Inside the book

An operating philosophy for delivering devolution - built from thirty years of practice, original research, and the constructive lessons of four decades of policy.

The premise

The places that succeed are the places whose leaders can answer five questions, honestly and specifically, about everything they do: what is causing the problem, what is possible, what you will build and what you will stop, why delivery is not working, and how you will know it worked and who it benefited. This book is about building the institution that can answer all five.

It is honest about the lessons of the past, national and local - and constructive about every one of them, because the point of understanding what has gone before is to do better.

Start by scoring yourself

Chapter 9 makes an argument that applies to this book as much as to any programme: record the baseline before you spend. So the Introduction closes with a self-assessment. Five capabilities, four levels each - absent, emerging, working, great - with a sentence describing each level, and the chapters that address it.

Ten minutes. Better still, have three colleagues score it separately and compare: where you disagree with each other is itself a finding. Do not add the scores up. What you have is not a number, it is a shape.

What’s the cause - and are you sure you know?Chapters 3 and 4
What’s possible?Chapters 5 and 6
What will you build - and what will you stop doing?Chapter 7
If delivery isn’t working - why?Chapter 8
How will you know it worked - and that it benefited who you said it would?Chapters 9 and 13

The chapters

The Reckoning

Learning from the past to be great in the future.

Intro
Do You Want to Be Great? - the ten-year test devolution now faces, and the self-assessment that starts the work.
1
We Can’t Go on Like This - 40 Years of Failure - four decades of policy experience, distilled into lessons you can use.
2
The Habits That Keep Places Poor - honest reflection on the field’s habits, turned into better ones.

The Truth

Diagnosis before prescription - always.

3
Understand How Your Economy Got Here - beyond the dashboard: analysis that explains, not decorates.
4
What’s the Cause? - causal knowledge, account management, and relationships that reveal what the data cannot.

Discovery

Generating solutions worth delivering.

5
Foresighting Means Solutions Discovery - thinking several steps ahead, backing the businesses that are the future of growth.
6
Ambition With Realism - credible ambition: grounded in real assets, costed against real delivery solutions, staged so progress is provable.

The Work

Delivery is where great places earn their results.

7
Build the Impactful, Stop the Rest - the pipeline, the filter, and the discipline of saying not yet.
8
When Delivery Stalls, Ask Why - diagnosis over defensiveness when reality pushes back.
9
The Learning Organisation - evaluation that changes decisions, memory that survives reorganisation.

The Leadership

What makes all of it work.

10
Partner Like the Economy Depends On It - real partnership changes budgets and behaviour, not calendars.
11
The Organisation and Its People - from the author’s doctoral research: why management, staff and culture decide what structures cannot.
12
Leadership: Taking Everyone With You - culture, scrutiny, and the lessons of Singapore’s EDB.
13
Prosperity in Every Postcode - created, shared and sustained: the standard the book is named for.
End
Conclusion: The Ten-Year Test - three things first, then the ninety-day, one-year and five-year plan.

What you do with it on Monday

Thirty-six tasks across the book, three to a chapter. Each one names the output you will hold at the end of it, who owns it, roughly how long it takes, and the first step. Some take half a day. Some take three weeks. The book says which.

The pipeline stocktake

Output: a register of every live proposition, its honest stage, and what it needs next. Owner: the programme management office, or the person who will become it. Time: half a day to build, an hour a month to maintain.

The account management audit

Output: your twenty most important employers, with a named account manager, the date of the last structured conversation and one decision it changed. Time: a day, then permanent.

The stewardship account

Output: an annual public account of your economic stewardship, honest reds included. Owner: the chief executive, published in their name. Time: three weeks for a thin first edition.

And a worked example of each document it asks for

Appendix B shows one of each, because a practitioner who has never seen an annual stewardship account cannot write one on Monday: a pipeline register with six propositions at three different stages, a theory of change with the assumption most likely to break marked, and a stewardship account contents page with the section headed ‘what we got wrong this year’ written out in full.

Organisational failure remains the most under-diagnosed cause of policy failure in this field, and reorganisation remains the most over-prescribed cure.

From Chapter 11: The Organisation and Its People