Elected officials and civil servants: Different clockspeeds or different rhythms?
The popular stereotype of running any democratic country involves civil servants, who represent continuity and stability, and politicians, who represent the tug and pull of politics as usual. Civil servants can be seen either as a benign steadying influence, or bureaucrats who bog down any attempts at change, but politicians are nearly universally seen as having the attention span of caffeinated squirrels, with one eye on the poll results and the other on social media.
This is sometimes explained simply as a difference of clock speeds, where civil service would run by calendar if it could but keeps being interrupted by elected officials whose attention is directed by the news cycle. While it is true that daily politics produce a lot of impulses that influence elected officials, who must prove themselves to the electorate regularly, most political parties also have key policy aspirations and core tenets of their platforms that may remain essentially unchanged over generations. At the same time, civil service operates in cycles that repeat annually and over parliamentary terms, but also has interruptions that result from inside the organization or from external impulses other than politics. A simple dichotomy of one being “long-term” and the other “short-term” is not accurate.
This difference is better described as a difference of rhythms. One rhythm (civil service) is more predictable, mostly steady and many normal core functions happen on annual cycles. The other (elected officials) can speed up unexpectedly or slow down to a near stop during an impasse or an interregnum. Important things happen in politics in a rapid pace, sometimes on daily or even hourly basis, but similarly important are multi-year cycles such as regular elections.
Serious crises seem to unify rhythms, as the pace is then set by external factors. But how could the rhythms be better synchronized during normal times? Maybe the solution is not forcing one side to conform fully to the rhythm of the other but a sufficient degree of disconnection. Ballroom dancing requires precise synchronicity, techno music is danced to mostly in splendid individual isolation, so maybe disco is the answer? Or those peerless 1960s dance styles, like the Monster Mash or the Twist? A willingness to dance together is needed, there is a degree of connection and reaction, but precise synchronization is not required for success.
What does this mean for foresight and long-term thinking in general? Foresight professionals’ particular problem is that they are often the third party in this dance. Other two dancers are dependent on each other and connected in many ways, but a foresight professional can be outside the core functions of both civil service and elected bodies and considered secondary by both. There are two basic ways to escape the periphery: Try to move to the core or embrace the advantages of periphery. Moving to the core and becoming integrated into either party, of which civil service is often seen as the more desirable destination, represents institutionalization and permanence but has downsides as well. The function of foresight can remain peripheral, which causes it to fare badly in internal competition for new and existing resources.
Like often in life, there is no perfect solution. Embracing the periphery means precarity but also freedom. Doing foresight on the side, or outside of established structures in a think-tank or a consultancy can feel like being permanently excluded from the core but offers freedom to reinvent methods and repurpose information to bring the two main partners together.
As for the long-term thinking, an important fact about it is that while it aims for the long term, it is current work, and hard work at that. This means that it has best chances of bearing fruit if it is scheduled to fit into both parties’ short- and long-term cycles. Annual planning, legislative calendar, electoral cycle and others all dictate whether the right people with the right schedule and the right mindset can get around the table. Planners of long-term thinking processes may have to plan for the long term.
