Jumping to solutions

 

Among public servants there’s an interesting dynamic, a conflict that’s always just below the surface. Sam and her most senior bureaucrats are practical and politically motivated. Most of them want to get things done, and strive to actually achieve something. On the other hand, Peter, a career public servant without urgency, thinks this is a reckless approach.

Peter, and even public servants who work harder than he does, are more cautious than politicians. They tend to recommend research or further investigation before committing to anything or recommending anything. It’s a battle between the practical and the process kings, the impatient and the procrastinating. It’s at the heart of understanding the policy process.

  Speaking simply, Sam and the senior bureaucrats want to get things done. They want results on the board, and promises delivered. On one level, they want to win elections. You might say, then, if doing things wins elections, that it’s also what most voters want.

For politicians to survive in the game, it’s important that they always have an answer to every question, so that they look like they are in control and taking action. A wrong answer, made without research or planning, and not based on evidence, is usually the outcome.

The middle-level manager, Peter, and the rank and file policy officer, if they are trained properly, often want the exact opposite. Academics and policy trainers preach the ‘policy cycle’ approach. This means policy advisors should do their homework and proceed through a policy project carefully. It starts with identifying issues, research, analysis of options, consultation with stakeholders, decision, implementation and then evaluation.

As the policy advisor sees it, each of these stages would normally last about two or three months each, at a minimum. As the politician and senior bureaucrat would see it, each of these stages should take around 15 seconds. However, they are usually willing to compromise on timeframes, as long as the first four stages are finished before the three o’clock media conference announcing the decision. The other variation with Sam and her senior bureaucrats is that the decision is usually the first stage in the process, and analysis and consultation follow.

The policy advisor is like a machine. Well, a poorly functioning machine, perhaps. Every regular action that they dream up for other people to complete requires a form. Every new task they take on themselves will require a project plan. In other words, if I want to go to the toilet, they will require me to fill out a form for it, and get the appropriate sign-off. 100 points of ID may be required, depending on the circumstances.

If they themselves need to go to the toilet they will devise a project plan. Of course, they are the form-makers, so there might not be a form yet. But on the other hand, why should a policy deity such as them be required to justify themselves anyway? Everyone knows they’re obviously the experts. The project plan will likely involve analysis of route options, a cost-benefit analysis, and a risk management plan.

The idea with the form is to slow you down to their level. If possible, you should be frustrated into total inaction. The idea with the project plan is to slow the whole process down. The last thing they need is to get to the implementation stage — they put that off as long as possible. In some ways I used to find that weird, because the policy advisor never completes the action anyway, they just shunt it off to some other non-suspecting person (the ‘operational’ staff). But the reality is that implementation is only one stage away from evaluation, a place that — ideally — no policy advisor ever gets to.

Delay the implementation and evaluation of a project as long as possible. It’s all in the timing, you see. Ideally, you will hand over the project to someone else just before the implementation stage, and then you cruise off to some other job in some other government department. If you become a policy advisor and you ever get this lucky, the key phrase to remember is ‘It’s all virtually finished and set to go, there’s just a few small loose ends to tie off’. To be successful, you should repeat that phrase to as many people as possible, and repeat it at your last team meeting.

During my time working with my manager, Peter, I attended many meetings involving him and other public servants from different areas of government, to discuss various different projects. You see, there really are two different types of public servant. Peter, the first type, is so cautious and likes to have gone through thorough research processes, dozens of rounds of report editing and endless meetings before committing to anything. To use a positive label, they are perfectionists; they like doing their job ‘properly’. Trouble is, they don’t really seem to be bothered about the fact that it can take a very long time to actually achieve very little. And there’s nothing perfect about that.

There’s a second type of public servant, the type that sees themselves as more ‘practical’. They are happy to give a nod to research and planning, but they are mindful of getting actual outcomes. These people, on average, come from higher in the organisation, but not all people of this mindset are senior. My years of formal study taught that good public policy involves a well-thought-through approach to planning.

I tried to be in between these two categories.

I have seen too many small tasks sit on to-do lists for years. In my view, public service processes are, on average, far too slow. For a small project, or the type of thing that might even be too small to actually call a project, I would say that the research phase should take a relatively short time. If there isn’t any controversy, it shouldn’t take too long. Most public servants, like Peter, simply aren’t outcomes-focused.

When I first arrived to work for Peter there was one listing on the big spread sheet of our division for a task to develop a basic training package to help private sector businesses implement some new requirements of legislation with their staff. In short, someone had to come up with a cost-effective way of telling employees working in the transport sector what they had to do to comply with a new law. The businesses didn’t need to do very much, they just needed to be aware of the law.

This was a small project, part of a larger project that was being implemented by a multi-jurisdictional working group. It was Queensland’s way of contributing to a larger project involving other states. Originally, the spread sheet committed to drafting a training package and sharing it with the other states within six months. Nine months later, at the end of 2010, there had been no action whatsoever taken to complete the project. None. It was still on the to-do list. By 2011, there were changes in the department’s priorities as a result of the huge floods early in the year and around Christmas of the previous year. The last I heard about it, in April 2012, two whole years later, there were still planning meetings happening to discuss it.

 

The classic politicians-versus-bureaucrats mentality was played out in a little team called the Boating infrastructure and Waterways Management Branch of the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads. This is a big title, but what they actually do is build boat ramps, about a dozen a year. Well, actually, what they do is draw up a tender document, watch a contractor build it, and then make the odd boat or plane trip around the state every now and then to ‘inspect the progress’. This last part of the job, inspecting the progress, is apparently a very long and drawn out process. In fact, it can be very annoying because it takes so long that you can’t risk booking the afternoon flight home, and you have to stay in a four-star motel overnight. That’s just because of the possibility of a worst-case scenario, though, and often the job can be done in around 30 minutes. This turns out quite handy because, being boat ramps, they’re usually near a beach or a pub or something. If not, there’s plenty of time to find one. And claim overtime while you're doing it.

The Peter types working in this area always took an hour to do a 30-minute job, and they always took the precaution of booking a night’s stay-over in a motel.

Have you ever been down to your local boat ramp? A little one- or two-laner? In Queensland the process for building one usually takes about two years. An interesting little fact, I think, which pretty much says it all. So before you rush to judgement against the hasty politicians and senior bureaucrats, bear in mind what they’re up against.

Just before the 2009 state election, there was a minor disaster for the bureaucrats in the Boating and Waterways Management Branch – a tactical masterstroke from the politicians. As an election commitment designed to help them win the election, the Minister for Transport decided to make a commitment to build about 30 new boat ramps within the following three years. With about two days’ notice, they required the bureaucrats to provide them with a list of nominated locations, which they did. And then everyone was committed for the next three years. This was the actual decision-making process – nothing like the type of process Dr Tim talks about in his university lectures.

Following the election, it was found that many of the locations were less than ideal for boat ramps. Some were along rivers that didn’t have firm foundations and needed a lot of engineering. Some were in areas that already had lots of boat ramps nearby, or not a big enough nearby population to actually use the new facilities, once built, so nobody really wanted them anyway. Some had environmental impacts. That kind of thing. Many ended up being quite costly and took a long time to plan and construct. They got done, though.

The politicians, the Sam equivalents, got their way and their election commitments were honoured. But their election commitment meant that more money was spent than was ideal. It meant that, although infrastructure was indeed built, and promoted, it wasn’t always built in the areas where it was actually needed. It was a rushed announcement of a commitment with no research, no consultation beforehand to ask the community for input, and no time allowed for public servants to research the task and recommend a plan of action.

That’s how things really work. So you can see how, despite politicians' marketing of themselves, a lot of problems in society don't get adequately solved by governments.

I found out a little interesting fact about government construction projects. Have you ever seen in the newspaper where a department has claimed a project will create a set number of jobs? For example, ‘the project cost is approximately $2.8 million, and will create 13 jobs over the life of the project.’ The way we figured this number was just by dividing the project cost by the number of years of the project, and then dividing again by a set constant, say 0.2, which was a set number for every project, calculated by people in the finance division. There’s no actual specific number of jobs that these numbers in newspapers refer to.

Of course, being caught out having to commit to delivering set projects, in a set timeframe, is close to the worst type of disaster situation for bureaucrats. They devised a plan to avoid a similar situation at the next election. This time they had to be ready with a better list if they got asked for one.

So they started a project. And a project plan. They drew up a tender document, and eventually got a consultant to draw up a list of recommended future projects, and travel around the state consulting with the community about the plan, which had already been devised before the consulting took place.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find out what ever happened to that process. Like all good public servants, I had well and truly moved on before any actual action or follow-through was required. I’d say the consultants had a few consultation sessions and then drew up a report. The original tender was for over $100,000 to complete this report. Nice work if you can get it. Yes, in this crazy government world, it is possible to develop a project to plan a project. Reminds me of all those pre-meeting meetings I’ve had.

 

In truth, most politicians like Sam have had little actual education, training or experience in policy development and implementation. Their main skill is in trying to win elections. Some senior bureaucrats have had training or education in policy development, but most have skills from other fields, such as finance or engineering or any other background. This means they can’t recognise a good or bad policy process when they see one.

Psychologists can give some interesting insights into how people, in general, make decisions. There’s a lot of explanations in psychology as to why government policies might not be effective, or might be inefficient.

Daniel Kahneman gives a good summary in his book Thinking, fast and slow.⁸ He calls the human brain ‘a machine for jumping to conclusions’. We also tend to be bad at judging evidence and statistics. We can be wildly over-optimistic about whether it’s possible to complete a project or not, and we can be bad at judging risk. These are some of the reasons why it’s good to follow the policy process. Doing the homework, research, analysis of options, asking for opinions from others (especially those affected by a policy), and careful project planning: these are all important so that the right decisions are made and money is spent efficiently. If there are people living around Queensland somewhere that badly need a boat ramp nearby but haven’t got one, it could be because decisions were rushed, and not all of these steps were followed.

But Kahneman also calls our intuitiveness ‘efficient’. He says that there are actually an endless number of decisions we make every day, like which tie to wear or when to sit up straight in your chair. We don’t need to do in-depth research before these things, we can just do them. Of course, there will always be someone who wants to make a fuss and ponder for 30 minutes about which tie would be best to choose, but that person is an idiot.

With some public policy decisions or projects it is entirely valid to make decisions and get action actually happening without having to spend six months doing a ‘scoping study’ and having endless team meetings. But the scoping study is the policy officer’s way of procrastinating, not wanting to make a ‘risky’ decision or recommendation. It’s also what happens if a policy officer is lacking skills and is unsure how to do their job. They make a fuss, and take a long time. If you still haven’t got that boat ramp, strangely, this reverse situation could also be the reason.

It may seem obvious to say, but it isn’t. You have to know when to make a decision and when to do a scoping study. You need to know what amount of homework and research is required to gather facts to make a good decision. Too much thinking and not enough thinking are both mistakes that you can make. Procrastinating and forming a ‘working group’ to ‘consider options’ and report back in six months’ time, while attractive to some, is not actually always necessary or productive. It could just be an excuse for delaying work and action and decisions.

There are two important categories of solutions that people often jump to, without carefully considering their effectiveness, costs or alternative options.

The first category is solutions that are looking for a problem. For example, I worked in an area once where the clever policy officers had drafted an Act, a piece of legislation, that became law. By the way, if you ever thought politicians made laws, don’t be so sure: politicians are just the rubber stamp. Now, a lot of Acts that get passed by parliament also have ‘Regulations’ attached to them. Not always, but they often do. The regulations are seen as more routine, process or implementation rules, and they don’t usually even have to get voted on in parliament to become law. In this particular business unit they had written an Act but not an accompanying Regulation.

Writing a Regulation stayed on the ‘to-do’ list for several years, like lots of bureaucrats’ tasks. In my years working in that area, I never heard anyone propose a reason for developing a Regulation. It just seemed like a cool thing to do. It was a bit frustrating because I asked what the purpose of a Regulation was on many occasions, but others usually reacted as if I’d asked some absurd, nonsensical question like ‘Why is the sky red?’ or ‘Why is the Pope a Catholic?’ Of course, it didn’t matter if there wasn’t a reason for doing something, they just wanted to do it — but not before developing a project plan, of course. It was a cool solution looking for a problem to solve.

Of course, the word ‘cool’ probably made you think of technology, and it’s one of the biggest causes of the occasional flight of fancy for politicians and bureaucrats who have a cool, whizz-bang device that just needs to be used somewhere, to prove how much better we are than someone else. In emergency management areas this often happens. I once went to a presentation about some new whizz-bang flood-mapping system that could place infrastructure on a map and give information about which roads would be cut in something like 1000 different hypothetical situations. It didn’t seem to have any actual practical purpose that would actually be helpful, but it certainly was cool.

From time to time in the past I have often heard about the possibility of developing a system where police or emergency management officials could send communications to members of the community by SMS message, for example during disaster situations. Of course, this sort of thing looks attractive to Peter and his mates in the public service, because it’s cool. Politicians can also tell everyone about it and make themselves look cutting edge and active. The Australian Government also has a phone app for iPhone and Android called Disaster Watch. You can download it if you want, but it tells you virtually nothing. I suspect it just felt like a cool thing to do.

 

The other solution that people always jump to is the default solution. Take this test below and see if you intuitively know the normal default solution for the following hypothetical problems. The answers are on the next page.

 

1. How do you reduce crime?

2. How do you reduce unemployment?

3. How do you fix hospitals?

4. How do you get banks to lower fees and give better service?

5. What do you do if someone gets sick?

6. What do you do if a child misbehaves?

7.  How do we improve teaching in schools?

8.  How do we reduce car accidents and road deaths?

 

 

 

Typical default answers:

1.  More police, tougher penalties.

2.  Cut taxes, increase free trade and free market policies.

3.  More doctors and nurses.

4.  Encourage better competition.

5.  Go to the doctor. Get medicine.

6.  Discipline them.

7.  Pay teachers more money.

8.  Driver education, and speeding fines.

 

 

Some of these might actually turn out to be the best option. But they could sometimes actually be the cause of the problem, or at least not be the best solution. There’s a strong temptation to pursue these default options automatically, because they seem so obvious and logical. I bet when you did this, you found the answers pretty easy to come by. Too easy.

In defence of politicians and senior bureaucrats, they are pressured to do something, quickly. If there’s a problem, the media very quickly asks ‘what are you doing about it?’ As discussed in chapter 4 about the media pressures on politicians, saying nothing is being done is not an option. Even doing something that isn’t effective is infinitely better than doing nothing.

  When H1N1 influenza (‘swine flu’) developed as a possibility in 2009, governments were pressured to do something. Even if they really didn't know what exactly they should do. One of those things tried was to get a big stockpile of vaccinations in case of an outbreak. This is clearly a nonsensical thing to do, unless you have some system and enough vaccinations to vaccinate millions — or at least thousands — of people at short notice. But it certainly looks like action, so that’s what happened in many places around the world. There was also a big buy-up of facemasks at the time.

  At these times, if possible, we have to encourage politicians like Sam to choose sensible action that has a chance of being effective and good value for money. Perhaps we should also realise that we share some responsibility for creatively trying to analyse policy problems and recommending good solutions to politicians in the first place. They need good advice, because they can’t be experts at everything.

The media is guilty, too, for not investigating the likely effectiveness of solutions that politicians propose. This is often a job left for opposition politicians, who have a strong bias towards saying almost any policy won’t work. They're like the boy who cried wolf, and you are better off ignoring oppositions most of the time. The media, it seems, are happy to have their news story, and the conflict between the different sides of politics. Journalists demand instant answers, and punish politicians like Sam if they appear, even for a nanosecond, as if they aren’t doing anything to solve the supposed crisis of the moment. In the 24-7 news cycle, journalists, who compete against each other to get scoops and deliver copy according to daily deadlines, are not rewarded for allowing politicians to take time — weeks or months — to respond to an issue. They need the story, action, and opposing political views straight away. They punish politicians who are slow to respond and insist that they respond immediately, rather than allowing more time for analysis of options and for a proper, considered decision to be made.

 

 

 

Key points: ·         There is always a tension within the public service between, firstly, cautious people who want to research everything but never seem to want to take action, and secondly, people who are impatient for outcomes and decisions. ·         Politicians constantly make decisions and announcements aimed at getting themselves re-elected, even when their proposals haven’t been researched properly. ·         Good decision-making involves knowing when to do further research and when it’s time  to actually make a decision. ·         People often have solutions ready in their mind which they try to retro-fit onto problems that may not even exist. New technology provides many expensive examples of this. ·         Too often unskilled policy advisors resort to default or template solutions for problems, rather than researching or considering other alternatives.

Possible reforms: ·        Focus on skilling policy development officers so that they know how to research and provide better analysis of options. ·        Increase the skills of politicians and their staff so that they can recognise the difference between a good analysis of options and research and poor-quality advice. ·        Journalists should not expect immediate answers from politicians and should realise that politicians are not experts on everything and are not able to control everything. Rather than merely ‘reporting’ what opposing politicians say, journalists should punish them for unfairly blaming everything on ministers’ incompetence, because that is certainly not always the reason for problems.