🪞 The lived experience paradox

If you don’t follow Kirsty McNeill MP on LinkedIn, you should.

Several of her posts, like this or this, get into the kind of detail on policy influence that a Policy Unstuck reader will value. Yes, Kirsty is an MP and a minister, but she’s also a former executive director at Save the Children, and a former chair of IPPR (a left-wing UK think tank). She’s seen this terrain from many vantage points.

Three things I took away from our conversation:

• We don’t value philosophical study enough. The narrative has become ‘philosophy is disconnected from reality’; the narrative perhaps should be ‘philosophy is a useful tool to understand humans.’

• The phrase ‘lived experience panel’ doesn’t always communicate what people think it does.

• Effective public affairs people are facilitators, not representatives.

This is the last interview of 2025. It’s been a real pleasure having an excuse to speak to such interesting people. Thank you to everyone who subscribes and gives me the reason to do it, and especially to those of you who share Policy Unstuck on your social channels or refer your colleagues. I’m hugely grateful.

Have a great break & happy Christmas,

Tom

💡 Forthcoming training

• Generative AI for Policy Communicators, starts 6th Feb 2026

• Communicate to Persuade, starts 26th Feb 2026

• What Ministers Want, coming soon {reply ‘tell me more’ if you want a notification when it’s online}

Constituency of interest: is yours tightly defined?

Don’t tell me that you know more about my constituents than I do–you don’t. But, you probably do know much more about your constituency of interest than I do…

One of the things that was announced at the recent budget was a change to the pensions of some people who worked in the coal industry. What the trade union movement did really well in securing those victories—which are hard-fought, and they’ve been pushing for those changes for a really long time—is applicable elsewhere. They said: ‘This is of outsized importance to this named group of people. And you will not have any questions about whether we speak for them.’

If you claim to speak for a group, be very explicit about who this group of people are, whether they are carers, conservationists, young parents, whoever it is. And make sure that it is very clear to me that you know what their hopes and dreams are.

But… (sorry team)

The most effective thing to help me understand that depth of representation is for people in that group to be speaking to me themselves. Most of the time it’s a public affairs professional doing it; it’s always more effective when it’s not.

The ‘lived experience’ paradox

The trade union movement must find some of this discussion about ‘lived experience’ completely baffling. 

They find the idea that we might have to have a special process to understand what people want just completely wrong, because their bread and butter is representing the material interests of their membership–‘we don't need to have a 'lived experience panel' of ambulance drivers, because our members are ambulance drivers.’

Prejudging the person opposite you is a fool’s errand

Do you ever find yourself litigating a case that is premised on the idea that the person opposite the table from you does not care about the things that you care about? 

It may be the case that they do indeed have fundamentally different values, but the only way you'll know that is to ask.

In advocacy, as in life, approaching people having prejudged them doesn't lead to meaningful, generative, creative, respectful, equitable relationships.

→ Kirsty recommends ‘Political Philosophy: a beginners’ guide for students and politicians’, by Adam Swift {Amazon}

A lack of ideological diversity is a function of lack of curiosity

If the presenting symptom is an organisational lack of ideological or worldview diversity, I'm not saying that's not a problem—that is a problem–but the underlying problem is a lack of curiosity.

If you lack curiosity, that will be showing up in every element of your life and professional practice. You should be curious about every single person that you meet. You should be curious about what your board thinks, what your donors are motivated by, what and why other political ideologies think the way they do.

If you get that right, a lot of these other problems will sort themselves out.

When ‘don’t ask, don’t get’ goes wrong

If a campaigning organisation mobilises people to say, 'please sign an early day motion about X,' or ‘please ask a parliamentary question about Y,’ well, as a minister I can't do that. 

I don’t mind when members of the public ask me these things, but if you’re a professional public affairs person, it is your job to know this. It doesn’t reflect very well on your organisation if you ask me to do things that I just cannot do.

Ministers as policy champions within government

Asking me to effect a policy change outside my department won’t work, but I can use my internal communications channels to champion things.

I have been running a campaign to champion social clubs across government, for example. This is not me saying ‘I disagree with government policy’ but saying ‘here is a piece of our national life that I would appreciate us turning our attention to.’

Championing things internally is a fruitful way for people to get a hearing.

To those who do the civil service down…

There is a very clear distinction in function: officials have things to do, which is supply quality analysis, and ministers have things to do, which is to take decisions. 

Ministers can only make effective design decisions on the basis of unbelievably high-quality analysis, and the quality of analysis that I have received from the civil service has been really outstanding. They perform their function in a world-class way.

Good design is about structure; don’t overload

Good design matters. Acknowledge that audiences will want to get the gist as fast as possible, and then curate their own journey if and when they want to go deeper. 

Remember that your level of knowledge on your policy area is so much higher than mine. You should treat me as if I am a learner, because I do not know as much about your topic as you do. 

So, curate the knowledge accordingly, and tag it to signal to me what I need to understand, and in what order.

Thank you to the 81 Policy Unstuck readers who have referred a friend or colleague.