Group Hugs and Stating the Obvious

by Kent Aitken

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In 2010 I attended an event variously called GOC3/Collaborative Culture Camp and Collaborative Management Camp. This was back in the halcyon days of our youth when events had tweet walls, displaying the inner workings of the hivemind. Some of this was insights and connections between speakers’ points, though most was essentially live-tweeting quotes from the on-stage conversation. At one point, the tweet wall showed someone’s assessment that the event was “So far, mostly group hugs and stating the obvious.”

Which serves today as a launching point for thinking about that community, how it has changed, and where we are today. (Crowdsourced timeline here: http://gc20.pbworks.com/w/page/99478487/FrontPage.)

At one point in 2006, there were zero public servants on Twitter – because there was no Twitter. By 2010 it was probably in the scant hundreds; you could reach the end of the community, so why not follow everyone? We could figure out the “why” out later, but for the time being it was good enough to be connected around a general ideology of sharing, collaboration, experimentation, and openness (see: Millenials, Lego and the Perimeter of Ignorance). I wrote about the value of writing in the open as a way to create “rough edges” that could create connections with people learning the same directions or trying to solve the same problems (see: On the Importance of Being Earnest (and Open)).

That was before the era of information overload and much need for Twitter hiatuses or culling who you follow (though one of Nick’s most popular posts, a full decade ago, was about using Yahoo! pipes to fast-filter articles shared through social media (see: Signal to Noise)). The community matured, grew, and one of the driving common problems – bringing government into the social media era – started looking like a solv-ed/able problem. So people started subdividing into more niche and specialized sub-elements, and taking the natural step of expanding networks across sectors (though there’s still a serious core of “people on Twitter outside government that people inside government know”).

In parallel, the double-edged sword of asking “What problem are we really trying to solve?” emerged as a guiding principle. I say “double-edged” because an impact focus is, of course, a healthy lens. On the other hand, it may have undervalued community-building efforts where the “goal” was really a Venn diagram of many different goals for different people. In many ways, “group hugs and stating the obvious” was exactly what many people needed to start growing into a new and wider community. The first time I heard this question answered really well was Heather Remacle in the BC gov: success for a collaborative community is “growing people who fulfill the vision.”

Which roughly leads us to why posting on CSPRenewal.ca fell off for me. Like Nick (see: Fully, Completely), it was a combination of factors: new and challenges roles in my career, a busier personal life, but there was also an element of the GC collaborative community changing. Where once I agreed whole-heartedly with Andrew Kjurata’s “Shut up and say something” call for people to raise their voices in public spaces, the other increasingly plausible lens was that additional voices were as likely to just be uninformed bellowing into a cacophony. My standards for what I posted about and why went up.

So now, in a cacophonous environment characterized by information overload, Nick and I have both returned to posting at around the same time, and again for some of the same reasons. A little bit more professional and personal space, but at the same time, I think there are some useful things to discuss about the cacophony. One of my strongest conclusions from a year of interviewing people about digital-era governance was how warped our discourse can be about technology and change. Talking points can enjoy years of repetition before critical voices and evidence emerge to correct them – and even then likely don’t stand a chance against the ingrained memes.

Which I don’t purport to be able to correct, but it does mean that I continue to find this space interesting. And I wrote way too much stuff a couple years back (see: Governance in the Digital Era) that I had always intended to chop up into somewhat more digestible sections, which seems like a worthwhile project. I enjoyed Laura Wesley’s description of writing in open spaces as talking to her future self, and I’d like to keep making deposits in that collection rather than just withdrawing all the time.

And if we’ve met recently and you’re new here, here’s a few starting points from the past years that I think remain non-embarassing. Also, holy shit. The current count is 715 posts (more Nick than me and the other contributors). I’ll leave Nick to note his own, if he so chooses. 

• Public Service Anonymity is Dead, Long Live Public Service Anonymity
• Public service: the Long Game and the Dark Side 
• Innovation is Information
• The Next Big Thing
• Tricksters, Hackers, and Schemers

Best,

Kent

Boundaryless Problems and the End of the Elevator Pitch

by Kent Aitken

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I've always been terrible at elevator pitches. My stock answer to most questions is "It depends". When people ask me "What do you do?", I tend to respond with a couple questions to gauge their level of familiarity with government. Providing succinct value propositions has never been my thing.

Last year a handful of us organized a talk and facilitated workshop with Joeri van den Steenhoven, Director of the MaRS Solutions Lab. While bouncing the idea off people, we were asked "What's the desired outcome?" My response was that it would be a combination of outcomes, and that it would be different for different people:

• learning about social innovation
• learning approaches to tackling problems
• practice teaching and facilitating
• meeting potential collaborators
• generating ideas for follow-up

Which, I think, is reasonable. But we still ask for elevator pitches, and still demand a blindingly obvious causal link between solutions and problems. It's one of the 10 Tricks to Appear Smart During Meetings: asking "What problem are we really trying to solve?"

To be honest, I think it's an incredibly useful question - but perhaps insufficient. For public policy, the likely better question is something like "What environment are we trying to influence?"

In the interest of pragmatism, when someone asks you for an elevator pitch, you should probably have one ready. But I think it's in our best long-term interests to move away from that fiction about policy. This world doesn't actually exist:

It's more like this*:

Except:

• the bubbles are all constantly moving around
• the bubbles are always changing size and shape
• not everything on the environment side is a problem
• not everything on the effects side is positive
• this diagram looks at least slightly different to every different player who cares about these problems and solutions

Last week Canada 2020 held a Big Ideas session, at which former Deputy Minister Morris Rosenberg pitched a governance rethink as a Big Idea, citing problems and solutions without clear boundaries in time, space, or definition as the burning platform. Don Lenihan's recap is worth a read.

This prescription isn't easy. Governments have duties pushing from the other direction, including to prove the success of their interventions, and to communicate accessibly with citizens - there's friction against wonkspeak about complex problems. But we can at least stop reinforcing the false expectation of easy answers by asking for and providing them, and recognizing the red flag when we hear them. 

*Venn diagrams are one of the other tricks to appearing smart.

Note: nothing I write on CPSRenewal exists in a vacuum. In this case, thank you to John Kenney, Blaise Hebert, and Abe Deighton for the conversation and ideas.

Another note: there are some parallels to this post on short- and long-term thinking; the issues stem from overlapping incentives for government.

Moving Public Service Mountains, Part I

by Kent Aitken

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This post will be part one of at least two. Next week I'll explain why I believe this is so incredibly important.

At The Museum of Nature in Ottawa, visitors can simulate an earthquake in the Vale Earth Gallery. You turn a crank to pull a spring-loaded hunk of simulated mountain over a surface, and at some point the force overcomes the friction and it slams back into place. The intended lesson is that it's impossible to predict exactly when the tipping point will be reached; each experiment plays out differently.

On To The Dogs or Whoever I referred to a possible “tectonic” shift approaching for public service. I can see the possibility of a very different model for how the bureaucracy functions, develops policy, interacts with Canadians, and creates a competitive advantage for Canada. And in the last few weeks, I've discovered that others have the same hunch. People arrived at this prediction from two very different roads, some on account of mounting evidence, and some from feeling the increasing weight of necessity.

But like the museum counterpart, it's hard to tell if that tectonic shift is actually about to happen. If this mountain worth of inertia is about to move. Or if it needs a shove.

Holmes! A CLUE

Some of the evidence I would point to:

• I've noticed some outspokenness from former Clerks of the Privy Council lately. Mel Cappe has called for Canada to respect its faceless bureaucrats. Alex Himelfarb, to celebrate public service [see: Can Bureaucrats Be Interesting When The World Demands That They Be Boring?]. Another, Jocelyn Bourgon, launched the New Synthesis Project to work with partner countries to explore the future for bureaucracies. Her 2011 release, A New Synthesis of Public Administration, paints a fascinating portrait of the world in store for us, and it looks quite unlike today [see: Is There a Gap Between What We Know and What We Do?].

• Throughout 2013, a Deputy Minister Committee on Social Media and Policy Development will be soliciting input on how public servants carry out a key function in today's world.

• It was recently announced that Deputy Minister Robert Fonberg would join the Privy Council Office with a specific mandate to examine the broader policy development model.

• The Seventh Report of the Prime Minister's Advisory Committee on the Public Service has “modernizing the employment model” as its theme, going so far as to say that the current model is “outmoded in every respect.” The focus, they say, is “managing for high performance at all levels.” I'll admit that my optimism about progress here is cautious, but it is optimism all the same.

• Treasury Board President Tony Clement has echoed the above report's priorities; performance management is on his radar as well. He's also encouraging public servants to push against the status quo, and to innovate.

• Lastly. Last week, the Clerk's Twentieth Report to the Prime Minister on the Public Service of Canada was released. It left us with a teaser of announcements to come, presumably during National Public Service Week in June:

“I believe that we need a clear and shared vision of what Canada’s Public Service should become in the decades ahead,” the Clerk wrote, adding that Deputy Ministers have been tasked with engaging “all public servants in this important dialogue about our shared future.”

Some may greet this litany of anecdotes with skepticism. One could point to Public Service Renewal, the push for a strengthened public service that launched in 2006 or 2007, and ask how far we've come. Is today any different?

Necessity is the Mother of Innovation

On the necessity side, I feel that we have a better grasp now of the mounting need for committed renewal:

• Deloitte's William Eggers highlights, in his Public Sector, Disrupted report, that government is the one sector of economy where innovation has not pushed down costs.

• Samara's research suggests that the number of Canadians satisfied in the way Canadian democracy works dropped from 75% to 55%, in only 10 years.

• Research from Nanos also puts Canadian's level of trust in public servants at record lows. Only 14% surveyed responded that they had a distinctly positive view of the role of Public Servants in developing public policy.

• The rate of mental health related absences in the public service is 300% what it is in private sector*.

All is not necessarily well. I would go so far as to suggest that the status quo is a risky position. So what's next?

Mountains to Move

So here stand we. Staring at a mountain that may, or may not, be ready to move.

We know that it needs to, and we have some forces pushing. It could be another Public Service Renewal, in which we never quite leaned in enough to overcome our inertia. But we have that lesson learned to build on, and the rules have changed. We have black swans proving the possible: there is a Deputy Minister conversing frankly and openly with public servants of all levels and backgrounds about policy development on GCConnex. Another deputy head has resoundingly proven the worth of employee engagement through honest, personal social media interaction. Pictures of cats and all. And the silo-defying, self-organizing GC community is stronger than ever, and has a science fair of success stories to showcase.

Often, we don't know what we don't know [see: The Importance of Being Earnest (and Open)]. And that (unnecessarily) incomplete picture of the world leads to pitfalls and obstacles; in this case, additional friction holding this mountain back. But today, that cold fact is increasingly recognized, and input is being widely solicited. I think we have a unique opportunity now to create discussion.

I don't want to look back, years from now, and wonder if that mountain was ready to go. If all it needed was one more good shove.

*I'd like to unpack that last one for a moment. When I first heard that figure, I found myself wondering how much was due to a safe and generous benefits system, and how much was due to mental health issues. Not that either exists in a vacuum. If a portion is due to the benefits system, it makes me wonder how many of our private sector peers are suffering through untreated mental illness because they are worried about losing jobs, or because they don't have needed benefits. And I'm certain that the system, alone, doesn't explain the discrepancy between public and private rates. Public servants are also more likely to binge drink, which is indicative of stress and mental health issues (although income and education levels impact here as well). There's a direct, and significant, correlation between engagement levels and absenteeism. And there are links between one's perception of control over their jobs and their health. I believe that mental health issues for public servants are a genuine issue and merit significant concern.