My Public Service Ideology

by Nick Charney

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There's been a whole lot of public discussion in the media lately on the role of the public service:

Photo courtesy of the NCC

• Towards a Charter of Public Service by Ralph Heintzman (Canada 2020)
• The Real Problem of the Public Service by Ruth Hubbard (Ottawa Citizen)
• To Everything There is a Season by Maryantonett Flumian and Nick Charney (Canadian Government Executive Magazine)
• How public servants support democracy: a response to latest Canada 2020 study by Maryantonett Flumian and Karl Salgo (The Hill Times, subscription required, but I can email you the submission)
• Reforms to bring neutrality to public service could lead to 'government by the unelected': think tank by Kathyrn May (Ottawa Citizen)

And of course there was Tariq's timely reflection on the public service as an ideology and subsequent discussion in the commentary (See: Public Service as Ideology).

All of this – the experts weighing in and my discussions with friends and colleagues – has got me thinking more and more about my own public service ideology; and while anyone could probably deduce it from views from the last 6 years of blog posts, I figured why not just simply declare it outright.

My public service ideology

I believe that public service is at the same time personally rewarding, professionally meaningful, and vitally important to the health of the nation.

I believe in a public service that trusts its people, where public servants are confident to exercise autonomy within the boundaries of their work and resist the urge to codify that which could otherwise be normative.

I believe in a public service that pursues continuous improvement in its service to citizens, a public service that consistently puts people before processes and seeks mastery over its professional domains by investing more heavily in the former than the latter.

I believe in a public service that is deeply connected to its sense of purpose, that holds up its end of the social contract and in so doing allows public servants to connect to mission the way they connect to everything else in their lives: directly, with few or no intermediaries.

I believe in a public service where pride in one's work is the rule, rather than the exception. One that allows civil servants to demonstrate their pride through their ongoing work as civil servants but also in their pursuits as citizens.

I believe in a public service that sees and accepts the challenge of innovation for what it is: the hard work of future-proofing society. One that understands that there is no magic bullet, and that leans into the hard work of governance.

I believe in an inclusive public service that recognizes that some divisions are artificial. One that recognizes that we are bound together through our common service to the country and its people regardless of our geographic location, place within our classification systems, or jurisdiction within which we operate.

But I also believe in a public service that recognizes that some divisions are necessary. One that recognizes that ultimately, the elected government represents the will of the people, and continues to respect that.

Finally, I believe in a public service that sees the time-honoured principles of fearless advice and loyal implementation as not only the bridge between those artificial and necessary divisions, but also as ongoing, concurrent and constant - rather than static, sequential or time limited.


There you have it. I've declared my public service ideology.

What's yours?

Unsolicited Thoughts on Destination 2020

by Nick Charney

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On Monday, the Clerk of the Privy Council Wayne Wouters released Destination 2020, the response to the government-wide Blueprint 2020 engagement process. The report comes on the heels of both the 8th Report from the Advisory Panel on the Public Service and the 21st Annual Report to the Prime Minister (See: Thoughts on the 8th Report from the Advisory Panel on the Public Service). While I could just cut to the chase and offer my take, there's actually a lot at stake here so I have to tread lightly.

A couple of high level thoughts

First, the report wasn't written with guys like me in mind. Clerk's reports generally speak to the early and late majority, not the innovators or the early adopters. If you are on the left side of the adoption curve like me, you likely thought the report fell short; and while perhaps that is true for you, you (we) need to remember that it's pretty progressive for those on the right of the chasm.

Second, if the report rattles the cages of the status quo and rallies the troops around change, then it's something that we all need to get behind. We need all the momentum we can get and holier than thou attitudes from guys like me aren't productive. We can disagree on execution but let's at least agree that we have consensus on the vision. Can we do better? Of course, we always can. But let's not allow perfection to be an enemy of the good. That tendency is old-school bureaucracy, and if we fall victim to it now, we'll become everything we profess to hate.

What I thought was most interesting

The recognition that the public service brand (as a profession) was in need of a major overhaul. While it was clearly an overarching theme of many of the conversations I took part in when I was on the inside, I was surprised that it made it's way into the final report. It's obviously a theme we've explored at length here (See: When did the Public Service become an ignoble profession?) but it's also one with no clear-cut solution. Engaging civil servants in profiling their work online will do little to stem the tide of sniping ministers, rhetoric filled unions, prosecutorial journalists, self-censoring bureaucrats or apathetic citizens. In short, while the problem here is well-defined, I have trouble reconciling the depth of that problem with the response. 

What I thought was cause for concern

A common thread through the entire report was connecting senior managers more directly with the rank and file employees. Many of the actions the report proposes would do just this (tiger teams, innovation labs, dragons dens, etc); and while creating new feedback loops is important, so is unclogging the existing ones. It's a point I've raised before and won't belabour further (See: On Dragon's Dens, Hackathons, and Innovation Labs). That said, while dens, 'thons, and innovation labs may work for some people, they definitely won't work for everybody. By their very definition they are exclusive and exclusionary, they benefit only those who have access and how one gains access is still not well defined. In my estimation, access is likely to be left to middle managers and early career executives to operationalize. They are the permission seekers, the vetters, the filters. How will selection for these new endeavours be any different than the selection of who gets what training opportunities, what briefing notes make it to the deputy, etc? Isn't the filter issue the thing we are trying to address here? Would we be exploring these novel approaches if more information managed to permeate the clay layer? What's the old adage about letting the inmates run the insane asylum?

Ironically (or perhaps more rightly, sadly), the Association of Professional Executives (APEX) recently urged the government to take more action on mental health because it's most recent study found that the organizational commitment of executives was on the decline (from 64 per cent to 52 percent) and that about 32 per cent of them are disengaged, disconnected from their work and unable to deal with the demands of their job. I'm not being glib, mental health in the workplace is an important issue that ought to be addressed. I'm not trying to liken middle managers to inmates or the public service to an insane asylum, but sometimes you just need to use a metaphor to drive home the point. Truthfully, I have plenty of sympathy for the challenges facing middle managers. It's something we have written about in the past (See: The Plight of the Clay Layer and Where Good Ideas Go To Die) and something I speak to frequently during presentations. I won't belabour the point but there is still something here that just doesn't sit well with me. It strikes me as avant-garde but guarded by the old guard.

What I thought the report did well

Give people hope. While I wasn't in the room (I'm an outsider now remember — arguably I've never been an insider, but that's another discussion altogether) I was told that the energy in the room was palpable. The twitter stream exploded with a cacophony of support from across the country with only a few (quickly buried) objections (why we are so desperate for hope is another conversation for another time).

There are hundreds of briefing notes and decks being written across the public service as your read this that are using the Clerk's report as leverage. A quotation from the report on the front page, a photo of the Clerk and another quotation on the back. If an initiative can be tied to any of the report's pillars, it will be.

This is to be expected. After all a Clerk's report is never about the actual report — it's about what we all do with it.

The question Blueprint 2020 should have asked but didn't

by Nick Charney

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On Wednesday Kent put forward the notion that the perceived lull in Blueprint 2020 might be hitting the trough of disillusionment (See: Blueprint 2020, Renewal, and the Trough of Disillusionment) and while I hope he's right and that there is a slope of enlightenment around the corner, I'm not so sure. I was in the same place as Kent on Friday, but a part of a very different conversation.

The issue with Blueprint is that put forward a pre-conceived vision and invited people to comment. In so doing it actually built on the assumptions of the day rather than challenge the validity of those assumptions now and in the future.

A perfect example of this was when someone from the Canada School of Public Service (CSPS) asked something like (and I'm paraphrasing) "How can the school best serve the needs of the Government of Canada in 2020" to which I replied (again paraphrasing) "Does the CSPS even need to exist in 2020?".

I'm not trying to throw the school under the bus here. There are at least two sides to the argument and it merits full discussion — that's not the point. The point is we need to get meta, not perfunctory. We can't carry flawed assumptions forward, no one builds on quicksand.

The most common criticism I have heard to date of Blueprint – from civil servants from all levels mind you – is that it is a process more concerned with getting us to where we should have already been by now rather than where we ought to be in 2020.  If the criticism is merited (and I think it is) it leads us to question why we would expect anyone to put forward anything more courageous than that which is already common sense (and commonplace) in other organizations. Flexible work arrangements, workplace WiFi, better bandwidth and open access to the Internet are yesterday's concerns not tomorrow's innovations. Who is doing the hard work of trying to figure out what actually happens when Westminster meets digital? Do we need to change the machinery? Do we need new policy levers? Should we be more aggressively pursuing alternate service delivery models (e.g. social impact bonds)?

It's precisely the same problem I put forward in On Dragon's Dens, Hackathons and Innovation Labs. To be clear, I'm not arguing that these things can't be valuable but rather that they risk doing more harm than good if there isn't a clear way to turn their outputs into throughputs.

In fairness, I'm not on the inside right now. I'm disconnected, and as a result I have no idea what, if anything, is currently happening with Blueprint. I'm working from what I've seen prior to leaving, and what I've heard since. Blueprint is obviously something I'm still thinking a lot about, when I read the Open public service in a global marketplace report earlier this week something clicked. I want to share something that Damien Venkatasamy said in the report because I think it's precisely the question Blueprint should have asked but didn't:

“... something does have to change in terms of the way that public services are delivered in the future, and I guess there is no one answer to that, and it depends on what the function is. But I think there is a very difficult question that every government department, every government agency and every local authority probably needs to ask which is: ‘what is our core function?’ By that I mean what are the functions that only we, the Civil Service, can fulfil, either because of a legal requirement or because, frankly, there is so much knowledge embedded in that function that it would be ludicrous for anyone else to even attempt to do it.”

Resolutions

by Kent Aitken

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The plan for this week was to continue on the theme of nudges as levers for action, but on Monday we're getting a gut-check on Blueprint 2020, and it was on my mind.

Ever made New Year's Resolutions? We start the year with lofty goals and a vision for how we’d ideally live our lives. By the end of January, many resolutions have petered out. There’s some disappointment, but we have a better sense of what is realistic, and crucially, what is actually important to us. Maybe the daily jog isn't worth the lost time with family.

And that's okay. In reality, it’s not about changing where you are, it’s about changing direction.

On the other hand, we have this:

"Cynics might ask if this is just another in a long line of public service renewal efforts, admirable in word but short on deeds."

That’s from a Canadian Government Executive article about Blueprint 2020, the ongoing vision-setting exercise for the Canadian public service. But it’s also basically a paraphrase of a conversation I’ve had with a number of people in the last few months. This is what they’re referring to: in the last decade and a half we've had would-be pivots for the public service, called PS 2000, La Rélève, and Public Service Renewal. And they didn't work.

Well, at least, that's the assumption. I haven't heard anyone ask the counterfactual: where would we be without those initiatives?

Define "Worked"

None of these renewal efforts lived up to their lofty ideals. Sure. Who actually thought they would? The important question is whether we changed direction for the better because of them.

And, crazy as it may seem, some resolutions may have stuck, and I think we discount those examples. We throw out out completed to-do lists, rather than frame them and hang them on our walls. Instead, we focus on the unchecked boxes.

Off the top of my head:

• In the last few years, I’ve watched networks open massively. I personally have far more freedom in how I do my work than I did when I joined the public service
• One of the Public Service Renewal pillars from a few years ago was a renewed workplace. Change to real estate takes a long time, but this is actually happening: the direction – agreed upon between the property, management, and IT forces that be - is that public servants will be able to work anywhere, anytime, with anyone
• In two weeks the Policy on Acceptable Network and Device Use comes into effect, providing policy cover for public servants to (among other things, and I quote):

• Participate in a video or audio conference with colleagues or clients from other organizations or jurisdictions through tools such as Skype or Google Hangouts

• Develop and share code repositories in collaboration with departments, other jurisdictions and private sector organizations via code sharing tools such as GitHub

• Collaborate on joint initiatives and projects, via open discussions or closed groups as appropriate, with other departments and levels of government through the use of wikis, professional networking applications, internal tools such as GCDocs or external cloud-based tools such as Google Docs

I think that's incredibly positive, and the subtext is not just tools, but trust. And no, we’re not where we could be. And never will be, because the world will keep changing underneath our feet. But we’re making progress, and who is to say that PS 2000, La Rélève, and Public Service Renewal contributed nothing?

Simply put, these things take time. Even in the age of the internet, ideas spread slowly when they're complicated or their benefits are indirect. The internet is still made of people. And cats. But mostly people. As are organizations.

Erring on Realistic isn't Pragmatic

Here's my personal worst case scenario for Blueprint 2020: Since June, I'm aware of, and inspired by, far more people who are passionate about positive progress in the public service because of the conversations we've been having. And I have a greatly expanded mental directory of people to whom I may want to reach out in the future, on many topics.

Best case scenario? We’re adjusting the sails, and we'll move towards where we should be in 2020.

I too wonder what will meaningfully happen because of Blueprint 2020. As Thom Kearney wrote, “healthy skepticism is, well, healthy”. And I've been vocal about my thoughts on the rate of change. But improving our direction is a very achievable goal.

To be honest, I'm not 100% sure that cynicism, here, is inaccurate. But nor can I think of any good use for it. One could argue that being honest about our prospects for change keeps everyone’s expectations reasonable, and thus avoids frustration and disillusionment. But really, the only conclusion I can come to is that the absolute best case scenario for cynicism about Blueprint 2020 is that it could get filed under “True, but useless.”

And I think the chance of it being false, combined with the damage it could do, is enough to embrace the alternatives. So instead, I think we should give credit where credit is due, and appreciate this foray into completely uncharted territory for the bureaucracy. 

Blueprint launched on June 7, and we're looking towards 2020. If I invoke the New Year's Resolution analogy? Today is roughly January 15.  We're talking about changing the course of a quarter million-person organization. These things don’t happen obviously, easily, or immediately.

I'm a public servant largely because I choose - weighed and measured - to be idealistic, and to look for the long shadow of the future. So I'm with Thom. Colour me naïve.

How Nudges Work for Government (and Might Work Against Blueprint 2020)

by Kent Aitken

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In the last few weeks some people took notice of the Behavioural Insights Unit in the U.K. government, which sparked debate about behavioural economics and the "nudge" approach to public policy and social outcomes. It seemed that there were many misconceptions about what nudges are. So a brief primer, then what I believe they could mean to Blueprint 2020.

Nudges

From Wikipedia:

"Nudge theory... argues that positive reinforcement and indirect suggestions to try to achieve non-forced compliance can influence the motives, incentives and decision making of groups and individuals alike, at least as effectively – if not more effectively - than direct instruction, legislation, or enforcement."

An example of a nudge, in contrast to alternatives: recently, New York City tried to stop sales of massive cups of soda on the basis that it was bad for both citizens and society (in health and health care spending, respectively). Here are some options:

• Banning the sale of large sodas, which was their attempted approach, would be regulation.
• Raising taxes on large sodas would be an economic incentive.
• Running ads promoting healthy lifestyles and noting the health risks of sugary soda would be education.

A nudge, on the other hand, would have been something like changing the range of cup sizes so that the biggest cups seem more excessive. Tim Horton's recently did exactly this in reverse, by shifting their cup sizes a notch. If the XL coffee is called a large, it sends a signal that it's more "normal" to drink that volume of coffee.

Nudges can work in conjunction with other policy levers, and can be surprisingly potent. For instance, a study showed that a sign showing speeders a frowning face caused people to slow down more than showing their speed and the associated fine.

A Misunderstood Policy Instrument...

The misconceptions arise from the goals nudges tend to be assigned to. Activities that are almost universally regarded as bad (e.g., theft) are typically covered by direct means, such as laws. Very few people are willing to argue that laws preventing theft unduly restrict personal freedoms. However, activities such as smoking cigarettes are trickier. Here, people invoked the principle that they have the right to make informed decisions about their lives, even if unhealthy. However, back when this debate was ongoing in Canada, it was estimated that cigarettes cost about four times as much in health care costs as they raised in tax revenue. So less smoking was good for Canada, on the whole.

There are many such social outcomes worth pursuing that exist in a gray area for government intervention, and this when is nudges tend to be the best policy instrument. So nudges get maligned as paternalism, big government, and the nanny state. But in reality, nudges are about the implementation method. What constitutes appropriate social outcomes is a completely different question. In considering the utility of nudges, we may as well assume that societal goals are already established, and we're instead at the point of selecting policy levers.

...With an Important Role to Play

So I see this emerging field simply as the recognition that information alone is not necessarily sufficient for people to make decisions that are in their, or society's, best interests. 

This is because humans respond (and wildly) to their environment. It's a fascinating evolutionary quirk for socializing: we instinctively match others' postures, gestures, and even accents to build familiarity, taking cues on what constitutes normal behaviour. However, we've exapted (adapted traits for very different purposes) some shortcuts and rules of thumb in decision-making. The well-known example is the opt-in/opt-out framework for organ donations. Countries get ~90% donor rates with an opt-out model ("check here to be removed from the organ donor list"), and more like ~10-20% with an opt-in model ("check here to be included on the organ donor list"). It's largely because the default choice sends a signal about what is normal.

And there are many such examples. The U.K. Behavioural Insights Team simply acknowledges this, and sets about designing policy instruments for such a world. Their core function isn't deciding what society should be doing; it's taking the scientific method and applying it to the complex world of policy. Developing hypotheses, testing them, and adjusting approaches as necessary (see: Test, Learn, Adapt: Developing Public Policy with Randomised Controlled Trials).

In my view, nudges are scarcely controversial. Basically, if you conducted use testing on policy instruments and tweaked for maximum effect, sometimes you'd get education, sometimes laws, sometimes incentives, and sometimes these bizarre indirect methods that we're currently calling nudges. But it's not paternalism, it's simply a question of what policy instruments work, and work cost-effectively. So I absolutely think we should be exploring this field in earnest.

But Wait, You Mentioned Blueprint 2020

If the premises behind nudges are valid, I think it's important to consider how our organizations' standards, defaults, and procedures (in the parlance, "choice architecture") are affecting our decisions. Since June we've been having this wide-ranging conversation about the future of the public service, and the difficulty of meaningful change is a common theme (see: Where Good Ideas Go to Die and Moving Public Service Mountains, Part I). 

And adding to the many possible reasons, what if, even when we have direction or policy cover for positive progress, we're continuously stacking the deck on the side of the status quo?

An example (which I overuse, but it's easy to explain and so I beg forgiveness): let's say from workflow and policy perspectives, a desk-bound worker and a mobile worker are theoretically equivalent options. The information about mobile efficacy is available, the forms for securing the equipment exist, and both are permissable arrangements. However, when on day one at a job you're assigned a desk, a desktop computer, a landline, and no VPN, what signal does that send to both manager and employee about what is normal and what is aberrant?

Do such procedural barriers become cognitive biases? I would suggest the answer is "yes, and massively."

So when we're looking at moving the public service towards our ideal for 2020, we should be ruthless in examining the environment in which we work. Ideals can’t simply be possible, if forces are nudging in the opposite direction. Ideals have to seem like the standard.

They have to seem downright normal.


Making the Vision a Reality

The U.K. provides another concept to borrow and remix (both internally and externally) - contestable policy. We consult on policy in development; why not solicit feedback on existing policy and process, to see if it works as intended, or if the environment to which it applies has changed?

And we have the tools. This could happen today. Copy and paste into our GC-wide platforms that happen to have discussion threads built in, and just ask: does this still work the way we thought it would?

It’s the same approach as the Behavioural Insights Team: the scientific method, applied to government.

What Blueprint 2020 Proves Thus Far

by Nick Charney

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While the exercise is ongoing, Blueprint 2020 has already done something very important: it has clearly shown that the Civil Service can benefit from - or dare I say desperately needs - a reliable, universally accessible, and focused outlet for its cognitive surplus. Moreover, the combination of GCPedia and GCconnex have proven best suited to the task of soliciting widespread participation as neither impose significant barriers to entry or traditional restraints to participation (hierarchy, organizational boundaries, geography, etc). It is also worth noting that while the participation thus far has predominantly been via GCConnex, GCPedia could easily facilitate the co-creation of the final report and could see significant uptake should the work go in that direction.

That said, it's actually symbiotic relationship

The fact that Blueprint 2020 is driving a tremendous amount of engagement on these platforms is a god send to the platform's administrators, overseers and evangelists. In fact, Blueprint 2020 may prove to be the first truly compelling case for their more mainstream adoption. The new life blood Blueprint has injected into these tools - at a time where their future is still being decided - is a boon to a tool set whose value has been upheld and defended by early adopters despite the fact that the tools themselves continue to lack a clearly articulated focus.

This point is likely to cause a stir, and I'm open to debate on the matter, but collaboration for collaboration's sake, I would argue, isn't a compelling enough reason. If it was, there would be wider adoption, more robust support, and firmer governance all backed by a larger budget. I suppose what I am saying is that in my view Blueprint 2020 has given the tool set a more succinct raison d'etre; Blueprint is a case study that hints at its still untapped potential: a dynamic and evolving repository of the cognitive surplus of the civil service. So while the explosive growth in usage since Blueprint's launch is encouraging, I have to wonder about what happens to all that engagement after the exercise is concluded. My gut tells me that in the absence of something as equally as compelling as Blueprint, the bulk of the users and their contributions will simply fall off.

Which of course begs the question: How do we build on the momentum rather than lose it?

While the tools will likely be prominently featured in the final report as a key enabler, there is an opportunity to do considerably more with Blueprint to further ongoing collaboration. For example, we could publicly affirm that the cognitive surplus of the civil service is something that ought to be more explicitly harnessed and that centrally provided collaboration tools - GCpedia, GCconnex, and whatever evolves there from - are the de facto outlet for that surplus. That said, an affirmation of this sort only goes so far.

Who among us hasn't quoted a Clerk's report to justify a proposed approach? 

If we are truly serious about pooling our cognitive surplus to solve real problems by levering centrally accessible collaboration tools, then we ought to take more demonstrable steps to enshrine that ethos directly into the Values and Ethic Code of the Public Sector. We could achieve this by including a statement under the sub-heading of "Expected Behaviours" that read:

6. Collaboration

Public Servants shall demonstrate a commitment to collaboration by:

6.1. Exercising their professional responsibility to direct their cognitive surplus towards joint projects that further the interests of the Crown at every opportunity.

6.2. Using centrally provided collaborative platforms with a view to working openly with their colleagues to create value, put forth ideas, and posit solutions to the organization's (GOC) most pressing problems regardless of which institution they work for, what position in the hierarchy they occupy, and where they are geographically.

Not only would such a statement explicitly make collaboration the default value it would also make the code of Values and Ethics more tangible, more relevant, and more in line with the vision that Blueprint 2020 actually articulates.