As Benjamin Franklin once said, ‘By failing to prepare, you’re preparing to fail’, but in a time of great uncertainty in a world beset by economic, geopolitical and climate-related challenges, how can the Australian Public Service (APS) better prepare for the future? It needs to develop a continuous strategic foresight capability process, and to do that, it must implement a methodological model that incorporates both a top-down approach and a bottom-up approach that focuses on nurturing leaders with key cognitive skills.

Strategic foresight is a continuous feedback loop that involves anticipating the future, innovating solutions and adapting through cognitive and behavioural changes that start with the organisation’s leaders. This enhances sense-making (the process of making sense of an environment), which is critical in building organisational resilience.

The APS has been interested in creating a Futures strategy capability for a number of decades. This has left APS agencies’ reluctant to holistically embed strategic foresight as an enduring systematic process. Other reasons include the risk-averse nature of agencies, the short-termism of political and budgetary cycles, constant political pressure to respond to myriad government policy focuses, and the exponential rate of complex changes in technological, social and economic issues.

Building on the 2019 Independent Review of the APS led by David Thodey, the government is working to embed strategic foresight into the APS. So far its efforts are highly encouraging, with annual long term insights briefings being considered. The test will be embedding systematic processes within agencies to realise outcomes from such future strategy capability.

The Australian government’s initiatives feed into a global trend of governments embedding future strategies within their agencies to encourage better policy outcomes. Notable ventures include those by Policy Horizons Canada, Singapore’s Centre for Strategic Futures, the UK Government Office for Science and the government of the United Arab Emirates. A standout for such thinking is the establishment by Wales of a Future Generations Minister. Together, such efforts have focussed on humanity, well-being, transformational future policies, elevated  public and private sector collaboration, and capabilities.

At the agency level, leaders must mitigate a strategic foresight impact gap and focus on executing strategies by implementing knowledge into tangible business deliverables. Without this focus, annual leadership discussions tend to involve merely moving around ideas before reverting to address more immediate issues.

For this, the APS adopts a top-down approach where the leadership consider and articulate the future operating environment. This allows for the initial seeding of strategic foresight into the organisation’s vocabulary. However such programs are not the final intended outcome: they are a necessary first step on which to design and implement internal systems and structures, and nurture a leadership mindset that embeds strategic foresight.

This top-down approach must be complemented with a bottom-up approach that addresses individual leadership capabilities. Written future trends reports are important, but it is more critical to explore the culture in which leaders make sense of their context as part of the strategic foresight process.

In assessing the capabilities of individual leaders, there needs to be a focus on their ability to engage with complexity and navigate the exponential pace of change in the current age. Leaders in today’s world must be curious. It’s a demanding role: the complexity of the modern public sector and the pressures it places on leaders have increased at a rate that significantly outstrips an individual’s cognitive abilities.

While unconventional, a more self-reflective leadership development approach would help individuals make sense of their environment by engaging with mindset, which can then prompt changes in behaviour. Assessing a leader’s cognitive capabilities requires a holistic, perhaps even spiritual, lens. 360-degree evaluations and other diagnostic tools are inadequate for connecting them with their unconscious true selves and maximising their full potential. Traditional leadership development programs are ineffective because they are not in step with the complex demands leaders face, and they don’t cultivate the cognitive skills necessary for sense-making and articulating and executing future strategies.

Taking a combined top-down and non-traditional bottom-up approach to strategic foresight would help the APS build a more enduring system for decision-making and policy planning, navigate increasing complexities and become more resilient to change. In particular, the government must apply a set of leadership requirements focused on the potential in individuals to ensure that the organisation they lead is future-ready. As Malcolm X said, ‘the future belongs to those who prepare for it today’.

In recent weeks, there has been a debate over the value of military education and training assistance provided to Southeast Asian states. The debate follows the UK’s recent suspension of education and training assistance to Myanmar’s military, the Tatmadaw, over the Rohingya humanitarian crisis. Washington has been mulling options to limit ties to the Tatmadaw, or at least halt plans to expand existing engagement.

Australia, however, will continue its engagement. A Department of Defence spokesperson said that Australia was working with the Tatmadaw to ‘promote professionalism and adherence to international laws … It is therefore important we maintain appropriate lines of communication with the Myanmar military.’

This debate basically boils down to two opposite poles. On the one hand, human rights groups have argued for a complete suspension, given the devastating condition of the Rohingyas. Referring to Australia’s position, one group claims that ‘it shows the total abandonment of human rights as a core part of Australian foreign policy’. On the other hand, some argue that engagement is the only way Australia could positively change the Tatmadaw. Others also previously argued that US military assistance could be the key in Myanmar’s democratic transition.

This debate is of course neither unique nor new. During the Cold War, many debated the extent to which US military aid could shape the human rights record or democratisation process of its recipients. Recently, how the US and NATO could build local security forces has been one of the central questions in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. In Australia, one could think of the debate over the value of engaging the Indonesian Army Special Forces following the 1999 Timor fiasco and in the aftermath of the 2002 Bali bombings.

In any case, the two poles of the engagement debate—suspension or continuation—are equally unconvincing. They rely on assumptions, expectations and anecdotal evidence rather than a thorough systematic investigation of the complex nature of military assistance programs.

For one thing, there’s no singular ‘military-to-military engagement’. It consists of dozens of activities and programs, from joint training and professional military education to arms sales and military dialogues. Each of these has different logics and functions, and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to evaluate their value or problems. Sweeping statements that military engagement is either useful or repulsive provide us with little understanding about what specific promises and pitfalls they might have.

For another, there are different ways we could measure the effects and value of military engagement and assistance. Different bilateral military engagements have different historical donor–recipient contexts. Many donors and recipients in Southeast Asia, however, consider the value of military assistance or engagement to be primarily political.

Some donors care more about what the programs could do to boost their bilateral relationship with the recipients. Australia’s Defence Cooperation Program with Indonesia, for example, has often been used as a barometer to gauge the health of the bilateral relationship. Other donors simply want the recipients to help them with specific needs (such as providing intelligence on local terror groups), or to equip recipients with the necessary tools to fight a future regional conflict (such as maritime security assistance to several Southeast Asian states).

Recipients, meanwhile, consider engagement as providing symbolic legitimacy to their armed forces or political regimes. In the mid-1990s, for example, Indonesia had banked on Australia’s continued military engagement to get Washington to restore education and training programs that had been suspended. Occasionally, recipients have genuine specific training needs to sustain their operational readiness.

These political values notwithstanding, the Tatmadaw debate is at heart about the potential organisational effect of military-to-military engagement. And when we talk about organisational effects, we’re implicitly talking about ideational influence—about how Western donors, including Australia, could ‘impart’ or ‘export’ their professional military values and norms of democratic civil–military relations.

Such ‘norms transmission’, in turn, is about the degree to which a military could remodel itself into the system, structure and values of another (what scholars call ‘military emulation’). Unlike the political lens, this benchmark implies that the primary function of military engagement—particularly education and training programs—should be to fundamentally change the recipient’s organisational and professional outlook.

However, the success of military emulation depends on one critical condition. Officers receiving foreign military education or training should be, by and large, promoted to key leadership positions. If organisation-wide professionalisation were to take place, for example, the recipient should have a ‘buy in’ of the values that the donors are offering. What better way to achieve that than to have senior leaders championing those values inside the military? Put differently, if we adopt emulation as a benchmark, we need to demonstrate that Western-trained officers have been promoted to senior and leadership positions in their respective militaries.

Officials, however, provide anecdotal evidence; the fact that a few generals were Western-trained is somehow considered evidence of engagement success. Former President Yudhoyono, for example, was the poster boy for the expansion of US military training in Indonesia. Yet my own research shows that out of 677 Indonesian Army generals who graduated from the academy from 1950 to 1990, less than 16% were US-trained. Further statistical analyses reveal that foreign education has no significant effect on their overall career trajectory.

So, without any systematic evidence that Western military assistance programs—whether from the US, the UK or Australia—have successfully created a critical mass of senior leaders in recipients’ militaries, how do we know those programs have any organisational effect? To be persuasive, both proponents and detractors of military engagement should provide thorough examinations of the programs’ complexities, rather than talking past each other based on assumptions.

Australian has lots of nasty fauna. Crocodiles. Sharks. Spiders.

Then there’s that dangerous, unpredictable species—the Oz politician, a breed that catches and kills its own, frequently and ferociously.

Tony Abbott’s demise has prompted angst about the toxic and tough nature of Oz politics. We’ve had four prime ministers in just over two years. The nation that misplaced a PM at the beach now culls them at extremely close intervals.

Australia has ever been tough on its politicians—nearly as tough as they are on each other. But just as the sharks and the crocs aren’t getting any nastier than previously, neither are our pollies. They’ve always been a threat to each other.

The claim that the system today is harder than ever before is misleading on several levels. Not least because it becomes a self-serving excuse for the pollies: it’s not my fault, it’s all too hard—I didn’t fail, it’s the system that’s broke. The Rudd-Gillard years produced many versions of this lament-cum-excuse.

Ditto now for the just-terminated Abbott era.

In his farewell, Abbott offered a fine version of the lamentation:

‘The nature of politics has changed in the past decade. We have more polls and more commentary than ever before, mostly sour, bitter, character assassination. Poll driven panic has produced a revolving door prime ministership which can’t be good for our country. And a febrile media culture has developed that rewards treachery.’

Ah, mauled by the modern media monster. Have pity on a defenceless PM.

As Annabel Crabb commented, Abbott ‘will be remembered as this country’s most talented fomenter of poll-driven panic.’

The febrile media whinge is best answered with a long-ago quote from Enoch Powell: a politician complaining about the press is like a sailor complaining about the sea. Rank this with Powell’s other classic: all political careers end in failure.

Leaders tend to exit in tears. Reach high, fall far. Play enough zero-sum days and you’re guaranteed to lose. Political leadership is one of the toughest gigs going because the stakes are always big. Australia is entitled to judge its pollies as critically as any elite footy team or test side—score or be dropped. And these days, the opinion polls give the pollies continuous score updates.

Dispose of the ahistorical claim that it’s harder to do politics now by considering the two ultimate stress tests that have confronted the Commonwealth—WW1 and WW2. In both wars, governments fell because MPs in the House of Representatives started stabbing each other in the front as well as the back.

In WW1, the great military conflict had its political counterpoint in the huge argument over the government effort to introduce conscription. The Labor Party shattered and lost government, the sectarian divide between Catholics and Protestants deepened, yet the country voted—twice—to reject conscription and shun the pleas of its Prime Minister. If you think pollies today are devious, frantic schemers, go view the myriad light and dark sides of one of our greatest, the PM who was rebuffed: Billy Hughes.

In WW2, the Coalition government tore out its own vitals and cast out Bob Menzies as PM. Shortly afterwards, the minority Coalition government was felled in the budget debate on the floor of the House of Representatives. A successful censure vote as the nation faced existential crisis—now that’s Oz politics as blood sport.

No wonder Winston Churchill was moved to say to Menzies: ‘My goodness, you Australians do seem to play your politics with a fine 18th century flair.’ Churchill was appalled and contemptuous that unlike the Brits, war didn’t force the Australian parties to form a government of national unity.

If Oz politics is no harder than in days past, it’s true that the system has changed in important ways. Our leaders have grafted presidential prerogatives onto the prime ministership.

The presidential PM gets the power. He or she thus gets even more of the blame. The way the system culls presidential PMs is brutally efficient. The US takes nearly two years to select a new president. Last Monday, the Liberal Party got the job done in an afternoon.

Here is the Dobell Theory on Killing PMs. We’ve shifted from party splits to leadership spills. The transition from split to spill was made at roughly the mid-point of the 20th century. In the first half of the century, the big parties responded to crisis and internal pressures by blowing themselves up; in the second half, Labor and the Liberals blew up the leader instead.

In the first half, Labor split three times—over conscription, the Depression and Communism. Each split condemned Labor to the opposition benches. The conservatives, by contrast, destroyed their existing parties to get or retain power. The conservatives blew up their parties—renaming/reforming parties and creating coalitions—to renew their right to government.

In the second half of the century, the Coalition and Labor parties have been extraordinarily stable as institutions. The professionalisation of politics—the ascendancy of the apparatchiks—reinforces party structures. Machine men and women, by definition, tend the machines.

The periods of stable, long-term leadership—Menzies, Fraser, Hawke-Keating, Howard—aren’t the whole story of how the system operates. Bursts of instability punctuate the equilibriums as ambitions clash and egos soar.

In the decade from 1965, for instance, the Coalition was led by Menzies, McEwan, Holt, Gorton, McMahon, Snedden and Fraser (all but one of those as PM). After the long period of Menzian rule, Australia churned through leaders. After the long period of Howard rule, we have had the same experience.

Culling is brutal business with a high purpose. Australia is entitled to the best years of the best leader on offer. There’s just the matter of getting the right leader. Politics, the most inexact science, builds from failure as much as success. A bit of brutal efficiency is Australian pragmatism—dynamic Oz democracy getting the job done quickly. This is the country that eats both of the animals on the national crest. We treat our pollies no worse than our emus and kangaroos.