REPLY SD Impact on National Government Policies (SD6163)

[System Dynamics Mailing List]

Posted by  "Richard Tait" <richard.tait at med.govt.nz>

I have arrived back at work today and read this thread with great interest.  
I am a relative newcomer to SD, and appreciate the collective wisdom that 
this list can offer to people like me as I learn more about it.  I thought 
I would share a couple of observations that I have picked up during my 
initial forays into SD in the context of the government department I work 
for.  They seem to resonate with comments that others have made.

I work for a reasonably large (by New Zealand standards) central government 
policy agency in the area of economic development.  Over the last year or so 
I have come to appreciate the benefits that a systems thinking approach can 
provide in the modern public policy environment, and I have begun what will 
probably be a long journey to try to get systems thinking and SD approaches 
to enter the toolkit for policy analysis in my own and other public sector 
organisations.  

While this journey has just started, I have begun to observe a few things 
which have been mentioned in comments by others: 

1.	In the world of developing policy advice for consideration and decisions 
by government, timeframes are often tight and resources scarce.   While a 
systems thinking approach could be helpful in scoping problems to avoid 
surprises down the track, when the pressure is on there seems to be limited 
willingness to depart from the traditional problem-solving recipes and tools, 
a dynamic that ironically increases the risk of policy failure.  Some people 
seem to have quite firm mental models about problem solving approaches!

2.	There can be significant time and cost associated with modelling exercises, 
particularly because there aren't the skills to do it in-house. 

I believe that getting public servants - policy analysts - to base their 
advice on a more systemic approach to problem solving will lead to more 
robust policy design.  While I think it is important for politicians to 
be able to think systemically about complex problems, they are ultimately 
quite solutions-focused and may have limited tolerance for discussion about 
methodological niceties.  This means that there is an important role for 
officials advising government Ministers to think systemically about complex 
problems, and then to lead their Ministers through the main insights, and the 
consequences for policy design.  This conversation should help Ministers to 
understand the dimensions of the problem in terms that are not too linear and 
reductionist.  Simple CLDs could be used in this context.

I also think that the public sector needs to be able to apply systems 
approaches to analysis of policy problems, and in the process, work with 
stakeholders beyond the immediate agency (see the Demos work on Systems 
Failure for more discussion of this aspect).  All of this suggests some 
implications for public sector analytical capability and process, which 
will need some time to build and will be complemented by initiatives aimed 
at the education system, the public, etc.  I see the solution as a 
combination of deliberate and opportunistic capability building as well as 
harnessing the 'demonstration effects' of well-chosen projects.

>From a personal perspective I have found that a very pragmatic and 'soft' 
approach works best with my colleagues.  I help them understand the need to 
take a systems thinking perspective on complex problems, supported by relevant 
practical examples.  This (hopefully) leads to an 'aha' moment where they go 
"I see what you are saying, what have you got that can help us?"   Then I have 
picked a handful of practical problems where non-threatening tools like CLDs 
can be used as a way of creating a more effective conversation around the nature 
of the problem and the relationships between relevant factors. Ideally I would 
like to build people's capability to be able to whip up quick CLDs by themselves 
or in groups, but the conversation process itself seems paramount and there are 
several ways to generate the right kind of conversation.

To my mind, it will be valuable to have a large number of people in the 
organisation with the ability to think and talk about problems in this way, as 
a complement to other approaches.  Beyond this, these people should be capable 
of making judgements about whether and when it would be valuable to develop more 
formal simulation models, and know where to go to find the expertise.  

In short, I see the more general systems language capability as an essential 
entrée to the acceptance of deeper SD projects, at least in the public sector 
environment here.  For many people this is as far as they may need to go and it 
would improve the quality of their output.  From my limited observation, pushing 
hard on the simulation modelling side without preparing the ground first leads 
to resistance (given the time pressures, mental models about analytical 
approaches etc).  This might put people off the whole thing, meaning that they 
will miss out on the benefits of using a less formalised approach that they can 
usefully apply in their day-to-day work.   This would be unfortunate.

Cheers
Richard
 

Richard Tait  |  Chief Advisor - Strategy Development | Ministry of Economic Development | New Zealand
Posted by  "Richard Tait" <richard.tait at med.govt.nz>
posting date  Mon, 8 Jan 2007 11:00:49 +1300