## Notes from 07 January 2026 [[2026-01-06|← Previous note]] ┃ [[2026-01-08|Next note →]] Read [[Martin Stanley]]'s commentary on a piece by [[Henry de Zoete]] offering 14 lessons from his time as a special adviser (Spad) in the UK government. De Zoete served in the Department for Education (2010–2014) and later advised Rishi Sunak on AI. The format is useful: de Zoete's original advice, followed by Stanley's response - sometimes agreeing, sometimes pushing back. Good conversation about for the advisory role in other non-UK contexts, including Brazil. **Interesting lessons from de Zoete (with Stanley's reactions):** - _Set direction_: Ministers often reach the end of their tenure having only reacted to what the civil service put in front of them. Spads should carve out time to ask: what does the minister actually want to make happen? Stanley agrees. - _Project management matters_: De Zoete found that unless a minister or adviser actively tracked progress (Monday meetings, Thursday check-ins, repeat) things wouldn't move. He argues Spad roles (policy, comms, parliamentary liaison) miss the operational dimension. Stanley agrees with the diagnosis but thinks the solution should be replacing weak officials, not turning Spads into managers. His concern: advisers should advise, they are not managers. - _People, people, people_: De Zoete cites the startup maxim that a good CEO spends 80% of their time recruiting. Ministers spend maybe 10%. He also notes that the C-suite (CEO, COO and CTO) is not assembled at random. Stanley is cautiously sympathetic, but is concerned about the emergence of a competitive market of 'stars' within the government, moving between departments. - _Box notes_: De Zoete argues Spads should work with civil service teams upstream so that by the time advice reaches the minister, the Spad can simply endorse it. Stanley disagrees. He thinks Spad advice should remain separate from official civil servants advice—parallel, not merged. Keeping Spads detached from the machine preserves their value as an independent, technical voice. - _Cross-government work_: De Zoete advises applying a "heavy discount" to anything requiring the involvement of other departments, given the huge amount of effort required to make progress without the explicit and consistent support of the Prime Minister. Stanley agrees to some extent, but emphasizes the need for clear departmental leadership rather than avoiding coordination altogether. **Some observations:** The delivery vs. advisory distinction runs through the whole piece. De Zoete describes Spads who had to step into quasi-managerial roles because officials weren't delivering. Stanley's response is that this reflects a failure of the civil service, not an argument for expanding the Spad role. I'm not sure I agree with Stanley here. The assumption that delivery and execution should remain exclusively with career civil servants seems more normative than practical. If political appointees can manage projects effectively, why shouldn't they? The question is less about role boundaries than about competence and accountability. The private sector parallels are also interesting. The C-suite observation (CEO, COO, CTO) highlights what government lacks: operational and technical leadership at the top. In most governments, the CTO equivalent (where it exists) sits several layers below ministers. This needs to change. There's a broader point here about how government talks about itself. In my experience (especially in Brazil), the discourse centers heavily on planning, strategy, coordination - abstract nouns. Operations, delivery, execution get less airtime. Planning sounds serious; it implies foresight, analysis, long-term thinking. But it also carries higher risk of becoming detached from reality... plans that never confront implementation constraints, strategies that assume away friction. Operations is hands-on. It's tracking deliverables, solving bottlenecks, noticing when something isn't working. It's less glamorous but closer to what actually produces results. The imbalance may reflect an implicit hierarchy: planning is for senior people; operations is for those who "just execute". This seems backwards. Is there comparative work on how different governments allocate senior attention between planning/strategy and operations/delivery? Would be useful to see whether this is a general pattern or specific to certain administrative traditions.