Occasionally, you’ll face a proposal that is away with the fairies. It is the sort of proposal designed to solve a non-problem or a proposal whose intended and non-intended consequences will be detrimental to the interests that the author intends to solve.
Wherever ambitious politicians or civil servants exist, there is always the risk of a proposal going off the rails of reason. Brexit is a good example – making a country poorer and less free got tabled and adopted. Dan Heath’s Upstream lists more examples.
The good news is the Commission has filters built in to deal with evidence-free problems. It is called Better Regulation. The Regulatory Scrutiny Board are there to call out the evidence-free or evidence-weak proposals. Even then, their veto can be overridden by Commissioners.
What can you do
In case you face an initiative that is dealing with a non-problem issue, here are some practical things you can do:
- Eternal vigilance. You need to be vigilant. Just because an idea has no bearing, in reality, does not mean it can’t be tabled.
- Filter the output of Academica and the public policy community. That’s a good place to find non-problem issues germinating.
- Develop a robust, evidence-rich, and credible briefing that the non-problem issue highlighted by someone is not a problem.
- Have your answer in your filing cabinet. One day, when you least expect, the non-problem issue will come up.
- If you want to cut off the debate early on, see if a god-like expert can join the debate in the pages of the academic-public policy-press. Hopefully, their intervention will be clear and forceful enough to close down any future discussion.
- Engage in the public policy debate. Silence is not an option.
- If a study says something you disagree with, commission the best study by independent gods and publish the results.
- Engage early. The longer an issue is in the public arena, the higher the risk of it being taken up.
- Ensure the non-problem issue does not get into the new Commission’s Political Guidelines and Mission Letter.
- Address the issue not from the perspective of your values but from the perspective of the decision-makers’s values.
- Present your case visually. Data and words alone are seldom enough.
- Present your position with clear language, metaphors and analogies. The reason why a non-problem issue has got so far is likely due to the power of clear communication.
- Have the world’s experts at hand and available to present their evidence.
- Follow most of the suggestions in this post.