“The capability intended to help an organisation see the next problem is often among the first exposed to the pressure created by the current one.”
That is Rob Warner’s diagnosis of his own experience: a decade spent building foresight and strategy capability inside Maritime New Zealand, ended in May 2026 when the agency began consulting on organisational change, directing savings toward enabling functions rather than frontline delivery. Strategy and foresight sat inside that category, although they’ll continue – in a way. A newly formed Strategy Hub linking three functions (external strategy and programmes; internal organisational strategy and transformation; and performance, planning, and risk) are now tasked with foresight and horizon scanning, albeit without a dedicated individual filling the role.
Warner does not think the call was wrong.
“If something has to give, it should not be the people who inspect vessels, respond to incidents and investigate deaths,” he says. But he sees something structural in it, larger than one agency. An inspector’s case for funding is concrete. A foresight function’s case is a bet on a future that hasn’t happened yet. In a budget round, concrete tends to beat hypothetical.
After his departure, warner founded Fathom Practice, a consultancy built around three ideas he developed there: a temporal framework for regulatory foresight known as HIFO, a related concept called uncertainty-based regulation, and Regulated Experience, or Rx, which reframes how regulators should think about the people and organisations they oversee.
The ideas he is taking with him
HIFO stands for hindsight, insight, foresight and oversight. Developed with Dr Grant Pink through a series of ANZSOG guest editorials since 2023, the framework treats hindsight and insight as well-developed muscles in most regulatory agencies and foresight, the capacity to sense what is emerging, as the weakest of the four. Uncertainty-based regulation is what Warner calls the practical extension of that foresight quadrant: a set of tools for acting when a problem cannot be reduced to a quantifiable risk.
Rx, developed with Pink and published in Policy Quarterly, is a different kind of argument. It challenges the widespread importation of customer experience thinking into regulatory design, on the grounds that a regulated party is not a customer and that conflating the two can lead to regulatory capture or a public perception that a regulator is not operating fairly and impartially. Rx asks a deliberately uncomfortable question: what does a regime actually feel like from the receiving end, where compliance is either produced or frustrated.
Warner did not set out to become a consultant. HIFO began as a way of naming something he had observed: an imbalance in how regulators use time. What changed his sense of scale was repetition outside his own sector. As Warner and Pink took the ideas to the National Regulators Community of Practice (NRCoP) and webinars with the UK’s Institute of Regulation (IoR), regulators working in domains Warner had never touched began telling him HIFO described their problem too. “Different statutes and different risks, but the same underlying imbalance in temporal orientation,” he says. “After a while, that stops looking like coincidence.”
The direction, in other words, was settled before the timing was. What Warner had helped build with backing from former Maritime New Zealand chief executive Keith Manch and deputy chief executive Andrew Saunderson, no longer depended on him. Other people owned it. The ideas needed a wider context than one agency could give them, and the funding pressure removed any remaining ambiguity about when to leave.
“Most of that was not just individual work,” he wrote. “It was made possible by colleagues, executive sponsorship, and an organisation willing to invest in thinking beyond immediate operational demands. I’m genuinely grateful for that.”
Risk is necessary. It is not sufficient
The intellectual core of Warner’s work, and the part most directly useful to any regulator reading this, is a distinction between risk and uncertainty drawn from the economist Frank Knight’s writing in the 1920s. Risk, in this framing, is quantifiable uncertainty. Uncertainty is unquantifiable risk. Most regulatory systems, including the widely used ISO 31000 risk management standard, are built almost entirely for the former.
Warner does not argue that risk-based regulation should be replaced. He argues it is incomplete. Quantified risk models depend on historical data, and the future generates no data points of its own. Applied to genuinely novel or fast-moving domains, such as the regulatory questions now emerging around artificial intelligence, a risk-based approach can create false confidence precisely where confidence is least warranted. Warner is careful to frame uncertainty-based regulation as additive, not a replacement: “icing on the cake, not replacing the cake.”
“Icing on the cake, not replacing the cake.”
A regulator might face an issue that initially looks like a conventional risk problem: a new technology entering a regulated market, an unexpected pattern of non-compliance, or a sector beginning to behave differently from historical experience. The instinctive response is often to gather more data, refine the risk model, and improve the forecast. Warner argues that the more important question may come first: have the conditions themselves changed in ways that make historical evidence a less reliable guide? That, he says, is where the distinction between risk and uncertainty stops being theoretical and becomes operational.
The distinction has a practical edge. Complex adaptive systems, he notes, tend to follow distributions with fatter tails than the standard bell curve assumes, meaning the events regulators treat as outliers occur more often than conventional forecasting predicts. Misdiagnosing which kind of problem is in front of you, a risk problem or an uncertainty problem, is itself a common regulatory failure.
What an outsider can really offer
Ask Warner who his clients will be, and he answers plainly: regulators and public bodies across New Zealand and Australia, some newly established and shaping a regime while its habits are still forming, others questioning whether their existing strategy and posture still fit the conditions around them. Boards and executives feature prominently, because much of regulatory performance is set at the governance layer.
Pressed on why an agency would pay an outsider for capability it should arguably build itself, Warner pushes back on the premise. “Regulators should build this capability internally, although scaffolding from external expertise can be useful,” he says. “If an agency permanently outsources its judgement about its own future, something has gone wrong.”
What he believes an outsider can genuinely offer is narrower and more specific: protected time that operational urgency would otherwise consume, pattern recognition built from working across different regimes, and permission to ask a question an employee would pay a price for asking. After more than 30 years inside government, Warner says he has a feel for which of those provocations land and which do not.
He is careful, too, about the limits of his own mobility. Professional networks such as the NRCoP, AELERT, CLEAR and the Institute of Regulation build depth and trust that no individual consultant can substitute for. What an outsider can sometimes do is bridge between those communities in ways institutions, bound by their own mandates, cannot.
“That mobility comes with an obligation,” he says. “The task is to carry better questions into specific regulatory contexts, not apply somebody else’s generic answers. A consultant arriving with what worked over there is precisely how best practice becomes a trap in deep water.”
Scaffolding, not cladding
Warner’s own writing on HIFO warns that foresight succeeds when it becomes invisible, integrated into an organisation’s normal operating rhythm rather than ring-fenced as a special initiative. That creates an obvious tension for a consulting practice built around exactly this kind of engagement, and he does not dodge it.
“That will always be a tension, and I would be wary of anyone who claimed not to feel it,” he says. Consultants, he acknowledges, have a commercial incentive to remain necessary, and foresight work packages neatly into named programmes, workshops and polished scenarios that risk becoming “elegant point-in-time shelfware.”
His stated response is to avoid producing foresight projects at all.
“I am trying not to create foresight projects per se but rather creating lived experience of ways to make sense of the world now, near and next, to act more coherently in it,” he says. “If an agency ends up with something called the foresight programme, I have probably failed.” The work, in his framing, should surface inside the board paper, the risk conversation, the annual plan, and the strategy refresh, embedded in problems the client already owns rather than delivered as a separate output.
Warner offers his own measure of success: what is still running, or embedded, six months after he has left. “If the anticipatory, agile, adaptive capability leaves when I leave, the engagement has just produced an output, not an outcome,” he says. He also proposes a test any prospective client can apply without hiring him at all: does the practitioner publish, and do they teach into professional networks rather than compete with them? “Rx is published in Policy Quarterly. HIFO and the related work on uncertainty-based regulation are freely available through ANZSOG,” he says. “If the only way to encounter the thinking is to buy it, that tells you something.”
Testing the ideas against contact with other systems
What Warner says he is keeping from his time at Maritime New Zealand is harder to quantify than a framework. “A sense of consequence,” he calls it. “People go to sea, and some do not come back. That disciplines abstraction and keeps the distinction sharp between a decision that looks defensible and one that is right.” Three decades inside the public sector also taught him how a budget bid is actually decided, what a strategy looks like under select committee scrutiny, and how long legislative change genuinely takes. “Advice that ignores those realities is decoration,” he says.
“People go to sea, and some do not come back. That disciplines abstraction and keeps the distinction sharp between a decision that looks defensible and one that is right.”
What is new, in his own account, is range. Inside a single agency, he says, there was no way to properly test whether HIFO and Rx held up elsewhere. “Now I can, and I expect to find places where they do not. That is part of the point.” Both ideas emerged from a maritime context and a great deal of argument with Pink. A year working in regimes he did not come from, Warner says, should show where they hold, where they do not, and where they need rebuilding. “I would like to be able to say plainly what was wrong with them.”
Asked what success looks like a year on, Warner does not point to revenue or headcount. He wants Fathom Practice recognised as a means of building anticipatory regulation, regulatory diplomacy networks and collaboration among like-minded agencies, sustained commercially enough that it does not become, in his words, “an interesting sabbatical.”
Beyond that, the measure he cares about most is harder to track by design: an agency he worked with still doing the thing a year later, and Warner hearing about it second-hand because nobody thought to tell him.
“It stopped being my thing,” he says, “and became theirs.”
