Pedantic Policy Post! About the Policy Framework Dialogue Session

Greetings all!

I thought I'd start a thread that focused not on WHAT the Policy Framework is, or its value (that thread will come soon though) but on HOW our team can create dialogue spaces that help to bring the PF to life in the lives of employees.

Recognizing that most people have neither heard of the PF, nor know why it was deemed necessary to create one, there is definitely an 'educational' component to the dialogue space. The educational component involves our desire to ensure participants in the dialogue sessions discuss certain pieces of information:

- why the DM felt there was a need for a PF (opportunity for some great anecdotes to be told here, I've already heard a few!)
- our departmental take on a "natural resources story"
- the role of the department in that story

In addition to ensuring employees have a chance to discuss those 3 items, there is also clearly a conversational component to the dialogue session (hence its name) in that we want to know what value the ITG products can bring to people's daily work.

We need to ensure whatever spaces / processes we create give people an opportunity to reflect on how the PF and the KM/CT action plan can contribute to people's daily efforts to achieve the North Star goals (which are simply professional good practice goals) of being more collaborative, more integrated and more evidence-based.

We have identified (on our workplan on the wiki) 4 streams of activities that can create spaces for dialogue:
· small group discussions
· large group discussions
· 1-1 discussions
· multi-media discussions (e.g. this blog)

This thread will hopefully catalyze some discussion on what that "how" could look like for the small / large group discussions.

EDUCATIONAL COMPONENT

(A) Presentations

The traditional approach to education assumes that the need to convey information will require some sort of presentation. I accept that there will be times where that is true (particularly where time is tight). If so, the 3 bullets noted above would likely be covered in a traditional powerpoint of some kind. That's fine when we only have a short amount of time.

(B) Beyond Presentations

Where there is more time, however, there is an opportunity to go about this in a very different way using popular education values/approaches http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_education.

Popular education approaches assume that much of the knowledge that you think you are going to convey actually resides in the group itself already. In which case, there is an opportunity to draw out this knowledge (and other pieces of knowledge you could not anticipate accessing) by facilitating conversations, using techniques that engage the group right from the outset.

For example: the natural resources story in the policy framework wants to highlight 4 things: the competitive global context, knowledge and the new growth theory, sustainable development and the role of NRCan. While all of these are important, we all know that the story could have included 3 things, or 6 things --- it's all a matter of where you draw the line. So, we don't need to control the discussion around only those 4 things.

Instead of doing a powerpoint presentation that walks people through this, we have the opportunity to design fun activities wherein people discuss their understanding of the natural resources story. Collectively, 99% of the time the group will hit all the points you want to convey and more. This information is then captured on the discussion page of the policy framework wiki page, making the PF page a living, breathing organism.

The role of the facilitator then is to weave the story together from what everyone has contributed and to highlight the 4 things that the ITG team decided to focus on.

You can then move on to the most important piece, which is: given the natural resources story, given the context within which we are operating, what is the role of NRCan - and of NRCan employees - in that story?

This is where we would turn to the eyeball diagram (the NRCan Panopticon - apologies to Bentham) and begin the second part of the session, which is about the value-added brought by the policy framework.


DIALOGUE COMPONENT

There appear to be two functions that the ITG hopes the PF will play in the lives of NRCan employees:

1. To help NRCan employees conceptualize, understand and explain their work in terms of a common set of ideas, a common story, a common vision (a unity in diversity approach).

2. To provide a set of lenses / questions that can support every employee / team in their efforts to work in a more integrated, collaborative and evidence-based way (which we all strive to do on a daily basis).

As a result, there should probably be two streams of conversation during the Dialogue Sessions:

Part 1. helping people situate their work within the language/themese/vision of the PF (mapping our work onto the framework)

Part 2. helping people learn to use the PF as a tool / lens through which to help them improve their own work (mapping the framework onto our work).

I suggest that the methodology we use to facilitate this 2-way dynamic should vary depending on the type of audience.

Audience 1:
· a group of individuals from different teams (e.g. a session with all the SPI folks working on the different horizontal task teams);
· an individual who is not involved in policy / program work;
· a new group which is developing its work-plan, and has not been doing work on its key files for very long;

Audience 2:
· individuals or groups who have been working on a given issue for a while, and have a pretty clear sense of what they're working on and why

(a) Part One

Audience 1
For this set of audience types, it would make sense to use a generic case study to walk through the eyeball diagram (eg. Bioleaching). This helps people to see how they can express/ articulate/ understand/ conceptualize their work using the language and terminology of the PF.

Audience 2
For this set of audience types, it would make sense to use an applied case study drawn directly from the work of the team. The goal would be to guide people through an activity wherein they can map their work onto the policy framework and explain what they are doing using the language / phrases of the PF.
This will also be an opportunity for the group to do a mapping (not a critical assessment, just a mapping):

· the roles they are currently playing, and in what ways;
· which stakeholders are being engaged
· which levers of influence are being deployed in the file


(b) Part Two

The purpose of Part Two would be to support participants to apply a Policy Framework lens to the Case Study in order to generate key questions that the bioleaching team might be well advised to consider / have considered before, during or after their work.
These questions would function as a checklist of some kind that would be be directed to helping the team consider:
· ways to work in a more collaborative, integrated and evidence-based fashion
· ways to be a better champion of SD - a leader in S/P - a world class ctr of knowledge

For example, using the bioleaching case study, Audience 1 participants could examine:

· the degree to which stakeholders were involved at each stage of the project, and how this facet could have been improved;
· which of the 3 roles above NRCan was playing in this project and how well we did;
· which of the levers NRCan was using at each stage of the project, and whether we could have done better;

Audience 2 participants would ask themselves this question for their current work on the file in question in order to identify strengths and opportunities to improve their performance.

Ideally, the checklist items would be linked to a "best practice" way of working from the PF (stakeholder engagement, collaboration, etc.) that would in turn be linked to a series of recommended skills/capacities/tools that employees can access/develop competencies in.

A group that recognized that it needed to improve its collaborative efforts, for example, might then want to follow up on the PF workshop with a workshop from the KM/CT action team, or a professional development training on collaboration. Similarly, a group that was excellent at integrating science into policy might offer a workshop / lunch&learn to other NRCan groups.

Thoughts?