Changing the Way we do Business in the U.S. through Data Sharing

Guest blog written by Rachel Cychosz

Sharing. It’s the concept of “using, occupying, or enjoying something jointly with others” or “giving a portion of something to others”. It’s a concept that I’m confident most people learned as young children. It’s a simple concept, that’s why we learn it as children, because it’s something that can be understood without substantial explanation or justification, and as children it just makes sense. Why then, does sharing seem to be such a complex challenge for adults?

Working in government is a unique and interesting journey, always navigating to find a balance between meeting the demands of a political machine that yearns for immediate change to prove the success of their regime (often without understanding, advocating for, or appropriating the resources necessary to adequately address the request) and being able to spend sufficient time thinking through a given problem to find the best solution. Over the past seven years, I’ve worked in both policy development and more direct program management. I’ve struggled with different challenges, but ultimately found that much of it comes down to the same issues – how we choose to approach a problem.  Too often, the programs and policies that I’ve worked with approach problems with a direct to solution approach. More often than not, without much if any, consideration for the root cause of the problem, a “solution” is identified and pursued. There are any number of shortfalls that come out of this approach, but the most obvious is that it often only scratches the surface of the problem, resulting in (often another) failed attempt at a novel idea, which discourages program staff and disincentivizes innovation.

Going into this course, I was seeking a fresh perspective and a different way to think about and approach the problems I was facing in my program. Thinking back over the time since starting the course, PDIA was so appealing to me because it offered a mechanism to address exactly what I had been so frustrated about, but hadn’t been able to articulate a solution to addressing. The concept of not looking at something as one single problem, but diving into it more deeply to get to the root cause, find entry points, and apply an iterative approach to problem solving, was enlightening. It offered a different way of thinking, that so effectively changed the way we could approach new projects and program development.

(more…)

PDIA is a Journey about How to Engage

Guest blog written by Eleanor Sarpong 

My first reaction when I was introduced to the course on IPP via email was hesitation- “Really how different will this course be to others on implementing public policy?” I asked. I was particularly anxious to know how to navigate the political minefield that often hamper public policy implementation. So, I applied for this course with high hopes to understand what new ideas I could adopt to help me with delayed policy implementation in my role as an external advisor to governments on ICT policies and strategies.

What I received in this course however, was eye opening and surpassed my expectations.  From the outset of the course, I was challenged to think differently with the concept of the Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) approach. The cherry on the cake was the wonderful classmates I met, all of whom are working on some remarkable but complex policies and projects such as establishing a Ministry of Peace in a country emerging from years of near autocracy and recent civil unrest, to fighting land grabbers in the Amazon, or getting politicians to understand the impact of Brexit on the financial industry in the UK to implementing an investor drive for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in a Middle Eastern country.

I joined this course with preconceived notions about how public policy implementation should be – following the plan and control approach commonly used in projects. What I left with however, was a new way of looking at implementing policy through a problem driven iterative approach that was agile in its format.  The entire PDIA process has been really insightful from looking at problem identification differently, and unearthing the underlying causes of a problem which are often multi faceted. In reality I’ve learnt that the policy implementation process is not a logical process. One can go back and forth on each stage but the learning or iterations is what makes this approach more engaging. An interesting part of this programme was applying the knowledge of the 5whys to the develop a fishbone diagram which gave me visual representation of the underlying causes of my chosen policy problem of poor and inadequate broadband in many parts Ghana. The next stage was searching for entry points based on the Triple A framework – Ability Authority and Acceptance. I’ve learnt to navigate the fine balance needed between legitimacy (measure of how the public perceives or accepts the policy and often judges the policy’s effectiveness) and functionality (the measure of the “what and why” a policy intervention is being pursued and to what extent that policy intervention resolves the problem or objective identified) and I know that it is not a linear process but zigzag in reality. Another powerful takeaway I took from this course is knowing the power of negotiation and having humility to confront difficult decisions and biases. I still remember vividly the day we were taught how to confront the problem of discrimination and inherent biases that rear up in some policies and how to tackle these through tactful negotiation and smart concessions.

This programme challenged me to redefine my policy problem and to focus. I discovered something new about my policy challenge during the problem construction and deconstruction phase of the process when two representatives from the regulator (who were directly linked to my challenge) pinpointed trust issues as an underlying cause that needed to be addressed. Subsequently I have been working with them to tackle this problem. Our review of the Everest Case Study amplified team roles and responsibilities in a way I had not considered. It forced me to evaluate the team I had assembled for my policy challenge and reassign roles. The process has however not been easy. One of the hardest part of my policy implementation journey has been managing the stakeholder relationships and ensuring continuous motivation for those who are part of this process, to stay on course. One complaint I continue to receive is that this process is too involving and time consuming.  While I’m self-motivated, getting my internal team to continue to support this new way of approaching policy was a challenge. When my internal team started losing momentum as the process moved slowly I knew I had to step in. The modules on motivation, follow up group conversations and Anisha’s blog on motivation helped me realise this turn of events was nothing new. I’ve tried to build a safe space by encouraging individual members of my team to candidly share what is working in our process and what is not. One common thread was the lack of time to pursue the iterative learning with our external stakeholders because we worked remotely. E.g. attempting to have calls with key stakeholders in poor bandwidth areas was frustrating. After we listed all the problems we collectively tried to find solutions or new ideas to address this challenge. (more…)

Listen to our sixth virtual discussion on Leadership Through Crisis

On May 1st, 2020, we hosted a sixth virtual discussion with Matt Andrews, who answered audience questions on his new Public Leadership Through Crisis blog series.

Thank you to ALL those who attended our sixth session and for engaging with us. If you missed the session, you can listen to it here or in the player below.

https://harvardbsc.simplecast.com/episodes/ltc10-a-virtual-discussion-with-prof-matt-andrews-may-1-2020

BSC’s new Public Leadership Through Crisis blog series offers ideas for leaders questioning how they can help and what kind of leadership is required in crises. Each blog offers a few ideas as well as questions for reflection, thus creating a space for learning and contextual reflection.

PDIA Application in the UK Private Sector

Guest blog written by Mitchell Rusu

What an incredible journey this has been!

Coming into this course, I really didn’t know what to expect.  I was excited about attending classes at Harvard Kennedy School, but did not realise the tremendous learning opportunity that was awaiting me.

I’ve been working in the private sector my entire career (over twenty years) across many different industries, different countries, and multiple continents, and always for the best companies within their respective industries.  Along the way, I have encountered various methods of problem-solving, challenge-resolution, and workflow-mapping.  You could say that I thought I’d seen every leadership and management approach there was.

Yet, I have been pleasantly surprised to discover how useful this course would be to my development as a leader. While conceding that some aspects of the course were not entirely unfamiliar, the way they were brought together and packaged in such a powerful problem-solving approach that could be applied to any type of complex situation came as a great surprise and as a learning opportunity – a fresh way of looking at the tools in my cupboard.

Although the initial aim of this course was to teach us how to raise awareness of social problems and implement public policies that would ensure a sustainable long-term response, in my opinion, this course has taught us much more practical, hands-on skills.  In this course we have learned a problem-solving methodology that can be applied in various fields, industries, or even our personal lives, whenever and wherever we face complex situations.

I have learned how powerful and engaging we can become by knowing how to appropriately construct a problem and present it in a way that engages multiple stakeholders, how to create powerful teams without formal authority over the members of the team, how to acquire authority from authorisers, how to progress in solving a complex problem in a non-linear way, and how to overcome roadblocks such as bureaucratic organisational structures that can affect your efficiency and ability to engage stakeholders.

Case Study: How I applied My HKS skills to a Banking Industry problem:

At the beginning of the course we were asked to think about a challenge or a project that we could work on over the following months by approaching it in a different way; the “Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation” (PDIA) way. (more…)

Growth after the Coronavirus: Thoughts and Questions

written by Matt Andrews

A lot of  people ask me how governments should support economic growth in the period ‘After Coronavirus’. It is a vital question that I wrestle with daily in preparing  for the forthcoming Leading Economic Growth Online executive education program (which I teach with my amazing colleague, Ricardo  Hausmann). Here are some of my personal thoughts on the issue.

1.  I believe we must focus on future growth, even if it seems misplaced in the current crisis

At times in the last few weeks I  have found myself asking if I am a little tone deaf focusing on how governments should be supporting growth tomorrow when many people are dying, starving or falling into deep poverty today. Then I remember that economic growth is actually key to helping those who are suffering today have better lives in the future. As my colleague Dani Rodrik wrote in One Economics, Many Recipes,  ‘Historically nothing has worked better than economic growth in enabling societies to improve the life chances of their members, including those at the very bottom.’ Dani’s comments echo studies that find many connections between growth, jobs, prosperity and well-being. I can’t see why these connections will matter less tomorrow than they did in the past, so we need to keep focusing on growth as a key to getting lots of other stuff right. To keep motivated in this work, I recommend that everyone focused on growth scour the literature to identify how growth does connect to other improvements in their country, city, or region.

2.  We should focus on growth as a means, not an end

We who work on growth should consider growth as a means to various ends, not an end in itself. Growth matters because it helps us achieve other ends we really care about—like ensuring our people have high quality work or access to education or better health care or (building on Dani  Rodrik’s words)  ‘improved life chances for our members’. When we develop our growth strategies it should be with these ends in mind, such that we promote the kind of growth that our society needs. This is really important because governments can foster growth in ways that undermine their real objectives. For example, I worked in a country where officials told me their biggest problem was that twenty-something university graduates were emigrating because they  did not  have good quality jobs (where the implied policy ‘end’ would be ‘more jobs for recent university graduates’ so that ‘college educated twenty-somethings emigrate less’). A consulting firm encouraged the country to pursue growth in tourism and mining, which it did, and which led to growth. Very few jobs in the newly expanded tourism and mining sectors went to the target population, however. As a result, the country’s growth did not achieve the needed objective or end. To ensure we focus our growth strategies on ends we really care about, I  recommend developing an ends means growth chart that (i) lists the key problems we hope growth will help to solve; (ii) suggests a simple theory on how growth can help address each problem; and (iii) we use to guide our choice of which growth opportunities to pursue and which to pass on.

Listen to our fifth virtual discussion on Leadership Through Crisis

On April 24th, 2020, we hosted a fourth virtual discussion with Matt Andrews, who answered audience questions on his new Public Leadership Through Crisis blog series.

Here are some of the questions he answered:

• • Since the pandemic requires quick decision making at the national level, this might pose a threat for democracies and citizen inclusiveness, how can countries (especially Developing ones) improve the inclusive decision making process especially when we see more digitalization in many areas of our lives.. perhaps big investments will be required on digital government.
  • Interesting point about more junior people being hired at this point. As the economy is slated to open up in stages (those with immunity first), my suspicion is that the younger, less risk population (likely fewer pre-existing conditions…age is one of them) will be allowed out first. What will this do for economic equality for middle-aged, older people whose retirement savings are likely decimated at this point?

Thank you to ALL those who attended our third session and for engaging with us. If you missed the session, you can listen to it here. We are now holding these virtual sessions every Friday morning at 9am EST. Follow our blog to get registration information!

https://harvardbsc.simplecast.com/episodes/ltc-8-a-virtual-discussion-with-prof-matt-andrews-april-24-2020

BSC’s new Public Leadership Through Crisis blog series offers ideas for leaders questioning how they can help and what kind of leadership is required in crises. Each blog offers a few ideas as well as questions for reflection, thus creating a space for learning and contextual reflection.

Jumping the Wall

Guest blog written by Mohamed Hejres

I applied for this course as I was seeking clarity on best practice and innovation that would support my organization. The issue that I had identified was the methods that the Bahrain government adopted towards addressing, designing, advocating and implementing public policy initiatives. I was seeking ways that my organization, the Bahrain Economic Development Board (BEDB), could be an effective part of the government process.

The Bahrain Economic Development Board became an advisory body (exclusive to the government), to support policy advocacy and policy implementation. This came after a major restructuring of the government. However, I found that our role could be more efficient.

I felt that we, BEDB, require adding value, as I saw a standard approach towards any policy. This is done through a single project manager, where he/she would request for a benchmarking activity with issue in hand. No innovation nor engagement processes, which is commonly used internationally.

I saw an opportunity in this course. Little did I know that this was going to be a life changing experience. I felt excited once I was accepted into the program. The excitement had no limit, but I was concerned about whether this course would really benefit my hunger to bring some more effective methods to how we, in Bahrain government, deal with policy development and/or policy change.

The method of which the course started had enabled me to start with enthusiasm, especially the course material and videos which we had before the start of the course in Boston.

Also, it will be unfair to limit learnings of this course to few. I would start with the main word that attracted me to this experience, “iterative adaptation”. I have been practicing policy development and change, where I had understood some part of the Iterative Adaptation; however, this has enabled me to have a clear path towards employing it and involving teams in such an approach. My colleagues in this course were amazing, they shared all their views and many success, and many times, failures as well. This was an amazing experience and learning curve for me. (more…)

COVID-19: Planning for Tomorrow’s Problems Today

Guest blog written by Peter Harrington

When he started his blog series on crisis leadership on these pages, Matt Andrews asked: can public leaders navigate high winds and big waves in little boats? We could add to that question: how do you build the boat when you are already at sea and the storm is raging?

For most governments, the mechanisms to deal with this crisis did not exist, and existing ones were not designed for it. As a result, much of the response is being improvised in the middle of a hurricane, and more recent blog posts on  Liberia and Bahrain have explored this.

This challenge gives rise to a very common pattern: crisis responders will focus on the problems that have to be solved right now. It is a natural way to go about the job; prioritise what is urgent and solve the problem, then move on to the next. But anyone will familiar with the so-called Eisenhower matrix (‘Urgent versus Important’ 2×2 shown below) will know that we ignore ‘important but not urgent’ issues at our peril.

Source: Vinita Bansal’s excellent Techtello article on ‘How to  Prioritise and  Master Productivity’

The current crisis is no different, and this post is dedicated to the problems which will become critical in the next few weeks and months as the crisis evolves, and which must be planned for (those in quadrant 2 of the matrix and need to be scheduled for action through strategic thinking  NOW). Leaders need to make sure they put in place resources to tackle these ‘tomorrow problems’.

COVID-19 is impacting every sector. But for simplicity’s sake, I am going to focus on the two main, broad dimensions of the crisis: the medical (or public health) side in this blog post, and the economic side in the next post. These two dimensions are intimately connected – what happens in one, including the policies implemented, profoundly affects the other. It’s vital to consider how these interdependencies will play out as the crisis evolves, and some countries are doing that already. But forward planning will be especially important in developing and transitional countries which have yet to bear the full brunt of the pandemic.

The medical response: Sword vs scalpel

On the medical side, countries are at different stages of the crisis. The focus so far has been to seek to ‘flatten’ and spread out the transmission curve. This uses social distancing and lockdown to prevent an exponential spike in cases which would exceed the healthcare system capacity, thus buying time and enabling the system to adapt and cope. This is illustrated in the well-known figure below:

The red curve is the nightmare scenario, as seen tragically in Italy, where hospitals are overwhelmed and terrible clinical choices have to be made. The blue scenario, supposedly, is manageable and achieved by behaviour change – getting people to stay separated through protective measures like lockdown. Such measures are a crude weapon: like a sword being swung at the pandemic, to make the blue scenario more likely. It makes sense that the focus has been on the urgent thing: stop the spike. But there are two big questions hanging over the response: how effective will the sword be in your country? And even if they work, how do you get from the peak to zero? The first question is especially pressing for developing countries. The later question matters for everyone. Let’s start with the latter.

There are well established methods for shutting down an epidemic before it becomes a pandemic. They consist of three key ingredients:

1. Testing – to see who has the virus
2. Contact tracing – to find everyone who a positive tested case has been in contact with
3. Quarantine – of all contacts for the full incubation time, to stop the transmission chain.

This approach is much more precise, like a scalpel instead of a sword. It involves people (an army of health workers) meticulously tracking down each line of the disease and shutting it off. In the early spread of COVID-19 we saw various countries adopt this tactic at first. The reason this approach – which has been urged consistently by the WHO – was replaced by crude lockdowns is because the virus got ahead of the trackers in many countries. Whether or not that was inevitable or not is a debate for another day. What matters is that for countries’ who have chosen lockdown, their only hope of exit and of economic recovery is the scalpel.

The world is currently watching Hubei and South Korea very closely. As the two locations furthest down the road of their COVID-19 epidemic they hold lessons for others on how to exit from lockdown successfully. At the moment there is good reason to believe that their approaches – which rely heavily on testing, tracing, quarantine and border control measures in various combinations – are working. This mirrors the experience from Ebola in West Africa. Once the curve had peaked, getting to zero cases was all about detective work. Although COVID-19 is much more contagious than Ebola and can transmit without symptoms, there is still widespread consensus that these methods are the best hope. As other OECD countries contemplate the gradual easing of restrictions, some combination of these methods will be needed.

Right now leaders are understandably focused on their Urgent pile. But it is critical to start planning and preparing for this detective phase of the crisis so that in 1-3 months time – whatever the shape the curve in a given country turns out to be (and it will probably be somewhere in between the red and the blue) – the country is ready to pivot its approach. The biggest issue at this moment is widespread availability of accurate testing. But if you are a public leader, ask yourself if you are ready to swap the sword for the scalpel:

• Is my country preparing now for later, crucial phases of the medical response?
• What are our strategies to get sufficient testing in place? Where will we get tests?
• Are we preparing to do contact tracing and to enforce quarantine on a large enough scale?

Although urgent ‘today problems’ will consume most resources, national and sub-national responses need to allocate resources now to plan for these ‘tomorrow problems’. The crisis management snowflake can accommodate a ‘Plan-Ahead team’ – as McKinsey calls it – to be looking at these issues. And other teams can and should look even further ahead medically, to the psycho-social and mental health problems which are going to ensue six months from now.

What about the other question? Will the sword work in all countries? The wave of lockdowns across the world has been astonishing and the uniformity of response begs the question of whether isomorphic mimicry is at play. There are several reasons to think that lockdown may not be the most effective approach in many developing countries. First, in some places the dashed line in the figure above representing health system capacity is so low that any hope of keeping the curve beneath it is impossible. Second, urban housing situations in many places – from Kibera to Kolkata – make social distancing a fantasy. Third, in developing countries people do not access food or essential cooking fuel in supermarkets which can be easily controlled. And outside rich countries only a tiny fraction of economic activity can shift onto Zoom and into home offices. These issues, and sensible alternatives, are brilliantly outlined here by W. Gyude Moore, a former Liberian government minister.

For many countries, the scalpel might actually be the best, or only option, or at least more nuanced social distancing measures combined with precision measures. Partly because the sword won’t work, and partly because – as Ricardo Hausmann explains – many countries simply don’t have the fiscal space to deal with the ‘sword wounds’ caused by lockdown. The point is that it depends on the economic, social, political, cultural context, and there’s not enough sign yet that measures are being truly tailored to context. Finally, lest anyone think poor countries can’t do testing, contact tracing and quarantine, remember that in 2014 three of the world’s poorest countries – Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea – did it with volunteers armed with clipboards and good risk communications.

The economic response: a great balancing act

COVID-19 will affect every economy in the world, even if a country never has a case of the virus. Global supply and demand have already plummeted, and will lead into a global recession. But much of the economic damage will be self-inflicted, ‘sword wounds’ resulting from the lockdowns which lead to business closures, job losses, loan defaults and halted investment. The public health crisis and the economic crisis are closely intertwined. Measures to mitigate one affect and can undermine the other. Leaders need to pay careful attention to these interdependencies.

As Jonathan Said, head of Inclusive Growth at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change explained to me, economies will probably go through three broad phases during this crisis, shown in the stylised figure below:

1. Phase One – Shock: In the first phase the economy goes rapidly into recession. Where lockdown policies and extreme containment measures are implemented, the shock to supply as businesses close, and the shock to demand as consumers shelter at home, causes the real economy to contract dramatically. GDP growth rates will turn negative. During Ebola the Liberian economy went from 6% GDP growth to -10%. We are watching this happen in dozens of economies around the world in real time.
2. Phase Two – Stabilisation: The Phase 1 contraction in the economy will continue until it approaches a new, low equilibrium where decline in growth will bottom out. The timing and level will be determined by the precise mix of public health policies (e.g. length of lockdown, border controls), the mix of stimulus policies, and the point at which supply cannot fall any further. Depending on the stimulus measures, public health policies and the strength of the real economy, growth will eventually start to recover from zero growth to low growth (1-3%).
3. Phase Three: Recovery and reform: In this third phase, the economy theoretically picks up momentum and growth progresses towards previous rates. The timing of this phase depends largely on measures taken in Phase 1 and 2 and the impacts and condition of key sectors. This phase also offers an opportunity for economic disruption and transformation – to make inefficient sectors more efficient, and stimulate new sectors.

The main aim of measures taken in Phase 1 is to cushion the shock as much as possible. The shock is coming from the contraction in the world economy, contraction in the national economy due to changes in behaviour and sentiment, and from a country’s public health measures like lockdown and enforced business closures.

What’s in the Urgent pile? Every economy needs some form of stimulus package to protect businesses and households. But these measures also interact with, and bolster or undermine the counter-epidemic measures. In developing countries, poor and vulnerable populations need cash transfers and possibly food distribution to comply with and survive health policies like lockdown and social distancing. If people cannot stay at home without starving, they cannot follow restrictions and the epidemic will accelerate.

We are seeing many governments struggle with this balance, closing food businesses and impacting food supply chains without sufficient planning. These are quickly becoming binding constraints on an effective medical response.

Rapid steps are needed to keep food markets and essential supply chains open, especially for access to food and cooking fuel. Key workers and suppliers need support to keep markets, ports, transport and utilities operating, but able to accommodate social distancing measures. Businesses forced to close either due to the recession or health policies need help to prevent insolvency through government backed loans and/or insurance policies. In the case of small and micro informal businesses, the lifeline may need to come via social protection-style cash transfers.

The mechanisms in developing countries, with high rates of informality, need to look different to those in OECD countries. Direct cash transfers are much more important in the former. In rural areas, CSOs and village saving schemes may be vehicles for distribution. Mobile money systems should be used where possible.

Given all this, Covid-19 is leaving a large hole in government revenues which needs to be plugged urgently. As Hausmann makes clear, a country’s fiscal space will determine the scale of funding available for stimulus. Most developing countries will have limited capacity to borrow, so will need direct support from the international community. This throws into even further question whether lockdown, which inflicts so much damage on an economy, is the right approach for all countries.

The other aim of the measures taken in the first, shock phase is to make the phase 2 as short as possible, and hasten the transition in to phase 3. Although much will depend on the world economy, the more a country’s recession is V-shaped rather than U-shaped, the better. And here, everything comes down to what happens with COVID-19 within its borders. Exit from the recession hinges on exit from the epidemic; but exiting from the epidemic hinges on getting the economic measures right.

Much has been written about the balance between balancing the impact of the virus itself versus the impact of economic measures, but it is not simply a trade-off. They have to work together, and planning ahead is the only way to do it.

Plan-Ahead teams also need to be looking at the future stages of the economic crisis. While the Urgent pile above remains urgent, on the important pile are issues like the agricultural harvest and planting seasons, financial sector collapse due to loan defaults, and identifying the public works and policies that will help kickstart economic activity and key sectors. Longer term problems include investment promotion, while a smart industrial strategy can target inefficient or indebted sectors, and nurture new sectors to flourish in a recovery.

Leaders need to ask themselves:

• Are our immediate economic measures going to be a binding constraint to the medical response?
• Are we planning sufficiently for kickstarting the economy?
• Are we planning for opportunities for economic transformation?

Epilogue

The medical and economic dimensions of COVID-19 are deeply interconnected, and responses to one can be a binding constraint to the other. Protective medical responses are causing massive economic problems, and policies to relieve those economic problems can, in turn, strengthen or undermine the medical response. This interdependence is the main challenge facing countries today, and will become even more important. Blunt protective measures may not work for all countries, and where used they will need to give way to more precision tools as the crisis evolves. If governments fail to plan now for this evolution, and for problems down the line, they risk getting trapped in a cycle of outbreaks and economic collapse which will affect millions of lives.

Peter Harrington is a principal at Oxford Policy Management and a former BSC Fellow.

Public Leadership Through Crisis 19: How do political leaders commonly structure their roles?

written by Matt Andrews

This is the second of four blogs addressing questions about political engagement in crisis response organization. The questions are: Who are political leaders and what roles do they play in crises?  How do political leaders commonly structure their roles? How can political leaders structure their roles more effectively? I will offer some thoughts on the second of these questions here and, as usual, ask questions for you to reflect on.

How do political leaders commonly structure their roles in crisis?

Let’s start with recognizing that political leaders differ in a myriad of ways, and political leaders organize themselves quite differently in response to crises as well. Different structures often  reflect different personalities, political cultures, available tools, and more.

Even with the differences, some fairly commonly observed ways politicians respond to crises. One of these ‘common responses’ pertains to how they organize their response: Many politicians centralize and try to move towards a command and control deciding and operating mode.

This is the core observation of Paul ‘t Hart, Uriel Rosenthal and Alexander Kouzmin in their 1993 classic: “One of the more enduring ideas about governmental response to crisis is the expectation that government decision making becomes highly centralized.”

In discussing “Crisis Decision Making” Hart, Rosenthal and Kouzmin detail different  models of centralization in the face of crisis. It is very worthwhile reading. I have seen three models personally, shown simply below (apologies for the rough picture):

1. A political leader (the red person in “a” above) believes they can simply command and control their usual organization (the blue hierarchy), and do so on  their own, being  the only decider and expecting operational staff to follow their orders to a tee.
2. A political leader gathers their most trusted ‘political insiders’ into very focused decision-making structure (a limited Political Task Force or Political Crisis Committee, perhaps, shown in the red circle in “b” above), which gives orders to the operational staff  in the blue hierarchy.
3. A political leader brings their most trusted ‘political  insiders’ into the top portion of the organizational hierarchy (incorporating some administrative experts in this group as well, as shown in the top triangle), and this mechanism (perhaps a Political and Administrative Task  Force) instructs the rest of the hierarchy in blue to act.

These structures all limit participation and variation in political decision-making. I thus often refer to them as ‘circling the wagons’ command and control models (where leaders gather their closest confidantes together to defend against the crisis threat, limiting the voice of those who think differently and might slow or get  in the way of the decision-making process).

These structures also link strategic political decisions to operations very tightly, often through ‘one-way’ delegation controls. Administrative or bureaucratic staff in the hierarchy often receive orders directly from the political leader, or through a tightly controlled cascading mechanism (where orders pass rigidly through layers of the hierarchy to ensure faithful execution according to the political intention). There is no room for departure in this kind of command and control approach, and (often) limited feedback up the hierarchy (from operational staff to political decision makers).

Politicians often opt for these kinds of structures to try and speed up their crisis response (thinking that it is  best to focus responsibility for the crisis and  streamline and expedite decisions and the process of ensuring commands are followed).

These politicians are correct in certain instances, as these structures can work—but  only under specific conditions, including the following:

• First, the crisis must pose a threat that the political decision-maker and their close allies fully understand and do not need to learn about – such that  they know exactly what needs to be done and the key is to lock-in compliance to commands. (This does not promote learning, however, in that learning would require—amongst other things—engaging more voices in decision making, fostering more experimentation in operations, and ensuring information flows up and down and side to side in the organization).
• Second, the political leader must be sure that they enjoy the trust and following of all societal groups affected by the crisis – such that they can guarantee compliance with orders by citizens, businesses, etc. affected (those who are likely to incur losses, or face behavioral adaptation demands) (given  that it would be very  difficult to mobilize trust and  following of other groups without including voices from those groups in the process).
• Third, the political leaders must have complete confidence that they have de jure and de facto authority over all the organizational capabilities they need in the crisis response (so that they can order these capabilities to do what is needed to address the crisis) (given that they will not be able to order capabilities that are under the de jure  or de  facto control of political leaders they have excluded from the command and control process).

These ‘centralization-conducive’ conditions are usually met in regard to activities that organizations have done for long periods, where the focus of work is on  ensuring reliability through compliance, efficiency through syndication, and perenity through detachment (see Ventrappen and Wirtz on When to Decentralize Decision-Making, and When Not To).

The problem is that these conditions are only met in highly specific crisis situations—where the type of crisis has been seen (with quite a lot of specific overlap) before, and where the organizations needed for response are known and can  be corralled by the political leader, and where all citizens affected can be  directly and effectively influenced by the political leader. Some examples might be  localized weather emergencies (like a tornado) or food safety failures that lead to  localized crises (affecting specific production plants or locations).

In most crises, the conditions are not conducive to centralized ‘circling the wagon’ deciding and operating models. Consider a few reasons:

• Crises are typically fraught with unknowns that can only be resolved with reference to multiple views and perspectives in an active learning process. But ‘circle the wagon’ command and control processes do not allow diversity of thought in the decision-making process, or experimentation and learning in operations. Consider Karl Weick’s views on the matter, in the seminal article “Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations” (1988, 312): “The danger in centralization and contraction of authority is that there may be a reduction in the level of competence directed at the problem…. [because the] person in authority is not necessarily the most competent person to deal with a crisis, so a contraction of authority leads either to less action or more confusion.”
• Crises often require that many  citizens and businesses adapt behavior, and  these different agents often have different political affiliations and listen to different political voices (and other social influences). If  political  leaders in power at any given time decide to exclude specific voices from the decision-making  process they run the risk of alienating the followers of those voices. Getting these followers to adhere to crisis-induced change then proves hard.
• Crises require the mobilization of capabilities in many parts  of government and society,  which single leaders can seldom authorize on their own. Remember my  note earlier on the many political leaders that exist—at national, regional and local level, in religious and media settings, in the executive and legislature, etc. One single leader cannot mobilize organizational or social capabilities across an entire system as the centralized structure requires. Consider Arjen Boin and  Paul t’ Hart (1993, 550) on the topic, in “Public Leadership in Times of Crisis”: “Crisis-response efforts depend on many people in several networks. At the political-strategic level, efforts to radically centralize decision-making authority tend to cause more friction than they resolve because they disturb well-established authority patterns.” They go on  to  say that, “In most democracies, governance takes place in shared power settings: Political leaders and institutions share power among each other, central government shares power with supranational and subnational governments, and the state shares power with societal groups and private corporations. Unless there is an overwhelming need for drastic measures (during war, for instance), actors in the crisis-response network whose policy-making roles are abruptly diminished by the ad hoc centralization of authority will, to say the least, not be motivated to contribute their resources and comply with centrally issued policy directives.”

An additional concern about political centralization relates to a prior blog post on  the importance of ‘keeping an eye’ on the way your crisis response impacts many different kinds of public value. It is highly likely that various important  values will be under-represented if political leaders close access to their decision-making and operational processes through a centralized command and control process. This could easily result in crisis response actions having particularly adverse effects on some values (especially damaging public value in under-represented groups). This could have significant long-term impacts.

Some questions for you to reflect on:

• Have your political leaders ‘centralized’ decision/operating structures in the current crisis?
  • What have been the positive results of this?
  • What have been the negative results of this?
• I argue here that centralized political decision making—and control over operations—works in only some crisis situations ((i) where the  crisis is known to the political leader, (ii) where the political leader can  directly gain needed compliance from all citizens etc. affected, and (iii) the political  leader has direct authority over all entities needing to  respond). What do you think of  this argument?
  • Do you think these conditions are met in your current crisis?
• In your current situation, are you at all  concerned that some ‘public values’ could be under-represented in the decision/operating activities are too centralized?
  • What ‘values are you particularly concerned about being excluded?

The Public Leadership Through Crisis blog series offers ideas for leaders questioning how they can help and what kind of leadership is required in the face of a crisis (like the COVID-19 pandemic).

Public Leadership Through Crisis 18: Who are Political Leaders and What is their Role?

written by Matt Andrews

I have used a few blogs to discuss the need for governments to reorganize when facing crisis, adopting flat, fast and flexible structures. There are various versions of such structures but I propose a snowflake mechanism that allows one to have a central coordinating team (like a snowflake nucleus) that interact with organically emergent set of relating teams, all acting, learning and sharing with the full system.

I see this kind of mechanism operating in crisis responses like the 2014 Ebola experience in Liberia and the 2020 Covid-19 experience in Bahrain. These mechanisms allow for what Mark Moore calls the ‘decentralized mobilization of  energy’ where the entire governmental system works together to solve the crisis. Some might think this sounds like chaos, but it is the kind of mechanism needed when you face huge tasks fraught with unknowns and need rapid work and learning at scale.

A key question can be raised in designing such mechanism: “Where do political  leaders fit in?”

I will address four issues related to this question in the next set of blog posts:

1. Who are political  leaders and what roles do they play in crises? 
2. How do political leaders commonly structure their roles?
3. How can political leaders structure their roles more effectively? And
4. Is it ever appropriate to criticize political leaders during times of crisis?

In this blog I offer some thoughts on the first question and, as usual, ask questions for you to reflect on—thinking about the political leaders in your crisis situation and the roles they play.

Who are ‘political leaders’ and what roles do  they play  in crises?

There are many sets of political leaders in government. Perhaps the most obvious are the formal politicians who have been elected to run the executive operation of government (the President or Prime Minister, Governor or Mayor) and the formal politicians who have been elected to run the legislative branch of government (the Congress or Parliament or Town Council). (more…)