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?

*****

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.

Public Service: The Long Game and the Dark Side

by Kent Aitken

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I’m optimistic. About the public service, its mission and work, and my role in it.

Teresa Amabile analysed journal entries for months from 238 employees in 7 countries, and determined that the singular difference between a good day and a bad day for a professional is whether or not they made progress on meaningful work. That’s it. Just that they got to do their job, and they felt that it meant something.

We can zoom out and look at Corporate Executive Board’s research on employee engagement. They didn’t get into journal entries, but surveyed 11,000 employees around the world and came to a similar conclusion: the number one driver of employee engagement is the sense of connection between what you’re doing and the organization’s mission.

And if I wanted to really hammer the point home, Gallup did a meta-analysis - an analysis of other analyses - of 1,390,941 employees. Same thing. Connection to mission comes out as the number one driver.

This kind of engagement is emotional. It’s something you feel, day to day.

Which is sometimes hard to reconcile with a mission of long-term stewardship.

In the public service jobs are, by their nature, part of a long-term mission. Political parties come and go and we stick with the ship of state. In Canada our senior civil servants are modelled after “Permanent Secretaries” in the UK, charged with making sure that departments function smoothly through political changes. The values and ethics code includes Stewardship and Respect for Democracy as pillars.

Although you’d be more likely to hear those pillars interpreted in the news as “risk-averse” or “slow-moving.” Thick skins required.

For individual public servants, this grandiose role of stewardship gets broken down, then broken down more, into day-to-day tasks. Sometimes this is exciting and engaging, and sometimes it is decidedly not. But it’s all a part of something bigger. Public service is about the long game.

When I first started in the public service, I admittedly wasn’t incredibly excited about my job, for the most part. I sat in my cube wondering if I could do this for the rest of my life. Eventually, I decided I’d stop worrying about it, and did the most bureaucratic thing possible to do so: I set an appointment in Outlook to worry about it later, on my three-year anniversary of public service employment.

This was a mistake.

As it turns out, the three-year mark is when you’re statistically likely to hit rock bottom for engagement in your career. For your first three years you’re full of enthusiasm, ideas, and idealism. But then you start running into obstacles, limits, and the realization that as a public servant you don’t get to do everything you want, or even all the things you think are in the public interest.

And to be honest, I was wrong a lot. Many of those obstacles are purposeful and useful, and they are, if nothing else, democratically legitimate. But it doesn’t mean it still doesn’t hurt a little when you run into them.

This is the dark side. You can rationally appreciate the long-term calling, but you still want the emotional day-to-day engagement.

So what happens to your level of engagement as time stretches towards the end of your career?

You start getting more responsibility, more control over outcomes, and more involved in the bigger mission of the organization. In fact, executives (in general, not necessarily government) tend to be the most satisfied with their jobs. I’ll stress tend - I have immense concern and sympathy for the all-too-real and prevalent mental health challenges for many over-taxed executives. The satisfaction is not universal, and the distribution is more interesting than the average. 

But for young public servants, that’s ages away. It’s hard to think about where you’ll be, and if you’ll be happy, 20 years from now. I mean, you should be happy now. 35 years of service would put my retirement date at May 5, 2044.

2044.

That is hecking terrifying. That is a date that only ever crosses my consciousness in science fiction. Even Star Wars happened before then.

Of course, it all depends on how we look at it.

Here’s some homework. Take out a sheet of paper and write the date ten years ago. November 30, 2006. And start making a list of everything you know how to do now, everything you understand, everything you’re good at, that you weren’t, then. That you’ve learned in the last decade.

It’ll be a long list.

Think about all those things, then start imagining what’s possible in the next ten years. The next 20. The next 30. That’s your horizon. Don’t worry about specifics, now, just the overall potential.

I, for one, am very excited about what is possible over this long horizon. The kinds of projects I’ll be able to contribute to, and the kinds of meaningful progress we’ll be able to make, individually and more importantly, together. I can look at that 2044 date and think “I’m going to get to work on so much amazing stuff by then.”

Listen to this man:

Jen Palhka, founder of Code for America and former White House Deputy CTO, said that to work in government you need to hold two contradictory thoughts in your head at once. “You need to love government, yet want to change it.“

The problem with thinking about change in fiscal years, or even three-year stretches, is that nothing happens. Ever. It’s like the turtle that keeps on getting halfway to the finish line, but never quite reaches it.

Even three years is too short for massive changes unless something breaks. Public servants are here to be stewards, the steady hand on the wheel, but that means the job is to keep things from breaking, not wait for turmoil to ensue when it does.

But the crazy thing is that they actually do happen. New Public Management actually happened. That’s a massive change. And now, of course, we have to un-change it, and that’s a nightmare. But it happened. The public service is capable of significant course changes.

Public servants don't get to scream what they think. But they're close to the fulcrum of the levers of change. When the lever moves, it can have a lot of impact for a lot of people.

Interpret that as both reward and duty.

At many points you will be the ones with the hard decisions. It’ll be up to you to think about stewardship and respect for democracy and to not say no because it’s easier than saying yes.

If you forget how important your job is, it will immediately become unimportant.

If you forget how much is possible, many things immediately become impossible.

If you ever say “it can’t be done”, or “there's no appetite for that,” you'll be right, because you just made it that way.

It’s about the long haul, not the quick wins. That’s the mission to connect to. When you feel like you’re missing that piece on any one day, remember the long game.

The dark side of community engagement as a public servant

by Kent Aitken

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Last week I had a dark thought. I considered the possibility that my stakeholder community would possibly be equally well off if I was an anonymous public servant who never got out of the office. You might imagine that this goes against my general philosophy on modern public service, and you’d be right.

So I want to share my experience as a public servant for the last few years, with an emphasis on the "public" part. I recently wrote this on Twitter in response to Amanda Clarke, on the trend towards public servants having digital presences linked to their roles in government:

@KenRasmussen1 @kentdaitken It may also be a necessary feature of open, networked policymaking. PS needs to have an online presence.

— Amanda Clarke (@ae_clarke) October 16, 2016

@ae_clarke @KenRasmussen1 I'd second this. I can't imagine being good at my job without the presence.

— Kent Aitken (@kentdaitken) October 16, 2016

And I believe that, but I have to nuance it.

Three years ago I joined the Government of Canada's Open Government team (I've since taken a year of interchange). I took a broad view of Open Gov, and considered the principles and in a way the ideology in how I worked and wanted the team to work: open, engaged, collaborative, empathetic. I didn't think we could run a successful Open Gov program if our world was an office in Ottawa.

I wanted to get the know the community, hear from stakeholders, and look for opportunities to work together with groups in and outside of government. And I feel as though I did a reasonably good job of that.

In three years I've learned so, so much from people. Over Twitter, over beer and coffee, in meetings, and at conferences. My understanding of the problem space is immeasurably richer for those conversations, and they made me better at my job. 

Here's the downside.

For all of those insights and partnership possibilities, I was able to act on them and help change things maybe, maybe 10% of the time. Which, in my view, means I couldn't fully respect the time and effort that the community puts into helping governments and government employees. Increasingly, I started telling people that I'd love to help them but that they may want to contact my senior executives directly and try that route as well. Which is time-consuming for everyone, and hamstrings the analyst-level value of adding context and considerations.

I don’t think I was delusional. In many cases, executives in my organization responded positively to the ideas and partnerships discussed. But people in such organizations rarely make complete decisions; instead, they make parts of decisions while this complex amorphous thing called an “organization” is responsible for the overall picture.

So where does this leave me? I’m going to stick with being a public public servant. I’d feel like I had earplugs in and blinders on otherwise. But that impact gap concerns me. In a vacuum, the more senior a public servant is engaging with a community, the better it is for the community - except for the fact that available time to engage in “rigourous hanging out” decreases in proportion to seniority (see: relevant Matt Bailey Twitter essay). This concern, like so many others, has common roots in big governance questions, including how well we align expertise, responsibility, accountability, and authority. And I don’t know if we can get to an open, user-centric, empathetic, and ultimately a more effective government without addressing those questions.

Bursting the Filter Bubble

by Kent Aitken

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Let’s start with a Twitter essay from Matt Bailey, DC’s former Director of Tech Innovation who just left for the White House:

(1/n) ..There are so many great people in DC government who want to hear from you. Sometimes they don't know how to find you. Seek them out.

— Matt Bailey (@MattBailey0) April 29, 2016


(2/n) ..There are a *lot* of times when public input really makes a difference in the decisions that get made. More voices are needed.
— Matt Bailey (@MattBailey0) April 29, 2016

(3a/n) ..A lot of govfolks have no idea that the public cares about they do - they think it's too nerdy, too esoteric, etc..

— Matt Bailey (@MattBailey0) April 29, 2016

(3b/n) .. and the pure joy on their faces when they find out the contrary is a thing to see <3 <3 <3

— Matt Bailey (@MattBailey0) April 29, 2016

(12/n) ..The old model of limiting public interactions to senior and communications officials is deeply broken.

— Matt Bailey (@MattBailey0) April 29, 2016

(12a/n) ..Government needs to remunerate/incentivize employees to attend after hours public events.

— Matt Bailey (@MattBailey0) April 29, 2016

(12b/n) ..People deserve to be paid for their time and this is a core competency of government.

— Matt Bailey (@MattBailey0) April 29, 2016

I caught that string of tweets on the train back to Ottawa from Toronto. I had facilitated a lunch workshop for the Government of Canada’s next open government plan, latching onto the National Youth Leadership and Innovation Strategy Summit who graciously included us in the event.

The weird thing is that I’m slightly uncomfortable pressing “Publish” on that last paragraph. I’m hesitant about the idea that I was there representing the Government of Canada. But there’s no two ways about it, as far as the participants were concerned. I was. And a lot of us represent the government, directly or indirectly, on a daily basis.

And we have to get used to it. I agree with Matt Bailey about the value of public servants interacting with the public. For the Summit I could have left after lunch, but I chose to get the latest train possible back to Ottawa (rolling in around midnight) so I could spend more time with the participants. Here’s the breakdown of my afternoon, after my "official" duties were done:

• I think I corrected a lot of misconceptions about how far along government was. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in gov that’s well-known to public servants and completely opaque to the public.
• I had a string of “3b/n” moment (I’m very lucky to have them regularly). Indelicately put: hearing from people who genuinely care about the work that you’re doing in gov really, really makes you want to work your ass off.
• I had opportunities to get clarity on what the stakeholders of my program really need and care about.
• I met some fascinating people who could turn into future collaborators.
• I’d like to think I helped people understand the ways in which they can influence government, and provided some reassurance that government is actually influenceable.
• ...and that government is, well, human.

That is, it was positive to the point where I’m actually legit worried about what we’re not at. Where our presence is missing and our voices are absent. How much opportunity for understanding, collaboration, and inspiration are we missing?

On that note. Thinking about the public service/public relationship, here’s a couple recent articles. First, a TVO piece summing up a point that former Clerk of the Privy Council Wayne Wouters has been making lately:

"Sometimes we send the strangest signals to the people who work in the public service. In the best of all worlds, here’s what we want from them: We want them to be brilliant. We want them to be much less bureaucratic and much more creative. We want them to serve us better, find solutions to our problems, and explore new ideas that could help save us money. But woe betide a single one of them if they ever experiment with a new idea that goes south, then costs the taxpayers money. In that case, we’ll be the first to string them up in the town square and shame them from here to eternity."

And this, on public servants becoming increasingly public:

"Does it in fact matter if civil service leaders become more public figures than they have previously? I argue that the reason these changes matter is because the traditional anonymity of civil servants is linked in important ways to the impartiality of the civil service. To dispense with the former is to endanger the latter in ways that re-shape the core role of civil service leaders in a Westminster system."

...At which point I'm going to let the post hang, and I welcome your thoughts. 

Why Government Social Media Isn't Social

by Kent Aitken

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At a Community of Federal Regulators workshop last month, the presentation material led a handful of us in the audience to a conversation about social media and how government can get past using it as a "push" mechanism and into two-way dialogue. Which is not just a Canadian thing; Ryan Androsoff and the OECD found the same worldwide:

"[W]hile governments are increasingly using social media, many are still using it primarily as a traditional communications mechanism rather than for opening up policy processes or transforming public service delivery."

I found myself saying that "I don't think government will ever really get there," and wanted to explain that comment. It's a matter of where "there" really is, or, as Ryan put it, "What's the ideal state for social media in government?"

The ideal state

For starters, if the social media goal is something like profit, reach, or providing a supplementary channel, then interactivity and sociality may really just be means to an end. In that case, one-way messaging might work perfectly, even if it offends social media purists, and the story ends there.

But let's assume that the goal is as Ryan wrote in the above quote, to open up policy processes or transform service delivery. In this case, responsiveness and interactivity become central.

And if that's the there, I think government can get there - just in a limited and particular set of circumstances.

But first: why aren't we there yet?

The worldwide state of the practice is still one-way in government, which means that there are more barriers to genuinely interactive government social media than it may have first seemed (or that it's not as attractive a goal). It might be easy to point to common culprits: maybe it’s just culture change that hasn’t taken root yet. Maybe it’s approval processes that make it hard to be “social” and responsive - it’s hard to carry on a conversation while routing responses through half a dozen people, and the time investment smothers the engagement benefit. And so on.

But the state of practice is similar in the private sector. There’s no shortage of examples of really clever back-and-forths between companies and customers, but that's the exception, not the rule. Where companies do get social, it tends to fall under customer service: that is, just an alternative channel to calls or emails to complain, which leads to tightly and extensively scripted interactions. Anything more in-depth and the company's social media team would have to go digging for answers, which breaks the responsiveness element.

Which is more like the government reality. The Public Inquiries model is a good analogy. Questions from the public come in to a central office. That team has a solid map of the institution and they triage questions as best they can for response - in some cases to multiple teams, just in case. In some cases, the answers are a few pages long, and (reasonably) take a couple days to provide.

Government could try to ask general, light questions about broad thoughts on policy or services via social media, such that such in-depth knowledge is not needed, but it'll inevitably get to a complicated request or question. Then the only response available is "That's interesting, we'll consider that and get back to you" and suddenly the people engaging are reminded that they're not talking to the people responsible, and it breaks the spell.

The TL;DR: for this section is that people talk to people, not organizations, and it's impossible to have a conversation that hypothetically could include everything that an organization "knows." The departmental level is too big for conversation.

When and where can government social media get social?

I've been considering three axes that we can play with:

1. Length of time
2. Officialness/institutionalness
3. Source

For source, the question is to what extent the engagement is led by programs/policy/services versus communications, and for today the long story short is that you need both involved.

For the others, let's imagine a grid like this:

From left to right we have the length of time of social media interactions: point-in-time, like hour-long Twitter townhalls (that usually convene a "war room" of comms professionals and subject matter experts to support) to ongoing, like how complaints and comments can come in at any time.

At the top we have large, institutional, and official social media interactions: again, townhalls, but also announcements, senior executive corporate accounts, and the Public Inquiries clearinghouse model applied to social media. At the bottom, we have individual public servants using social media for work purposes (which happens mostly unofficially in the Government of Canada and more officially in some other counties).

How social media in government can be social:

1. It can't be institutions, they're too big to converse
2. It can't be individuals, that doesn't jibe with the public administration culture in Canada (at least now now)
3. The existing escape hatch from (1) and (2), convening war rooms for point-in-time engagements, is too niche and needs alternatives

I think government should instead look at expanding the use of models that cover the middle ground. For instance:

1. Creating governance and content partnerships between policy/program shops and social media teams for more like a week to a month, still using institutional accounts. It might be tied to a consultation or campaign, but would regardless involve posing questions - both into the ether and to identified stakeholder accounts - and getting into back-and-forth dialogue. The policy shop behind the interaction would be identified for the duration, which would put this near the middle of that grid.
2. Identifying policy and program areas whose work requires public consultation and engagement, provide public affairs training (lest I invoke Chris Hadfield), and expand the use of official community accounts, again identifying the teams behind the accounts. This would be in the middle of the grid from top-to-bottom but allow for interactions from point-in-time to ongoing.

Are there other models in use that are working well now? Any other ways to explore the middle ground?

Forward momentum

by Kent Aitken

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A while back, Nick wrote a post about "Chekhov's Gun." It's short and you should read it, but if you'd like to just keep forging ahead, the central idea is the following consideration for novelists: 

"If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."

That is, if you've made it seem to everyone that something is important or that something is going to happen, you need to follow through.

Nick applies it to organizations, giving examples of innovation lab mandates, Blueprint 2020 goals, and employee/stakeholder engagement. And that last one is broad: promises to employees, strategic plans, and any communication that includes the phrase "stay tuned."

Different definitions of "the gun went off"

Here's an additional caution: we all have different definitions of what constitutes a satisfying gunshot. Returning to Chekhov's one-liner, if the main character takes a short break from the action to go hunting, it doesn't count. If you make a gun hanging on the wall a plot point... well, a primary character is going to have to take a bullet. Sorry.

Novelist Robert Jackson Bennett takes on the show Jessica Jones in this way, in a piece called Jessica Jones and the problem of forward momentum – or, Marvel needs a goddamn editor. As he sees it, things keep happening in the show. Conflict is introduced and resolved. Chekhov's guns are described, then fired. But his problem is that none of it truly matters, and the core state of the show never changes. In episode one, this is the concept:

Jessica Jones is a cynical, traumatized superhero being harassed and threatened by the incredibly powerful mind-controller Kilgrave, who can strike at her at any moment.

Bennett then walks through each episode and checks against that baseline after each, concluding that it doesn't budge.

In the professional world, we do this test as "The Five Whys": asking why something is the way it is, then asking "why?" about the answer, continuously. 

For example:

"Why is communication to Canadians important?" 

"To raise awareness." 

"Okay, why is awareness important?"

Etc.

Yesterday I heard this referred to as the "What do you do?/Bullshit, what do you do, really?" test.

How has the core state of things changed?

That's the main question Bennett has for storytelling, that he says Jessica Jones fails: how has the core state of things changed? It's easy to write content that seems like a conclusion, but it's often communicative fondant, all structure with a vague, unsatisfying flavour.

But we're definitely not fooling our readers and stakeholders.

What's different now, because of what we've done?

 

If nothing's different, what have we been doing?

Put differently: the gun went off. Did it matter?

Golden non-rules for government communications

by Kent Aitken

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We’re past the days of people calling for government writ large to be “more like the private sector.” It might still come up for certain areas or practices, but the view that private sector techniques are a panacea is fortunately out of date.

But private sector practices have a more subtle, distributed influence too. In fields like marketing, communications, or community management it’s far easier to find books and resource directed at the private sector. The software we use is almost invariably designed for the private sector (e.g., customer relationship management, web publishing, and analytics platforms). We have to mentally convert terms like “sales leads,”disregard some irrelevant ideas, and bootstrap some missing ones.

With the private sector comparison in mind, I’d like to look at some reasonable rules for government communications - and their limits.

Measure engagement

Last year I was getting advice on analytics from a friend in the private sector. She suggested mapping website pages out on a 2x2 grid to start analyzing content against views and time-on-page. It looked like this:

You can see how the logic applies to a company’s blog or product page. If people rarely find a page, but when they do find it they spend a lot of time on it, perhaps it should be promoted better. But what if your “best content” - i.e., where visitors spend the most time-on-page - is an FAQ explaining how a government program works? Or guidance on how to complete a transaction with government? If they’re reading text because they can’t figure out how to do something, that’s not good content, that’s bad service.

Consider the idea of a retail sales funnel, below. The idea is that a number of people will keep taking steps towards buying something, and you want to minimize the number of people you lose at each stage of the funnel (via losing interest, bad UX, etc.):

This isn't what we do, but the logic behind it is pervasive. I’ve heard people talk about “driving traffic” to government websites. Why? We’re not selling anything. We're not necessarily trying to get more people into the funnel. 

Maybe a stakeholder seeing a tweet and simply knowing that there’s a policy that says government data and information is open by default is exactly the ideal outcome. For many people, I don’t think clicking on that tweet and reading that policy adds to their experience. They actually shouldn't go any further into the "sales funnel". Which means that Twitter’s engagement metrics might be precisely backwards sometimes; maybe it means we didn’t write the tweet clearly enough and we forced people to waste their time finding an explanation.

Community is king

“Kent, we haven’t seen you in a while.” “Kent, X, Y, and Z people are all talking about #exln42.” “People are looking at your profile.” Etc. We get emails like that every day, plus tons of straight-up content marketing. Community is king, they say. Create a relationship with your customers. Every business wants a relationship with you. Buying show tickets in a city you don’t live in? Heck, may as well make you choose a password and verify your account for the next time you happen to be swinging through Sao Paulo. Why not.

“Kent, check out these shows that are happening this weekend [8,000 km from you]!”

But really:

“I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something.” [source]

In government, we want to maintain regular communications, write engaging social media content. Of course.

But maybe, we actually want to design for transience, not community. Maybe, we don’t actually want people coming back regularly, because maybe they don’t want to come back regularly. Maybe they don’t want to “check back” or “stay tuned” or “keep watching this space.” Maybe we should contact them only when we have something really meaningful to share, while erring on the side of being forthright for the sake of transparency.

Don’t make me think

Don’t Make Me Think is a wonderful book that everyone should read, regardless of whether you work in digital communications or not. It’s about designing websites, and the golden rule is that everything should be easy for visitors. They shouldn’t have to search hard for the information or task that they’re most likely to be looking for, and things should work intuitively.

But in government we have to nuance even this bible. Nick wrote last week about how government’s role may appropriately be a platform for slow, deliberate dialogue, and he’s right (see: Thinking Fast and Slow About Online Public Engagement). That will often be the approach we want. In a crowdsourcing world, a high volume of people that click Like is probably not our goal. In the private sector it's about lead generation. For government, it’s about better decisions, people feeling involved, and decisions being legitimate.

Are single-click upvotes the right way to gauge sentiments on, say, where we build power plants? It’s a sensitive, complex topic.

An example: the Brooklyn Museum asked their community to help curate an exhibit called Click!. They designed the engagement platform to slow people down. No Likes, no Favourites, no Upvotes, no thumbnails of art to scroll through. Participants had to view each piece of art at full size, one-by-one, consuming their screen, and enter a number out of 100, slowing them down just enough to make the process deliberate and thoughtful.

To be clear: the functionality was still smooth. The task was still easy to complete. They just defined the task as “thoughtfully review and rate art” instead of “rate art.”

The future is visual

Tweets with images get more engagement. Posts with videos get linked more. Visual content drives engagement. On Facebook, photos get more Likes and Comments than other content types. Youtube is apparently a whole big thing. (Here’s a bunch of stats.)

“40% of people will respond better to visual information than plain text.”

What does that even mean?

Yes, of course, if we as government officials have important information and visual content is how we get people to view it or understand it, great. How to file taxes or awareness campaigns about online bullying are good examples.

Here’s a framework for how we interact with information (h/t):

We can present information such that people interact with it in a purely conceptual, abstract, rational, and language-based way. Or, we can present it in a very perceptual, visual, and even visceral way.

The rise of visual content in political campaigns and product marketing is often based on the desire to elicit an emotional, rather than rational, reaction. The images and music in some political ads (particularly in the US) are designed precisely to avoid having our language processors kick in.

More people will click on content that fits in the bottom right of that graph.

But maybe, the future of government content will often still be to elicit deliberate and rational reactions. Which means that we might find ourselves in positions where we could build an infographic, but we rightly decide not to. The future might occasionally still be text-heavy, and we’ll be okay with that, knowing that it’ll serve the needs of the country.

Lastly, plain language

Just kidding. This rule stands. Plain language is the way. Stop writing like that. (That goes for me, too.)

Non-rules are made to be broken

I'm not suggesting that we don't try to engage people, or that we skip visual content, or that we should be protecting citizens from our web content. Not at all. But we live in world where the state-of-the-market and much of our professional guidance is an imperfect analog for government's goals - and citizens' goals interacting with their government - and we must be conscious of that.

This post owes a lot to last weekend’s CanUX conference, particularly the presentations from Marsha Haverty, Leisa Reichelt, and Shelly Bernstein. Feel free to check out my rough notes.