Aligning Expertise with Ambition: Is the Civil Service Mission Ready?

Labour has carried through its commitment to delivering change through a mission-led approach to government and the first vacancies have been posted to help “make mission-led government a reality.”  This raises the question of what skills the UK Civil Service needs to deliver this ambition effectively. 

Traditional approaches to understanding skills

Before completing my Master’s at the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS), I would have approached this question by relying on two methods: reading a lot about the topic and speaking with interesting and informed people.

As it turns out, this is what most people have done on this topic! The problem is that, by itself, it reads as too subjective. One reason is that the concept of a Mission-driven government is a bit like a Rorschach ink-blot test with different writers seeing it through their particular perspective. For example, some people stress the importance of skills modelled on agile software development, others view it through the lens of social innovation, and others stress participatory approaches and sharing power.

The LIS approach

One of my big learnings from my year as a Master’s student at LIS is the possibility of getting objective about subjectivity (I think I owe this phrase to the brilliant James Carney) and the methods for doing so. For example, to understand social contagion, the emotional content of posts on Reddit forums about the US election, or even the colours countries choose for their flags.

As part of my capstone project (the culmination of the Master’s programme at LIS), I have applied some of these methods to the question I started this blog with: what skills does a mission-ready civil service need?

Data collection and analysis

Since February, I have been web-scraping Civil Service vacancies and gathering expert opinions on mission-driven government. So far, I have collected nearly 2,000 vacancies and over 1.1 million words of expert opinion. 

Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, I statistically measured the skills emphasised in expert opinions to generate a list of the 16 most important skills for the successful delivery of Mission-led change. These are skills such as creativity, agility, taking risks and designing and delivering participatory approaches to secure citizen engagement.

I have also run a statistical comparison to show the difference in importance that expert opinion places on these skills and the importance they enjoy in the Civil Service vacancies (all of which are Grade 6 or above).

This is shown in the heat-map below. The colours provide a scale of the skills' significance within one of our two corpuses - the hotter the colour, the more significant the skill for that corpus. For example, according to expert opinion, Experimentation is the most significant skill for the successful delivery of Missions. 

What’s especially important is the difference in colour between the two corpuses - for example, the skill of designing and delivering Participatory Approaches is seen by expert opinion as much more important (it has a hotter colour) than its representation in the Civil Service Vacancies (where it has a cooler colour). 

It's tempting to write in response, "Houston, we have a problem." Overall, the heat map shows a Civil Service that, for understandable reasons, under-appreciates the skills needed to successfully deliver the ambitions of a mission-led approach.

On a more personal note, the heat map above fills me with pride: in absolutely no way would I have been able to achieve this analysis before my Master's.

By the way, that’s an objective fact - not a subjective feeling.

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