This post is written by Dr Adam Cooper, Associate Professor from University College London.

  • The problem: Failing to ‘join the dots’ in policy design can build in failure.
  • Why it matters: Policy failure can cost lives as well as time and money.
  • The solution: Exploiting novel expertise can help you navigate the complexities.

You may know the parable about the blind men and the elephant. None of them knows what they are looking at, but each is gathering data about different parts of the animal. The one at the trunk says it’s a snake. The one on the leg, a tree, and so on. Each is using the expertise they have to explore the problem in front of them but their limited perspective prevents them from seeing the whole picture and identifying what might otherwise be obvious. I think of this fable a lot when I reflect on the issues of expertise in policy. Economists see one part of the world. Statisticians another, related part. Social researchers have a different view. Natural scientists another. And so on. In each policy domain – be it social care, energy, transport or justice, certain perspectives are more commonly relied on. In policy in general, economics is often the very basis of ‘reality’. But this raises the question about which bits of the world are actually being seen – and whether expertise you know about but don’t use (a known unknown) might actually help you ‘see’ policy issues and options better.

In my experience in government, I’ve learned that there is a lot of benefit to stepping outside these normal ways of seeing things in your sector in order to look afresh at an issue, and maybe spot problems or opportunities that were previously obscure, but then become obvious. It’s really a story of novel expertise, of using what you have available but didn’t previously consider relevant. A couple of vignettes from my time in the UK government help illustrate this.

The issue? Joining the dots

When I joined the UK’s energy ministry (the then Department of Energy and Climate Change, DECC) in 2011, it was grappling with a major policy failure. In 2009, they’d set up a (relatively generous) electricity tariff that paid homeowners with solar panels for electricity supplied to the grid. It was generous because panels were fairly expensive at the time, so the tariff helped subsidise the investment, encouraging installation. What happened? Suddenly panel manufacturing in China ramped up, boosting supply and dropping prices significantly. For those just signing up to the tariff, it was like they hit the jackpot – and a lot of public money was wasted paying a lot for investments that didn’t need it. Could they have avoided this? Any understanding of the manufacturing basis of panels, the capacity of certain countries to deliver them, and understanding the system of supply, would have spotted this issue in advance. Then it is a matter of designing policy in that expectation.

Eight years earlier, I had started in the civil service, and encountered another – more tragic – policy failure. It was children’s social care policy – a world away from energy and climate, but no less burdened by similar failures of analysis. Time and time again cases of children abused by carers are not saved because the signs of abuse are not picked up by teachers, GPs, social workers or health visitors. The issue was ‘joining the dots’. Faint signals in different parts of the system were not added up to raise the alert.

I look back now and see these challenges as connected in ways I couldn’t have done at the time. It was my time at DECC that gave me that insight. It was the first time in government I’d worked with colleagues trained in engineering. While this brought its own challenges (maybe that’s for another article…) it also opened up a novel world of analysing policy problems and how they might be addressed – techniques developed over decades and stress-tested on real-world problems.

"The principles of systems thinking can (carefully) be brought into other areas – such as social care, education and justice. "

Taking a systems-thinking approach

Significant in this new world was the ‘systems’ approach to policy analysis. It’s the intuitive idea that everything is connected: changes in one area bring about changes in another (and another), often in non-obvious ways. We all recognise that policies are delivered into complex, interconnected environments, that’s not new. What’s new is the discipline of approaching problems in this way, and the tools it has to manage system interconnectedness without either ignoring it (and hoping for the best) or having it overwhelm you, leaving you more confused than when you started.

‘Systems thinking’ is a domain expertise of systems engineers – for me, I encountered systems engineering via energy grids and domestic heating, but I can see how the principles of systems thinking can (carefully) be brought into other areas – such as social care, education and justice. What’s more, engineers also bring a practical, problem-solving and design mindset that considers business needs, and often-forgotten materials and supply chain issues. Not something you usually get with other analysts.

Engaging with novel expertise like this in policy is difficult and career development offers that help foster this engagement are thin on the ground. I’m working with a national academy in the UK to help refine their career development offer and have developed an online survey to gather the perspectives of public servants around the world. It’s really about how best to help public servants engage with potentially novel expertise and open up new perspectives like those in the stories above – and understand what kinds of offers might actually appeal. If you want to participate – and help shape career development for colleagues – you can take part in the survey below. You never know, you might discover a source of novel expertise for your policy area.

Survey: Developing policy leadership with expertise

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