Greg Fyffe and Thomas Townsend

Transcript

I'm Greg Fyffe, I spent half my career as a political aid and I spent the other half in government and I'm Thomas Townsend, I've spent 37 years with the federal government in a number of departments in the science areas: social development, labour market development and economic ministries. I've done a fair amount of teaching in both

leadership, strategic thinking and in security and intelligence. The course is about strategic thinking it takes people through the process of addressing an issue, understanding where you need to go, how you're going to get there and it gives a number of tools for people to use as they systematically work their way through an issue.

It's about thinking wide, deep and long. Thinking deep is about getting into the subject matter, the context of the problem, the people that are involved. Thinking wide is ensuring that all of the actors that are involved are being included and thinking long is thinking over time; the

past and the future context. We give a number of tools that people can use, we talk about the value of questioning, we talk about the value of mapping out your issue, we talk about the importance of understanding the value proposition, where you need to go, what you need to accomplish, how you understand how complex your issue is and what that entails,

how do we understand what the future is going to do to our issue and how to prepare all of the ways of unrolling a strategy that will be resilient in any kind of future. Strategy is becoming increasingly important in the public service because, one, is that seldomly we can do things by ourselves, there are government and non-government actors, both the private sector and civil society.

The problems that we are dealing with are more complex. We have to look at things in the area of the issue but as well all of that area around the issue, stuff that we refer to as the dark matter of strategy and increasingly public servants are being asked to work with limited

resources but to affect large and important changes. Really anybody who has a major issue in policy or in operational design could benefit from the course. We ask people to bring the strategic issue that they are actually working on and we integrate that in the way that we teach the course.

People who come normally have something that they are actually working on right then and they want help in understanding tools and ways they can approach it and reach effective solutions. Strategy, it's a practice that we develop over a period of time and what we're going to accomplish in the two days that we're on

the course is to provide participants with a set of tools that allow them to better analyze the problem that they're dealing with, allow them to select courses of actions that would be more effective and to start to look at innovations and creative ways in which they might accomplish their strategic goal. If you understand all of the things that you

need to go through in strategically preparing yourself to address an issue and you know how to really identify your objectives and understand the context that you're working in, it gives you a more complete set of ideas about where you need to go, you identify much earlier the complexity of your issue and all of the things that you have to do. It helps you not be surprised more than is

necessary in developing a difficult issue. Participants, once they've completed the course, they're going to be aware of the a much broader context for the work that they're doing so they're going to be able to relate the piece of work that they're dedicated to working on with a context which is more related to the department and the government as a whole.

They're also going to be able to have a greater awareness of the different kinds of players that are involved in their area of operation or their area of policy formation and be able to look for the opportunities of connections with those different actors and then finally we're looking for developing skills that allow individuals to think better across time periods so to have a better sense of foresight so

that they can better risk manage and as well looking as a range of alternative actions that might be appropriate.