John Daley: Prioritise what matters

Former Grattan Institute CEO John Daley explains why and how think-tanks, government departments and other report-writing bodies should prioritise. To most influence people's lives for the better, they must ask: which issues should we go after?

Season 2 episode 8, presented by David Walker

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David Walker: In this episode of Shorewalker on Reports, we’re going big-picture. We’re going meta. We’re looking at two public reports which are about public reports. In particular, they’re about how to choose the subjects for public reports.

Our guest again is independent policy consultant John Daley, who also joined us on episode 7. Episode 7 went through John’s process for writing a report. But in this episode John and I look at a decision you need to make before you start. How do you decide which problems to examine?

Here’s a taste of how John discovered the scale of the problem:

John Daley: I was fascinated to discover that there is very, very little in the public sector literature about prioritisation. It's a huge contrast to the private sector literature. And what does exist? A lot of it sort of concludes, “look, your priorities should be, whatever are the priorities the day”. And I sat there and thought: “Well, as a think tank, that's not very helpful.”

David Walker: Now, John Daley’s had a rich and varied career. For example, he’s worked as a McKinsey consultant and as an ANZ Bank senior executive. In both those jobs he learnt some of the techniques that he talks about in this podcast. Having learnt those lessons, John put them into action when he became founding CEO of a new independent Australian public policy think-tank, the Grattan Institute.

While he was at Grattan, John Daley wrote two major reports that set out how report producers should go about choosing their topics – that is, how they should prioritise. The first of those two reports was written near the start of his time at Grattan, and was titled Game-changers: Economic reform priorities for Australia. The second report, written near the end of his time at Grattan, he called Prioritising a Government’s Agenda.

Prioritisation is a vital question for leaders in just about every field. It matters for leaders of think-tanks, and for leaders in government departments, in academia, and in private businesses just as much as anywhere else. It certainly matters whenever the organisation is considering producing any report on an issue of public interest. At think-tanks, in particular, your choice of the problems to tackle makes or breaks you. My own view is that it’s the decision that many Australian think-tanks do worst at making.

Back in 2010, Grattan started out with natural advantages in the think-tank contest. It was a large think-tank by Australian think-tank standards: within a year, it employed more than 20 people. It had a certain amount of credibility because of its early government and private-sector backing.

Nevertheless, Daley believed that to really establish itself, Grattan  needed to understand how it could best play its role. That role was to contribute to Australia’s growth and prosperity. But how best could Grattan contribute? For a start, it could figure out where public policy research would have the greatest impact.

A private-sector approach to public policy priorities

John Daley: In my time at McKinsey, you spent a lot of your time when you were doing corporate strategy essentially helping senior executives think through all of the stuff on their plate. What really matters? What should they do more of? What should they do less of? And there’s lots and lots of frameworks floating around in the private-sector context for helping people to think about prioritisation. And there’s also a lot of work floating around talking about the importance of prioritisation to success in corporate life.

And then when I was at ANZ, running strategy for group – same thing. A lot of the work that I did with various the business units at ANZ was essentially helping the head of the business unit think through of all of the stuff that they were doing, what was the stuff that really mattered that they should really focus their energy on? What was the stuff that didn’t matter that they should do their level best to turn off?

David Walker: So Daley headed to the world of think-tank reports with a default strategy that went like this: survey the field of issues; decide where you can make the biggest impact; work on those issues. But in think-tank world, a surprise awaited him.  

John Daley: When I started at Grattan Institute … inevitably, the first thing you worry about as the head of a brand new think-tank is “what should I work on?” – and implicitly, you're asking the same question as: “where should government be focusing?”

And I went looking at the literature, and I was fascinated to discover that there is very, very little in the public sector literature about prioritisation. It's a huge contrast to the private sector literature. And what does exist? A lot of it sort of concludes, “look, your priorities should be, whatever are the priorities the day”. And I sat there and thought: “Well, as a think tank, that's not very helpful.” You know, if a government minister or prime minister comes to me and says “well, what should my priorities be?”, it's not very helpful if I say “well, whatever your political priorities are, your political priorities should be”. Hopefully, I've got an answer that says: “I think that what you should focus on is A, B and C”. And they may or may not take that advice. But at least you've got a point of view.

But of course, without any published frameworks, it's actually quite hard to think about: “Well, you know, government's responsible for a huge number of things; how would you decide where it should focus?” And so that was always something I was interested in.

And it also came together with me going to a number of conferences, and everybody sitting there talking about how governments weren't making enough progress on productivity growth, and we needed to increase, you know, economic growth, etc etc. And when you sort of asked “well, how?”, they'd wave their arms and they'd sort of mutter a number of things. And my intuitive reaction to a number of things was: “a) that's been around for a long time as an idea; b) some of those ideas don't look all that large in the overall scheme of things – is that really the best we can do?”.

Identifying Game-changers

David Walker: Can we do better? Daley’s answer is set out in a report he wrote called Game-changers: Economic reform priorities for Australia. Grattan published it in 2012. Game-changers represented John Daley thinking out loud about the principles that would drive Grattan’s choice of topics. And he believed that this choice of topics would drive Grattan’s success.

John Daley: The aim of that first project, Game-changers, was, in a disciplined way, to go through all of the bright ideas that people had about how you would promote economic growth, and say: “Well, which of these should you focus on?” Because it was clearly true that there hadn't been a lot of progress for quite some time. And it struck me that the sort of techniques that were very well evolved in the private sector in terms of “work out what's big, really put energy behind a small number of things, and make them happen” was probably something that would work for government as well.

David Walker: The really big step that the Game-changers report took was this: it looked both at the size of potential gains from a reform, and also at how confident people could be about the success of that mooted solutions. It did that for a range of reforms. And in doing that, Game-changers owned up to the reality that we don’t always have certainty that a particular solution is going to work that well. And then it sought to incorporate that uncertainty into the prioritisation process. That struck me as very unusual in 2012, and I think it’s still very unusual today.

John Daley: Yeah. And I think one of the reasons for that is that in the public sector, people are really reluctant to put numbers on something unless they can prove it to three decimal places. And there’s this whole sort of ethic that Treasury won’t put anything up unless it can be super-confident about the numbers. And consequently, if you’re not super-confident that the number is right to three decimal places, you don’t put any number on at all.

For prioritising, rough numbers will do

John Daley: And one of the things that I had learned at McKinsey was the enormous power of putting rough numbers on things. Because actually, you usually don’t care whether or not something is 250 million or 280 million. You care whether or not it’s 250 million or 2.5 billion or 25 billion, because that’s what tells you how important it is.

And I’d seen this in action, or at least heard about it. Apparently Richard Pratt, when he was running the Pratt Group, used to make all of the business decisions, not on the basis of learned board papers, but on, literally, a whiteboard. And … they would sit there as a senior executive team and and say: “Look, here’s this opportunity that someone’s got. Roughly speaking, how big is it? Roughly speaking, what’s our cost of capital when we do the numbers on this? Is this something that looks big and wildly attractive, or is this something that looks kind of marginal, or is this something looks like a really dumb idea?”

And of course, one of the insights was, if it was only marginal, they just didn’t do it. So they didn’t spend lots more time refining the numbers to discover it was just better than their cost of capital. They said: “Look, if it’s marginal, then forget about it. If, on the other hand, it’s got a profit margin of 40%, it’s a really good idea – and rather than spending another six months proving it up, we should spend six months six months getting it to happen.” And so they were, at least at that stage, a very agile and of course, it turned out to be an extremely successful company through that period.

And I’d seen the same thing play out at ANZ, as I had worked with a lot of these senior executives on their strategies. Although it was often hard to get numbers accurate, to do this to two decimal places, it was usually pretty easy to say: “Roughly speaking, this bright idea that you’ve got, what’s the interest margin? How many customers do you realistically think you could get? What does a sensible cost to income ratio look like? Okay, this looks like something that could make you an extra ten million … At a very attractive margin, that looks like a good idea. And alternatively, this looks like something that, if you’re lucky, will make you half million bucks a year. And given the number of people will have to be involved to make it happen, that’s marginal. So what you should do right now is just forget about it.”

And that rough sizing is really important, and it and it’s surprising how little it gets done. And I guess I had seen this relatively early in my tenure at Grattan.

Parallel importation: a policy that wouldn’t change the game

One of the things that was always on all of those Productivity Commission-type lists of, you know, good economic reforms you should do, was around the parallel importation of books.

And this is now, given the way the Internet has gone, sufficiently far from anyone’s memory that may not remember. But once upon a time, there was a big controversy in Australia about the fact that we had copyright laws that said, not only did you have to have the copyright to be allowed to print the book, but you also had to have the copyright to be able to publish it – i.e. to distribute it in Australia, as opposed to in the United Kingdom, as opposed to in the United States. So even though the book had been legitimately printed and was being sold in the United States, you weren’t necessarily allowed to import it into Australia. And this used to get the economic types really, really upset, partly, perhaps, because they were the kinds that bought a lot of books.

And Kevin Rudd wound up, at one stage getting behind this and trying to change these laws, which effectively acted in the benefit of Australian publishers, because it meant that they got a clip if you wanted to … buy that particular book in Australia. And of course, publishers are a very bad lobby group to get offside – because they’ve got lots of authors, and so it’s very easy for them to get lots of people to write things in the newspapers about how terrible this policy change will be and how it will lead to the death of Australian literature and so on, all of which may or may not be true. I have my doubts, frankly, but even if it is true, actually, if you sat down with it, you would realise pretty quickly [that at] absolutely tops this economic reform was worth maybe $150 million a year in an economy of $1.5 trillion. In other words, [it was] way, way, way too small to move the dial. Now, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it wasn’t $150 million. Maybe it was $200 million. But either way, it was that order of magnitude. And yet, the Rudd Government spent several months in which this was literally a front-page issue many days of the week because, of course, the publishers were outraged and were getting all of their authors to write about it. And it really struck me that they had just picked the wrong issue – that on any view of life, this was just not big enough to care, and therefore not something that they should have been spending a lot of their time on.

And so I think that that’s one of the reasons that one of the things that Game-changers did was say: “Let’s just, roughly speaking, work out how big these things are – and if they’re not big enough to care, then say so.”

Workforce participation: A true game-changer

Interestingly, there were some things that dropped out of that analysis – particularly around female workforce participation – that were not really on the political agenda at the time, but which we put onto the agenda because we said: “This one is big enough to care”. You know, the evidence is pretty good that … it’s principally women who are second-income earners. So how much extra money do you take home from working an extra day a week, but having to put the kids into childcare? … People’s decisions at the margins are really sensitive to that, which is not wildly surprising, but it’s one of those things you can improve. And you do the rough numbers, and you go, this is worth potentially $25 billion a year to the Australian economy, and that’s kind of big enough to care. And so it the opportunity of the framework was to say: “Don’t spend your political capital worrying about these things that are worth $120 million a year and that cannot possibly change the overall shape of the economy. Spend your time worrying about these things over here that are worth $25 billion a year.” So in other words, they’re 100 times larger, and that therefore really can change the outcomes.

David Walker: And 12 years later, female workforce participation is one of the few changes in Australian society that you really can see just with a glance at the GDP numbers.

John Daley: Yep, that’s exactly right. And, and interestingly, you know, maybe it was Grattan, maybe it was other things, but that is one which we did succeed in getting a lot more government focus on. Governments of both sides of politics have continued to upgrade and change the way that the childcare benefits work. And the consequence has been that it has materially changed people’s decisions at the margins. And therefore there’s materially … it’s not so much more women working, but it’s more women working more days per week.

The need for confidence

David Walker: So we’ve talked about the need to look at the size of the stakes in various public policy challenges. We’ve seen the need to concentrate on the issues that will really make a difference. But in his Game-changers report, Daley also confronted another issue: there were a lot of activities where the impact of government policy might be large, or it might be small, and we really didn’t have the data to tell which.

John Daley: That’s right. And that was the second thing we looked at. Because if you don’t know, well, then it’s probably not where you should be spending. You shouldn’t be spending your energy to implement something if … you’re not pretty confident that it will work. And I guess that’s partly something that maybe came from my scientific background, which is that it is possible to separate that question of, you know, “what’s our best guess about the right answer here?” [from] our analysis about “well, how good is the evidence?”

And there are some things in public policy where we can say there’s really strong evidence here that is a very high probative value. And there’s some things where you say the evidence is inherently not particularly strong – it may well be true, but we should be honest about the fact that the evidence is not strong. Now, that requires quite a lot of intellectual humility, to say “I don’t think the evidence is all that good”. But I think it’s a really valuable step. And it was one of the things that was quite unusual about Game-changers in terms of its methodology … to say: “Let’s also look at all of these ideas that people have got and ask, ‘how good is the evidence base?’ And [to] say for things that might be big, but where your evidence base is weak, “well, that that prioritises your research agenda” – very useful if you’re running a think-tank, but it probably shouldn’t drive your agenda as a government about what you’re going to do. And of course, it drives your research agenda in two ways, because if you don’t know and something is big, then that’s something you should work on. If you don’t know, when something is small, then that’s fascinating and interesting, but you shouldn’t do any work on it … If government has scarce resources, think-tanks have even scarcer resources. You should spend the scarce resources of your think-tank working on the problems that are really going to make a difference, where the evidence is weak, rather than the problems which, even if you get terrific evidence, the bottom line is, it’s going to not make much difference to the society.

Husbanding political capital

David Walker: In the example you just talked about, regarding parallel book importation, one of the features of that was, I think – on your analysis anyway – that it was not only taking up the government’s time, but it was depleting political capital for very small gain: that $150 million a year, if it had been gotten, would have been gotten at this cost of a lot of angry letters and essays in periodicals about the government’s war on literacy and the like. And that seems to you to be something that is again, underrated by the sort of people who generate policy in the first place.

John Daley: Well, it’s certainly not something they talk about very much. And I think that that’s partly because, at least in theory, those political questions are not something that public servants are supposed to turn their minds to very often – and it’s supposed to be just things that their political lords and masters worry about. But of course, the world is, in fact, not that pure and not that simple.

And you’re right that that question about political capital was, in fact, the way that we ran the prioritisation – well, first for one of the Orange Books that Grattan used to write before the Commonwealth elections, talking about, you know, “where should the next Commonwealth Government focus?”

So that was the first time that we applied this framework. And then, in Prioritising a Government’s Agenda, we actually wrote it out in a rather more formal way so that it was bit easier for people to follow what we were doing.

The essential idea … was, if anything, a sort of an update to the Game-changers framework, over 12 years. You know, I’ve learned a little bit, and I had thought it through a bit more carefully. And I think if one of the things that you care about when you’re prioritising is, “well, how big is it? how much of difference will it make?” [then] the other thing is, ultimately, not just simply “how good is the evidence base?” but more generally “how much political capital will it consume?”

And I guess the thinking behind that was that the scarce resource in government – the scarcest resource – is fundamentally political capital. You’ve only got a finite amount of it. Paul Keating was very articulate about this idea, but so have many other people been:

• You’ve only got a finite amount of political capital spend any time that you try and push through reform which is difficult.
• And all reform which is worth doing, pretty much, is difficult; you’re going to spend some political capital.
• So make sure that you spend it on things that that really matter.

And then one of the other things that we did in prioritising a government’s agenda was to actually break down, well, what are the sort of components of political capital? What is it that makes a policy more or less expensive in terms of political capital? And again, this is not something that you can put beautiful numbers around. But you can definitely say this is high, medium, low. And that’s, I think, quite helpful.

And so we’ve broken it down into its components …

• You need more political capital if there’s a bunch of powerful interest groups are going to kick up a stink, like the mining industry.
• You need more political capital if it’s something that the general populace [are] not attracted to and their instinct is that it’s a bad idea – so for example, privatizations are always going to be very expensive, from a political capital point of view, or pretty expensive.
• If the evidence base is weak, then that’s that actually costs you political capital as well – A) because it’ll take you more time to work out what to do, but B) and much more importantly, because if the evidence base is weak, then you haven’t got lots of people who will come in behind you saying “Yes, this is a terrific idea”.
• If it’s going to be really complicated to implement, then it’s probably going to cost more political capital.

All of these different components go into thinking about, “is this a reform that’s going to be easy for a government or hard for a government?”

• And therefore … as part of the overall prioritisation, ideally, you want to go after things that are going to make a big difference and which are politically easy. There’s actually not very many of those, because if it was easy and going to make a big difference it probably would have happened by now – not always the case, but often the case.
• Then if you’re going to go after things, then go after things that at least are going to make a big difference. And even if they do cost a lot in political capital, at least you are making a difference.
• And of course, if you find things that are not going to make much of a difference and are going to be really expensive from a political capital point of view, then those are things you should just put a big cross through and say that you’re not going to worry about them. And parallel, importation of books is a really good example of something which is in that category. It wasn’t going to make much of a big difference, but it was always going to be politically really expensive.

A prioritisation culture

David Walker: As an aside, did you have to do much work to get Grattan to adopt this sort of approach to think-tankery?

John Daley: Well, I had the advantage that Grattan at the time I started, you know, consisted of me, plus a board. And by the time I had finished, it consisted of about 25 people, plus me, plus a board. And I guess it was a group of people, including the board, who are really interested in this slightly technocratic approach to policy, understanding that politics matters, and understanding that we were partly talking to politicians – and therefore, if we were ignoring their language, we were not helping them – but at the same time that if we could provide them with a really clear way of thinking about things, that might be helpful. So no, it was not a difficult sell at Grattan.

And indeed, I think one of the things that you know it’s been distinctive about Grattan is it’s always had this quite disciplined way of thinking about its own agenda and where it goes. We had a saying while I was there, which is that we didn’t get out of bed for less than half a billion dollars a year. And that was the sort of prioritisation thinking: if you do the quick back of the envelope in the first half an hour and come to the conclusion that this thing is terribly interesting, but can’t possibly be worth more than $50 million a year to the economy and has no particular cultural benefits, then cross it off. It’s interesting; it may well be fascinating; it may well get you published in a learned in a learner journal. But it’s not the kind of thing that a think-tank should spend its very scarce resources on.

David Walker: One reason that people seem to so often avoid prioritising is that they underrate the effort that’s going to be needed to get people in behind a change once they recommended. You’ve talked about the way Peter Costello spent a lot of time arguing the case for the GST as an example of somebody doing it right.

John Daley: Yeah. And I think that’s because if you’re doing things that are expensive in terms of political capital, then what you do have to do is argue for them really hard. And you’re going to have to. You’re not going to win everyone over. It doesn’t work like that. There is no example of a tax reform in Australia in the last 50 years, a major tax reform that has had bipartisan support. Not one. It’s always controversial, to take tax reform in particular. That doesn’t mean that tax reform hasn’t happened. But it does mean that every time it has happened, a treasurer has had to go out and argue for it really, really hard. And yes,  Peter Costello notoriously did nothing for 12 to 18 months but walk up and down the country and at every opportunity explain what the GST was, how it was going to work, why it was a good idea, why people were going to be better off, and so on. And they didn’t necessarily completely win that argument, in the sense that Howard very nearly lost the subsequent election. But of course, it did happen as a policy change. It has materially and permanently changed the face of tax policy in Australia for the better. And that’s a very good outcome.

I think that that’s just a demonstration of the way that, when you say that something is going to be expensive in terms of political capital, what that means is, in order to make it happen, some senior politician – possibly several of them – are going to have to spend a lot of their time arguing for it and trying to push it through. And that’s hard.

I think the other reason that prioritisation doesn’t happen is the opposite reason – which is that any time that you prioritise, sure you’re saying: “These two or three things matter a lot; we’re going to put lots of energy behind them”. But inevitably, what you’re also doing is saying: “All of these things don’t matter so much”. And if you really want to do prioritisation properly, then what you do is you say: “we’re going to turn them off, and we’re going to put all of the resources that are currently being put into these things that either don’t matter or are never going to happen into this small number of things that are going to happen, but which are hard”. And the problem is that every single thing that you want to turn off or deprioritise is bound to be somebody’s pet project, and they’re going to be very upset when you take the thing that they’ve been working on personally for how many years, and say “we’re just not going to do it”. And so it’s really, really hard to take that step. And that is a crucial part of prioritisation – because unless you do that, all of those little projects keep running, and they keep sending stuff up the line, and they keep clogging up all of the scarce management resources that you need in order to make things happen.

Selling your priorities

David Walker: Am I right that in ANZ, you came across a rather nice way of making this problem less of a problem?

John Daley: I came across two. One was a fantastic story about a CEO of Barclays Bank, who had come in and after a couple of weeks had issued this thing saying: “Right, the following five projects are the key priority projects for the bank. If you’re working on these, carry on. All of the other things are to stop now.” And then, a week later, he put out another thing, saying: “I really meant it. If you have been working on any of these things for the last week and haven’t transferred to one of the other projects, then you do not have a position at this bank.”

But of course, what it did was that it liberated enormous amounts of energy behind the five things that really mattered. So that’s the kind of rip-the-band-aid-off approach, and you probably need to be a somewhat forceful character to get away with that.

The alternative way to do it ... I was running eTrade Australia at the time, and Brian Hartzer was the head of retail banking. And ... I’d followed my own recipe, and I’d come to him and said: “Brian, I think this is what my priorities should be. And implicitly, that means that the following things are not going to be pursued by eTrade Australia.” And I said: “And one or two of them are, you know, projects that various other people elsewhere in the bank care about a lot.”

And he said: “John, no problem”. He said: “The things that you think are important, I totally agree”, he said, “and those are Phase One”. And he said “all of those other things, that you think are less important – and I totally agree, but other people care about – those are all Phase Two. And obviously you’re not going to start phase two until you’ve [finished] Phase One, and you’re going to reassign the resources that are currently working on Phase Two projects onto Phase One projects.”

And it was a very valuable lesson that that sometimes you can frame things in a way that will keep a lot of people happier. You’re not throwing their work away; you’re just saying it’s part of Phase Two. Now, Brian and I both knew perfectly well that most of the things on Phase Two were, in fact, never, ever, ever going to happen. But the fact that we called them Phase Two meant that a lot of people were a lot less unhappy about it than they would have been otherwise.

David Walker: With your reports about prioritisation, both Game-changers and Prioritising the Agenda  — do you look back and think they moved the dial, or do you look back and think “I wish they’d had more of an effect”?

John Daley: So one of the kind of frustrations of running a think-tank is that you never really know whether or not you made a difference. Because, as the saying goes, success has lots of parents, and failure is an orphan. So anytime that you push something as a think-tank, and it actually happens, inevitably lots and lots of people are involved. And proving that you were actually a key player, as opposed to just going along with what everyone else was saying, is always hard.

That said, I think there’s a number of things at Grattan – and female workforce participation is definitely something where we were a very early voice to be pushing that – where not a lot of other people were particularly interested. Maybe it would have happened anyway; you never know. But definitely, we were very early onto the onto the bandwagon, and arguably, getting it started. So I am pleased … I I look at Game-changers, it effectively pulled out three things. It [argued for] female workforce participation; that was a tick. It [argued for] older age workforce participation, and in particular, [for] pushing up the age at which you can get access to the pension and to your superannuation. And that was one of the few things that Kevin Rudd really did that really pushed through: he pushed up the progressively the retirement age from 65 to 67 in Australia, which I think would just about as of this year, have come fully into effect. And over the long run, that makes a big difference. No question, in an ideal world, it will go up higher, but at least it went in the right direction. And I think that was possibly also influential in encouraging the Abbott-Hockey government to push the same type of reform: they wanted to push it further from 67 up to 70. Unfortunately, that one didn’t go so well. But there are a lot of things in that Abbott-Hockey budget that didn’t go so well, so that that might have been the reason. So we made progress on that.

And we also identified tax. Now, the reality is that tax reform has not made a lot of progress in the last 15 years. That’s an interesting one on which, to some extent, I’ve changed my mind. I haven’t changed my mind that tax policy really matters. At the time, though, we said that the key thing that made it would make a difference is essentially reducing corporate income tax rates. That was the consensus at the time. It looked like the evidence was pretty good. In fact, it was something I subsequently did some work on. I discovered that everybody was referring to everybody else, and that when you actually dug into the work to find out “how good is the underlying research to show that in Australia, with a dividend imputation scheme, reducing corporate income tax rate will make a really big difference”, that evidence is actually pretty weak. And so I am much less convinced than I used to be that simply changing the corporate tax rate in Australia will, in fact, help. And in fact, we did some work while I was at Grattan, partly leveraging some work that the Australian Treasury had done, to show that the impact of that reform would be quite a lot less in terms of its impact on people’s incomes than a lot of the historic literature had said in Australia.

David Walker: My own experiences running policy and advocacy for public policy organisations have convinced me that John Daley is right. No organisation has the resources to talk authoritatively about everything, or to act everywhere. Effective organisations prioritise their agendas. Only then can they hope to change the game.