The Center of Excellence on Public Sector Productivity is sponsoring eight KARTILYA Sessions dubbed as ‘The Productivity Series focusing on relevant issues and concerns affecting national development and productivity. The said sessions will focus on foresight, education, leadership, rightsizing, productivity measurement, performance management, smart regulation, innovation laboratory, and knowledge management. Last October 13, 2017, the theme of the ‘Kartilya’ Session was ‘Foresight and Education in Productivity.’ This is the first installment of the said eight sessions. There were two resource speakers who graced the event: Dr. Santhi Kanoktanaporn, the Secretary-General of Asian Productivity Organization, who delivered a presentation titled, ‘Harnessing Foresight for the Public Sector’ and Cong. Jose Maria Sarte Salceda, the 2nd District Representative of the Province of Albay, who gave a talk on, ‘Increasing Productivity through Quality Education.’
Foreseeing the Future. Secretary General Kanoktanaporn stressed the point that the future does not actually exist because it is simply built by human being. But given that nature of the future, scenario planning is a must. Scenario planning, according to Kanoktanaporn, is more than forecast planning. Scenario planning is used when both uncertainty and complexity are high. It is done through three approaches: deductive, incremental, and inductive approaches. Definitely, there is a need for strengthening strategic foresight capability. For him, institutionalizing strategic foresight capacity requires a paradigm shift and at the same time a cultural shift towards creating a learning organization. He believes that countries should consider moving from traditional planning and national analysis to prospective (scenario) analysis and global perspective.
Educating the Youth. Cong. Salceda through his RA 10931 known as Universal Access to Quality Tertiary Education Act aimed to increase the participation rate among all socioeconomic classes in tertiary education. He presented and explained the provisions on free higher education in state universities and colleges, national government to pay the tuition of students enrolled in local universities and colleges, free technical-vocational education and training in post-secondary technical-vocational institutions, tertiary education subsidy for Filipino students, and student loan program for tertiary education. Given this law, it is projected that there will be 40% increase in enrolment and 30% increase in graduation in HEI’s in the next five years. But this needs greater CHED oversight in SUC’s and private HEI’s. To push to improve quality of education, there should be a pressure for international benchmarking.
The Things We Learned. The DAP Senior Vice President, Ms. Magdalena L. Mendoza, gave us three things learned in the Session: first, foresight capability is key to sustainable productivity; second, education, a critical determinant of the overall standard of living, is directly linked to productivity; and third, taking pro-active stance in harnessing productivity through education guided by strategic foresight is the call of the time. Indeed, education and foresight become our drivers for social change. Given the rate of change in our societies, it is crucial that national government agencies, the academe, and the local government units, should play positive and critical role in enriching our nation’s productivity and ensuring our social development. Hopefully, the insights we realized will inspire and excite us to push things more and go beyond our limits. ___ The Session was attended by more than 150 participants (greater than what was expected) coming from NGA’s, the Academe, LGU’s, and other sectors.