There are lessons in governance that arrive in policy papers, and others that arrive in balance sheets, elections and court judgments, and then there are those that arrive with a song.
Kent County Council in England has recently provided one of the more entertaining and instructive lessons in political management. The episode is funny enough to be dismissed as a prank, yet serious enough to warrant closer attention. It is about change, preparation, detail, compliance and the limits of symbolic leadership. And, unexpectedly, it is also about the national anthem.
In May, the Reform UK-controlled Kent County Council voted to change its constitution so that full council meetings would begin with the Lord’s Prayer and end with the singing of God Save the King. The Reform administration presented the changes as expressions of patriotism, heritage and national identity. The anthem proposal was approved by 46 councillors, while 48 supported the prayer.
Opposition councillors objected on several grounds, including the use of council time for religious and patriotic observances and the reduction of time available for opposition responses. But the Reform majority had the numbers, and numbers matter.
That is one of the first lessons of leadership. If you have the votes, you can change the rules. But having the numbers does not mean you have mastered the consequences of the change. That distinction would soon prove important.
On July 16, after a council meeting lasting about five hours, the newly imposed anthem ritual reached its comic climax. Most councillors sang the familiar first verse and seemed ready to return to their seats. Then Green councillors Mark Hood and Stuart Jeffery produced copies of the lyrics and began singing beyond the first verse. Other opposition councillors joined them. The pre-recorded accompaniment eventually stopped, but the singing continued until council chairman Jeremy Eustace intervened and asked them to stop.
The Reform leadership was reportedly unimpressed. The Greens, however, had done something rather clever: they had complied. The council had voted for the national anthem. They sang it. The council had not said: “sing only the bit everybody knows”, so they sang more.
Malicious compliance is following a rule, instruction or requirement exactly or excessively, thereby exposing the rule’s inadequacy, absurdity or unintended consequences. It is usually associated with workplaces, bureaucracy and frustrated employees. But it can be a powerful instrument in politics.
The first lesson from Kent is simple and concerns consideration: Do not make a rule merely because you can. Make it only after you have considered what happens after you make it.
The Reform administration had the votes to amend the constitution. But constitutional change is not merely about voting. It is about drafting, definitions, procedures, implementation, exceptions, unintended consequences, and the questions an unfriendly opponent will ask. The decision to introduce the anthem was therefore not simply a question of patriotism. It was a question of governance.
What exactly constitutes compliance? Which version of the anthem? How many verses? Who leads the anthem? Who provides the music? Does everyone have to participate? What happens if someone refuses? How much time is allowed? What happens if participants continue singing beyond the expected version? These are not trivial questions. They are the details that turn political intentions into workable policy.
Kent appears to have discovered the difference between announcing a change and designing a change. Perhaps the most amusing discovery for some councillors was that the song they thought they knew is not simply the seven familiar lines that are normally heard at sporting events and ceremonial occasions.
God Save the King has a longer and more complex textual history, with additional verses that have appeared in different versions and contexts. There is no straightforward statutory “full version” prescribed by British law, as people might assume. The first verse is simply the version most people know and most commonly sing. That distinction is not merely a matter of enriching detail; it is crucial.
A leader who assumes that everyone understands the same thing from a phrase may be setting a trap for himself. In management, words such as urgent, complete, professional, patriotic, inclusive, efficient and transparent sound precise until someone asks: What exactly do you mean?
Implementation starts with understanding exactly what is meant, and it is where many reforms fail.
A common view holds that reformers are courageous, while conservatives resist change. However, this oversimplifies reality. While change requires courage, acting without preparation leads only to disruption.
The successful reformer must possess several disciplines at once: Clarity about the problem, Conviction about the desired outcome, Consultation about consequences, Consideration of stakeholders, Confidence in the proposal and action, Competence in implementation, Communication about the change, and Control over the details.
Kent’s Reform administration demonstrated one of these qualities very clearly: it had the political confidence to act. But the episode raises questions about the others. The constitution was changed, and the consequences were not fully anticipated. The opposition found the gap. That is not merely a lesson for Reform UK. It is a lesson for every government, board, university, company and organisation that has ever believed that a majority vote is the same as a successful reform. It is not.
The Green councillors recognised an important aspect of compliance, and they rightly deserve acknowledgement for this insight. They understood that opposition isn’t always about saying no; sometimes the most impactful opposition is saying yes: precisely as requested. In this way, compliance can serve as a strategic tool.
A badly designed instruction can contain its own contradiction. If a manager says, “Follow the procedure exactly,” an employee may discover that doing so produces an absurd result. If a government introduces a complicated regulation without considering its practical consequences, those subject to the regulation may comply so literally that its deficiencies become obvious. If a political majority insists on a symbolic ritual, its opponents may participate so thoroughly that the symbolism begins to undermine itself.
The Greens did not need to overturn the rule. They did something more elegant: they used the rule against its authors. That is a fascinating way to practise opposition.
There is another lesson here for political parties. Majorities are powerful, but they are temporary.
Winning an election grants a party the right to govern but does not shield it from scrutiny. Interestingly, the larger the majority, the more likely it is to neglect consultation, which is risky. While the majority has the power to pass laws and alter the constitution, the minority plays a crucial role by scrutinising these actions and interpreting the constitution thoroughly.
The majority sets the rules, but the minority questions their meaning. Therefore, healthy democracies depend on more than elections; they rely on institutional memory, procedural expertise, oversight, and an informed opposition. An opposition that merely shouts is easy to ignore. An opposition that reads the rules is much harder to defeat.
It would be tempting to make this a partisan story: Reform embarrassed by the Greens. That would miss the point. The deeper lesson is about leadership and decision-making. Leaders are often judged by their ability to make decisions. They should also be judged by their ability to anticipate what happens after the decision.
Every decision passes through four stages: announcement, implementation, reaction, and consequence. Wise leadership considers all four stages carefully. A leader who focuses only on the announcement is practising politics as theatre. A leader who focuses on implementation is practising governance.
One of the oldest errors in leadership is to treat details as secondary. They are not, details are where strategy becomes reality.
An architect may have a magnificent vision for a building, but a poorly specified foundation can destroy the entire project. A university may announce a brilliant new programme, yet fail because the curriculum, admissions process and staffing were not in place. A government may promise reform, only to discover that implementation requires resources, legislation, training and institutional coordination. A company may launch a new strategy without considering how employees will actually execute it.
In each case, the failure is not necessarily in the idea. It is in the conversion of the idea into an operating system. Kent’s anthem episode is a miniature version of the same phenomenon.
Contrary to what instinct urges us to think, compliance is not always submission. This is perhaps the most interesting lesson of all.
We often imagine compliance as the opposite of resistance. It is not always so. Sometimes compliance is resistance with a straight face. Sometimes the most effective way to challenge authority is not to refuse the order but to obey it so precisely that its weaknesses become impossible to ignore. That is why malicious compliance deserves to be studied beyond workplace anecdotes.
Malicious compliance belongs in the study of leadership, management, law and political strategy. It reminds leaders that every rule invites interpretation. It reminds opposition groups that every rule should be read carefully. And it reminds institutions that the sharpest critic may be the person who follows your instruction more faithfully than you intended.
There is an irony here that should not be lost. A political movement called Reform should understand better than most that reform is not simply about changing things. Reform is about improving outcomes. Not every change is reform. A change can be unnecessary, badly designed, or resource-consuming without creating value. A change can even make an organisation worse.
The test of reform is therefore not: Did you change something? It is: Did the change produce a better result? That is a much harder question. And it is one every reformer should welcome.
This episode has a Shakespearean quality: a ruler creates a rule, subjects follow it, but when someone examines the rule more closely than its creator did, the rule becomes a joke. Beyond humour, this teaches us that leadership isn’t just about having the authority to make decisions. It also demands the discipline to carefully consider those decisions.
Effective decision-making and leadership depend on the discipline to recognise that Change needs preparation, Reform involves consultation, Policy demands accuracy, Authority calls for oversight, and every decision requires someone willing to ask the critical but often overlooked question: “What happens next?”
The Reform Councillors had the numbers, but The Greens had the detail, and for one memorable evening in Kent, the detail sang longer than the numbers had intended. That may be the most useful lesson of all.
A majority can impose a rule, but it cannot control every consequence of the rule. And when leaders fail to think through the consequences of their decisions, they should not be surprised when their opponents do the thinking for them. Sometimes the most formidable form of opposition is not refusal.
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Anthony Kila is a Jean Monnet professor of Strategy and Development. He is currently Institute Director at the Commonwealth Institute of Advanced and Professional Studies, CIAPS, Lagos, Nigeria. He is a regular commentator on the BBC and he works with various organisations on International Development projects across Europe, Africa and the USA. He tweets @anthonykila, and can be reached at anthonykila@ciaps.org
