2023 Annual Conference Sessions: Rethinking Budgeting
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Sessions for Sunday, May 21
No rethinking budgeting sessions for May 21
Sessions for Monday, May 22
The Budget Officer as Decision Architect: Designing the Decision-Making Environment
Government leaders make decisions for a living. With good decision making, they can greatly improve the lives of their constituents and further their own careers. But decision making is messy. It is often done by groups, so there are conflicting points of view. It is usually time constrained, so there isn’t time to consider everything. There is always uncertainty, usually more than we realize. And it is done by humans, so it comes with the myriad of well-documented psychological biases. Finance officers can help their organization make better decisions by "architecting" the decision-making environment. In this session, we will discuss the key skills of a decision architect, how finance officers have used them, and how you can build them.
Bridging the Divide: Conflict Resolution in Public Finance
Public finance often involves conflict. Conflict can actually be good if it leads to discussion and participation from diverse stakeholders. However, it can also be common that when resources are scarce, tensions can run high, especially in our increasingly polarized society. Public finance officers must have a means for addressing conflict, quickly and effectively. At this session, we will discuss two very different methods of conflict resolution that GFOA has field-tested over the past year. You will come away with practical, actionable ideas for how you can address conflicts in your own organization.
Sessions for Tuesday, May 23
Politics in Budgeting: Don't Hate the Player, Don't Hate the Game, Change the Game
Budgeting is a political process. "Politics" is often considered a dirty word in our profession, but the finance officer needs to not just survive a political environment, but thrive in it. This can be done without succumbing to the worst aspects of politics. In this session we will talk about common political power plays the finance officer might encounter, the sources of the finance officer's own political power, and how to ethically exercise that power and redirect potentially destructive political impulses to more productive outcomes.
Behind the Scenes: Practical Lessons Learned in Budgeting for Equity
Many governments are taking an interest in “budgeting for equity,” which means allocating resources to address unfair disparities between different groups of people, such as racial groups or income groups. Budgeting for equity is important because it is the ethical duty of government budget officials to develop a budget that is fair. In this session, you'll hear about the practical tensions that governments must navigate to introduce an equity lens to budgeting, including lessons learned from Results for America's City Budgeting for Equity and Recovery program.
What Does It Take to Rethink Budgeting?
The typical budget process is based on line items and historical precedent. While this does have some advantages, it also has a host of disadvantages that have long been recognized. Those disadvantages are becoming more acute as our society evolves. Many intrepid finance officers have explored new ways of doing budgeting and GFOA's Rethinking Budgeting project is providing guidance for creating a budget differently. But what does it take for a local government to change the way it budgets and plans? In this session, we'll discuss what GFOA research is finding and hear from practitioners who are challenging the long-held status quo to rethink their own budgets and discover potential for a better process that provides stronger outcomes.
