The theme for the Prime Minister’s Summer Reading List 2022/2023 is the things we cannot see (or the things we decide not to see). We cannot easily see carbon in the air, dolphins in the ocean, seabirds flying above, or more specifically, the mental health of someone we love or the neighbour’s abuse of family members. If we want to solve challenges and optimise opportunities, we need to find better ways of understanding our complex world. This means politicians and policy analysts must work harder at improving the quality of hindsight, insight and foresight across the public service, and design new ways of revealing, measuring, and managing what is currently unseen or poorly understood. Arguably, the analogy that ‘we manage what we measure’ should be expanded to: ‘we manage what we measure, and we measure what we see.’
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.mcguinnessinstitute.org/prime-ministers-summer-reading-list/prime-ministers-summer-reading-list-2022-2023/