Group Hugs and Stating the Obvious

by Kent Aitken

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In 2010 I attended an event variously called GOC3/Collaborative Culture Camp and Collaborative Management Camp. This was back in the halcyon days of our youth when events had tweet walls, displaying the inner workings of the hivemind. Some of this was insights and connections between speakers’ points, though most was essentially live-tweeting quotes from the on-stage conversation. At one point, the tweet wall showed someone’s assessment that the event was “So far, mostly group hugs and stating the obvious.”

Which serves today as a launching point for thinking about that community, how it has changed, and where we are today. (Crowdsourced timeline here: http://gc20.pbworks.com/w/page/99478487/FrontPage.)

At one point in 2006, there were zero public servants on Twitter – because there was no Twitter. By 2010 it was probably in the scant hundreds; you could reach the end of the community, so why not follow everyone? We could figure out the “why” out later, but for the time being it was good enough to be connected around a general ideology of sharing, collaboration, experimentation, and openness (see: Millenials, Lego and the Perimeter of Ignorance). I wrote about the value of writing in the open as a way to create “rough edges” that could create connections with people learning the same directions or trying to solve the same problems (see: On the Importance of Being Earnest (and Open)).

That was before the era of information overload and much need for Twitter hiatuses or culling who you follow (though one of Nick’s most popular posts, a full decade ago, was about using Yahoo! pipes to fast-filter articles shared through social media (see: Signal to Noise)). The community matured, grew, and one of the driving common problems – bringing government into the social media era – started looking like a solv-ed/able problem. So people started subdividing into more niche and specialized sub-elements, and taking the natural step of expanding networks across sectors (though there’s still a serious core of “people on Twitter outside government that people inside government know”).

In parallel, the double-edged sword of asking “What problem are we really trying to solve?” emerged as a guiding principle. I say “double-edged” because an impact focus is, of course, a healthy lens. On the other hand, it may have undervalued community-building efforts where the “goal” was really a Venn diagram of many different goals for different people. In many ways, “group hugs and stating the obvious” was exactly what many people needed to start growing into a new and wider community. The first time I heard this question answered really well was Heather Remacle in the BC gov: success for a collaborative community is “growing people who fulfill the vision.”

Which roughly leads us to why posting on CSPRenewal.ca fell off for me. Like Nick (see: Fully, Completely), it was a combination of factors: new and challenges roles in my career, a busier personal life, but there was also an element of the GC collaborative community changing. Where once I agreed whole-heartedly with Andrew Kjurata’s “Shut up and say something” call for people to raise their voices in public spaces, the other increasingly plausible lens was that additional voices were as likely to just be uninformed bellowing into a cacophony. My standards for what I posted about and why went up.

So now, in a cacophonous environment characterized by information overload, Nick and I have both returned to posting at around the same time, and again for some of the same reasons. A little bit more professional and personal space, but at the same time, I think there are some useful things to discuss about the cacophony. One of my strongest conclusions from a year of interviewing people about digital-era governance was how warped our discourse can be about technology and change. Talking points can enjoy years of repetition before critical voices and evidence emerge to correct them – and even then likely don’t stand a chance against the ingrained memes.

Which I don’t purport to be able to correct, but it does mean that I continue to find this space interesting. And I wrote way too much stuff a couple years back (see: Governance in the Digital Era) that I had always intended to chop up into somewhat more digestible sections, which seems like a worthwhile project. I enjoyed Laura Wesley’s description of writing in open spaces as talking to her future self, and I’d like to keep making deposits in that collection rather than just withdrawing all the time.

And if we’ve met recently and you’re new here, here’s a few starting points from the past years that I think remain non-embarassing. Also, holy shit. The current count is 715 posts (more Nick than me and the other contributors). I’ll leave Nick to note his own, if he so chooses. 

• Public Service Anonymity is Dead, Long Live Public Service Anonymity
• Public service: the Long Game and the Dark Side 
• Innovation is Information
• The Next Big Thing
• Tricksters, Hackers, and Schemers

Best,

Kent

The dark side of community engagement as a public servant

by Kent Aitken

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Last week I had a dark thought. I considered the possibility that my stakeholder community would possibly be equally well off if I was an anonymous public servant who never got out of the office. You might imagine that this goes against my general philosophy on modern public service, and you’d be right.

So I want to share my experience as a public servant for the last few years, with an emphasis on the "public" part. I recently wrote this on Twitter in response to Amanda Clarke, on the trend towards public servants having digital presences linked to their roles in government:

@KenRasmussen1 @kentdaitken It may also be a necessary feature of open, networked policymaking. PS needs to have an online presence.

— Amanda Clarke (@ae_clarke) October 16, 2016

@ae_clarke @KenRasmussen1 I'd second this. I can't imagine being good at my job without the presence.

— Kent Aitken (@kentdaitken) October 16, 2016

And I believe that, but I have to nuance it.

Three years ago I joined the Government of Canada's Open Government team (I've since taken a year of interchange). I took a broad view of Open Gov, and considered the principles and in a way the ideology in how I worked and wanted the team to work: open, engaged, collaborative, empathetic. I didn't think we could run a successful Open Gov program if our world was an office in Ottawa.

I wanted to get the know the community, hear from stakeholders, and look for opportunities to work together with groups in and outside of government. And I feel as though I did a reasonably good job of that.

In three years I've learned so, so much from people. Over Twitter, over beer and coffee, in meetings, and at conferences. My understanding of the problem space is immeasurably richer for those conversations, and they made me better at my job. 

Here's the downside.

For all of those insights and partnership possibilities, I was able to act on them and help change things maybe, maybe 10% of the time. Which, in my view, means I couldn't fully respect the time and effort that the community puts into helping governments and government employees. Increasingly, I started telling people that I'd love to help them but that they may want to contact my senior executives directly and try that route as well. Which is time-consuming for everyone, and hamstrings the analyst-level value of adding context and considerations.

I don’t think I was delusional. In many cases, executives in my organization responded positively to the ideas and partnerships discussed. But people in such organizations rarely make complete decisions; instead, they make parts of decisions while this complex amorphous thing called an “organization” is responsible for the overall picture.

So where does this leave me? I’m going to stick with being a public public servant. I’d feel like I had earplugs in and blinders on otherwise. But that impact gap concerns me. In a vacuum, the more senior a public servant is engaging with a community, the better it is for the community - except for the fact that available time to engage in “rigourous hanging out” decreases in proportion to seniority (see: relevant Matt Bailey Twitter essay). This concern, like so many others, has common roots in big governance questions, including how well we align expertise, responsibility, accountability, and authority. And I don’t know if we can get to an open, user-centric, empathetic, and ultimately a more effective government without addressing those questions.

Hype and Hope for Digital Citizen Engagement

by Kent Aitken

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If we were to place digital citizen engagement on the Hype Cycle, I suspect we'd be pinning it in the trough of disillusionment.

The Hype Cycle idea is this: for any emerging idea or technology, it goes through a period of inflated expectations, then a trough in which people think it won't amount to anything, and then it settles into the "plateau of productivity" somewhere between the two.

Five years ago, people were really excited about the idea of digital citizen engagement: nation-wide discourse on the topics of the day, free to all, on a level playing field. Instead we've gotten this:

Publications are disabling comments forums because the quality of the discourse is so low. The experts in the field are very much so in the design and research stage, and the most sophisticated online deliberation models (like MIT's Deliberatorium) are still being tweaked and studied.

And while governments have had to react to powerful political mobilization and public will on social media (read Vox's take on How the Internet is Disrupting Politics), government-led digital citizen engagement has hardly become a game-changer for governance.

Digital citizen engagement is going to be a whole big thing

Yet, I'm pretty confident that digital citizen engagement will be hugely important in the future. Not because it's better than existing analog or in-person ways of getting citizens' ideas and feedback, but despite the fact that it's demonstrably worse.

MOOCs - Massive, Open, Online Courses - are the perfect analogy. North of 90% of people that register don't finish (though because they're new(ish), people will sign up for novelty; there'll be less of that in the future (see: Hype Cycles)). Deloitte's resident predictions expert, Duncan Stewart, has listed all of the many problems with MOOCs and still concludes that they'll still be a huge part of education and even credentials in the future. It's simply because university keeps getting more expensive, especially relative to entry-level salaries. The nexus of market forces demand the distribution model that only the internet allows.

Likewise, digital citizen engagement is, on balance, worse than the suite of options governments have to engage in-person. It's less engaging, less conducive to developing trust and relationships, and poorly suited to dissecting complex issues. But, it's the only way to even approach fairness and scale, and I think that this imperative will overpower any limitations or weaknesses.

Canada has a population of ~35M people. You can provide an opportunity for the first 12.7M to engage with government by visiting only 5 cities. But after that it gets tricky, and the next 95 biggest urban centres only get you 10.7M people. And after that, there's still 11.7M Canadians to go.

Imperfect but better

A couple closing thoughts:

One, the level playing field of the internet isn't actually level. There are still massive distributional biases in internet use*, leisure time, civic literacy, trust in government, and cultures of deference or irreverence. These will need to systematically managed. (Even municipal 311 systems have distributional biases; even big data isn't always full data.)

Two, digital citizen engagement tools are getting better, What's available to the Government of Canada today (via standing offers) is a huge improvement over only a few years ago. And the more these tools get used, the better they'll get (and the bigger the market will be for bilingual, accessible platforms). And the better people will get at using them.

*"Internet use among the richer half of the country is actually over 90 per cent with the top quartile of household income at 94.5 per cent and the second quartile at 90.2 per cent. Internet use among the bottom quartile of Canadians stands at only 62.5 per cent (the third quartile is 77.8 per cent)." - Michael Geist in the Toronto Star

Why Government Social Media Isn't Social

by Kent Aitken

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At a Community of Federal Regulators workshop last month, the presentation material led a handful of us in the audience to a conversation about social media and how government can get past using it as a "push" mechanism and into two-way dialogue. Which is not just a Canadian thing; Ryan Androsoff and the OECD found the same worldwide:

"[W]hile governments are increasingly using social media, many are still using it primarily as a traditional communications mechanism rather than for opening up policy processes or transforming public service delivery."

I found myself saying that "I don't think government will ever really get there," and wanted to explain that comment. It's a matter of where "there" really is, or, as Ryan put it, "What's the ideal state for social media in government?"

The ideal state

For starters, if the social media goal is something like profit, reach, or providing a supplementary channel, then interactivity and sociality may really just be means to an end. In that case, one-way messaging might work perfectly, even if it offends social media purists, and the story ends there.

But let's assume that the goal is as Ryan wrote in the above quote, to open up policy processes or transform service delivery. In this case, responsiveness and interactivity become central.

And if that's the there, I think government can get there - just in a limited and particular set of circumstances.

But first: why aren't we there yet?

The worldwide state of the practice is still one-way in government, which means that there are more barriers to genuinely interactive government social media than it may have first seemed (or that it's not as attractive a goal). It might be easy to point to common culprits: maybe it’s just culture change that hasn’t taken root yet. Maybe it’s approval processes that make it hard to be “social” and responsive - it’s hard to carry on a conversation while routing responses through half a dozen people, and the time investment smothers the engagement benefit. And so on.

But the state of practice is similar in the private sector. There’s no shortage of examples of really clever back-and-forths between companies and customers, but that's the exception, not the rule. Where companies do get social, it tends to fall under customer service: that is, just an alternative channel to calls or emails to complain, which leads to tightly and extensively scripted interactions. Anything more in-depth and the company's social media team would have to go digging for answers, which breaks the responsiveness element.

Which is more like the government reality. The Public Inquiries model is a good analogy. Questions from the public come in to a central office. That team has a solid map of the institution and they triage questions as best they can for response - in some cases to multiple teams, just in case. In some cases, the answers are a few pages long, and (reasonably) take a couple days to provide.

Government could try to ask general, light questions about broad thoughts on policy or services via social media, such that such in-depth knowledge is not needed, but it'll inevitably get to a complicated request or question. Then the only response available is "That's interesting, we'll consider that and get back to you" and suddenly the people engaging are reminded that they're not talking to the people responsible, and it breaks the spell.

The TL;DR: for this section is that people talk to people, not organizations, and it's impossible to have a conversation that hypothetically could include everything that an organization "knows." The departmental level is too big for conversation.

When and where can government social media get social?

I've been considering three axes that we can play with:

1. Length of time
2. Officialness/institutionalness
3. Source

For source, the question is to what extent the engagement is led by programs/policy/services versus communications, and for today the long story short is that you need both involved.

For the others, let's imagine a grid like this:

From left to right we have the length of time of social media interactions: point-in-time, like hour-long Twitter townhalls (that usually convene a "war room" of comms professionals and subject matter experts to support) to ongoing, like how complaints and comments can come in at any time.

At the top we have large, institutional, and official social media interactions: again, townhalls, but also announcements, senior executive corporate accounts, and the Public Inquiries clearinghouse model applied to social media. At the bottom, we have individual public servants using social media for work purposes (which happens mostly unofficially in the Government of Canada and more officially in some other counties).

How social media in government can be social:

1. It can't be institutions, they're too big to converse
2. It can't be individuals, that doesn't jibe with the public administration culture in Canada (at least now now)
3. The existing escape hatch from (1) and (2), convening war rooms for point-in-time engagements, is too niche and needs alternatives

I think government should instead look at expanding the use of models that cover the middle ground. For instance:

1. Creating governance and content partnerships between policy/program shops and social media teams for more like a week to a month, still using institutional accounts. It might be tied to a consultation or campaign, but would regardless involve posing questions - both into the ether and to identified stakeholder accounts - and getting into back-and-forth dialogue. The policy shop behind the interaction would be identified for the duration, which would put this near the middle of that grid.
2. Identifying policy and program areas whose work requires public consultation and engagement, provide public affairs training (lest I invoke Chris Hadfield), and expand the use of official community accounts, again identifying the teams behind the accounts. This would be in the middle of the grid from top-to-bottom but allow for interactions from point-in-time to ongoing.

Are there other models in use that are working well now? Any other ways to explore the middle ground?

Golden non-rules for government communications

by Kent Aitken

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We’re past the days of people calling for government writ large to be “more like the private sector.” It might still come up for certain areas or practices, but the view that private sector techniques are a panacea is fortunately out of date.

But private sector practices have a more subtle, distributed influence too. In fields like marketing, communications, or community management it’s far easier to find books and resource directed at the private sector. The software we use is almost invariably designed for the private sector (e.g., customer relationship management, web publishing, and analytics platforms). We have to mentally convert terms like “sales leads,”disregard some irrelevant ideas, and bootstrap some missing ones.

With the private sector comparison in mind, I’d like to look at some reasonable rules for government communications - and their limits.

Measure engagement

Last year I was getting advice on analytics from a friend in the private sector. She suggested mapping website pages out on a 2x2 grid to start analyzing content against views and time-on-page. It looked like this:

You can see how the logic applies to a company’s blog or product page. If people rarely find a page, but when they do find it they spend a lot of time on it, perhaps it should be promoted better. But what if your “best content” - i.e., where visitors spend the most time-on-page - is an FAQ explaining how a government program works? Or guidance on how to complete a transaction with government? If they’re reading text because they can’t figure out how to do something, that’s not good content, that’s bad service.

Consider the idea of a retail sales funnel, below. The idea is that a number of people will keep taking steps towards buying something, and you want to minimize the number of people you lose at each stage of the funnel (via losing interest, bad UX, etc.):

This isn't what we do, but the logic behind it is pervasive. I’ve heard people talk about “driving traffic” to government websites. Why? We’re not selling anything. We're not necessarily trying to get more people into the funnel. 

Maybe a stakeholder seeing a tweet and simply knowing that there’s a policy that says government data and information is open by default is exactly the ideal outcome. For many people, I don’t think clicking on that tweet and reading that policy adds to their experience. They actually shouldn't go any further into the "sales funnel". Which means that Twitter’s engagement metrics might be precisely backwards sometimes; maybe it means we didn’t write the tweet clearly enough and we forced people to waste their time finding an explanation.

Community is king

“Kent, we haven’t seen you in a while.” “Kent, X, Y, and Z people are all talking about #exln42.” “People are looking at your profile.” Etc. We get emails like that every day, plus tons of straight-up content marketing. Community is king, they say. Create a relationship with your customers. Every business wants a relationship with you. Buying show tickets in a city you don’t live in? Heck, may as well make you choose a password and verify your account for the next time you happen to be swinging through Sao Paulo. Why not.

“Kent, check out these shows that are happening this weekend [8,000 km from you]!”

But really:

“I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something.” [source]

In government, we want to maintain regular communications, write engaging social media content. Of course.

But maybe, we actually want to design for transience, not community. Maybe, we don’t actually want people coming back regularly, because maybe they don’t want to come back regularly. Maybe they don’t want to “check back” or “stay tuned” or “keep watching this space.” Maybe we should contact them only when we have something really meaningful to share, while erring on the side of being forthright for the sake of transparency.

Don’t make me think

Don’t Make Me Think is a wonderful book that everyone should read, regardless of whether you work in digital communications or not. It’s about designing websites, and the golden rule is that everything should be easy for visitors. They shouldn’t have to search hard for the information or task that they’re most likely to be looking for, and things should work intuitively.

But in government we have to nuance even this bible. Nick wrote last week about how government’s role may appropriately be a platform for slow, deliberate dialogue, and he’s right (see: Thinking Fast and Slow About Online Public Engagement). That will often be the approach we want. In a crowdsourcing world, a high volume of people that click Like is probably not our goal. In the private sector it's about lead generation. For government, it’s about better decisions, people feeling involved, and decisions being legitimate.

Are single-click upvotes the right way to gauge sentiments on, say, where we build power plants? It’s a sensitive, complex topic.

An example: the Brooklyn Museum asked their community to help curate an exhibit called Click!. They designed the engagement platform to slow people down. No Likes, no Favourites, no Upvotes, no thumbnails of art to scroll through. Participants had to view each piece of art at full size, one-by-one, consuming their screen, and enter a number out of 100, slowing them down just enough to make the process deliberate and thoughtful.

To be clear: the functionality was still smooth. The task was still easy to complete. They just defined the task as “thoughtfully review and rate art” instead of “rate art.”

The future is visual

Tweets with images get more engagement. Posts with videos get linked more. Visual content drives engagement. On Facebook, photos get more Likes and Comments than other content types. Youtube is apparently a whole big thing. (Here’s a bunch of stats.)

“40% of people will respond better to visual information than plain text.”

What does that even mean?

Yes, of course, if we as government officials have important information and visual content is how we get people to view it or understand it, great. How to file taxes or awareness campaigns about online bullying are good examples.

Here’s a framework for how we interact with information (h/t):

We can present information such that people interact with it in a purely conceptual, abstract, rational, and language-based way. Or, we can present it in a very perceptual, visual, and even visceral way.

The rise of visual content in political campaigns and product marketing is often based on the desire to elicit an emotional, rather than rational, reaction. The images and music in some political ads (particularly in the US) are designed precisely to avoid having our language processors kick in.

More people will click on content that fits in the bottom right of that graph.

But maybe, the future of government content will often still be to elicit deliberate and rational reactions. Which means that we might find ourselves in positions where we could build an infographic, but we rightly decide not to. The future might occasionally still be text-heavy, and we’ll be okay with that, knowing that it’ll serve the needs of the country.

Lastly, plain language

Just kidding. This rule stands. Plain language is the way. Stop writing like that. (That goes for me, too.)

Non-rules are made to be broken

I'm not suggesting that we don't try to engage people, or that we skip visual content, or that we should be protecting citizens from our web content. Not at all. But we live in world where the state-of-the-market and much of our professional guidance is an imperfect analog for government's goals - and citizens' goals interacting with their government - and we must be conscious of that.

This post owes a lot to last weekend’s CanUX conference, particularly the presentations from Marsha Haverty, Leisa Reichelt, and Shelly Bernstein. Feel free to check out my rough notes.

More thoughts on the Copernicus formula

by Nick Charney

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A while back I presented a model demonstrating what I consider to be the future of public policy (See: Blending Sentiment, Data Analytics, Design Thinking, and Behavioural Economics). Kent later observed that the model could in fact describe the more encompassing idea of governance writ large (See: Building Distributed Capacity). At first I agreed with his observation but it's something I've been quietly reflecting on a lot lately and the more I think about it, the more I get the sense that what I've put forward is more precisely a formula that informs governance. Or perhaps more rightly, could inform a particular way of "doing" governance, because governance is – as Kent himself recently noted (See: People Act, Technology Helps) – what people do.

Recapping Copernicus

If you didn't catch the original post (again, see: Blending Sentiment, Data Analytics, Design Thinking, and Behavioural Economics) here's the TL;DR recap of the formula:

(Public Sentiment + Data Analytics) / (Design Thinking + Behavioural Economics) = Future of Evidence Based Policy

It's a back-to-basics model that argues that the sum of what the public wants (sentiment) and what the evidence suggests is possible (data) is best achieved through policy interventions that are highly contextualized and can be empirically tested, tweaked, and maximized (design thinking + behavioural economics) while simultaneously creating new data to support or refute it and facing real-time and constantly shifting public scrutiny.

Naming Copernicus

I chose to name the formula Copernicus for the following reasons:

• it speaks to the fact that the formula represents a significant reorientation in the field of policy development and execution; 
• it infers the amount of effort that will be required to overcome the inertia that is inherent in current frame of reference; and
• it conveys the sense that once the formula becomes the new frame of reference the old frame is no longer tenable.

You may have noticed that I sense "once the formula comes the new frame" and not "if the formula becomes the new frame"; I did so subconsciously, noticed, paused, reflected, and kept it as is because my gut feeling is that it is only a matter of time before the formula's elements become as ubiquitous as the social media that we used to talk about in similar veins.

Copernicus is a means

It's a frame that helps you lean into the hard work of figuring out the variables. What do people want? What does the evidence suggest is possible?

It's a frame that helps you lean even further into the harder work of structuring the execution. What policy levers are most likely to work? How do you design the interaction? How do you build adaptability into the prototype?

It's a frame that helps decision makers gather rich information points and brings them to a series of decision points.

Copernicus is not an end

What I'm trying to get at is the fact that the formula isn't a panacea of simplification but a lens through which to better understand complexity. It doesn't tell you how to weigh the variables against one another, or what choice(s) to make, but rather it helps identify that which you ought to consider when doing so.

To be honest, I was planning on writing a series of posts elaborating each of the formula's elements but every time I sit down to do so I get lost in the complexity of each of them. In short, I'm still learning, thinking them through, running them up against real world examples. I still plan on doing so, but I need to dedicate more time to think it all through.

To this end, I'm considering convening a small discussion to test the model against recent policy choices made by different organizations (e.g. Canada Post' decision to end home delivery) to see precisely how it could help me both understand and explain a policy choice if I was in the position to make one. If this is a thought exercise that you are interested in participating in, drop me a line, I'd be happy to run through it with you as a thought exercise.

Blending Public Sentiment, Data Analytics, Design Thinking and Behavioural Economics

by Nick Charney

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The Thinker by Darwin Bell

Last year I wrote a lengthy piece that argued that understanding the future of evidence based policy meant understanding the confluence of big data and social media (See: Big Data, Social Media and the Long Tail of Public Policy). Today I want to further qualify my statements, and refine my conceptual model to reflect some of my more recent thinking.


Project Copernicus

To be fair the conceptual model – which I've decided to nickname Project Copernicus (See: Towards Copernicus if you don't get the reference) – is very much a moving target; and while it ebbs and flows as I come into contact with new (to me) thinking, it's very much about leaning into the hard stuff (See: Lean into it) and "building a better telescope" (See: Complexity is a Measurement Problem).


To recap quickly and push forward

At the outset of the aforementioned piece I offered up a TL;DR summation that was essentially:

Social Media + Big Data Analytics = Future of Public Policy

And feel that refining that statement is as good as a place to start as any; here's my latest thinking:

(Public Sentiment + Data Analytics) / (Design Thinking + Behavioural Economics) = Future of Evidence Based Policy

In a sense its a rather simple, back-to-basics model that argues that the sum of what the public wants (sentiment) and what the evidence suggests is possible (data) is best achieved through policy interventions that are highly contextualized and can be empirically tested, tweaked, and maximized (design thinking + behavioural economics) while simultaneously creating new data to support or refute it and facing real-time and constantly shifting public scrutiny.


I have a number of reasons for nuancing the model

• Public Sentiment is broader than social media and it is incumbent on policy makers to be as inclusive as possible when incorporating sentiment. Focusing on social media ignores issues of the digital divide and unduly privileges those with greater digital literacy. This may be one of the reasons that the Deputy Minister's Committee on Social Media and Policy Development was recast as the Deputy Minister's Committee on Policy Innovation; social media may be innovative but it doesn't necessarily follow that innovative ideas flow from social media.
• Data Analytics is broader than Big Data and includes both linked data and open data. These don't necessarily always fall into the category of big data on their own but will play an important role as more and more data sources start to rub up against each other. 
• Design Thinking combines empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and rationality to analyze and fit solutions to the particular context
• Behavioural Economics brings sentiment, analytics, and design to ground by emphasizing what people actually do when faced with a given situation (rather than what we think they ought to do)
• Evidence Based is an important qualifier and cannot be narrowly construed as relating to only one of the variables on the left side of the equation; evidence comes in many forms and it is up to policy makers and elected officials to determine how to weigh the different sources of evidence (variables in the equation above) against each other in a given set of circumstances.

On Savvy Policy Makers

Savvy policy makers (and for that matter, elected officials) are likely the ones able (and willing) to chart their policy directions against this type of model; the one's who can say with confidence:

"Here is what we've heard from the public, here is what the evidence supports, and here is the most policy intervention we have determined to be the most efficacious. However, it is one we will continue to refine over time, as it creates new data, and is forced to stand up to real world public scrutiny"

When was the last time you heard someone qualify a policy position with that kind of preamble?