How can governments use public inquiries to learn?
We love a public inquiry in Australia. Prime Minister Scott Morrison recently announced the fourth royal commission under his tenure, the Royal Commission into Defence and Veterans Suicide. It’s the 139th that’s been commissioned by the Australian Government since 1902, and certainly won’t be the last.
But what is the point of public inquiries?
Dr Alistair Stark defines public inquiries as “temporary working groups created, mandated and made independent by governments in order to fact-find, hold actors to account or develop policy lessons, [which] if implemented, should prevent future failures from reoccurring”.
This interests us at the Centre for Public Impact, because we believe that governments will work most effectively when they are constantly learning, adapting and improving. But are public inquiries achieving their purpose? Do they actually result in learning and improvement?
We decided to review some of the academic literature in the space, to better understand whether inquiries do support learning and improvement and, if not, how they might do so more effectively.
Inquiries do learn — but they learn in a specific way
In ‘Policy learning and the public inquiry’, Stark suggests that public inquiries are more effective at supporting learning and improvement in government than we may appreciate — it’s just that they prioritise and produce distinct types of learning.
Inquiries often produce significant amounts of what Stark calls ‘instrumental learning’. Through inquiries, governments are able to understand gaps in existing policy, and then revise or create new policy instruments, which improves future crisis preparedness.
The 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission (VBRC) is a good example of significant instrumental learning — the inquiry highlighted the various failures of bushfire warning systems, and recommended the implementation of an enhanced system for communicating bushfire warnings. In 2014, The Bushfire Royal Commission Implementation Monitor highlighted this learning — because of the enhanced system, ‘public information, warnings and advice are now far more comprehensive and concise than they were on Black Saturday’.
Stark also notes that, in addition to instrumental learning, public inquiries produce ‘cognitive organisational learning’. Through inquiries, people are able to improve their levels of coordination and communication, across organisational boundaries.
The VBRC also produced cognitive organisational learning. The Commission recommended an independent Fire Services Commissioner be created, to ensure bushfire responses were coordinated across emergency services organisations. In interviews with Stark, the Bushfire Implementation Monitor found that the creation of the role “for the first time really drew together a central point of authority and control”, which helped people working in emergency services understand “who’s in charge at any given time and where they should go for high-level decision-making”. In this way, cognitive organisational lesson-learning changed the emergency management policy space in Victoria “from a largely unsophisticated approach with silos, to a joined-up one — with everyone having responsibility”.
However, while public inquiries can be quite effective at supporting instrumental and cognitive learning, Stark points out that they tend not to support as much ‘value-orientated’ learning — inquiries don’t often bring radical changes in the values, assumptions and cultural norms that sit behind policy.
Stark suggests this is because of the pressure of implementation — inquiries focus on promoting more modest, achievable amendments to pre-existing policy systems, rather than “more radical changes to the values behind those systems”. One VBRC official summarised this tendency well: “we certainly never thought that it was our job to get [recommendations] implemented, but it was our job to make them implementable.”
According to Stark, this is a shortcoming of the current approach. He argues that public inquiries should be aiming to strike a balance between easier to achieve, implementable lessons that might not question fundamental values (instrumental and cognitive organisational learning), and “potentially contentious, but perhaps more meaningful” value-oriented reforms.
So what does the literature say about how public inquiries might support learning and improvement more effectively?
Inquiries must be structured to explicitly prioritise learning
Researchers from King’s College London in the report ‘Learning the Right Lessons for the Next Pandemic: How to design public inquiries into the UK government’s handling of COVID-19’ argue that running two separate inquiries could allow for greater lesson-learning.
The researchers explain that inquiries often fail to learn lessons because of the competing need to attribute blame. This is largely unhelpful because big disasters are not necessarily caused by big mistakes, but are more often the result of a ‘chain of errors’ built into systems, procedures and cultures.
The report therefore suggests that running two separate inquiries would better ensure the competing priorities of lesson learning and attributing blame are given proper time, resources and fit-for-purpose processes. The first of the two inquiries would be focused primarily on lesson-learning, and the other would be designed as a fact-finding, accountability-focused, and public trust-restoring inquiry. The authors make the following suggestions:
- The lesson-learning inquiry should be initiated, coordinated and funded by reputable organisations with subject matter expertise (not necessarily government bodies) who could act as “credible knowledge-brokers”.
- The second inquiry would have a narrower focus on actors, allegations and disputed facts.
- Both inquiries should set their terms of reference up front, outlining the different guiding purposes and specific questions that each inquiry should answer. The terms of reference shouldn’t be so broad that the inquiry “becomes overloaded and unable to report sufficiently swiftly”. On the other hand, the terms of reference shouldn’t be so narrowly defined that “issues at the heart of the problem cannot be investigated properly”.
However, the report is largely silent as to how inquiries can bring value-oriented learning — the authors focus on outlining ways in which inquiries can bring about more tangible (i.e. instrumental and cognitive organisational) learning.
Perhaps we need to structure inquiries up front to bring about value-oriented learning. Both Stark and the authors of this report talk about competing priorities getting in the way of learning. The authors of this report suggest running two separate inquiries, and setting terms of references up front, to ensure proper attention is given to competing priorities. As highlighted in Stark’s interviews with the VBRC, value-oriented learning is often overlooked — so why shouldn’t we, in a similar vein, create distinct spaces for value-oriented learning to emerge?
Inquiries should make learning central
While people have been skeptical about public inquiries, the literature that we’ve reviewed suggests that they do indeed support learning. They consistently create changes in policy (instrumental learning), and often help people understand their role in complex, inter-organisational systems (cognitive learning).
However, they rarely question the values, mindsets and cultures underpinning our systems (value-oriented learning). From our perspective at the Centre for Public Impact, this is a shortcoming, because in complex environments we need to continuously learn and adapt. The dominant values, mindsets and cultures embedded in government may contribute to a false sense of certainty, for example — they might lead us to believe that a detailed plan will equip us to respond to future crises. But in order to learn and adapt, questioning those assumptions, and being more comfortable with uncertainty, is critical.
It does appear that we can reorient inquiries to support learning. We need to explicitly structure inquiries up front, to allow them the time, resources and space to learn. We’re still exploring the question of how inquiries might better enable value-oriented learning, and would really welcome your input, to develop the conversation:
- How are organisations currently enabling the learning of value-oriented lessons?
- What might a separate inquiry for value-oriented learning look like?
- What types of value-oriented questions in an inquiries’ terms of reference could we ask — about values, assumptions and cultural norms?
Inquiries are crucial to restoring public trust in the aftermath of a crisis. They’re a way for governments to publicly show where things went wrong, and how they might improve. This requires governments to be vulnerable — admitting that sometimes, they might not have all the answers. But as we’ve written before — this opens the door to learning:
“Crucially, saying “I don’t know” doesn’t mean that nothing can be done. To the contrary, it broadens our minds to recognize the wealth of possibilities outside the traditional toolbox and (somewhat counter-intuitively) increases the chance of achieving more together.”
