Decision-making in the public sector can be paralyzing. You have to decide on complex issues, under uncertainty and limited by several restrictions (time, money, politics, etc.). On top of that, knowing that your work impacts the lives of many increases the pressure. This blog summarizes some practical tools to help you think clearly from Dan Levy’s new book Maxims for Thinking Analytically: The wisdom of legendary Harvard Professor Richard Zeckhauser.
About the book
Maxims for Thinking Analytically: The wisdom of legendary Harvard Professor Richard Zeckhauser was written by Dan Levy, a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School. The book is based on Analytic Frameworks for Policy, a course Prof. Zeckhauser has taught at the Harvard Kennedy School for more than four decades. The book shares key ideas of the course in the form of maxims, one-sentence nuggets of wisdom meant to immortalize an important idea (in bold in this blog). (You can download a one-pager with all the maxims here).
In Dan’s words, what makes Prof. Zeckhauser extraordinary is his intellectual breadth, wisdom, and generosity. Zeckhauser graduated from Harvard College (summa cum laude), received his PhD in Economics there, and has taught at the Harvard Kennedy School for more than fifty years. He is an elected fellow of the Econometric Society, the Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Sciences), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2014, he was named a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. Often in collaboration with others, he has published over 300 academic articles and a dozen books.
I highly recommend reading the book, choosing those maxims that could be most beneficial for you and start applying them. This blog summarizes some that are particularly relevant for civil servants and development practitioners dealing with policy decisions. I hope it inspires you to read the book.
The power of keeping it simple
We tend to overcomplicate things and often get stuck when trying to think clearly about a real-world situation. The book suggests practical tools to overcome confusion.
To understand a situation better, take it to the extreme. Consider what would happen in the best-, and worst-case scenarios. This is something I do often, in public policy and daily life decisions. It helps you have a spectrum of options and consequent actions. Sometimes just knowing that the worst-case scenario isn’t as terrible as one might think, will give you perspective and clarity to move forward. This was the case when I decided to take the job as a minister or to plan a strategy for project execution anticipating bad outcomes and preparing for them.
An alternative could be to simplify a problem without losing its essence. You know that in Better Govs we are fans of keeping things as simple as possible, but not simpler. Spoiler alert, in the book you’ll find this Einstein quote and lots of wisdom related to this principle as a tool to help you think straight. For example, you could think of a simple case to start, just to get some momentum and then go back to the original circumstance with some perspective. This is the principle I’ve used when designing monitoring systems in government, for example. You’ve heard me before, dream big but start small.
The problem is, as Gary Orren said, “simplicity is common sense but not common practice”. The maxims in the book will help you think about how simplicity can be applied in Public Policy.
The problem is, as Gary Orren said, “simplicity is common sense but not common practice”. #ThinkingAnalytically Click To TweetMaking decisions in the public sector under uncertainty
If you’ve been working in the public sector, you know that one rarely has all the information required to make a decision. You have to make the best decisions you can with the available information, from different sources. The book discusses in detail how to make decisions in those situations.
Start with awareness. The world is much more uncertain than you think. The pandemic is training us well. The uncertainty we’ve felt in the past months has brought this maxim to reality. Recognizing that the world is an uncertain place can help us improve planning and consider different alternatives.
There was a reflection on the book from Atul Gawande, a renowned surgeon, writer, and public health leader, about uncertainty in medicine. I’ve added below because there are many parallels between public policy and medicine and the way we approach complex problems. This quote encapsulates eloquently the uncertainty we face in the public sector too.
“The core predicament of medicine— the thing that makes being a patient so wrenching, being a doctor so difficult, and being a part of a society that pays the bills they run up so vexing — is uncertainty. With all that we know nowadays about people and diseases and how to diagnose and treat them, it can be hard to see this, hard to grasp how deeply the uncertainty runs. As a doctor, you come to find, however, that the struggle for caring for people is more often with what you do not know than what you do. Medicine’s ground state is uncertainty. And wisdom — for both patients and doctors — is defined by how one copes with it.”
Atul Gawande
With such uncertainty, how do you think clearly? By thinking probabilistically about the world. I’ll talk about it in more detail on next week’s blog. The essence is that you assign and constantly assess and update probabilities of events occurring for effective decision making. This quote from Chris Robert summarizes it well: “What can I do to control an outcome? That’s the wrong question. What can I do to influence the odds? Now that’s productive”
How to improve decision making in uncertain situations… By thinking probabilistically about the world… Chris Robert summarizes it well: “What can I do to control an outcome? That’s the wrong question. What can I do to influence the… Click To TweetUnderstanding policy
The maxims regarding policymaking rely on basic economic principles. I would like to highlight one.
Elasticities are a powerful tool for understanding many important things in life. The main principle behind this maxim is the idea of thinking at the margin. In other words, what would be the value of adding an extra unit of something. On those days when there aren’t enough hours, would you rather have an extra hour of sleep or an extra hour of work? With time, I’ve learned that not sleeping enough ends up costing more hours of productivity in the long run.
Thinking Analytically
Thinking analytically is a skill. Like everything in life, the more you practice the better you would get at it. If you’ve been in a situation where you didn’t know what to do, without enough time to think through, then this book could help. Having a toolkit that you can apply in those situations could be lifesaving. It can help you gain perspective on something that might’ve been intuitive at first or to raise awareness on biases of your decision-making. The book’s purpose is to lead you to better understand the world around you, make smarter decisions, and ultimately live a more fulfilling life.
