ABSTRACT

While conducting a research interview with a very senior civil servant in Singapore in 2003, I was confronted by an extraordinary assertion. This permanent secretary 1 asserted that the major challenge facing the civil service was overcoming the ‘problem’ of conformity, lack of imagination and ‘group think’ among the younger administrative officers – that is, among the corps of elite civil servants who are expected to exercise leadership and initiative in governance. It is apparent that straightforward technocratic and professional skills abound in the Administrative Service, and indeed they are strong throughout the civil service as a whole, but my interviewee asserted that among the newer administrative officers the capacity to transform academic and technocratic brilliance into original, independent thought is restricted to fewer than 1 in 20. More than 80 per cent of them in a particular sample, with which he had been in professional contact, displayed, in his firm view, no capacity for independent thought at all.