Preparing Public Officers for New Modes of Governance
- this is an expansion of a piece published by “Ethos”, the Singapore Civil Service College journal: http://bit.ly/1sqXgYv
Government in Singapore experienced several transformative shifts since independence in 1965, categorised by the following stages:
I. Providing basic services and dealing with fundamental security imperatives
II. Becoming cost-efficient in a world of scarcity
III. Establishing enduring, long-run institutions in response to internal and external volatility
IV. Cultivating and sustaining adaptive, innovative and change-ready institutions
V. Moving beyond impersonal institutions to governance that is relational, empathetic and engaging in dealing with diverse citizen expectations and stakeholder interests
These stages are not mutually exclusive; each supplemented rather than supplanted the previous. Each shift is linked to increased magnitude, diversity and complexity in the demands on government.
Stage I included traditional security, like defence and internal affairs, and human security issues like health and housing. Both were priorities for a newly-independent Singapore, immediately after our departure from Malaysia (1965).
Singapore moved from Stages I to II during an industrialisation drive in the 1970s, to build the domestic economy and attract Foreign Direct Investment from multinational corporations.
Stage III began in the late 1980s, in response to prospective internal political transition with Lee Kuan Yew’s plans to step down as Prime Minister, and international volatility arising from Eastern bloc collapse and the aftermath of successive global debt crises. In the mid-1990s, long-run institution-building dovetailed with early stages of the PS21 (“Public Service for the 21st Century”) movement, which encouraged officials to Anticipate, Welcome and Execute change.
Government in Stages I to III adopted what economists term efficiency-based “optimisation” approaches to carry out government functions. Particularly from Stage II, “lean” government was in vogue and outsourcing became more prevalent.
New Frontiers …
Government currently operates at a combination of Stages IV and V. Adaptive capacity is increasingly necessary, as demonstrated in successive and ever-more-frequent disruptive shocks that require alacrity and flexible responses — including the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the outbreak of Severe Acute Respitatory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003, and risks of H5N1/H1N1 pandemics in the mid-2000’s. The growing prevalence of social media has intensified these trends.
There have also been increasing calls for more empathetic, engaging policymaking since the mid-2000’s. These diverse citizen views predated, but have been uniquely enabled by, social media. They have gained stridency and momentum since Singapore’s 2011 General Elections, when the ruling People’s Action Party garnered one of its lowest historical vote shares.
At Stages IV and V, governance involves:
· wisdom to operate at the frontiers of trade-offs and make difficult prioritisations. Singapore’s double-digit growth, post-independence and more recently post-recession, cannot be sustained indefinitely. Singapore now operates on, rather than within, its production possibilities frontier. The opportunity costs of policy choices will be more acute, until and unless technological improvement shifts the frontier outward. Increasingly, policy is made under circumstances of austerity, not abundance.
· being creative and seeking new sources of ideas, innovation and productivity, rather than relying on tried-and-tested options. This requires shielding small, entrepreneurial teams — akin to “skunkwork” groups or the growing number of futures/strategy units in government — free to consider out-of-the-box issues, without being encumbered by daily routines.
· working multi-sectorally to harness businesses and civil society in delivering “governance”, a concept beyond the exclusive remit of the public sector. Such governance involves a spectrum of cooperative modalities, including: communicating alternative policy choices; consulting business and civil society on options generated by policymakers; coordinating among different groups with interests in particular aspects of a policy; co-creating policy with non-government entities; or even facilitating community-ownership of policy areas where there are no major public good benefits from government provision.
· navigating constant adaptation, experimentation and innovation rather than having the comfort of stable equilibria. Instead of seeking elusive “right” answers, policymakers will find themselves using more iterative, experimental approaches, emphasising the process of governance as much as the final product. Constant incremental refinement of prototypes, rather than pre-packaged policy that is “ready-upon-delivery”, will become more common. Current examples include how to operationalise “public engagement” in a way that responds to citizen preferences, but does not degenerate into populism.
· working beyond “hard” policy options and embracing “softer” aspects like effective citizen engagement, resonant communication and policymaking that connects emotively, not just analytically — with the “heart”, not just the “head”. This involves policymakers seeing the public not just as taxpayers, customers or service-receivers in transactional relationships, but also as citizens with a stake in Singapore’s collective future.
… and New Capabilities
Stages IV and V require qualitatively different policy capabilities from earlier stages. The exact capability set will not be static, but dynamic and kaleidoscopic — shifting and evolving as governance acquires new facets and dimensions. Nonetheless, several key ideas are already discernible:
· As uncertainty grows in what Giddens has called our “runaway world”[i], policy work will increasingly be less amenable to solutions that are obvious ex ante. Instead, policymaking will be characterised more by indirect approaches or “obliquity”, a term popularised by Kay[ii]. Rather than tackle policy challenges “head-on”, governance practitioners may find it more useful to address the systems surrounding a particular policy experience — an often undervalued technique. Singapore’s effort to increase Total Fertility Rates, for instance, have moved beyond providing financial incentives and access to affordable childcare, to tackling ostensibly ancillary issues like the length of the work-week. Implementing obliquity will be challenging, demanding lateral thinking from policymakers more familiar with direct approaches, as well as patience to explain indirect measures to an impatient citizenry and potentially critical Opposition parties. Time-constrained decision-makers will have to exercise some suspension of disbelief for oblique approaches to play out fully.
· “Optimisation” will become less useful. The Washington Consensus spawned what could be termed an “efficiency fetish”, as governments attempted to operate systems with engineers’ precision and arrive at economists’ optimum-points. In Stage IV and Stage V, the emphasis will shift to balancing tensions, tradeoffs, dilemmas, contradictions and paradoxes. Governments will increasingly find themselves making delicate, discerning judgement calls, without the clarity of obviously “correct” responses. In complex, untidy situations, policymakers will need what Scott Fitzgerald described in The Crack-Up as “first-rate intelligence … the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”.
· Policymakers are also likely to find themselves applying “bio-empathy”, a term included in Johansen’s list of leadership qualities for a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world[iii]. Bio-empathy involves understanding the emergent, non-linear qualities of complex systems, which resemble biological ecosystems far more than mechanical systems’ immutable input-output relationships. Greater bio-empathy will help policymakers understand that they might not be able to predict all the phase transitions in a complex system, many of which arise from self-reinforcing feedback loops. The Arab Spring and governance challenges like climate change and falling fertility rates possess quasi-biological characteristics, with major consequences sometimes resulting from minor perturbations.
· Perhaps most fundamental to future governance will be the growing need to constantly remake policy, reinvent ideas and re-perceive the world. This will involve acts of creation, not just maintenance of existing systems. In many ways, future policymaking will give expression to latent “maker-instincts” among some policymakers — to be what Thomas and Brown[iv] have called “homo farens”, the doer, not just “homo sapiens”, the thinker. They extend this argument to include the growing need for more “homo ludens”, engaged in creative play. The ability to participate in strategic, appropriately playful exploration will be key if inate maker-instincts are to be fully realised.
Capability-building and Training
Training of policymakers, particularly policy leaders, will concomitantly have to be more oblique, tension-literate, bio-empathetic and play-related. Some training techniques will be experiments in themselves. At Singapore’s Civil Service College, such experiments have included:
· Sessions combining training and “sense-making” functions — Instead of seeing training as one-way trainer-to-trainee communication, sessions are structured more as “facilitated” discussions: facilitators and participants learn from one another. Such dialogues are critical sources of new ideas, especially since most programmes involve participants from multiple government agencies, whose experiences of what Kauffman has called different “adjacent possibles”[v] provide their colleagues with new insights. Such sessions require facilitators with both experience in guiding such open discussions, and broad policy exposure, who can connect different agencies’ work to illuminate commonalities and contrasts.
· Sessions involving policy-gaming and simulations — While militaries have a long tradition of “wargaming”, such techniques have been less widely used in civilian government. Singapore’s Applied Simulation Training Laboratory crafts such exercises, immersing policymakers in realistic, if not totally life-like, circumstances that hone their decision-making instincts amid dilemmas, complexity, incomplete information and unpredictability. These are not always comfortable exercises; the expansion of participants’ comfort zones is in fact a key aim.
Complementing these experiments is a set of fundamentals in Singapore’s training philosophy that we believe will have enduring utility, even as the nature of governance evolves.
First, training must continue to be systematic and regular. As demands on policymakers intensify, leadership programmes must grow more intentional and purposeful. We currently conduct programmes for:
- new entrants;
- those taking on supervisory roles for the first time;
- new Directors or Heads of Department; and
- new entrants into senior agency-head positions.
This calibrated sequencing is not likely to change. Each intervention occurs at a key career inflexion point — usually involving a qualitative leap in both the complexity of issues dealt with, and the depth and breadth of leadership required.
Second, the Whole-of-Government nature of training programmes will continue. Even as governance extends beyond government in a multi-sectoral world, core competencies in government tradecraft must be well-developed. This cross-agency focus brings twofold value: analytical value, inculcating understanding of how government operates as a system, not discrete silos; and social capital value, through network- and trust-building across agency boundaries.
Third, we continue to adopt a “practitioner-based” teaching/facilitation model. Senior officers share experiences and insights with junior colleagues, building a culture of mentorship. Some invited practitioners are also from the private, non-profit and academic sectors, providing useful non-government perspectives. Each sharing encompasses best/good practices and learning points from policies that did not pan out as anticipated. Both nurture a deep awareness of the Public Service’s shared history, thereby informing the thought processes of future generations.
Future Directions
The five-stage model grounding this analysis can be refined. I hope to explore three further areas in particular.
First, how far do Stages IV and V apply outside Singapore, to complex and relational issues faced by other governments? Without being triumphalist or universalist about Singapore’s experiences, I believe there are transferable lessons about what constitutes good governance, and how it can evolve.
Second, beyond this article’s focus on national governance, it would be useful to explore possible modalities for global governance, as opposed to global “government”, in Stages IV and V. An area worth exploring is how global governance, responding to complexity and the need for relationality and engagement (e.g. in harnessing epistemic communities, global civil society and other non-government networks), will deal with entrenched international norms like Westphalian national sovereignty.
Third, this article deals with a government that is largely benign — seeking information, capabilities and tools to function effectively, objectively and rationally. To such governments, innovation and mindset-broadening present opportunities. However, if governance challenges are viewed through traditional power-political lenses — e.g. if governments’ flaws stem from principal-agent problems between rulers and ruled, as seen in growing lack of trust and examples of government capture by powerful interest groups — then new policy tools and mindsets will take root less easily. It is questionable how comfortably traditional notions of power will sit in Stage-IV and –V governance.
