Deep dives, or long drags

by Kent Aitken

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The idea that problems are increasingly complex is incredibly common. It's taken as a truism. If that's the case, why haven’t we reorganized our institutions to deal with it?

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A quick story. In March I was at a Tamarack conference on community engagement, and I was struck by the design details of the event.

There were no panels, no real keynote speakers, and no “big names” as hooks. Most of the conference programming was led and delivered by three experts from Tamarack. It was more like a curriculum than a conference; they clearly spent a lot of time deciding on what participants needed to learn and preparing sessions to get it across. It came with a textbook-length package of tools and further reading. To some extent this is a luxury of small events, but I’ve seen it done well with 300 people, too.

This is what we’d expect of that organization; Tamarack's business is designing and facilitating collective learning and decision-making processes. Their President, Paul Born, used an example about being approached to facilitate the development of a homelessness reduction strategy in one community. The process he designed was a 2.5 day session with the key actors in the ecosystem, including senior leaders from government, NGOs, and business. He considered it the minimum amount of time required to work through the issue, have participants meaningfully reflect, and to build commitment to action.

At this point I’d like to contrast this with what I’d consider the standard approaches. Conference panels that work more like back-to-back short presentations, often without trained moderators, that barely scratch the surface of an issue. A universal meeting format of presenting an issue followed by discussion and decision, 20 minutes tops. A premium on brevity and simplicity in written materials.

Our group knowledge transfer and decision-making systems are, unequivocally, not designed for complexity.

I suspect that the common reaction to the idea of getting the 100 most influential people in a system to work through an issue for 2.5 days would be that it’d be impossible. That’s way too much time. Which is exactly what facilitators, designers, and consultants hear. “Can you help us do this?” “Yes, and it’ll take X amount of time.” “That’s too much, it has to be a half day max.”

We give lip service to the idea of complexity, but we certainly don’t behave like we appreciate it. If a given issue is complex, then it requires a deep dive and sustained attention. But if every issue brief is two pages, it’s hard to tell the difference between those that should be two pages and those that should be a book.

At which point I’m sure someone will tell me to be practical. Executives don’t have time to explore issues for 2.5 days or read long briefings. And of course I agree, but it’s exactly the problem*.

And here’s the result: instead of deep dives, we do long drags. It’s when you find a four-month project creeping into 18-month territory, and one more month doesn’t seem like much of a big deal. It’s when you realize that you have to scramble to bring stakeholders to the table that you hadn’t originally identified. It’s when you’re sending just one more briefing up, or having just one more meeting, to work out an issue with a proposal. It’s why everyone is comfortable with the oxymoronic word “reconfirm.”

This is very different from, say, agile software development. In that case, the complexity and constant iteration is scoped, planned, and designed for. But for these long drags you underestimate the amount of time and effort required, and uncover and resolve issues as much by accident as by system.

Complexity is a defining feature of the digital era, and we are not adjusting our governance structures to manage it. Just the opposite, in some ways: as authority and information became distributed and hyperconnected, the pressure towards centralized decision-making and message control became stronger. Governments have grown by orders of magnitude since we developed our conceptions of accountability, and we’ve increasingly realized that the sharp lines between issue areas are more porous than we once thought, making them effectively much broader. If your portfolio is health, it’s also education, social security, and the economy.

What hasn’t grown is the time, tools, or resources to deal with boundaryless problems with many stakeholders: everything from the most intractable policy problems to building user-centred digital services. You need deep dives, the time to do things right, and people empowered to test ideas and work across organizational lines.

To do it, governments will need to either free up senior leadership from day-to-day issues, or push authority further down the chain**. If they aren’t willing to - which is, admittedly, a reasonable position - then the appropriate conclusion is to revise expectations downwards: for the ability to solve wicked problems, collaborate between jurisdictions, or rework internal systems to create more coherent public-facing services.

I may be naive for thinking that this system can be changed, but we’re all naive if we think we can get better at dealing with complex problems if it stays the same.

*Every project lists senior executive commitment as a success factor, which is a resource that doesn't scale up with complexity. At which point it's worth noting that executives tend to overestimate the success of corporate initiatives, and underestimate the scope of organizational problems; executives are already spread more thinly than they think.

**I'd consider the Codefest events that brought internal and external communities together to develop the Web Experience Toolkit to be a shining example of both designing an event to make progress on complex work and of working-level employees having the authority to lead it.

Paving the policy innovation cowpaths?

by Nick Charney

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If you aren't familiar with the idiom paving the cowpaths it essentially means looking to the paths that are already being formed by behaviours and then formalizing them rather than creating some arbitrary or artificial structure that ignores how people actually behave inside organizations.

Cowpaths are akin to the problem of design versus user experience highlighted in the image to the left. People are supposed to be walking the path but the path curves away from destination so they forge a more direct route to their destination. The cowpath metaphor also accurately describes much of the policy innovation ecosystem. People are out forging their own paths -- for example, with successful pilots -- and leaving trails behind them that others can follow. The very existence of the cowpath gives rise to the question: should or should we not simply pave them?

Within the policy innovation ecosystem the question of paving the cowpaths is one that seems to invoke a wide range of responses (See also: On Scaling Innovation). Some prefer to continue to quietly walk the path, and find success for themselves and their initiatives. Others choose to try to be a champion for change at the organization or systems level and take on the burden of rolling that boulder up the hill. Most of the people I've spoken to about this tend to land on the idea that actively paving the cowpaths is the right thing to do but tend to shy away from it when it comes time to lean into the problem. Its not a criticism so much as an observation. There's a myriad of different factors at play -- incentives, zones of control, social capital, degree of difficulty, scale of the change, and interdependent and/or cascading processes, to name but a few -- and its hard to fault individuals for doing the mental math and deciding its best to keep walking the path rather than paving it. Especially since its not a one sided problem; there needs to be both push (i.e. someone rolling the boulder up the hill) and pull (i.e. someone at the top demanding that people do so); in other words supply needs demand. Finally, if we assume that policy innovation cowpaths have natural tipping points (cow tipping pun!) then actually paving them doesn't seem to make sense because at that point the path is so well traveled that they are no longer risky. Investing scarce resources in paving an established cowpath could be a hard sell.

I can offer only one defence for paving them: eliminating the possibility of the backslide. After all, "[Change] requires sealing off the way backwards, not simply pointing the way forwards" (See: The Fine Art of Burning Your Ships).

A Government that Learns by Design

by Melissa Tullio

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In an earlier blog post, I talked about values and our social contract with people (see: Open Gov, Values, and the Social Contract). I touched briefly on an idea that Nesta posted on their blog about cognitive government. Nesta posed an interesting challenge in that post:

How can governments shorten their learning curve to more effectively adapt to the technological changes that surround them?

It will come as no surprise to people who have worked with me, or even if you've read a couple of my posts here on this blog, that I think we need to begin with examining what values we support and demonstrate inside government in order to tackle Nesta's challenge. An assumption embedded in their challenge is that government has the kind of learning culture to support adaptation, so I think we need to dig deeper.

Based on my seven years exploring the government culture, an assumption I've been able to test (and confirm) is that innovation and creativity are things that governments don't inherently value (they usually require you to fill out a business case template to consider such things <tongue-in-cheek>). So I have another challenge I've been thinking about related to cognitive government.

How might gov support a learning culture that allows for experimentation and creative ways of approaching the way we do our work?

My hypothesis is that a government that learns by its very design, and values creative mindsets, will be a government that adapts better to technological changes (and other shifting patterns and citizen expectations). My big idea would be to create opportunities in government, from the inside-out, to think and act like a lab.

Gov that Thinks and Acts like a Lab

Design thinking principles, from d.school's bootcamp bootleg

Because I've drunk the design thinking Kool-aid, so to speak, naturally, I believe that that's the approach we need to start applying in order to change the way we build and deliver government programs. There's a lot of lab and lab-like work going on across the globe to start transforming how government delivers services and programs to citizens.

In Nesta's 2014 report on i-teams — units that are established inside government to enable innovation in service design — successful teams have a few things in common with design thinking principles. One of the ten principles identified that i-teams possess is to "have a bias towards action and aim for rapid experimentation."

This is where you tell me "it'll never happen." Government isn't a fast-moving animal; it's the sloth¹ of the services kingdom. But I'd argue that it's not about speed of overall change, or about being the first to play with the latest shiny object; it's about figuring out quickly how it might add value to existing processes.

The "figuring out quickly" part is where we can use (that is, demonstrate that we value) creativity — it's where, inside government, we should find ways to experiment, learn, and use those lessons to feed into existing programs and processes. And for that, you need people who understand the system, and are able to learn and apply some creative thinking.

People who Think and Act like a Lab

Any organization is as nimble and adaptable as the people it fosters. A learning culture supports experimentation; a culture that values creative mindsets is where innovative people are driven, and where they thrive. If you've followed me this far in the post and agree that gov should think and act more like a lab, we need to start thinking about how to attract and keep people who value innovation and creativity.

What would move us closer to adopting a culture that supports i-teams? What barriers are in the way, and how do we start getting around them or removing them completely? And if we can carve out a tiny space for them somewhere, what experiments might we run, on a small scale and in much needed parts of government (e.g., procurement? IT? Budget?), to test my hypothesis above?

^{This, of course, is unfair to sloths. I saw a little guy on Meet the Sloths come back from having a leg amputated, and he re-learned how to climb within a day after his bandages were removed. But the sanctuary does support a learning culture (and experimentation), so that might have been part of the reason for his success.}

You're Experimenting Right Now

by Kent Aitken

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You may be familiar with the trolley problem in ethics:

There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five people on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person. Which is the correct choice?

The latter option is better from a purely utilitarian perspective, but many people lean towards the first option, which absolves them of participation or responsibility in the outcome.

The current public administration zeitgeist would more likely point to behavioural economics to prove the power of defaults to provide a level of comfort and confidence in people’s decisions (see: How Nudges Work for Government). But the point stands: we are unduly comfortable with the status quo, and we wrongly absolve ourselves of culpability for outcomes generated through the status quo. In the trolley problem, doing nothing is a big decision*.

Duty and Responsibility

Let's say you're debating a pivot in your career. You've been working in a field for a few years, and you're considering trying something new. It could just be a different job within your organization, or it could be throwing everything out the window, including yourself, and taking a leap of faith. Everything along that spectrum comes with uncertainty, discomfort, and perhaps a degree of fear.

Or, let's say you're an politician debating a policy change: it could be a minor adjustment or something major like mandatory voting or a guaranteed basic income, both of which have been proposed in Canada lately. It's not the sort of thing you can pilot in a vacuum; you have to change the way things things work to gauge how people react. Like the career pivot, it's  uncertain, uncomfortable, and scary.

Who knows how such experiments will work out? Will they be worth the risk? It's impossible to say with 100% certainty, which is the nature of experiments.

It’s tempting to think that those changes are experiments, whereas the course we are on is not. But the status quo is not a valueless, neutral starting point. It’s an experiment. It represents a plethora of design decisions, all of which influence how people behave and make decisions. And you are — we all are — complicit. As Richard Thaler, co-author of Nudge has put it, “There’s no avoiding nudging. Like in a cafeteria: You have to arrange the food somehow. You can’t arrange it at random. That would be a chaotic cafeteria.”

You’re Experimenting Right Now

You've never gone through a career on your current track before. No one ever has, in today's particular environment. Are you in digital media, for instance? Exactly zero people ever have put in a 30-year career in that field.

Likewise for policy. Canada has never entered the 21st century before, our policies have never stood up in the economic, demographic, or technological context they're about to face.

You're experimenting right now. We all are. And we have to weigh the costs and benefits of both the changes we’re considering and the track we’re already on.

* If you find yourself finding holes and rationalizations, Michael Sandel will cure that in his amazing lecture on ethics.

Through the Looking Glass: How Google Glass Could Radically Change Your Organization

by Nick Charney

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A couple of weeks ago I read an article in Rolling Stone entitled "The Future of Movies: How Will Google Glass Change Filmmaking?". While it was obviously focused on the how Glass will impact the film industry, reading it sparked an idea about how organizations could lever Glass to better understand their day-to-day operations.


The idea is simple

1. Grab a junior employee, a low level executive, a mid level executive and the head of the agency; ensure they are all a part of the same reporting structure;
2. Equip each one with Google Glass;
3. Have them film their entire work day on a day where they typically interact with one another; 
4. Sit them all in a room together as all four videos simultaneously in a split screen; and
5. Engage them in an honest and professionally facilitated conversation as the movies roll. 

What might you see? Perfect alignment? Fodder for a revamp of Yes, Minister? Or something in between? 

In fairness, it likely varies from organization to organization. That said, I get the sense that information asymmetries is likely to be a key finding of any such experimentation. 

What do you think? 

Is your organization courageous, desperate, or driven enough to peer through looking glass?

And if so, what do you think they would find?

 

This is why we can't have nice things (in government)

Last year I wrote about how enterprises could leverage tablet applications like Flipboard in order to change how senior leaders received and actioned their business intelligence.

After sitting on the idea for a year I established bureaucrati.ca as a foothold to try to help bring the app to market (note I'm pivoting on the role of the site, it will now be an outlet for creative writing).

Trying to get an app built meant hitting the streets and talking to a number of established mobile development companies and start ups, it also meant stumbling
on what I think is one of the core reasons why we can't have nice things in government.

As for the reason? Well it's painfully simple.

Plainly put, companies that make beautiful things don't consider enterprise solutions as a viable market. The CEOs I spoke with all cited four reasons why they have steered their businesses clear of enterprise solutions:

1. they tend to require a bunch of integration work (work that is often different from organization to organization and rooted in its own technological evolution);
2. integration work is difficult to scope in advance and thus hard to determine what would constitute an appropriate resource level (and thus the price of the contract);
3. dealing with enterprises often entails hiring a sales guy to do the grunt work. The people I met with are skilled developers and shrewd business people, they don't want to be out shilling their wares; they want to build applications and services that are so beautiful and useful that they sell themselves.
4. No one wants to invest any effort into the procurement process. If you aren't a big vendor you simply don't have the resources, expertise or established relationships to successfully navigate the world of procurement.

While many of us on the inside already know that there are procurement challenges (ever try to procure a Mac?) I find the fact that the innovators in the private sector feel as though the procurement process itself is so broken that they can easily afford to purposely ignore the entire public sector. In the midst of the establishment of a new Shared Services Canada, I can only hope that those at the helm take a good hard look at the details around how we procure IT resources, because it may just be one of the reasons why we can't have nice things in government.

Originally published by Nick Charney at cpsrenewal.casubscribe/connect