Operationalising policy stewardship: the policy programme

Another “aaS”

It seems everything today is leveraging technology in order to be provided ‘as-a-Service’. If you take the view that, by dint of being delivered by the public service, public policy work is already delivered ‘as a service’, then the suggested nomenclature of ‘Policy Work as-a-Service’ is both redundant and faddish. It serves only to make an ‘aaS’ out of the craft. [Boom!]

An alternative view, using the conversation around Mobility-as-a-Service as the metaphor, is that policy work and the delivery of advice has been captured by a particular mode of acting, that the demands of the preferred mode have over-taken the demands of the outcome in importance and have retarded achievement of that outcome. Policy work ‘as-a-Service’ implies both the need and the possibility of adopting a ‘multi-modal’ approach to undertaking policy work and delivering policy advice.

The dominant mode of policy work

This is not a paper about papers! The dominant mode of policy work is not the briefing or, conversely, the back room deal.

This is not a paper about ideologies. The dominant mode of policy work is not neo-liberalism or, conversely, formulaically value-neutral cost-benefit analysis.

The dominant mode is ‘responsive problem solving’.

On the face of it, this does not sound like too bad a thing. Public servants need to be responsive to political leadership. Problems should be approached in a constructive, solutions-oriented manner. But there can be too much of a good thing, and this can lead to the neglect of better alternatives.

The risks that confront responsive problem solving are that not all requests should be taken at face value, and not all problems need to be solved. Allowed to regress to its natural extreme, responsive problem solving draws solely from the knowledge provided by the question, which often includes an assumed solution. The policy work and the outputs it creates thus exist as distinct nuggets of ‘stuff’, disconnected from the past, present and future, except through a narrative of political urgency.

Good policy method moves between the different modes of contexting and framing a question, exploring and selecting between the wider bodies of evidence that might be available, testing the true nature of the problem or opportunity, and only subsequently going into a problem solving mode.

This is neither new nor news. But it is something that seems to be becoming progressively more difficult to deliver at short notice.

This seems to be because of a range of factors that undermine the ability to maintain and present a different narrative basis or context for framing and responding to political requests for action. Policy as responsive problem solving is one of these factors: it is a means for narrowing and atomising domain knowledge, and a self-reinforcing one as it becomes more and more the ‘go to’ tool to overcome the systemic lack of capability to do otherwise. High turn-over of staff and high rotation between unrelated staff assignments are other factors.

Many people right now will be saying “we use good policy method”. And indeed, many policy shops do so quite often, and every policy shop does so sometimes. But these examples are almost always in formally established projects, operating distinct from the normal teams and the business-as-usual of the organisation. And distinct from the practice as usual. The very formality of their creation – and subsequent dissolution – is evidence of their novelty.

In steps the humble programme

Today a policy (middle) manager needs to create learning-based teams – not just in the sense of a bunch of semi-random people who report to the same person, but in the sense of people who work together towards a common goal. The policy manager needs to develop programmes –not just in the sense of groups of jobs that happen to be worked on by the same person or people, but in the sense of a group of responsibilities that must be delivered in close alignment and deliberate sequence in order to achieve the common goal.

Every policy shop I have worked in has had stewardship responsibilities that have been able to be expressed as a finite number of areas of responsibility: from these areas the team architecture has been drawn. Each area, each team, has in turn been able to have its responsibilities expressed as small number of discrete outcomes – whether through reference to legislation or an agency outcomes framework, or extrapolation from some technical delineation. It is these discrete outcomes, and the way they cascade together, that define the proper focal points for each programme/functional sub-team within the parent policy team.

The programme does three things:

·      It spreads the middle manager’s burden over junior leaders, who lead the programme teams, building their capability and freeing the manager to focus on other things

·      It supports the aggressive cultivation, capture and dissemination of domain knowledge amongst the members of the programme sub-team, to create a regenerative centre of excellence

·      It creates contextualised understanding of a particular policy domain that provides the programme members with the knowledge to provide swift and sure advice that is free, frank and informed.

Critical to the success of the programme is that the programme team deals with everything that directly relates to its outcome of interest, and has responsibility for identifying and connecting with related work located around its boundary. That does not mean it must do everything equally, or that additional resource cannot be sought. It means that the people closest to the risks of prioritising have a bigger say in how to prioritise. It means that new or temporary people do not work alone and walk off with the institutional knowledge, because their role is to add capability and capacity to the existing leader and team, who stay involved or closely in touch.

False friends

Outcomes are difficult things to work with in a responsive problem solving culture, because they are harder to see than immediate impacts, and even harder to attribute.

The reach towards more easily observed and measured things is reflected in a common approach to programme design that emphasises procedural outcomes over customer/citizen outcomes. The idea is that higher service quality can be achieved through greater technical consistency. A related idea is that delineation on functional and procedural lines will force collaboration: if no single team holds all the levers relating to an issue of political interest, then multiple teams will need to join up to make the necessary difference.

In practice these two approaches – whether applied separately or together – tend to fall down because the ‘cuckoo outcome’ of technical purity tends to capture the home team and push the citizen outcomes out of the nest. In addition, the approaches are often implemented with the view that coordination is a free good, and/or that hierarchical silos will still need to be tightly adhered to. In all these cases, a goal of achieving authentic adherence to some rigid ideal comes to trump practicality and attention to citizen outcomes.

Outcome centred programmes are not about forcing a particular narrative onto the politicians. They are about being able to locate a political direction within a stewardship narrative that supports understanding and the provision of better advice. Labelling something a programme is not a fix; making it work as a programme is not easy. But centring on the key outcome and unifying effort is a useful first step towards effective policy stewardship.