Governing in turbulent times

National governments are “struggling to be strategic” in the late 2020s, and many are trapped in short-term reactions rather than shaping events.

This TIAL briefing note argues that this is not mainly a leadership flaw. It is an institutional design problem in the centre of government: strong communications and delivery oversight, but weaker capacity for strategy and imaginative policy design.

The risk is governing in “an eternal present”, where each new shock resets priorities.

The core recommendation is practical: treat strategy as a function rather than a document. Build it as an operating capability with a mandate, routines, and clear routes into decisions and implementation.

The strategy function: what it is, and what it has to deliver

The briefing defines the strategy function as capability that helps a government act over multiple time horizons, from immediate shocks to long-term priorities.

The note links this capability to four outcomes: clear direction and priorities, future readiness, problem-solving, and coherence across government.

The paper also explains why this has become harder. Since the 2007/8 financial crisis, time horizons in many democracies have shrunk, and tactics have often displaced strategy. Economic stagnation, political instability, and fast-moving social media have pushed attention towards the immediate.

As a consequence, the centre of government can become imbalanced, with communications and delivery oversight growing faster than strategy capacity, so activity tilts towards messaging and short-cycle performance tracking rather than making and holding long-term choices across departments.

In that situation, governments can “go adrift”: they keep moving without a stable direction through shocks, and can end up implementing policies that are well-managed but poorly chosen, which citizens experience as churn, inconsistency, and public money spent on programmes that do not improve outcomes.

Strategy teams as institutional architecture: what tends to work

The paper reviews different strategy team models, including India’s Niti Aayog, France’s Haut-commissariat à la Stratégie et au Plan, Singapore’s Centre for Strategic Futures, Spain’s National Office of Foresight & Strategy, Brazil’s planning ministry structure, and arms-length bodies such as Finland’s SITRA and Policy Horizons Canada.

Across contexts, the design constraint seems consistent: strategy teams must be useful to the political leaders they serve, and close enough to power to shape decisions, without being swallowed by daily firefighting.

Read as institutional design, the note highlights recurring building blocks:

• Position and mandate: direct accountability to a president or prime minister, often with involvement from a finance ministry or treasury.
• Staffing mix: civil servants plus outsiders (business, academia, consultancy, civil society), supported by wider networks.
• Repertoire of work: rapid responses, deeper design projects that include budgets and implementation plans, plus synthetic work such as reviews and strategic audits.
• Decision routes: awaydays, in-depth sessions, and pathways that can take work through Cabinet so analysis is absorbed by principals.
• Connection to implementation: strategy that accounts for delivery realities rather than separating policy from implementation.

The note also flags missing but practical capabilities: knowledge management that stops governments “reinventing wheels”, and staff circulation that builds networks across departments.

The strategy stack: a practical way to organise strategy capacity

The traditional planning ministry model now looks anachronistic, partly because such bodies often struggled to connect to the rest of government and the outside world.

The suggestion is more networked and “mesh-like”, with stronger links across government and with business, universities, and other tiers of government, plus closer links to experiments and “test and learn” approaches.

To make this operational, the briefing introduces the “strategy stack”. It frames strategy as layered work that can be distributed, but still needs to be consciously shaped, commissioned, and connected.

The paper names the layers as:

1. analysis of current data, problems, and threats (including, in some cases, digital twins);
2. foresight, scenarios, and futures;
3. experiments and innovation where policy is uncertain;
4. policy design that feeds into budgets and laws;
5. communications, narratives, and frames;
6. synthesis that integrates inputs with political priorities for action.

Weak “connective tissue” between layers produces disconnected reports and one-off exercises, rather than decisions that hold.

Methods that help strategy teams work with uncertainty

The note argues that strategy teams must work faster in more uncertain conditions, while keeping direction across multiple timescales. It points to methods that reduce overconfidence and test assumptions, including simulations and games, red teams, and pre-mortems.

It also highlights a newer method: using multiple AI tools and large language models for scanning, synthesis, modelling, and red-teaming, while staying vigilant about error and bias. The paper notes that physical proximity still matters for shared understanding, and mentions decision-support spaces such as Decision Theatres and Situation Rooms.

What the briefing note asks governments to redesign

The biggest challenge for strategy teams is handling different timescales and different levels of uncertainty.

Governments must build a strategy function that is close to power, protected from daily churn, and connected through a strategy stack that links analysis, foresight, experimentation, policy design, narrative, and synthesis to decision and implementation.

That is how governments avoid being trapped in the “eternal present”, even when the news cycle is determined to become the unofficial minister for everything.