The future of citizen engagement is vinyl

by Kent Aitken

---

For the last little while I've been expressing wariness about online citizen engagement, and I'd like to explain that.

Of course a lot of citizen engagement will be online. And it can be incredibly effective. The distinction between online and offline is culturally and practically fading. I've defended the idea that online platforms are no worse than in-person ones; just different, suited for different interactions. The term "online" may have a cultural shelf life itself.

So why am I wary?

Let's shift gears a little and talk about digital audio. When CDs came out, they completely sidelined vinyls and cassettes in a decade. Vinyl basically ceased to exist. Yet today we've seen seven years of double-digit growth in vinyl sales and they're now a $1B market, representing 15-18% of physical music revenues.

It's because we over-adjusted to the digital audio option. It was seen as the future, and we wanted to future-proof our collections. We wanted to virtue signal the idea that we were modern and technologically savvy. But over time, those psychological bonuses to the economic decision of audio formats subsided, and we returned to a level playing field between vinyl and digital. We could decide in a less biased way between the two options. At which point we rediscovered the virtues of vinyl - the quality, the packaging, the art, the ritual - for some situations.

Which doesn't change that digital audio is the absolute standard, and for good reason.

Back to online citizen engagement. It's seen as nearly free. It's seen as easy. But most of all it's seen as inclusive. That is, because engagement is online it's seen as fair. It's seen as plausibly reaching the entire intended audience.

More simply: online engagement gets used as a get-out-of-jail-free card for thinking through your goals, engagement design, and audience. It's seen as the future, ergo it's good.

It is sometimes. It it not always.

There are many reasons, but let's look at three:

Digital tends to be shallow. As Robin Gregory put it:

"When hundreds or thousands of stakeholders are asked to (a) speak before a panel for ten to fifteen minutes, (b) submit short written statements to a government body, or (c) participate as representatives of identified interests, then the invitation contains an implicit request to be either superficial or one-dimensional."

This effect is exacerbated by our current culture towards online engagement. The idea that public policy issues are complex is repeated daily, but we ask people for bullet points. Yet! It's possible to do small, deliberative working groups that get into the complexities and nuances of an issue. They may report analyses or pros and cons to a larger interested audience, who may vote or be surveyed in a lightweight way. This can all be done online. But people to tend to assume online always means open, public, easy, and everyone.

Digital lets us think we can skip design and facilitation. When you're doing in-person engagement, the level of design is incredibly involved. Session designers or participant experience designers (that's a thing - do you have one for your online engagement?) think through to the individual personalities in the room. They adjust the timing of parts down to 5-minute increments. They pull from a library of techniques for group discussion. And they actively facilitate. We're only flirting with that level of sophistication online; this is where low-fidelity MP3s started getting replaced by high quality-digital audio but we're not quite there yet. It's a little bit about the technology, but far more about how we use it.

The digital divide is real. Canada's well-connected to the internet, but if you look at the top quartile for age, or the bottom quartile for income, those reassuring 90%+ numbers drop to more like 60%. Many people have to choose between home broadband and mobile and opt for the flexibility of mobile, but there are three activities with massive transaction completion drop-off rates on mobile: banking, looking for jobs, and interacting with government. To say nothing of skills, attitudes, and cultures.

All that to say: digital citizen engagement is going to be amazing for public policy-making and for the relationship between citizens and their governments. I really believe that. And digital will be the standard. But it'll only get amazing when we learn to love the record scratch of in-person engagement, realize the shortcomings of online and therefore get better at it, and choose deliberately between the right options for the right situations.

Public engagement and hard policy evidence

by Kent Aitken

---

Last week I pressed send on my dissertation, on which I'll blame my lack of posting. The topic was public engagement in Canada, and particularly, the role of economic analysis. My plan is to reduce the interesting parts of that research into a readable length, but I thought I might share six points that fell out of my conclusion.

1. Public engagement on policy, program, and service development is a thing. There's always a slate of ongoing public consultations in Canada, but the pace has picked up in the last year and the major difference is that there are far more that are intended for a broad public audience, rather than niche stakeholder groups. There are pros and cons to this.

2. As a general rule, government consultations are designed to understand what citizens value, but in a qualitative, rather than quantitative, way. That is, public input is viewed as a source of ideas and general feedback, not as empirically rigourous data. As currently practiced, public engagement is better suited for generating general insights, achieving social licence for policies, and avoiding major pitfalls than it is for systematically adding to the evidence base for policy options.

3. Each public engagement activity is important. Each represents an experience through which citizens' trust in government, and their willingness to participate in future engagement, can rise or fall. Public perception of the value of these engagements is crucial. The major variables here are the extent to which public input can theoretically influence policy, and the extent to which governments can prove that input was meaningfully considered. 

4. While it can be appropriate for governments to seek public input for general ideas and feedback, there's a massive downside. The greater the extent to which public input can be considered hard evidence, the easier it is for governments to incorporate that input in policy decisions, and the easier it is for governments to demonstrate how it influenced policy. There are many goals to engagement, including education, consensus-building, and legitimacy, but insofar as better policy is a central goal, engagement should be designed to produce data.

5. Public engagement is complex. There are hundreds of studied formats, each requiring a set of detailed design decisions, to align governments' needs with citizen satisfaction while producing the required data and insights. However, the way public engagement is governed, most of these design decisions are lost. If I may be blunt, it's essentially like a first-time homeowner overruling an architect on how their plumbing and electrical will work.

6. Governments need to build capacity for public engagement, particularly digital, but as per the above they may already have more capacity than they realize. So they must also develop governance that prioritizes expertise and good practices over ad hoc goals. The strongest version of this would be governance that includes public input and oversight on how engagement is designed and evaluated.

Hype and Hope for Digital Citizen Engagement

by Kent Aitken

---

If we were to place digital citizen engagement on the Hype Cycle, I suspect we'd be pinning it in the trough of disillusionment.

The Hype Cycle idea is this: for any emerging idea or technology, it goes through a period of inflated expectations, then a trough in which people think it won't amount to anything, and then it settles into the "plateau of productivity" somewhere between the two.

Five years ago, people were really excited about the idea of digital citizen engagement: nation-wide discourse on the topics of the day, free to all, on a level playing field. Instead we've gotten this:

Publications are disabling comments forums because the quality of the discourse is so low. The experts in the field are very much so in the design and research stage, and the most sophisticated online deliberation models (like MIT's Deliberatorium) are still being tweaked and studied.

And while governments have had to react to powerful political mobilization and public will on social media (read Vox's take on How the Internet is Disrupting Politics), government-led digital citizen engagement has hardly become a game-changer for governance.

Digital citizen engagement is going to be a whole big thing

Yet, I'm pretty confident that digital citizen engagement will be hugely important in the future. Not because it's better than existing analog or in-person ways of getting citizens' ideas and feedback, but despite the fact that it's demonstrably worse.

MOOCs - Massive, Open, Online Courses - are the perfect analogy. North of 90% of people that register don't finish (though because they're new(ish), people will sign up for novelty; there'll be less of that in the future (see: Hype Cycles)). Deloitte's resident predictions expert, Duncan Stewart, has listed all of the many problems with MOOCs and still concludes that they'll still be a huge part of education and even credentials in the future. It's simply because university keeps getting more expensive, especially relative to entry-level salaries. The nexus of market forces demand the distribution model that only the internet allows.

Likewise, digital citizen engagement is, on balance, worse than the suite of options governments have to engage in-person. It's less engaging, less conducive to developing trust and relationships, and poorly suited to dissecting complex issues. But, it's the only way to even approach fairness and scale, and I think that this imperative will overpower any limitations or weaknesses.

Canada has a population of ~35M people. You can provide an opportunity for the first 12.7M to engage with government by visiting only 5 cities. But after that it gets tricky, and the next 95 biggest urban centres only get you 10.7M people. And after that, there's still 11.7M Canadians to go.

Imperfect but better

A couple closing thoughts:

One, the level playing field of the internet isn't actually level. There are still massive distributional biases in internet use*, leisure time, civic literacy, trust in government, and cultures of deference or irreverence. These will need to systematically managed. (Even municipal 311 systems have distributional biases; even big data isn't always full data.)

Two, digital citizen engagement tools are getting better, What's available to the Government of Canada today (via standing offers) is a huge improvement over only a few years ago. And the more these tools get used, the better they'll get (and the bigger the market will be for bilingual, accessible platforms). And the better people will get at using them.

*"Internet use among the richer half of the country is actually over 90 per cent with the top quartile of household income at 94.5 per cent and the second quartile at 90.2 per cent. Internet use among the bottom quartile of Canadians stands at only 62.5 per cent (the third quartile is 77.8 per cent)." - Michael Geist in the Toronto Star

The New Nature of Process

by Kent Aitken

---

In a recent report on the next frontier of digital technology, Accenture created a model of the long history of challenges that have faced management.

http://www.accenture.com/us-en/Pages/insight-looking-digital-being-digital-impact-technology-future-work.aspx 

In short: the industrial era was characterized by a transition from individual craftsman and artisans to large-scale processes, and this transition was enabled by repeatability. A worker didn’t need to know how the factory ran to screw part A into part B, and if he left, a replacement could be trained incredibly quickly. This was the age of Taylorism, of precision and measurability permitted by process and structure.

 

Throughout the last century we’ve transitioned into an economy far more based on knowledge work (see Deloitte’s assessment, below), which meant the industrial management style ran into a crisis of rigidity, the solution to which was adaptive processes. Judgment, discretion, if-then statements, case management.

http://dupress.com/articles/the-future-of-the-federal-workforce/ 

However, for senior executives ultimately managing a variety of adaptive processes, the problem then became one of complexity. There’s too much going on, it’s too hard to understand, and the performance reports that are so useful for widgets-per-second are far less revealing.

 

Accenture suggests that the solution to complexity is in digital. Specifically, “smart digital processes”, which would feed decision makers key information exactly when they need it. My response is: maybe? In some cases? It seems the more plausible answer is a return to process - which is happening all around us, albeit which a crucial difference from the Taylorism of old.

 

 

Process in the Knowledge Economy

 

There's a common thread among the emerging approaches to governance. In his equation for today’s public policy, Nick highlighted several, including design thinking, behavioural economics, and public sentiment. We could add the field of facilitation, the practice of public participation, and innovation labs to them mix. All of which are hugely reliant on defined processes. 

 

The key difference is that the interim goal of the process of old was to remove the need for learning, whereas the process of today is designed to maximize the speed of learning. At the end of this post there are some links to example process kits: if-then guides to, essentially, helping humans understand other humans and the systems they live in.

The end goal is the same: scalability and repeatability. In this case, it’s repeatably, reliably solving unpredictable, emerging, or complex problems. We’re on the same arc as the first graph, but for a completely different organizational paradigm.

 

So the challenge for management becomes a new, grander problem of complexity. Where executives have been struggling to manage adaptive processes via industrial-inspired organizational designs, they’re going to be overwhelmed by managing a variety of learning processes without significant changes in management style. In some cases the if-then flow will be impossibly complicated, and in others it’ll need to be thrown out the window. A single node in a hierarchy will never be able to understand each process, only the principles behind them.

What's in it for Us?

 

We need to do it. It’s where the performance gains in a complex environment will come from. I’ll exapt an HBR article about how our personal learning curves regularly plateau. Here’s the graph, with learning on the Y axis and time on the X axis:

http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/09/throw-your-life-a-curve/ 

Success comes from knowing when to jump to the next learning curve, which is incredibly hard at the outset but maximizes the speed of progress.

Embracing this learning curve will be cost-effective in two ways. First, there’s evidence that consensus-building through learning processes costs less in the long term than making and defending decisions (which will apply to both internal management and policy/program governance). Second, in the latter part of that learning curve we’ll reach a level of sophistication that allows economies of scale:

• We’ll be able to reliably pull from a menu of processes and adjust to new situations, rather than starting near scratch every time
• We’ll be able to recognize when we can leave these learning processes to citizens, businesses, and NGOS, and govern accordingly
• We’ll be able to share and teach approaches broadly

Returning to Accenture’s claim, organizations have run into a problem of complexity. Particularly for governments, however, I don’t buy their claim that the answer is in smart digital. Instead, I think we have to recognize that in many ways we’re back at the beginning, worried about about scale and repeatable processes. Just very different processes.

 

Example process kits:

http://www.involve.org.uk/blog/2005/12/12/people-and-participation/

http://labcraft.co/

http://stepupbc.ca/explore-your-career-increase-collaboration/idea-navigators

http://www.mindtools.com