There are tried and tested ways a policy entrepreneurial Commission official can get an important proposal adopted without the hierarchy being any of the wiser.
Here are some of the most effective techniques I know:
- Give the proposal a long and technical title. When dealing with a chemical, use the technical name and stick in strange-looking codes. This will help make sure the proposal is not easy to find.
- Put anything important in the proposal into the Annex. Remember, people don’t like reading, and those doing the political safeguarding and checking are unlikely to have the time or fortitude to work their way through to the Annexes.
- Make sure that you don’t declare your eDecide planning entry as ‘politically sensitive’. That brings you extra work and scrutiny.
- The best time to launch a proposal is late on a Friday around the holiday. Hopefully, your counterparts will just miss it.
- If you know someone who wants to give a negative opinion of your initiative, try to launch when they are on holiday, preferably somewhere with bad Wi-Fi.
- Make sure the language you use to describe your proposal is non-descript. Hopefully, the blandness of your writing will induce deep sleep.
- Cloud any extra resources the Commission/Agencies will be forced to carry for decades to implement the proposal. If DG Budget find out, they’ll block it.
- For anything important, put it at the bottom of page 8.
- Hope that your counterparts in other DGs who are against your proposal are ultra busy on something else when you launch your proposal for adoption.
- Hope that any of your opponents outside the Commission are sleeping when you launch. Your ideal is that they have no realistic proposal against yours, with no data or evidence to knock it down.
- Ideally, those who don’t want your proposal, are not known or trusted by the Inter-Service Steering Group or lead officials in the Cabinets. If that’s the case, you are nearly there.
- And, if they can’t communicate, and are stuck in technical jargon, the Cabinets are unlikely to understand what they are writing, and so ignore them.
- You certainly don’t want anyone altering the Sec-Gen desk officer or Cabinet lead that what seems innocent is in direct contradiction to the Commission’s own Political Guidelines on political sensitivity.
- You are seen by the small group of officials in the Services, especially the Sec-Gen and Cabinets, as straightforward, honest and reliable. You can get a lot carried through by goodwill alone.
- The more technical and politically awkward an issue is, the fewer people will want to second-guess you.
- Certain times of year are best to launch: Xmas, Easter, and before the summer vacation.
- Could you make sure it is an A Point? An issue so innocuous and low-key it gets adopted without ever being seen by the Commissioners.
If you deploy all, there is little that can stop you.