4. What is a Challenge Session?
“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off
every once in a while, or the light won't come in.” – Isaac Asimov
A Challenge Session is an event which focuses on a particular
FCO policy, and invites a panel of experts and non-experts in to
challenge it over a discussion.
5. How do they work?
The “Home Side” consists
of the relevant director and
one or two departmental
experts, often the Head of
Department and/or a
Research Analyst. These
additional participants are
there to provide information;
it is the director who is
being challenged.
The “Away Team” consists of
3-4 trusted outside experts
and non-experts. These
might include a Director from
a different part of the FCO, a
senior civil servant from
another department, an
academic, and people from
the business or NGO
communities.
6. How do they work?
1. Introductions, and “rules of the game” from the Chair
2. Home Team to briefly describe the policy being challenged
3. Initial comments from members of the Away Team
4. Brief response from Home Team. Free flowing discussion –
but with the Away Team doing most of the talking
5. Closing points from Away Team
6. Brief summary from the Chair and/or the “home” Director
Why do we need to open up foreign policy? Because we need to stay informed. We have more access to information than we’ve ever had before. And so does everybody else. We want UK Government to know when revolutions are breaking out, when advocacy campaigns have gone viral and to be able to get our information out to where its needed. As the Foreign Secretary has said previously:“Relations between states are now no longer monopolised by Foreign Secretaries or Prime Ministers. There is now a mass of connections between individuals, civil society, businesses, pressure groups and charitable organisations which are also part of the relations between nations and which are being rapidly accelerated by the internet.” In fact the nature of our work has always been totally externally facing and built on opening up relationships and channels of communication with others.
So far on our OPM journey we’re innovating in several ways: [next slide]
We’re embracing challenge. We need to develop policy with users at the heart of it. How many times have you seen a policy announcement in the press and thought, I would do that differently. Thinking about yourself, what is it about you that your circumstances that you think a civil servant in Whitehall simply might not understand? How much do you think it costs to rectify a mistake at the design stage, compared to the implementation stage? [Pause] The answer is that the cost is multiplied by a factor of 100 if you spot a mistake in the phase of implementation rather than when you’re designing policy. On the flip side, we all know the reasons why its simply not possible for all of us as government officials to understand the circumstances of every carer, child, immigrant, artist, fisherman... in the UK. Or in our case every sheikh, president, guerrilla army, entrepreneur or farmer whom our international policies may be affecting or trying to affect. So our primary tools for addressing this are: inviting in credible and knowledgeable outsiders; and increasing our own capacity to think creatively, ask different questions and challenge the status quo. When developing foreign policy we need to teach people how to think the unthinkable, to imagine crises that have not yet happened and to put themselves in the position of people they may have never encountered. [Start animation] We’ve done this in a few ways- and the method I’m here to talk about today are our FCO Challenge sessions, which involve inviting in panels of experts to work with a team to offer their knowledge and challenge existing policy.
