Departures

by Kent Aitken

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Starting today, I’m on a year-long interchange from the Government of Canada. It's a research fellowship at Canada's Public Policy Forum to study governance in the digital era. I wanted to post a couple thoughts and invitations.

 

First, I’ve been fortunate and delighted to be able to work with an amazing group of people over the last few years. The open government scene involved a lot of interaction, communication, and collaboration with the civil society community and colleagues across the public service - on public engagement, the CODE series of hackathons, open data, and the general push for open government in Canada. This has been a distinct and resounding highlight of my career thus far, so thank you.

 

Second, I’m completely bummed out to be leaving the open gov team, even temporarily. The initiative is incredibly important to the way government functions, and we’re not running out of work anytime soon. I’m very hopeful and optimistic that the work for the next two years will make things better for many communities. And I can’t say enough about the awesome and talented team there, and I appreciate both how much they’ve done (a lot) and how they’re always pushing to do more.

 

Lastly, I have lofty goals for the year to come. I see the role as somewhat of a common resource for governments (and observers of governments) in Canada, and I’d be really open to people dropping me a line (or, for academics, finding me on GCcollab). I’ll be looking at both the opportunities that the digital era provides (like connecting with people and information) and its challenges (such as how we develop policy, regulation, and legislation around technologies and trends that emerge and evolve quickly). I’ll be posting about the research as I go, so there’ll be more specifics coming.

My Experiment with a Personal Failure Report

by Kent Aitken

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At this time last year - the end of the fiscal year for government, during performance review season - I wrote a personal failure report, based on the Engineers Without Borders model and likewise inspired organizations like Fail Forward. The goal was to reflect on my failures and consider how I'd make the most of those lessons learned. As Engineers Without Borders put it:

EWB believes that success in development is not possible without taking risks and innovating – which inevitably means failing sometimes. We also believe that it’s important to publicly celebrate these failures, which allows us to share the lessons more broadly and create a culture that encourages creativity and calculated risk taking. 

In the comments on last week's post (see: I Don't Have It All Together), David referenced failure reports:

We have started with failure reports and talking about failure, but very rarely do I see anyone admitting to anything that can't be construed as failing up or failing on the road to success. There's a certain "failure-based PR" lens that's rubs me the wrong way.

Here's the funny thing: after several drafts, the personal failure report just didn't work. At all. I posted it, then quickly took it down. I failed at writing a failure report.

Here's why:

• It's impossible to know if alternative decisions at certain points would have worked; there's no data on the results of choices not made
• I don't work in a vacuum. I tried to make it about how I worked within my environment, but it was impossible to fully separate my personally owned missteps
• There wasn't much overlap in the Venn diagram of A) brutal honesty about how things went, B) what I thought would be useful for others to read, and C) what I would be willing to publish (the aforementioned failure-based PR lens)

It wasn't a complete waste. The exercise reminded me about what I valued about my role in the public service, and where I had to work harder to live up to that. But all told, failures exist in a very particular context, and it's better for us - and those we'd share resultant lessons with, even publicly - to respect that.

Being up front about one's vulnerability (see: On the Value of Vulnerability) - for the sake of intellectual honesty, creating a safe space for dialogue, and building trust - may be a different beast altogether.

I Don't Have It All Together

I don’t have it all together.

Not that anyone is suggesting that I do. But it's easy to get that impression about others. We all have a capacity for selective disclosure through any forum - Facebook, Twitter, and blogs like this one being obvious examples - so we have a tendency to see the interesting, virtuous, or easy sides of others’ lives.  (This can be seriously damaging to our mental health.) So I’d just like to put it on the record that I don’t have it all together.

Not by a long shot. Struggling to keep on top of correspondence and to-do lists? Always. I’m sure I’m letting some slip, too, without even knowing it. Feeling like I’m barely keeping my head above water? Often. Starting projects I can’t finish, that I really should know that I can’t finish? Afraid so.

Screwing up at work? Of course. For someone who spends so much time thinking about how the public service works (probably over-thinking), I completely floundered in a new position in the last few years. It was pretty bad for a while.

Self-doubt? I barely go a week without questioning my path in life, which includes my career. It’s the rest of my life. I think it merits that level of concern. I almost as regularly reflect on the appropriateness and usefulness of what I write on CPSRenewal.ca.

Mental health issues? Yes. (And I don’t mention this as an explanation or excuse for anything else.) Mostly social anxiety, but a few other quirks in the mix, too.

I don’t have it all together.

I don’t need to. That’s life. I’m generally comfortable and confident about my imperfect state of affairs, even on those days when it’s a fight to keep things between the lines.

And I’m certain that most people who suggest that they have it all together - by words, by deeds, or by the strategic absence of certain words or deeds - are chalk-full of shit.

We can Not Have It All Together together, and make some good things happen anyway.

A thank you and hat-tip to Dave Fleming. Specifically related to this post, also in general.

A Quick Note on a Public Service Highlight

by Kent Aitken

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For my first four years in the public service, I worked for what is known as a Common Service Organization: a government department that provides services to other government departments. It has only been in the last approximately 18 months that I've held a position with public-facing elements.

Over the weekend I traveled to Vancouver for the CODE Hackathon, a competition based on the creative use of Government of Canada open data. We logged the better part of a week's work from Friday night to Sunday night, supporting participants and learning from them. It was fantastic. 

A while back I wrote that "Ottawa, the concept, needs to spend more time out of Ottawa, the city", an idea reinforced by every opportunity to do so. I went from reading daily media monitoring reports to a room seemingly exempt from politics. I realized that participants were downright excited that the Government of Canada, of all entities, would be interested in the works that they accomplished. And I got to see, firsthand, what many public servants' hard work meant for people on the ground.

A post like this would, stylistically, merit a pithy observation at this point. Something like "We need more of that/X". But my purpose for sharing is stylistically boring, as a combination of many things: a reminder that the cynics about the public service are louder than those content with it, a note that government does interesting things, and an expression of appreciation for being a part of them.

Unrelated: hackathons are basically Mac advertisements.

Influence, Organizations, and Team Players

by Kent Aitken

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Nick recently wrote about different forms of influence (see: On Influence and Hierarchy in Bureaucracies):

My modus operandi (see: Scheming Virtuously: A Handbook for Public Servants) has never been about acquiring or pulling rank but rather building, safeguarding and levering reputation and ability to influence.

In doing so, he hits on a concept I've been wrestling with. Regardless of what your job description says, you don't start jobs with the right level of ability to influence. It needs to be built.

However, there's always a balance to be struck. Building influence (which is largely building relationships) takes time, and it's time that could be spent working more directly on goals. I'd contend that organizations generally err on the side of narrow goals at the expense of systems, relationships, and, well, better definitions of those goals. But there are dark sides to personally spending time on the latter:

In Tragedy in the Commons - largely a collection of interviews with former Members of Parliament - the story that emerges is that no one ever reached a point where they felt they could just start doing the right thing. Even Cabinet members felt the need to "be good team players" and it was clear that not all were comfortable with the level of compromise. If this is true for end-of-career statesmen, senior decision-makers, I don't think this tension is going away any time soon for the rest of us.

And where building the ability to influence fits the above mold (being "a good team player") it can perpetuate bad systems. I wrote about this idea a while back (see: When Parameters are the Problem), in that sometimes there's a trade-off between doing the right thing and maintaining smooth relationships with our coworkers or hierarchy (and recognizing that sometimes we can get "the right thing" wrong).

I tried to walk that walk since I wrote that post: pushing back against faulty systems. My experience is that it's hard, uncomfortable, and the downsides are greater than I imagined. I'm not ready to rescind that idea, but I can see plenty of scenarios in which it's wise to shelve that maxim. It's an interesting dilemma in which the future I'd want for the public service writ large may be different than the advice I'd give individuals I care about.

Because these day-to-day decisions add up, over time, to those outcomes: influence through soft power or influence through positions in the hierarchy. And we should consider our approaches with caution and thoughtfulness.

Personal Stories and Testing Assumptions

by Kent Aitken

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Recently a few of us spent an evening deconstructing the idea of storytelling: why we're drawn to it, how it works, and how we use stories personally and professionally.

(I've written about storytelling on CPSRenewal before (see: Towards a New Professionalism in Government), as has Nick, probably multiple times (see: Purposeful Story Telling).)

We looked at a number of angles, but the one that stuck out for me might be called the stories we tell ourselves. Ashleigh Weeden opened this rabbit hole for me with her fantastic blog post on the subject, and most of my post, today, is just encouraging you to go read it.

Humans have a deep-seated tendency to find patterns, categorize, and sort things in our minds. These can turn into heuristics about how we see ourselves, which could be as simple and innocuous as saying something like "I'm very intuitive." It might be true, or it might just be rationalizing shortcuts on decision-making. In other cases, some stories that may well have been true at some point can outlive their usefulness. And they influence how we approach the world and our jobs, for better and for worse.

Examining our stories is an incredibly useful exercise, a healthy testing of assumptions. But we also noted two things about this kind of introspection during that evening:

• it's deeply uncomfortable - and full of cognitive dissonance - when we realize that some of the things we tell ourselves and others aren't true
• it must be highly deliberate, with others challenging us and prodding; it would otherwise be as easy to rewrite our stories with just new, different fictions

I'll forgo the temptation to apply the above to public service renewal and change initiatives.

All of that to say. If you're interested, and you should be, you should read Ashleigh's excellent and courageous post. With the warning that it may lead to an uncomfortable but ultimately worthwhile exercise of introspection. 

Tiny Costs and Potential Benefits of Helping Each Other

by Kent Aitken

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Last year I wrote a post called Painfully Obvious: Find Links, about seeking out the existing knowledge in a field. While we should be respectful of others' time, the cost/benefit calculation is pretty solidly on the side of reaching out - it only takes a minute to write and read such emails, and the effort only has to work out occasionally to be incredibly worth it (often for both parties, on top of being just generally enjoyable). And people still have the option of accepting or declining.

There's a cost to being too reticent, here. I think we still reinvent far too many wheels.

Looking back, I continue to be amazed by how generous people can be with their time and expertise. It has become our standard to invite authors when we discuss books (which turns into the Impossible Conversations/Monday Book Review series), and I've been surprised at how often the response is resources, regrets based on scheduling, or acceptances. The same goes for some research I wanted to learn more about recently.

However, even with that cost/benefit calculation in mind, and knowing that those I reach out to can certainly decline, I occasionally feel bad about it. It's largely because I feel as though I'm more often on the receiving end of this kind of help and advice, which I chalk up to being relatively early in my career, and somewhat less so to being a generalist. My theory is that balance will shift towards the providing side over time.

It recently struck me that this theory may be true - or it may be a total cop-out.

With That in Mind

If anyone ever thinks that I could be of help - for discussions, resources, or anything - please, please feel free to contact me (there's a Gmail icon at the top of every post).

For the record, I've noted that I often feel unqualified writing and sharing my thoughts publicly (see: On Writing). I'm not suggesting that I have a tremendous amount of expertise. Instead, I'm extending the invitation based on the same principle with which I ask others: because it takes so little effort to offer, and because it only needs to work out and really click once or twice to be worth it. The cost is so low that even if I can provide a tiny benefit, it works.

Post Script

This post is very much so based on my personal approach to navigating government and academia. But it's perhaps worth noting as a reflection that the more comfortable we all get with striking up discussions with those in our fields, the better government will be.

Lastly, a genuinely huge thank you to those described above, kind and generous with their time.