Building resilience for a new reality
At a friend’s birthday party some years ago, guests had to sing for their supper by declaring, then justifying in a 60-second ‘presentation’, their favourite word in the English language.
Mine wasn’t, and still isn’t, ‘resilience’ – but in the current economic, political and security context it might have been an interesting and reassuring choice. As a country, as a government and as individuals buffeted by daily threats, uncertainties and unpredictabilities, we’d all like to believe that we’re individually and collectively resilient, able to recover, adapt or “bounce back” quickly from difficulties, misfortune and unexpected change.
The reality is that most of us aren’t.
In the private sector, a huge army of consultants, spurred on by volatile markets and by the disruptions of the pandemic, has been preaching organisational resilience for years. Now wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and the growing likelihood of systemic shocks in energy and cyber, are exposing new vulnerabilities in policymaking, our public institutions and our understanding of long-term risks.
I hope this edition of the Heywood Quarterly will provide some inspiration for those across government striving to make us more robust.
How much we should actually spend on defence, of course, is a live political debate and one that falls outside the remit of this publication. In the opening article, though, you’ll find some fascinating insights into the changing nature of warfare by the Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Rich Knighton. Drawing on a recent visit to the drone-dominated landscape of Ukraine, Sir Rich points out how, over the sweep of history, “destructive power and the distances between protagonists have grown”; he suggests that space, cyberspace and artificial intelligence will be the next big frontiers of war. In a future issue, we hope to come back to what all this means for the Ministry of Defence; for the moment, at least, the nature of future threats and what the CDS calls the ‘dizzying’ pace of change have been made abundantly clear.
Rosehanna Chowdhury may not be on the defence front line, but as CEO of the relatively new UK Resilience Academy she is charged with making us safer and more secure. She argues persuasively that resilience is the job of a whole nation (citing the cases of Finland, New Zealand and Singapore) and that choices made by governments, local authorities, emergency services and communities long before a crisis occurs often determine how effectively we respond. “Preparedness should sit alongside good policy design and effective delivery as a routine part of how government operates,” she writes; it should not be “treated as a specialist or exceptional concern.”
If one of Rosehanna’s takeaways is that “[resilience] capability is built through exercising, testing assumptions and learning,” Madelaine McTernan could be its living embodiment. Between December 2020 and September 2022, Maddy was Director General of the Vaccine Taskforce (VTF), a joint unit of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Department of Health and Social Care, responsible for securing Covid vaccines for the UK. She is now Chief of Defence Nuclear at the Ministry of Defence, the umbrella term for those organisations and the submarines that deliver our nuclear deterrent. While these two roles might seem worlds apart, her article highlights important and salutary common leadership themes: the importance of having a focus on purpose, on trusting data yet accepting risk, on being willing to change course, on prioritising outcomes over process and on driving pace.
Leaders set the tone for all organisations, but good policymaking requires much more besides. How do we evaluate policy and how do we know what’s really working? That’s a question which has long been troubling Adam Coutts, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge, who helped design and evaluate one of the UK’s largest social policy randomised controlled trials in the Work and Health Unit at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). In a challenging article, Adam says the relationship between academic researchers and government policy practitioners is one of mutual frustration and calls on government departments to better acknowledge the role of methodological rigour, academic independence and the capacity of academics to build institutional memory.
Continuing the theme of better policymaking, Catherine Taylor highlights her highly positive experience of helping run a public deliberation workshop. Public deliberation brings together a diverse group of citizens – often in what is known as a citizens’ assembly – to engage deeply with complex issues, consider evidence, hear a range of perspectives and reflect before reaching conclusions. She concludes that the UK Government “at all levels should be using deliberation more consistently when designing and delivering policy so as to achieve better policy outcomes and strengthen societal trust and cohesion.”
The next two articles put a welcome spotlight on public service delivery. Nick Kimber, Director of Public Service Reform at the Cabinet Office on secondment from local government, assesses the early results of the Test, Learn and Grow initiative and argues that, by rolling out this approach across the country, central government in partnership with local communities can make a big difference to citizens’ lives. Warren Heppolette, writing from Greater Manchester, believes devolution is key and sees signs of hope that attempts to direct more resources towards prevention of poor social outcomes are starting to bear fruit.
Our last full article in this edition contains a timely plea for government not to ‘passively adopt’ AI. Its author Michael Padfield, Head of Strategy in the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (the UK Government’s Applied AI team), illustrates how citizens are already ahead of the state in using Large Language Models (LLMs) as credible alternatives to government services. “In the medium term,” he concludes, “we should meet the market where it is heading and shape it… or else we will fail to adapt to how citizens are using the tech in the real world.”
For a little light relief over the summer, Penny Stephens’ cosy crime thriller Till Death Us Do Part – complete with a public service dimension – is reviewed by Sophie Cliff. Finally, we have excerpts from our new Mid-Term Transition Series, including insights from Simon Case, Mark Sedwill and Adam Coutts.
Tim Dickson, Editor in Chief
