Political leadership is hard. Leaders arrive in office only to discover that, for all their supposed powers, making things happen is not straightforward. Unforeseen challenges, crises and the relentless demands of the day-to-day schedule impinge on the ability to deliver on their highest priorities. Aspirations do not automatically translate into impact.
The leaders who succeed have learned to treat delivery as a discipline that ensures their aspirations lead to action and, in turn, that those actions lead to outcomes. As Tony Blair has said: “The biggest challenge for a leader is how to deliver. How to get things done. How to translate the grand vision into the practical reality. I learned this firsthand as prime minister.” Today, this learning curve has a new dimension, as leaders must also adapt to changing realities in the age of AI and evolve their thinking on how technology can enhance their ability to get big things done.
Newly elected leaders rapidly discover the work of government can be painfully slow, with vested interests and incentives encouraging a system that masks problems rather than solving them. Even seasoned leaders can struggle with the focus required to move past what can feel like a conspiracy of inertia to get done the things that matter most. The key is setting up the right core elements – political agenda, policy priorities, delivery mechanisms and communications – ensuring they are all working together in a unified direction.
Delivery, Enabled by Tech
The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) works in more than 35 countries across five continents, advising political leaders at the highest levels of government on strategy, policy and delivery, with technology as the enabler across all three. Our experience reveals that political leaders share common challenges and frustrations – and delivery is one of the major things they look to us to help them with.
A new leader or minister’s initial reaction to the cacophony and complexity of government is often to add to it, requesting more meetings and further analysis of problems. This sort of direct involvement and attention can indeed help to solve problems, but only one at a time – and time is the one thing a leader cannot generate more of.
TBI’s teams work shoulder to shoulder with political leaders around the world and understand the challenges they face. We’re constantly learning from the governments we support, and use that experience to advise leaders on where and how their limited time will best be spent.
Among the many things we support leaders with, from priority setting to strategic communications, we focus heavily on equipping them with what they need to deliver ambitiously and effectively. We understand how new technologies are accelerating and transforming leaders’ abilities to translate their political visions into reality in the age of AI. As the private sector provides higher-quality digital services, people’s expectations rise for seamless digital interactions with their public services. Adding new digital tools to the delivery toolkit is crucial – including those that can help governments leverage data to understand what is (and isn’t) working. Similarly, emerging technologies such as AI can support governments to design and deliver services more efficiently and to better meet people’s needs. This can be done in a number of ways, including improving the business of government, making it easier to access public services, and stimulating enhanced productivity and prosperity.
To remain focused on what matters, political leaders need a clear strategy, underpinned by a limited set of priorities, which are driven by strong systems and the right people.
Systems That Deliver
Delivery systems need to be comprehensive but simple. Any priority with a hope of success needs to start with a clear plan and a limited number of well-defined outcomes, milestones, targets and trajectories. The plan should reflect the leader’s political mandate to the people (as defined by their strategy and political realities) and grounded in the case they made to win election.
This needs to flow into an ability to track progress. In some countries, there are meaningful gaps in data collection and analysis that constrain leaders and mean they must plan with imperfect information. In other countries, the flow of data is easier and more rapid than ever – which brings with it the risk of overwhelming leaders or creating a disproportionate focus on data integrity at the expense of delivery. In either scenario, governments need to invest time in developing the right data strategy that enables them to cross-reference multiple sources and isolate the insights that matter most.
Leaders need regular routines, which drive accountability, decision-making and focus. These routines imply an investment of their time, as routines are the driving force for problem-solving and moving past roadblocks to progress. They also need a clear communication strategy – both inside the system and to wider stakeholders, including the public. Explaining progress towards the end goal helps build and maintain momentum.
The president of a country in southern Africa inherited a political landscape with a struggling economy and weak social sectors. TBI worked with the new president to determine the priority areas of focus and the systems for success required to achieve results. Powered by impact-oriented routines and a roadmap to deliver, the country saw significant improvement in border-crossing efficiency, enhanced internet connectivity for 20 rural schools and augmented energy security to counteract power outages during a severe drought.
The Art of Action: People Who Get Things Done
Delivery requires capable, politically switched-on, outcomes-focused staff who can develop positive relationships with subject-matter experts based in government departments and beyond. Those staff and experts need to partner, but also push each other, to achieve what is needed. To succeed, the leader requires a team that understands the wider set of stakeholders to advise them on who might stand in the way of progress and who might be an ally. Partnerships with the private sector are even more crucial to enable government to keep pace with the rapidity of innovation that is characteristic of the technology revolution.
The system needs a bias towards action and the agility to adjust where needed. Leaders have a huge role to play in establishing relationships built on trust between the political staff and the teams doing the work. A “no-blame” culture focuses people on collective resolution while still maintaining accountability.
With the right systems, and people, politicians can turn ambition into improvements citizens see and feel. TBI established a small, central team in a political leader’s office (a Delivery Unit) to prioritise the leader’s most critical outcomes. That unit has driven an increase in electricity access for 3.7 million households and drinking-water access for 3.6 million more households.
Governing in the Age of AI
The fundamentals of political leadership remain, but technology is now the primary tool in reimagining the art of the possible.
The future of delivery uses tech as an enabler of greater efficiency and effectiveness, allowing leaders to direct attention, efforts and resources where they will best help meet their greatest political ambitions – and deliver transformative results for citizens.
Using AI and data can help leaders to create better solutions. Benchmarking or costing simulations can widen the range of solutions that leaders might consider possible. The rapid development of new artificial-intelligence applications – both “traditional” narrow machine learning and emerging general-purpose generative AI – is opening new avenues for what political leaders can achieve in both value and in savings. These technologies allow them to overcome long-standing constraints so that they can deliver improvements in the volume, cost and quality of services all at the same time. This makes today arguably the most exciting time to be a political leader.
Transformative change can only happen through a combination of technology and its political application to drive better outcomes. These factors can apply all the way through the government programme. Digital transformation requires a whole-of-government approach to delivery, across the silos of departments. Gone are the days of tasking a single ministry or team with digital transformation. That transformation needs to tap into executive political authority, and innovations must be driven across the system.
The best digital tools are now accessible to most governments: think video-conferencing platforms to enable remote access; new ways of collecting, analysing and displaying data; new means of scenario mapping; and “digital twins” that simulate policy and intervention outcomes. But it’s important to remember that the tools are not an end in themselves. No matter the new technical trappings of the operation, the fundamentals remain the same: a clear strategy, a limited number of priorities, and the systems and people to drive their delivery.
In partnership with the Institut Pasteur de Dakar, a public-health and digital-infrastructure nonprofit, the government of Senegal used advanced digital records through the Oracle Health Management System to increase Covid-19 vaccination coverage by 45 per cent in less than two years. TBI simultaneously helped the government set up a digital health-worker portal, which registered more than 1,500 health centres and 280 health-care workers countrywide. These changes ushered in an era of digital outcomes tracking that enables more efficient and effective health care, generating and using health data on comorbidities for the first time in the over-65 population.
Conclusion
Political leaders who succeed are those equipped to make decisions with confidence that action will flow; are prepared to revisit, refine and redouble their plans as things unfold; and are committed to the right communication both within government and out to the public.
In other words, it is the application of delivery disciplines that matters. Leaders who, from day one, dedicate themselves and their time to overseeing a successful operation will be better placed to cut through the inertia and complexity, to pass the test of an emergency or to resolve a long-term, knotty challenge.
We’re proud to be part of that story in many countries around the world.