The United Kingdom (UK) faces long-term challenges – global shifts, climate risk, ageing demographics, technology change and eroding social trust – that require a sustained national strategy. 

The playbook is a practical and open-source account of what national strategy should look like in the UK. In creating it, the team engaged politicians, academics, policymakers, students, pollsters and observers at home and abroad; co-designing a cycle of national strategy to make the UK more long-term, bolder in solutions, and able to mobilise all national capacities, not just central government.

A permanent strategic practice, reviewed every five years on a 15-year horizon, would ensure adaptability and coherence. Its output would be a concise national strategy outlining five major challenges, related objectives and key strategic bets for the UK. The intended outcomes are clearer national purpose, better-informed decisions, coherent policy, resilience and greater collective agency. 

The playbook aims to set out the steps, stakeholders and tools involved, offering choices to suit different contexts. While broadly chronological, some of the six stages and 25 sub-stages may need to run in parallel. 

Stages

1. The foundations of national strategy – establishing the right institutions and governance, and agreeing the principles, timescales and expectations for this cycle.
2. Diagnosing the country’s challenges looking at its past, present and future – diagnosis and scenario-building.
3. Competing big bets and developing pathways to the future – competing ‘big bets’ as alternative strategic approaches to the key challenges.
4. Forming and settling the national strategy – comprises the testing, formation and communication.
5. Mobilising transformative change – steps for the rapid adoption of national strategy and mobilisation of national capacities.
6. Monitoring and iterating the national strategy – monitoring the cycle throughout its life and at its conclusion.