The Next Big Thing

by Kent Aitken

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Almost a year ago, Tariq, Nick, and I caught up for drinks and to bounce around ideas for CPSRenewal. We felt that the vibe of the blog had been changing. Nick had originally envisioned it as “Lifehacker for government,” which led to posts that made sense of trends and provided advice on how to make the most of new platforms and tools*. And we agreed that as time went on there were fewer of those future-focused posts.

For a while I worried about that change, as if I was missing something. But now my theory is this: I don't think sensemaking the future is as unique and valuable as it once was, for a few reasons:

1. People can choose to ignore ignorable things

2. The future is becoming less predictable

3. Being hyper-networked isn’t special

Ignorable things

Organizations will change for at least two reasons: when there is a burning platform (an urgent need or pressure for change), or when the benefits of change are obvious (and the opportunity cost of not changing is great and obvious). However, public organizations have a high threshold for what constitutes a burning platform. Ten years into Twitter's existence, governments worldwide are using still social media as a broadcast-only channel. There's really no possibility for catastrophe resulting from a cautious approach here.

Calculating the benefits of change is tricky here too. Any change, no matter how obvious a win it would be in a vacuum, requires one of an organization's scarcest resources: management attention. It doesn’t work if a requirement to realize an activity's benefits (or avoid costs) is the attention and approval of an executive who can provide neither. There is a vast and powerful attention economy within public institutions.

The future is becoming less predictable

I highly recommend that you read Wait But Why's piece on artificial intelligence. In particular, the opening section on why we can’t picture the magnitude of changes coming in the future. It opens with a graph, and the question "What does it feel like to stand here?"

"It seems like a pretty intense place to be standing—but then you have to remember something about what it’s like to stand on a time graph: you can’t see what’s to your right. So here’s how it actually feels to stand there:"

We have a growing body of evidence suggesting that change is occurring on an exponential scale, in several ways. And we can understand that idea rationally; we've pretty well internalized it.

"We have all heard this before, but constant change is the norm and the speed of change is staggering...

The complexity of the issues we face is also growing across all domains—fiscal, health, environment, security, diplomacy, development, defence, transportation, to name a few. "

- Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council [source]

But, like the figure in that second graph, we tend to revert back to thinking that we can manage that level of change. The problem is that our brains are swapping one question for another without us knowing it. Instead of answering "Will the near future look very different from the present if we’re experiencing an exponential rate of change?" we're answering "Can I personally imagine the effects of exponential change on the near future?" and the answer is actually that no, we can’t. We tend to just mentally extend the trendline from the last few years.

How we deal with a largely unpredictable future merits much longer shrift. For another time.

Hyper-networked isn't special

In the earlier days of the digital (and particularly social) world, finding insights in other fields or sectors of the economy and being able to imagine them applying to government was a really useful skill.

The thing is, it no longer takes research or even much insight to recognize useful tools or credible change drivers. We can replace "Aha!" moments with mental shortcuts, and the way we find information provides cues about people's intelligence and authority. For instance, if X colleague and Y scientist reference Z person's idea, and we think X and Y are smart, we'll probably think Z is smart and the idea holds water. An extreme example would be when Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates warn about artificial intelligence. They're smart, and when other smart people agree with them, the idea is credible. It doesn't take any understanding of AI on our part to catch a glaring hint about its importance - all we've done is compare the claim against a mental rolodex of trusted sources. Search algorithms, human curation, and the existence of instructions for pretty much anything have hugely leveled this playing field.

It was easy to see Uber coming, but much harder to prepare for it. Which is why taxi drivers were still protesting in Ottawa yesterday.

The next big thing

So I’m left thinking that the Next Big Thing is that we get better at how we make sense of purported Next Big Things, and we get better at how we handle constant Big Things that we won’t really see coming. Which would mean we need to dig into and dissect the concepts of foresight, change management, adaptability, agility, resilience (agility and resilience being two very different things), and take them far, far more seriously.

*A quick note on future-focused posts: long before I joined the site, posts like this hugely impressed me: Signal to Noise. I still find those kinds of posts to be strong, and they seem to garner more interest:

• How Nudges Work for Government
• Does Government Need a Prediction Market for Policy Options?
• Side note: I think Nick was right to single out prediction markets and I think they merit further exploration. Their success is pretty astonishing compared to individual expert prediction.
• Blending Public Sentiment, Data Analytics, Design Thinking and Behavioural Economics
• Why the Sharing Economy is Inevitable

The Future of Policy Work

by Nick Charney

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***Updated Nov 28 to reflect changes to remarks between the original draft and the speech I delivered.***

On Tuesday next week I will have the privilege of addressing a large number of policy professionals in the Ontario Public Service as a part of Polivery V: The Future of Policy Work. What follows is a first draft of my remarks, pardon the style, it helps me deliver. As always, your comments are more than welcome... (it's late, this is a draft, and I'm tired, etc).



Good morning everyone.

I'm not sure you know how lucky you all are to have such an esteemed panel before you today.

I'm not really sure how I snuck on to the bill.

My name is Nicholas Charney.

I'm the Director for Engagement and Innovation at the Institute on Governance.

We are small not for profit organization whose mission is to advance better governance in the public interest.

We do this through our ongoing advisory work, learning activities and by conducting primary research with academic partners.

I’m a policy professional and currently on interchange from the Government of Canada where I've spent the last 8 years working at the confluence of people, public policy and technology.

There are many things that I could say the future of policy work.

I could start by saying that in the future having the right skills will be essential.

Or, that a talent-focused culture will be critical.

Or, that organizational agility is the key to effective outcomes.

But I could say all of that and have said nothing.

I'd rather start out by saying that future of policy work is still being written.

That there is no shortage of wicked problems, demand for ideas, or need to bring them bear.

That technology and Zeitgeist are changing the nature of public policy.

That these changes are creating a number of challenges and opportunities.

And that how you deal with them today will ultimately determine what your future holds.

First the challenges.

Challenge #1 - The hollowing out of capacity.

Strategic policy shops have quickly become issues management shops.

Driven by increased transparency and a 24/7 news cycle.

We often sacrifice the long-term health of our democracy to deal with that which is immediately before us.

This is the fast food approach to public policy.

It might taste good at 2 o'clock in the morning, but ultimately it's terrible for our health.

As my mother used to say to me when I came home late at night, we need to make better choices.

Policy makers need to re-claim their relationships with the media, with elected officials, and with each other.

They need to stand by less and stand for more.

The faceless bureaucrat is no longer a tenable position in this environment.

Challenge #2 - Innovation by check box.

Everyone is suffering from innovation fatigue.

When everything is innovative, nothing is.

Labeling something as such is as meaningless as labeling it as secret in today's environment.

Yes - innovation hubs, labs, dragon's dens and hackathons are all in vogue right now.

But the true test isn't what goes into them, but rather what comes out of them.

Too often our best and brightest are put to work on matters of process rather than substance.

Let's put more smart people next to hard problems and stop treating problems as puzzles to be solved.

That metaphor assumes that all the necessary pieces are already on the table.

That they just need to be rearranged or reprogrammed.

But that’s not true.

‘Policy Innovation’ defined as moving the pieces around or adding more processing power won't disrupt the status quo.

That is the status quo

Challenge #3 - Hyper-bureaucratics

Process has always been the bureaucratic panacea.

But by now we must be fast approaching what I like to call peak bureaucracy.

The point where we simply cannot add any additional layers without incurring untenable costs.

Be wary of those who refuse to do the hard work of flattening hierarchies, simplifying processes and minimizing barriers.

Be wary of those who would rather establish processes to diffuse blame than simplify them to consolidate responsibility.

We need more decisions and less diffusion.

Challenge #4 - The loss of monopoly & increased competition

We have new roles.

We've moved from that of a monopoly provider to something more akin to a sensor, sense-maker, connector, a validator.

It can be unnerving but don't panic.

Embrace the fear and explore the new opportunities.

Opportunity #1 - Bask in the complexity

We have never had a better understanding of how things are interconnected.

But focusing solely on technology or innovation actually prevents us from realizing the art of the possible.

We know that connecting people and ideas has never been easier.

Yes the policy shop of the future deploys technologies to connect people around ideas but also employs people to do the same.

It asks people to lean in and slog through the messy stuff: the history, the economics, the philosophy, the art, the ambiguities, the contradictions, the trade-offs.

The stuff technology can't fix.

This takes time and effort.

The policy shop of the future retains the time-honored tradition of subject matter expertise and encourages depth, not just breadth, of experience.

Opportunity #2- Engage in social media

Listen to what people are saying.

Find the experts.

Weigh their analysis.

Read what they read.

What's the Zeitgeist telling you?

Be curious.

Create content don't just consume it.

Lean in and slog through the hard stuff yourself.

Write things down and work through problems.

And don’t forget to take the time to unplug once in a while.

Put down your phone

Put down the remote and read a book.

Like a paper book.

Break its spine, dog ear the pages and write in the margins.

Opportunity #3 - Experiment with data

Find, verify and link or liberate useful data sets inside your organization or within your field of work.

Explore what happens at the margins where different data sets interact.

Create visualizations that cast an old problem in a new light.

If you find something interesting broaden the tent and engage others.

I did this recently by visualizing all 278 instruments in the Federal Government’s Treasury Board Policy Suite.

I did it out of interest, shared it to the Internet and wound up in front of the ADM responsible for the suite within a week.

Don't worry, it was a good meeting.

If you don't have the skills to do this or the time to learn, find people who do, and work with them.

Opportunity #4 - Use design thinking

Empathize with problem.

Be creative when thinking about solutions.

Be rational when mapping the solution to the problem.

Match people's needs with what is feasible.

This is something we are teaching right now in collaboration with the GovLab @ NYU.

Its surprising how effective a two day deep dive on a problem can be if you approach it with the right methodologies.

In case you are interested, both NYU and the d.school at Stanford have a number freely available methodologies online.

Opportunity #5 - Read up on behavioural economics

Commonly referred to as nudge.

There are a lot of books on the matter and some interesting work has been done recently in the UK.

Long story short, slight tweaks in your approach vector can drive vastly superior outcomes.

Behavioural Economics brings sentiment, analytics, and design to ground by emphasizing what people actually do when faced with a given situation rather than what we think they ought to do.

The US government just invested $100 million dollars in a simple nudge.

They doubled the value of the SNAP benefits – or food stamps – for people who use them to buy local fruits and vegetables at farmers markets.

They got the idea itself came from a farmers market that had been doing it on its own without the government subsidy.

In conclusion I want to say

How you go about your work will continue to change but ultimately being able to frame up advice that helps leaders make good decisions will always be a critical skill for policy makers.

Indeed, it always has been.

Now if you recall in my opening remarks, I told you that the future of policy work is still being written.

In closing I want to appeal to your sense of agency and remind you that when it comes to policy advice you literally have the pen.

Invest that pen.

Familiarize yourself with the trends and new techniques, but don't chase breadth at the expense of depth.

Do you best to balance both, stay curious, and remember, the pen is mightier than the sword.

Thank you

Towards Copernicus

by Nick Charney

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Right before the holidays Kent and I sat down to discuss how our partnership was going thus far. As we sat in the local pub on a Friday evening we were flanked by a group of staffers doing as staffers do and snow falling as snow does just outside the window. Kent and I reflected on successes and challenges and spoke a bit about the year ahead, jotting down notes feverishly about themes we wanted to explore, products we wanted to deliver, and where we thought we'd be in another year's time. We remarked at the fact that we had not yet had a serious disagreement on either direction or viewpoint despite the fact that both of us expected at least a few points of contention to surface since forming our partnership.


We left the table with a number of ideas questions

How can public servants slow down and focus more on the long game? How can we separate rhetoric from evidence in a professional and non-partisan way? How can we continue to look laterally for solutions that can and should be applied within the public sector? How can we improve public perception of the civil service? And what can we do to keep our skills up when technological advances continue to create uncharted territories for governments around the world?


Not every idea question will be addressed

At least not by the two us in some sort of vacuum. These are questions facing all of us and the best that Kent and I can aspire to is to be deliberate about our goals, err on over-sharing and look for the win-win. In practical terms, and again I'm paraphrasing Kent here (See: Positive-Sum Leadership), that means:

• acknowledging that we can't run with everything, others may be better positioned to do it
• finding value in sharing our ideas because its low-risk and high reward (See: On Writing)
• striving to make something greater than the simple sum of our parts

Which I suppose brings me to the issue at hand

A decidedly anti-TED TED Talk by Benjamin Bratton  (embedded below) is making the rounds right now. The talk, while perhaps controversial in its treatment of TED, pulls on a number of important threads that apply well beyond the world of their popular talks. It pulls on threads that Kent and I spoke at length about that aforementioned evening, threads that I've shared with you above.

At its core the argument Bratton puts forward is - in my view, as much a criticism of contemporary popular culture as it is of TED's uncanny ability to distil the essence of that culture into 20 minute video awe inspiring video. That said, I'm not interested in chasing the pros/cons of TED down an obscure rabbit hole. I'd much rather - and admittedly - completely divorce Bratton's comments from TED-proper and apply them to the theme of public sector renewal because I think they hold true.

Would you argue otherwise if I said we often

• simplify complex problems so that they may be more easily consumed
• avoid tough societal issues when we fear they would offend the public
• put our best and brightest to work on issues of form rather than substance
• engage in placebo politics, placebo innovation and (by extension) placebo bureaucratics (See: The Real Problem of Facelessness)
• are timid in our ambitions and lack the wherewithal to pursue new architectures
• misconstrue process improvement disruptive/transformative innovation
• overstate the upside of technologies and fail to address the innovations that we don't want to see

Perhaps, but I doubt it

That said, where Bratton is particularly brilliant in his assessment in his conclusion. And again, while reading it forget TED, think public sector renewal:

"Problems are not "puzzles" to be solved. That metaphor assumes that all the necessary pieces are already on the table, they just need to be rearranged and reprogrammed. It's not true.

"Innovation" defined as moving the pieces around and adding more processing power is not some Big Idea that will disrupt a broken status quo: that precisely is the broken status quo.

...

If we really want transformation, we have to slog through the hard stuff (history, economics, philosophy, art, ambiguities, contradictions). Bracketing it off to the side to focus just on technology, or just on innovation, actually prevents transformation.

Instead of dumbing-down the future, we need to raise the level of general understanding to the level of complexity of the systems in which we are embedded and which are embedded in us. This is not about "personal stories of inspiration", it's about the difficult and uncertain work of demystification and reconceptualisation: the hard stuff that really changes how we think. More Copernicus, less Tony Robbins.

More Copernicus, less Tony Robbins

Bratton's right, the discussion about renewal needs to go deeper. We need to focus more on the hard stuff - the history, economics, philosophy, art, ambiguities and contradictions - if we are to continue to make progress towards the ever shifting goal posts of public sector renewal (See: Why I'm a Renewal Wonk).  That deeper-look ethos is precisely what inspired us to start up the impossible conversations book reviews, what inspired the most popular post of 2013 (See: Big Data, Social Media and the Long Tail of Public Policy) and what will ultimately underpin everything we choose to create, share or build upon from here on in.

Together then, towards Copernicus.




Bratton is an Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego and can be found on Twitter.

Moving Public Service Mountains, Part I

by Kent Aitken

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This post will be part one of at least two. Next week I'll explain why I believe this is so incredibly important.

At The Museum of Nature in Ottawa, visitors can simulate an earthquake in the Vale Earth Gallery. You turn a crank to pull a spring-loaded hunk of simulated mountain over a surface, and at some point the force overcomes the friction and it slams back into place. The intended lesson is that it's impossible to predict exactly when the tipping point will be reached; each experiment plays out differently.

On To The Dogs or Whoever I referred to a possible “tectonic” shift approaching for public service. I can see the possibility of a very different model for how the bureaucracy functions, develops policy, interacts with Canadians, and creates a competitive advantage for Canada. And in the last few weeks, I've discovered that others have the same hunch. People arrived at this prediction from two very different roads, some on account of mounting evidence, and some from feeling the increasing weight of necessity.

But like the museum counterpart, it's hard to tell if that tectonic shift is actually about to happen. If this mountain worth of inertia is about to move. Or if it needs a shove.

Holmes! A CLUE

Some of the evidence I would point to:

• I've noticed some outspokenness from former Clerks of the Privy Council lately. Mel Cappe has called for Canada to respect its faceless bureaucrats. Alex Himelfarb, to celebrate public service [see: Can Bureaucrats Be Interesting When The World Demands That They Be Boring?]. Another, Jocelyn Bourgon, launched the New Synthesis Project to work with partner countries to explore the future for bureaucracies. Her 2011 release, A New Synthesis of Public Administration, paints a fascinating portrait of the world in store for us, and it looks quite unlike today [see: Is There a Gap Between What We Know and What We Do?].

• Throughout 2013, a Deputy Minister Committee on Social Media and Policy Development will be soliciting input on how public servants carry out a key function in today's world.

• It was recently announced that Deputy Minister Robert Fonberg would join the Privy Council Office with a specific mandate to examine the broader policy development model.

• The Seventh Report of the Prime Minister's Advisory Committee on the Public Service has “modernizing the employment model” as its theme, going so far as to say that the current model is “outmoded in every respect.” The focus, they say, is “managing for high performance at all levels.” I'll admit that my optimism about progress here is cautious, but it is optimism all the same.

• Treasury Board President Tony Clement has echoed the above report's priorities; performance management is on his radar as well. He's also encouraging public servants to push against the status quo, and to innovate.

• Lastly. Last week, the Clerk's Twentieth Report to the Prime Minister on the Public Service of Canada was released. It left us with a teaser of announcements to come, presumably during National Public Service Week in June:

“I believe that we need a clear and shared vision of what Canada’s Public Service should become in the decades ahead,” the Clerk wrote, adding that Deputy Ministers have been tasked with engaging “all public servants in this important dialogue about our shared future.”

Some may greet this litany of anecdotes with skepticism. One could point to Public Service Renewal, the push for a strengthened public service that launched in 2006 or 2007, and ask how far we've come. Is today any different?

Necessity is the Mother of Innovation

On the necessity side, I feel that we have a better grasp now of the mounting need for committed renewal:

• Deloitte's William Eggers highlights, in his Public Sector, Disrupted report, that government is the one sector of economy where innovation has not pushed down costs.

• Samara's research suggests that the number of Canadians satisfied in the way Canadian democracy works dropped from 75% to 55%, in only 10 years.

• Research from Nanos also puts Canadian's level of trust in public servants at record lows. Only 14% surveyed responded that they had a distinctly positive view of the role of Public Servants in developing public policy.

• The rate of mental health related absences in the public service is 300% what it is in private sector*.

All is not necessarily well. I would go so far as to suggest that the status quo is a risky position. So what's next?

Mountains to Move

So here stand we. Staring at a mountain that may, or may not, be ready to move.

We know that it needs to, and we have some forces pushing. It could be another Public Service Renewal, in which we never quite leaned in enough to overcome our inertia. But we have that lesson learned to build on, and the rules have changed. We have black swans proving the possible: there is a Deputy Minister conversing frankly and openly with public servants of all levels and backgrounds about policy development on GCConnex. Another deputy head has resoundingly proven the worth of employee engagement through honest, personal social media interaction. Pictures of cats and all. And the silo-defying, self-organizing GC community is stronger than ever, and has a science fair of success stories to showcase.

Often, we don't know what we don't know [see: The Importance of Being Earnest (and Open)]. And that (unnecessarily) incomplete picture of the world leads to pitfalls and obstacles; in this case, additional friction holding this mountain back. But today, that cold fact is increasingly recognized, and input is being widely solicited. I think we have a unique opportunity now to create discussion.

I don't want to look back, years from now, and wonder if that mountain was ready to go. If all it needed was one more good shove.

*I'd like to unpack that last one for a moment. When I first heard that figure, I found myself wondering how much was due to a safe and generous benefits system, and how much was due to mental health issues. Not that either exists in a vacuum. If a portion is due to the benefits system, it makes me wonder how many of our private sector peers are suffering through untreated mental illness because they are worried about losing jobs, or because they don't have needed benefits. And I'm certain that the system, alone, doesn't explain the discrepancy between public and private rates. Public servants are also more likely to binge drink, which is indicative of stress and mental health issues (although income and education levels impact here as well). There's a direct, and significant, correlation between engagement levels and absenteeism. And there are links between one's perception of control over their jobs and their health. I believe that mental health issues for public servants are a genuine issue and merit significant concern.