Change - The Only Constant

The feild that we are all in, Public Affairs, blows my mind because we are mostly dealing with people. I find in common with many peers I talk to within the school that we share a love for people rather than say....numbers. Duh, right! Our goals as Public Servants is to establish systems and norms that are suited for the specific public we are catering too. We solidfy these systems and norms by making them into policies and using various tools to enforce them. Some force is more direct and some indirect. Yet, the more I learn about people, their motives and irational behviors the more I struggle with this impossible goal Public Servants are reaching for. Policy formulation is this art of constructing words that will influence behaviors to create some sort of norm. Yet these norms are always changing because people are always changing. As soon as we implement state of the art software and computer systems they will be irrelevant, or not near as worthy in ten years.

This constant change is wonderful. It allows us to evolve, adapt and be excited about different. Yet it makes things difficult. It makes policy making impossible. Is there a way to make policy making more sustainable? I am not talking sustainable policies, I am talking about frameworks or techniques to use that will make for better policy making. Should policy makers focus more on basing their policies on people's underlying values which do not change as drastically from decade to decade? Or perhaps this will allow for too ambiguous of policies in which people will find MORE loopholes to jump through. Are ambigous policies really as bad as some academics make them seem? Ambigous policies more easily allows people to find ways around the rule towards their goal, ultimatly sparking creativity or innovation.

Since the only thing we know will for sure happen in the future is change, why do we not create policies that allow room for that. Have underlying values in the fabric of the policy and remember that, no matter what, individuals will find their way around. Lets create ambiguous policies that have long lasting values in the fabric while subtly influencing the innovative creation of loopholes.