Advanced Policy Workshop

Master policy planning, the art of stakeholder engagement, and strategies to tackle unexpected policy challenges.

Laying the foundation for policy success

- Outline the need for new policy or policy change

- Understand the knock-on impact of change

- Identify knowledge gaps to prioritise research and data needs

Building a policy community

- Identify, understand, and analyse key stakeholders

- Facilitate productive policy discussions

- Frame policy ideas to influence and gain support

Navigating real-world policy challenges

- Challenge existing policy assumptions 

- Examine unintended and perverse policy outcomes

- Manage unexpected policy requests and tight timeframes

Explore best practice policy risk management, critical thinking techniques, and the impact of cognitive biases.

Planning for uncertainty and risk

- Apply critical thinking to define uncertainty and risk

- Explore and outline the sources of risks

- Use risk as an opportunity for better policy-making

Handling risk with evidence-based policy

- Ask the right questions throughout the policy cycle 

- Learn to distinguish misleading information

- Use evidence effectively for better decision-making

Cognitive biases in policy 

- Incorporate diverse perspectives in policy

- Implement strategies to mitigate biases

- Review and challenge surface assumptions with logic models

Learn to simply communicate complex policy concepts, explore monitoring and evaluation models, and develop adaptive policies.

Communicating complex policy issues

- Simplify and clarify complex policy concepts

- Communicate evidence effectively at each policy stage

- Explore different types of visual aids to support policy evaluation

Monitoring and evaluation 

- Investigate program theory and methodologies

- Identify success measures for continuous improvement 

- Understand political implications and assess consequences

Big picture policy thinking

- Address key challenges of evaluating policy outcomes

- Utilise research, data and analysis for strong policy evaluation

- Prepare adaptive policies and be ready for change