TBD’s collaborative policy planning

What problem are why trying to solve?

TBD’s collaborative policy planning is an antidote to the incremental growth of government overreach in business life. The fact is that nowadays each political and regulatory decision made, each plan, each policy document, each new tax initiative, has the potential to significantly impact our working lives, our business profit, our health, our children’s upbringing and our prosperity in our old age.

But the underlying problem is that while all this government activity has grown, we have let a tiny clique of party-political activists and senior civil servants get on with the job of running our lives without us bothering to take much notice at all. We are not getting what we need and we are not getting what we pay for in tax.

As an illustration, just about every activity within the private business sector is now increasingly regulated. So many tasks whether they involve arranging a loan, hiring a new employee, designing an office layout, re-equipping a factory, buying a new light bulb or conducting a simple conversation with a colleague, such as a performance review, job interview, or reprimand, are now potentially fraught with unnecessary tension and worry and or extra work and cost. All of this hassle is induced entirely by potential or actual government intervention and regulative oversight.

The quagmire of government involvement in our affairs hit profits, enthusiasm, professionalism, enterprise, productivity and competitiveness.

We are all poorer as a result and pay a lot more taxes than we used to.

There is a wealth of talent in the SME sector that could improve policy outcomes

The nub of the problem is that the prevailing belief in government infallibility in solving society’s problems, ignores the wealth of conscientiousness, experience, professionalism and goodwill of the vast majority of the population. In particular government policy making routinely neglects the wealth of business acumen within the five million strong SME sector.

The TBD planning approach can change this and tap into this bank of talent to develop better and more fruitful policy ideas. We anticipate that given the opportunity, our SME business community is far more likely to get consistent results without the stress of spiraling tax and the periodic and inevitable lapses in policy initiatives.

Why is TBD’s policy planning any better?

In this respect, the TBD is unique. The reason is that we base policy-making ideas on rigorous, proven science, not party ideology or discredited formulas from the 19th Century. To this end we use four broad approaches, each of which makes a powerful contribution to the policy making process. These are as follows:

1. Stanford Research Institute (SRI International) long range planning study
2. The neuroscience-based human givens approach to psychology
3. Systems thinking
4. Toyota Production System’s continuous improvement philosophy

Stanford Research Institute (SRI) long range planning study:

Back in the 1960s and 70s, SRI conducted a ten-year study into corporate planning that created some fairly revolutionary ideas. The first finding was that it was always better to enable the people doing the work to plan the work. They saw that separating the planners from the people they were planning for always ended in failure or at least sub-optimum outcomes. Among other findings the research team went on to develop the now well known stakeholder concept and also the SWOT analysis.

Translate this idea of grassroots inclusion into government policy for business or family life means that the first step in successful policy development is the participation of the people the policy is meant for.

For this reason, we draw extensive qualitative and quantative data from the SME community. The next step is to provide structured planning methods that enable dynamic group collaboration. In other words, TBD doesn’t develop policy on its own like some isolated London based think tank. Instead, we orchestrate the talent and experience of people in the SME sector to create winning policy ideas to put to government.

By the way, the ‘structured planning methods’ we use are another outcome from the SRI research. They enable a planning team to develop policy almost as quickly as an individual.

Another advantage to this approach is that this style of collaborative planning benefits from a wider input of data, skills and experience. This means there is less likelihood of the unintended consequences that so often bedevil government policy.

Human givens approach to psychotherapy

Modern psychology and neuroscience have two clear messages for the role of government.

The first is that every healthy citizen possesses inherent survival traits of inestimable value to society (It is obvious when you think about it). These are known as the human givens and in brief, these qualities include group loyalty, enthusiasm, conscientiousness, empathy, compassion, curiosity, a range of creative problem-solving skills including rational thinking, imagination and a long-term memory. In the context of policy-making, perhaps the most important of all is the innate urge and equally strong ability to collaborate with one another in pursuit of common goals.

But you might well ask if this is true, then why do we not always see these qualities being displayed? The short answer is because of the ubiquitous stress response. This leads us to the second clear message for political leaders. And that is that the above human attributes are only available when people are in their natural brain states.

When stress disrupts our natural brain state, it harms rational thinking, motivation and behaviour, triggers conflict, hostility, competitiveness and so on. If even a few people suffer from stress, they have an adverse impact on the whole group. in short, the stress response shuts down or prevents access to the higher faculties or ‘innate resources’ outlined above.

These scientific findings open up new opportunities for policy making to improve societal stress, prosperity and happiness.

For instance, this knowledge allows us to predict why, where and how people are going to be stressed. We can do this by firstly analyzing processes, rules and regulations in terms of how they will impact a set of twelve well-defined psycho-physiological needs (See diagram). And secondly by analyzing  the impact on the range of innate resources mentioned above.

Importantly, we can now identify what to do to get these needs met. Once met, they switch on, not suppress, those invaluable innate resources that can so quickly elevate society to a higher level of performance and individual fulfillment.

Systems thinking

There is no space in this article to give a comprehensive account of systems thinking, as it is too large and complex a subject. However, two fundamental aspects help give an understanding of its role in collaborative policy making.

Firstly, there is the understanding that when we see problems occur, then 94% of the time it is due to a failure in the design of the system and only 6% due to a ‘people’ failure. In other words, the system is the major influencing factor in how people behave, and how they interact with the system and each other. This is a crucial point as TBD’s methods use neuroscience to ensure that new policy ideas are geared to making ‘the system’ compatible with people’s emotional needs and their innate ability to get those needs met if left to get on with things on their own.

Secondly, in essence systems thinking sees any societal or economic problems as an integral part of an intricate web of interacting and intimately connected defects, impacts, lost opportunities and so on. This means that if you look at a problem in isolation then your proposed solution is almost bound to attract unintended consequences. In other words, something, somewhere else in the system will be adversely impacted by your actions and you will just have to solve another problem later on.

So, any solution, to be truly viable and sustainable, must deal with all aspects and all causes. In fact, ideally any new policy initiative should ‘dissolve’ the problem i.e., take away the root causes of the problem so it does not reoccur. The only way to do this is to use synthesis as well as analysis. By that we mean, learn to understand the system as a complex, dynamic, whole, a myriad of interactions between its various parts.

For this reason, group collaboration with like-minded and experienced stakeholders will be in a far better position to achieve a useful ‘synthesis’ rather than isolated government planners or highly clever policy wonks remote from the field of business.

What we hope to see as result of this systems approach is that less coercion is required to implement a policy idea. Instead, it is more likely that small changes will produce disproportionate results, and in a fraction of the time that would be unimaginable with conventional thinking.

Toyota Production System’s continuous improvement philosophy:

Toyota have become one of the most profitable manufacturing firms in the world. But unlike many other large corporate enterprises they have sustained this success over several generations. The reason for this success is their continuous improvement policy. Founded on respect for human beings their philosophy and enterprise operating system have enabled Toyota to excel at collaborative problem solving. Importantly in this context, these skills are endemic throughout the entire workforce.

Toyota have developed a range of problem-solving techniques that TBD adopts in it’s policy planning work. We train participants to use these techniques and not just rely on senior management to use them. The starting point is to ask “What problem are we trying to solve? How do we know it is a problem? Where is the data to show this?” Then we will deploy other highly useful techniques such as process mapping, root cause analysis, cause and effect diagrams, impact analysis, cost benefit analysis and so on.