Inside the Political Mind: The Human Side of Politics

Salimah Samji Welcome everyone, we’re gonna get started. Welcome to the Building State Capability talk series today. My name is Salimah Samji and I will be your moderator. I’m the executive director of Building State Capability. We’re delighted today to have Greg Power with us. Greg is the founder and board chair of Global Partners Governance and the author of Inside the Political Mind: The Human Side of Politics and How It Shapes Development. I mean, how pertinent is that topic given the world we live in today? So we are extra delighted to have Greg with us at this time. He has been a special advisor to the UK Minister Robin Cook and Peter Hain. He has been involved in constitutional and democratic changes since the mid 1990s. And since 2005, his organization, Global Partners Governance Practice, has helped to strengthen political systems across Asia, the Middle East, North and sub -Saharan Africa and Central and Eastern Europe. He has worked in the weeds of politics in more than 60 countries, helping politicians and officials find solutions to today’s problems while building the resilience of their institutions. Welcome, Greg. We are really honored to have you with us today. I just wanna give all of you who are here a sense of how this presentation is gonna go. Greg is gonna start off by doing a presentation on his book and sharing some key insights. I will then as moderator ask him a few questions and then we will take questions from all of you. If you have questions while Greg is speaking or at any point, please feel free to use the Q&A feature on Zoom and we will basically pick the questions from there and ask Greg. With that, I’m gonna turn it over to Greg. Greg, welcome again and I look forward to hearing your presentation.

Greg Power Salimah, thank you very much. And apologies to you all that I’m not actually with you. Salimah knows I’ve been trying to get to you physically for about nine months and have just failed for all sorts of reasons, but this was the next best thing. So thank you for having me. What I’ll do is I’ll dive straight into the presentation. I will aim to talk for sort of 20 to 25 minutes. Salimah, if I’m talking for too long, please do interrupt and stop me because there is a risk that I could just keep talking unless I’m stopped. So. As Salimah mentioned, this presentation is about the content of my book which came out last year called Inside the Political Mind and that book was pretty much an attempt to try and capture some of the stuff that we have been doing. As Salimah mentioned, I started off my career in British politics, worked in the British government and since 2005 been working internationally. We’ve done sort of mainly worked with parliaments and political parties but also with ministers and civil servants and worked with a whole variety of aid agencies and implementers right across the world. The book was an attempt to try and capture some of the insights from some of that work, but also it’s partly a criticism of the way of a lot of international work has been done when it comes to politics. And I obviously exclude the Building State Capability Program from this because we think very much alike on these subjects, but an awful lot of international support to politicians and to political institutions tends to focus much more on process than it does on people. And my experience of working in more than 60 countries has reinforced the fact or two facts. Firstly, every single country in which we’ve worked is different. They all have their own specific peculiarities and differences. But the more you work with politicians, the more you start to see some of the commonalities as well. And the key thing is that politicians are human beings. And when you’re working with them, they behave like human beings quite a lot of the time. And that often gets in the way of sensible reform for reasons which I will explain. And I’ll start – I’ll try and capture some of this with an analogy about traffic. Now, wherever you are in the world, the the rules of the road, in theory, the highway code is you’d have it in the UK or the rules for driving are pretty similar, wherever you are. And going to any country, you broadly understand this. The stop signs look pretty similar wherever you are. They all conform to the same sort of basic principles. The road furniture will be the same. You’ll have a green man to tell you when to cross the road and when not to cross the road. The junctions you see, you’ll have white lines down the middle of the road, you’ll have those sorts of junctions, you’ll have stop signs, you’ll have traffic lights. However, given all those similarities, learning how to drive in another country is far less about these formalities than it is about human beings who are inside the cars, because then you get to somewhere like Cairo. And I have a lot of my wife is from Cairo, so I have a lot of affection for the place, but it’s also, if any of you have been stuck in traffic jams in Cairo, it is an inordinately frustrating place to be stuck in a traffic jam. And when you first get there the traffic doesn’t seem to make any sense whatsoever. All the rules which I had thought were normal when I got to Cairo didn’t seem to apply at all. But the more you’re there the more you start to see the patterns emerge. You start to see the logic that has emerged from all of these drivers interacting with each other millions of times on a daily basis and norms start to evolve. You start to understand how you drive in this place. And as I say, learning how to drive in a different city is far less about what the formal rules say than it is about the norms of driving that have evolved through all of those millions of interactions. And what that highlights is the difference between what the rules say and what the rules mean in practice. So as I say, the road furniture will always look the same wherever you are, but the norms will have developed over a period of time and then logic starts to emerge. The problem, as that last bullet point highlights, is that none of this improves the traffic and often it makes it worse. And I’ve encountered, I mean, I’m using Cairo as an example, because I know it very well, but I had similar experience in Delhi, in Nairobi, in Kuwait city where invariably I’ve been in a taxi and said to the taxi driver, well, the driving is very difficult here. And the response I always get is, oh, it’s perfectly safe, provided by a pause, and then provided you know how to drive here. And it’s that question, provided you know how to drive here, which is key to understand it. Just to use another example, if any of you have been to another city, the first point at which you try to cross a road at a pedestrian crossing for the first tim, you often will not know whether the traffic is going to stop for you until you put your foot into the road. But everybody there does know it. It’s understanding the assumptions and the insights and the norms to which driving and traffic conforms in each of the different places. The problem, as I say in that last bullet point, is that this process of driving will make sense in the short term. What it doesn’t do though is improve the traffic and it often makes it worse. And the parallel here with politics is very applicable. This is that, that photo is from Tanzania. We’re working with some politicians in Tanzania. This is just outside Dar es Salaam. I spent some time with the MP there going around his constituency. And it was him who said, what else can I do? In the context of what he said was that: I know some people coming to me today. If I don’t give them any money, they’re not going to eat. So what else do I do in that situation? He said, I know it doesn’t solve the problem. I know these people are going to have to come back to me in a day, a week, a month’s time. They’ll go and tell their friends as well. And their friends will come to me. So I’m increasing demand without the ability to increase supply. But what else can I do? That’s the logic of politics, that’s the logic of traffic. In the same way that drivers in dysfunctional traffic systems will find ways around the system, so too, do politicians. Where the state is weak, politicians will be expected to fill the gaps. And they’ll often, the only way they can do that is by going around the formal system because the formal system doesn’t work. They’ll have to find workarounds. They’ll have to, you know, most of the politicians that we’ve worked with around the world will spend a lot of their time, as this Tanzanian MP did, giving people money, finding them jobs, paying for the hospital bills, paying for their kids’ tuition fees. They have to find ways of fixing the problems because they’re expected to do it, but also because the state is failing to do it. What happens then is a logic-sensing. In the same way that the interactions between drivers start to set the norms so voters come to prize those traits in their politicians and elections are competitions between voters who are best able to get around the system and fix the problems that their constituents need fixing. What many elections end up being is quite literally MPs proving their worth to their politicians. They have to show that they have the means to help their citizens or can get access to those funds, that money, those resources, have the ear of the ministry in order to fix those problems. And they’re competing on that basis for votes because that’s what voters want. But none of this addresses the underlying problems. And the catch -22 is that it’s expensive, inefficient, and largely ineffective. Most of the politicians that I’ve worked with doing the constituency work, there’s a double-edged sword for this work in that they get almost, most of their rewarding stuff that they do is in helping people locally, because they’re often facing very, very serious problems. And there’s a huge sense of personal reward. If you can give somebody money so that you make sure that they eat, or if you can find them a house, or if you can give them access to the benefits that they need or get their kids into a school, that will give you a sense of fundamental reward as a human being. What it doesn’t do is solve the problem in the long run. And the book explains at some length, how this constituency work is a useful thing to understand about what motivates politicians, why they do what they do. And as I’ve come on to how you might address some of that, the challenge and the distinction I make in the book, I think there are three key points to make, three key principles around which the book is built. The first is understanding the difference between what the rules say and what the rules mean. As I said, a lot of international assistance in this space tends to focus on what the rules say, but spends much less time on what the rules mean. Secondly, there’s the importance of the human factor. Ultimately, the way in which systems function is down to what motivates individual human beings. And you need to understand what’s motivating those human beings in order to understand why the system is working the way that it does. And thirdly, what you end up with is systems or behavior, which is entirely logical, but not very rational. And what I mean by that is that in the short term, as I said, you know, the lessons of the drivers, if you’re stuck in a traffic jam in the middle of Cairo, you will focus on what you need to do to get to your destination as quickly as possible today. If you asked any of those drivers in Cairo or Delhi or Nairobi, would you like a better traffic system, which works more effectively, they would only have one answer, which is of course, yes. But that’s the rational answer. But they’re powerless to do that. In the same way as the politicians faced with a state that doesn’t function properly. You’re largely powerless to do much about that in the short-term. You have to fix problems today. You have to get to your destination today. And so you do what is logical. Even though by doing this, you’re making many of the systems work, the politicians that we’ve worked with will recognize that by going around the system, politicians in these sorts of contexts get good at going around the system. But arguably, they’re further undermining the ability of the state to actually strengthen its own structures and processes so that it can fix those problems in a more rational way. And that tension between what’s logical and what’s rational is what sits at the heart of the book. So the book then, the last part of the book tends to go through four broad principles and focusing on a much more behavioral approach to political reform. The first, and Matt Andrews work was very useful when I started thinking about all of this probably a decade or so ago, and I very much enjoyed his book on the limits of institutional reform and development. And the book itself highlights a number of international interventions which tends to focus on form rather than function, on process rather than people. And the example I use in the book, having been to Afghanistan about a decade ago, you could argue that by many standards, the international interventions in Afghanistan were highly successful. In that, they created almost exactly the constitutional architecture and the institutional furniture that the international community was trying to create. What they failed to do was take the people inside those buildings with them. So although the institutions of politics had changed in Afghanistan, culture of politics hadn’t changed at all. People kept doing exactly what they had been doing, just in slightly different surroundings and, you know, slightly more efficient, in a slightly more efficient way. That’s the problem. I mean, there are, as I say in that last bullet point there, there’s what is often good on paper is not so good in practice. Just because you’ve changed the structure of the institution doesn’t mean that people’s behavior is going to change. A lot of the patterns of political behavior in most of the countries in which we work are deeply embedded in you know, the culture, the norms, the social expectations of what the local leaders should do. And these often predate the introduction of formal political institutions. And what you’ve got often is a very informal political culture trying to operate within the limits of formal institutional structures. And you get tensions at many levels there. The key point and that first part of the first principle of change is that from John Cotter is that change sticks when it becomes the way we do things around here, but all change is ultimately behavioral change. The point of changing an institution, changing a process, trying to change the formal structures is to provoke a different form of behavior to improve the way that people are performing within those institutions. You get people better at their jobs to encourage different patterns of behavior, new techniques, new skills, etc. That’s the first principle. The second then, and the book borrows quite heavily from a set of well from three or four different disciplines from comparative politics as will be evident, but also from behavioral economics and from change management in the business world. The behavioral economic stuff is really useful. And I’ve been talking to people in the behavioral insights team in London about some of this stuff. And what’s striking is that an awful lot of the way that behavioral science is used in the international sphere in particular is often about getting the public to do things differently. To get people to eat different things or wash their hands more regularly or hygiene, whatever it might be. It’s very rarely applied to institutions and the process of institutional change. But there are huge insights from behavioral economics which are very useful here. And the key, I mean, I think the central thing to understanding how political institutions function, and I mean, every organization and the difficulty of change is the power of loss aversion. Now, some of you will probably be familiar with some of the work that’s been done by Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler and others about loss aversion and the willingness of people to take risks. And all these behavioral experiments tend to show that people are only willing to take gamble or to take a risk if the benefits are roughly twice the value of what they might lose. So basically in order to take a bet, which is going to cost you $5, you have to win at least $10. So you’re potentially doubling what you’ve got. But the problem with a lot of behavioral economics stuff is that because it’s economics, it tends to focus on money as the main currency. But in politics, the stuff that’s at stake when you are, when change is in the air, is in many ways much more important than money. It’s about everything that defines you as a politician. It’s to do with power, authority, status, and in many of the places in which we have worked the challenge, we’ve had conversations with senior politicians who just did not want to contemplate the prospect of change because of the risks that it might bring with it. It wasn’t they weren’t even willing to engage with the pros and cons of the individual reforms. It was just a fact that as one there was a chief whip that I worked with in in the UK who who I had a conversation with about some of this stuff about you know the importance of reform and went with what I thought were really useful insightful arguments to persuade him and at the end of my long, you know, efforts to persuade him to support these reforms he just looked at me and said, yeah, look, we know the systems aren’t perfect, but we know how to operate it. And he said, essentially, what he was saying was that, you know, the merits of these changes you’re proposing, you know, absolutely, I’m not going to argue with them, but they come with a risk. And I’m not willing to take the risk because, you know, at the moment, I know where my power is and I know how to use it. And I think the challenge of reform, the challenge of, and the power of loss aversion is hugely underestimated. As many of you will know, you know, change management from the business world, there’s libraries full of books on change management, most of which spend time explaining why change is so hard, why people do not like to change. This seems to be magnified when it comes to policy, because as I say, what’s at stake is to do with power, authority, status, everything which defines you as a politician or as a minister. What the book argues, and I go through the process of change in a number of different parliaments around the world, is that the successful reforms tend to be combining personal interests with a higher political principle. You know, whenever change is in the air, the first, for everybody’s first thought is how is this going to affect me? That might not be the determining factor in whether you support the change or not, but it’s always your first thought, how am I gonna be affected by this? And change initiatives need to start by understanding what change feels like when you’re on the inside of an institution and you need to persuade people that the change is gonna benefit them personally, but also that they will be supporting a bigger, wider, broader political principle. The third principle in the book then is how you use reciprocal exchange as part of that reform process. There’s an academic called Joel Barkan who did some really useful work on the development of African parliaments during the early 2000s. And his analysis of the Kenyan parliament was very interesting. What he, what he did was that he, he, he argued that, well, the process of reforming the Kenyan Parliament was one which went from, the Kenyan Parliament went from one of the weakest parliaments on the African continent to one of the strongest in the space of about 10 years, which is a remarkably quick turnaround for that sort of change to happen. And it was largely down to a guy called Oloo Aringo who had been a minister but was then became a reforming MP working against the government in which he had been a minister. And his insight was that you needed to persuade, you needed to appeal to both the the reforming side and the opportunistic side of politicians brains in order to get that change to happen. He recognized that for the parliament to strengthen itself it needed to have its own budget because it was entirely dependent on money coming from government to start with and for as long as it was dependent on that government money it couldn’t really control its own agenda or its work or employ its staff. However, he also knew that there was a level of self-interest involved in this, namely, if the parliament could get hold of the budget and control the budget, it could then determine how much MPs were paid. And he played on both of these things. As I said in the previous slide, the argument was both to do with self -interest and political principle. There was a principle involved that parliament should have the ability to control its own budget. But secondly, there was a certain self interest, which is we can pay ourselves more, we can have more researchers, we can get better offices, all those sorts of things. Now in Kenya, as some of you will be aware, at one point, Kenyan MPs were amongst the best paid in the world as a result of this. So it’s not an unalloyed success, but it did achieve what what Aringo was after, in that the parliament did dramatically strengthen itself. And the book talks through a number of different examples from the political world about how politicians have used the process of reciprocity and negotiation of trade-offs in order to appeal to both of those sides of the of the political brain to both the the altruistic and the egotistic at the same time. The Cialdini book, if any of you want to read it, is a cracking book on how to persuade people, his first principle being one of reciprocity. But it was summed up for me by that quote at the bottom. I was working with the Irish parliament in the early 2000s and the chief whip of that parliament when I asked him how he had successfully driven through a whole series of reforms quite quickly looked me squarely in the eye and somebody said to me you have to make sure that everybody gets something. You have to maximize the winners and minimize the losers if you’re going to succeed in getting change to happen. And then the fourth principle, this is the last principle, is one, again, which draws heavily from behavioral economics. The principle of thinking big and acting small. But I mean, the first time I heard that phrase, I was in Baghdad, we’d been working with the government and the parliament in Iraq since about 2008. And when I was first there, I asked one of them, the people who’d already been there for a couple of years working with the prime minister’s office, you know, what advice would you give me, you know, about how to get meaningful change here? And he said that, he said, the thing you have to think big, but act small. Progress is going to be slow. It’s going to be difficult. It’s going to be arduous. You need to be clear about the bigger objectives you’re trying to get to. But, in order to get there, you’re gonna have to take a huge number of very small steps in order to make this progress. And this was the Banerjee and Duflo work I’m sure some of you will be familiar with, which really is built around this principle of trying to get small change in small spaces and then building it outwards. And that line really resonated with me, that first line about how international assistance is often structured, which is we shouldn’t do anything unless we can do everything. I’ve spent the last 20 years talking to different aid agencies about programs that they are trying to implement, and they always end up being far too ambitious, far too unrealistic about what they might achieve, but they don’t get funded unless they promise to change the whole political scene in the space of three to five years. But everyone knows they’re not going to achieve that, but they have to promise it to start with, this sense that we shouldn’t do anything unless we can do everything. It’s much better to focus on the small stuff first. And it’s, again, I borrowed from some of the work of the key people at the center of the Building State Capability Program on some of those principles, those challenges that you have in international assistance of over-ambition, premature load-bearing and political resistance. They are always underestimated when it comes to international assistance, trying to do stuff in the governance and political sphere in most of the places in which we work. As one Iraqi MP said to me, when we first started doing that, as I mentioned, we were there. We started working there in 2008 and USAID at that time were running a project with the parliament, which I think had a budget of about 35 million dollars a year, I think. And the department was filled with implementers from different agencies scurrying around, trying to get things done. And the Iraqi MP says to me, we’ve got no control over this. It feels like we’re the ones that are being implemented. And, you know, there was a limited amount of lasting effect because of that sort of approach. The last thing I mention, I will wrap this up in a minute. The last thing I’ll mention, the Scott book is a cracking book, Seeing Like a State. And, I mean, just generally, I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with his work. But the idea of metis, which he talks about in the book, is a really useful one for understanding how politics develops, how it works, why it works when it does work and why it doesn’t when it doesn’t. This idea of metis is often translated, a Greek word which is often translated as cunning. The way that he interprets it is metis is the sort of skill that you develop by engaging with a constantly moving terrain. So the example he uses, for example, is when, if you’re trying to learn to sail a boat, there is one thing to be learning, you know, the techniques of how you sail, you know, how you get the sail up, how you use the rudder. The metis comes in reading the waves and the weather and the wind and anticipating what’s gonna happen. It’s like playing any sport. If you’re playing football or basketball or any sport, you’re engaging with a constantly moving opponent. So it is one thing to learn how to dribble a basketball or kick a football, but it’s something else to anticipate what the people you’re playing against are going to do and how you counter that. And that’s Metis. And Metis is essential to being an effective politician. And it’s, it’s hugely underestimated those sorts of skills that you build up over time, by engaging with your subject by engaging with it, you know, difficult topics by engaging with something which is constantly moving. The best politicians are the ones that, that have that, that metis. So, to wrap up very quickly, those four principles just to reiterate. the key to the reforms are people over process that you know it’s individuals over institutions understand what the institution looks like from the inside what does it look like through the eyes of the politician or the minister. Secondly if you’re going to try and get change it’s no good solely appealing to principle you need to recognize that personal interest will always have an effect on how people approach their own principles. Thirdly, the importance of reform sorry reciprocity as a key element of reform. And then fourthly, get the small things right. And if I was going to leave you with one final thought, it’s that from Rory Sutherland, who, as it says, there is Vice Chairman at Ogilvy, the advertising agency, who points out in that book, which is, again, a very entertaining book, you should never denigrate a behavior until you’ve worked out what purpose it really serves. And a huge amount of international assistance still doesn’t do that. It still is based on. walking into other countries and saying you’re doing this wrong why are you behaving like this this doesn’t make sense. You need to start by working out why it does make sense to the people who are doing it because there will always be a logic there and you just have to find it and I’ll finish there. Salimah, back to you.

Salimah Samji Thank you so much, Greg. That’s been really great. We at Building State Capability often say policy is about people. We talk about how change is hard and we do talk about personal interests. I really love your whole point on humans are logical, but not rational. Sometimes we like to explain, especially the last point you made. I love that quote. Status quo prevails for a reason. It’s not, you can call it unfair. You can call it whatever you want, but it prevails for a reason and understanding why, who is getting what out of the status quo really helps you start to peel that under that onion, if you will, of what is really going on. So I really appreciate this. You know, we are living at a time and I had said that earlier in my intro, of how great the timing is. I know we had wanted to have you in the fall and then that didn’t work out. But I almost feel like this is much better for these times, the turbulent times and uncertain times we’re living in where the public sector is really under attack, not necessarily just in the U.S. We see it in the ripple effects around the world. So how would you, what would you say about how one uses the insights and the four principles that you’ve developed to be able to think through this new world order that is continuing to change.

Greg Power Yes, I mentioned that this has come up in previous talks, which I’ve done as well, and I still don’t have a great answer for it, because it is so, you know, so seismic. And I think I’d say three things in terms of the themes in the book, I guess there are three. The one is that the appeal of this sort of disruptive populism is again, I think, logical, but not rational. And if I take the example of Brexit in the UK and what’s happened to British politics over the last decade. When we had the vote on whether to leave the European Union or not, lots of people assumed that that vote was already won, that it would be absolutely nonsensical for the UK to leave the European Union. What they’d missed was the fact that for the previous six years, and actually since 2008 since the financial crisis. The government, in trying to balance the books, had implemented a policy of austerity, cutting benefits and reducing public spending. Now this affected, if you’re at the margins of society and weren’t doing well to start with, you were most deeply affected by those cuts. By the time you get to 2016, after eight years of this, and you’re offered a vote, lot of people were thinking, well, how much worse can my life get? Well, let’s try something different. This is, you know, this is, it’s clear that, you know, lots of people’s living standards have declined. And there are some, I mean, there’s some very interesting graphics, which I’ve seen recently about productivity and real earnings in the UK over the last, well since 2008, which really highlight the problem. But off of that vote It might, this might not be a rational, any, any rational argument would have said, you know, UK, the UK has to say in the European Union, it would be nuts to leave. But the logic, the powerful logic of something which is very different at that point was, was absolutely appealing to a lot of people. And that’s, you know, to a large extent, the appeal of, of Trump as well. And a lot of the other populist leaders that you’re seeing around the world is what we’ve lost sight of is that for a lot of people their living standards have stalled or declined over the last 15 years and faced with a choice of well do you want more of the same or do you want something really different which might carry a risk with it you’re thinking well the risk is not that great for me because my life’s not that great to start with so let’s take the risk. So that’s the first point the second point I’m sorry I’ll try and compress this because I was going to try and ask this in more short order. I think the what you’re seeing with the second Trump administration in particular is a deliberate disruption of the norms which have previously existed, which, you know, both, you know, both Brexit and Trump 1 and now Trump 2 were, the polarization which has emerged from that is a product of the fact that, you know, already the arguments were heated about on both sides of whether you supported Trump or against Trump, supported Brexit or not. But, the disruption of those norms has made those arguments even more incendiary in that both sides somehow feel the other side isn’t playing fair. Especially, I mean, especially true in Brexit, where the people who wanted to remain thought that the referendum was only won by a tissue of lies. The people who wanted to leave thought that the Remainers wanted to ignore a democratic referendum. And you can see parallels again in the States with Trump about the good, it’s not just a disagreement with the policies, but it’s the way in which Trump is implementing those policies, which is clearly illegal in many respects, and ignoring, you know, the power of Congress and the law, in order to get things done like the abolition of USAID and various other things. That’s what’s heating stuff up to a point where it becomes really incendiary. In the book, at the beginning of the book, there’s a short chapter about why parliaments fight. If anybody’s interested. there is a website called Parliamentary Fights, where you can go and watch MPs knocking lumps out of each other. And I use that as an interest for the book to explain, you know, when the norms of normal interaction are being breached, that’s when the fighting starts. That’s when tensions really get, it goes from just an argument about policy to one, which becomes much more personal and visceral. And then the third point, which sort of links to the book is that the disruption of those, you know, the large part of the book is about how organizations depend on much more an acceptance of what the rules mean rather than what the rules say. In learning any job, I mean, you don’t go in and read the rule book in order to learn how to do your job. You learn by watching what other people are doing and absorbing some of the patterns and the accepted norms and the, you know, how you interact with each other. What the Trump government is doing just throwing all those up in the air which means that none of those institutions will work very effectively, if at all, for some time because new norms will have to come in to determine how they function. So we’re in it for a period of prolonged turbulence, I think, whilst they… I mean, but this is clearly their strategy to deliberately disrupt how those institutions function partly because the real, you know, the sharpest effects of that disruption won’t be felt probably until the end of this electoral term, possibly into the next election term, because that’s the way that politics will start to really realize the damage I think in two, three, four, five years time, by which point, you know, they will have new people to blame for why things went wrong in the same way that in the UK, the people who supported Brexit are saying, well, no, it’s not our fault. It’s all to do with everything else that’s going on, the reason that, you know, we didn’t get a proper Brexit. Anyway, that’s, yeah, I’ll make those three points.

Salimah Samji As you know, Building State Capability is housed at the Kennedy School of Government. And we train public policy professionals. What advice do you have for them, especially in this realm of politics? You hear a lot people say, oh, it’s politics. It’ll just work itself out, as though it’s not even a variable to consider. And what you’re saying, and a lot of our work tells you, is you can’t not engage, like you have to engage with politics if you’re looking to get anything done. So what’s your advice? What should students or alumni be thinking about? What skills should they think about sharpening to be able to be better policy professionals?

Greg Power I’d go, oh sorry, I should explain. Tell me if I’m looking slightly ghoulish. It’s dusk, it’s now got to about 6 p .m., so the sun has gone down. So this room has suddenly got dark, I didn’t think to put lights on. If I need to put lights on, please tell me. I could look like a character out of Scooby Doo, if I’m not careful. The, what I go back to is the, I mean the feminist slogan of this sort of 60s and 70s, that the person is political. I think the political is always personal as well. it’s if you reverse that, it’s the fact that you’re right, you have to engage with politics at every level if you’re going to get stuff done. And you have to understand that the political is always personal. That as I said in the talk that, you know, politicians are human beings and they behave like human beings with all the idiosyncrasies and odd things that human beings do. And I mean, my own personal experience is perhaps instructive because I say, you know, I studied politics, did a master’s degree in political economy, I worked in the NGO sector in the think tank world for a few years. I ran a commission on how to reform the British constitution and parliament, then went into government to work for a minister, a couple of ministers in the early 2000s, and went in thinking I had all the answers. I’d spent several years writing about this from the safety of the think tank world. And suddenly realizing quite sharply that the stuff which looks fairly obvious and straightforward and sensible from the outside takes on a whole new level of complexity when you’re on the inside of government and it’s far less to do with the intellectual cogency of your arguments than understanding the political interests at work and at a very simple level. You know, the ministers that I worked for absolutely believed in the reforms, which I was saying we should try and implement this. But what they wanted me to do was give them a briefing paper so they could go into the cabinet and explain to their fellow secretaries of state, the fellow ministers, why they should support that reform. And the argument often was why should we make the government’s life more difficult? We know how to function. You know, we know how to run these things at the moment. It’s not perfect, but it works. So why on earth should we change things? And it’s understand what would often happen is that politicians working on the reform of Parliament of Westminster in the House of Lords. What you often find is these old objections, which would come out of nowhere until you realize it was to do with, you know, just how how they did their job. What happens with with parliaments in particular and with politicians is that the biggest determinant of whether a parliament in any country is going to get stronger is whether politicians have an interest in making that parliament stronger. And that will often relate to how they do their job because it’s like anybody coming in and interfering with your job description. Why should I do this? You’re making my life more difficult. The book explains a lot of this, but I think The key insight is that I think that the sort of work that you do, and you know, I mean, the Kennedy Center for Building State Capability is invaluable stuff. But the acid test is then going inside government, looking at what this what everything that you’ve learned from the inside of government from through the eyes of a minister or a senior civil servant, and understanding the things that they have to manage the I’m often asked to help NGOs and charities with their lobbying and the influencing of government. And what I say to them is the key rule of lobbying is what does the world look like through the eyes of the person you’re trying to influence? If you’re going in to see a minister and want to change their mind, what does the world look like to them? What is it that matters to them? What motivates them? And what are they trying to manage today? Those three M’s are really important and you need to start every meeting with a minister or senior official thinking about those three things: what matters, what motivates, what are they managing? Then the fourth question is, what have I got that is going to help them with all of those things? And that’s the, you know, my experience of working for ministers was, you know, ministerial days filled with meetings from eight in the morning till eight in the evening, most of which involve people coming in and saying, you’re doing it wrong, you need to spend more money, you’re not taking this seriously enough, you need to do what we think is important. The rare meeting where somebody comes in and says, look, we think we’ve spotted a problem that you haven’t seen, but we can help you fix it. You will take the handoff. You will invite them in for a second meeting. And I think that’s the key to, and often for this process, that transition from, if you like, the theoretical to the practical and back again to the theoretical is I think key part of what you do and the key part of, you know, working in public policy.

Salimah Samji Thank you, Greg. I think you’ve got some real great ways of even thinking about this for students. I love the three M’s, for example. Just thinking about what is their perspective. I think so many times at policy schools, you are taught to be the expert, not to think about what is the other person thinking about? What is putting yourself in other people’s shoes? So I think that was really helpful. Thank you. We’re going to take some questions that we have received. And I’m gonna read them for you. Our first question is from Maggie Jones. We know her really well. And so she asks, the question is around change and contingency planning. And the question is, there has been so much change in our organization, she works for local government in the United States, but our higher ups are lukewarm about contingency planning because, in quotes, we’re not there yet. How could we talk through the benefits of contingency planning? And how can it be a helpful tool in times of change and may provide comfort rather than assumption that it will cause chaos? I’m going to throw in the second question that we have so that you can answer those two questions. Our second question comes from Cesar Nunes. We know him well too. In the slide on reciprocity, you mentioned the key principle, make sure everybody gets something. How do you evaluate that? And how do you be accountable as a public policy allowing that everyone would get something different. So I’ll stop there.

Greg Power And on that second question. I mean thank you for the question, they’re both very pertinent. On the second question about that accountability and how you make sure everybody gets something, the book is specifically about getting changed through the inside of political institutions, but it applies, I think, to most sort of organizations. The thing about parliaments, which is where we do a lot of our work, is that they’re very difficult to change for three reasons. The first is that there’s never any one person in charge. I mean, if you take the Congress, for example, you will have a speaker, but the speaker only controls part of the institution. There’s also an administrative part of the institution and most of the power is always contested and this is true of most parliaments in that you will have, there’s never one person in charge of the whole institution because that’s, you know, that’s the way, that’s what democracy is for, to make sure that nobody is in absolute control. So it means that in order to get any change, you’ve got to negotiate. There’s a good book by a guy called Eric Schickler about the evolution of the Congress called Disjointed Pluralism, looking at how the Congress has changed over the over the last century or so. And what he points out is that the change that tends to emerge is a product of negotiation. It’s ultimately nobody gets exactly what they want. So if you’re going to try and change an institution where nobody’s in charge, but secondly, I mentioned there were three points. So firstly, there’s nobody in charge. Secondly, every politician will have an opinion about how the institution needs to change or not. And thirdly, and perhaps most significantly, they’ve all got a vote on it as well. In order to get that sort of change through that sort of institution, it often has to be put to the floor on a vote. So the process of getting change to happen is one of, you know, constant negotiation and trading stuff off. And most of the change which happens in that process of negotiation, nobody gets exactly what they want. But you have to be willing to trade off some of what you in order to get most of what you want. But the key thing, and the book sort of makes this point, is that everybody has to feel ultimately that you’re gaining more than you’re losing. And what I argue in the book is that that sort of change, rather than taking one reform at a time, it’s far better to bundle several reforms together so that you have a chance of maximizing the number of winners and minimizing the number of losers. And that accountability, that understanding that negotiation is an internal political process. Ultimately, if some people feel that they are losing out, it’s because of that negotiating process. But the key to success for all sorts of stuff that you do and we do is to try and make sure that the vast majority of people feel that they are net beneficiaries rather than losers from that process. So that’s the point I’m making. On the first point about contingency and change, I’m not sure I entirely got exactly what the question was. But I think the key thing – It sounded like it was to do with people at the top not taking some of these issues seriously enough. And I think the problem, as you go up organizations… Obama, in his memoir, one of the insightful things he said is that by the time you’re president, all the, you know, you don’t get any easy decisions. You know, anything that’s easy to decide is filtered out at a lower stage. It’s only the really thorny stuff which happens. And there’s a couple of quotes I use in the book for the start of different sections. One is from the famous Bismarck quote that politics is the art of the possible, the attainable, the next best. And that’s fine, you know, but the last, the very end of the book, the last short chapter, starts with a quote from J .K. Galbraith, the economist who worked as an advisor to Kennedy when he was president. And in one of the notes he sent to Kennedy, he said Bismarck was wrong. Politics is not the art of the possible. It’s about choosing between the unpalatable and the disastrous. And that’s more to do with the reality of politics. By the time you get to that stage, if you’re at a senior level, it’s not often that it’s just about getting the, you know, trying to get the best outcome. It’s often that there are no good choices, face you. You are choosing between the unpalatable and the disastrous, and you just need to do the least worst thing rather than the best thing. And that’s the challenge you’re facing. So the I’m not sure I’m answering Maggie’s question particularly well, but I mean, I think in terms of those issues of, you know, trying to convince the higher -ups, it’s understanding again, well, what are the other choices that they are facing here? What are the trade -offs they are having to make? And how do you make the case that this is going to be both a logical and a rational solution, that it’s going to solve a short -term problem, which is probably what they’re facing, as well as a long -term problem, which sounds like the contingency issue which she’s raising there. But I’m happy to have that question clarified and try and come back.

Salimah Samji No, I think she said you’re doing great. Thank you. That’s direct quote. Yeah, just thinking about the less the least worst option. And again, putting yourself in their shoes. Why are they fighting this? What is their interest? What are they possibly worried about? I think this your earlier point on loss aversion is something that we take very seriously as well. And it’s one of the reasons why we do say change is hard is it’s always loss aversion and just trying to figure out the risks. And as you go higher in the chain, the risks are higher. And I love your President Obama’s quote on, you only get the worst thing. So the risks just increase, sometimes exponentially, as you go above the chain. And that can help people understand. I have a final question from the chat. And this question is from Lacey Jeffries. And the question is, is it possible to discuss change in reforms in an environment where zero -sum thinking… Sorry. It just jumped. Where zero -sum thinking dominates, how do you help people with the zero -sum mindset shift it to make space for change that benefits everyone? I think that’s a great question to end with.

Greg Power Yeah, I mean, that and that really, I mean, it’s a good quick, if that’s the last question, it’s a good question to finish on, because that’s sort of at the heart of the book. And the first part of the book is it talks about how organizations function, how norms evolve. And it uses our experience, my experience of working in Iraq, and Libya and Egypt, where they were trying to create institutions where there were no norms, where there were no, you know, accepted ways of working and trying to get, you know, leaving aside the political divides, the fact that each of those countries had gone through a revolution of fighting. There was a huge political divide there, but equally, none of them, also none of the politicians coming in had any agreement about how the institution should function, what it was for, what they were there to do. And Libya in many ways, was the most extreme version of zero -sum politics I’ve ever encountered. There was no trust anywhere between any of the politicians. And if you’ve got no trust, it’s impossible to negotiate. Now, what I, the point I make in the book is that you need, I also refer to Robert Axelrod, Robert Axelrod’s book, the title of which is now completely escaping me. It’ll come back to me. Which is about reciprocity and behavior and how you move away from zero -sum thinking. But the key is, you need to build enough trust for people to be willing to trade stuff off between them. You need the key, the people who are gonna negotiate the process of change, you know, just get away from zero -sum thinking, need to believe that the other people on the other side, also, you need to find the commonality. There’s an example I used from Somaliland, which did go through a process of constitutional rupture and has largely been stable over the last 20 years. And they were able to negotiate this very fractured process in a way which was more successful than many other countries have gone through something similar. One of the key aspects, key facets of that. was that many of the people who were negotiating with each other on different sides of the political divide had been to the same school together. So even though they fundamentally disagreed with each other, they had a basis from which at least to negotiate. And it’s building that basis for negotiation, that working out where the commonalities are to start with, that’s the only way you can start to get away from that zero sum thinking, where if you’re gaining, then I must be losing. there needs to be some sense of reciprocal exchange of, and the book talks a lot about reciprocal altruism, which is another interesting concept which we don’t have time to go into, but that’s the key. It’s building that basis for negotiation, enough trust at least, that you’re trusting the people on the other side to deliver on what they’re gonna say they’re gonna deliver and that you have some commonality of interest, no matter how small it is to start with, when you build outwards from there.

Salimah Samji Wonderful. Thank you. I mean, trust is really key and building that from commonality. It’s really great. The former governor of Massachusetts tells a great story of how he grew up in a household where his one parent was Republican and the other one was Democrat. And he really learned that that’s the only way is finding common ground. And he said, you know, we always can. It may take a day or two, but you can always find common ground because we are all coming back to your real key point that we are all human, and that is something that binds us all. We all die.

Greg Power On that theme, Salimah, the book has now come back to me. It’s The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod, which is a cracking book. I’m sure you’re aware of it, but I highly recommend it for describing exactly what you just described there.

Salimah Samji Yeah, it’s great. Well, what a wonderful way to end this. This has been really informative and very helpful. I’m sure even those who are not here will be able to watch the recording and get a lot of at least some insights and how they may think about doing things differently. Thank you so much, Greg. It’s been a delight.

Greg Power My pleasure. Lovely to be with you. Hope to be with you physically at some point soon.

Salimah Samji Definitely. We look forward to it.

Greg Power Thanks very much.