The messy middle
When Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced milestones for delivery last month, I started thinking about something I’ve been describing as the messy middle. This is the bridge between political intent and the ability of a system, organisation, or team to make progress. It’s about navigating the required changes and challenges of government targets or missions.
Armando Iannucci described it this way on the Strong Message Here podcast (12 December):
“Lots of politicians make pledges, simple words and phrases […] they think they’ll get kudos for saying it will happen. They do these things confidently, that because they’ve said them, they must happen [but] they haven’t factored in fallibility and impossibility […] targets have been downgraded to milestones, because there’s a recognition that these are hoped for rather than guaranteed.”
I have no problem with the political intent demonstrated by the new government or how they are communicating and positioning policies using language like missions or milestones. But the messy middle is where these pledges have to become real in the systems they’re speaking to. It’s the pathways that need to be navigated for people to feel any real difference in their lives through how services are improved or transformed.
The messy middle is the hard work of delivering real change. If we’re talking about the civil service, it’s the shift that needs to happen in how individual organisations and teams work. It’s where the actual efficiencies and system improvements must eventually start to happen.
Why call it the messy middle? Because translating political intent involves people, bringing with it all the fallibility and impossibility you will ever need. It involves navigating layers of institutional complexity tied to history — generations of choices and details that determine how our systems function, and how organisations are able to adapt and respond to challenges that demand cost efficiencies.
To navigate the messy middle, you need ways of organising, alignment, and methods to motivate people to work towards something. You need structure and clearly defined values applied to how progress can best be made. You also need to determine how you intend to demonstrate that progress is happening, and how value is actually being delivered.
There are no neat boxes in government. A lot of consultancy work (most of my current world of work) involves understanding people and team dynamics to try and unlock progress and new ways of doing things.
The messy middle is organisations moving away from traditional thinking and finding new ways to apply hands-on learning. Test and learn is a good example of this happening in UK government. But the messy middle is also where government departments now need to navigate the challenges of how to use new technologies ethically and with the care required — a challenge not to be underestimated in areas such as welfare.
One part of December’s announcements I didn’t like is what felt like an attack on the civil service, with the Prime Minister reportedly saying that “Whitehall [has become] comfortable with failure.”
The messy middle is hard, and the civil service needs the support and confidence required to navigate it. This means finding and building both practical and better ways of responding to change and making real progress in delivery. Whether starting with missions, milestones, or any other framing, I’m most interested in how government will invest in and support the translation of intent into meaningful action. The messy middle then becomes the most important, the hardest, and the most interesting work.
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 20 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky and LinkedIn.