Free and Frank Advice: The Six Postures, Part One

07/03/2026

I explain how the Q-sort revealed a structure in the way practitioners hold free and frank advice, and I describe the first three of the six postures: the Institutional Pragmatist, the Democratic Constitutionalist and the Collaborative Sense-Maker.

This is the twelfth of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis on free and frank advice in Aotearoa. Having set out what the six practitioner postures share, I turn in this post and the next to what distinguishes them. This post covers how the Stage Two analysis produced six factors and how those factors were read as postures, and then the first three of the six postures: the Institutional Pragmatist, the Democratic Constitutionalist and the Collaborative Sense-Maker.

The Public Service Act 2020 describes free and frank advice in terms of the manner in which advice is given, and in my thesis I give the name posture to that manner, meaning a stance taken up in the advisory relationship rather than a procedure to follow or a trait a practitioner happens to have. A posture, in this sense, is the level at which the manner of advising becomes visible, and the six I found are shared ways of holding the obligation to give free and frank advice when advice has to carry evidence, judgement, timing, relationship and consequence at once. I do three things in this post: first, I explain how the Q-sort revealed a structure and how a statistical factor becomes a posture; second, I describe the two largest postures, the Institutional Pragmatist and the Democratic Constitutionalist, together, because they are easiest to understand side by side; and third, I describe the Collaborative Sense-Maker, which carries a different account of where advice comes from.

How the sorting revealed a structure

Stage Two produced 58 completed Q-sorts from a set of 34 statements, and each completed sort recorded how one practitioner arranged the whole field of free and frank advice, from the statements they agreed with most strongly to the ones they rejected, with everything else placed in between. The unit of analysis in Q-methodology is that whole arrangement rather than the answer to any one statement, which is what makes it possible to compare one way of holding the convention with another. It is also the reason I read every factor as a configuration of all 34 placements rather than from its extremes alone (Brown, 1980; Watts & Stenner, 2012).

The analysis compared every sort with every other sort, using Spearman rank-order correlation because the task asked participants to rank statements against one another, and then extracted and rotated factors, examining solutions of between four and eight before retaining six. The six-factor solution had to satisfy statistical tests, including eigenvalues above 1.0 and adequate explained variance, and it also had to remain legible against the qualitative material. On both counts it did, with the first six factors explaining approximately 70% of the study variance and the communalities ranging from 0.33 to 0.91, with a mean of about 0.69.

The solution is also clean in a way that matters for how much weight it can carry. Of the 58 sorts, 50 loaded significantly on one factor only, eight sat on the hyperplane without defining any factor, and none were confounded, meaning that no sort loaded significantly on more than one factor in a way that would blur the line between them. A factor, at that point, is still only a statistical pattern in how participants arranged the statements, and it becomes a posture only through interpretive work, reading the factor array, the distinguishing statements and the explanations practitioners gave for their sorts together, which is an act made on stated reasons and open to challenge.

The Institutional Pragmatist and the Democratic Constitutionalist

The Institutional Pragmatist treats free and frank advice as workability under pressure, and it is the broadest posture in the solution, defined by 27 of the 50 sorts (54%) and accounting for 35% of the study variance. Its array places at +5 the statement that free and frank advice combines expertise, evidence and practical wisdom about implementation, and at +4 both the statement that good ministers actively seek out free and frank advice and the statement that ministers and officials share responsibility for making it work. At the other end it places at −5 the statement that Westminster arrangements oblige officials to give free and frank advice, and at −4 the statement that free and frank advice is part of Aotearoa’s democratic tradition. In my reading, those placements mean that for this posture the authority of free and frank advice rests on what it does inside the machinery of government rather than on duty or inheritance.

Advice that cannot be carried into delivery, or that leaves the minister unable to act, does not count as free and frank in this array, however candid its content may be. The posture is institutional because the judgement is carried for and by the machinery of government, inside the ministerial relationship, and pragmatic because usefulness, in the sense of knowing how decisions travel, where they meet implementation and what a minister needs to understand before a commitment hardens, is placed at the centre. The substantive judgement may stay the same from one moment to the next while the manner changes, and I read the Institutional Pragmatist as treating free and frank advice as the patient work of keeping advice capable of being heard, acted on and used again.

The Democratic Constitutionalist treats free and frank advice as a duty attached to office and role, owed regardless of the minister, the moment or the relationship, and it is the second largest posture, with 12 of the 50 sorts (24%) and 15% of the variance. What makes this posture instructive is that its strongest placements look, at first, very like the Institutional Pragmatist’s, since it also places implementation wisdom at +5 and ministers who seek advice at +4. Only the whole array shows the difference, in which challenge and debate helping to avoid policy mistakes sits at +3, Westminster obligation moves up to +2, and at the rejection end sit the statements that free and frank advice is the craft of senior officials only (−5) and that it is an ultimate failsafe used only as a protective measure (−4). Read as a configuration, the array treats challenge and independent judgement as part of the constitutional function of the role, and treats free and frank advice as ordinary duty owed at every level of the service.

The record matters to this posture as part of the duty itself, because a minister is entitled to decline advice, but that entitlement has democratic force only where the minister has had the whole of the advice before deciding. The obligation therefore runs in two directions, with officials owing ministers complete advice and owing the system a record that the advice was given, and ministers holding the right to decide against that advice and the responsibility to answer for the decision. In a country with an unwritten constitution, I read the Democratic Constitutionalist as treating free and frank advice as part of the work a written constitution would otherwise do, holding the executive to a reasoned decision and keeping the duty in the office across changes of minister.

The contrast between the two largest postures is one of emphasis within shared commitments, and both questions it raises remain live in the advisory system. The Institutional Pragmatist asks how advice can be made useful enough to be acted on, while the Democratic Constitutionalist asks how advice can remain full enough to discharge the office, and the Stage Three validation suggested that practitioners tend to move between such questions according to the issue and the setting in front of them.

The Collaborative Sense-Maker

The Collaborative Sense-Maker treats free and frank advice as something made through relationship and collective judgement, and its distinctive claim concerns where advice comes from. It is one of the smaller postures, with 4 of the 50 sorts (8%) and 7% of the study variance, and in its array the advisory relationship is the setting in which judgement is formed in the first place, more than a channel through which an official’s finished judgement is passed to a minister.

The array places at +5 the statement that free and frank advice is co-produced by ministers and senior officials and requires both speaking and listening, and at +4 both shared responsibility and the statement that relationships between ministers and senior officials need constant attention and adjustment. It places at +3 the statement that strategic silence can be as important as strategic speaking, which in this configuration I read as making room for other voices. At the rejection end it places at −5 the statement that officials’ free and frank advice must fit a minister’s democratic mandate, and at −4 the statement that free and frank advice helps democracy work properly, a placement that, in the context of the whole array, I read as setting the democratic framing of the obligation below collaborative problem-solving.

Practitioners in this posture described advice as the work of assembling partial knowledge into a form that can support a decision, which presses against closed understandings of the advisory relationship. The posture treats the boundary around that relationship as porous where a problem requires knowledge that sits beyond the state, or in a corner of the state with limited access to ministers, while still sitting inside public service advice, because officials remain responsible for shaping what reaches the minister. Its distinctive claim, as I read it, is that situated knowledge, community knowledge and knowledge from across agencies can become part of free and frank advice when officials make the conditions for that knowledge to enter the room.

Taken together, the three postures in this post account for 43 of the 50 defining sorts, and none of them is a misunderstanding of free and frank advice. Each gives a recognisable account of what free and frank advice is for, how it should be performed and where its legitimacy sits, and the differences between them, over duty, usefulness and the source of advice, are the beginning of the plurality the thesis reports.

In the next post I describe the remaining three postures, the Moment Chooser, the Political Servant and the Westminster Protector, and explain why two of them were retained on a single defining sort.

References

Brown, S. R. (1980). Political subjectivity: Applications of Q methodology in political science. Yale University Press.

Watts, S., & Stenner, P. (2012). Doing Q methodological research: Theory, method and interpretation. SAGE Publications.