Te Rā Whakamana: Every Briefing As Story

11/08/2026

I argue that almost every briefing note to ministers is a story, with a villain, a victim, a hero and a moral, and I ask whether that story survives the journey to the front line.

I have been quiet for a while, and I am finding it difficult to write this winter. Part of it is the post-doctoral lull, a strange flatness that settles in after years of sustained thinking and writing, but most of it is the state of our information environment, which is volatile, saturated with misinformation, and so thoroughly politicised for petty and passing advantage that sometimes it feels as though I am only adding to the noise.

I am being more careful as a result. I am still pottering away on the various series, but I am trying to write in a more acupuncture-like way, with a small number of precise interventions placed where they might actually help, rather than a steady output of contributions for their own sake.

I am also trying to be deliberate about placing the writing in the peer-reviewed literature and in the theory, and the reason has little to do with vanity: I have come to worry about how procedural our policy advisory systems have become, when they ought to be the place where ideas are contested so that ministers can get on with what they are actually there to do, which is politics. My hypothesis is that the proceduralism pulls ministers into operational matters they have no training for, and that a good deal of the frustration we see follows from exactly that, because elected officials are given warrants to resolve political questions and to be accountable to Parliament, and nothing in those warrants asks them to act as general manager of a service delivery model nobody prepared them to run. There will be theory, then, and I expect it will challenge some of you.

Last month Te Rā Whakamana focused on the machinery of delivery, and in particular on the lack of operational policy capacity and capability. This month it turns to the thing that starts that machine, the briefing note to ministers, and puts forward the hypothesis that almost every briefing note is a type of story, with a villain, a victim, a hero and a moral, and that the story does not always survive delivery. The tools for reading policy stories are useful here, though they have rarely been pointed at the place this series cares about, which is the gap between the plan and what happens when the plan hits the street.

Te Rā Whakamana has spent its time so far on a single idea, the interpretive hinge, which is the place where policy intentions formed at the centre of our policy advisory systems meet the judgement used at the front line to actually deliver on a government priority. What I want to know now is what crosses that hinge, and the answer, most of the time, is a briefing note.

We like to think of briefing notes as neutral and objective, with the facts set out and the decision left to the politicians, but over the past 30 years I have come to think that this is the most persuasive fiction in the whole business of public policy.

Every briefing note is a story, in the sense that it is built, as any story is built, out of a small number of parts: a setting; a villain, which is the problem; victims, who are the people suffering while nothing is done; a hero, which is almost always the recommended option; and a moral, which is the course of action the reader is being led, quietly and professionally, to accept. None of that makes the note false, though we resist the description because it sits badly next to the idea of ourselves as neutral analysts, and the discomfort does nothing to make it less true.

Narrative policy analysis got there a good while before I did, and the argument made by the contributors to the collection Rhodes edited is that governing is done as much through the stories we authorise as through the rules we write (Rhodes, 2018). The plots tend to be familiar as well, since most policy stories turn out to be a tale of decline, of helplessness, of blocked progress, of conspiracy or of change, and a good deal of the craft lies in choosing which one the facts will be made to fit.

The same numbers, two stories

Take youth offending in Aotearoa, where between 2011/12 and 2021/22 the overall offending rate for children fell by 63 per cent, the rate for young people fell by 64 per cent, and the rate of Youth Court appearances fell by 65 per cent, while against that decline sits a small recent increase, including a 16 per cent rise in police proceedings for burglary in the final year of the series (Ministry of Justice, 2023). Those figures do not speak for themselves, and the two stories that can be built out of them run in opposite directions.

The first story is one of individual failure, and its parts fall into place without anybody having to work at them: the villains are young people who break the law, the victims are the citizens they offend against, the hero is whoever promises to crack down, and the moral is that tougher punishment will keep the rest of us safe. It fits on a placard, and it can be told in a single sentence at a select committee without anybody asking a follow-up question.

The second story takes longer to tell, and that is a large part of its problem. It reads the same figures as a record of what happens when housing is insecure, when services are thin and arrive late, and when a system has already decided in advance which children it expects to see again; the young people in this version are the ones the system has failed rather than the ones failing it, and the moral is that working on causes will do more, over a longer period, than punishment will.

Both stories come from the same statistics, and what separates them is the interpretation each one brings to the numbers; the second is closer to the evidence and almost impossible to compress. In a contest of stories the placard wins more often than it should, and in my experience it wins for reasons that have very little to do with which story is right.

The story does not always survive delivery

Stories do not stop once the decision is made, however, because the story travels onward and it does not travel whole. The study of policy narratives has recently been brought to implementation, and the point is made plainly there: once a policy is adopted it leaves the desks of the decision-makers and passes to the people who have to run it, where it meets the groups it is meant to move, the interests that lost the argument, and the media, any of whom can pick the story up and bend it into a different shape (Stauffer et al., 2024). The argument the note appeared to settle is then quietly reopened on the ground.

Nearly fifty years ago the same thing was described from the other side, in the argument that the person at the counter, the street-level bureaucrat, does not receive a policy finished, and remakes it in each encounter, under pressure and with very little time (Lipsky, 2010). I have written about this before in this series, but putting the narrative work on implementation together with Lipsky brings out a point that is plain enough: what reaches the front line is rarely the careful advice of the original paper, and is far more often the story boiled down to its moral. An official working from a story of individual failure reaches for enforcement, and an official working from a story of disadvantage reaches for support, which gives you the same policy on paper and a different thing at the counter. By the time it arrives there, the story is doing the work we credit to the policy.

There is potentially another reason the contest gets reopened. A briefing note and its narrative exist to close a contested political question down, and both the form and the function of a briefing note or cabinet paper are to drive towards the one recommendation that forces that closure. The note, the paper and their narrative are an attempt at closure in service of the politics of the day, but some of the tensions a note is asked to close cannot be closed.

On one well-known account, political settlements always leave a remainder, the part that will not be absorbed and that returns to disturb the settlement later (Honig, 1993). My own work on free and frank advice finds the same shape in the Westminster arrangement, where the long definitional silence about what free and frank advice actually is turns out to be a space in which competing commitments coexist without final settlement, and was never an absence awaiting resolution. If that is right, most advice leaves things out on purpose, and the omission is the Honigian remainder at work, which careful drafting would not remove and sloppiness does not explain. The remainder does not disappear because a recommendation has been signed; it waits, it re-energises, and it arrives, I would argue, at the counter as the discretion of the person who has to decide what any of this means for whoever is standing in front of them.

There is also a gap of another kind here, and the implementation researchers say so themselves. A recent review of almost twenty years of narrative policy framework scholarship found that the approach explains well how stories are built and how they win an argument, while some of its own elements, plot and belief systems among them, remain underused and conceptually ambiguous, and it is still unclear how far policymakers or civil society actors draw on any of this when they decide how to communicate (Kuenzler et al., 2025). We are well equipped, then, to read a policy story, and very poorly equipped to say whether it survives being delivered, which is the question this series exists to ask.

Telling the story on purpose

Advisors are not about to stop telling stories, since that is not on offer and the story is what makes the material readable at all, and what I am asking for is that the story be told on purpose, by someone who knows which one they have chosen. The warning that if planning is everything, maybe it is nothing, was made a long time ago (Wildavsky, 1973), and a briefing note holds out exactly that clean line from intention to result, when delivery does not run in a clean line at all.

Research from inside the Aotearoa system describes implementation as a process of experimentation and learning in which the front line finds out what the centre could not know in advance (Eppel et al., 2011). A note that tidies all of that away, that turns every uncertainty into a neat recommendation because the template asks for one, has stopped describing delivery and started telling a story about it, and it then hands that story to the people who have to live in the gap. The matching point has been made about coherence: the tidy and consistent account we prize is often unattainable and sometimes ill-advised, because the neatness is bought by hiding the very tensions that delivery will expose (Cairney, 2025).

The ask, then, is modest and a little uncomfortable. When you next write advice, notice the story you are telling, name the villain, the victim, the hero and the moral, and ask whether you would still choose them if you had to deliver the result yourself. Ask what your tidy recommendation has left out, and whether the people at the counter would recognise the problem you have described.

We already know this can be done well, since a study of the pandemic found that the governments that told a clear and honest story delivered better, because the story travelled without falling apart (Mintrom & O’Connor, 2020). The lesson I take from it is to write notes whose story still holds when it arrives, and duller notes are no answer to that.

Next month Te Rā Whakamana stays with this and turns to accountability, and to the question of who is answerable for the difference when the plan and the street pull apart and the story no longer holds.

References

Cairney, P. (2025). Why perfect policy coherence is unattainable (and may be ill-advised). Policy Sciences, 58(3), 619–642. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-025-09582-9

Eppel, E., Turner, D., & Wolf, A. (2011). Experimentation and learning in policy implementation: Implications for public management. Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington.

Honig, B. (1993). Political theory and the displacement of politics. Cornell University Press.

Kuenzler, J., Stauffer, B., Schlaufer, C., Song, G., Smith-Walter, A., & Jones, M. D. (2025). A systematic review of the Narrative Policy Framework: A future research agenda. Policy & Politics, 53(1), 129–151.

Lipsky, M. (2010). Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public service (30th anniversary ed.). Russell Sage Foundation.

Ministry of Justice. (2023). Youth justice indicators summary report, April 2023. New Zealand Government.

Mintrom, M., & O’Connor, R. (2020). The importance of policy narrative: Effective government responses to Covid-19. Policy Design and Practice, 3(3), 205–227.

Rhodes, R. A. W. (Ed.). (2018). Narrative policy analysis: Cases in decentred policy. Palgrave Macmillan.

Stauffer, B., Kuenzler, J., & Jones, M. D. (2024). Narrative policy framework and policy implementation. In F. Sager, C. Mavrot, & L. R. Keiser (Eds.), Handbook of public policy implementation (pp. 193–203). Edward Elgar.

Wildavsky, A. (1973). If planning is everything, maybe it’s nothing. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 127–153.