Alex Ellis has just left his post as the FCO’s director of strategy to become ambassador to Brazil. On his last day in the job, Winnie Agbonlahor learns how he’s tried to encourage greater self-criticism in a department not known for its self-lacerating humility.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) does not have a reputation for being overly self-critical. Widely regarded as one of the world’s best diplomatic and international affairs services, it tends to escape much of the criticism bombarding many home departments; and inside the FCO, it’s traditionally been viewed it as an elite institution. So it must have been something of a shock when new foreign secretary William Hague expressed strong criticisms of the department’s skills and capabilities. But many of his comments rang true, and the FCO introduced a reform programme – Diplomatic Excellence – to sharpen up its act.
One of those wielding the sharpening tools has been the FCO’s director of strategy, Alex Ellis. In keeping with the aim of improving self-awareness and honest appraisal, he’s open about where the department’s weaknesses lie and the difficulties of getting people on board with change – and his experiences offer valuable lessons for reformers across the civil service.
“When the foreign secretary arrived, the message he and the ministers gave to the FCO’s civil servants was: ‘You’re excellent abroad, but you’re not quite as good as we’d like you to be at home’,” Ellis recalls. “Our best work is very good indeed, but we are being inconsistent across the organisation”.
It has not, he admits, been easy to win whole-hearted support for the change programme. “With centrally imposed programmes, people will nod and say ‘fine’, but they don’t really absorb them,” Ellis says. “The Foreign Office has quite a devolved culture. The consequence of that is some things don’t embed easily: sometime you’ve got to pay a price [for local autonomy]. In any organisation, if you want to be creative you have to accept that some things don’t work.”
So how do you change this culture? “You can’t,” Ellis says promptly. “One of the things I have learnt in this job is you’ve got to work with the culture you have. You have to incentivise people.’”
One of the ways in which he has tried to get people on board has been the launch of a competition, open to all staff, to come up with new ideas in any area of foreign policy. The best ideas were to be presented to senior management, who would consider whether they want to sponsor and explore them in more detail. In a bid to encourage people to think radically and challenge existing systems, Ellis called the competition ‘Scratching the Rolls Royce’ – building on a speech made by Hague in October, in which the foreign secretary said he wants the FCO to be “a Rolls Royce of a government department” and called on his team to “not be afraid to take that Rolls Royce out and to race it around the odd corner – on two wheels when necessary, even if that means risking the occasional dent and scratch”. Though it’s too early to identify concrete outcomes, Ellis says that the competition has been helpful in engaging people with the change programme.
He’s also tried to get civil servants to question their own ways of working by introducing regular ‘challenge sessions’, at which the FCO brings in outsiders to discuss and test policies. Chaired by Ellis, the sessions are held once a month and give relevant specialists – economists, academics and journalists, for example – the chance to fire questions at a team working on a particular policy. “It’s testing the quality of the work and the assumptions that lie behind it, particularly with an external pair of eyes,” Ellis says. “We focus on particular issues.” These issues can range from existing policies to the development of new ones, and also cover internal systems such as the FCO’s recruitment processes. On this last topic, Ellis says, typical questions might include: ‘Do we need to change our human resources policies in order to attract the right people?’; or: ‘Do we organise people in the right way?’. Although he firmly believes the sessions are useful, he says their results are hard to quantify. But he argues that the exposure has led to policy-making becoming more consistent.
Another of Ellis’s reforms involved a bid to measure and quantify the outcomes of FCO employees’ work – including the ‘softer’ tasks of diplomacy and outreach work. “Within the civil service in the Foreign Office there is a risk of getting lost in process: there was a visit. There was a meeting,” he comments. “The question you have to ask is: ‘What British interest did that visit or meeting advance?’”
As a result, FCO staff now try to make direct links between their activity and events overseas, with reports going to the departmental board. Board members then assess the FCO’s impact, grading each workstream’s effect on British interests abroad (one meaning that it had little influence; five that it was very significant).
One project which scored well under this assessment process was the securing of an important transport link: direct Easyjet flights to Russia. The low-cost airline launched its route between London and Moscow last month, with one-way flights now available at less than £50 – an important step in supporting Anglo-Russian trade and tourism. “That sort of thing doesn’t happen by itself,” Ellis says. “It requires an embassy and quite a lot of work with the Russian authorities to make that happen.” The recent launch of Iraqi Airways flights from Iraq to London has also been a significant achievement; or, as Ellis describes it – “a tactical success; a piece of the jigsaw of how we’re trying to develop our relationship with Iraq”. This ‘numeric value’ method of assessing projects began last year. It is clear, though, that Ellis is not convinced it’ll outlast his tenure: “We’ll see if it continues after me.”
If Ellis’s initiatives achieve their aims, the FCO should not only be better at developing and delivering policy, but also at learning from past mistakes. For example, he says, in areas of conflict it’s important to act very quickly to re-establish governance and services. “I think we have learnt a lot about what you need to do in the immediate post-conflict situation,” Ellis comments. “We are very clear about the importance of the immediacy of dealing with local needs – electricity, water, stuff like that – and the need to get basic, functioning infrastructure up and running.” Asked whether the government got these matters badly wrong following our invasion of Iraq, he refuses to put a direct criticism on the record – but his arguments are clearly applicable to the UK and USA’s operations in Iraq.
Having spent more than two years trying to get FCO staff to address such questions, Ellis may be heading for his next job with some relief. As the UK’s ambassador to Brazil, he will now have the onerous duty of overseeing Britain’s role in the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. So it seems that whilst change management jobs may be tough at the FCO, the rewards are probably worth it.