Democratically define what “good” looks like — in public language, not civil service fog — while recognising that the population is not homogeneous and different groups have different needs.

• What do we want this system to do for people?
• Where are there legitimate trade-offs between groups (for example: cost vs resilience vs speed)? Make them explicit instead of hiding them.
• What is out of scope? Capture that clearly, so we don’t pretend the system can solve everything at once.

Decide what success would look like — in numbers, not vibes.

• What metrics prove the system is delivering?
• How often are they measured, and by whom? (Who is accountable when they drift?)
• Are these outcomes actually legible to the public, or do they only make sense to specialists?

Example in energy: instead of “net zero-aligned market reforms,” say “Keep household bills under £X/month for a typical home while meeting Y% reliability and Z% decarbonisation.”

This part is not ideology. It’s diagnosis.

• What is currently preventing those outcomes? Technical? Legal? Financial? Governance? Capability? Incentives?
• Which problems are structural (baked into how the system is built) vs. which are operational (bad process / incompetence / no one’s job)?
• Which problems are real constraints vs. excuses used to resist change?

Propose solutions that actually solve the stated problems and map to physical reality, not just wishful policy language.

• What changes to the system architecture are required?
• What technical / digital / market mechanisms get us there?
• How does money flow under this fix? Who pays, who is paid, who is accountable?

Here is where Energy Unleashed began: redesign the electricity market so it actually values availability, flexibility, and deliverability — not just theoretical marginal prices.

Now we’re honest about reality.

• Legal blockers (does the law literally forbid it?).
• Institutional blockers (nobody owns this problem / everyone wants to protect their patch / political risk).
• Capability blockers (the state machine literally doesn’t have the digital spine or people to do it).
• Cultural blockers (“We’ve always done it this way” / “That would embarrass leadership” / “We can’t admit failure publicly”).

You can’t deliver change by throwing PDFs at ministers and hoping. You need commitment.

• Who actually has to say “yes” for this to move in the real world?
• What are they scared of (press, unions, investors, voters, regulators, backbenchers)?
• What offer are we making them? Why should they back this specific plan, now?

This step is political economy discipline, not vibes. Delivery requires power to align.

This is execution. This is where it normally dies.

• What’s the rollout sequence? Pilot? Phased national deployment? Parallel systems during transition?
• Who is operationally responsible at each stage, by name / team, not just “the department”?
• How do we surface slippage publicly so it can’t be buried?

The world moves. Systems that don’t evolve become fake.

• How do we review outcomes against reality and update the design?
• How do we record what changed and why — so we keep institutional memory instead of restarting the same doomed debates every 3 years?
• How do we avoid drifting into authoritarian control while trying to “be efficient”?