As someone who has attended a few away days - in business, and in spad-life - I find this approach somewhat maddening (thread): https://twitter.com/katyballs/status/1278061034587258881

There is an underappreciated need for special advisers to be trained. They tend to be selected without real consideration of merit. The person sitting next to the right politician at the right time. Often only really experienced at party or constituency HQ. Or worse ...1/

...journalism, comms, PR: so likely to think that saying something means doing something. Then suddenly pitched into a quasi-senior role in a Department, weirdly but undefinably powerful. An alien environment, widely dispersed round SW1, distrustful of all around ....2/

How many are actually trained at public policy, the management of bureaucracies, HR, how to treat other human beings, finance, economics? It is haphazard. But selection bias and Dunning-Krueger means they will often be weirdly self-confident ...3/

Above all, they are not trained to think like a *team*. Even though supposedly appointed by the PM, they often have very cellular loyalties. E.G. Gove's DFE spads - I forget their names, 2011-13 really only cared for what Gove wanted, not the wider govt. May's too ... 4/

...anyway, so there *is* good reason for away days. Let the more experienced teach the less. Swap stories and case studies. Get to know and trust one another. Establish links between the dysfunctional baronies that make up Whitehall. Learn the intricacies of cabinet govt... 5/

What I *don't* think is a great idea is to make these away days the vehicle by which one person lectures the rest on their particular intellectual hobby horse. I hear nothing but good about Andy Grove's memoirs and Tetlock's work. But it is ludicrous grandiosity ...6/

...to imply that the barely-vetted, haphazardly appointed spad-connecting tissue is meant to think like the manager of massive silicon valley company or geopolitical forecaster. Whitehall is about small-p politics - little bargains, human interaction, persuasion and trust. 7/

Bottom line: it is great that they all get away to learn off each other. I hope they end up in circles with PostIts on their foreheads. But it is colossal, misdirected pretension to hijack it for some dilettante lecture on management gods. They are spads, not CEOs /Ends