The best policy?

Policy makers should look to strategic project management approaches to ensure more of their well-intentioned efforts deliver the desired impact.

As I first wrote in a piece for the RSA, the policy-making process often lacks a strategic approach. Policy makers are bad at engaging end users and empowering the agencies involved with delivery.

In his influential work, System Failure, Jake Chapman demonstrates how the concept of systems thinking can improve the way that public policies are formulated and developed. 

Chapman writes that, if the systems-thinking approach were employed, “the policy-making process would focus on the processes of improvement, rather than the control of the agencies involved. Engagement with agents and stakeholders would be based more upon listening and co-researching rather than on telling and instructing.”

He adds that, from a systems perspective, an ideal policy statement would consist of a minimum specification with the following ingredients:

• a clearly established direction of change; 
• boundaries that an implementation strategy cannot cross; 
• the allocation of resources, but without specifying how they should be used (including statements of timescale and potential further funding); 
• the granting of permissions, for example, that explicitly allow innovation; and 
• the specification of core evaluation requirements, always based upon the experiences and outcomes of the end users.

Those familiar with the world of projects and project management may see in Chapman’s ideal policy-making structures similarities with their own preferred model for strategic project plans. If so, three questions arise. 

First, why is the application of project management skills and expertise rarely considered necessary in policy making? 

Second, should policy making and strategic planning always be undertaken as if they constitute the preliminary stages of the project that will deliver the desired policy outcomes? 

Third, as the primary purpose of any project, regardless of type, must be to implement its sponsors’ decisions (and policies), should all projects be planned strategically in much the same way as Chapman recommends for policy making?

A project is any initiative arising from a need to move forward and, especially for society, the means by which a change, as defined by the project’s objectives, is brought about. Chapman maintains that we do not see the implementation of polices as projects. If we did, he says, it would considerably improve a policy’s chance of success, but only if we also understand that we are almost always working with human-activity systems.

Complex systems

Systems are commonly regarded as consisting of technology alone. But no technology can – for now, anyway – be created or subsequently operated without human participation. Even systems dominated by technology are better seen as primarily human-activity systems. 

Unfortunately, it is widely accepted that human-activity systems are difficult to describe and understand. They are constantly changing, complex and adaptive.

In his famous work The Lucifer Effect, the psychologist Philip Zimbado defines a human-activity system as follows:

“Let’s define ‘person’, ‘situation’ and ‘system’. The ‘person’ is an actor on the stage of life whose behavioural freedom is informed by his or her make-up – genetic, biological, physical and psychological. The ‘situation’ is the behavioural context that has the power, through its reward and normative functions, to give meaning and identity to the actor’s roles and status. The ‘system’ consists of the agents and agencies whose ideology, values and power create situations and dictate the roles and expectations for approved behaviours of actors…”

However complicated a system might seem, systems thinking techniques make it possible to assess how systems of interest might respond to changes we are exploring, and which we might ultimately select as our objectives. That is, of course, if we genuinely want to be successful in initiating and securing a policy change affecting that system.

Realistic assessments of system behaviour can encompass more than just risk and bring a steadying hand to the analysis and planning that should precede any policy decision. It is also easier to understand and assess the risks we face and the obstacles to be overcome if, in parallel with development of the policy, we plan its implementation as a project commissioned to deliver the changed human-activity system.

Today, despite progress in so many fields of science and technology, and the development of advanced, liberating methodologies for societal risk assessments and decision making in projects, we seem to pay no more than lip service to the need to think and formally plan in terms of human-activity systems. 

Why is it that, in policy making and the planning of projects, reasoned and informed assumptions are rarely made about the likely behaviour of the critical components of the human-activity systems to which our policies and projects must respond? These components will be acting as individuals, in informal and formal groupings, and as members of structured organisations. 

President of the Institution of Civil Engineers Sir John Armitt wrote in The Times that it is possible to manage the political process more effectively, and in doing so build confidences. Systems thinking combined with the facilitation and coordination provided by project managers in the service of policy makers would do what Armitt recommends.

Project management professionals know that projects are not always seen as devices for solving problems invariably dominated by human-activity systems, and thus by human behaviour. 

Projects should not simply give life to solutions that emerge from a lengthy, sometimes chaotic series of debates, conversations and hastily commissioned reports, all to ensure the ‘right’ solution to the problem emerges more or less aided by the organisation’s political forces. 

If this is the only way we can conduct policy formulation and decision making, whether as a standalone function or as a prelude to a project, no wonder so much time and money is wasted on failure.

It is almost as if we can only test the soundness of our problem solving by incurring substantial expenditure on project after project, reassured by the fact that, if all goes badly, we can say ‘we did our best and lessons have been learned’. After all, what is an unintended consequence or two among friends?

A recent edition of the Harvard Business Review’s quarterly magazine, OnPoint, focuses on ‘the art of decision making’. Yet we are in the 21st century, so what about the science of decision making?
 

Michael Ocock is the former chair of BSI Group's technicial committee for project management.