My last 2 posts on public policy discussed on the need to revisit our public policy making process and how it can be mapped to software development.
There are a few areas that I would love to focus on for convergence of policy making process and software development process.
To provide some context on what is really happening in policy making today, please check this video out.
Design Thinking and Service design
The model of thinking where business models are understood and redesigned holistically is referred to service design.
Technology has gone from being an enabler to being a key competency for companies in all industries. With this change, service design has been used more frequently in software development process these days. Stating and understanding business challenges has become key to the success of any software development program.
Public policy making is the right area to apply service design in. In fact, It just have been the industry where it is used the most.
However, not just stoping with service design, we must extend it beyond to also making sure the public policy making gets the benefit of design thinking.
Though service design and design thinking sound very similar, they differ Design thinking refers to the discipline of being able to think of design when we think of challenges and solutions to them. IDEO is very famous for design thinking. Design thinking definitely forms a part of service design.
Problem spaces and Decisions
The other key challenge for public policy making process is the ability to understand and evaluate problem space and our decisions - both the choices available and the consequence of those choices.
There is a NY Times article that talks about the toll that decision making takes on people. As people involved in public policy making , they have to take decisions day in and out - often with limited or bad data.
Understanding the problem space is very important. More important in that is understanding that the decision that we are taking in a problem space alters it and we have a whole new problem space altogether.
This concept is defined as wicked problems - a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. More information is available here.
So how can policy makers enable decision making. These are already solved problems in the Industrial and software development space Specifically in the software development space, some ideas have been executed more successfully thereby leading to a more widespread adoption of some ideas. One such idea is that of Cynefin framework.
Cynefin framework will take several posts to explain. Suffice to say that it helps decision makers analyst the situation they are in and lay out how to communicate and arrive at a decision to move to a more stable and predictable environment. Please read more of Cynefin framework here. http://cognitive-edge.com/videos/cynefin-framework-introduction/
Other ills that we can think of in policy making
There are some pet peeves of mine that needs to improve in policy making and planning process in India.
- Interventions
- Interventions, especially large group interventions, is more of an art than science. Decision science is still in a trail and error mode with very few logical examples on how large social interventions work
- Some example of social interventions - especially as referred to in the Beveridge report - are typically irreversible. Hence over a long run, the costs outweigh the benefits
- While we might need interventions, it is tough to balance with short term versus long term interventions. Short term interventions are no effective but cause less harm while long term interventions will be effective but cause more harm.
- A typical social state s filled with interventions assuming every one is at the same maturity level and are rational. However, some times we will have to apply multiple models to understand outcomes - rational actors, behavioral as well as rule based actors. This makes the situation messy
- Policy making currently does not seem to understand the impact of interventions and does not seem to also have a long term view of the consequences.
- Budgeting process
- Budgeting - specifically in public finance - is one of the biggest and most logistically complex activities ever. There are various concepts around how to do public budgeting, most of them centred around the western world.
- India borrowed zero-based budgeting from the west and has now borrowed performance based budgeting
- This is still following a federal structure and more top down. I would prefer a very atomic anatomy and a very bottom-up participatory budget structure. However that is ideal.
- Performance based budgeting needs to have a lot of data collected and analyzed. Policy makers need to have the ability to understand that.
- Performance based budgeting is the practice of developing budgets based on the relationship between program funding levels and expected results from that program
- Policy makers need to understand what results can be expected from any program that they decide or policy that they enact. This is not easy. Software development programs also have outcome based budgeting. However the verdict is still out for that.
Conclusions
- Solutions to stand alone challenges create more challenges that are not directly visible
- Viewing challenges beyond their realm is not easy
- Having a framework for viewing these challenges is very tough
- Existing systems for breaking down solutions allows for analysis of problems and solving them. We also need synthesis.
- There is a certain need for intervention in policy making as well - for example constitutional amendment is easier than revisiting assumptions of earlier policies. So institutions take the easier way out.
- There is also a fear in current policy institutions that they could be displaced as a part of any solution
- Typically not involving them in the solution also adds to this problem
- presumption that people are the problem and not the system / process
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