2. POLICY PLANNING EXERCISES

A "policy planning exercise," as we are using the term here, is a workshop intended to allow those involved in formulating public policy an opportunity to consider the implications of various strategies in an interactive environment. The interactions include those among the participants as well as others between the participants and analysts who can shed light on policy effects. Participants are assured that they will not be quoted, which allows them to explore different positions without fear of sending public signals that could be misinterpreted. Participants are recruited with the objective of ensuring that a variety of perspectives on the issue at hand is represented.

Policy planning exercises are structured around a "game" in which participants imagine that they are faced with a policy problem to be solved at some point in the future, possibly in some hypothetical state or city. To ensure that the players develop a deeper understanding of perspectives other than their own, they are typically asked to assume roles different from those they play in real life. Participants are furnished with details of the scenario and are then asked to suggest some strategy or line of action to be taken. For example, they are asked to suggest how much money to allocate to one or more programs of action or how to change the existing law. The strategy suggested by the players is fed into an analytic model, which predicts the outcome, which could be cocaine consumed or crimes committed or average education of the workforce, at some future point. Play then moves to that point, and participants are asked to make another "move."

Major policy issues are often politically charged, and policy planning exercises can take either of two approaches in response to this. Some exercises deal overtly with politics. By bringing persons with different politics together in a role-playing game, they seek to promote dialogue and understanding. The objective is to return participants to the "real world" with a stronger motivation to seek common ground and make progress against the challenges facing them. In other exercises, even though political fallout can be among the effects discussed, participants are invited to escape from the political pressures they constantly face. They are asked to consider policies on the basis of such standard measures of merit as effectiveness, efficiency, and equity. In playing roles in such games, players still have the opportunity to see things from a different perspective. Here, however, they may need to search more seriously for the measure of merit of primary concern to the role rather than assuming a certain political orientation.

In serving the overall goals and objectives discussed above, policy planning exercises accomplish a number of things. They pool the knowledge of experts, draw out divided opinion, reveal errors or omissions in concept, identify the values or measures of merit that people care about, and suggest questions or hypotheses for further study. They allow participants to examine the feasibility of concepts, rehearse the process of winning approval for a policy, or test strategies for long-term consequences. They thus permit participants to learn things that they could not learn on their own--or, for that matter, with individuals from their own organization--no matter how vigorous their analysis.

What policy planning exercises do not achieve, despite the presence of an analytic model, is a solution to the problems faced. They do not yield reliable, rigorously validated forecasts or predictions of consequences. They achieve their goal of furthering public policymaking by promoting understanding of a policy problem, of the potential effects of policy alternatives, and of the positions of others involved in policy formulation.