Challenge the Norms: Creating Better Public Policy Through Better Questions

Policy teams are usually asked to provide answers. Their greatest value may lie in improving the question.

A poorly framed question can direct months of intelligent work towards the wrong problem. It can embed a preferred solution, exclude important perspectives and turn assumptions into constraints before analysis begins. The work that follows may be rigorous, but rigour cannot rescue a question that has already narrowed the field too far.

Challenging the norms does not mean rejecting everything that exists. It means becoming more deliberate about which assumptions deserve to survive.

Questions shape the available choices

Consider the difference between these questions:

“How do we improve compliance with the process?”

“How do we achieve the outcome the process was designed to support?”

The first assumes that compliance is the central problem. The second creates space to examine whether the process remains useful, whether people understand it and whether a different approach could produce the same assurance.

The wording of a commission often contains a hidden theory of the problem. A request to “raise awareness” assumes people are not acting because they lack information. A request to “strengthen governance” assumes performance is weak because coordination or oversight is insufficient. A request for “more training” assumes a capability gap rather than unclear incentives, workload or poor system design.

Any of these assumptions may be correct. They should not be accepted without examination simply because they appear in the original brief.

Curiosity is a professional discipline

Curiosity can sound like a personal quality: some people are naturally inquisitive and others less so. In policy work, it is a discipline that can be designed into the process.

Teams can ask what evidence would change their current view. They can seek out people who experience the system differently. They can examine where the problem is absent and what those exceptions reveal. They can distinguish between a legal constraint, a political choice, a resource limit and a habit that has acquired the status of a rule.

These questions interrupt institutional memory. Government organisations carry lessons from previous attempts, which is valuable. But the lesson remembered is not always the lesson that should have been learned. A failed initiative may be summarised as “that approach does not work” when the real issue was timing, leadership, implementation or a particular design choice.

Curiosity allows the organisation to use history without becoming trapped by it.

Constructive challenge needs trust

Questions can improve thinking or create defensiveness. The difference often lies in intent, timing and relationship.

Challenge is least useful when it is performed to demonstrate intelligence after a team has invested months in an approach. At that stage, people have reputational and emotional reasons to defend the work. The same question asked early may have been welcomed.

Leaders should therefore invite challenge before positions harden. They can use structured reviews, red teams and pre-mortems to make critical examination part of the work rather than a personal intervention.

The person asking the question also matters. A question delivered with curiosity sounds different from one delivered as a concealed accusation. “What led us to this conclusion?” opens inquiry. “Why on earth have we done this?” may contain the same substantive concern but reduces the chance of receiving an honest answer.

Psychological safety and high standards belong together here. People need to know that ideas can be questioned without their competence being put on trial.

Ask who is missing

Policy is often developed through the perspectives easiest for the organisation to access.

Senior stakeholders attend meetings. Established organisations respond to consultations. Professional groups can translate their concerns into the language of policy. People with less time, confidence or institutional access may remain underrepresented even when the policy affects them most.

A better question is not simply “who have we consulted?” It is “whose experience could materially change our understanding, and have we created a realistic way for them to contribute?”

This may require different methods. A formal consultation document is not equally accessible to everyone. Frontline observation, interviews, user research and work through trusted intermediaries may reveal information that a written response does not.

Engagement should not be an exercise in demonstrating coverage. It is a way of testing the model of the problem.

Ask what behaviour the policy expects

Many interventions depend on people behaving differently, but policy discussions remain focused on structures, powers and funding.

A new entitlement may depend on eligible people recognising themselves in the description and trusting the route to access it. Guidance may depend on thousands of professionals interpreting language consistently. A market intervention may assume providers will respond in a particular way. A reform may require managers to surrender control or share information.

Teams should ask: who must do what differently, and why would they?

This question brings behavioural insight into the centre of policy design. It encourages attention to friction, incentives, identity, habit and trust. It also exposes where the policy relies on goodwill or capacity that has not been secured.

In work spanning housing, energy and public service reform, I repeatedly saw that a policy’s formal logic could be strong while its behavioural assumptions remained weak. The people affected do not experience the policy as a submission or strategy. They experience a letter, conversation, form, price, deadline or decision.

Ask what could go wrong without becoming paralysed

Challenge can become excessive. Teams can generate so many risks and caveats that action becomes impossible.

The purpose of questioning is not to remove uncertainty. It is to identify which uncertainties should affect the decision.

A useful approach is to ask which assumptions are both important and uncertain. These deserve evidence, testing or contingency planning. Less important uncertainties can be monitored. Some risks must simply be accepted because the cost of eliminating them would exceed the likely harm.

Leaders need to signal that a well-reasoned decision can proceed without perfect confidence. Otherwise, the demand for challenge quietly becomes a demand for certainty that no policy team can provide.

Better questions improve leadership as well as policy

Senior leaders shape the quality of organisational thinking through the questions they repeatedly ask.

If every review begins with “are we on track?”, teams will focus on presenting control. If leaders ask “what have we learned that should change the plan?”, adaptation becomes legitimate. If the first response to an idea is “has anybody else done this?”, precedent becomes the main test. If leaders ask “what would a proportionate test look like?”, experimentation becomes possible.

Questions communicate priorities more powerfully than many formal statements. They reveal what the leader genuinely values.

Challenge the norm, not for its own sake

Public institutions need continuity. Established processes often contain wisdom, legal protection and safeguards created in response to real failures. Novelty is not automatically improvement.

The goal is not to replace inherited practice with constant disruption. It is to know why the practice exists, whether the context has changed and what evidence would justify a different approach.

Better policy does not begin with a more confident answer. It begins with a question that is open enough to reveal the real problem and precise enough to support action.

Challenging the norms is therefore not an act of rebellion. It is an act of public service: refusing to let familiar language prevent the organisation from seeing what citizens, users and delivery partners already experience.