Policy Leadership Requires a Different Kind of Thinking

When I first began working in policy, I approached everything like a student rather than a hard-nosed strategist. I was surrounded by brilliant minds and, truthfully, I felt like I was years behind the curve.

As the saying goes, “I knew what I knew … which wasn’t much.” But, I was eager to learn. Eager to build a new toolkit from the ground up.

If you’re like me then: that’s okay. In fact, it is very normal. No one starts out as an expert. It takes years, decades even, to build your voice and become a credible, trusted leader. And yes, I say build, not find your voice for a very specific reason.

Trial by Fire

One of my earliest lessons came during a planning session for a high-level international conference. 

I had been asked to help coordinate the event and convened a meeting to talk through logistics and thematics. But as the conversation unfolded, it became clear I was the least experienced person in the room — surrounded by seasoned minds with decades of expertise.

As soon as they began discussing the panel summaries I’d prepared, I quickly realized it was better to be a sponge than to over-contribute. I wasn’t embarrassed by that, just aware of it. So I shifted gears. I leaned in, listened carefully on how the problems were framed and how ideas surfaced, and scribbled furiously all over the one-page agenda in front of me.

Coming from a background focused on U.S. institutions, I wasn’t sure how to stretch my mind to understand this new international domain. I’d lived abroad, spent summers in Russia and Bulgaria, and was a dual citizen. I considered myself semi-knowledgeable on global affairs, but that conversation humbled me. 

At one point, I asked a few people in the group:

“How did you learn all of this? Can you recommend any good books for beginners?”

One of the fellows whose work I greatly admired smiled and said:

“Just read the news.”

At the time, the advice almost felt too simple. I did read the news, even had a print copy of the NYT delivered to my house. Imposter syndrome crept in. But I took the advice, subscribed to new media outlets and slowly began building my own lens and bank of expertise. I read the news daily, often throughout the day, and began to notice the common themes, learning the shared language. Over time, I gained the ability to identify hot-button (or soon to be) policy issues at various levels of government. Eventually, I could distinguish nuanced positions, historical context, and very clearly see policy implications. Not too long ago, a mentor and close friend I greatly respect in the government affairs space reinforced this simple idea to me – you can’t begin to understand the world if you don’t know what’s happening.  

So, I encourage you to ask questions, even those that seem simple, read up on current events, and assess situations today retrospectively— what are the critical drivers that led us to the present — then think, how might those forces shape the future? These conversations helped me see that systems thinking isn’t always innate — it’s built and refined over time.

What Makes a Strong Policy Leader?

People ask me this question regularly. They often assume the skill set is about technical expertise—oftentimes, it is. But in reality, some of the best policy leaders I’ve worked with aren’t just narrowly focused on a specific set of issues. They see the thread between issues and offer innovative solutions: they are something called ‘systems thinkers.’ They can see across silos and disciplines, identifying common ‘inflection points’ and how decisions made in one space have intended (and unintended consequences) in others:

I often use this metaphor when I speak with younger professionals:

If you’re an expert, you’re often looking upwards from deep inside the machine or from the outside at one area. You know how one or a few specific cogs work together: the speed of their rotations, the size, their limitations. This type of knowledge and understanding is its own unique type of brilliance.

If you’re a strategist, you’re stepping above the machine and scanning the whole system from above. You understand how to build flywheels (or you can appreciate the value in their function), you see where most of the cogs slow down, and where things might need a little grease or tinkering.

You can be both an expert and strategist, but it takes three things: time, discipline, and non-linear thinking. 

The Nature of Policy Work

Another thing that I see time and time again: 

Public policy is rarely clean. 

It’s full of constraints, feedback loops, and seemingly never ending political friction. Rhetoric does not always mirror the policies implemented. This holds true across many policy spaces.

That is why we need people who can look across the cogs and pulleys of a system and say:

• “Where are the real root causes behind the problem?”

• “What forces are shaping the behavior we’re seeing?”

• “What are the ‘carrots and sticks’ influencing human behavior and outcomes?

A Quick Example: Health Policy

Take a case of chronic asthma. A medical expert will treat the symptoms, provide breathing treatments, an inhaler, suggest daily antihistamines, a referral— all valid options, but reactive.

A systems thinker will ask:

Why is this person developing asthma in the first place?

A deeper examination may reveal poor HVAC filtration, the housing insecurity, a lack of air purifiers, or income constraints. And suddenly, what seemed like a clinical issue becomes a housing/infrastructure, climate, and economic one.

This shift in perspective, from symptoms to upstream causes, is now referred to as Non-Medical Drivers of Health (or Social Determinations of Health), and it’s reshaping how health policy gets built.

So How Do You Build This Skill?

You don’t need a PhD, though the training helps. What you need is discipline, perspective, and a willingness to stretch your lens.

Here’s where I tell people to start:

Curate a feed of topics you want or need to know. 

Even if you aren’t familiar now, you’ll quickly build an understanding of what’s important to know. 

Learn how decisions get made.

 Who holds influence–why? Is it soft or hard power? Learn the stakes.

Ask different questions.

Get curious about upstream forces.
Ask why things happen, not just what happened.

Learn to reframe.

Try to put yourself in the shoes of someone who has the opposite perspective of your issue. Think objectively about your work and develop an understanding of how others arrived at their view. The machine metaphor I shared earlier? Think about the relationship between parts in the machine (your stakeholders), and how those relationships can be optimized, not just between two cogs, but among all parts. Systems Thinking for Social Change by David Peter Stroth will help you understand this.

Study Incentives

Human behavior can be changed by rewards and penalties. You see this in energy, health, immigration, drug policy etc. 

Most of all, get comfortable being a student again. Knowledge is active, dynamic and never complete. 

Not everything is a personal failure, limited resources or a broken system. Sometimes it’s just a flawed design and a small shift (correction in the feedback loop) can effectuate significant change. The more I’ve worked in this space, the more convinced I’ve become that we need policy leaders who are willing to think across silos, ask better questions, and learn how to design for complexity, not against it.

That kind of leadership doesn’t come from knowing everything. It comes from having the patience to observe, the clarity to connect dots, and the courage to shift perspective when something isn’t working.  It means being willing to sit with ambiguity, map complex systems in motion, and work toward durable change — even when the incentives aren’t obvious (or do not exist yet).