On Leadership: Better Data, Better Outcomes

Governments around the world face a paradox: they have access to reams of data, yet often lack the kind they actually need. Vast quantities are within reach, in the form of open-source platforms, social-media trends and commercial data. Yet we still find that many political leaders lament the lack of data at their fingertips to track the progress of their initiatives, the pace of implementation and how government actions are impacting citizens.

A leader can set out a bold vision for economic growth and health-care improvements but typically, a few months in, their government will start floundering. Cabinet ministers announce ideas left, right and centre, departments operate in silos and critical policies get stuck in limbo. Meetings begin with thick binders of incomplete updates and evenings end with conflicting briefings. Lots of information, but not what really matters.

The Advantages of a Delivery Dashboard

While better information flow and decision-making can be exercised through various tools, as we’ve explored across the On Leadership series, a well-constructed dashboard can be game-changing for political leaders. It can help them focus on their priorities, track live progress across ministries, surface bottlenecks and flag opportunities for strategic intervention.

This kind of tool creates real traction, allowing leaders to shift from scrambling for updates to proactively managing delivery. It creates transparency around decision flows, meaning the time it takes to approve a project can be significantly reduced, inter-ministry collaboration can be meaningfully improved and programme implementation can be kept on track.

At the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change we have developed such dashboards for clients around the world, helping them reform education, infrastructure projects and more. We’ve distilled our experience into three key lessons for making dashboards a success.

Lesson 1: Data Collection Is Hard, so Be Picky About What to Collect

Every elected leader comes to office with a desire to do big things, but they don’t always know how to measure progress. For example, better health-care outcomes are difficult to quantify, maths-test scores don’t necessarily add up to a better education and crime is constantly evolving.

The private sector rarely faces this kind of data gap; data on sales, production and supply chains routinely inform business decisions. Business leaders also usually have little trouble getting a hold of the data they need on the state of their operations.

Political leaders, by contrast, struggle to access similarly useful data from their civil services, who may be reluctant to share information with the centre of government due to competing agendas, bureaucratic inertia and risk aversion. The data that really matter – on public services and the outcomes that citizens experience – are often sparse, outdated or unavailable. This isn’t just a challenge in developing countries, but a problem affecting all countries across the board.

Typical bureaucracies, limited by their resources and biases, will default to easier measures within their control: how much money was spent, how many programmes were administered and how many reports were issued. These measures do not reflect how citizens experience policy. Political leaders should push for new data sets, such as the number of commuting hours saved by citizens as a result of upgraded public transport, or the reduction in waiting times for surgery as a result of an increase in MRI machines.

However, collecting data, particularly fresh data, is difficult, time-consuming and expensive: things like new survey methodologies, data-mining techniques and staff with the right skills are needed, combined with the added headache of data security and privacy protection.

Meanwhile, political leaders can come to office with hundreds of commitments across all areas of government activity, and the government delivery unit (DU) is tasked with measuring all of them. The DU can become so focused on data collection that it loses sight of delivery, meaning dashboards display only cursory top-level metrics and surface-level insights.

In the end, the dashboard that tries to tell you everything ultimately tells you nothing. Effective delivery requires focus. Time and resources are limited; leaders must prioritise and the dashboard must reflect those priorities. For a delivery dashboard to work, the leaders and their DUs must be picky about what data they want to collect, monitor and manage. The data included should track the outcomes being prioritised, and those outcomes should be limited: fewer than ten and, ideally, no more than five.

Lesson 2: Know How and When Data Are Being Manipulated

As we’ve already established, building new data sets and measuring useful outcomes is time consuming and expensive. The more DUs try to track, the less time they have to analyse and verify data; in addition, it becomes easier for the government machinery to delay (or stall), hide in a forest of data and fill in made-up or manipulated results. We’ve witnessed these issues first-hand in governments we’ve supported.

Inconsistent Data Lead to Inadequate Dashboards

A regional government in an Asian country built a dashboard as part of its Covid-19 response. However, the dashboard faced major challenges due to unreliable and inconsistent data reporting, limited interoperability across departments and delays in updating information. This ultimately rendered the dashboard ineffective because it emphasised superficial data and lacked transparency, thereby failing to drive accountability among officials.

Misleading Reporting

An African country built a dashboard to monitor its infrastructure projects, including the construction of new highways. It was reported that 430km of highway had been completed, suggesting remarkably good progress. However, after further examination it was discovered that only 215km of highway had been laid down. To bolster its reporting, the transport department had counted each individual lane on a road – in this case, 215km going in one direction and another 215km coming back the other way.

Gaming the Outcome, Not Solving the Problem

In the early 2000s, Tony Blair’s government wanted to significantly reduce the time that UK citizens had to wait to see their doctor, including a guarantee that citizens could get a GP appointment within 48 hours. However, in struggling to meet this target, many health practices simply limited the number of patients who could book appointments in advance, or outright prevented earlier bookings. This meant that tracked waiting times were reduced – but public satisfaction with access to health care fell too.

Political leaders should keep an eye out for some key indicators of poor or manipulated data:

• When data are taking an unusually long time to be collected.

• When proxies – such as money spent on subsidies – are provided, rather than information about the target outcome itself.

• When the metric descriptions and/or caveats keep changing.

• When data seem too good to be true.

• When data reports have gaps, are inconsistent or wildly fluctuating.

It is almost impossible for a political leader to monitor their own data-monitoring function. To address this, they should think of data for each priority outcome like diamonds, to be examined from numerous angles to verify their accuracy. For example, in targeting increases in agricultural production, information should be gathered from field operators but also satellite data, alongside sales volumes from wholesale markets or exports. Every data set should align to build a more accurate picture of a leader’s target outcome; viewing it through multiple lenses limits the ability of those collecting the data to hide and game measures.

Tracking outcomes in this way increases the volume of data that needs collecting, and data collection is hard and expensive. This further emphasises the first lesson: a leader won’t have the resources to do this for every outcome. It’s about collecting better data, on a small set of priorities.

Lesson 3: Dashboards Should Focus on the Why, Not Just the What

At the heart of delivery is the need to set ambitious targets to achieve impactful change for citizens, using a focused, data-driven approach. But in the countries where TBI operates, too often we have seen governments focus on the end goal and not the means by which they get there. Political leaders often sit in front of statistical dashboards and find that their government isn’t making progress on a target outcome, but have no idea why.

If a delivery dashboard is going to help leaders make decisions, it needs to identify problems, diagnose them and present options for discussion with advisors and ministers. For each target outcome the dashboard must display the roadmap for implementation and where an initiative is in the process, as well as providing a diagnosis of risks and challenges – and, if the project is stalled, options to unlock it.

This comprehensive approach to policy implementation requires the DU to get deep into the details and go beyond presenting headline statistics. It has to build relationships across government to ensure that the data on the dashboard are accurate and that the recommended solutions are feasible (technically and politically). And this all has to take place in an environment where the DU is confident about providing honest feedback when a priority is off track, to a leader who is open to hearing it.

There are some good examples of delivery dashboards in action that focused on the process, not just the headline statistic. Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern didn’t have a full DU to the extent that some TBI countries do, but she received a monthly dashboard of her top priorities. Every month she would meet her advisors and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) to review the tracker. They would discuss updates, identify interventions to advance stalled priorities and assign responsibility to someone in Ardern’s office or within DPMC to catalyse progress. This approach worked because of the focus on key priorities, for which they were able to gather the right data and leverage the system to drive implementation.

In India, Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu needed a dashboard to monitor his priority policy areas. The dashboard leveraged real-time data to closely monitor infrastructure projects, welfare schemes and citizen grievances, accelerating decision-making and improving transparency. Clear visualisation of bottlenecks, actionable insights for administrative officials and strong accountability mechanisms led to measurable improvements in project-completion rates.

Making Delivery Dashboards Deliver

While delivery dashboards can be a highly effective communications tool for political leaders wanting to drive an ambitious agenda, they need to be used effectively. That requires:

• Clear prioritisation – being picky about what data are monitored and collected.

• Close examination – viewing priorities from different data angles.

• Extensive collaboration – putting roadmaps and relationships in place to build the right framework for problem-solving.

It isn’t enough for governments to just track their target outcomes. To move them in the right direction, regular and consistent data are required, not least regarding obstacles and their potential fixes. At their best, dashboards don’t just display information: they drive decisions. And when backed by discipline and leadership attention, they help turn ambition into action and policy into real outcomes for citizens.

Our Credentials

James Wilson is a TBI Advisor for Delivery and Data, and former data lead in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Australia.

Wamaitha Mary is a TBI Associate for Delivery, supporting clients across Africa.

Vivek Agarwal is TBI’s Country Director in India, having formerly worked at the World Bank.

Justin To is TBI Senior Director for Economic Prosperity and former Deputy Director of Policy to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Kurt McLauchlan is TBI Senior Advisor for Government Strategy & Policy and former Senior Advisor to New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

Quote from Tony Blair taken from his 2024 book On Leadership: Lessons for the 21st Century.