Then after navigating the 3-envelope challenge and successfully interpreted the bass ackwards question (I think), came the final – unrelated – challenge.

When I went to mail the yellow envelopes (that’d be envelope “C”), I was met with 2 side-by-each mail boxes: one for “Vancouver Island Only”, and one for “Non-Vancouver Island Addresses” (with a big X’d out red circle and all).

Seriously, Canada Post? I mean, really? Is that necessary? Do you wake up every day asking: “how can we appear more irrelevant and annoying – simultaneously – today?”

I first thought: this is easy – Elections BC is in the Cook Street Village, in Victoria, and clearly ON Vancouver Island. Right-hand mailbox, QED.

But the envelope had a Vancouver PO Box address. Maybe it’s the left-hand box – but that has the big “do not enter” circle.

I went with the off-the-island mailbox. Better out than in.

I have no idea which way this vote is going to go. But seriously, if this referendum gets more than 35% return, I’ll be shocked.

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, please visit http://ebriefings.ca/index-4.html. These two publications provide much of the basis for our briefing note workshops.

For some thoughts on writing the “Proposed Options” section of the briefing note, see our 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.

For the past 15 years, the Internet has profoundly changed our lives – and changed us. Now the Internet itself is undergoing its own transformation with accelerating changes in information and communications technologies and the adoption of technologies collectively called Web 2.0. This second generation web is characterized by the emergence of the Internet as a participatory platform, with the distinction between consumers and producers blurred. The shift from user-selected content to user-created content has significantly changed our on-line interactions – and has the potential to change our social interactions with it. In the presence of all this change, the public sector is seeking to adapt.We use the term Web 2.0 to describe recent changes in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that facilitate enhanced creativity, communication, collaboration and function. Web 2.0 technologies – such as blogs and microblogs, wikis, mashups, podcasts, RSS feeds, social networking, content sharing and tagging – continue to grow in popularity and function.
Principally used for social activities (e.g., Facebook and MySpace continue to be cited as prime examples of Web 2.0 applications), Web 2.0 has also been deployed in a number of corporate environments for marketing and operations management (McAfee, 2006). Under the name of Enterprise 2.0, tools such as wikis and blogs have seen widespread uptake. Organizations have years of experience with a range of communication media – email, telephony, intranets and document management systems. What Enterprise 2.0 seeks to accomplish is to reduce the traditional management function of coordination necessary in running large organizations and instead builds collaboration into the infrastructure.

Where governments have adopted Web 2.0 (i.e., “Gov 2.0”), it has generally been in support of communication strategies – principally internal, but increasingly external (e.g., Wyld, 2007). More robustly, Gov 2.0 technologies can be deployed to: improve service delivery, improve operations and management and reinvigorate democracy. There has been little emphasis, however, in the application of Web 2.0 technologies to that specialized internal communications function – policy analysis and briefings.

The briefing function in government is at least a half century old. And while it is well established, the contemporary policy analysis and briefing process, as revealed in practice, shows several points at which the process of assigning and drafting briefing notes has broken down or run into challenges:

• In the communication of the request from the political executive to the operational policy analyst, the hierarchical nature of these relationships and the number of steps through multiple channels can lead to distortion of the message and delay in delivery.
• As the policy analyst strives to respond to these requests, they often work in isolation from the client requesting the information and from other possible collaborators.
• As the draft briefing note returns back up the hierarchy, institutional incentives lead to delay in the process and minor changes of minimal importance.
• And the distance between policy analyst and decision maker (mediated by several hierarchical layers) impose challenges for communication.

These problems in the traditional model of the policy process – communication distortion, delays in message delivery, isolation of the policy analyst from their client and other collaborators, institutional incentives and bureaucratic culture leading to further delays and low value-added, and challenges for in delivering briefing messages – are the result of adherence to hierarchical, sequential modes of work.

As with the movements towards collaborative knowledge work that are evident in many private sector organizations, it is our position that the public sector can benefit from moving towards similar collaborative models in order to address the challenges in policy analysis identified earlier, but also in response to increasingly horizontal challenges, desires for more coherent ‘joined-up’ government responses, and in response to the changing expectations of the next generation of public servants.

As an alternative to traditional modes for preparing briefing notes, we propose collaboration as the central idea around which the shift in process can take place, driven and facilitated by the adoption of a policywiki environment.

Think about the current policy environment: a policy analyst receives an assignment (which is first logged in a database by an administrative assistant) and starts a briefing note by opening a document template and filling in the various spaces: “prepared for”, “issue”, “background”, “discussion”, “options”, “recommendation”, etc. They work away on that document and, when satisfied with its state of completion (and constrained by a deadline), they forward it to their superior who reviews it and makes changes before sending it on to their supervisor, or returning it with a request for changes. This iterative process continues until the client who requested the briefing note receives it. This is the ultimate hierarchical system, and leads to the problems outlined above.

Orienting the process around the creation of a policywiki space can have a transformative effect on this process by creating a mechanism for collaboration.

In some respects, there is nothing radical about a wiki. Take a standard definition of a wiki: a computer medium that can be edited by anyone with access to it, that provides an easy method for linking from one page to another. In the traditional briefing process, the policy analyst who opens a Word template on a group server is essentially doing the same thing. But by organizing a policy analysis team in a wiki environment, and having those team members to explicitly commit to the process, we can have a transformative effect on the briefing process and move from this hierarchical situation to one marked by collaboration.

In by-passing the hierarchy and removing the incentive of those in the chain to delay the progress of the briefing simply in order to be seen to add value, a flat policy team should be able to complete briefings more quickly. By engaging a wide array of skills directly in the policy analysis team, such an approach can explicitly take advantage of the “long tail” concept. Lastly, the creation of a standing wiki environment can improve the speed and accuracy in establishing briefing teams as well as increase the material available from which they can draw. Perhaps one of the more important transformations from applying Web 2.0 to the policy analysis function will be the development of “perpetually-beta” briefing notes: instead of reactive “eventually perfect” briefings written in response to an emerging issue, the development of an inventory of “always ready” briefings adaptable to a specific request would return policy briefings to an earlier idealism.

Workshop Design

These workshops can be thought of as the second generation version of our “Better Briefings” Workshops.

The objective of these PolicyWiki Workshops is to expose students and practitioners of the briefing note process to a different mode of operation – the starting, constructing and completing of policy briefings in a collaborative wiki environment.

This is not just about learning a new interface or software environment. Moving from traditional hierarchical briefing processes to a collaborative process will challenge much of what we have learned in our academic and professional lives.

These workshops are designed to be conducted in a computer networked environment, where all workshop participants will interact with their workshop colleagues in the PolicyWiki workspace. Multiple iterations of briefing rounds will give participants the opportunity to work as a “policy wrangler”, “resource sage”, “gatekeeper” and wikifairy / wikignome. We’ll also look at the impact of wikitrolls and other disruptive behaviours that can make a policywiki challenging.

The particular software environment that the workshop is conducted in will be determined by the interests of the participants and the IT environment they work in (or will likely be working in). Whether the workshop uses Microsoft Office SharePoint Server with Collaboration tools, MediaWiki, SocialText or some other collaboration suite, the focus will be on how teams work collaboratively to produce better briefings, faster.

(excerpt from eBriefings.ca White Paper #07-07-001)

This paper surveys the literature in the expansive field of public policy studies, from its modern origins through to its present state. The study of public policy is broadly concerned with the processes of identifying and analysing public issues, the means by which a collective course of action (or inaction) is taken by an authoritative decision making body in response to perceived public problems, how effect is given to that course of action, and what affect the entire process has on the issue or problem being addressed.

As a course of action, policy as used here is distinct from the common organisational use of the term (e.g., “departmental policy requires that visitors sign in at the front desk”) that connotes the routines, procedures and practices of an institution. Also, following Majone’s (1988) distinction between “two types of policy analysis” – i.e., between allocating public resources among competing ends (in which rational techniques are best suited to determining the optimal solution to a given problem) and the development of arguments in support of a proposed policy – this survey generally considers policy to fall under the heading of the latter, where the focus is on “determining which assumptions and arguments would provide a conceptual basis for a certain policy of assessing the persuasiveness of the evidence that supports a proposal” (Majone, 1988: 157).

In tracing the lineage from the emergence of the policy sciences through to the current state of the art (and craft), this survey reviews the evolution of the policy approach over the past half century. This literature will follow the general theme of the continual erosion of the rational policy approach as an authoritative foundation for “good” policy making and the attendant struggle to rescue some form of policy analysis as an aid to the exercise of precautionary adaptive governance in an environment marked by uncertainty and complexity.
I begin with a brief review of the precursors to the development of a conscious policy approach following World War II. After a period of stagnation during the late 1950s, the policy approach enjoyed a “Golden Age” in the late 1960s and a period of professional and academic growth during the 1970s. These successes gave rise to a significant body of critique – both of the theoretical constructs and the applied record – that exists to today. I conclude with observations on the future of policy analysis in the context of this post-positivist critique.

To order a copy of this white paper, please contact reference@ebriefings.ca

Thanks to Flickr, here are some photos of the trip and the spectacular Bamfield Marine Station.

Transportation from Port Alberni to the Bamfield Maine Station in Barkley Sound for the 1st Barkley Sound Knowledge Symposium was aboard the MV Frances Barkley.

the frances barkley…10/365, originally uploaded by axiepics.

This is the Bamfield Marine Station, specifically the Rix Centre for Ocean Discovery – location of the Barkley Sound Knowledge Symposium.

To quote a document posted on BC Bid: “The Apps for Climate Action Contest is intended to inspire yoots (sorry, yer honour … “youths”) and the public in British Columbia to take action on climate change.  The Province is developing a Contest for computer programmers to create dynamic internet and mobile applications using government and publicly available climate change and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions data.  The Contest is expected to award cash prizes based on the creativity, interactivity and effectiveness of the applications as outreach tools. To support the Contest, the Province has created a Climate Change Open Data Catalogue (perhaps modelled on Vancouver’s Open Data Catalogue – who knows?) for programmers to use in their applications.  Examples of this data include publicly available greenhouse gas emissions and climate change impacts data. The Climate Action Open Data Catalogue will demonstrate open data as a platform for citizen engagement and a way to showcase the Province of BC as leaders in openness and transparency.”

While his colleagues were left to ponder how his departure would affect their advancement prospects, he found himself rapidly descending into the depths of hell. No Satan, Beelzebub or Melchom met him there – he simply slide quickly down a rocky, dark embankment and splashed into a fetid, putrid swamp. Gasping and grasping to find his bearings and remain above water, he was able to find a footing on some slippery rocks where he found he could just reach his mouth above the waterline if he stood on his tip-toes and craned his neck.

After a few minutes, wondering what he would do next, he noticed an old colleague – a senior DM who had mentored him on his way up, but had passed away many years before – to his left. He didn’t recognize the old man at first, but it was certainly him! But the old DM could offer no assistance as he seemed to be in the same position as his younger colleague – just able to keep his mouth above the water by craning his neck. And after a little while, he noticed that the older DM was repeating slowly – and with as little movement as possible – some familiar advice: “Don’t make waves …. Don’t make waves”.

The recently arrived DM, still pondering his predicament, did realize why he didn’t recognize his old mentor at first: it was the only time he had ever seen his senior colleague stick his neck out.

- originally told to me by my senior colleague Rod Dobell