Achieving meaningful and sustainable outcomes in health security goes beyond technical fixes. It depends on understanding incentives, power dynamics, institutional behaviour, and political context. These insights underline why a Thinking and Working Politically (TWP) approach is essential to strengthening health security in ASEAN and why HSP developed a TWP Guidance Paper that sets out what this means in prinicple. In practice, however, TWP often falls short at the point where analysis should translate into action.