Cooking up a Policy is an exciting new program
for policy beginners

April 16, 2010 8.30 am - 5 pm

Centre for Leadership Excellence, Towrang,

What do policy and cooking have in common? Well, what if you cooked a roast turkey for guests coming for morning tea? What if you made dinner for 6 but 10 people turned up? What if you tried to make a cake without eggs and flour?

Effective public policy requires:

• Understanding and defining the problem to be solved
• Identifying all of the “ingredients” needed to develop the policy
• Processing the ingredients
• Timing
• Presentation
• Implementation

The Program

Participants will be asked, as a group, to plan the morning tea they will be cooking as part of the program. This will require consultation, determination of needs as a group, and advising the program coordinators of the proposed menu for lunch.

8.30 Arrival at The Centre for Leadership Excellence, welcome and introductions 9.00 Introduction to policy development

10.00 Time to cook morning tea and review the application of the metaphor of cooking to policy

11.00 Applying the basics of policy development to a real world problem

This session takes a current policy issue (health sector reform, closing the gap, addressing corruption, revitalizing the public service, retaining graduates – the issue will be identified by the participants as one they wish to work on), and works through an ideal process for developing a strategic policy response, including identification of existing resources, new resources which may be required, identifying vested interests and consultation participation, analysis and development of options.

12.00 Time to prepare lunch and review development of the lunch menu and applying that process to the policy development process

2.00 Leadership with the Llamas

The venue for this program is a working Alpaca property. There is much to be learnt about leadership and management from Alpacas. This segment will be a walk, talk, and debrief session about what the participants have learned from the cooking experience and the practical application of these skills to policy development as well as an introduction to leadership.

3.00 Writing a policy statement

This short session will invite participants to draft a one page document outlining the outcomes from the policy problems considered in the earlier session. This session will introduce participants to the art of condensing complex problems to the important issues or questions.

4.00 Wrap up and conclusions

This session will invite participants reflections on what they have learned, the skills they have acquired, and ask them to develop an action plan for gaining future experience in the policy development process, including writing skills.

5.00 End of day

The Venue

The workshop will be held at the Centre for Leadership Excellence, Towrang, NSW.  Participants will need to arrange their own transport to the venue.

Who should attend?