Why Government Needs More Creativity, Not More Consultancy
Government has no shortage of capable people. The challenge is creating the time, confidence and conditions for them to think differently and solve difficult public problems.
Government does not suffer from a shortage of intelligent people. It suffers from a shortage of time and permission to think.
Across central government, local authorities and public bodies, talented people spend their days managing urgent demands, responding to senior stakeholders, preparing decisions and keeping essential services moving. The work matters, and much of it cannot wait. Yet the cumulative effect is that the urgent repeatedly displaces the important. Teams become excellent at responding, but find less space to step back, question assumptions and imagine a different approach.
When a problem becomes serious enough, the conventional answer is often to buy more capacity. A consultancy is commissioned, a team arrives, a programme begins and a new set of recommendations is produced. Sometimes that is exactly what is needed. External expertise can bring pace, specialist knowledge and independent challenge. But consultancy cannot compensate indefinitely for an organisation that has lost the space to think for itself.
The deeper need is often not more consultancy. It is more creativity.
Creativity is disciplined problem solving
Creativity in government is sometimes treated as a soft extra: something associated with away days, colourful notes or a lively facilitator. That misunderstands its value. Creativity is the disciplined ability to see a problem differently, challenge the assumptions surrounding it, generate more than one credible response and test those responses before committing significant time or money.
That is not the opposite of rigour. It is one of the foundations of rigour.
A team that moves immediately from problem to preferred solution may appear decisive, but it is carrying hidden risk. It may have accepted the wrong definition of the problem. It may be repeating a familiar intervention because that intervention is easy to describe, not because it is likely to work. It may have ignored the experience of users, delivery teams or organisations outside its usual network.
Creative problem solving slows down the initial jump to an answer. It asks: what are we assuming? Whose perspective is missing? What would have to be true for this option to succeed? Where has a similar problem been approached differently? What could we test cheaply before building something at scale?
These are practical questions. They improve policy, delivery and value for money.
Why capable organisations become less creative
Government’s constraints are real. Ministers need answers quickly. Elected leaders face public and media scrutiny. Accounting officers must manage risk. Local authorities operate with limited resources and rising demand. Diplomatic organisations work across cultures and political sensitivities. Nobody can simply suspend these pressures in the name of innovation.
The problem is that pressure changes how people think. It narrows attention. It encourages reliance on familiar patterns and proven processes. It rewards answers that feel defensible now, even when a less conventional approach might deliver more value later.
Hierarchy can reinforce the effect. Junior colleagues learn to anticipate what senior leaders are likely to accept. Senior leaders are shown a progressively narrower range of options. Challenge becomes something that happens before a meeting rather than inside it. The organisation may still contain diverse views, but those views are filtered into a familiar shape.
This is not a criticism of the people involved. It is a predictable response to the system around them.
During eleven years in Whitehall, I saw many examples of extraordinary public servants solving difficult problems under pressure. In housing, immigration, education and energy, people frequently had to build workable responses from incomplete evidence and competing objectives. During periods of crisis, multidisciplinary teams could move with remarkable speed. Yet crisis also revealed the cost of having too little thinking time before the crisis arrived. When organisations are permanently busy, they become dependent on urgency to create permission for change.
What useful external support looks like
The answer is not to reject outside support. It is to use it differently.
External practitioners can create value by bringing a fresh perspective, introducing methods that a team has not used before and making it safer to question established assumptions. Someone who understands government can help a group move quickly without spending months learning the context. They can also hold the process while internal leaders take part in the thinking, rather than having to facilitate and contribute at the same time.
But the purpose should be to unlock the organisation’s own capability, not replace it.
This is the principle behind Citizenry’s idea of bringing the best of outside, inside. Experienced people work alongside public servants to help them examine the problem, create options and make decisions. The knowledge developed through the work remains with the organisation. The methods are visible. Internal colleagues participate in the analysis rather than receiving it at the end.
That approach is less theatrical than the classic consultancy reveal. It is also more sustainable.
Creating the conditions for better ideas
Creativity does not require a complete cultural transformation before it can begin. Leaders can create better conditions through a few deliberate choices.
First, separate problem exploration from solution selection. Give teams permission to understand the issue before asking for a recommendation. A tightly framed commission can still allow genuine exploration if the question is open enough.
Second, invite challenge before positions harden. It is easier to question an assumption in the first week than to challenge a fully developed proposal after months of work. Red teaming, pre-mortems and structured peer review can normalise disagreement without making it personal.
Third, involve the people who experience or deliver the policy. The most useful insight is often already present at the frontline, but has not travelled through the organisation in a form that decision-makers can use.
Fourth, test ideas earlier. A prototype, scenario or small-scale trial can reveal more than another round of abstract debate. Testing is not an admission that leaders lack confidence. It is a way of earning confidence.
Finally, protect some time for thought. This sounds obvious, but it is rarely treated as operationally important. Thinking time is often the first activity removed from a busy diary, even though the quality of every later decision depends on it.
Better government starts with better questions
Government will always need specialist advice and additional capacity. There will be moments when only an external team can provide the pace, independence or expertise required. The mistake is to assume that every complex problem is primarily a capacity problem.
Often, the organisation already has much of what it needs: knowledge of the system, commitment to the mission, relationships with stakeholders and people who understand where previous attempts have failed. What is missing is a process that allows those assets to be combined differently.
Creativity is not about making government less serious. It is about taking public problems seriously enough to look beyond the first acceptable answer.
The best external support does not arrive with the cleverest idea in the room. It creates the conditions in which the people responsible for the problem can generate, test and own better ideas themselves.