Meritocracy

by Kent Aitken

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I'm a little late to the game, but I've been fascinated by reactions to a proposed idea for Canadian politics: an equal number of men and women in cabinet. The subsequent debates about diversity and the perceived conflict with the idea of merit are interesting, even setting aside politics, because those concepts are fundamental to the Canadian public service. From the Public Service Commission:

"The merit system has been the foundation of a competent, professional, non-partisan public service for almost a century."

But many people get the relationship between merit and diversity wrong.

The title of a recent Andrew Coyne piece suggests that such a "quota in Cabinet leaves out the principle of merit":

"If merit is defined in traditional terms, this is obvious nonsense. Suppose, in a governing caucus of, say, 180 members, one-third are women (their current proportion of the House of Commons is 25 per cent). And suppose that the talents and experience to be desired in a cabinet minister are distributed equally between the sexes, such that a fifth of either — 12 women, 24 men — might be considered cabinet material. If nevertheless the cabinet must have an equal number of women and men, then in a cabinet of 36 six women who should not have been appointed will be, and six men who should have been appointed will not be. That may be many things, but it is not the merit principle. 

The only way you can square that circle is if you redefine merit to mean diversity."

In response, Laura Dobson-Hughes wrote on the Policy Options blog:

"‘Merit’ is not itself a neutral concept. We can, for example, define merit as someone with expertise and lived experience in aboriginal affairs. Merit could be policy expertise in policing in black communities, or an understanding of healthcare provision for newcomers."

I could jump in with opinions, but it's the wrong argument. The issue is that merit, as it's colloquially understood, is a complete red herring. When a "merit-based appointment" is considered to mean "the most qualified person for the job", the provisions for diversity do indeed seem at odds, as Coyne describes. But what lurks just outside the conversation is that whether or not someone is good at their job isn't actually the ultimate goal. It's secondary to whether the system on the whole generates good outcomes.

In an environment where many people feed into decisions - through research, consultation, committees, governance structures, and the provision and consideration of advice - it's the dynamics and results of the group, the collective, that matter. To return to Dobson-Hughes's example, one's experience with healthcare provision for newcomers is moot in a committee stacked with colleagues that discount that knowledge.

In Collaboration and Creativity: The Small World Problem, a pair of researchers worked out a "u-shaped" benefit curve to group cohesion. Some familiarity bred comfort and collaborative norms, leading to better results. But too much meant that everyone had the same information and mental models, which inhibited those groups' ability to think outside the box and limited their results. In their model, appointing "the most qualified person for the job" would be sub-optimal - repeatedly and predictably. Turning back to the Canadian public service, such an approach would sacrifice another foundational principle: stewardship.


In the Canadian Public Service

The Public Service Employment Act seems to have squared the circle (emphasis mine):

"Under the PSEA, merit has two components. 

1. First, everyone who is appointed must meet the essential qualifications, which includes official language proficiency. 

2. Second, the manager (or other delegate of the deputy head) may take into account:

• qualifications that are considered an asset for the work, currently or in the future; 

• any current or future operational requirements and organizational needs that he or she has identified; and finally, 

• the current and future needs of the public service, as determined by the employer, in deciding on the needs of their organization."

Not so at odds

Merit and diversity only seem to be in conflict if we conceptualize people's roles in government as the execution of their job descriptions in a vacuum, rather than the role they play in the broader system. 






Note: please don't take this to mean that I think we should aim for diversity 'even when someone isn't the best person for the job'. I'm really not saying that, merely questioning the debate itself. I'm also not defending a partisan platform - this topic was around long before that.

Redefining diversity in the search for ideas

by Tariq Piracha

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With Nick and Kent’s recent focus on a new way forward for policy development, I began thinking about the sourcing of design thinking from Nick’s piece, and the system for more reliable problem solving from Kent's piece. If we are to assume that policy making is to take this proposed course, who is the source of the design thinking? Where do the ideas come from?

Diversity, old school.

When I first joined the public service in 2001, I remember attending a Town Hall related to visible minorities and diversity in the public service. The question back then was not all that different from questions we see today: how to we attract and retain *diverse* talent for the public service?

The assumption is that there is value in a diversity of backgrounds and what those backgrounds can bring to the table. The focus for visible minority groups, of course, is to provide more opportunity for those who are otherwise shut out of the process due to the colour of their skin. 

And they weren't the only groups who focused on representation based on a particular demographic. Our meetings or consultations became an exercise in ensuring that we included a visible minority, a woman, a person with a disability, a member of First Nations, someone younger, someone older – the list goes on. A successful exercise in inclusiveness was a room filled with demographic diversity. 

However, if the nature of policy development is going to change (as Nick and Kent suggest), then it follows that a redefinition of diversity may be required. 

As Blueprint 2020 uses digital tools to bring public servants together across the country to envision a new future for the public service, the focus is on ideas. In short, government may need to shift from visible to invisible inclusiveness.  

A good idea is a good idea is a good idea

When I say “invisible inclusiveness”, I'm talking about a focus on the source of design thinking: tapping into a diversity of experience, opinion, and ideas.

It’s the notion that cognitive authority needs to supplant institutional or positional authority. We should be drawn to good ideas and we lose out if we retain biases of any kind that favour source (one's position or influence) over merit (of an idea).

It means a good idea is a good idea, no matter where it comes from and is treated as such. It means that there is value seeking out other voices and ideas (even dissenting ones). It is a belief in producing better outcomes through consultation, collaboration and cooperation. It is an acknowledgement that no one person has all the answers. 

The opportunity here is that one's value is determined by their contribution, not by the colour of their skin, the year they were born, or the nation to which they belong.

It’s asking for a change in culture, which is no easy task - there is still a long way to go. Collaboration and the use of collaborative tools, while increasing in use, are by no means pervasive in the public service. And the use of these tools and the culture that may be fostered through the use of these tools are no guarantee that racism, discrimination and exclusivity are going to disappear. 

However, if better policy outcomes and an effective public service are the goals for the public service, then the focus on finding the best ideas will truly need to shift from obsessing over who is getting a seat at the table to stepping out of the boardroom.

Weekly Column: The Opportunity for Enterprise

I was fortunate enough to have been invited to participate on a "one person task team" run by the President of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, Mme Monique Collette (who btw is an absolutely wonderful woman). Essentially, Mme Collette was asked by the soon to retire Clerk of the Privy Council, Kevin Lynch, to travel across the country collecting best practices in three areas: diversity, official languages, and communication.

As you might expect, I was invited to participate explicitly because of this blog. The session was very well run, with some pleasant surprises, unexpected fun, and most importantly, great ideas being exchanged.

Early in our conversation, someone raised a fair point: the conversations we were having about fostering bilingualism, capturing diversity, and opening up communications had already happened, a number of times, in a number of places. So how do we move beyond them? Ironically, her point was one that had also been raised repeatedly.

Being the “blogger/social media evangelist/new collaboration preacher” in the room, I’m not sure if Mme Collette was just keenly aware of who was in the room, or if it was just ridiculously apparent by my face that I wanted to jump into the conversation. Either way (though it was probably a bit of both), she quickly gave me the floor.

Naturally, I brought up GCPEDIA and its enormous collaborative potential, and made a couple of points worth sharing.

First, I pleaded (begged really) for Mme Collette to make the findings of her task team available in GCPEDIA, and even volunteered to put them there myself (to which they were quick to oblige).

Second, I drew attention to a statement made by the Clerk in his latest report. Specifically, when he states that:

The business of government has become markedly more complex than in the past. Today, almost every department and agency must deal with global challenges, using new tools and asking people to work in new ways - in integrated teams, often across organizational boundaries.

Great statement, right? Anyone looking to build a business case for the adoption of new tools (e.g. social media tools) should be quoting the Clerk on the first page. That being said, I think the Clerk could have been a bit more specific, something like this perhaps:

The business of government has become markedly more complex than in the past. Today, almost every department and agency must deal with global challenges, using new tools and asking people to work in new ways - in integrated teams, often across organizational boundaries. That is why a tool like GCPEDIA is so important. GCPEDIA is the first of a series of small but deliberate steps to address enterprise-wide problems in a more systematic way.

Those extra two sentences would have been a boon to the project; I need not even explain why. The more I reflect on public service renewal the more I feel like enterprise-wide (i.e. federal government-wide) technical solutions are necessary. They are important because they do something that has thus far seemed to elude the public service for too long: they show us the need to think about our business as an integrated whole, and more importantly, give us a proven and tangible means to act as an integrated whole.

Quite often I run into people who say they are frustrated by “the bureaucracy”, but what they are really frustrated by is people’s unwillingness to share, their unwillingness to adapt or embrace change, and their unwillingness to let go of what they think is theirs. They are not frustrated by some abstract or amorphous entity, but by a lack of vision around what it means to be, and act as a single enterprise, while creating tremendous value by sharing, trusting and challenging within it.

I will be honest, I have a whole lot more to say about this and leadership under these circumstances(things that I have been reflecting on a lot lately), but for now I bite my tongue.

Maybe next time, but until then your thoughts?