One of the things that we keep at the forefront of all of our government work is that policy making is about the future. Good policy is an attempt to bring about a particular vision of a particular future. For that reason, its development benefits from a strong, disciplined futures orientation, for instance: a recognition that there is no single future; the further out the target, the harder it is to hit; deployment, implementation, and observance/compliance are system affairs, and rely on complicated and messy interactions; models don’t tell you what will happen; and stakeholders often turn out to be different than anyone imagined.

Building a business plan to support a new policy, particularly one that is distinct from status quo, has to be responsive to this orientation while still providing an actionable roadmap. We’ve found the best way to manage the enormous financial, political, and frequent social risk that new policy development entails is through the identification and use of trend clusters.

Trend clusters are the result of broad-spectrum environmental and narrow-band industry scanning. Current trends coalesce into clusters that then drive the emergence of new trends that become instrumental in the policy’s successful realization.

Instead of focusing on a policy’s desired end state, we build policy business plans with an eye towards these policy-rich intermediate clusters of trends in the short and medium term. This orientation manages risk, while allowing policy makers greater flexibility to adjust targets and intentions in response to emerging trends (whether political, economic, social, or technological).

The result is a policy process more sensitive to change and thus more likely to affect the sort of change desired by its advocates.

There is a recent Pinyon white paper [pdf] on this approach, and I’d recommend a quick read if you’re interested.