Civil Servants: The Unique Leadership Pathway
Civil services day is celebrated every year on the 21st of April. So on this day, we ask: how is the civil service different from other professions like engineering and medicine?
The pathway to become a leader is different. In conventional professions like engineering and medicine the pathway is funnel-shaped where one starts as a generalist and becomes more and more specialized. In contrast, in the civil services the leadership pathway is hourglass shaped!
In the lower bulb of the hourglass, civil servants start as generalists, gain concentration in a few domains in the neck and, finally, become expert-generalists in the upper bulb. Let us see how this happens in their careers.
Lower bulb (generalists)
In the lower bulb, civil servants make decisions in the field “by doing things again and again, failing, succeeding … getting a feel for a problem, learning when to go by the book and when to ‘stretch’ the rules”. This is stored in their mind as know how and know what to make sound judgments and good practice.
Whenever faced with a new problem or challenge, civil servants look for common elements in the new decision situation to their memory of past similar experiences. This similarity becomes the starting point for understanding and acting in the new situation. Over time, civil servants acquire a rich and diverse bag of experiences and this enables them to quickly draw upon near-similar experiences and make faster and better decisions.
Neck (domain concentration, not specialization)
At senior levels, merely recycling ones’ particular experiences is not enough. What is required is to make ones’ own (and others) experiences more usable to fix stuff when stuck, understand the implications of actions in the wider political economy and to innovate. This comes by arranging experiences and ideas on a network of models. Mental models work as follows:
“Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts (or experiences) and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience both vicarious and direct on this latticework of models … You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.” - Charlie Munger
Models add value to experiences in the following ways:
Understanding the implications of actions in the wider political economy - Models empower civil servants to get to know in advance who has a stake, what each group or individual wants, how much they care, and how much influence they have on others. Such visualization helps civil servants to assess and predict the nature and extent of support or resistance to the policy.
Move ahead when stuck - Models tell what works, what does not, and under what conditions. So, it is easy to quickly understand what is holding up implementation on the ground and take corrective action. In other words, one gets to know how to fix bugs when policies are implemented on ground.
The next question is: why do civil servants often complain that models are not useful in real life decision-making (pejoratively called gyan)?
One reason is that they do not know the right models and, second, even if they know the right model, they are unable to connect the right model with the right experience.
Upper bulb (expert generalists)
Having practiced to connect the right model(s) to experiences, civil servants move on to the upper bulb. Here, they step back and take a wide angle view to connect experiences, fields, ideas and problems, hitherto thought to be unrelated. This leads to innovative thinking and practices.
The message for civil servants is that experiences in field postings will only take you so far. Recycling of experiences leads to jaded decision-making. What is required is to organize experiences on a network of models. This requires a lifelong quest to learn models and connect them to the right experience.
