Traveller’s guide to policy learning – Q&A with Associate Professor Alastair Stark (part 2)
As part of Associate Professor Alastair Stark’s recent research with Dr Jenny van der Arend on some of the dynamics of policy lesson learning, we took five minutes to sit down with him a few quick-fire questions about his research, what he found, and some key learnings.
In case you missed it, read part 1 here.
This research tested these ideas with a sample of practitioners from Queensland, what did that involve?
We went around the key organisations in Queensland’s disaster management community. It is a strong community of practise with lots of sophisticated actors and really well advanced arrangements.
Comparatively Queensland is very strong as a disaster management community. Doesn’t stop disasters happening, doesn’t stop their effects, but there’s still very sophisticated.
We went around the community and we spoke to the key actors and what we were interested in was the Queensland based departments, departments like Transport and Main roads and who are affected by disasters, the blue light services, Queensland police, Queensland fire, organisations that are dedicated to disaster like the Inspector General for Emergency Management. But crucially as well the local councils of Queensland who are often under resourced, overworked, but demands are made of them in terms of disaster management.
We spoke to lesson learners across the state, across the arrangements and simply asked them about the pros and cons of learning in their own contexts. And the idea of travel, and the metaphor of travel really emerged as a way to think about how lessons created in one place do or do not get implemented and another one. And of course, a massive state like Queensland, with many different organisations, we see lots of different journeys in terms of lesson learning.
Did you find people were keen to engage in the conversation?
Absolutely. Because there’s a there’s a shared sense of purpose. I think in the disaster management community in Queensland many people know each other. There’s lots of networks which help, there’s lots of thought given to lesson learning and I feel that across the community there’s an openness to academic thinking and concepts as long as they can be shown to be located in practise and the perceptions of people who do the practise work.
You present your findings as a series of Travellers tips. Can you talk us through some key takeaway tips for people in the public sector.
There’s Five key tips.
1. The 1st is getting over the fear of travel. The fear of travel in terms of lesson learning comes across in terms of the blame and the censure and the criticism that people typically associate with lesson learning. There’s a sense that if we publicise problematic issues which then lead to lessons, we’re going to get into trouble and that leads to lessons not moving at all. Either those problems don’t see the light of day initially, or they are known but kept in house and so the fear of travel stops many journeys before they even begin. So having a no blame culture and no fault process of lesson learning or simply celebrating success as much as possible is the start of thinking about good dynamic capacity.
2. The second one is preparing for the journey. If anybody’s going in any kind of long term journey, you have to do some preparations and that’s about anticipating where you’re going, the kind of people that you might meet, the risks and the opportunities of travel. Too often when we prepare lessons, we simply don’t think about where they are going and the implementers who are waiting for them and their resources and their contexts, and we simply assume that a good lesson will speak for itself and convince other people. But we need to prepare for the journey by really putting yourself into the shoes of implementers and understanding that they have discretion to reject your lesson, or at least not implement it with a huge amount of gusto.
3. The third one. Translation. You know, the language of one profession does not necessarily translate to another. The language of one level of government does not translate to another. We need to understand that in order for lessons to move, they have to be capable of being translated. Keep the lesson simple, so that people can understand it, keep it outcome focused so that they have the ability to translate how they go about doing it. And generally, try and find a language which is going to be feasible in multiple context. The business case, the language of risk management, the language of strategy versus the language of operations. We have to think about all of these things.
4. Number 4 is about good accommodation. People want to accommodate lessons and they want to provide homes for them. But they often don’t because they don’t have any capacity. And so if we can understand the capacities of the implementers who we want to action or lessons, they might find good accommodation. If we don’t understand those capacities and we simply impose lessons upon people, they will simply ignore them. And so we need to think about what ends up in the too hard basket for many people and avoid ending up in that basket because if we if we simply create lessons without thinking about the capabilities, they won’t be accommodated.
5. The final one relates to the long term state. Some point in time we need lessons to stop travelling, stop moving around and settle in for the long duration. They need to put down anchor and really institutionalise downwards. That’s still movement, but it’s not movement across, it’s movement down into organisations. And so we need to think not only about institutionalising lessons within business as usual practises, but also cultures and narratives which are crucial for remembering. And we need to really think about those in terms of the lesson learning journey. We have to go from lessons identified to lessons remembered and that requires A mixture of hard and soft processes. And so that’s the five big takeaways from the people. And we think that if we think about these five and probably many more dynamic capacity will start to improve.
Were there any surprises for you in terms of the interviews and what was uncovered?
Yes, I think there was quite a few actually.
I knew that the community that I was engaged with because I guess to some extent, I’m part of it. I knew that they cared a lot about lesson learning.
I was surprised at how much it was already going on and acknowledged in terms of these five issues.
If we take blaming for example, the Queensland Police Service is trying very hard to generate a no-fault culture around its lesson learning. Not necessarily because it’s thinking about dynamic capacity, but it wants to create this culture because it knows that lessons identified will be stronger as a consequence.
What surprised me about that was not just that it was an avenue for lessons to move, but it was also a mechanism that people use to reassure themselves that the problems that they face that they had to learn lessons about were universal. And so there was a solidarity to those, those kind of networks which countered the blaming narrative and made people reassured to hear some of the problems.
I was surprised that there was a lot going on and a lot that could be harnessed to deal with this issue and improve dynamic capacity. If we could just talk about it a bit more and kind of bring these solutions up and that’s what the paper tries to do
If you could see across all of the different groups in disaster management, if they were to just take a couple of key things and apply it in their day-to-day, whether that’s in relation to disaster management or something else where there’s a policy learning opportunity, what would that be?
Great question.
I think for me, if I was to make wave a magic wand and say here’s something that could make a difference, which is low cost but potentially high impact, I would say why don’t we all reflect on the traditional report as a medium for communication?
It’s the go to default position. There’s a problem. We need a report. There’s a need for lesson learning.
But the number of times that I’ve spoken to time poor public servants who have zero time to read reports, and often, let’s be honest, zero Interest in reading beyond the executive summary. It’s such a problem that we continue to use this medium of communication.
If we think about lesson learning and we think about alternatives, much more salient to have the five people who are at the centre of a disaster talking about their personal experience and there one or two lessons that people need to hear.
Doing that by video, doing that in an alternative medium that is much more powerful in terms of going on a journey and getting to the end of the journey, then a hundred page report that won’t be read.
I think that’s a universal point.
We still think that the production of the report will lead to the outcome, and we don’t necessarily need to operate in that world anymore. We don’t need to impose that imposition on people who don’t have time.
The full article is available on open access here: Stark, A., & van der Arend, J. 2023. The traveller’s guide to policy learning . Journal of European Public Policy.
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