Testing assumptions and new normals for policymaking
In Multiplied, I briefly referenced The Blunders of our Government by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe. It’s a book I’ve referenced a few times on this blog. It’s become a classic that I’ve long felt deserves a new updated edition – just think of the stories they would be able to add from the last decade.
A lot of the policy failings in the book relate back to underlying assumptions made, or reasoning about what will happen. As this 2014 article reviewing the book for Civil Service Quarterly explains: “the common feature of the ‘blunders’ is the extent to which policy development gets separated from the realities of the world.”
As most of the examples shared in the book demonstrate, people often don’t behave rationally, or at least as we expect them to, and that’s in large part due to the assumptions that we make about what we believe will happen in a given situation.
Intellectual prejudices
As the book explains, it’s important that we consider how our own points of view contribute to the assumptions we take into the work we’re doing, especially when it comes to intellectual prejudices:
“…those that hold them are likely to regard them as obvious truths, undeniable facts, things to be taken for granted. But what is taken for granted in one generation may seem implausible and weird to the next, possibly only because intellectual fashions have changed.”
This is an important point to grasp as we respond in new ways to all sorts of priorities, policy, and anything within the realms of responding to change. The strange can quickly become a new reality, helping us to better shape future society, it’s social fabric, and its service infrastructure. But this is dependent on our ability to keep questioning ourselves.
What seems impossible can become possible, just not always without the ability of a generation to see beyond its own horizons and self-preserved boundary lines. It’s why we need new perspectives to challenge the work of policymakers, something that co-production and user centred approaches can help us to achieve.
What I think is most important here is our ability to dismantle established models of the world, and to find ways of exploring their alternatives. This is how design can help us to explore new realities that challenge our preconceived wisdom and life experiences.
Testing ourselves against the world
A final quote from the book:
“No feature of the blunders we have studied stands out more prominently – or more frequently – than the divorce between policymaking and implementation and, in human terms, between those who made policies and those charged with implementing them.”
Resetting the relationship between policymaking and implementation requires a new normal. This, arguably, continues to be the biggest challenge for government.
My experience has taught me that the only way we start to challenge preconceived ideas is by testing them against the world. It’s the importance of seeing our own ideas meeting reality first hand through approaches like user research. It’s how we find ways to test and evaluate what really happens using hypothesis-based approaches. And it’s the power of learning by doing, how we can sense and respond to the impact of policy in real life situations, as experienced by real people.
Most importantly, in being more willing to challenge ourselves and our own belief systems, it’s the chance to realign policymaking with how we deliver and implement change.
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 20 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky and LinkedIn.