Paul 't Hart on why royal commissions fall short on policy learning

The drama of royal commissions might satisfy the public’s democratic urges, but they’re often not particularly useful when it comes to avoiding stuffing things up in the future.

When faced with significant policy failure, much of the time governments become deeply involved in managing the politics and saving reputations, while the policy lessons take a back seat, argues policy evaluation and crisis management expert Professor Paul ‘t Hart.

A focus on the politics usually leads to inquiries searching exhaustively for who is to blame. From the perspective of learning how to do better next time, this means you can end up reinventing the wheel.

“We already know a lot about what causes blind spots in the way organisations diagnose risks, for example, or how they are captured by vested interests,” says ‘t Hart. “It’s not like these are uncharted.”

The University of Utrecht professor and Australia and New Zealand School of Government lecturer, who recently co-authored a paper on the study of policy failures, notes that a lack of public administration and policy experts on many inquiries is exacerbated by the fact that inquiry commissioners, often former judges, and lawyers tend not to have deep knowledge of policy and administration.

The result can be a “fighting the last war” syndrome — long checklists of recommendations worked out from the one particular policy failure under examination in the inquiry, some of which are not particularly useful when it comes to implementation.

“What bureaucracies then do is they tend to make tick the box exercises,” ‘t Hart explains.

“You get working parties for each recommendation, and what might get lost are the connections between these things or the sensible weighing of the cost efficiency of implementing these changes.

“It can be quite costly responding to a very infrequent failures, but it’s politically impossible not to wholesale adopt the recommendations. What you need a policy look at whether it’s useful. … thinking strategically about whether all those recommendations make sense.”

He’d prefer to see more ‘blue ribbon’ inquiries dominated by experts, such as the Shergold Inquiry. Blue ribbon inquiries often bring a comparative element missing in blame-focused royal commissions.

“They spend less time on forensically going through issues of culpability, and instead focus on issues of institutional design, taking learnings from similar cases that have been researched in the past.

“They don’t have to do all that research themselves — there are databases already there, but often they’re not looked at … If you did that you would get a more robust outcome.”

Not only do experts have a pretty good idea about what typically leads governments into policy failure, but there is a significant body of knowledge on what makes organisations function well and avoid making “big bang” mistakes.

“One answer is they’re really good at learning from small mistakes,” ‘t Hart says.

They are good at debriefing. “Failure is treated as a data point. Blame and dodging and hiding to save skins doesn’t really exist in such organisations.”

A no-blame environment

The aviation industry, where minor faults can lead to potentially catastrophic outcomes, is one exemplar of excellent risk management and high performance.

“They have really embraced this culture of learning from errors, being open and transparent about them, investigating them thoroughly in a no-blame environment and disseminating results, including to competitors,” he explains.

“Governments are not great with sharing reputation-sensitive information — or any information. Partly it doesn’t occur to people that a mining regulator can learn from a financial regulator. People don’t tend to see the commonalities in being a regulator, so information isn’t circulated as energetically as in these high performance organisations.”

Well-functioning feedback loops allowing for quick corrections when implementation doesn’t go to plan can help prevent a fiasco down the track. Empowering front-line employees to provide feedback about what does and does not work helps with this.

There are lots of ways to allow and incentivise feedback, such as flattening hierarchies, creating a culture where it is valued and offering awards for reporting.

What the public sector also underdoes is learning from sustained high performance and success, ‘t Hart suggests. There are a few awards around, which can provide a morale boost, but there is very little in the way of documenting, diagnosing and learning from high performance in government — why do some governments manage to precipitously reduce the number of drink drivers while others struggle to make any headway, for example?

“Go to any journal on public administration and you’ll find 60-80% of the pieces are about explaining limitations, shortfalls, problems, failures, et cetera and not even 5% is about what can we learn from high performance from best practice.”

Happily, ‘t Hart was recently granted €2 million to conduct a study on what makes for enduringly effective governments agencies and policy networks.

All this learning aside, one of the biggest hurdles to high performance is leaders actually making the decision to prioritise the prevention of failure, rather than merely giving the appearance that this is occurring.

“Lots of organisations currently are geared towards minimising political risk rather than preventing failure,” he argues.