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Barry Quirk: ‘The fear of making wrong decisions looms large over every decision-maker' At this year's annual SOLACE dinner, the local government minister, John Healey, spoke about the key role of chief executives working alongside locally-elected politicians. He described chief executives as the ‘implementors' of policy which was ‘made' by politicians. As a short description in a brief speech, this gets the general message across. But senior local government managers actually advise on policy – they don't just implement it. The development of cabinet decision-making and the growth of single-member decision-making has altered the context for advice-giving in local government. But, regardless of the context, advice-giving is always difficult and complex. Some decision-makers have difficulty accepting advice that differs from their prior judgment, while some advice-givers find it too complex to give objective and impartial advice. Giving good advice to elected politicians requires sound reasoning and strong character. It also involves the science of foresight and the art of hindsight. Foresight is a science because it requires a careful examination of those factors which may influence future events. It involves a probabilistic approach to appraising the chances of these events happening. The interplay of multiple factors over time and space weave uncertainty into the future. Our current risk assessments and business continuity plans are modern attempts to calibrate uncertainty – so that we can better control the future. Only fools predict events with certainty. Smart people simply try to improve their ability to judge what might happen. Foolish policy advisers refer to ‘predictive factors'. Smart policy advisers refer to factors being correlated or somehow linked. In my view, it is best to consider foresight to be a science because it makes those involved more cautious about the advice they give. Our foresight and imagination is what makes us human. Marx famously said bees put to shame many an architect, but what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that architects raise their structures in their imagination before they erect them in reality. The fear of making wrong decisions looms large over every decision-maker. This inevitable human bias leads to us weighing possible losses and failings more heavily in our mind than potential gains or benefits. Therefore, advice-givers need to be aware of new developments in ‘decision science', if they are not to befuddle or bemuse their decision-makers. But, it is often the call of hindsight that dominates public debate. The prevailing questions are often, Were we right to decide that? Was the advice the right advice given all the known factors. In local government, these questions are posed by those politicians with an executive role as much as those with a scrutiny role. In public policy implementation, as with the wider sweep of events, success or failure is usually described in retrospect. Things go wrong or things work out a little differently from original intentions. That is why it is crucial to assess risks and uncertainties in advance – particularly if the resources to be deployed are large or the consequences of failure is great. Forensic foresight should cut the range of errors described with the benefit of hindsight. Some hindsight questions elicit answers which are useful lessons for learning how to do things better in the future. Learning from mistakes is crucial – and so all organisations need to have hard approaches to using hindsight. But, other hindsight questions may be utterly speculative or even pointless – along the lines of, What would have happened if your mother hadn't met your father? Moreover, it has to be said that hindsight can confuse inquiry. We may know what happened and how it happened – but the key question is whether the advice given and the decision made at the time, with the information then available, was as comprehensive, balanced and reasonably based as it ought to have been? Hindsight is a benefit but it is also a bias. We know more now than we did then. And when advice-giving is questioned with ‘the benefit of hindsight', the question is, Should we have known these unknown factors then, could we have balanced issues somewhat differently, and given different advice? This is why hindsight is more an art than a science. And how a six-syllable word, accountability, can be compressed into a one-syllable word, blame, in the space of a single sentence. Great advice-giving is a building block in effective local government management. The past two decades in local government have seen immense changes to how decision-makers seek advice, and how advice is proffered. The current growth of single-member decision-making raises particular challenges. It is time that we gave more attention to the science of decision-making, as well as to the character and content of our advice giving. Barry Quirk is chairman of SOLACE and chief executive of Lewisham LBC Download the full version of the guidance, Decision making and the art of giving advice by Barry Quirk, here.

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WHITEHALL

The art of advice

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