This question is what philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, calls “a systematically misleading expression.” Like the ghost in a closet, there is no canon in my profession as a practicing policy analyst about which to provide an answer. A book of mine from over thirty years ago continues to be cited in the academic literature, but I doubt–with one or two exceptions (google “J.W. Kingdon”)–that there is a widely shared canon of classic texts in graduate school curricula for policy analysis (universities being the key way canons are transmitted).
This is as it should be.
Practicing policy analysis is about being topical right now when it matters to the decisionmaker, and you can’t be topical and definitive at the same time–at least definitive in the sense of being able to say, Here is a policy memo, brief or report that will stand the test of time.
Oddities happen–famously George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” on Soviet containment–but I’d be the first to admit the memos and briefs requested of me remain in the Great Unread. Hopefully, read once by the right person in the right position at the right time, but even then there is the crevice between hope and experience.
Nor is there anything new here, and not just for practicing policy analysts. The Great Unread is a term from literary history, e.g. almost all the novels from the 19th century remain unread, save for canonical fractions. But I am unaware of a methodological parallel to the latter’s “distant reading” efforts: that is, the use of computational methods to determine patterns, if any, in the corpora of the now archived memos and briefs as has been done for 19th century British and French novels. I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if evaluative developments on the academic side are already underway.
So what?
It is worth pausing on just how manifoldly contingent is that “right person in the right position at the right time” in policy analysis as practice, since “contingent” here embraces so many different scales of evaluation.
Sources.
Barré, J, et al. (2023). “Operationalizing Canonicity: A Quantitative Study of French 19th and 20th Century Literature.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 8(3). https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.88113
F. de Cristofaro and S. Ercolino, Eds (2026). Experimental Criticism: Franco Moretti and literature. (Translated by R. Braude) Verso, UK.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 
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