Information transmission for policy implementation: optimizing the leadership role

The underlying motivation for this work stems from the observation of a weak participation by traders in a policy program envisaging the modernization of a city’s centre commerce. The analysis of the leadership – the board of the local trade association - whose main task was to lead this initiative, showed a poor performance in the transmission of information to policy targets. This research consists in the search of alternative strategies to form leaderships groups whose task is to implement policy programs, particularly in contexts in which individualism and mistrust abound. With the tools of social network analysis and combinatorial optimization it is possible to select key players to form leadership groups as well as select the targets most in need of information concerning a policy program. A comparison among the leadership teams’ performance –empirically observed vs. theoretically constructed - reveals that this methodology can improve the transmission of information of leaders of policy processes. In result policy implementation processes could be made easier and more effective.