amateur author Andrew Keen (See: New Thoughts from an Early Adopter) to discuss it at length.
3. There’s some discussion about “the spoils of new, middle class jobs for thousands of people” (page 69) which to my mind simply signals the fact that any change in governance will have huge economic implications as those changes cascade through our complex and interrelated systems, that and that the stakes are obviously high and interests are vested.
4. Noveck also talks at length about the “We the People” website (pages 77-79) which simply confirmed for me that we have no good models for engaging people in policy making in large numbers, that level of sophistication is still relatively low, and our technological systems are too fast for slow and thoughtful deliberation (See: Thinking, Fast and Slow About Online Public Engagement)
5. I found the concept of “thick” versus “thin” engagment (page 82) to be interesting and likely helpful in framing discussions with others (e.g. do you want thick or thin engagement on this or do you have enough dedicated resources for thick engagement?).

Finally, if you read anything from the book, read pages 144-145. It's insightful and aligns with how the policy innovation and experimentation winds are blowing in Ottawa right now. Here’s a snippet:

“Although there is a lot of writing about improving the use of science in policymaking, Nudge work included, there is still little attention to the science of policymaking itself and only the whispers of an effort to test empirically new ways of deciding and of solving problems. Even if we vary where and how and at what level of government we restrict abortion or legalize prostitution or change the design of the forms used to enroll people in social programs, we do not often question the underlying assumptions about how we make these policies in the first place…

Examining the choice between policies arguably helps to spur a culture of experimentation, but it does not automatically lead to an assessment of the ways in which we actually make policy. To be clear, the Nudge Units often test choices between policies, or sometimes test the the impact of changing default rules, such as how and when to enroll people in a social service. Typically however, they do not experiment with approaches to making policy. They do not examine how governance innovations, such as open data, prize-backed challenges, crowdsourcing, or expert networking translate into results in real people’s lives …

The first step toward implementing smarter governance, therefore, is to develop an agenda for research and experimentation ”

Kent Aitken

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I want to start by doubling down on Nick’s fourth point, with some nods to his first. Large-scale digital citizen engagement is still in its Myspace phase, and we’ll need to keep designing and experimenting to get to models and platforms that work really well. No one's really cracked the online deliberative dialogue nut. Here's a solid, if dated, overview, and here's MIT's work, but the long story short is: polarization around views, in-person power dynamics being replicated online, the order and timing of comments influencing debates, and people sometimes just being lousy.

That said, the exceptions prove the rule for intentional design: for crowdsourcing, some of the really successful case studies are incredibly specific to a particular activity (e.g., spotting supernovae or folding proteins).

During our book club discussion on this one we spent a lot of time on questions about the value of citizen engagement, and the perceived success of governments at both soliciting and using feedback and ideas. My reaction tends to be along these lines: of course it will be of benefit, in many cases, to work with people outside of government to solve public problems, whether that means niche experts, demographically representative samples, or broad public engagement. The question is knowing when to do it, and being able to design the approach such that it’s worthwhile for everyone involved. Subtitles of books like this tend to be hyperbolic (probably well beyond the authors’ claims), so I’d nuance the line to “part of the future of governing.”

Lastly, there’s one area where I tend to be very skeptical, which is the “technologies of expertise” that Noveck refers to: that is, platforms that are designed to surface experts and make them findable by governments. I suspect that if you dig beneath the connections made through platforms that allow people to use, and publicly prove, expertise (e.g., Github, Stack Overflow, Wikipedia, etc.) the lines will map to the interpersonal social networks of the people using those platforms. This argument could be a little chicken-and-egg (when the relationships start virtually over shared interests), but the social context isn’t going away.

From an impartiality perspective, this is a tad dangerous because it means it’s not a perfectly level playing field, but the relationship between government and citizens is going to grow through the aggregate relationships between citizens and government officials (see: Why Government Social Media Isn't Social (and the comments)). The Smart Citizens we're talking about will engage with government when government starts to get to know them.

Impossible Conversations: How to Run a Government

The latest in our book review series is How to Run a Government so that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don't Go Crazy, by Michael Barber. The book covers Barber's experiences working with governments around the world to create "delivery units," teams responsible for mobilizing the civil service into delivering on a handful of top priorities - and the range of strategies and tactics Barber has tried to make that approach effective. Here are our joint reviews and reflections:

Nick Charney

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As with any author there’s noticeable cherry-picking and rose-coloured glasses. However, I must say that I really enjoyed Barber’s book and I find the idea of refocusing government culture around delivery refreshing. That said, the reason that I think the book is a must-read isn’t necessarily about its contents but rather its context. Barber recently briefed cabinet and all of Ottawa is abuzz with talk of deliverology (see: here, here, here, and here). If you want to understand the shift in culture/mindset that may be about to make its way through the bureaucracy you need only look to the table on page 154 of the book which describes the difference between ‘Government by spasm’ and ‘Government by routine’. If you are a public servant, you’d probably do well to pick yourself up a copy.

Francis Nolan-Poupart

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I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it’s genuinely useful. As much as we might like to, most of us public servants don’t spend our days up in the theory clouds; we have deliverables, deadlines, and performance expectations. Once in a blue moon, we might have a few days to grapple with and devise solutions for a complicated issue that wasn’t even on the radar a few weeks before. Barber’s book is practical in that way: it deals with the nitty gritty of policy and program delivery, and provides simple, road-tested conceptual tools that can help you think through those tough situations. I’ve already found myself referring to his approach in meetings and referring to some of his charts while writing up some documents - the same can’t be said of, say, the Evgeny Morozov book, much as I appreciated it. 

Another reason I enjoyed the book is that it serves as an effective wake-up call for the public service to get its own house in order. Barber humorously describes the silly things us bureaucrats do all the time, from the point of view of a politician or staffer - think of our attachment to the status quo, our tendency to claim that something can’t be done, our proclivity to engage in ridiculous turf wars, our stalling tactics, etc. If we agree that these kinds of behaviours are pervasive and counter-productive, we won’t be able to rely on ‘deliverology’ to save us, given that there wouldn’t be delivery units for most of the things the government does. So if the Government of Canada as a whole is going to become the kind of modern, high-performing, data-literate organization that Barber is envisioning, then bureaucrats will have to deal with some of our own purely internal performance issues in a more ambitious fashion (all within the framework of our delegated authorities, yada yada yada). Better diagnosing the nature of the silliness, and the possible solutions the bureaucracy could reasonably implement on an internal basis, is a topic for another day.

There’s also a lot I didn’t like about this book. My main irritant is that Barber is a poor social scientist. He usually conforms to a ‘logic model’ vision of government, where, for any given policy problem (e.g., low literacy rates) you just need to find the one right lever to pull (i.e., forcing teachers to teach one new literacy class a week in elementary school). Um.. hold on a minute.  For most policy issues, there’s a lot more going on under the hood - I dunno, maybe persistent social exclusion driven by economic inequality, systemic discrimination, or uncontrollable economic forces over which governments have little to no control? (Pick your poison.) So yes, I was somewhat disturbed by Barber’s tendency to make sweeping statements about complicated situations, without much in the way of caveats. So you might want to listen to Barber to decide on how to ‘run a government’, but take his opinions on what the actual policy responses should be with a massive grain of salt. (Don’t get even me started on his frequent claims that ‘the markets vs. governments debate is over’ - the guy’s a pro-market social liberal with light redistributive tendencies. Which is fine; just don’t try to make a drive-by ‘end of history’ argument which passes that off as being the only viable political/policy approach out there.)

Argh, there’s a ton of other things that annoyed me about this book, but I want to keep this review ‘lengthy’, as opposed to ‘unreasonably lengthy’, so I will leave it at that - I won’t even address Barber’s constant humble-bragging and lack of critical self-reflection, or the unsatisfactory way in which Barber discussed the risks of over-relying on metrics (I’ll leave Prez to do the explaining, from way back in 2004). Another topic I would have liked to explore is that ultimately, Barber really only addresses a small sliver of what policy implementation actually involves (a lot of the times it seems to comes down to tracking bureaucrats in order to scare them into coming up with new solutions, but he doesn’t often tell you what the actual solutions were), but I’m a slow writer, and a man has to have evening hobbies that go beyond reviewing books.   

    John Kenney

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I liked the book and agree with Nick that Barber’s focus on delivery is refreshing. Here are a few things on my mind in relation to how it might be applied, particularly at the federal level:

One of the things that makes the “science of delivery” different than, say, federal public administration via the Management, Resources and Results Structure (MRRS) and the Management Accountability Framework, is that deliverology focuses government on strategy and priorities. The point is not to “deliverology” everything. In theory at least, it requires a government to make deliberate choices, understand where it’s going and how it’ll know if it’s making progress getting there, and if not, learning and adapting as needed. It’s hardcore when it comes to assessing whether or not the government has the capacity to deliver on what it sets out to do. While some of that may sound like the good intentions of the MRRS or “integrated planning”, deliverology takes it to a new, concentrated level with political engagement and leadership.

Deliverology strikes me as a convergent practice. It picks up at a point where a government has identified its priorities and what it intends to do to achieve them. In the context of complex public problems (aka “wicked problems”), new and emerging policy approaches are attempting to embed divergent and integrative thinking, user research and experimentation into the policy design process in advance of converging on solutions. If well-executed, deliverology could expose the (non)effectiveness of intended policy solutions earlier in the policy cycle and open up opportunities for creative problem-solving and experimentation. I like how it builds in (some) stakeholder engagement, rigourous (enough) performance measurement and monitoring, learning and iteration to rapidly improve and address delivery problems as they arise. It’s an action-oriented and continuous learning approach. Arguably, governments need more of that assuming they’re open to learning, acknowledging when things aren’t going well and adapting their approach to hit the mark. 

I’m intrigued by the application of deliverology at the federal level. The UK and Ontario are oft-cited examples of deliverology in action, and in both cases, they are arguably closer to where the rubber hits the road as far as delivering policy interventions directly to citizens go. I’m writing generally here and it will depend on the policy priorities and strategies in question. The government and implicated jurisdictions are open to challenge conventional assumptions of how stakeholder arrangements may work to deliver the public goods, at least in theory (possibly in practice?).

Deliverology is not a magic bullet. Barber doesn’t present it as one so let’s not get cult-ish about it. There’s a lot of good stuff to learn and apply, but note that the same federal government that appears eager to apply its principles and practices has also been clear on the need to create the time and space for (super)forecasting, designing citizen-centred digital services, and experimenting with new policy instruments and approaches, including behavioural and data-driven insights, and engaging Canadians via crowdsourcing and open data initiatives. It remains to be seen how consistent and compatible those approaches are with deliverology, which, as Barber writes, “...is still in its infancy”. He concludes the book with three rules on the future of delivery:

• Big data and transparency are coming (prepare to make the most of them);
• Successful markets and effective government go together (avoid the false dichotomy); and,
• Public and social entrepreneurship will become increasingly important to delivering outcomes (encourage it).

Deliverology is not a linear approach although it can sometimes come across as one. While Barber’s focus is intentionally on delivery here, there’s a continuous learning loop built into it that, if executed effectively, could yield insights that inform ongoing and future policy design and delivery approaches.

I’ve added “in theory”, “if executed effectively” and “assuming that…” in a number of places above. I agree with Francis that Barber oversimplifies things a lot to demonstrate the lessons (or “rules”) for government. I like many of them in principle (there I go again), but if and how deliverology is applied to influence complex systems and human behaviours both within the public service and beyond may depend on its openness to adapt where necessary to the policy contexts and needs of numerous implicated users and stakeholders at different times and scales.

Kent Aitken

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Er… well done, gentlemen. I’m getting to this joint review late, and Nick, Francis, and John have covered a lot of ground in spectacular fashion. I only have a handful of points to add.

One is to re-emphasize Nick’s angle, which is that part of the reason this book was so interesting was the possibility that it’s about to influence public administration in Canada - possibly in tangible, day-to-day ways for some public servants. That said, during the discussion I also cautioned that one bureaucrat's environmental scanning or forecasting may be another bureaucrat's tea-leaf-reading. I’m trying to resist reading too far into things until deliverology rears its head for real.  

The second is to sum up what the core of the book, and the idea of deliverology, was for me: it’s government knowing what it wants to do, and knowing for sure that those things are getting done. Which sounds pretty reasonable. Barber highlights in the book that holding administrators to account for results isn’t about a blame game, it’s actually about helping and clearing obstacles for initiatives that are challenging to implement. (Which, I suspect, is an ideal that some past “implementers” may not have felt at the time.)

Which leads into a related third point: I’m curious as to how bureaucratic writing and deliverology will mesh. Government officials can tend towards non-specific language like “commit to,” “enhance,” “support,” “enable,” and “facilitate” in their planning and reporting - which I don’t think would cut it to a delivery unit: “Okay, but what did you really do?”

Lastly, which contrasts a little with the above reviews: as a public servant, I spend my time in the weeds of public administration. I think about the details, the working level, and the implementation. Barber’s ideas are those of someone who has to take the 10,000 foot-high view, working with heads of state or their close circles. So where Francis and John (rightly) express concern with how these ideas work in complex, day-to-day realities, the book gave me some perspective on what delivery might look like to a country’s senior officials - who are forced to look for the best ways to condense their information intake while making things happen.

Impossible Conversations: a Review of What is Government Good At?

by Kent Aitken

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This is the latest in a series of book reviews, which we usually write en masse as a book club. Given that we discussed this book leading up to Christmas, I'll just jot down some notes myself. I’ll try to return to the group format for the next book as I think we’ll have a lot to discuss (it’s How to Run a Government so that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don’t Go Crazy).

Here’s the short story for this one, starting with a caveat: I really like Donald Savoie’s book Breaking the Bargain, and consider it a must-read explainer of a long-term shift in the political-public service relationship. I liked Whatever Happened to the Music Teacher?, his book about why the focus has fallen off front-line public services, though I would have liked more solutions for the problems he diagnosed. But I’d recommend Breaking the Bargain over his latest, What is Government Good At?.

It’s because of something we might call “the Last Chapter Problem,” which is what I'm actually going to talk about for this review. (For Savoie’s take on the Canadian public service, you can still read our reflections on Whatever Happened to the Music Teacher?.) 

The Last Chapter Problem

Over the last couple years, we’ve gone through an interesting list of books on governance in Canada. A common theme running throughout is a comprehensive, 300-page analysis of what’s wrong, followed by a “So what do we do about it?” chapter that falls flat.

Joseph Heath (Enlightenment 2.0) broke down why we can’t have nuanced, rational discourse about complex public policy issues, but couldn’t really muster a convincing solution. Likewise for Susan Delacourt (Shopping for Votes), who tackled a similar thread as Heath - a drift away from weighty, intellectual discourse - but focused on elections and campaigns. Alison Loat and Michael MacMillan (Tragedy in the Commons) went straight to the source - former members of parliament - for their assessment of the status quo, and could only end their book with the explicit recognition that some of the problems described were seemingly intractable. They included the following quote in their last chapter:

"People often ask: how can we reform politics? And the answer is: we can’t. There are very few institutional changes that would do any good, and whatever would has no chance of being enacted." 

- Andrew Coyne

Jeffrey Simpson (Chronic Condition) came to a similar conclusion as Coyne, but about health care reform in Canada.

The same idea struck me for What is Government Good At?. Savoie notes in the opening that the book developed from a conversation with another academic, and I feel as though he set out with best intentions to answer the title question. but after laying out his extensive experience with the public service had accidentally answered the converse: “What is government not good at?”.

Good at What?

“In brief, government is good at looking to the long term, dealing with wicked problems, and making visionary investments*… This makes the point once again the government should do things that no one else is doing, wishes to do, or is able to do. In short, governments are better at establishing circumstances for success than at managing success.” 

That note appears in the chapter Good at What?, which is still mostly about what government is not good at. His (actual) last chapter returns specifically to why governments can come up short, focusing on the gap between direction from the top and implementation on the ground. Or as Savoie puts it, the public service above the "fault line” and the public service below it (see: Nick or Kent on the clay layer). And this is not a slight on the book, just an example of the Last Chapter Problem. The sole real prescription is calling for a national debate on how to improve ailing institutions.

Which is fair. These problems are hefty and we should be suspicious about easy answers. But at some point we really need a good Last Chapter, a “So what do we do about it?” We seem to be, as a country, running somewhat of a deficit on answers.

All of which makes me excited to discuss the next book, which is all about implementation in government.

*Mariana Mazzucato book’s (The Entrepreneurial State), for what it’s worth, laid out the long-term, visionary investments piece in convincing detail.

Impossible Conversations: Tragedy in the Commons

by Kent Aitken

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A group of us started a Public Administration/Political Economy Book Club in March 2013, prompted by a tweet from George Wenzel.

The June discussion was fantastic. The last two months have added some sharp new voices to the group, and the most recent book, Tragedy in the Commons, by Samara founders Alison Loat and Michael MacMillan, made for great fodder. The book is a dive into the (recent) state of Canada's parliament, based on interviews with former Members of Parliament, a demographic that allows for candid reflections.

We invite members to provide their reviews and reflections for posting here. Alison was kind enough to join us via Hangout to discuss the book when we met, and asked for suggestions for future editions, as well.

Thank you to Alison, and to everyone who takes part.

Nick Charney

Sequence matters; this book is a perfect complement to Delacourt’s Shopping for Votes and Savoie’s Whatever Happened to the Music Teacher. Taken together, these books provide great insight into the evolution of the political-bureaucratic interface in Canada. That said, I was taken aback by the fact that many of the interviewees saw themselves as the citizen’s solution to interfacing with the bureaucracy when things break down, choosing to cast themselves as ombudsman dealing with symptoms rather than legislators fixing systems. Unsurprisingly the book casts the ‘bureaucracy’ as amorphous and a part of the problem. To the best of my recollection none of the MPs questioned ever spoke of to the issue of the ongoing relationship between elected officials and the public servants that serve them or working with the civil service to achieve a particular end. It’s almost as though the relationship didn’t even register. I find it fascinating because of the amount of attention the relationship gets from the other side of the equation; bureaucrats, former bureaucrats and public admin academics (especially those in Ottawa) love to weigh in on the relationship (See: On The Trust Gap). I think it would be fascinating to conduct similar exit interviews with former civil servants and see how their answers stack up. My gut tells me we’d see an incredible gap in concerns, a gap that might be contributing to the Tragedy of the Commons.

Erin Gee

Freshly off Delacourt’s Shopping for Votes, I tried to guess (without much luck) whether or not any of the interviewees were playing the political marketing card. Tragedy in the Commons shed an interesting light into the world of politics, and despite the subject matter, remained accessible (so whether you’re a political junkie or not, you should read it). What struck me the most was the candour with which the interviewees spoke. They were (seemingly) incredibly forthright in their responses and I’m curious to see how future MP exit interviews may turn out.

Kent Aitken Nick and Erin both mentioned the context of other books we've read. I'll second the value of reading these books together, and add the warning it may feel like a slight punch in the gut. Where to even start? Alison asked for suggestions for improvements, and while any book could be improved, suggestions for Tragedy would be minor quibbles. They've done an excellent job, and published an engaging read out of powerful and unique source material. It's a worthwhile addition to the interim reports from the same interviews. My one concern would be that, given the qualitative nature of the research, those that disagree could dismiss the narrative as being a product of the authors' perspectives. Fortunately, many direct quotes from former MPs will hold much weight on their own. TL;DR: I've probably thrown around the term "must read" in the past, but this absolutely is, for anyone interested in politics or public administration. For reflections: I was struck by the idea of MPs considering themselves "outsiders" to the heart of the process, and working for ways to make a difference. Many seemed torn between "playing the game" and delivering results for their ridings and the country. Since I wrote When Parameters Are The Problem I've been seriously debating where the balance is between fitting neatly within the system, and adhering to one's principles (at least, when the two are indeed in conflict). I just didn't realize that the conflict would apply to MPs, as well. I was also intrigued at the lack of agreement on what an MP's job is in the first place: trustees of their riding, or delegates? There to echo voices or make decisions on their behalf? Simultaneously, should they be acting as ombudsmen for the bureaucracy to citizens, as Nick notes? I finished this book over a month ago and it's still rolling around in my mind. When voters go shopping, pick this up.

Monday Book Review: Beyond the Idea: How to Execute Innovation in Any Organization

by John Kenney

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It would seem that it is completely natural to frame the innovation challenge as a battle between an innovation hero and a bureaucratic octopus. In the real world, however, innovation heroes get strangled, almost every time. Therefore, we need a more productive approach… 

... what is needed is mutual respect between innovation leaders and performance engine leaders…innovation leaders must recognize that conflict with the performance engine is normal. It is not the result of people being lazy or unwilling to change. Quite to the contrary, it is the result of good people doing good work, trying to make the performance engine run as efficiently as possible. Performance engine leaders, for their part, must remember that no performance engine lasts forever…(Beyond the Idea, p. 48).

Blueprint 2020 generated a lot of ideas and maybe just as many questions regarding if and how they will be implemented. What follows is a summary of Beyond the Idea: How to Execute Innovation in Any Organization and a few thoughts with respect to public sector innovation.

First, a few things about what the book is not:

With the exception of a couple of brief appendices on strategy and change, which I’ll discuss below, it’s not a guide for strategic or systemic approaches to innovation.* It picks up where the generation of ideas leaves off so doesn’t explain (directly) how innovation supports desired outcomes, needs and/or solutions to problems. It also doesn’t speak to innovation diffusion. There’s a deliberate focus on project-level innovation initiatives based on the authors’ survey of the field, which was primarily private sector companies...so the public sector is not the intended audience. The book, therefore, does not tell a complete innovation story, nor does it attempt to.

If I haven’t lost you after that preamble, I think the authors have some important insights with respect to managing innovation initiatives vis-à-vis ongoing operations. There are a number of jumping off points for further reflection and discussion.

The book’s premise is that orgs must shift time and energy from a focus on generating ideas to executing innovation initiatives. An innovation initiative is defined as “any project that is new to your organization and has an uncertain outcome.” The definition is intentionally broad.

The way the authors see it, most orgs are not built for innovation. They’re set up to deliver ongoing operations via the “performance engine.” “…Innovation execution is its own unique discipline. It requires its own time, energy and distinct thinking.”

Three models for executing innovation initiatives are presented. Orgs can have any number of innovation initiatives on the go; what’s crucial, say the authors, is to match each initiative to the proper model to ensure they are executed effectively. “The criteria for choosing the right model are internal. They are tied to the physics of getting the work done.”

EACH MODEL HAS ITS OWN STRATEGY FOR DEALING WITH THE PERFORMANCE ENGINE 

Model	Strategy for Dealing with the Performance Engine	What It Delivers
S Small	Squeeze It In Squeeze innovation into the slack in the system.	A very large number of very small initiatives.
R Repeatable	Make It Repeatable and Predictable Make innovation look as much like day-to-day operations as possible.	A series of similar initiatives.
C Custom	Separate It Separate incompatible innovation tasks from day-to-day operations.	One unique initiative at a time.

- Beyond the Idea, p. 15

Model S, for small initiatives, “squeezes innovation into the slack time” of the ongoing work of the performance engine, spontaneously and organically. This model is largely dependent on motivated employees, individually and/or collectively, doing their regular work plus the work to innovate, but only part-time given the performance engine has got to keep chugging along. For that reason, Model S can work for small initiatives only, but the cumulative impacts can be significant. E.g.:

• See Tanya Snook’s Hacking Our Way To Agile Government. 
• Tiger Teams, Insight Teams, and Tech companies’ “20 percent projects”.

Model R, for repeatable initiatives, is all about the process and making innovation systematic for a series of similar initiatives, big or small. It aims to make innovation as repeatable and predictable as possible. “…for all of Model R’s strengths, it is also its own worst enemy. Its drive for efficiency eventually becomes its undoing.” Systematic, process-driven innovation for specific initiatives requires some flexibility (e.g. time, budget) at times to allow for breakthroughs to occur. E.g.:

• Product development teams that pump out the ongoing series of your favourite smartphone,
• An HR team that develops and implements a new performance management directive using a similar process and people as the previous year’s exercise.   

The bulk of the book is dedicated to Model C, for custom initiatives, which is the most difficult and robust model. This model is used for all other initiatives beyond the limitations of either Model S or Model R. Model C initiatives require a structure for disciplined experimentation that is incompatible with the performance engine. Each custom initiative has a “Special Team” and a “Special Plan.” The Special Team is made up of “Dedicated Staff”, who work full-time on the initiative and “Shared Staff”, who provide part-time support (as needed) and continue their role in ongoing operations. The Dedicated Staff is assembled as if you’re putting together a new, custom-built organization: the culture, ways of working and make-up of the team, which could include external talent, is designed for the specific initiative. The Special Team and Special Plan emphasize rapid learning to design and execute the initiative, and the work of the team is evaluated more so on that basis. E.g.:

• New ways of working and innovation executed via a skunkworks or design/innovation/change lab.

I buy Beyond the Idea’s argument that we have to acknowledge and manage the inevitable tension(s) between our ongoing operations and innovation initiatives. There’s some truth to “innovation heroes get strangled, almost every time.” Often, the performance engine is busy doing other things. Motivated employees with brilliant ideas get swamped or directed to work on other priorities. Or, the culture and ways of working of an established org unit (or an entire department) do not lend themselves well to adapting to new ways of working to achieve desired outcomes. The book includes info on the roles a Chief Innovation Officer and/or innovation support team can play in coordinating initiatives, providing support and guidance, and managing the potential conflicts.

There’s more to it than that though.

Beyond the Idea’s focus on using the right model for an innovation initiative is important, but is it the right initiative? A scattershot approach to innovation via idea generation will only take an organization so far, and possibly in an unknown direction (See Innovation is the Process of Idea Management and Why your innovation contest won’t work). We need to commit to the long game and take the necessary steps to get there. That may include taking a step back, looking at the big picture, and ensuring our overarching frameworks, business processes, and ways of working enable innovation and its diffusion. Check out You can’t impose a culture of innovation for tips on investing in long-term change and consider moving from incremental fixes to systemic innovation.

An argument that innovation requires “its own time, energy and distinct thinking” doesn’t mean that it happens in isolation of everything else. Alex Howard recently wrote about the launch of 18F, a startup within the US General Services Administration that is setting up to “hack the bureaucracy.” “18F builds effective, user-centric digital services focused on the interaction between government and the people and businesses it serves. We help agencies deliver on their mission through the development of digital and web services.” Also mentioned in Howard’s post was Clay Johnson’s response to 18F: “Is 18F a complete solution to the US government’s IT woes? No. But, like RFP-IT and FITARA, this new office is part of a broader strategy.” Ah, strategy.

Buried at the back of Beyond the Idea is an appendix on “Strategy.”. The authors claim that “everything a company thinks and does can be put into one of the [following] three boxes:

• Box 1: Manage the present;
• Box 2: Selectively forget the past; and
• Box 3: Create the future.”

Most organizations spend a lot of time on managing the present. Blueprint 2020 and the recent planning push have got us thinking about the future, but as we do that, are we making deliberate, well-informed decisions and challenging the enduring assumptions of the performance engine to selectively forget the past? We need to address the underlying problems and (sometimes perceived) barriers to new ways of working. Innovation is not just about doing new things. Sometimes it’s about making deliberate choices to stop doing old things.

The guidance in Beyond the Idea will not get us there alone, but being mindful that innovation initiatives come in all shapes and sizes and require appropriate models to effectively execute them is timely advice. Managing the tensions between ongoing operations and innovation initiatives and selectively forgetting the past will be crucial if the federal public service is expected to meet at the desired Destination 2020 rendezvous point.

*E.g. See the Three Horizons Approach in Appendix Six in Empowering Change: Fostering Innovation in the Australian Public Service and Innovation for Now and for the Future, and Kent’s post on Standardizing Innovation.