Thinking Like Historians: A Secret Weapon for Public Leaders

Strategic Thinking in Public Affairs

Strategic thinking in public affairs requires not only forecasting future developments but also reflecting on past events to understand how outcomes unfolded. This dual perspective, looking forward as strategists do and backward as historians do, is crucial for those preparing for leadership roles in government. Lawrence Freedman, in his seminal work Strategy: A History, explores the dynamic between planning and retrospection, emphasizing that strategy is not a rigid set of instructions, but a continuous process influenced by context, contingency, and human behavior (Freedman 2013). Too often, public servants approach challenges with a preferred outcome in mind, failing to consider the broader set of possibilities that might arise. By adopting a mindset that simulates hindsight before action, what could be termed a “historian’s foresight," public administrators and policy advisors can improve decision-making, anticipate unintended consequences, and respond to complexity with agility.

Practitioner Insights and Best Practices

Government practitioners who have navigated complex policy environments often stress the importance of scenario planning and red teaming... tools that mirror the historian’s capacity to reconstruct events and consider alternative outcomes. Scenario planning, as employed by the U.S. Department of Defense and intelligence agencies, involves developing multiple plausible futures to assess the resilience of strategies under various conditions (Gompert, Binnendijk, and Lin 2014). This technique requires decision-makers to suspend their preferences and instead analyze how various forces (i.e., political, economic, social, and environmental) could interact to shift trajectories.

Scenario Planning and COVID-19 Response

For example, during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) employed scenario-based modeling to anticipate how the virus might spread under different policy interventions. This approach allowed federal and state officials to weigh the impacts of lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination campaigns based on a range of plausible outcomes rather than a single forecast (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2020). While not all projections materialized, the mindset of exploring multiple futures helped guide resource allocation and policy timing.

Red Teaming as a Strategic Tool

Another method aligned with the historian’s foresight is red teaming. Popularized by military and intelligence communities, red teaming involves assigning a group to challenge prevailing assumptions, test plans, and identify vulnerabilities before a decision is finalized (Zenko 2015). In Kansas, the Department of Health and Environment created a red team to evaluate its pandemic response plans, uncovering gaps in communication, supply chain management, and public