Doing Policy

Next week, use PowerPoint only for tables, graphs, and images.  You do not need to use it at all.

If you have a PowerPoint for your presentation next week, either post on the class blog or email it to me for posting.

From Bardach:

• Complexity is your main enemy, so start by simplifying. The two main routes to simplifying are by means of outcomes and by means of constraints.
• [D]on’t be misled by the word best in so-called best practices research. Rarely will you have any confidence that some helpful-looking practice is actually the best among all those that address the same problem or opportunity. The extensive and careful research needed to document a claim of best will almost never have been done. Usually, you will be looking for what, more modestly, might be called “good practices.”
• Two particular types of vulnerability are especially worth attending to. 
• One pertains to likely failures of general management capacity—such as a low general level of leadership talent or the lack of a “good government” ethos—that would make it easier to implement this or any other practice successfully.
• The other pertains to weaknesses intrinsic to the particular practice itself—such as a service delivery program’s susceptibility to conflict over whether to give priority to this or that catchment area or needy subpopulation, or a safety-oriented regulatory program’s inability to determine whether to err on the side of injury-tolerant leniency or costly stringency.

Policy Lessons from the Movies

Apollo 13 and Brainstorming:

All the Way:  LBJ on policy windows:

LBJ's words to David Halberstam: 

When you win big you can have anything you want for a time. You come home with that big landslide and there isn’t a one of them [in Congress] who’ll stand in your way. No, they’ll be glad to be aboard and to have their photograph taken with you and be part of all that victory. They’ll come along and they’ll give you almost everything you want for a while and then they’ll turn on you. They always do. They’ll lay in waiting, waiting for you to make a slip and you will. They’ll give you almost everything and then they’ll make you pay for it. They’ll get tired of all those columnists writing how smart you are and how weak they are and then the pendulum will swing back.

The Martian and a lesson about life: