Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Maximizing the Value of Talk and Ideas



by Kent Aitken RSS / cpsrenewalFacebook / cpsrenewalLinkedIn / Kent Aitkentwitter / kentdaitkengovloop / KentAitken



Note: I’ll be at the Digital Governance Forum today (January 28-29, 2015). Drop me a line if you’re there and say hi.


Last week I wrote about the unnecessary villainizing of talk. I worried that we subtly discourage the sharing of, and discourse around, ideas that are less than fully formed.

There are also times to rightfully skewer talk. It obviously does occur that an idea should happen and doesn't due to a lack of follow-through. But the more interesting cases are when it’s not solely a matter of personal responsibility, but rather, the requirement to productively fold such talk into a hierarchy.

Where last week's post was about talk in general, this one will focus on asking for input, and in particular, what we hear back.


Ideas plus Hierarchy

Complexity Kryptonite
Collaboration bests complexity. It helps us suss out hard-to-see impacts of our actions, reveals our ideas' redundancy, and helps us improve our plans.



This collaboration could be requesting meetings with experts, bouncing ideas off colleagues, facilitating working groups, or running engagement activities. For all of these, there is a worst case scenario that I detest: asking people for their time then being unable to turn it into something productive.


I learn a lot, and I love the discussions, but it’s not enough.


And it's particularly hard in large organizations. Those soliciting ideas and those approving them have different incentives and mandates, and different information about the exercise. It’s no one’s fault; rather, an inevitable product of hierarchies.

Often, it’s a personal failure on behalf of the idea steward, the person tasked with analyzing the talk - ideas, feedback, input - and moving it forward. I have to admit to this - failure to understand my environment, to frame and communicate ideas well, and to give those ideas a chance of success in the hierarchy.

So, I'd like to explore three approaches that stack the deck for those ideas in a hierarchy.



1. Get In Front of Your Process


What do you have control over? Actually, really, reliably?

You need to know your role and limits, inside out - and be transparent about it. It’s far more powerful to have done that up front, than to have to answer the question when asked.


For example, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is currently destroying multi-million dollar rockets trying to get them to land on a drone ship off the Florida coast. His tests can end in fiery explosions yet he retains trust, because of how he sets expectations and lays out the chances of success beforehand.
(For a non-explosion-based example, I’m very proud of my colleagues’ work on this report following a massive consultation.)


We’re in this for the long haul, and projects don’t supersede relationships. Promise where you can, and admit it where you can’t.



2. Get Others in Front of the Process


If you're the liaison between the hierarchy and the universe with which you collaborate, you're in the best position to understand both. Lay out what is expected of both collaborators and the hierarchy you represent. This is where "plans are useless, but planning is indispensable".

Is someone's commitment required to make this collaboration or dialogue a success? Make sure they see or approve the plan, and make them part of the story, by name or by position. As explicit as "At this point, X person will do Y."

Make them promise where they can, and admit it beforehand where they can't - so you don't over-promise on your organization's behalf.



3. Make it Easy for the Hierarchy to Internalize Ideas


The showstoppers get done. What about the bulk of simply good ideas?


The typical approach after brainstorming is over to send around a set of summary notes. But, it's difficult to contextualize a mass of notes. There's no visual hierarchy to provide cues about what's important. Essentially, we're expecting our audience to simultaneously identify good ideas and assign responsibility to themselves or others, from an email that looks identical to the hundred others they'll receive that day.

Here's an example alternative. Following the last big workshop I ran, I listed the dozens of action phrases that followed some variant of “we should”, “you should”, or “the organization has to”. For each, I introduced the idea, then walked my team through these questions:



Idea
Should we do this?
Now, or later?
Us, or partners?
How?
Are there alternatives that achieve the same goal?
If partners are handling this, what do they need from us?
Who, specifically, is responsible for this?
"We should X"








It doesn't have to be as structured as the above, but the principle stands: it's much easier for people to walk through a series of small, concrete steps. And it's much easier to take ownership of an idea - the "Who's responsibility is this?" question - after working through the how and why, even briefly.


Why?

I love meeting with people, talking and learning new things, and hearing new takes on subjects. Those interactions are resoundingly worthwhile. In the end, it's so easy to share ideas with others, to ask for feedback, and to give help. So, even if it's relatively rare that you really, truly connect and improve the idea, it's worth it.

Yet, if we can further honour that time by maximizing the chances of those ideas positively influencing the systems in which we work, we should.

Friday, January 23, 2015

On Friendship, Villainy, and the Social Contract


by Nick Charney RSS / cpsrenewalFacebook / cpsrenewalLinkedIn / Nick Charneytwitter / nickcharneygovloop / nickcharneyGoogle+ / nickcharney

Last weekend I piled into a car with my best buddy and drove down to Richmond Virginia to surprise a friend for his 30th birthday party. We left on Friday, drove all day, surprised him on Saturday night and drove back on Sunday. All in all it's about a 2,150 kilometre round trip (1,335 miles). It's not the first time I've made the trip and it sure as hell won't be the last time either.

Now there's a whole lot of back story here about what brought me to Richmond that weekend, but rather than share that, I'd rather speak to what I took with me when I left.

The morning after the party, Kevin (the birthday boy) came downstairs to where I was sleeping and made time to talk with me. It was important to him that we spend some time together before he had to work (and we had to drive home) he asked me why it was so important for us to come down and celebrate with him.

The answer was simple: friendships and stories.

He smiled and shared that his favourite moment of our friendship was when we just sat on the front porch last summer and did nothing but talk. Family, history, religion, politics, aspirations, successes and failures; we discussed it all.

What crystallized for me when I was in Richmond was that stories truly are at the heart of friendships, that friendships drive engagement and engagement leads people to co-create new stories together. It's a virtuous feedback loop that helps us frame how we see the world, how we understand others, and how we present ourselves to others.

I've written at length in the past about the importance of stories, argued that we ought to be more purposeful story tellers and lamented the fact that somewhere along the way the story arc of the public service skewed towards the ignoble (See: Purposeful Story Telling and When did the Public Service Become and Ignoble Profession?). What I'd like to do now is double down on Kent's claim that 2015 will be the year of the social contract (See: The Social Contract). To take a moment to remind you that you have an active role in shaping the continuing evolution of that social contract by cultivating relationships, engaging others and creating the narratives you want to work in, live in and play in.

Talk is important (See: The Villainy of Talk).

Co-creating a shared narrative is essential.

And sometimes, pausing to re-frame when necessary, even more so.


Postscript

I've invested a lot of professional energy lately in a research project on digital governance; we're holding our first large forum next week in Ottawa. The agenda is off the hook and the speakers are top shelf, and there's still room. If you are interested in attending the forum drop me a line.

Cheers 

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

The Villainy of Talk


by Kent Aitken RSS / cpsrenewalFacebook / cpsrenewalLinkedIn / Kent Aitkentwitter / kentdaitkengovloop / KentAitken



Showing is better than telling. Actions speak louder than words. Or, paraphrasing a much-retweeted line from Twitter today, stop talking about the shit you're going to do and just do it.

It's a great slogan for errands, to-dos, or exercise. I'm less sold on it when applied to work, starting a business, side projects, or in Peers' example above, urban planning.

It's tempting to vilify talk.

We have this tension between springing into action and being methodical. In 2013 a tentative theme for Collaborative Management Day was Borrow and Build: rather than re-inventing the wheel, the idea was to introduce people to all of the currently available wheels, to help them round out their toolkits for problem solving.

Which has its own issues. Building on the work of others, and helping existing projects and organizations, is often the most efficient approach. Yet, so many people start from scratch, rationalize a differentiating ideology, and do their own thing. Why is that?

In many ways, we ought to be able to feel a sense of agency over others' work when we get involved. But that feeling pales in comparison to how we feel about an idea that's uniquely ours. For a while I tried to square that circle, and figure out how to get people emotionally involved in others' missions; to have continuity of projects without continuity of people.

Now, I'm starting to suspect that the alternative - the frequent, theoretically inefficient, starting from scratch - is often better, or at least, okay. If that's what motivates people and gets them working on something? So be it, build from scratch. Get shit done.

But. I think it behooves us to talk about what we're scheming. Otherwise, it's impossible for others to point to similar projects, challenge your ideas, or suggest building on someone else's work instead. 

Sometimes, the feedback will crush the project. If it's a bad idea, or if the problem has been solved elsewhere, great. Many ideas are bad, duplicate, or at least incomplete. Most shouldn't actually happen. Most are not the absolute best use of someone's time. So airing out these ideas should not be seen as a passive act to be frowned upon. It should be seen as a reasonable step towards getting something good done.

So talk about it. Then, do whatever you want: help someone else's idea in motion, accept feedback or help, scrap it and move on to something else, or run with it. Get shit done. Just get the right shit done.





Friday, January 9, 2015

On Breaking Bread


by Nick Charney RSS / cpsrenewalFacebook / cpsrenewalLinkedIn / Nick Charneytwitter / nickcharneygovloop / nickcharneyGoogle+ / nickcharney

Every day at work around noon someone gets up in the office and turns to someone else and asks "Are we breaking bread today?"

The question ripples.

Within five minutes the kitchen is full of people.

We eat.

We laugh.

We voice concerns and celebrate triumphs.

We laugh a little more.

The true measure of office culture is whether people gather and break bread or swallow sadness alone hunched over their keyboards.

tl;dr - break more bread.

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

The Social Contract


by Kent Aitken RSS / cpsrenewalFacebook / cpsrenewalLinkedIn / Kent Aitkentwitter / kentdaitkengovloop / KentAitken


2015 will be the year of the social contract.

That is, the general concept of the social contract will underpin every major discussion on governance and politics for the months to come. At least more often than usual, and going deeper than usual. For no single reason; rather, the result of the intersection of many trends and forces. I'd like to explore those, and frame some questions for consideration throughout the year.

The key questions:

  • whether government approaches policy on the basis of principles or pragmatism
  • whether the standard wiggle room between "bigger" and "smaller" government is adequate for the magnitude of changes emerging in Canada
  • how government reacts to today's citizens' (appropriately) incredibly high standards for fairness from their institutions
But first:

The Social Contract

The social contract is an Enlightenment idea whereby human beings, otherwise born free, give up certain rights and accept duties to live in a society in which remaining rights are upheld. We give up the option of violence for revenge, but the state uses their monopoly on violence to promote safety and order. We have a duty to keep properties free of harmful waste, as it infringes on the rights of health and cleanliness of neighbours.

Basically, the social contract is the general deal or arrangement we can expect from the institutions, people, and environments around us, having been born into a society.

Why Now?

The social contract comes up all the time. It's a hairsbreadth away from this incredibly common question: What is the appropriate role of government?

However, I think there's something more grandiose going on these days that is begetting a return to this idea. Multiple threads are converging in the policy space that cannot (or should not) be answered without a serious deep dive into the question of what government does, and beyond that, what people should reasonably expect out of life in Canada.

This post walks through some drivers and signals of how answering this question is harder than it ever has been.

The End of the Job-for-Life

2014 was, allegedly, the year the job broke:

2014 was the year we accepted a re-interpretation of the job's fundamental bargain, and bought in to the push to get us to all work for ourselves rather than each other.

A major downside is the associated departure of pensions, benefits, and stability: a long running contract between employers and employees (see the comments in: Why the Sharing Economy is Inevitable and We Need to Think Differently) . Major, long-term investments like houses and businesses require some degree of certainty. Much preventative health maintenance, often much cheaper than later hospitalization, is affordable only through workplace benefits. For these reasons and others, Policy Horizons Canada, the organization that identifies long-term policy issues, pegged the rise of part-time work as a potential challenge in its 2012 Metascan.

TD Bank studied the issue and found:
  • of 95,000 jobs added in the first half of 2014, 60% were part time
  • the number of involuntary part-time workers - those who would rather be full-time - rose from 650,000 pre-recession to 1,000,000, but has since stabilized
TD's conclusion was confidence in the Canadian economy, but even deliberately chosen part-time will have downstream impacts on social security and health care. Do workers choosing flexible employment deserve a revised social contract? For reasons of principle? Of pragmatism?

Regulating Ghosts

Part of that trend towards self and part-time employment is driven by what one might call a nichification of the economy, where enterprises of every scale and scope emerge through lower transaction costs. Between someone renting a room through AirBNB and a hotel there's a business with a handful of standardized rental properties using AirBNB as an online storefront. And everything in between.

This could be a fascinating, high-potential, or even damaging trend for the economy. However, I also suspect that as governments try to categorize and regulate - or justify not regulating - new business models, the logic of existing laws and regulations will face massive scrutiny. Over the next few years, we're about to play the Socratic Method game with institutions' approaches to governance and it may not be pretty all of the time.

What should would-be entrepreneurs be able to expect from their business environment? Can we develop principles? Do we rely on heuristics, rough measures for categorizing businesses, for the sake of pragmatism? Can we do better?

Guaranteed Annual Income

Kevin Milligan wrote about this idea in 2010: scrapping pensions, employment insurance, and other social security payments and instead guaranteeing a minimum income (small, but livable) for all citizens, but deducting for every dollar earned. 2014 saw a conference in Montreal on the topic, the premier of Prince Edward Island floating the idea of a pilot, and elsewhere, Switzerland planning a referendum on the topic.

The immediate question is whether it'd work well. The deeper question is on principle: is this how people live in Canada? And there's a meta-question: what balance of principle and pragmatism is desired in governance? In the UK, the head of the Behavioural Insights team* (then government, now spun out) took flak for the pursuit of effectiveness: critics argued that paternalism went too far and humans must be allowed to be humans and make decisions on their own.

Many people apply this logic - that some things should be hard - to other government programs, such as Employment Insurance, which would be in play in a Guaranteed Annual Income discussion. Analogously, we hear arguments about whether or not voting should be easy (Andrew Coyne and Don Lenihan recently debated making it mandatory), an argument drawn very much from principle.

This brings us to:

The End of Voting

In the early days of the social contract, democratic representation wasn't necessarily in the picture. The core idea was just people giving up some rights for order, peace, and stability, which as easily described Monarchical states.

Since, voting has been the central act of participating in democracy.  "If you don't vote, you can't complain", as the bumper sticker goes. My CPSRenewal coauthor Tariq Piracha calls this bullshit, with which I'd readily agree.

As is increasingly obvious, voting is one of many ways of participating in democracy. For most Canadians, it's decreasing in potency (our population has grown faster than the House of Commons). Theoretically, time and access for writing or visiting your Member of Parliament would be decreasing as well. At the same time, alternatives outside the formal political system are increasing in popularity and availability (relevant: Nick's post on Digital Governance).

We've come a long way since the original view of the social contract. Today, citizens demand far more than a vote. They demand to sit at the table with the same information government has, through transparency and accountability measures. They're demanding, proactively, to give more on their side of the bargain: the end of voting as the central interaction between citizens and institutions.

But these are not simple changes to the contract. 2014 may have been the year of accountability backlash, where intelligent observers called for shutting down the cameras in government: the return to "the honest graft" and backroom politics in the name of effectiveness (see: How We Govern Ourselves).

Once again, we find ourselves with a fascinating question about what citizens should be able to expect of the institutions around them, with competing pragmatism and principle approaches, and no agreed-upon framework with which to even begin answering the question.

The Better Angels of Our Nature

We never formally agreed on the principles of the social contract; it was as much an ex post rationalization for the way things had evolved.

The social contract was broken repeatedly throughout history: legal recourse failed and people lost assets, corruption twisted institutions, and people were falsely imprisoned (and executed). Once, public executions were spectacle (the guillotine was still used up until the mid-1950s in many European countries) and the possibility of wrongful sentencing was ignored. The people who watched were basically genetically identical to us. Now, we have - rightfully - comparatively high standards for how humans are treated. We have the empathy to apply those standards to others, people we don't know.

These standards, and the outrage they generate when they go unmet, defined the end of 2014 for me: perceived unfairness from institutions towards citizens.

Stories of police violence in the United States, business owners having trouble interacting with government, even inadequate citizen interactions with government services or websites - they all upset people's notions of fairness. States and institutions have become far more responsive over the centuries, but, more than ever, the remaining gap between expectations and results garners attention. This is a wonderful, positive development, but it puts pressure on government to perform well and minimize breaches of trust.

Regardless of the magnitude of the transgression, citizens increasingly are both aware and unaccepting of all perceived breaks in the social contract, of all perceived unfairness. In fact, it's not just citizens; legitimately elected representatives are increasingly questioning the legitimacy of the system that gives them and others authority. One example is elected representatives denouncing judicial branch decisions. It's fascinating and telling to see friendly fire among institutions of the social contract.

All of which means that pragmatic, broad-strokes policy is increasingly difficult to implement, because it's unfair even to small subgroups. Policy interventions in the Grand Banks Fishery - which would have been pragmatic - were delayed due to principles. On grounds of fairness, traditions, and rights of fishers.

On the other coast, BC's carbon tax could only be implemented with a revenue-neutral approach. It seems that we have, as a society, set a status quo. Changes cannot leave anyone worse off than before.


A later social contract thinker, John Rawls, described this as the maximin principleHowever, our starting point arrived by accident (I'd argue media and the digital age revealed it, to an extent), not by any agreed-upon principles. Is that fair?

Lastly:

2015 Federal Election

I tend to avoid discussing politics online. However, it's inescapable that politics drives much of the context for the Canadian public service, and for public service renewal. The idea of the social contract is far grander than the public service as well, so it'd be a gross omission to not mention that 2015 is a federal election year.

Perhaps less so in Canada, but that starting question about government's appropriate role plays heavily in politics. From Paul Wells:

But mostly, this election will pose, in stark terms, the central question about government at the national level: What’s it for?

So?

This post contains no prescriptions, just a lens for thinking about a changing Canada and its policy environment, and a reference point for more focused CPSRenewal posts for the year.

What's government for? What's government's appropriate role, and how is it approached? What should Canadians reasonably expect?

These days these questions are much, much thornier than usual, and we need to go much deeper in answering them. The surface-level answers to these questions - incremental changes from the status quo - won't hold up given the nature of changes at our doorstep.







As an aside, the Impossible Conversations public policy book club has covered topics ranging from marketing in political campaigns, to government's role in innovation, to the moral considerations of technological progress, to austerity economic policies, and the social contract has come up in every single discussion.

*Covered here: How Nudges Work For Governments (and Might Work Against Blueprint 2020)