Overview - Policy Updating

Update, relearn & reconceptualise your policies

There is a lot happening out there in ‘policyland’ and practitioners are so busy ‘doing’, that they have little time for ‘thinking’ what they are doing, reflecting what they have done or learning what’s new. Habit, coping, making do, becomes the order of the day. Thinking out of the box is as difficult as getting out of the office.

This course gets backs to basics, but goes the next step – what are new developments that serious policy practitioners need to know to be more effective, to be reinvigorated in tackling policy problems and to develop more effective policies. In addition to coping with the ‘doing’ of policy, of coping with the latest crisis, of working with clients there are also new ideas, theories and practices out there waiting to be tried to each practitioner’s particular policy patch.

The challenges faced by policy makers

• New problems are emerging, perennial ones need new approaches, governments are hard pressed to keep up, focus and deliver
• Voters are impatient, shifting in loyalties
• New issues, new stakeholders, new crises, new ways of dealing with policy issues are emerging

...More data, more evidence, more information

• Changing governments, different priorities, new leaders, ministers and new demands for action
• Working in policy is not easy
• It is an ever changing environment
• There is always a demand for more
• There are never enough resources or time
• Organisational politics get in the way of progress
• Policy is always chasing actions, needs and demands

How to respond to these challenges

This is a new specially developed course that responds to these challenges and seeks to:

1. Refresh core policy development processes and frameworks
2. Update on key policy, political and organisational trends
3. Inform of new policy processes, actions, trials and what works
4. Enhance core analytical and problem solving skills in applied case studies
5. Understand what is now available in terms of techniques, thinking, solutions in the policy shop

Outcomes

At the end of this intensive two day course you will have been exposed to lots of new ideas and revisited some older ones. You will have worked hard both before you attend the masterclass in the exercises we give you, and in the two days of group case studies and presentations.

But you will:

• Understand better what you have been doing
• Seen where policy has been coming from – and where it might be going
• Been exposed to new concepts and ways of doing policy
• Developed and improved your analytical skills
• Got some big picture ideas, but learnt some on-the-ground skills
• You will be a better policy player

We cannot guarantee that the course will automatically give you a job promotion. But it will give you greater confidence in tackling some of those hard jobs we all have to do, to make policy work.

This is a course not just for policy players, but for policy stayers. For those who want to make a difference.

About your masterclass leader:

Professor Scott Prasser is professor of public policy at the Australia Catholic University. Scott has worked in senior public service advisory roles in State and Commonwealth Government departments as well as in Ministers’ offices. Scott has held branch director positions in the Departments of the Premier and Cabinet, State Development, Tourism, Small Business and Industry and Welfare Services. In these roles Scott was responsible for delivering programs to target groups that required properly developed marketing strategies to ensure program take up and to minimise resistance and political controversy.