Can a new style of political leadership unlock the energy at the edges?

If you spend time with people innovating in and around government, it won’t be long before you hear a complaint about politicians and the behaviours they drive through the system. The blame falls partly on a top down political playbook — a blend of old-school political strategy, comms, and policy-making — which reduces politics to announcing things in speeches. You might also hear criticisms of a certain political style — a way of leading that is rather stiff and anxious, and which over-relies on bureaucratic control mechanisms, targets, and levers.

In this post, I’ll explore whether this could start to change now, with the rise of Andy Burnham to Prime Minister. Clearly Burnham can’t usher in a whole new way of doing politics. But there are signs that he will bring a different style to Number 10, one that is more about creating space for good things to happen. At the same time, it would be daft to think everything will get better now, and a lot of questions remain unanswered. What kind of leadership is needed, specifically, to create space at the edges? Do we have evidence that Burnham works like this? And, trickiest of all, can this style of leadership translate from Greater Manchester to Great Britain? But let’s start with why so many people have been calling for a more enabling style of politics.

1. A growing consensus

Over the past year, Kinship Works and JRF have been running an initiative called The Centre for the Edge, exploring what it would take to unlock the energy of reformers working at the frontline of public services and in places all across Britain.

When we started this work, the whole idea of inverting government — putting the centre in service of the edges — felt a bit of a stretch. But as the work has progressed, I’ve noticed that a similar idea runs throughout today’s leading movements for public service reform, albeit expressed in a range of ways. Indeed I would say it’s close to being a unifying aspiration.

At the risk of being reductive, there are currently six main agendas for reforming the state:

1. Places and devolution — pushing money and power to local places via mechanisms like pooled budgets, fiscal devolution, and local government reorganisation

2. Community-led development and civic renewal — an organic movement growing in communities across the country, now backed by a communitarian statecraft — using the state to cultivate capacity in communities

3. Mission- and purpose-driven approaches — ways to orchestrate action across sectors and organisations, especially by inspiring people behind a long-term goal

4. Relational practice — ways to run public services that are centred on building relationships. Doing things with people, rather than for people or to people, and enabling people to make life better together, in community.

5. Digital and test-and-learn — working iteratively towards outcomes in mixed-discipline teams; first used for software but now for any complex problem. This is now coupled with a reform agenda in which iterative working is used as a discovery mechanism, finding barriers to progress so that they can be removed for everyone.

6. Participation and deliberation — thickening democracy and making it less transactional. This is partly about upgrading democracy but also about recognising deliberation as a form of collective intelligence.

There’s a lot of diversity in that list, both in the details of the work and its intellectual origins. But I also think it’s clear that all of these agendas are trying to make government more decentralised and adaptive, adding more ‘give’ to the system. Each agenda does this in its own way. Sometimes they lean on purpose, judgment, and relationships; sometimes on devolving money or authority to teams, or to places. But ultimately they all envisage a world in which more power sits at the edges of the system.

2. The prevailing mode of politics

Let’s turn to political leadership, and get more precise about the problem. Why exactly do reformers in these various traditions get so frustrated by the way politics works today?

If you sit in roundtables about public service reform, you will hear lots of complaints about New Public Management. But I think a more compelling characterisation of the prevailing style of politics is given by Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, who has written about ‘vending machine government’, a phrase he has credited to political scientist Donald Kettl.

Vending machine government is a mental model of the state and politics in which politicians promise things to voters, and then use the state to deliver them. We put our taxes in the slot, press democracy’s buttons, and get the things we want. Newsom has associated this mentality with the rise of populism because of course we don’t get the things we want. What happens, instead, is that we get ever more frustrated with the machine for not delivering what we ordered, politicians panic and respond by making more promises and frantically pulling levers, and we bang on the glass harder and harder until we break the machine.

The trouble with vending machine government is not just that we don’t get the things we want, but that we can’t get the things we want. This is partly because we each want different things. And it’s partly because many of the things we want — things like ‘being healthy’ — cannot be ‘delivered’ to us, arising, as they do, from a mix of environmental factors and our own agency.

The other reason we don’t get what we want from the machine is more nuanced. This is that when we treat government like a vending machine — or really any type of machine — we lock the state into a range of anachronistic organisational practices that don’t suit the complex territory that governments now work in.

To see why this is, consider a defining aspect of vending machine politics: a politician standing at a lectern giving a speech in which they announce a policy solution. If you’ve ever worked in government, you’ll know that this mode of politics drives a lot of behaviour across the system. In Whitehall, there’s even a name for these kinds of policies, which I always think sounds like a snack product. They’re called ‘announceables’.

When politics becomes nothing more than a business of announceables, it locks us into old-school ways of working. It means we plan upfront, as opposed to iterating; we commit to deliver a thing at the start, when we have the least information, and get stuck with it. We focus on outputs, not outcomes, and specifically things that can be announced, so we get endless pilots, reviews, champions, taskforces, and trailblazers. Worse, we then build Whitehall around these outputs, naming teams after deliverables, which means we can’t pivot. We fragment government, spending 100 x £10m on lots of little initiatives, rather than calmly investing £1bn to learn and build momentum. We prioritise novelty, because each new politician needs their own announcement, so we don’t get better at things. People at the frontline meanwhile spend all their time piecing together funding from all these little short-term pots. And we simply have worse ideas, because why would a politician or official in Whitehall know ‘the answer’ to a complex problem?

Needless to say, none of this means we should never govern by promising to deliver things. There is, of course, a time and a place for stating a clear priority and driving it through the system. Things got better from 1997 to 2010 partly thanks to an adept use of this mode of politics. We also shouldn’t fall into the trap of blaming politicians entirely for the lack of innovation, much of which is down to other factors (as we’ve been exploring in The Centre for the Edge). The best innovators are succeeding despite the way politics works, albeit by working against the grain of the system.

Still, you can see why reformers are so frustrated with the prevailing style of politics. Why should they have to work against the system in order to improve it?! So what does an alternative, more enabling style of leadership look like?

3. What is enabling leadership?

One useful thing about leadership is that leaders love writing about it, which means there is a deep literature to learn from.

Within this literature, enabling leadership has long been the most distinguished counter-tradition to the dominant, heroic view of leadership; the ‘Great Man’ model of the warrior or king.

Without trying to summarise the whole corpus, here are some concepts that flesh out what we mean when we say a politician leads by enabling others.

There is a classical tradition of writing that emphasises leading by example. A key idea here is ‘show, don’t tell’ — the leader who exemplifies virtue. See, for example, Confucius in the Analects: “he who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it.”

Another tradition is leading by fostering pride and a sense of ownership. The Tao Te Ching emphasises self-effacing leadership: the best leaders are the ones people don’t notice, leaving people to feel “we did this ourselves.” While this rather jars with the modern politician’s need to get re-elected, there are also subtler forms of empowering leadership. I’m sure we can all think of a boss we loved precisely because they gave us space and didn’t take all the credit. We see this in the modern idea of servant leadership, or the decentralised leadership of Ella Baker: “strong people don’t need strong leaders”. A servant leader develops the capacity of people to lead themselves.

There is a different slant on enabling leadership in the civic republican tradition. Here, political leadership is seen as creating and renewing the conditions for collective self-government. This idea can be found in the republican strands in Machiavelli’s writing (see the Discourses, as opposed to The Prince). And it runs through modern thinkers like Hannah Arendt, who distinguished power (“springs up between men when they act together”) from strength.

There is especially rich thinking on leadership in democratic pragmatism. See John Dewey (The Public and Its Problems; Democracy and Education) or Ruth Anna Putnam (I recommend her wonderful opening essay in Pragmatism as a Way of Life). Dewey argued that democracy is a way of life — it is not just about elections. Political leadership is therefore a creative act; it literally ‘calls a public into being’. This speaks to the importance of ritual and shared experience; formative cultural moments when we feel part of something — be it a neighbourhood, city, or nation.

Another tradition comes from neighbourhood-organising. See Mary Parker Follett, one of the most relevant thinkers for this moment. Working in Boston in the 1910s-20s, her writing was decades ahead of its time (The New State, Creative Experience, the Dynamic Administration lectures). Follett argued that politics should build “power-with” people, not “power-over” people. She also coined the wonderful phrase “the law of the situation”, meaning that public servants should take their lead from the context, not from the hierarchy. A leader’s job is to create more leaders, not to create followers.

There is the idea of “non-anxious leadership”, which we argued is essential to community-led renewal in a recent Kinship Works report, Civic Rewilding. At the time I hadn’t realised this term was used by Edwin Friedman (A Failure of Nerve) and is also found in the Bowen family-systems tradition. By being a non-anxious presence, the leader lowers the reactivity of the system. This strikes me as especially pertinent today, when one of the biggest problems we see in government is a kind of panicked wheel-spinning. The idea of calm leadership has come up a lot in work I’ve done with public sector leaders in Australia and New Zealand; in those discussions, we talked about it by analogy with swimming — the risk of anxious leadership is that you drown precisely because you are worried about drowning.

Finally, there are ideas from the history of community organising. See Saul Alinsky (Rules for Radicals) and Marshall Ganz on public narrative. This speaks to the role of story-telling — how to tell a story of self, and “a story of us”. Here, leadership is about “enabling others to achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty.” This all leans heavily on the role of place in building a sense of shared purpose, identity, and belonging.

Reflecting on all of this, it’s clear that enabling leadership is a rich tradition. Most of these ideas are now also supported by mature frameworks and playbooks (see an earlier article, How to save bureaucracy from itself). We also see that today’s production-oriented approach to politics — ‘I promise to deliver a thing’ — is actually quite recent. It emerges as a fusion of the old hero tradition — a person (normally a man) who will solve everything — with modern methods, like Taylorism. When you add the pathologies of professionalised politics and the sociologies of modern government (political strategy, speech-writing, policy-making, project management, procurement), you get the pickle we’re in.

All of which is to say that a leader with enabling instincts is in good company, and has a lot of material to draw on.

4. Burnham’s style of leadership

Let’s wrap up with a few words on the prompt for all of this: the rise of Andy Burnham to Prime Minister. Without trying to be definitive, here are three sets of evidence that speak to the question of whether Burnham is an enabling leader.

First, there’s the way he communicates. At Kinship Works we recently ran a discourse analysis to compare the language used in the centre of government to the language used at the edges. I thought it would be interesting to adapt this method to compare Burnham and Starmer to see what it says about their leadership styles. I took ten recent speeches from each and used Claude (Opus 4.8) to compare their vocabulary and other features of speech (their use of pronouns (I, we, you), modal verbs (will, must, should), and the balance of concreteness vs abstractions). Here are the key headlines:

• Overall their vocabularies are surprisingly similar (aside from obvious differences that reflect their roles). Their top words are broadly the same and they have a similar split between you, I, and we.

• Starmer is more declarative, and Burnham more conditional. Starmer uses “will” far more often (86 vs 49) and “must” more often (14 vs 5), while Burnham leans on “would” (26 vs 9) and “should” (16 vs 11).

• Burnham is more concrete. He names 40% more people and places and uses 3+ times more numbers, while Starmer leans abstract; he uses nouns like security, renewal, values, and responsibility. When Burnham is abstract, he favours ‘devolution’, ‘local’, and ‘bottom-up’.

• Starmer’s main theme is security. He uses “security” 49 times in the ten speeches; Burnham almost never. (NB: This partly reflects the PM’s focus on foreign policy, but not entirely: Starmer often frames other issues, like the cost of living, in a language of security.)

• Burnham uses much longer sentences (around 22 words on average vs. Starmer’s 9). This seems to reflect Starmer’s speeches being more ‘speechy’, with their odd political cadence. While Starmer is clipped, Burnham is conversational. (NB: this is partly a function of Starmer giving more podium speeches, while Burnham does more ‘in conversations’. This likely partly reflects their different offices and partly their preferences.)

• They have different go-to phrases. Starmer’s favoured refrains are: “a Britain built for all” (9), “on the side of” (7), “take control of our” (5), and, tellingly, “today I can announce” (6). Burnham’s favourites are: “from the bottom up” (13), “back under public control”, “the integrated settlement”, and “pulling in the same direction”.

Second, because people say that much of how we communicate comes through body language, I thought it would be interesting to contrast this too. I selected ten recent photos of Burnham and Starmer at random and I used Claude to analyse their aesthetics, emotional register, and style. Here is a distillation:

• Burnham: “A smart-casual register that leans informal. Mobile, warm, expressive; sometimes wry, sometimes intentful. The affective temperature is high and shifting. Reads kinetic; caught in motion. Spontaneous; laughing, squinting, glancing off-camera. A sense of having been “photographed while doing.” Contemporary and a little indie. Warm, restless, unbuttoned.”

• Starmer: “A formal-institutional register, the uniform holds constant across all pictures. Contained, even, composed; steady, slightly grave, low emotional amplitude. Reads still and settled, weight-planted, minimal gestures; anchored rather than propulsive. Self-consciously composed. Crisp, sharp, sleek. A mid-century institutional register. A statesman-in-repose.”

Those descriptions might prompt some chortles, but it strikes me as quite important that Burnham is by far the more relaxed of the two. As Sam Freedman said when we chatted about these topics last week, “one important upside for Burnham is that he looks like he’s enjoying himself”.

Third, Burnham’s track record. I pulled together accounts from people who have worked with him in Manchester, and soon saw echoes of the literature on enabling leadership. Bev Hughes has spoken about Burnham’s tendency to aim for consensus and the energy he puts into convening councils in the city-region. Kate Green has described his clarity of vision combined with a certain concreteness; a focus on practical things that make a difference. These are allies, of course, but the qualities they mention are telling. Burnham has also clearly done a good job on narrative, telling a story of Manchesterism. What I find most interesting, however, is that his signature policy, Live Well, is not really a ‘policy’ at all, and certainly not an announceable. It is a network of spaces for well-being and preventative healthcare, collaboratively run by community groups and public institutions. This is precisely the kind of initiative envisaged by the reform agendas I named above. Rather than providing answers, Burnham has offered clarity of vision, a case for why, and has used his office to carve out space — e.g. helping to negotiate funding — and has celebrated the work.

Having said all this, I can imagine Starmer’s team feeling frustrated. They will argue that working in this way is much easier as Mayor than as Prime Minister. They might also point to a range of initiatives — the civil society covenant, the No 10 Partnerships Unit, Pride in Place (e.g. see Steve Reed’s much-praised recent speech) — that show Starmer’s government acting in an enabling way. The implication being that, as soon as Burnham is leading the machinery of government, it will make a machine of him too.

My sense is that there is some truth to this, but also a note of fatalism. It is surely right that it’s harder to be an enabling Prime Minister than an enabling Mayor. It also seems clear, however, that Burnham has a better shot of being an enabling PM than Starmer, thanks to personal disposition and skill learned through practice. This is not to say it won’t be difficult; it will be, dauntingly so. But that is less a reason to despair and more a reason to double down in order to offset the challenges that are coming.

Can we say anything more specific, to end with, about what these challenges will be? What is the hardest thing about pursuing a transformative, enabling style of leadership from Number 10?

As it happens, in June I spent five days in the Basque region of Spain, talking with local leaders about exactly this question. We were puzzling over how the Basque region had pulled off such an extraordinary transformation — a story of devolved power, enabling leadership, and collaborative governance — while most efforts to deploy a similar strategy at national level have failed (most notably Labour’s short-lived effort to be ‘mission-driven’). The answer deserves an essay in its own right (indeed I might write more about this soon, because it’s a fascinating example for Burnham’s team to learn from). In short, we named five things:

1. The intense media pressure and dire information environment facing Prime Ministers, which keeps you permanently anxious and on the defensive

2. The formidable machine-thinking and inertia in the institutions you have to work through, from HMT to the NHS to the procurement profession

3. The complexity of national identity, which makes it harder to tell a story that unites and galvanises people

4. The scope of the job and especially the unique demands of foreign policy, which soak up the Prime Minister’s time, energy, and political capital

5. The peculiar lack of agency in the office of Prime Minister, by comparison to the role of Mayor

Reading all that, we might feel our hope ebbing away, but from everything I’ve read and the conversations I’ve had, I’ve been left feeling positive and certainly inclined to proceed with confidence. If I had to bottle the takeaway for team Burnham, it is probably some version of: trust your instincts — they are right for the moment — and recognise that you will need to double down to overcome the system’s machine instincts.

Conclusion

Will the next Prime Minister fare better than the last few? I guess only a fool would bet their house on it; the environmental challenges are just so formidable. When you look at the polling on PM approval ratings over time, public support for each one seems to start lower, fall steeper, and lead to a resignation sooner. Perhaps, in time, we’ll conclude that the job of Prime Minister is no longer doable on its current terms, and that the answer isn’t to swap personnel, but to reform the system itself.

Overall, however, I think it would be churlish not to permit ourselves a little optimism. It’s been clear for a while that Britain needs a far more decentralised and adaptive state, and we’re about to get a Prime Minister who believes in one, and who has the disposition, and more experience than most, to deliver one. If that doesn’t give us a reason to hope then maybe our inability to hope is the problem.