Andrew Pike has spent much of his career inside the machinery of British power. From Downing Street to GCHQ, his work has sat at the centre of national security, public affairs and high-stakes government communications.
He was the first director of communications and engagement at GCHQ and later served as director of national security communications for the Prime Minister’s Office, handling some of the most sensitive strategic briefs in government. Earlier in his career, he worked in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and served as Her Majesty’s consul in New York, where he led on Northern Ireland Peace Process messaging in North America.
In this quick chat, Pike reflects on crisis leadership, strategic judgment and the mindset leaders now need in a far less predictable world.
At the highest levels of government, what enables leaders to stay calm, make decisions quickly and still think strategically during a crisis?
Andrew Pike: “Like everything else, crisis response, dealing with lots of things at once. There are techniques, but they are largely about practice. It is possible by having some structure to what you do and, we did do a horrible exam in the Foreign Office to get us to the senior levels, but what it made us do was embed behaviours. So we learned how to do certain things so that they went into your muscle memory, and you can practise that.
“In my teams, I boringly used to make them go away and have a look at an Economist article and see it as a really boring, tough one about a real-world problem and how would they carry that into something that had real-world effect. So I think with all these things, they are learnable and practicable, so that when you're in the situation itself it becomes automatic to you.
“That isn't to say that you won't get decisions wrong sometimes. I think something, certainly in government where there is less tolerance than in the private sector, is so-called 'fail fast'. So, the ability to take risks. But all the best decisions I've taken in my life, they've all required risk. They haven't always gone in the way that I'd wanted.
“But if you get those jigsaw pieces in place beforehand and you know you've got the basic outline, the basic plan, you know where you want to end up, and you just take a moment and you have that clarity to compute that in your own brain and then convey it to people, there is very little that you can do that's going to make this entire thing crash. You can course-correct. You can reverse if you really need to. You just need to do it in a mindful, planful way, with a bit of thought.”
What capabilities will matter most for the next generation of leaders operating in a far less predictable world?
Pike: “The next generation of leaders are going to have to learn a whole new skill set from my advanced age colleagues and myself.
“I was doing a little talk the other day and I call it the end of planning because, in the good old days, say in the Foreign Office where I was, we did a risk register every year and we picked out the five things that were likely to make the world grind to a halt in the year ahead, and we used to be able to do that quite effectively at one time because we could see the markers and we could plan very convincingly.
“We don't have that anymore. Leaders now are going to have to learn to work in the moment much more. They're going to have to rely on their own judgment much more. They're going to have to deal with the world as it is with quite a short time frame to make quite crucial decisions. And they're going to have to transplant their minds and their brains into a mindset where that's going to be the norm.
“Now, I would also say, living in America so long, I remember being there in the 2008 crash and being at a Wall Street dinner with a lot of really serious bankers, and everybody in the world was in turmoil because we thought the financial system was coming to. I remember them sitting around the table going, "Nope, we're going to find opportunity in this."
“And there was something about an energy that was there in New York that we're all going to need in our commercial endeavours from now on. We're going to have to find that opportunity. We're going to have to see these things as an opportunity.
“I mean, we're just finding our way with AI. But again, I'm a great believer in being optimistic, grabbing the positive parts. Same actually about this country. My last job in government was running the nation's brand overseas. But guess what? There's quite a lot to celebrate. Still there is opportunity. The UK is a world power, superpower. Our music, our art, our design, all that stuff.
“And I think a bit of that Americana would do us no harm. That isn't to be naive or to deny that there are of course real issues, but I think there is more opportunity than there is threat, and coming at these issues in that way is likely to bring a better result.”
Andrew Pike has over two decades of experience working in senior advisory and communications roles at No.10, the Cabinet Office and GCHQ, and in diplomatic postings including the British Consulate in New York. He also works as an international relations and geopolitics speaker, helping public sector audiences to understand diplomacy, global security and the pressures shaping government decisions.