This is my #OneTeamGov, what’s yours?

I left the civil service last year, having worked in Government since 2003.

I joined full of the idealism that comes with being a freshly graduated white liberal woman. I was going to make the world a better place.

Through the years that followed the idealism slowly drained from me, through the thousands cuts I received from the giant bureaucracy that is the civil service.

Let’s see over 13 years I saw: silos, excessive hierarchy, individualism. The suppression of stories of failure (preventing any learning), the fear of transparency, and the unspoken rule that no-one below grade 6 was allowed to speak publicly. The policy fetish, the perfectionism, the identikit white middle class Oxbridge crew. The politics and the Politics; the politicians and their preoccupation with optics; the rareness with which truth was spoken to power. The lip service paid to citizen consultation, to staff engagement, and to truly independent reviews. The chasm between private office, strategy, policy and delivery.

But before I left (because, well, Brexit) I saw signs that things were changing for the better.

The Open Policymaking and PolicyLab teams in the Cabinet Office started doing work that I could see was truly different to what had come before. This was the first time I could see people working across departmental boundaries (we’d tried and failed in the past with cross-cutting PSAs). The first time I’d seen truly multidisciplinary teams that INCLUDED policy bods. The first stories I heard of failure and lessons learned, and of bringing citizens into the policy process.

And over the last couple of years the #OneTeamGov community has built something that goes even further. They’ve started to build a revolution from the inside, catalysing collective action from the bottom-up and galvanising senior leaders. They’re hierarchy-agnostic, inclusive and prefer to seek forgiveness instead of permission. They’re action-oriented, empathetic and open. They’ve created a space to fail, to ask for help, to be vulnerable without being judged.

OneTeamGov introduces new ways of working – from small microactions you can build into your working day to big exciting new practices from the world of digital and beyond. And these new ways of working will over time change ingrained power structures, shift organisational culture, and deliver to British citizens the civil service they deserve.

It’s inspiring and heartening. This is the future civil servant – someone who can BE BOLD and GET SHI*T DONE. Doing one without the other is not going to change centuries old organisations. And we don’t need another think tank.

I can’t wait for tomorrow’s #OneTeamGovGlobal unconference. This is my tribe. If I’m right, this is the future of the civil service – it’s certainly one I’d like to return to.

[N.B. This is my #OneTeamGov, and the views in here are mine and mine alone. The experiences relayed have been under all colours of Government. Things have changed and continue to do so]