Free and Frank Advice: Stage One and the Six Domains of Advisory Practice

14/02/2026

I report the first stage of my thesis research, the six domains through which practitioners talked about free and frank advice, and how that material was reduced to the 34 statements later sorted in Stage Two.

This is the tenth of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis on free and frank advice in Aotearoa, and the first to report what the research found. It covers Stage One, the elite interviews, and the bridge that carried their material into the Q-sort.

What Stage One had to produce was a field of practitioner meaning, the fullest range I could gather of the ways free and frank advice is talked about, argued over and recognised by the people who do the work, and the findings proper came only once that field had been sorted and tested.

In this post I do three things: first, I describe who took part in Stage One and how I read what they said; second, I set out the six thematic domains of advisory practice that emerged from the interviews, and the way they ran into one another; and third, I explain how that material was reduced to the 34 statements of the Q-set. As with the rest of this series, I report the findings at the level of the domains and the statements, and without participant quotations, because participants were promised confidentiality.

Who took part and how the interviews were read

The Stage One sample comprised 32 senior practitioners, chosen purposively for their experience across the advisory system in Aotearoa and assembled to bring together the main positions from which free and frank advice is given, received, tested and shaped. It included current and former prime ministers, ministers and ministerial chiefs of staff, current and former chief executives from central agencies and line ministries, deputy chief executives with operational responsibilities, senior ministerial advisers, academics with expertise in the field, and chief executives from outside the public service with experience of policy advice. The sample leaned deliberately toward the space where politics and administration meet, and so toward elected and senior political experience, because that meeting point, the purple zone, is where the work of free and frank advice is most directly practised (Alford, Hartley, Yates, & Hughes, 2017). In my view a convention practised across a relationship has to be studied from both sides of it, from those who ask for advice and those who give it.

The analysis was abductive and interpretive, moving between the interview material and the concepts of the decentred approach, especially traditions, dilemmas and situated agency, so that practitioner accounts could be read in their own terms and in relation to the advisory problem under study (Bevir & Rhodes, 2006). The coding moved from close reading of transcripts and participant-confirmed summaries, through line-by-line open coding that kept practitioners’ own language, to axial coding that clustered related codes around the characteristics of free and frank advice, its importance, the barriers to its practice and the conditions that made it possible. I then checked the resulting domains against the statutes, scholarship and institutional material I have described earlier in this series, as a check on coverage, and that check confirmed what the earlier chapters had shown, that the formal material gives free and frank advice constitutional, administrative and procedural significance while saying relatively little about what it is. The interviews therefore remained the primary source of the concourse, which is, in my view, the right order of priority for a study whose question is what practitioners take the convention to be.

Six domains of advisory practice

The interviews gathered into six thematic domains, each a field of practitioner concern made up of related codes, examples, distinctions and tensions, and the domains overlapped in practice in ways that matter as much as the domains themselves. A discussion about timing often became a discussion about trust, a discussion about trust often became a discussion about ministerial authority, and a discussion about ministerial authority often returned to the inherited bargain between elected ministers and permanent officials. I read that overlap as a sign that practitioners experience free and frank advice as one practice with several faces, which any later finding would need to explain.

Constitutional inheritance and institutional memory formed the strongest field of concern, and it concerned the public service bargain carried by Westminster practice, in which ministers hold democratic authority to decide and officials retain a duty of independent judgement. Practitioners treated free and frank advice as part of an inherited constitutional practice with moral and professional force, while also describing its application as something worked through in particular encounters with particular ministers. Ministerial authority and democratic accountability brought that inherited bargain closer to the decision itself, and here the tension lay in the weight given to each side of the relationship, with some accounts placing more emphasis on service to the elected government’s programme and others on the official’s duty to sustain independent judgement. In my view these first two domains together frame the central question the Q-sort later had to test, which is how free and frank advice keeps ministerial authority and official independence in the same advisory encounter.

Challenge and productive tension gave candour its most active form, because practitioners often treated disagreement between ministers and officials as part of how policy judgement improves, provided it is carried through respect, timing and a shared commitment to better decisions. The same practice carried risk, since challenge could bring different perspectives into view and could also be heard as resistance, delay or a lack of commitment to the elected government’s programme. Timing, strategy and professional judgement shifted attention from the content of advice to the conditions of its reception, and practitioners repeatedly described free and frank advice as more than data, analysis or the production of a formal paper, with its force shaped by the moment chosen, the forum used, the relationship available, the political temperature and the adviser’s sense of how far a minister could be pressed before the advice lost purchase. My reading is that this domain describes a craft that resists conversion into rule, and that free and frank advice depends on how, when and where advice is given as well as on what it says.

Relational maintenance and trust showed how much free and frank advice depends on the conditions under which difficult advice is received, especially where advice cuts across a minister’s preferred direction or asks a decision maker to absorb a risk that has not been stated before. Practitioners described trust as built through repeated performance, through accurate work, careful judgement, reliable delivery, political sensitivity and the ability to anticipate a minister’s information needs, and trust appeared in their accounts as both a condition and a constraint, since it could make candour possible and could also discipline the form candour took. Implementation wisdom and contested boundaries connected free and frank advice to practical judgement about how government works: which levers can be pulled, where capacity will bind, which institutions will resist, how communities will experience a policy and which consequences are likely to appear later. The same domain carried uncertainty about the limits of the convention, about how far advice should be pressed, when persistence becomes pressure and how advisers translate between political purpose and administrative caution. I see in this last domain the first sign of what the thesis later names practical statecraft, although at this stage it was one field of concern among six.

From the concourse to 34 statements

The six domains were the empirical result of Stage One, and they also showed the limit of interview material for this inquiry, because interviews could gather the language of practice and show recurrence across roles and institutions while leaving open whether the meanings in them form shared patterns. The bridge to Stage Two began with the concourse built from the interviews, and the domains served as the checking structure for developing a draft Q-set. A statement was kept where it expressed a recognisable claim about free and frank advice, could be understood by participants from different positions in the advisory system, and required judgement when placed beside the others, and statements were revised or removed where they were too general, duplicated others, depended on a single interview account, sat too close to my own language or seemed unlikely to produce meaningful sorting. I regard this as the point at which an interpretive study is most exposed, since whatever is left out of the Q-set cannot be recovered later by the sorting, and for that reason the thesis sets out each step in the order it was taken.

The draft Q-set was then reviewed with selected Stage One participants as a check on recognisability, coverage and sortability, before any Stage Two sorting had taken place. They were asked whether the statements reflected the advisory language and tensions they recognised from practice, whether any important dimension of free and frank advice was missing, and whether people working from different positions could sort them, and their feedback led to further work on wording, the removal of duplication and the adjustment of statements that were too broad, too narrow or too dependent on one role. Timing shows how the review worked, since participants pressed for timing to be represented as more than a single statement about giving advice at the right moment, keeping the working distinctions practitioners make between timing, forum, manner, persistence and reception, and timing was accordingly represented through several statements. In my view that decision mattered, because Stage Two participants then had to weigh distinct timing choices against claims about candour, authority, independence, trust and challenge.

The draft pool was finally checked for coverage across the six domains, to confirm that the Q-set did not narrow the concourse by over-representing one part of the Stage One material or losing another. Across the 32 interviews every domain was raised by at least 25 participants, with constitutional inheritance and timing and professional judgement appearing most widely, and a chi-square goodness-of-fit test using participant incidence showed the distribution of the draft statements to be consistent with the spread of domains across the interviews, χ²(5) = 1.98, p = .852, with a sensitivity check on raw reference counts reaching the same conclusion, χ²(5) = 4.94, p = .423. The final Q-set contained 34 statements, each printed as a card and sorted by 58 participants, most of them new to the study, from most like to least like their own view of free and frank advice. By the end of the bridge the material had changed form, from coded interviews to six domains to a concourse to 34 sortable statements, and my view is that the care taken at each step is what gives the later factor solution its claim to rest on practitioner meaning.

In the next post I turn to practical statecraft, what every one of the six postures shares, and why I treat it as the shared boundary of free and frank advice.

References

Alford, J., Hartley, J., Yates, S., & Hughes, O. (2017). Into the purple zone: Deconstructing the politics/administration distinction. American Review of Public Administration, 47(7), 752–763.

Bevir, M., & Rhodes, R. A. W. (2006). Decentred theory, change and network governance. In E. Sørensen & J. Torfing (Eds.), Theories of democratic network governance (pp. 1–20). Palgrave Macmillan.