Over the past month, I’ve been reading through Eugene Bardach’s A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis: The Eightfold Path to More Effective Problem Solving. I’ve been with Scioto Analysis for just about a year and a half now, and when I came on as a full-time policy analyst in May, it was due time I made my way through Bardach’s eightfold path for policy analysis.
Eugene Bardach passed away earlier this year, and the Goldman School of Public Policy, where Bardach was an esteemed faculty member, wrote a great article in May to honor Bardach and to remember his legacy. A large part of Bardach’s legacy is his contribution to the policy analysis field, as policy analysts, we follow the guidance from Bardach’s eightfold path closely in much of our work.
My colleague Rob has written extensively about Bardach’s eightfold path. In late 2022, Rob closed out a series of blog posts he was writing about each step of the eightfold path and practical applications of them. The eightfold path is an eight-step framework to help us understand public policy and conduct policy analysis more effectively. The eight steps in the framework are as follows:
Define the Problem
Assemble Some Evidence
Construct the Alternatives
Select the Criteria
Project the Outcomes
Confront the Trade-Offs
Decide!
Tell Your Story
Today, I want to focus on the eighth step of Bardach’s eightfold path: “Tell Your Story”.
How can we tell stories as policy analysts?
One of my biggest takeaways from Bardach’s eightfold path is the importance of conveying results and information to stakeholders and interested parties. In policy analysis, your relevant audience can range from policymakers to reporters to everyday constituents. The audience of policy analysis might be friendly, and they might be hostile.
Bardach emphasizes the importance of choosing an appropriate medium, creating a well-structured narrative flow, maintaining credibility, and most importantly, explaining findings simply and clearly. Before even presenting our findings at all, Bardach recommends we apply the “Grandma Bessie Test”. This is an exercise where we aim to explain our work and conclusions in about one minute to our Grandma Bessie, our intelligent but not politically sophisticated grandma.
The purpose of this test is to give us a reality check–do we actually understand the conclusions from our work well enough to explain them clearly and succinctly? If we find ourselves struggling to explain our work to other people, then perhaps we don’t understand the findings well enough to make reasonable conclusions, let alone well to present to others.
How do I perform on the Grandma Bessie Test?
To determine if I’ve been following Bardach’s eightfold path well myself, I want to apply the “Grandma Bessie Test” to a few of the analyses I’ve worked on while at Scioto Analysis. For each project, I’ll aim to explain the goals, methods, and findings in just a couple of sentences,
Wildlife Crossings
In spring of 2025, we released a cost-benefit analysis about wildlife crossings. Wildlife crossings are bridges, culverts, underpasses, or other structures intended to direct animals across roadways to safely navigate through their habitat. To conduct our analysis, we pulled data from various departments of transportation and other state agencies to calculate how many wildlife-vehicle collisions can be prevented from each structure.
By preventing collisions, we can save lives, avoid damage to vehicles and infrastructure, and restore ecosystem connectivity. Ultimately, we found that over a 70 year lifespan, one wildlife crossing can prevent 1,400 collisions, decrease at least one fatality, reduce 60 injuries, and create over $14 million in net present value to society.
Energy Permitting
In December of 2025, we released a study analyzing the energy permitting process in Ohio in partnership with the Ohio Chamber of Commerce Research Foundation. This refers to the process of applying for and getting approved for a permit to build an energy permitting facility in Ohio. The energy permitting process is lengthy and methodical: there are many built-in opportunities for community input and legal review. These steps are important because they ensure that both community and legislative priorities are taken into consideration, but they come with a steep tradeoff.
To conduct our analysis, we reviewed the entire energy permitting process according to the Ohio Revised and Administrative Codes, and we collected data on energy permitting timelines from projects across the past several years. We found that the average timeline for receiving an energy permit is 540 days, nearly one year longer than the statutory goal. Per year, these delays result in $440 million in lost investment, 5,400 fewer jobs, 9,000 megawatts of lost energy capacity, and $4.3 million in lost state tax revenue.
Affordability in Franklin County
In February, we released a study on affordability in Franklin County. Our goal was to replicate the regional price parity but at the county level. The regional price parity is an affordability measure created by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The measure consolidates relative prices from housing and essential goods and services into one index that can be used to compare prices across different states. In our analysis, we wanted to create a county price parity measure to compare prices in Franklin County to other, similar counties around the country.
We used consumer price index data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, total spending data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and household income and expenditure data from the American Community Survey. We found that despite a high tax burden, the cost of living in Franklin County is relatively low compared to similar counties. For instance, prices in Franklin County are about 18.5% lower than in Tampa’s Hillsborough County and 11.8% lower than in Atlanta’s Fulton County, mainly due to relatively affordable housing, electricity, and groceries.
How do you think I did? If Grandma Bessie can’t understand these, then at least some policymakers are struggling with it, too. This test is a great tool for making policy analysis accessible to the people who are supposed to use it.