The project was made possible through the assistance of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) to fund the generation and development of the leadership cases.

The compilation was an offshoot of the partnership between the ASG and the Philippine Public Safety College (PPSC) whose Memorandum of Agreement stipulated that the former “will offer a Course consisting of a Module on Leadership for 250 uniformed officers of the Department of the Interior and Local Government and the PNP, including those in ARMM, for a period of one year.”

The ASG-PPSC partnership resulted in the project “Strengthening Leadership in the Public Safety Sector” with “A Module on Leadership” as its main feature. Participants of the five-day training module included officers of the PNP, Bureau of Jail Management and Penology, and the Bureau of Fire Protection. The series of training were conducted in Makati City, Iloilo City, Gen. Santos City, and Davao City.

Because it is the nature of a public safety officer’s job that he or she confronts ethical dilemmas—defined as “a situation that requires a choice between options that are or seem equally unfavorable or mutually exclusive”—as one performs his or her daily tasks, ASG designed the leadership course to address this concern. Grounded on the principles of the adult learning approach, ASG saw that the sessions should be based on factual and true-to-life dilemmas of public safety leaders—stories that would resonate with the experiences of the participants. The cases had to deal with exemplary stories of leadership guided by ethics, focusing on experiences relating to dilemmas faced in the field by public safety officers, how these were resolved, the conditions prevailing at the time of the resolution, and the key learning from the experience.

To generate and develop the cases, ASG collaborated closely with PPSC in identifying benchmark cases of experiences for documentation. A series of data gathering activities, which included face-to-face interviews with key informants and storytelling sessions, were conducted during the second quarter of 2005 in Metro Manila, Zamboanga City and Cotabato City.

The case stories and vignettes, which are composites of real-life experiences, were extensively used as instructional materials during the training runs of the “A Module on Leadership” and the series of training for public safety teachers and instructors. Names of persons and places were deliberately changed to protect the identities and circumstances of the respondents.

Feedback from the training participants showed that the case stories and vignettes were able to resonate with their true-to-life situations and validated their own ethical dilemmas in the field. As one participant said, “The stories truly mirrored the dilemmas I encounter in my job as a police officer.”

The project team was composed of Dr. Angelita Gregorio-Medel, ASG lead faculty; Adelfo V. Briones, MA, ASG program manager; P/SSupt. Nestor M. Fajura, chief of Center for Special Projects in PPSC, and Nina Lucia B. Tomen, MA, ASG project consultant.

Below are some excerpts of the leadership case studies and vignettes:

“Tapusin na natin ito…” (Let's Finish This)
Katas ng Jueteng (Fruits of Jueteng)
Hard Evidence
“My men are innocent…”