On defining and communicating the brand

by Nick Charney

---

When Destination 2020 was first released I remarked that "the recognition that the public service brand (as a profession) was in need of a major overhaul" was one of the most interesting things to come out of the report (See: Unsolicited Thoughts on Destination 2020). Given our recent discussions on public sector ideology (See: The Public Service as Ideology, My Public Service Ideology and Why Worry About Ideology) I thought it might be useful to go back to the 'Fundamentals of Public Service' section of Destination 2020, have another read, and see what shakes out.

Here's what it says:

... Building the Federal Public Service brand is a work in progress, and employee engagement will continue with the goal to further refine the strategy to address this priority area. Two new actions will help the Public Service reach its destination:

Engagement process to define and communicate the Federal Public Service brand 

An engagement process will be launched with public servants to shape what it means to be a public servant. Defining the Federal Public Service brand will include crowdsourcing the definition of who we are and developing a strategy to communicate to Canadians and public servants who we are and what we do.

A suite of measures will support the engagement effort and reach across internal and external channels to foster a strong image of the Federal Public Service, including defining ways to:

• showcase the role the Public Service plays in the daily lives of Canadians through dynamic vignettes and portraits to show how public servants affect the lives of Canadians directly or indirectly; 

• strengthen whole-of-government approaches to promote employment opportunities within (e.g., virtual tours, interviews, and videos); 

• profile the good work public servants do in communities across Canada (for example, the Government of Canada Workplace Charitable Campaign, volunteering with homeless shelters, and adopting a local food bank); and 

• highlight key achievements of public servants by showcasing awards of excellence and making them more visible, and appointing high-profile current and former public servants as Public Service ambassadors, who can project a strong positive image of the Public Service.

Public Service of Canada Landing Page to profile what public servants do and to promote employment opportunities

To advance these initiatives, a Public Service of Canada landing page will be launched to profile the great things that public servants do to serve Canadians. The landing page will function as a "home" for the Public Service, available to both public servants and Canadians. Horizontal communities will also be featured and can profile the landing page with their members.

What shakes out for me ...

While I agree that the brand is a work in progress, I disagree with the approach. How can we know that a communications strategy and a website are the fix to the problem when we've only just begun to define it (See: When did the public service become an ignoble profession or Can bureaucrats be interesting when the world demands they be boring)?

Haven't we put the cart before the horse? 

Shouldn't the engagement process be designed to unearth new solutions as opposed to validating old assumptions? We need only look back four years to see that Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) tried this before. Remember the short lived Public Service e-Magazine 'It's My Day'?

If not, that's fine the site is still live despite the mag only being operational for a calendar year (2008-09). Prior to Googling it, I assumed that someone at TBS would have archived the pages by now (e.g. when TBS implemented the Standard on Web Accessibility).

But surely this time around things will be different

NB: I wrote an entire section here that I decided to pull because I could neither contain my sarcasm nor drive home my point effectively without it; just re-read the subtitle, it captures the essence. 

Sarcasm aside

I'm genuinely interested in how this engagement rolls out; not so much from the process standpoint but in terms of its content and more importantly the resolve that will be required to wade into it in a meaningful manner. Despite the challenge, I think we have a tremendous opportunity in front of us. But I can't help but wonder, do we have what it takes to roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty on this one?

Are we going to ask the tough questions? 

Are we going to take a good hard look in the collective mirror of our common interests?

Are we willing to honour the fact that despite our differences we are all bound in the same social contract be we citizens, public servants, elected officials, union bosses, journalists or academics?

Are we willing to accept our own fair share of the blame for the mistakes of the past and take greater responsibility for our future?

Or, will we choose to keep our hands clean and resign ourselves to yet another website?

---

Non-sequitur: I published an article on Public Sector Transformation (co-written with IOG President Maryantonnet Flumian) in this quarter's Commonwealth Innovations Review, if interested you can download the journal here.

Why Worry About Ideology?

by Kent Aitken

---

Last week Nick declared his public service ideology, his cards on the table.

I've been thinking about ideology since Tariq wrote that we all have one, and I had planned to write out mine upon reading Nick's piece. But it's a delicate question of wording, and something that, if done, I want to do right. I want to make sure that it's not influenced by the issues of the day, including the deserved attention that the public service is getting recently (see: the list at the start of My Public Service Ideology).

(It's also worth considering the comments on that post, including Andrew's comment noting the blurry line between values and ideology. I'll stick with the term for now.)

It's particularly tricky where my ideology seems imperfectly aligned with commonly held principles about the Canadian public service. When this happens, there are several possibilities:

• My ideology should evolve
• My understanding of the principles is incomplete
• The principles need to evolve
• The common interpretation of the principles is misguided

Occam's Razor - the most obvious answer - would be that I need to either evolve my thinking or learn more. Also plausible is that the common application of the principles is misguided - recently I suggested that the phrase fearless advice, loyal implementation was a slight but profound tweak on the intended idea, propagated through repetition. The least likely answer is that the principles that have been written into law and carried our democracy this far need to evolve.

(That said - unlikely, but not impossible. Much has changed since those principles were established, and we've realized that things are often more complex than they seem.)

Almost a year ago our public administration book club read The Ethics of Dissent, which walks through case studies of public servants exiting official channels - to achieve a goal or to whistleblow. Abandoning, temporarily, loyal implementation. It's fascinating food for thought. But the most amazing thing to me was our discussion about the book - the nature of our own Values and Ethics Code was an hour-long debate, even among people who take time to understand it. But V&E is neither simple nor always easy to apply to our day-to-day experiences. So, my takeaway was that these issues merit more discussion.

For instance, the idea of public service anonymity hasn't been thoroughly revisited since 1996, when the internet looked like this:

Yes, that's GeoCities. Yes, I had one.

Alternatively, recently an executive put the question to a group of us: "What's the Public Service mission?" We've gone from the days of Supply and Services Canada to Public-Private Partnerships and Alternative Forms of Delivery. Has the mission changed?

Which leads to an assumption I'm making that begins to reveal my ideology. I frequently question whether my approach to public service is appropriate. That is, questioning everything and trying to understand the system in which I work. The alternative being functional stupidity, which is an unnecessarily harsh term for a reasonable approach: marginalizing doubt and communication, worrying instead about carrying out whichever tasks you've been given.

However, I don't think that's the correct approach. So I agree with Nick, where he believes in a public service that trusts its people, that is deeply connected to its sense of purpose, and where pride in one's work is the rule, rather than the exception. In short, a public service in which public servants ask higher order questions about what they're doing and why. That is, they feel that they can ask those questions, and they do.

So, to start I had to ask myself the question of why I worry about public service ideology at all, whether it should be left to others, and whether it's an appropriate discussion to try to advance. And here, once again I agree with Nick:

"I believe that public service is at the same time personally rewarding, professionally meaningful, and vitally important to the health of the nation."

Particularly the last clause (see: here, there, everywhere). And I think it's in asking these kinds of questions that we understand and maximize our contributions and their meaning.

My Public Service Ideology

by Nick Charney

---

There's been a whole lot of public discussion in the media lately on the role of the public service:

Photo courtesy of the NCC

• Towards a Charter of Public Service by Ralph Heintzman (Canada 2020)
• The Real Problem of the Public Service by Ruth Hubbard (Ottawa Citizen)
• To Everything There is a Season by Maryantonett Flumian and Nick Charney (Canadian Government Executive Magazine)
• How public servants support democracy: a response to latest Canada 2020 study by Maryantonett Flumian and Karl Salgo (The Hill Times, subscription required, but I can email you the submission)
• Reforms to bring neutrality to public service could lead to 'government by the unelected': think tank by Kathyrn May (Ottawa Citizen)

And of course there was Tariq's timely reflection on the public service as an ideology and subsequent discussion in the commentary (See: Public Service as Ideology).

All of this – the experts weighing in and my discussions with friends and colleagues – has got me thinking more and more about my own public service ideology; and while anyone could probably deduce it from views from the last 6 years of blog posts, I figured why not just simply declare it outright.

My public service ideology

I believe that public service is at the same time personally rewarding, professionally meaningful, and vitally important to the health of the nation.

I believe in a public service that trusts its people, where public servants are confident to exercise autonomy within the boundaries of their work and resist the urge to codify that which could otherwise be normative.

I believe in a public service that pursues continuous improvement in its service to citizens, a public service that consistently puts people before processes and seeks mastery over its professional domains by investing more heavily in the former than the latter.

I believe in a public service that is deeply connected to its sense of purpose, that holds up its end of the social contract and in so doing allows public servants to connect to mission the way they connect to everything else in their lives: directly, with few or no intermediaries.

I believe in a public service where pride in one's work is the rule, rather than the exception. One that allows civil servants to demonstrate their pride through their ongoing work as civil servants but also in their pursuits as citizens.

I believe in a public service that sees and accepts the challenge of innovation for what it is: the hard work of future-proofing society. One that understands that there is no magic bullet, and that leans into the hard work of governance.

I believe in an inclusive public service that recognizes that some divisions are artificial. One that recognizes that we are bound together through our common service to the country and its people regardless of our geographic location, place within our classification systems, or jurisdiction within which we operate.

But I also believe in a public service that recognizes that some divisions are necessary. One that recognizes that ultimately, the elected government represents the will of the people, and continues to respect that.

Finally, I believe in a public service that sees the time-honoured principles of fearless advice and loyal implementation as not only the bridge between those artificial and necessary divisions, but also as ongoing, concurrent and constant - rather than static, sequential or time limited.


There you have it. I've declared my public service ideology.

What's yours?

The Public Service as Ideology

by Tariq Piracha

---

Having conversations over the past couple of months with other public servants, it struck me that I don’t think that I’ve ever sat back and thought about the public service as an ideology. But the more conversations I have about Blueprint 2020 or any past public service renewal initiative, the more I’m starting to believe that this is the case.

We tend to think about ideology as large ideas like democracy, communism, socialism, capitalism, religion. Any ideology, whatever it is, guides any population that identifies with it on how to act and how to make decisions. In some cases it will be large and mostly academic like the ideologies listed above. In other cases, it may be much more personal or agenda-driven. Their scope may also be somewhere in between.

I’m seeing hints of ideology in the conversations around the public service, both academic and at the operational level: Who public servants ought to be; what public servants ought to be doing; the direction in which the public service should be going. The most recent and trending examples would be open government, open data and digital engagement — these are all marinating in a particular ideology that guides not only the direction that the public service ought to go, but also conditions the way in which we conduct our business.

I'm not attributing any positive or negative values to open government, or any ideology for that matter. My point is this: the public service has an ideology.

There’s a grey area that exists between the public service and government. The public service is tasked with preserving the public good, giving advice, implementing policy and serving Canadians. But the public service, despite its supposed impartiality, does not exist in a vacuum.

When the public service was created, it had a narrow purpose: support the mandate of the government. Public Works was one such department that was created in 1841 to build roads, bridges, canals. It provided infrastructure support in a country that in its infancy required significant support and momentum-building.

But the public service has grown way beyond those imaginings, or mandate around the time of Confederation. It has certainly grown beyond the imaginings of any one politician. Yes, government determines mandate, but there are pressures that exist in Canada that no one person (or politician) can manage on their own. (Even in Sir John A Macdonald's time, and despite his best efforts, he couldn't manage everything.) In that sense, the public service is not just responsive to government, it has become responsive to, or feels a responsibility toward the public good; to Canadians.

But if that’s the case, the values under which the public service operates are multi-faceted. Add in the organizational principles or trends that influence to the public service like groupthink, New Public Management, bureaucratic politics, and we’re now looking at a very complex public service that is trying to walk a tightrope of competing and sometimes confusing values.

One way in which Blueprint 2020 differs from previous renewal initiatives is that it asks about a vision for the public service in 2020. It is unfortunate that the conversations around Blueprint 2020 are often not about a vision for 2020. From what I have seen, the conversations are revolving around functionality, technology, effectiveness, efficiency.

Nick has already made the same kind of argument (see: The Question Blueprint 2020 Should Have Asked But Didn’t) that the conversations are less about a vision for 2020 and more reflective of a desire to catch up and keep up. I’ve seen few, if any, conversations about vision, values and ideology that the catching up and keeping up are couched in.

While I don’t think everyone should stop what they’re doing, book a boardroom and explore their feelings, I do believe a conversation about the nature and values of the public service is important. (See: Collaboration is about shared values.)

It’s the proverbial cart before the horse—talking about what to change before talking about the values and vision that could or should guide those decisions. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that public service ideology is an elephant in the room—I don’t think people are avoiding it. I think most simply haven't thought about it.

And we may not all be on the same page.