PPA 691 – Policy Analysis Brainstorming and Assumptional Analysis Procedures

Brainstorming  Guidelines for a productive session  Invite as varied a group as possible to participate in your brainstorming session. A diverse group will help you gain the widest and most creative range of ideas.  Select a leader and a recorder (they may be the same person). The trick to being a leader is to create the right structure for the process to work, but not to overcontrol it.  Define the problem or idea to brainstorm about. Write out your problem or idea concisely and make sure that everyone understands it.

Brainstorming  Remind the team members of the following: –Project goal –Factors affecting the project –Available resources –Constraints  Set up rules for the session. They should be aimed at: –encouraging members to have fun and come up with as many ideas as possible. –giving everyone the opportunity to contribute. –letting the leader have the control. –recording each answer unless it is a repeat. –ensuring that no one will criticize or evaluate another participant's idea. –setting a time limit.

Brainstorming  Start the brainstorming. This stage includes: –having the leader select members of the group to share their ideas. –writing down all responses so everyone can see them. –making sure not to evaluate or criticize any ideas until done brainstorming. –giving members an opportunity to think. During periods of silence, people are probably thinking or incubating ideas. –creating a diagram during or after ideas are presented.

Brainstorming  When you are finished brainstorming, go through the results and evaluate the responses. When examining the responses, you should qualify them by: –looking for and eliminating ideas that may be similar or repeated. –grouping like concepts together. –discussing the remaining responses as a group. –creating an organized diagram with a meaningful hierarchical structure, and figuring out if the responses fit in the diagram. –eliminating responses that do not fit.  Implement the results of your brainstorming session.

Assumptional Analysis  Stakeholder identification. –In the first phase, policy stakeholders are identified, ranked, and prioritized. –The identification, ranking, and prioritization of stakeholders is based on an assessment of the degree to which they influence or are influenced by the policy process.

Assumptional Analysis  Assumption surfacing. –In this second phase, analysts work backward from a recommended solution for a problem to the selected set(s) of data that support the recommendation and the underlying assumptions that, when coupled with the data, allow one to deduce the recommendation as consequence of the data. –Each recommended solution put forth by policy stakeholders should contain a list of assumptions that explicitly and implicitly underlie the recommendation. –By listing all the assumptions, there is an explicit specification of the problem to which each recommendation is addressed.

Assumptional Analysis  Assumption challenging. –In the third phase, analysts compare and evaluate sets of recommendations and their underlying assumptions. –This is done by systematically comparing assumptions and counterassumptions which differ as much as possible from the counterparts. –During this process each assumption identified is challenged by a counterassumption. –If implausible, eliminate it; otherwise, try to use it as the basis for a new conceptualization of the problem.

Assumptional Analysis  Assumption pooling. –When the assumption-challenging phase has been complete, the diverse proposals generated in the previous phases are pooled. –Here assumptions (not recommendations!) are negotiated by prioritizing assumptions by their relative certainty and importance to different stakeholders. –Only the most important and uncertain assumptions are pooled. –The ultimate aim is to create an acceptable list of assumptions on which as many stakeholders as possible agree.

Assumptional Analysis  Assumption synthesis. –The final phase is the creation of a composite or synthetic solution for the problem. –The composite set of acceptable assumptions can serve as the basis for the creation of a new conceptualization of the problem.