# An adaptive mindset—shaping the world, not merely observing it

Fitness
When addressing a policy or strategy challenge, individuals respond differently. Each person examines the situation based on their strengths and comfort levels, approaching it accordingly. For instance, some may consider their mindset and ask how the policy should be viewed, what has been done previously, and how to approach it differently or similarly.
Another individual might focus on their skills, such as economics, data analysis, policy writing, or interpersonal abilities, applying these assets to the policy challenge. Additionally, there are always numerous and evolving tools available for policymaking. So policy fitness required these three distinct layers: mindset, skillset, and toolset.
The challenge and opportunity lie in utilising all three layers effectively.
In this new era of policy development, it is essential to determine which mindsets make a difference in the policymaking process, the necessary skill sets (including experiential skills), and the appropriate tool sets.
Although not exhaustive, this combination of mindsets, skill sets, and tool sets serves as a starting point for creating value in policy endeavors.
An adaptive mindset—shaping the world, not merely observing it
Embracing a new approach to designing and delivering policy requires new processes, new tools, and new skills. However, shifting the way we do things will never on its own be sufficient; we also need new ways of being—new values, beliefs and values which guide how public servants do their work.

In order to bring about the shifts we’ve described above, we need new mindsets or mental models. In their paper The Water of Systems Change,
John Kania, Mark Kramer and Peter Senge describe mental models as follows:
“Habits of thought - deeply held beliefs and assumptions and taken-for-granted ways of operating that influence how we think, what we do, and how we talk.”
The table below offers some ideas around the kinds of mindset shifts required:
WORKSHOP TITLE
PURPOSE
“If I follow a good process, I will be able to implement a policy with absolute fidelity”
“I need a process, which I will hold lightly, in order to respond to new information and circumstances as they arise”
“I can control outcomes”
“I can create the conditions for good outcomes to emerge”
“Evidence and data will enable me to comprehensively understand the situation”
“We can never fully understand a complex system, so the evidence and data will support an ongoing process of learning and course correction”
“The role of government is to know the answers and deliver programs”
“The role of the government is to build relationships and partner with others, or give the work back to those best placed, to do the work that needs to be done”
“Not knowing is weakness”
“Humility is power”
Image by Alex Carebi

How do you shift mindsets? There are many ways. Kania, Kramer and
Senge highlight the role that narrative plays in supporting a shift in mental models. Disrupting dominant narratives can be a powerful way to begin shifting people’s mindsets. Donella Meadows, who uses the language of mindsets and paradigms interchangeably, offers the following:
“So how do you change paradigms?…you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep coming yourself, and loudly and with assurance from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.”
We also know that there is a bi-directional relationship between shifts in ways of doing and being. Mindsets often shift when people experiment with new ways of doing their work. The shifts in being and doing can— and often do—happen concurrently.
Open and closed mode thinking
Iain McGilchrist wrote a provocative book in 2010 called The Master And
His Emissary: The Divided Brain And The Making Of The Western World. There, he encouraged us to start focusing on the fact that humans feature two hemispheres to their brain. His argument was that this duality suggests a multiplicity of modes of experience and dispositions towards the world which can be harnessed to grow in our relationships to that world.
Sometimes, these different modes are engaged in a power struggle or we ignore one to the others’ peril. Either way, this limits our existence and progress. When we recognise and embrace the full cranial repertoire at our disposal, we alternatively provide a powerful engine to fuel human possibilities. In his words “The kind of attention we pay actually alters the world: we are, literally, partners in creation” (2010:18).
The world of policymaking is no different. Being able to tap the full capacity of our neurological networks should yield better payoffs in terms of fuelling possibilities and generating new freedoms and options.

How well are we currently doing in harnessing our cranial repertoire? The mainstream policymaking process is heavily dominated by the disciplines of economics, law and science. Yet we know that creativity and the arts are powerful and important to human endeavors. They can also be intrinsic to political and policy life. How did one set of ideas and disciplines crowd out others? Why have we tended to privatise creativity to the personal realm instead of its public face?
There are many stories that might be told to attempt to respond to these questions. That we privilege certain sorts of knowledge and evidence
(Althaus 2020), that our political and policy systems seek control because uncertainty is intolerable and viewed as incompetence or irresponsible
(Hamill 2013), that we have been captured by seductive models that suggest we can impose simple frameworks to tame the world (Pusey 1991).
For now, let’s put those stories aside to focus on movements we see by modern public services and servants to recalibrate the balance.
The Creative Bureaucracy movement and its associated Creative
Bureaucracy Festival is one such initiative spawned by Charles Landry and Margie Caust (2017) that encourages the harnessing of all human perspectives and capacities to improve policymaking for the 21st century.
Scholarly and practical work on narrative based policymaking is another movement that has kickstarted creativity in important ways across the policymaking spectrum. This reality can be extremely powerful for policymaking (see, e.g. Roe 1994; and Borins 2011). Public administrators can use narrative techniques to reframe problems and connect decision makers and affected parties to ways to make sense of what is happening at any given point (see Dickinson et al. 2018 who describe storytelling as a necessary skill for the twenty-first-Century public servant). Narrative also allows diverse stories to surface, thereby facilitating ways to understand why conflict and consensus might be present and how to navigate through such conflict and consensus (see, e.g. the work of Le Baron Duryea and
Potts 1993). These are important tools. Collective sense-making and a path forward through emotional and intellectual dimensions of policy are critical to public administration and policymaking success.
The ability to establish clearly shared understandings and empathic insights as to how a policy is framed and solutions put forward can shift the
 dial on policy progress. Antagonism can turn to empathy, brick walls can turn to possibilities and ignorance can turn to conversation.
Meanwhile in functional policy areas such as health, education, housing, justice to name but a few, we are seeing deliberate deployment of ideas and processes beyond conventional analytical, critical thinking to generate new options to meet community needs and aspirations. Links between the arts and human well-being are well documented. Crawford (2018) argues that the arts act as a “shadow health service”. Certain forms of music, singing, dancing, museum and gallery visiting, as well as visual thinking strategies present options to be more inclusive, to value diversity, to establish social bonding and connect people together in new ways that they find joyful and life-giving rather than threatening.
A turn to the possibilities offered by imagination, creativity and letting go of control involves tapping different mindsets and skills. Here, we call this method open mode thinking.
Whereas the conventional closed mode policymaking skillset stresses technical expertise, critical thinking and problem diagnosis with a view to coming to a solution, open modes of thinking suggest different pathways into and across the policymaking process (Chu 2017). Closed modes focus on predictability, analytical judgements and coming to single-solution precision, with policymaking largely a technocratic endeavor. Open mode works with unpredictability, preferencing imagination, multiple possibilities, blue-sky and no-wrong-answer thinking, iterative prototyping, improvisation, co-creation and empathic connection to make progress on policy challenges and developing innovations.
Facts and figures can exist as independent knowledge to some degree in that they need to be explained and bridged to the context of the knower.
Narrative, on the other hand, automatically and inevitably reaches into the depth of the knower and their world. Narrative connects. Our emotions— and often our senses—are engaged and not just our intellects. Cairney et al. (2016) argue that unlike the use of evidence to reduce uncertainty, this aspect of policymaking is about using persuasion to reduce ambiguity.
Using emotional appeals that turn to “…emotions, gut feelings, deeply held beliefs and habits” (Cairney et al.2016, 399) is as much a part of the
 policymaking endeavour as having recourse to hierarchies of “rational” evidence to inform problem definition and analysis. Political and policy leadership is thus concerned with performance. Sometimes this requires entertainment, but political and policy performance demands authenticity.
While many political and policy actors think carefully about how they will establish authenticity with respect to expertise and evidence, the arts remind us that authenticity requires as much care with emotions if this expertise and evidence is going to hold sway.
The policymaking endeavor needs both open and closed mode thinking.
While the (re)calibration of open to closed mode balance might shift, more or less, depending on the policy issue in question, overall we know that more emphasis is needed across conventional policy spaces towards open mode thinking. This is because the world around us has grown in complexity and VUCA2 realities. In order to confront these realities, we can either try to tame the world around us somehow or we grow the complexity of mind we hold internally in order to confront and respond with greater emergent confidence.
When open mode thinking is added to traditional policy analysis, new options open up and unforeseen opportunities begin to arise that are often unanticipated but positive. While they may or may not be a solution in themselves, open mode processes can inject powerful additives, or modes of expression and accomplishment, into the policymaking toolkit.
In the Australian setting, we are aware that parts of public services are adopting unique strategies to help create “under the radar” spaces for open mode thinking. For example, we know that certain groups of public servants are being “shielded” by levels above them in the hierarchy in order to create time and space for these innovators to engage in more playful and open-mode endeavors. These shielded teams are winning public sector innovation awards. While on the one hand this is an ingenious device to assist bureaucracies to generate new options and approaches, it is also sobering that our institutional fabric is not yet woven to embrace the entire continuum across closed to open modes of thinking and practice.
2 Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity, a lens that organisations can use to interpret their challenges and opportunities

Are there more open approaches to embracing all elements? If not, we may end up stifled in the grips of a closed mode prison of our own making. “In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets” (Mekas n.d.).
Balancing efficiency with efficacy
It is worth noting the old adage that you get what you measure. Our
Australian public sectors were, broadly speaking, initially established as simple rules of administration and obedience to direction. Nowhere in these early foundations do you find the “why” or purpose. Later in the 1999 Act we see a full values statement along with two interesting requirements that have dominated public sector culture ever since: efficiency and effectiveness.
Having the language of efficiency and effectiveness in the public service is appropriate, but it needs to be balanced with purpose and outcomes.
But when you look to the foundational frameworks of the Australian Public
Service, where is the reference to purpose, to outcomes, or to the intended goals for society, the economy or people more broadly? Surely success in public sectors should be predominantly measured in the resulting human outcomes? By embedding efficiency and effectiveness without explicitly embedding the intended impact on humans, we believe we have and have experienced the impact of a phantom “master”: the assumed and unrelenting master of blind financial prudence, with increasingly diminishing returns, usually and increasingly at the cost of all other goals or outcomes.
On the one hand, it seems obvious that if you want to do something, especially with public funds raised from taxpayers, that you should try to be efficient and effective. But on the other hand, efficient and effective as stated goals in isolation from other goals are a little tricky because they beg the question: to what end? Anyone can be 100% efficient in that if you give them nothing, they can do nothing. We always hear “there isn’t budget for that”, but the fact is, there is a substantial amount of money involved in the public sector and it is more a matter of prioritisation than availability.