An end to firefighting

tl;dr: Firefighting happens when uncertainty forces policy teams into reactive decisionmaking. Ending firefighting requires avoiding conventional management “best practices” that make teams fragile in the face of the unexpected — and adopting instead practices that naturally lead to innovative teams that relate better to uncertainty.        

You stand on the cusp of triumph. After months of meticulous research and cat-herding, your policy team, civil service bosses, and elected office-holders have all lined up behind the same policy. You’ve even won budget and staff to implement it.

Then an election-year scandal soaks up your elected office-holder’s attention and makes them #fearful of trying anything new. Or a pandemic dramatically changes how businesses must operate. Or some country invades another country so that energy prices shoot up. Whatever the unexpected things are, your carefully laid plans go up in flames and your team melts down too. Your days become a succession of firedrills.

Public-sector policymakers seem especially intensely affected by uncertainty. Policy work is becoming faster-paced, more demanding, and more uncertain. Policy teams feel increasingly overextended, under-resourced, and reactive — there seems to be neither time nor headspace for proactive, bold, innovative policy work. Over the last 3 years, I’ve met teams working in several governments. The image of firefighting always resonates strongly with them.

Insidious assumptions

Last year, I wrote about why organizations get sucked into unending cycles of firefighting even when they think they’re doing their best to avoid it.

The reason is simple: Organizational business-as-usual is to design work teams and processes as if the operating environment, nature of work, and definition of success either won’t change much or won’t change in unexpected ways. Without even thinking about it, organizations assume stability and predictability.

Here are some policy team examples I have seen in real life:

1. Team staffing: Business-as-usual is staffing well-structured project teams of indefinite longevity, with work planned on annual/multiyear cycles.
2. Research and implementation: Business-as-usual is fully building out policy before getting it approved and transferring it to implementing agencies.
3. Goalsetting: Business-as-usual is setting policy goals that are defined as concrete outcomes with legible metrics.

None of these practices explicitly assumes stability or predictability — but they implicitly require stability and/or predictability to work well. I’ve seen similarly insidious baked-in assumptions at businesses, NGOs, and not-for-profits.

The fragilification of organizations

These assumptions have unintended effects on how organizations work, which makes them fragile when they encounter uncertainty and unexpected change:

1. Staffing: Staffers expect their roles to be stable and predictable within work planning cycles, and teams expect to persist indefinitely with only minor changes in what they do. These expectations result in distress and trauma when uncertainty forces teams to be reorganized and staffers to do new things.
2. R&D: Policy is less responsive to emergence and change, and less informed by data and learnings obtained through testing and implementation. This rigidity causes policy to break when conditions change unpredictably. It also leads to missed opportunities for making policy that is both bold and supple enough to adjust to changing conditions.
3. Goalsetting: Key stakeholders fixate on concrete goals and metrics in measuring policy success. This fixation leads to policy which loses relevance when there is unpredicted change in the underlying conditions the metrics measure.

Uncertainty causes stuff to go up in flames when teams and processes are built on the assumption that things will be stable and predictable. Long-cycle team staffing, policy R&D separated from implementation, policy goalsetting focused on concrete, legible metrics are practices built on that assumption, and these practices are so normalized that they are taken for granted as being best practices for management. These conventional best practices make policy teams fragile in rapidly changing, increasingly uncertain environments.

Firefighting happens because conventional stability/predictability-oriented management “best practices” fall apart on contact with uncertainty. (Remember, uncertainty /= risk.)

An end to firefighting

To end firefighting, stop implicitly assuming and avoid taken-for-granted organization and management principles. Instead, explicitly design around the assumption that unpredictable change will happen — do this by strategically injecting uncertainty into team structure and management. This is what I’ve called an uncertainty mindset (my book, The Uncertainty Mindset, unpacks how this mindset changes the structure and management of organizations).

Below, I give three policy-relevant intervention for ending firefighting using an uncertainty mindset. For each idea, I’ve also linked to a short piece I’ve written that goes into more detail about how it works.

1. Staffing: Explicitly set expectations that staff roles are partly open-ended and will continually evolve, and pair that with putting in place processes for testing and negotiating how roles evolve. Read more about how negotiated joining and open-ended roles lead to dynamically evolving teams.
2. Policy R&D: Explicitly make experimentation part of policymaking, by training teams to design experiments that are correctly calibrated for each phase of policy development. Read more about training teams to experiment more effectively.
3. Policy goalsetting: Explicitly move goalsetting away from superficial metrics and toward underlying ways of recognizing success, by using tradeoff articulation as a way to define and choose goals. Read more about articulating goals via tradeoffs.

These are just three concrete possibilities drawn from a wide range of ways to inject the uncertainty mindset into a team or organization.

Do these interventions seem too radical and high-risk for a large bureaucracy to accept? They don’t have to be. Any uncertainty mindset intervention can be refactored to start small, inexpensive, and low-downside — to fit inside a team leader’s scope of control and authority. This also makes the intervention seem trivial and innocuous, hiding them from the bureaucratic forces that oppose change.

Another way to think about these interventions is as sneaky strategies for building innovative teams inside organizations that claim to want innovation but fear untested approaches and the possibility of failure. These sneaky strategies help policymakers stop firefighting and also create space and capacity for bold, effective policy work.

I’m giving an overview of practical ways to use uncertainty to design agile and innovative policy teams on Wednesday, 15 May. The session is for the Singapore Civil Service College, and will cover some of the ideas above — the signup form is here. Unfortunately, this is only open to Singapore Government officers.

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