Scenario five · The Challenge
Harrowmere Council
Eighteen months as Shadow Chief Executive. Five disciplines. One deadline that does not move.
Harrowmere Council is the new unitary authority being built from Cressfield County Council and the borough and district councils of Oxendale, Bramholt and Wrenfield: four separate councils becoming one, under a Structural Changes Order that fixes vesting day by law.
The Shadow Executive backed the submission that became that Order eight months ago: harmonise four sets of services, terms and cultures into one, to a date set in Westminster, not in this building. They backed it in a room that wanted the reorganisation to happen. Then they appointed you to run the shadow period, and Westminster's date does not move for anyone in this building, including you.
What comes next arrives the way trouble actually arrives inside a reorganisation, one thing at a time and never at a convenient one: your best systems lead turning out to be a bully, a residents’ campaign with a judicial review letter behind it, an inherited deficit nobody declared, a leaked paper, and a requisitioned meeting nobody wanted to call.
What is at stake
Every choice tests one of the five RESOLVE disciplines, and every discipline you let slip makes the next month harder. The consultation promise you can’t keep, the deficit you manage quietly, the appointment you make on loyalty rather than merit: all of it comes back, and here it comes back to voters and to Whitehall both. Reach vesting day with the disciplines intact and you will have proved something worth proving. Get there having quietly traded them away, and the department watching from Whitehall will have noticed exactly what it cost.
Harrowmere leans hardest on Velocity of Decision and Relentless Honesty, the disciplines a fixed deadline and an inherited deficit test hardest.
You will pick a difficulty and, if you want, challenge a colleague to the identical run before you start. It plays in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.