Now What?

Full disclosure: I was recently sent advance copies of two reports (canada@150 c/o the PRI and Road to Retention c/o the Public Policy Forum) and asked to blog about them. This is that post, sort of. Rather than waxing poetic about the reports themselves, I will simply offer up a quick observation on each, and then explore what I think is a far more important question: now what?


canada@150

Admittedly, I didn't read the entire canada@150 report. It’s a behemoth size-wise (I recommend the coles notes version). Rather than skim the entire document haphazardly I zeroed in on the vision of the public service in 2017, which was well-articulated and worth the read. I went so far as creating a data visualization of it:



The nice thing about the visualization is that it helps you get the sense of what the essence of the vision was, is interactive, and offers a lower barrier to entry to prospective readers.


Road to Retention

Despite not actually being listed as a participant in the final report, I was in fact in attendance at the Ottawa session. I quickly skipped over the contextualization in the document as I am familiar with the changing demographics in this country. I was however quite interested in the recommendations put forth. The recommendation that hit closest to home for me was the need for employers to understand that the boundaries of the workplace have shifted. I for one regularly empty my inbox, prioritize my task list and read relevant documentation on the hour commute in to work. Old school management philosophies wouldn't put any value on that work. I gathered all the text from the recommendation section of the report and put together this word cloud of the recommendations in the report.



Truthfully, I was a little disappointed in how the word cloud turned out. I don't think it necessarily conveys the essence of the recommendations (feel free to disagree). Looking back I feel as though being a part of the conversation itself was far more valuable to me than reading the report a year later. Similarly, I assume, to those who participated in the canada@150 process.


Yeah, so reports are all nifty and cool but like now what?

Great question, right? What should we do with the contents of these two reports? There are some bang-up recommendations in both. Surely they deserve a better fate than early retirement to a lonely corner of the internet somewhere?

Please forgive me, and I don't mean to sound insulting, the reports are great, but my feeling is that if we didn't have a plan to use the ideas put forth in these reports why did we invest in the process of creating them?

The problem is by no means unique to either of these reports. In my three years in government I have seen it happen over and over again. Good ideas published in reports only to gather dust.

I think the reason it happens is actually rather simple: we often set the publication of the report as the final stage of the project, sometimes we take it one step further and have a communications plan that exceeds “put it on the website”.

What I never see these reports include is a re-integration plan: how do we take these recommendations and bring them into our organizations. Don't just throw the recommendations out there, point people in the right direction, arm them with communication materials - things they can use within their own social circles, give them an opportunity to connect with other people interested in the ideas. Whatever you do, don't just set up a generic email address to field queries.

I'm not saying rush out there and set up a Facebook fan page, but perhaps you could find a little corner on the web that pulls together all the pieces of the conversations and enables broader community engagement with the ideas.

Workflows that produce reports with recommendations should include the reintegration of those recommendations born out of the ideation process. Failing to do this costs organizations in more ways than I think we understand. There are many ways to do this through outreach, tagging, and aggregation tools using currently available (and often free!) tools.

I don't want to focus too much on the communications aspect, but I am a firm believer that reintegration of recommendations and community engagement needs to be part and parcel of the process that create these types of reports. What we need is akin to a cradle-to-cradle strategy for these types of initiatives. In both of these particular cases these reports were produced from an inclusive and participatory process. My feeling here is that there is a kind of natural opportunity here. The community (even if only temporary as in the cases above) should be the primary means through which the essence of these reports are communicated, championed and reintegrated back into organizations.

There is no better way to reintegrate the findings of a report back into the business fabric than by involving those initial producers back into the fold. Surely their voices lend more credence to the contents. They speak with a conviction deeper than any blogger who was at best tangentially involved in the process. We must shift our thinking and equip participants to move forward in a meaningful way. If we don't, I feel as though we have done them a disservice: their opinions mattered enough for us to solicit them, but not enough to act on them.

Update: canada@150 Report to be Released Next Week!

I just wanted to write a quick update to let you know a bit about some key things going on next week. After much anticipation the canada@150 report will finally be officially released at an armchair discussion at the Canada School of Public Service.

You may recall that around this time last year I conducted an interview with one of the participants that was, and I quote (myself) "chocked full of successy-goodness".

Unfortunately I can't be at three places at once, so while the report is being released, I will be in Yellowknife presenting at the 2010 Northern Communicators' Forum; which also means I will be missing Govcamp Toronto.

Don't get me wrong I am very excited to be visiting the Canada's North for the first time, connect with some of the people in real life there (whom I have only ever met online) and to be on a panel with Jesse Brown.

All of that being said it pays to be a blogger (actually it doesn't =/) because it means that I am sitting on an advance copy of the canada@150 report and plan on sharing my thoughts in a blog post next Friday (June 18th).

Talk to you soon, have a great Public Service week next week. Oh, and if anyone has any suggestions on must do things while I am in Yellowknife, please let me know.

Cheers

Update: Busy Week, Lots to Do

Hey Everybody, there are a lot of great things going on this month that I just wanted to quickly draw your attention to.

First, in the month of "Movember" men everywhere take the opportunity to grow out their moustaches to help raise awareness (and money) to fight prostate cancer. To this end I have joined a team of my fellow public servants, cleverly titled Her Mo-jesty's Loyal Public Service. It is a great group of public servants and friends, one of whom - my brother Rumon - is even chronicling the month with daily photos. If you wish to make a donation it would be greatly appreciated. Now, if you have seen me recently you may have noticed that I have yet to convert to the "Mo", but I promise I will do it by the end of this week. For more on Movember feel free to have a gander at this video:



Second, Ignite is coming to Ottawa on Thursday, November 12. If I were you I would register immediately, show up promptly, and clap hella loud for my presentation: Public Service Renewal in 5 Minutes (Note: This will also be your last opportunity to see me prior to converting to the moustache for the rest of the month).

Third, I will be attending the 2nd Ottawa Timeraiser on Saturday, November 14th at the National Gallery of Canada. It is an innovative project that centres around a silent auction where people bid volunteer hours for local organizations. Great cause - I hope to see you there. There is a video below with more information.



Fourth, just a friendly reminder of that the 1st Case Study Jam is Thursday, November 19. Be there or be square.

Note: We just confirmed that the Canada@150 project will be sharing some of their findings about the use of new collaborative social media technologies within the public sector. It is going to be an awesome blend of some statistical analysis and user experience stories.

Weekly Column: An Interview With a Canada@150 Participant

A couple of weeks ago the Canada@150 project had its Ideas Fair.

Interestingly, our blog as well as Etienne Laliberté’s An Inconvient Renewal site were mentioned during one of the conferences, and links were included in the published materials (PDF and web). After a quick email to the Canada@150 team, the links to these pages went live on the Policy Research Initiative (PRI) official government website.

Despite Mike and I being screened out of the Canada@150 project (no bitterness here), we managed to wrangle ourselves [CPSR] an interview with an anonymous participant [AP].

Warning! This interview is chocked full of successy-goodness.

[CPSR]: Thank you for agreeing to speak with us about the Canada@150 project. Can you tell us a bit about it before we start?

[AP]: Sure, Canada@150 is the brainchild of the Privy Council Office (PCO) and the Policy Research Initiative (PRI). It consisted of a team of 150 young public servants selected from more than 1,700 applicants. We were tasked with identifying and evaluating the most important challenges that Canada will face in 2017, the 150th anniversary of Confederation.

We were instructed to go beyond current research and develop our own policy responses to the challenges we identified. We were also asked to consider the implications of our findings for the Public Service as a whole and to develop strategies for keeping pace with change and meeting emerging challenges.

[CPSR]: Looking back, what did you think about the project?

[AP]: Overall, it was a very positive experience. The project brought together 150 people from across the country and overseas, with varied backgrounds, educations and job experiences. The task was extremely broad by any measure: the context of the project, the geographical challenges, the use of a new collaborative web suite (Clearspace, not currently in use anywhere else to my knowledge). Despite the size and scope of the project, its novelty, and the unique backgrounds of the participants, I left feeling proud of what the group had accomplished. In the end, I think it was a success: a success that speaks to the qualities of the participants, the organizers, and the technologies.

[CPSR]: How much support did you have from your manager?

[AP]: My manager and director were extremely supportive of my involvement in the process. They even championed some of the initiatives that came out of the Canada@150, particularly in the adoption of collaborative platforms for policy development.


[CPSR]: How much freedom did participants have to manoeuvre during the project?

[AP]: The latitude we were given by the organizing secretariat was impressive but somewhat daunting. We were provided a solid introduction to futures and systems analysis, and then asked to undertake a broad environmental scan. PRI basically said, “go out and find out what we, as a country, are going to face.” Obviously we came up with hundreds of potential issues facing the country. But over the next six months, we continually refined our analysis and narrowed the issues to what we considered to be most pressing. Ultimately, I think we developed a solid list and some great recommendations from across the spectrum of policy instruments. I won’t go into any specifics because people should really read the reports when they are released.

[CPSR]: Do you know when those reports are going to be available? I was hoping they would be available at the Ideas Fair.

[AP]: From what we have been told, they should be released in September 2009 and, from what I can tell, many of the initial recommendations have been warmly received by senior management.


[CPSR]: Did you get to meet any of the big guns in Canadian civics?

[AP]: Absolutely. Among others, we heard from the Honourable John Manley, Kevin Lynch, Margaret Bloodworth (former National Security Advisor), author Adam Kahane (Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking Listening, and Creating New Realities), and Prof. Peter Bishop (Associate Professor of Strategic Foresight and Coordinator of the graduate program in Futures Studies at the University of Houston). It was great to hear them speak about the relevance of public service and problem-solving in general.

[CPSR]: You mentioned a collaborative tool earlier, would you mind speaking a bit more about it?

[AP]: With the advent of Government 2.0 there has been a significant amount of interest in the tools we used to complete the project. Senior management has becoming increasingly interested in Web 2.0 applications. I found that, despite modest prior experience, the collaborative applications were invaluable to the process. The learning curve, both in terms of research/document production and social cues, was very quick. For the most part, we transitioned from non-users to users within six weeks and were full-fledged practitioners at the end of three months. We quickly realized that editing someone else’s work is not a personal affront, but something that aims to improve the result.

In fact, I have become somewhat of a spokesman for the Web 2.0 tools with senior management in my own department. My first hand experience using them in the Canada@150 project gives my advice more weight and my ideas more traction. The project allowed participants to demonstrate, in a tangible way, that the tools aren’t just fancy communication vehicles or social toys – instead they were the tools that enabled us to be productive and allowed us to tap into one another’s expertise more easily.

[CPSR]: I know you are expecting a question like this from me, but can you tell us a bit about the conversation around public service renewal that was taking place among the participants?

[AP]: Hah, yeah sure. We discussed pretty much what you would expect: flexible working relationships, career development opportunities, and fostering collaborative work environments, technologies, and relationships. There was an entire group that focused on that issue, so look for more details it in the report.

[CSPR]: Do you have any final thoughts you would like to share?

[AP]: The Canada@150 experience was a once-in-a-lifetime experience – the opportunity far outweighed any personal cost in terms of time or added work. When the project first started, I met a lot of people who I would have considered colleagues in a professional sense. Those colleagues have since become good friends; friends who I am happy to raise a glass with and reflect on the project with. Honestly, sharing their insight and experience will prove invaluable as I move through my career in public service, and for that I thank them.

With respect to the project, my hope is that some of the recommendations and approaches will earn their place as mainstays within the public service because there is value in having them there.

[CPSR]: Thank you so much, and I am looking forward to seeing those final reports.

[AP]: My pleasure.