Finding the common threads of accomplishment
Recently, Reserve Bank governor Lesetja Khanyago spoke of the “execution deficit” within the government — just like a banker.
But if we think about our most recent and urgent need for the state to respond and deliver effectively — notably, to be protected from the outburst of looting and violence — the national commentary is justifiably far less polite about the performance of our government.
Whichever way it is said, South Africans have been stripped of their confidence as an achieving nation. We get through things — and we have done it very well in the past. Our transition to democracy is testimony to that — we pulled ourselves back from the brink and adopted an exemplary constitution, to which we can add four Nobel Peace laureates that affirm a national ability to produce exceptional leaders.
And yet today, we find ourselves wallowing.
This makes Sir Michael Barber’s book, Accomplishment: How to Achieve Ambitious and Challenging Things, resonate. It lays out what it takes to recover and achieve ambitious goals in complicated environments.
Barber’s global brand draws from his experience in government — as the title from his previous book explains, How to Run a Government: So that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don’t Go Crazy.
Under former UK prime minister Tony Blair, Barber led the world’s first specialist delivery unit, run from the prime minister’s office. It was a successful effort at getting some real results that mattered to people — for example, getting trains to run on time and reducing waiting times in emergency departments.
Today, President Cyril Ramaphosa, is drawing on this approach.
Barber has written extensively on his UK experience and that of other governments. In Accomplishment, he takes a different tack. He considers achievement across many fields of endeavour — art, science, business, elite sport and public service. As he puts it, he varies from “the grand and epic to the purely personal”.
This range has allowed my own work to be featured. Helen Zille heard about Barber’s successes under Blair, looked at how he did it, and appointed me to lead a unit akin to Barber’s that produced a different way of doing business in government with some exceptional results achieved. Particularly important was the rollout of e-learning to 1-million pupils that enabled the Western Cape school system to adapt better than others to the remote-learning requirements of Covid-19 lockdowns.
What interested me most in the book is the tapestry of accomplishment that crisscrosses a soprano singer; Olympiad sports stars; scientists; geniuses; political leaders; and a 17th-century Quaker woman, Mary Fisher, with whom he starts his story. He finds a pattern to accomplishment and, in that, he brings out the human side much more than he has done in his previous writings.
Technique is important, but it is the person and the people who make the difference. As he weaves through the stories and insights of his subjects, one cannot help but project onto SA. How does Ramaphosa fare within these patterns of accomplishment? And can we find an alchemy to achievement amid bureaucratic mediocrity?
Barber highlights the value of building coalitions, prioritising and having dedicated delivery expertise. The president scores on these, after a slow start. But there are more elements to success, like the importance of a good team (which Ramaphosa surely lacks even after his recent cabinet reshuffle).
Throughout his stories, Barber keeps coming back to open-mindedness, not being overconfident, avoiding dogma, meticulous attention to detail and facing “the brutal truth”.
These are not the hallmarks of our political leadership, who could draw pertinent lessons from Punjab’s former chief minister Shahbaz Sharif. He started from a “shockingly low base”, but instead of giving up, he “started with the one component of leadership capacity he had control over — himself”. He never let up, he browbeat and yelled with moral fervour (not, as Barber says, a case study for management handbooks). Relatively quickly, his priority, education, improved — schools got electricity, water and toilets; teachers pitched up for class; and decent textbooks were printed and distributed.
A similar myopic focus stood behind the success of the British Olympics team. In 2012, Britain, the host, won more medals than it had ever done. They could have rested on their laurels, but UK Sports “decided that history should inspire rather than inhibit them”. They went on to win more medals at Rio in 2016. “How? For a start, they prioritised ruthlessly.” For Barber, real accomplishment is never possible without prioritisation.
Barber’s early reputation was built on the use of a few key metrics and real-time data to improve impact. In this book, he is cautious about the adherence to the term “evidence-based policy or strategy”, preferring instead “evidence-informing”. The reason is that our choices and decisions never draw from evidence alone.
As he notes, both analytics and creativity are needed to prosper — as well as an ability to convince people of the veracity of the evidence. He traces the success of Galileo for uncovering “the truth in the heavens” and his failure to be believed. This is as much a story about the hard-sell of evidence (think of the anti-vaxxers today), as it is about the not so generous spirit of Galileo that curtailed the acceptance and effect of his telescopic discoveries of space.
Many stories are told, and many are fascinating in themselves, but Barber’s purpose is to find the common threads of accomplishment. The book achieves that, with ease of readability.