Seòmar agus comataidhean

It is an accounting change and not a cash-flow change.

You take my point. I understand that these things all wash through and that sometimes the aggregate position can be different, which can feed into your overall recruitment and retention.

Alex Thomas, you were discussing at some length why we should not throw out generalism, but perhaps the question is about how that generalism is acquired. If we look at other organisations, typically someone would be drawn into a particular function when they hit a certain level and, having developed expertise early in their career, they will then start hopping. People come up through a finance function, an engineering function or a sales function, and it is only once they hit their mid to senior career that they start to broaden their skills. Rather than thinking about generalism throughout, is there a need to think about when we seek civil servants to acquire that generalism?

What about the one that you do sit on?

I have a final, follow-up question. The points about generalism versus specialism that we discussed interest me. Is there a question about how you bring about generalism? Rather than people starting their career off in that way, do they instead need a grounding and a specialism before they broaden out into a generalism? Is it an issue if the civil service tries to create generalists from the moment that they arrive in the civil service?

I have one final question. One interesting point is about whether we have consistent understanding of roles throughout the Scottish Government. In my corporate life, we were obsessed with responsible, accountable, consulted and informed—RACI—models, and sometimes there is a blurring of those distinctions.

I want to zero in on what is understood as a programme board in the Scottish Government, because a number of different things are going on. Some programme boards look like programme boards as I understand them; they are for integrating different areas of delivery with Government officials. However, other programme boards seem more like consultation boards, because they have a lot of external bodies involved. Both of those functions are important, but they are different. A programme board should be internal and manage risk across projects, but there is external consultation on some of the boards. Is there an issue with the Scottish Government mixing metaphors and having clarity about the different strata of decisions and where integration and external consultation sit?

Is it a programme board as you would recognise it, though, or is it more of a round-table discussion forum?

Another point that has been made by separate groups of people is that there is a lack of consistency in the approach to policy making and implementation across different portfolios. We should bear in mind that we do not have multiple departments in the Scottish Government, which is essentially a single Government department. We might expect such a lack of consistency in Whitehall but not in the Scottish Government. Would you both agree that therein lines the problem? Without consistent approaches to both policy development and implementation, people will always struggle.

In a sense, I want to carry on the convener’s line of questioning regarding generalism. However, before I do, I thank you both for giving the Fulton report a namecheck—I have also done that in the past because it is interesting how frequently these themes come around—and also for mentioning project management.

Dr Foster, you set out the key stages of decision making as problem identification, agenda setting, consideration of potential actions, implementation and evaluation. That is a really good framework. However, it struck me that, when we are discussing the issue—whether that is with former ministers, civil servants, or others outside the Government—the tendency is always to dwell on policy, whereas our inquiry is about decision making in the round, without being prescriptive. If we push, people might talk about implementation, and if we push a bit further, they might talk about finance, but really only after prodding, and only if we ask about very specific things, such as commercial considerations. That is odd, given the number of external contracts and relationships that the Government has—the state does not do everything; it contracts out a lot. In private sector organisations, that commercial function is key.

When we are talking about generalism, is it that we overemphasise policy—those first two bullet points in Dr Foster’s list—almost to the exclusion of anything else? The issue is not so much about generalism as an area as it is about the need for a bit more focus on those different stages of the life cycle of a project and having specialist skills within those. Would that be a fair summary?

I have just one slight counterpoint here. That sort of assumes that everything in the private sector is neat, orderly and predictable, and it is not. Successful large organisations will have a lot more consistency and standardised methodologies—and I agree that they need to be adapted. We need to be careful, however, about the notion of exceptionalism for decision making in government.