This article is written by Kelly Vedi, Finance and Government Operations Policy, Office of Santa Clara County Supervisor Susan Ellenberg.

This article was selected by the Centres for Civic Impact and the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Centre for Democratic Governance and Innovation as a winner in Apolitical's 2020 American Public Servant Writing Competition.

“We’re building the plane as we fly it.”

“Then we’re going to crash!”

That was my reaction every time I heard the plane metaphor during my time teaching high school. Administrators believed they were encouraging us, but to me, it communicated the lunacy of our situation: My school was struggling to adopt new education standards for the second time in five years. Teachers needed to be re-trained, curriculum created, and textbooks bought — all under the deadline of a high stakes test that would impact teacher pay and students’ ability to graduate.

This mess was the result of good policy intentions gone wrong. Though I hated the phrase, I did feel it captured our odds of success. Schools were being asked to do the impossible, but policymakers didn’t seem to notice.

The policymaker’s toolbox

After two years, I left the classroom and got my Masters in Public Policy, vowing to do policy better.

I didn’t want to design policies that seemed good but had terrible results. Thankfully, my MPP equipped me with a toolbox full of policymaking knowledge and skills. However, when I started my current role (policy aide to a County Supervisor in California), I realised that just having these tools was no guarantee I’d use them.

It was frighteningly easy to skip right past all the steps I knew I should take and jump right to policies that seemed like good ideas, but didn’t have the analytical rigour to support them. How was I going to make sure I didn’t turn into that type of policymaker?

In my quest to answer this question, I somehow found my way back to planes. Luckily, this time I found an example from aviation that I like much better — the checklist.

In praise of the checklist

I was introduced to the idea via The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande, an American writer, surgeon, and public health researcher. He argues that many modern-day failures arise because we fail to consistently apply what we know how to do.

Gawande makes the case that the checklist can help experts in almost any field apply their expertise. Drawing from pilots' pre-flight checklists, he and his research team at the World Health Organisation (WHO) adapted it for surgical teams. In trials the pre-surgery checklist saved thousands of lives, leading the WHO to publish the Surgical Safety Checklist in 2009 and the near-universal adoption of checklists in operating rooms today.

With such a convincing precedent I thought I would try crafting a checklist for myself. I adapted a framework for rational policymaking that I learned in grad school to create this:

Did you:

  • Define the problem using data?

  • Generate and weigh the criteria to compare solutions?

  • Generate multiple solutions, with stakeholders, before deciding?

  • Select the best solution or solutions based on your criteria?

  • Figure out how to measure success?

This checklist helped save me from policy mistakes in one of my first projects. After her first year in office, the Supervisor wanted to make changes to improve strategic decision making in the County’s annual budget process.

Most people get into public policy because they want to impact people’s lives for the better. But as policymakers, we can’t take it for granted that our impact will be what we intend

One idea was to require departments to use forced ranking in budget requests. For example, a department asking for new software, additional supplies, and more personnel would order those from 1-3 by priority. But, following the third point in my checklist, I went over it with a key stakeholder — the County’s Budget Director.

To my surprise, he told me that some Department heads wouldn’t be on board. Publicly declaring some projects more important than others would damage relationships within their teams. Requiring forced rankings wouldn’t get us departments’ true priorities and it would put Department heads in a tight spot. Thanks to this feedback I made the referral more flexible. It still asked departments to communicate their priorities but left the mechanism up to them.

It’s a check-list — not a cure-all

The checklist also helps me collaborate with my team. The second line in the checklist about comparing solutions is particularly helpful in this regard.  At first, I was self-conscious about calling policy conversations to a halt to ask what our criteria were for comparing solutions. It didn’t feel natural, and other policy aides hadn’t done it before. But I was spurred to act when our Supervisor faced an important and controversial vote.

Our county has many immigrants, and passions around the issue run deep. A woman in our community was murdered by an undocumented immigrant and another supervisor brought a referral directing the county to revisit our non-cooperation policy with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Unsurprisingly, a heated discussion began on how we should advise our Supervisor to vote. Remembering the checklist, I took the conversation in a different direction. I asked the team what criteria mattered in making the decision. This led us back to our office’s mission — to make decisions that support the most vulnerable in our community. We agreed staying true to the mission was the most important factor.  With this clear, we soon reached agreement on how to advise the Supervisor.

After this, it became more natural for the team to talk about criteria to compare solutions. We understood it was worth the time. It was easier to unearth disagreements, confront tradeoffs, and reach agreement when we were all on the same page about what mattered.

Most people get into public policy because they want to impact people’s lives for the better. But as policymakers, we can’t take it for granted that our impact will be what we intend. With a little humility and a checklist, we have a fighting chance to get things right. — Kelly Vedi

(Picture credit: Death to the stock photo)

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