What would make the policy profession a real profession?

I have never felt part of a clear profession

According to the Civil Service’s ‘about’ page (who knew?), there are 25 professions in the civil service, but also the next sentence says there are currently 28, because counting is hard. The general idea is that being in a profession allows you to develop a career path and apply best standards.

Either way, the policy profession is one of these. And let’s be honest, it’s the big daddy. The ur-profession of the civil service. Some of the others seem so insignificant I question whether they merit being one of the top 28. Sorry, Knowledge and Information Management Profession, but librarians don’t make rules that govern the whole country. When people think of the civil service, do they really think of the Occupational Psychology Profession? And whoever heard of the ‘Medical Profession’?

I can’t find figures, but the policy profession is almost certainly the largest profession in the Senior Civil Service, despite operational delivery having at least 5 times as many staff overall. Almost all permanent secretaries are drawn from the profession. Ministers spend most of their time making policy, so it’s not exactly surprising that most senior officials are also policymakers.

So the effective functioning of the policy profession is extremely important. But I’m not sure it currently functions in a way that could fairly be described as a profession. I think I’ve been in the policy profession for all 3 of the jobs I have had in the civil service, although nobody exactly tells you clearly and none of them have been unambiguously ‘policy’ jobs. This vagueness is the first sign that the policy profession is rather poorly defined. I doubt so many accountants, doctors and teachers question whether they are actually in those professions.

Here are a few areas where I think we need to improve if policymaking is actually going to be professionalised.

Standards

The policy profession has quite a detailed standards document. This neatly sets out all the different functions the policy profession carries out, and defines 3 levels for each one, which map onto the seniority of the police official. Unfortunately, the descriptions of these standards are just vague waffle. If you read proper standards - like the kind BSI publish - they define things very clearly. They don’t just say “demonstrates courage and innovation when solving policy issues”. Not only are the statements subjective, but they also map very poorly onto the sorts of things policymakers might want to do. BSI standards are for things like mixing cement, which is a thing construction workers need to do. A civil servant probably rarely thinks to themselves “I really need to demonstrate some courage and innovation here”, or if they do, that’s presumably just an end goal, not a full description of how you might go about doing that.

The policy profession standards need to become far more specific if they are to be useful. The problem with that is that policymakers do 101 different things, so specifying them all is a challenging task. Which leads us onto the next thing that is needed to professionalise policymaking.

Making explicit what policymakers do

We need to start by clearly defining the activities performed by policy officials. Again, a construction worker probably follows hundreds of standards for mixing cement, wiring a house, laying bricks, etc. They can probably do a few of these, but specialise in a smaller number. Only once we have set out the components of policy making can we go about improving them.

I worry that this isn’t explicitly laid out because it would be embarrassing. We assume that policy officials are doing policy things - analysing evidence, breaking down the problem, talking to experts. And whilst they do all of these things, the reality might recognise that they also spend a lot of time doing low value things such as drafting responses to commissions, informing others of what they’re doing and seeking approval for their plans. There’s also just a lot of low-value meetings and documents due to poor use of time. These are all important things to do, but I describe them as low value because they are not producing new knowledge, analysis or recommendations, just coordinating existing understandings. We should be explicit that these activities are what policymakers spend their time on if we’re going to improve the effectiveness with which we do them.

Separate out and routinise admin tasks

Once we’ve identified the different tasks that policy makers do, we should focus their attention on the highest value ones.

When knowledge workers got computers and the associated software tools, the number of secretaries employed fell substantially. This is because the jobs they used to do like typing up minutes and arranging meetings became much easier for managers to do themselves. The problem is that these activities actually fall on something like a supply and demand curve. As the cost of these activities decreased, the quantity demanded rose enormously to meet the cheap mass supply. This happened to knowledge workers in all sectors, but the result is that managers spend a significant amount of time performing low-value admin tasks, with regular task-switching breaking up the ability to get into deep work and thinking. This is a waste of money and leads to policy skills failing to develop or atrophying because they aren’t honed and practiced. A significant part of the value of consultants is that they come in to do a small number of specific deliverables, without being distracted by the pile up of administrative debris that a full-time worker accumulates.*

If we look at other professions like doctors, the amount of admin and management tasks has exploded. The medical profession has responded by recruiting larger teams of non-medical professionals to manage this. The NHS now has hoards of managers doing these jobs, to ensure that the professional doctors can continue to spend enough time on medical specialist jobs like surgery and diagnosis. Many of these managers even earn similar or more than doctors themselves. Doctors may complain about managers, but I doubt they’d prefer it if the managers went away, as a modern medical system requires these roles to exist, and they’d just fall to doctors. Similarly, lawyers have paralegals to do their admin so they can focus on specialist roles like wearing fancy wigs.**

The policy profession would benefit from a similar separation of roles. Allow policy specialists to become experts in solving policy problems, with other people focusing on any tasks not directly related to that. To some degree this already gets done, with teams having dedicated briefing and correspondence leads, for example. But there’s definitely scope to do more of this and improve the efficiency of all activities.

Building better tools to allow the more routine tasks to be completed more automatically should free up policy official’s time to focus on policy. Although we need to be wary that doing this doesn’t just enhance the dynamic described above, with even lower cost admin tasks ballooning in number. One way to enforce this might just be to set aside a certain amount of time when policy officials aren’t expected to do any routine admin tasks.

Provide specialist tools to perform these tasks

Above I discussed building tools to improve routine tasks. But finally I should turn to the core functions of policymaking.

Once we’ve separated out and clearly defined the different tasks that policymakers do, then we can start to develop best practice tools to perform these as efficiently as possible. Currently there is far too much reliance on policy officials making their own tools, mainly from basic office suite software. This leads to endless duplication and creation of low-value tools that reduce everyone’s efficiency.

This comes back to standards - the best practice way of doing something should be instantiated in the specific tools designed for that purpose. This can help enforce the standards, because the tools are pulling in the direction of best practice policy making.

Providing standards without tools just ends up producing bureaucracy. Currently we have endless guidance documents, standards and processes designed to make policy making more effective. The problem is that none of them are embedded enough into the day-to-day activities of policy managers to make a meaningful difference. Instead, policy officials make their policy and then treat the formal process such as a business case or impact assessment as a hurdle to jump through at the end.

Ruthlessly train people in the key tasks

As I said above, if you don’t practice the core skills, they won’t get used. We need to identify the policymakers with the most potential early on and help them to spend as much of their time as possible solving policy problems. This needs to happen enough that the individual steps and best practice become second nature, a form of muscle memory.

This should of course be backed up by a rigorous training curriculum, which currently doesn’t exist. I don’t see significant value in formal credentials, as I don’t expect this to hold standards high enough. Plenty of people have masters degrees in public policy but are still mediocre policy officials. Instead, the training should be tailored around the specific tools and processes developed for the policy profession. 

I am intrigued by the idea of having an incredibly selective professional exam to make your way into a (much smaller, more elite) policy profession. This would be most effective combined with all of the measures described in this post. In one sense standardising is a way of lowering the bar for the profession, so it requires less skill and initiative. But if these improvements are combined with maintaining extremely high standards and competency levels, we could end up with double the benefit.

How does this differ from current plans?

I think the main departure of my approach to what currently gets done by the teams responsible for the policy profession is that mine focuses heavily on the day-to-day tasks performed by policy officials. A lot of policy profession guidance is aimed at an idealised policymaker, making policy in a slightly academic way of analysing a problem and proposing solutions. This work is mostly very interesting, but it feels like policy officials rarely get the privilege of making policy in this way. Focusing on the barriers to that feels more useful at the margin than creating better ways of doing it on the occasions we actually get the opportunity.

Note: This may be the first post in a series about the policy profession. Other topics I want to cover are a comparison with the local government commissioning profession, the relation to the analytical professions, and possibly expanding the idea of tools to make policymaking more effective by giving some examples of what I’d like to see. I stand by my arguments above, but they’re a little vague and I’d like to explore whether they could be realised.

*I think this is basically the argument from Cal Newport’s newest book A World Without Email, which I have yet to read.

**I know I’m confusing barristers and solicitors but I don’t have any jokes about solicitors.