‘Government as a system’ for COVID-19

Andrea Siodmok – Policy Lab

This post takes the government as a system approach which the Policy Lab has been developing and applies it to the policy challenges created by COVID-19, less in terms of the immediate response, more in terms of emphasising three areas where modern policy approaches are likely to be critical.

The first is thinking about the future in conditions of particular uncertainty. Doing that creatively, radically, realistically and usefully is hard enough at the best of times, and these are not they. The more self-consciously and the more collaboratively that is done, the better the chance that the results will survive contact with developing reality.

Policy Lab’s Analytics ladder diagram for COVID-19: what happened? what is happening? why did it happen? what will happen? how can we make it happen?The second is data, critically recognising that it is not just a matter of collecting updated answers to existing questions, but of identifying new questions and the data needed to answer them. The Policy Lab analytics ladder provides a really useful framework for thinking not just about how approaches relate to high level questions, but how their relative emphasis will change as we go through the crisis.

The third is relating all that and more back to the whole system and providing leadership and direction – a reminder that policy is an approach and an activity for those who want to change the world, not for those who wish merely to observe it.

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