Why diverse thinking makes for better public-sector delivery, and what that means for how we hire

By Poss Apostolou

When Commander Alastair Denniston assembled his Second World War codebreaking team at Bletchley Park, traditional bureaucracy suggested recruiting exclusively top-tier mathematicians.

He did that, but then he went further. He hired crossword solvers, linguists, chess masters, and classicists. He built a team whose minds worked differently from one another, ensuring they tackled complex problems through distinct intellectual lenses.

This is diversity – but not as it is most commonly discussed today.

At Oxford Insights, I’m equally focused on cognitive diversity: the differences in how people think, process information, and approach problems, born from varied life and career experiences. So much so, I want to create a dedicated recruitment pathway to support the delivery of our work. 

Why cognitive diversity matters to modern government

This isn’t just an interesting historical parallel; it is our live operational model.

Oxford Insights advises governments and international organisations on emerging technology, AI strategy, and complex data transformation. Our consultants are frequently dropped into highly ambiguous environments to face novel problems with no established playbooks.

When navigating how to safely adopt automation or structure data infrastructure responsibly, a homogeneous team defaults to textbook answers.

But user-centred service delivery doesn’t follow a “textbook”. Because the public sector supports people from every walk of life, the teams advising them must reflect that same breadth of lived experience. Impactful delivery requires a blend of deep sector expertise and practical, lived experience.

Balancing expertise with fresh instincts

Our equivalents to Bletchley’s mathematicians are our former civil servants and technology policy experts. We rely on their deep structural knowledge to lead our projects.

But alongside them are consultants from non-traditional backgrounds: former teachers, recent graduates, construction managers and retail assistants. They bring a complementary expertise to our work, specifically: 

• Different analytical instincts: they look at broken data flows or convoluted user journeys and ask the plain-English questions that insiders grow blind to.
• Grounded empathy: having managed crowded classrooms or chaotic shop floors, they have exceptional patience and resilience.
• Fewer structural biases: they are unencumbered by standard consultancy jargon or institutional inertia.

When these groups collaborate, our public sector advice becomes significantly more grounded, empathetic, and practical.

Opening a non-traditional route into consulting

This belief drives our current recruitment strategy. This summer, we are explicitly opening a dedicated hiring route for individuals who do not possess a conventional public-sector or consulting background.

We know that making a sideways career move into tech and data policy can feel daunting. We have built this programme around three core pillars of support:

• Peer Mentoring: pairing non-traditional hires with seasoned consultants to bridge sector-specific knowledge gaps quickly.
• Leadership Input: providing regular exposure to senior leadership to help shape unique insights into formal strategic arguments.
• The “OI Way” Toolkits: granting full access to our internal project methodologies, service design, user research, and business analysis frameworks.

We are a remote-first organisation within the UK, with hubs in London and Cambridge for those who like to work in person. Our roles are flexible, accommodating both full and part-time arrangements, because brilliant minds don’t all operate on the same schedule! 

If your CV doesn’t look like a standard consultant’s, but your mind works like a problem solver’s, we want to hear from you.

Find out more and apply for Oxford Insights’ career change programme.

Grid image: The Colossus Computer on display at Bletchley Park, by Farai Gandiya on Unsplash