Bringing in good ideas from everywhere: how to tackle groupthink in government
Creating diverse and inclusive public and civil service teams is one of the key ways that governments can ensure that services are responsive to the needs of their populations – and governments around the world are aware of the importance of getting the best ideas into policymaking, regardless of where they come from.
This was the subject of a discussion at Global Government Forum’s Innovation 2025 conference, where a panel of public servants shared insights on how policy development and implementation processes can be devised to make the most diverse ideas.
The session focused on how the UK and Dutch governments are working to diversify their workforces and tackle groupthink, with lessons shared on how to reform recruitment practices to promote inclusion and attract women to roles traditionally dominated by men.
“Creating a diverse and inclusive organisation is a critical way for us to ensure that our services are responsive to the needs of the populations that they serve,” said Amrita Devaiah, deputy director, civil service communication, UK Cabinet Office, and chair of the session.
As well as touching on gender, the panellists covered the importance of attracting people from different backgrounds – social, cultural and racial – those who are neurodiverse, and those living with a disability.
Carla Groom, head of human-centred design science at the UK Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) – who is a trained psychologist and mentioned during the session that she is autistic – made the business case for diversity.
She argued that a diverse team means more sources of ideas and the incorporation of more perspectives and knowledge into decision-making.
A diverse team is also “more likely to be able to spot risks and derisk things” and more likely to “build trust between service users and the service owners and also between communities and government in general”.
Thoman Beautyman, deputy director, government digital capability, UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, made the point that shifts in technology and the advent of AI means that there is going to be a “fundamental reset of all of our roles in the future”.
As such, he said it was critical governments begin to think about what their workforce needs to look like and seize the opportunity to “understand users and colleagues much better” and to “rethink what services look like for citizens”.
“We’re only going to be successful in doing that if we’re able to harness the creativity of diverse teams and bring people together and think about actually what does our organisation look like in a different way,” he said.
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Attracting women to the TechTrack apprenticeship programme
Beautyman gave the example of the TechTrack apprenticeship programme, which aims to recruit 2,000 apprentices into government departments by 2030 and is part of the UK Labour government’s ambition to digitally transform public services, as set out in its blueprint for a modern digital government.
While devising the TechTrack programme, Beautyman’s team thought about how they could attract people from communities who might previously have “felt completely excluded from the process”.
They “challenged normal recruitment conventions”, deciding with their recruitment partner that in order to reach specific target groups, the programme would initially be marketing through influencers on Instagram. Three weeks after launch, the government had received 15,000 applications and 57% of the resulting talent pool were from ethnic minority groups.
In the initial round, 29% of applicants were women. The government sought to increase this and worked to tweak the language of the campaign, which proved successful – in the final talent pool, 40% were women.
To put this in context, research by tech recruitment and service provider Lorien found that while women constitute 49% of the UK’s workforce, they represented only 29% of the tech industry in 2024.
Mariya Hulzebosch, acting director, central government procurement, facilities, and accommodations at The Netherlands’ Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, said that, similarly, government job ads in The Netherlands are checked to ensure language is not tailored more to men or to women.
Interviewers are also coached in a way that aims to prevent bias in selection processes.
The Global Government Women’s Network is a free network for women in civil and public services around the world – a global community of women who can advise and support each other as they navigate their careers, underpinned by exclusive news, opinion, analysis and events. Visit the Women’s Network hub and become a member here.
Inclusive interviewing
Groom spoke of a new way of interviewing for government roles devised by her team at DWP which has since been rolled out to other departments.
Groom’s team of social scientists was set up in 2015 “to look at things in new ways” and to “try to crack” problems the department had struggled with, as well as to help build “capabilities for the future”.
What they found was that the department sometimes made decisions based on assumptions about people that weren’t true. As part of working through this, they looked at the way recruitment decisions were made and recognised that departmental processes risked excluding talented people who aren’t naturally good in interviews.
So, to make interviews as accessible as possible, they decided to give all job applicants the interview questions in advance by default.
This helped people – including neurodiverse people and those from different cultures and class backgrounds – who found it difficult to “play the game and use language in what you might call an instrumental way” and instead think ahead about examples of work they’d done in previous roles that demonstrate the competences outlined in the job description.
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Freeing people to speak up
Panellists agreed that more needed to be done to promote diversity and inclusion efforts not just in recruitment but in career progression and in organisational culture.
In response to a question from a member of the audience about policies in departments such as the DWP often affecting poor or working class people but those people not being represented in government, the UK Cabinet Office’s Devaiah said there was a huge amount of diversity at the lower grades and a huge amount of different experiences, but it tends to be very similar types of people who reach senior roles.
Another point that Groom and Hulzebosch made was that diversity alone doesn’t lead to better decision-making or better services for citizens. In order for groupthink to be avoided and the benefits of diversity harnessed, people must feel able to speak up and share their perspectives and misgivings – and this comes down to organisational culture.
“It’s all well and good having a really diverse group of people around the table but if people don’t feel empowered to speak to their own experiences… then actually that diversity is pointless so there’s a cultural piece there as well,” Hulzebosch said, adding that it was important for leaders and managers to “lead by example”.
Beautyman reiterated that there was a “very strong need” for governments to “reach out to all those people who might not feel included and say ‘We’re open for business and we care about you as much as we do about everybody else and we can’t serve our users without having people in our organisation that represent that user base’.”
His hope, he said, is that when there is greater stability in government, the most senior decisionmakers will be given the scope to organise their departments “in a way they believe is going to be the most positive and most sustainable”. There are “lots of power dynamic” issues to work through, but “I hope I can reassure you that my peers and colleagues and I share the same ambition and by working collectively we can shift the behaviour directly but also shift behaviour upwards and outwards as well.”
Global Government Forum ran the training session ‘Incorporating Diversity in the Policy Making Process – Enacting Mission Driven Government’ on 14 March 2025. Keep an eye on our Learning & Development page to find similar upcoming courses.
The three main keynote speakers at Innovation 2025 were women: Cat Little, chief operating officer for the UK civil service and permanent secretary to the Cabinet Office; Sarah Munby, permanent secretary at the UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology; and Valeriya Ionan, deputy minister for Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine. You can read summaries of their speeches here and here.
About Mia Hunt
Mia has been editor of globalgovernmentforum.com since 2019. She has 15 years’ experience as a journalist and editor and specialises in writing for civil and public servants worldwide, including covering sustainability policy and related issues. She has led the Global Government Women’s Network since it launched in 2023. Previously, she covered commercial property having been market reports and supplements editor at Property Week and deputy editor at Retail Destination. She graduated from Kingston University London with a first-class honours degree in journalism and was part of the team that produced The River newspaper, which won Publication of the Year at the Guardian Student Media Awards in 2010.
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