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“Money is essential, but it depends how you spend it,” says Michael Fullan, a top education adviser to the Ontario government and a collaborator of Barber’s. “Money can be squandered pretty easily. So it’s not the money factor by itself. But you do need resources to do it. So they do have resources to do things now. … It’s money, but it’s got to be accompanied by the kind of focused strategy that we’re talking about.”

After years of being beaten up by the Tories, the provincial education ministry was in a bad way in 2004. “The ministry did not have the capacity to lead this,” Fullan says. So the government created a literacy and numeracy secretariat in 2004, which served as the ministry’s deliverology centre. It started tracking the numbers the McGuinty government wanted and then began working on strengthening teachers’ ability to teach.

They were building the capacity to deliver on the government’s agenda (rule No. 13). The permanent budget increases mean continued funding for the secretariat’s work, but the idea is that it keeps feeding new and better resources into the system.

When deliverology goes wrong

Applied right, deliverology gives politicians and public servants clear goals, the means to reach them, and motivation to do it. But if you get parts of it wrong — pick the wrong targets, for instance — things can turn pathological quickly.

Blake, the Alec Baldwin character in the movie version of Glengarry Glen Ross, is a deliverologist of a kind, descending on his company’s moribund sales office with a pep talk for the guys that includes a contest: “As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anyone want to see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired. Get the picture? You laughing now?”