In my recent dissertation research, I came at this question by asking practicing policy analysts to rank-order five policy analysts archetypes – connector, entrepreneur, listener, synthesizer, technician. These archetypes, and their descriptions, were derived from earlier work by Durning and Osuna (1994), Meltsner (1976) and Morçöl (2001).

The ‘synthesizer’ archetype is ranked consistently high as describing the role and orientation of policy analysts, followed closely by ‘connector’ and ‘entrepreneur’, with ‘listener’ and ‘technician’ rounding out the rankings. For more information on that research and to see the results, a working paper is available at http://www.whitehallpolicy.ca/mitacs/?p=338.

“All Our Ideas” is a research project that takes a hybrid approach to gauging attitudes and opinions that combines the quantifiability of a survey and the openness of interviews. As of February 2012, about 1,500 surveys have been created.

As an experiment in using the “All Our Ideas” approach, and to further look at how policy analyst professionals think about their work, an “All Our Ideas” survey has been created at http://www.allourideas.org/policyanalyst

The Policy Analyst Survey at All Our Ideas

Each refresh of the page will present you with two alternative definitions (out of a total of 18) of what a policy analyst does, and you’ll be asked to pick one. If you can’t decide, that’s an option too. And you can also add your own definition.

Thanks for playing. The results from this experiment will be posted here.

What will be of more interest to readers of this blog is that the story, reported by CBC News’s Power & Politics, includes an undated briefing note written for the Minister on this issue, acquired through an access to information request. Sections of the briefing note have been censored, but you can get a sense of the formatting and style which I would characterize as “old school” in its wordiness. Note that the Deputy Minister who approved this (not, we would note, authored it) was William Baker, former Deputy Minister of Public Safety who retired from the Public Service of Canada in July 2012 after a 33 year career.

Briefing Note re Gun Show Regulations

“If HP only knew what HP knows, we could be 3 times as profitable.” - Lew Platt, former CEO of Hewlett Packard.

What are collaborative social tools? These are web-based applications designed for use in a corporate context (as opposed to open access social tools like Facebook and Twitter) that facilitate collaboration without relying on existing formal workflows or teams. The tool might be a wiki (a document that any user can change or add to), a blog (a statement, paragraph or longer document that any user can comment on) or a related forum and platform. These workspaces can be used to pose questions, connect to knowledge sources, initiate discussions, or co-create documents. The key is that users can easily start conversations across their entire network, and other users can join that conversation, without the need for corporate approval or technical web support.

Problems that collaborative social tools can address? Social tools in the corporate environment are growing in popularity because they can address common problems in corporate settings: the overload of email, where you receive too much unimportant information and poor access to useful knowledge when it’s needed; meetings used solely to provide information updates; the re-creating of solutions, or the repeated discover of knowledge; answering the same question multiple times, asked by different colleagues; trying to find knowledge in the organization without really knowing what it is you are looking for, or who might know.

Additional benefits of collaborative social tools: new technologies can transform business operations and spur business process innovation, encourage collaboration across organizational and system silos, increase the efficiency of cross-organizational teams and ad-hoc working groups lacking physical proximity or established reporting relationships.

What type of collaborative social solutions are there? A number of software solutions are currently available, appropriate for use within corporate enterprises, but extendable to external customers, suppliers and partners. A leading source for understanding the tools available and  determining which is optimally suited to the particular setting is the Gartner review of workplace social software.

Source: Gartner, 2012 (http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1C8EOFX&ct=121001&st=sb)

Important questions to ask in identifying a solution include: your current technology exposure, including your capacity to support a solution in-house; the nature of your organization, with variables like organization size and structure; your predominant orientation – i.e., outward-facing or internally-focussed; and your need for mobile support. Companies who have deployed collaborative social tools to drive employee productivity usually share one or more of these characteristics: a high concentration of knowledge workers; undergoing significant business change; and a geographically dispersed workforce, possibly working in different time-zones or irregular hours.

What are the downsides? Collaborative social tools are not a magic bullet, and are not suited to every situation. Organizations with rigid hierarchical climates can find the technology incompatible with their culture. Employees can reject the solution, fail to engage with the objective of sharing and collaborating, or find workarounds that subvert the objectives. Poorly designed solutions can simply result in information overload, exacerbating a situation the tools were intended to solve. Opening up the organization, and flattening the organizational hierarchy, can profoundly disrupt the organization. Leadership must be prepared for a transformation of the organization. And leadership commitment is also crucial in order to ensure widespread engagement.

Are you curious about how new collaborative social tools can be used in your policy analysis environment to improve knowledge sharing and collaboration amongst your team and across the organization? Justin Longo, Principal Associate with eBriefings.ca is available for an executive level briefing or to participate in a practitioner seminar to discuss the results from his recent research and how those insights can help you move Towards Policy Analysis 2.0. Please contact justin by email (justin@ebriefings.ca) or phone (250-686-7288).

“Towards Policy Analysis 2.0″ is based on recently conducted research into the contemporary policy formulation environment in the British Columbia Government. In early 2012, Justin Longo (Principal Associate with eBriefings.ca) interviewed members of corporate policy units throughout government as well as deployed an on-line survey of BC Government policy analysts. His research was aimed at the question of how governments can deal with the challenge of policy complexity by supporting horizontal policy formulation, what barriers might stand in the way of the sharing of knowledge and efforts by public servants to collaborate with colleagues, and what challenges might arise as we move further into the collaborative social enterprise environment.

From the web-based survey and the interview data, it appears that attitudes (which measures what the respondents’ values and experience tell them is the right thing to do), followed by norms (measured as what respondents hear from their colleagues and superiors as being important) were the strongest and most consistent predictors of the intention to collaborate and share knowledge. A third measure – perceived behavioural control – was weakest, indicating that while policy analysts may believe and be told that knowledge sharing and collaboration are the optimal path, they may not feel they have the authority or latitude to do so; in fact, the data indicate that policy analysts may refrain from sharing knowledge with colleagues using technology networks in order to avoid contributing to their colleagues’ information overload. A curious gender result also emerged from the data: women were found to be less supportive of knowledge sharing and collaboration than were men. It also appears that a policy analyst’s organizational social network is instrumental in being able to locate knowledge sources and collaboration opportunities outside of their immediate location, with the reach and density of one’s social network related to career length.

The significance of the findings lies in the implications for organizations to provide support for knowledge workers to make effective use of the organizational social network, technology and organizational capacity to jointly solve problems. The results point towards strategies for organizational leaders to promote and support a knowledge organization, and towards tools for policy unit managers and individual policy analysts to navigate the challenge of responding to complex policy issues in a world of too much information and difficult to locate knowledge. Caution is advised that attempts to impose knowledge management technology solutions may face significant barriers where the organizational culture is not aligned with open knowledge sharing and collaboration. And the implications of the findings regarding gender must be considered, by looking at the culture and climate of the organization to determine whether it is having a negative impact on the ability and willingness of all employees to contribute. The potential power of organizational social networks, facilitated by an enhanced collaborative technology infrastructure, to bridge between the organization’s various sub-cultures is one possible path for helping to build the knowledge organization.

Are you curious about how new information and communication technologies – especially those under the heading “Web 2.0″ – can be used in your policy analysis environment to improve knowledge sharing and collaboration amongst your team and across the organization? Or have you been using Web 2.0 in your policy analysis work, but are starting to wonder why it’s not working as you hoped? Collaborative web technology like blogs, wikis, social networking platforms and cloud sharing can enable the knowledge organization to reach new levels of productivity. They can also lead to information overload on the demand side, and can fail to engage knowledge workers as content contributors on the supply side.

Justin Longo, Principal Associate with eBriefings.ca, is available for an executive level briefing or to participate in a practitioner discussion forum to discuss the results from his recent doctoral research and how those insights can help you get started in collaborative policy analysis or navigate the challenges of Policy Analysis 2.0. Please contact justin by email (justin@ebriefings.ca) or phone (250-686-7288) to get started. The abstract above provides a sketch of the topic, but the content of a briefing or discussion forum can be suited to your particular interests.

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Abstract

One approach to dealing with complexity in a public policy context is horizontality, the act of working across the various ministries and divisions of a government in order to harness the organization’s capacity and resources and direct them towards the addressing of complex problems. And one prominent mechanism for promoting horizontality is greater organization-wide collaboration, knowledge sharing and active knowledge seeking amongst a network of government knowledge workers commonly referred to as policy analysts. The emergent use of Web 2.0 tools and approaches within organizations has raised the possibility that we have entered a new knowledge era – Enterprise 2.0 – that can address the horizontality problem, facilitate the sharing of knowledge between policy analysts and across organizations, and promote transformative governance. This research investigated how policy formulation processes in the government of the Canadian province of British Columbia are being affected by the adoption of Web 2.0 tools internally within the organization as a way to facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration amongst government policy analysts. Semi-structured interviews with members of corporate policy units in the Government of British Columbia were conducted (n = 14), and an on-line questionnaire was completed by Government of British Columbia policy analysts (n = 129). These mixed methods form the basis for a triangulation approach to assessing the research questions. Respondents conceptualized policy analysis as rooted in an apolitical synthesis of evidence and best practices from a variety of sources, leading to a recommendation designed to support decision-making. The diversity and reach of the policy analyst’s organizational social network is related to their length of service in the organization and is an important supplement to the analyst’s knowledge base. There was little evidence that technology networks generally, and Web 2.0 tools specifically, play a prominent role in facilitating the knowledge organization; in fact, policy analysts may refrain from sharing knowledge with colleagues using technology networks in order to avoid contributing to their colleagues’ information overload. Following the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991), attitudes, followed by subjective norms, were the strongest and most consistent predictors of the policy analyst’s intention to collaborate and share knowledge with their colleagues. Perceived behavioural control was not a factor, leading to the possibility that while policy analysts may believe and be told that knowledge sharing and collaboration are advantageous, they may not feel they have the authority, latitude or ability to do so. A significant gender result was consistently revealed, that women were found to be less supportive of knowledge sharing and collaboration than men, a result possibly due to a culture dominated by masculine characteristics. The findings have implications for public sector organizations seeking to provide support for knowledge workers to make effective use of the organizational social network, new collaboration technologies and organizational capacity to address complex public policy problems.

Please note that by downloading this data file, the following Creative Commons license applies: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada License. If you want to make this file available to someone else, do not forward the source file to them; please direct them to this page: http://www.ebriefings.ca/wordpress/?p=614

The CANARIE investment in the Digital Fishers (DF) component of its NEP-67 grant to NEPTUNE Canada was intended to build a capacity within Oceans 2.0 to support ongoing interaction with a growing Internet-based community interested in contributing to scientific research into oceans issues. At the end of the initial capacity-building phase of the Digital Fishers initiative, the evidence suggests that the CANARIE decision to undertake that investment was well-founded. The development of Digital Fishers has both created a capacity to support ongoing oceans research within Oceans 2.0 and built a foundation for a number of very promising future activities that might also extend the high-capacity “big-pipe” CANARIE system into a range of important distributed applications. Among the benefits of this initial investment by CANARIE Inc is the potential to build – through both formal education and informal citizen engagement – a widening community of interest supportive of ongoing public investment in scientific research into oceans issues.

Crafting the Options

Usually there are 2 easy options:

• do nothing (if your department requires that as an option … and if it doesn’t, it should¹), and
• do-the-something-you-want-to-do (i.e., the thing your analysis has led you to).

And then there are a couple of other “well if you really want more options” options. Options 3 and 4 would be different kinds of “do something” (usually something someone else wants to do). And they should really be viable and distinct “somethings”, not non-options.² Assuming we are not so fortunate as to have a Minister with the, ahh, intellectual capacity of the Rt. Hon. James A. Hacker, let’s go with three options – real options – that might be:

1. do nothing;
2. do something smallish where someone else pays for it (e.g., a new regulation); or
3. do something big, with government money (i.e., the “Big Program” option).

The first challenge is to consider the optimal order in which to present them. Unless your department has rules about this (e.g., always present the recommended option last), you’ll want to think about which order makes the most persuasive case in the particular briefing at hand. Then you need to get to work on the pros and cons of each option.³

Writing the Pros and Cons

It’s surprising how little guidance all the “how to do briefings” books give on this topic of how to write the pros and cons. Most start and stop with an implicit instruction to “list the pros and cons”. Based on our research and experience, we have crafted a number of guidelines that are addressed in our publications and briefing courses. But we list them here briefly:

• know what your reader (or department) expects. The rest doesn’t matter if it contradicts what your reader thinks the pros and cons should be about and how they should be written.
• the biggest mistake many BN writers make in this section is to try to steer the reader towards their preferred option in a pretty heavy-handed way. There’s plenty of time to do that – you get to conclude with your “recommended option”, remember. True, the entire note should present analysis and evidence that logically concludes with the recommended option. But if the note reads as one long advertisement for why your option represents policy awesomeness, and all else are policy-fails waiting to happen, you may risk your credibility.
• consider this section as the opportunity to appear even-handed and magnanimous. Even if you sing the praise of the options you’ve rejected, your recommended option should still shine through if your analysis is any good. In order to achieve this, try this little trick: when writing the pros of any option, adopt the perspective that that option is your favourite. (This will be easy for your preferred option, but adopting this perspective for every option will make it easier to come up with good, objective pros for every option). Say to yourself: “I love this option, and I’m going to list all the reasons why adopting it it would be the smartest thing the Minister has ever done.” What do the people who support this option have to say about it? Why do they like it so much, what arguments support doing this and what great things will happen if it’s adopted? Do this for every option.
• do the opposite for the cons: for every option (including yours), say to yourself: “what a stupid idea. Here are the reasons this is a bad idea and the ways this could go wrong.”

Remember our definition of what constitutes good policy analysis, based on the persuasion perspective: “Somewhere between the technocrat and the hyper-political policy advocate, then, is where we should search for the post-positivist policy analyst. The the role of the analyst is one of having to persuade a decision maker that, having analysed the problem and considered appropriate responses to it, the analysis represent the best solution to the problem, given all the inputs that were identified, from the analyst’s perspective and are recommended from the analyst’s position within a responsible and ethical public service tradition. Having explicitly admitted that it is contingent upon the particular perspective that the analyst brought to the problem, and identifying what inputs were considered, the analyst can clearly state a professional opinion aimed at the admittedly fuzzy concept of the “public interest”: that the recommended course of action represents, as far as they are aware, the best solution available. A recommendation full of caveats, to be sure; but in the post-positivist realm, to express greater certainty, or to less explicitly state the effect of the analyst’s perspective and biases, or to have some other motivation than the public good would be dishonest and unethical. But by making transparent what all the participants knew beforehand anyway, the way is cleared for the analyst to focus on the challenging part of their task: persuading the decision maker.”

Footnotes

1. “Do nothing” is a key option to consider, because it backs us up to the problem definition stage and causes us to ask if this is really government’s problem to fix; then moves on to the analysis stage to ask if there is anything government can do or should do. It may indeed be a problem; but is it a public problem? And it may be a public problem, but does the government have the capacity to do anything about it? Also, as the legendary policy professor Dr. Rod Dobell notes, “Do Nothing” is often improperly labelled as “Status Quo”. The status quo is a misnomer as it is near-to-impossible to achieve; even if you do nothing, the situation is bound to change. On the “do nothing” option, the last word goes to “Yes, Prime Minister”, and a lesson in how to propose “do nothing” as a strategy when your reader insists that something must be done:

Bernard Woolley: What if the Prime Minister insists we help them?

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Then we follow the four-stage strategy.

Bernard Woolley: What’s that?

Sir Richard Wharton: Standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis.

Sir Richard Wharton: In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.

Sir Richard Wharton: In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there’s nothing we can do.

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it’s too late now.

2. If your reader isn’t too bright, you might get away with a version of the Yes Prime Minister ”non-option option”. But I wouldn’t count on it:

Bernard Woolley: What if he demands options?

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Well, it’s obvious, Bernard. The Foreign Office will happily present him with three options, two of which are, on close inspection, exactly the same.

Sir Richard Wharton: Plus a third which is totally unacceptable.

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Like bombing Warsaw or invading France.

(True story: I once put “Bomb Warsaw” and “Invade France” as separate options in a briefing note – but only because I knew the Deputy Minister shared an affinity for YPM, and he would strike it out before it went forward to the Minister).

3. Sir Humphrey once gave a brilliant briefing on the fly in a moving train between London and Edinburgh, listing first the options followed by the con for each (there was no recommended option in this case, as the solution turned out to be somewhat unorthodox):

Sir Humphrey: Well, Minister, in practical terms we have the usual six options: One: do nothing. Two: issue a statement deploring the speech. Three: lodge an official protest. Four: cut off aid. Five: break off diplomatic relations. And six: declare war.

Hacker: Which should be it?

Sir Humphrey: Well: If we do nothing, that means we implicitly agree with the speech. If we issue a statement, we’ll just look foolish. If we lodge a protest, it’ll be ignored. We can’t cut off aid, because we don’t give them any. If we break off diplomatic relations, then we can’t negotiate the oil rig contracts. And if we declare war, it might just look as though we were over-reacting.

This template is based on the work in our White Paper #07-10-004 “The Briefing Process in British Columbia” by Colleen Cunningham and is modeled on a standard template used by the British Columbia Government.  The full Google Docs version contains comments that guide you through the completion of the document. (The preview does not show the guide comments). Further reference to our work on the briefing note can be found in White Paper #07-08-002 “Communication in the Policy Process” by Justin Longo. To order either of these publications (or anything else in our white paper series that can be found at http://ebriefings.ca/index-4.html), please send an email to references@ebriefings.ca.

For some thoughts on writing the “Proposed Options” section of the briefing note, see this post on the topic. For an example of a recent briefing note ‘for decision’ in the Canadian federal government, see this recent post.

• Policy analysis and policy briefings are core internal communications functions: policy analysis is a particular function in the public service, that operates at the interface between evidence and decision making; its fundamental objective the attempt to persuade the client to accept both the framing of the problem and the conclusions of the analysis.
• Social and technological challenges are transforming how we manage the policy analysis and briefing processes: post-positivism requires new modes of collaboration and greater emphasis on persuasion; citizen engagement blurs the line between “inside” processes and “outside” processes; we need to understand these challenges if we are to effectively respond to them.
• Web 2.0 tools for policy analysis can facilitate this transformation: moving from hierarchy to collaboration; perpetually-beta briefing notes – beyond “eventually perfect” to “always ready”; returning to the decision-support fundamentals of the policy process; addressing current negative incentives in the system; harnessing the power of public participation.
• Barriers and pitfalls: do not entrust system transformation to enthusiasts; Policy Analysis 2.0 is a system to be managed, not a substitute for managing the system; the system can sabotage any technology that threatens it.

Part of the eBriefings.ca White Paper Series. Please contact eBriefings.ca to obtain the full document.