SSTG0030

House Commons Liaison Sub-Committee inquiry into
Scrutiny of Strategic Thinking in Government

Written evidence from the National Preparedness Commission

About the National Preparedness Commission (NPC) and this submission

The Commission comprises around 50 leading figures from public life, business, academia and civil society.  Its objective is to promote policies and actions to achieve better preparedness in the UK for a major crisis or incident.  In the three years since its first meeting the Commission has established its reputation as the leading body focussing on national preparedness. 

This submission draws on the experience and expertise of members of the Commission, and, where relevant, on research and findings from the Commission’s growing body of work.  NPC has to date commissioned 18 major reports, many of which have been discussed in closed roundtables, involving civil servants, policymakers, academics and subject matter experts in the topic under discussion.  We have published well over 100 shorter articles, discussion papers and thought leadership briefs on specific aspects of national preparedness. NPC has also provided commentary and responses to key policy and framework documents, including the following which are germane to the topic of strategic thinking within Government:

• Commentary on the UK Government Resilience Framework
• Commentary on the Integrated Review Refresh
• Commentary on the latest National Risk Register

Summary (submission is slightly longer than 3,000 words)

Strategy can be compared with a journey commencing from a known starting point with the intention of arriving at a defined destination.  Multiple routes are available, and attaining the endpoint requires attention to detail and flexibility in response to changing circumstances.

Strategic thinking is a combination of attitudes, mental models and analysis techniques that, as a whole, allow the thinker to project into a series of plausible futures (foresight), whilst learning from the past (hindsight) and seeking to understand the present (insight).   It is a vital tool in overcoming the pitfalls and short-term thinking encouraged by budgetary or political cycles.

Strategic thinking is necessary because the turbulent, novel and uncertain nature of the external environment has rendered traditional deliberative strategies ineffective.  Strategies need to be emergent, adapting to the evolving context. This necessitates strategic thinking.

Because strategic thinking is an approach or methodology and not a process, it is not the same as creating a strategic plan, a strategy or a set of objectives. It can be difficult to scrutinise.

Outputs of strategic thinking are likely to be flexible and adaptable (able to stand up against multiple futures) and applicable in multiple timeframes. The scrutiny of strategic thinking is likely to need different (or differently focused) structures, mechanisms and methods from those used to scrutinise performance against objectives. 

In response to specific questions, this submission discusses:

Issues with the tools created by government to underpin its risk and resilience strategy, including: the National Risk Register (whose presentation and narrative fails to show dependencies and relationships between risks, and therefore encourages single issue, tactical thinking); the overall approach to assessing and mitigating risk that, by its nature, focuses thinking on containment of loss, rather than identification of opportunities; the Integrated Review (which shows little evidence of having tested assumptions, or viability of strategies in more than one scenario and, in that respect demonstrates tactical planning, rather than truly strategic thinking).

For truly strategic thinking, a genuine capability in consultation and synthesis of feedback leading to better policy is needed.  Whilst we note some evidence of good practice, we do not believe that this is systematic throughout government.  The extent to which departments are proactive in sharing collective ownership of insight or foresight, or collaborate strategically may be driven by a lack of effective mechanisms for allocating cross-departmental funding.

Such atomised or non-system (and hence ineffective) behaviour can be greatly improved by embedding strategic thinking throughout government.  To be successful this will need to be supported by transparency about government’s strategic ambition.  The concept of strategic missions works well as a guiding framework here and allows for strategic conversations with all sections of society about the contributions each can make.

Whilst we acknowledge that Cabinet Office and No.10 can model excellence in strategic thinking, we do not think they are best placed to lead its instantiation as the primary way of working across government. For this to happen, effective mechanisms need to be created, including a body that has sufficient authority to orchestrate and monitor pan-governmental effectiveness and progress in strategic thinking. Lessons can be learned from the creation of the Climate Change Committee.

House of Commons Select Committees will create most value by delivering additionality to the existing framework of scrutiny.  It is important, for example, that scrutiny on strategic thinking employs success metrics beyond economic value for money measures (this function is delivered elsewhere).  We believe that proper scrutiny of strategic thinking can best be achieved with reference to strategic goals or missions.  It is virtually impossible to properly scrutinise strategic thinking from within departmental boundaries. 

The submission concludes with some comments on those countries whose parliaments engage particularly well with the strategic thinking of their governments, followed by some comments on the three case study areas.  These comments are drawn from experience and insight gathered in the course of our work.

Structure of this evidence

Given the nature of the NPC’s work, we are very familiar with the climate of challenge and opportunity which acts as an imperative for the Committee’s inquiry into the scrutiny of strategic thinking within Government.  We have chosen not to answer all the questions posed.  Instead, we have selected for direct response those questions to which we can most usefully augment the evidence base.  

The broader and systemic questions implied by the inquiry are discussed below, to provide a useful context for those responses.

Reflections on the three case studies cited in the Call for Evidence conclude our submission.

Context:  Strategic thinking

To properly scrutinise strategic thinking – in government or elsewhere – it is necessary first to know what strategic thinking is, what it is for, and why it is important.
 

Our starting point is the definition of strategy.  Perhaps the best way to understand strategy is by comparison with a journey commencing from a known starting point with the intention of arriving at a defined destination.  Connecting those two fixed coordinates (one certain and one aspirational) is a set of alternative routes (or plans) which are taken or abandoned in light of circumstances along the way.  Attaining the intended endpoint requires attention to detail and flexibility in response to circumstances (both anticipated and unanticipated).

US President, JF Kennedy’s moon-shot programme provides a textbook example of an effective strategy.  In his May 25, 1961 speech before a Joint Session of Congress, President Kennedy declared his intention to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the decade.  Importantly, he added the rider that the endeavour would require materials yet to be invented.  That his ambition was achieved despite his cruel assassination two years into the programme is testimony to the power of strategy over empty slogans or personal involvement.

It is important to note that while an effective strategy can survive the inevitable uncertainties of implementation, it must also overcome human and organisational resistance.  As the American business guru, Peter Drucker, once put it so succinctly “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” - a classical aphorism which serves to remind that the greatest barrier to strategic thinking is human resistance.

What it is – Strategic thinking is a combination of attitudes, mental models and analysis techniques that, as a whole, allow the thinker to project into a series of plausible futures (foresight), whilst learning from the past (hindsight) and seeking to understand the present (insight). 

Because strategic thinking is an approach or methodology, and not a process, it is not the same as creating a strategic plan, a strategy or a set of objectives.

What it is for – Strategic thinking in the context of government is a vital tool in overcoming the pitfalls and short-term thinking encouraged by budgetary or political cycles.  It facilitates coping with a volatile risk landscape within the context of an interconnected and interdependent system.  It supports the development of strategic missions and goals and enables:

• proper verification and challenge of decisions that might otherwise be overly influenced by cognitive biases such as Group Think, Confirmation Bias, Availability Heuristic or Optimism Bias;
• whole systems analysis within a mission architecture that compensates for the artificial boundaries of departmental structures, fragmented processes and knowledge specialisms. Instead it identifies dependencies and relationships between them; and
• alignment, as far as is possible, of disparate groups and agendas, identifying points at which divergence is necessary, and providing a framework within which agreement on how best to diverge can be achieved.

Why it is important – The turbulent, uncertain, novel and ambiguous (TUNA) nature of the external environment means that traditional deliberative strategies have become ineffective by their very nature.  To cope with the increasingly complex and interdependent world in which we live, strategies need to be emergent, adapting to the evolving context, whilst keeping true to the longer-term desired direction of travel. Horizon scanning and foresight are essential tools for maintaining awareness of emerging futures.  Strategic thinking is a crucial component of the toolkit needed to understand and navigate this complexity.

As a methodology and not a process, it can be difficult to scrutinise systems thinking.  The obvious trap to avoid is that of assessing whether processes have been followed or documents produced.  These do not necessarily signify strategic thinking. 

There will be behavioural evidence, however, such as the extent to which plans, knowledge or intelligence are open to challenge, and the diversity of inputs invited.  Crucially, strategic thinking involves genuine feedback loops (not token consultation exercises) that act on unfettered feedback and new intelligence to refine the thinking.

Outputs of strategic thinking are likely to be flexible and adaptable (able to stand up against multiple futures), to provide a systemic view of the matter of concern and its relationship to other matters, and to provide a robust framework for plans covering multiple timeframes.  It should, if done well, surface and test assumptions that underpin the output plans, strategies or policies.

The scrutiny of strategic thinking is likely to need different (or differently focused) structures, mechanisms and methods from those used to scrutinise performance against objectives.  This is because the scrutiny is based largely on behavioural change and qualitative outcomes, rather than quantifiable output or input measures.

Response to selected questions

Q: How well Government identifies strategic opportunities as well as strategic risks and threats:

The UK Government Resilience Framework (UKGRF) sets out the government’s plans to build its resilience capability, centred around the National Risk Register (NRR) and its parent document, the National Security Risk Assessment (NSRA).  Taken together, these documents are a welcome foundation for a robust approach to understanding risks and how they can be mitigated; but there are problems with them.  Specifically:

• The NRR/NRSA both encourage a linear or ‘isolated event’ understanding of risks and their implications.  By failing to present risks (visually or narratively) in a way that shows dependencies between them, the thinking is likely to be tactical.  Systems thinking would help to identify the risks and opportunities that arise from coinciding or cascading risks including the likelihood of one risk amplifying or ameliorating the effects of another. 
• Significantly, the decision to exclude so-called ‘chronic’ risks (including Climate Change and advances in AI) actively reduces the likelihood of strategic thinking, as it limits the NRR to a snapshot of the current context, and not multiple plausible future scenarios, that can vary significantly depending on the behaviour of ‘chronic’ risks.  The UKGRF, by choosing to focus only on what it calls ‘civil contingency resilience’, is similarly limited.
• A risk approach that is highly reliant on a simple risk register tends to focus the mind, and therefore any investigation, on specific risk mitigation and the containment of negative impacts or losses, rather than opportunities. It also fails to produce preparedness for unknown and unforeseen risks.
• The exercise of creating the NRR, and its impact/response summaries, from within government, fails to recognise that both risk and strategic opportunities arise across a number of dimensions: temporal (ranging from days to decades in scale), spatial (ranging from local to international) or maturity (requiring skills that may be immature in government itself but core to other sectors).

Other foresight and horizon-scanning documents are more successful.  The Global Strategic Trends report published by the Ministry of Defence Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC) combines insight into the evolving global context with the implications for UK strategy.  The Integrated Review (IR) attempts to draw on this valuable tool but fails to evidence true strategic thinking. In particular:

• It outlines a strategy for competition that is based on unverified assumptions about both current and future key capabilities.
• It does not take into account the fact that competitors are also following ‘winning’ strategies that will mean the competitive landscape will be constantly evolving.
• It does not contemplate the possibility that strategies may fail in the implementation phase or be overtaken by external events.  Should those things happen, the IRR would need to be refreshed again.  In that respect it is a short-term, reactive plan rather than a truly strategic, proactive one.

Identification of strategic opportunities is enhanced by wide-ranging consultation, providing diverse views and experience.  We are pleased to see government actively engaging with external stakeholders in exercises such as the National Resilience Academy’s ‘roadshow’ consultations and we can only wait to assess the success of these.  We can trace elements of NPC commentary and inputs in government policy, suggesting that genuine feedback loops do exist.  However, we do not believe that this is systematic throughout government.  For truly strategic thinking, a genuine capability in consultation and synthesis of feedback leading to better policy is needed.  We are concerned at the extent to which departments market or promote their work (trends and foresight work in particular) for use by others.  This is apparently due to a desire (or even a perceived obligation) for individual departments to develop their own policy frameworks and not to share collective ownership of insight or foresight.   The extent to which the need for effective cross-departmental funding is ignored is possibly a significant driver of this atomised or non-system behaviour.

Q: What government should publish or explain about its overall strategic concept:

Strategic thinking in government has little value unless there is a shared understanding of the national strategic ambition.  This is important, not least because strategies need to align as far as possible in pursuit of core goals, such as those outlined in the IR. Failing to do so calls into question both the government’s stewardship of public funds (potentially wasting effort or resource on competing strategies) and the extent to which government – or more accurately, Parliament – can remain democratically accountable to voters. 

In a democracy like the UK there is no reason why that ambition should not be shared publicly (excepting for matters that would compromise national security).  Indeed, sharing strategic ambition is one way of ensuring that all available resource and intelligence can be organised to deliver those ambitions.  The concept of strategic missions works well as a guiding framework here and allows for strategic conversations with all sections of society about the contributions each can make.  Vaccine development during the Covid-19 pandemic is a recent example of this kind of strategic mission.  A whole of society approach to national preparedness is another.  By publishing missions, government is likely to significantly increase the volume and quality of its overall resource.

Q: How No. 10 and the Cabinet Office should best lead on these issues across government:

Q: What additional machinery of Government, knowledge and skills are necessary to support strategic thinking and effective strategy-making and delivery, both within individual departments, and across two or more departments, and how strategy and strategic thinking can be sustained by building consensus between the main parties:

Taking these two questions together, it is our view that No. 10 and Cabinet Office are not necessarily best placed to lead on strategic thinking across government.  There is a separation of function in question here – between the three interconnected elements:

• effective policy objectives,
• effective policy creation, and
• effective policy implementation.

What is needed is a body that has sufficient authority to orchestrate and monitor pan-governmental effectiveness and progress in strategic thinking.  This is particularly important for cross-cutting issues, for which government does not currently have a functional mechanism for oversight, meaning these issues often lack the priority they deserve.

Strategic thinking is so important to the UK that it must be embedded throughout government.  No. 10 and Cabinet Office can model excellence but will be unable to embed it across departments and elsewhere without significant investment in skills building, and the extensive redesign of process or practice.  We note that the Government Office of Science has made publicly available its Systems Thinking Toolkit.  Such toolkits should not be viewed as mechanisms for creating definitive predictions.  Experts in different disciplines will apply different heuristics to the interpretation and validity of data, including trends analysis.  Strategic thinking helps to synthesise insight and, crucially, interpretation of insight (and foresight) across specialisms, leading to better consensus on policy and strategy.

An extension of this approach to include broader strategic thinking might be a useful way to start building the necessary skills.  Recruitment processes and annual performance reviews should be designed to seek evidence of strategic thinking. Training and exercising in strategic thinking – including reviews of ‘failed’ policy or strategy are useful tools here.  The principles of arrangements used by emergency services under JESIP might be transferrable, being designed to enable learning from failure in a ‘safe-to-fail’ environment.

To ensure that strategic thinking is embedded across Government, appropriate mechanisms must be created.  The same is true for national preparedness and resilience, as outlined in the article written for NPC by Sir Oliver Letwin, making the case for a legislative duty to deliver preparedness in much the same way as has been instantiated with regard to Climate Change.  The Climate Change Act and the Committee created by it effectively separate this important mission from the day-to-day concerns of government and incorporates parliamentary oversight. The same model might usefully be applied to resilience (and preparedness).

Q: How Select Committees consider strategic questions, including any recent examples of scrutiny of Government strategic plans and/or their delivery; and elements of Government strategy and delivery that are repeatedly identified by Select Committees as effective or deficient:

Q: The engagement of individual departments, and Whitehall as a whole, with Select Committees on strategic challenges, including through the provision of information necessary for effective scrutiny:

Q: What additional resources, parliamentary procedure, knowledge and skills are necessary to support effective Select Committee scrutiny of strategic thinking and effective strategy-making, as well as monitoring implementation of any Government action in response:

These questions all concern the structure and approach of Select Committees in scrutinising strategic questions. Our comments about the different nature of strategic thinking, strategic planning and strategic delivery notwithstanding, the core of this issue lies in the formation of the scrutiny sessions themselves.

Scrutiny designed to assess strategic thinking should ideally be designed around different groups of actors from those involved in other reviews.  Departmental reviews, for example will only look as far as that department’s actions or decisions.  It is virtually impossible properly to assess the quality of strategic thinking from within those boundaries.  Successful strategic thinking is tested by alignment, fitness for purpose, and credible implementation (do-ability).  Select Committees need to provide additionality to the scrutiny delivered by other bodies.  House of Lords Committees, for example, routinely review on a thematic basis.  Cross-cutting issues are dealt with in time-limited committees, which do not reflect the nature of the issues themselves.  The JCNSS has some capacity to look across Departments (and in a different context so does the JCHR), but this is the exception; and the resource is limited. Rather than considering plans by reference to past performance and the consequential status quo, House of Commons committees might usefully focus their reviews by reference to the likelihood of attaining strategic missions or goals.  This approach would test interdependencies between departments, and spot divergence or opportunities for multiplier effects of alignment. 

Scrutiny, testing and the challenging of strategies themselves is vital to counter cognitive or political bias.  Consequences and opportunities are key strands in this process.  Making overt the assumptions – and testing or verifying them – and continuing to do so for the lifetime of relevance to the strategy will underpin scrutiny and can make a material difference to success. 

Frameworks for delivery need to be assessed, and that includes devolving accountability as well as responsibility – whether that be to another department, or to a regional or local authority…or to a non-governmental partner.  Scrutinising strategic missions has the added benefit of supplying key indicators of success, moving the concept of value beyond economic value for money, and further into social value or environmental value. 

Q: How other parliaments around the world are engaging with the strategic thinking of their respective governments:

The countries whose parliaments are engaging with the strategic thinking of their governments tend to be those that are both smaller than the UK, and that have a good understanding both of their position on the World stage, and the risk context in which they operate. Examples include Finland, Sweden, Singapore, New Zealand and Switzerland. New Zealand has also demonstrated an approach that engages with parliament and the population through a national survey on risk and preparedness (summarised in this NPC article). Those countries who do well in this respect are able to balance national strategies with international commitments, based on a clear and realistic understanding of their approaches to participation.  Scrutiny is focussed not just on economic value for money but on the achievement of strategic goals (in contrast to input measures such as budget allocation), and capability outcomes including soft or positional power. But it is important to acknowledge that best practice is only directly transferrable if the context is similar – learning from best practice starts with understanding the conditions, culture and incentives needed for it to be effective.

Reflections on case studies

The UK’s net zero commitments while maintaining energy security.

This is a highly nation-critical challenge.  The strategic implication of decarbonising and decentralising the energy Grid introduces reciprocal dependencies on other systems – notably communications.  In the future system, if energy fails, communication fails – and vice versa.  Other CNIs are dependent to varying extents on energy supply and continuity, not to mention daily life for citizens, public services and businesses countrywide. 

Strategic thinking in this case study requires:

• Evidence that dependencies are fully understood and that the route to transition has been planned and wargamed.
• Evidence that interdependent sector strategies are aligned (with respect to time, compatibility and sequencing), and that vulnerabilities are known.
• That strategic choices in one part of the system do not unnecessarily restrict choice or opportunities in other parts of the system, or the system as a whole.
• That governance mechanisms, particularly regulation and its enabling legislation are designed to balance apparently competing interests without compromising on outcomes. Specifically, with regard to Net Zero commitments, this means making policy choices over appropriate timescales, acknowledging that progress may not be linear.

AI-driven economic growth while managing the impact of AI on the labour market and the safety of humanity.

Contrasting AI-driven economic growth with safety or negative employment effects is slightly misleading as it focusses attention on the labour market first and foremost.  Other implications of AI are untouched by the question but equally important – for example, the potential for AI to widen existing inequalities or vulnerabilities (of digital literacy, decision-making skills, risk perceptions, access to tailored professional advice, etc), which would likely have additional effects on the labour market and productivity.

Since many of the risks and opportunities that AI will bring are not yet known, strategic thinking would need to evidence a preparedness for:

• AI use cases to be different to those we currently imagine.
• Economic pressures to come from elsewhere, or to be exacerbated by the use of AI (eg productivity through high quality job growth).
• Supply side issues, including ethics and Government’s role in addressing these.
• Regulatory and legislative frameworks that need to be capable of adapting to developments such as malign or unexpected AI deployment.  Data integrity is potentially a more significant threat than data security.

The UK’s place in the 21st century international order, while balancing security and prosperity.

Strategic thinking is extremely important in this example – especially the capability to imaging multiple plausible scenarios and be prepared to adapt or pivot according to changes in context.  A new international order has emerged, and will continue to develop, in which existing rules-based order is increasingly challenged by actors who simply do not recognise it.

Strategic thinking here is encapsulated by strong national preparedness, specifically:

• Developing an expert and dynamic understanding of the changing nature of threats posed to the UK and its international strategies.  This will come both through understanding risks (notably grey zone aggression, which seeks to undermine without triggering military response), and honestly appraising vulnerabilities (this appraisal being based on facts, not ambitions or wishful thinking).
• Choosing to participate internationally in ways that play to our strengths and do not expose our weaknesses, accepting that the UK is no longer a leading world power in all spheres.
• Creating strategic partnerships that do not leave us exposed when strategic or tactical interests diverge (eg, through diversification of key suppliers or partners).
• Building prosperity through systematic development of 21st Century capabilities and skills – at all ages and in all learning settings.  These skills should focus on building a resilient and self-sufficient nation, with a workforce capable of transferring core skills across sectors as needed.