Hope is not a strategy

by Kent Aitken

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There seem to be two themes in any discussion on public sector reform. One is that our systems and structures are broken and need repair - perhaps referring to procurement, policy development, accountability, and so on - and the other is that people's culture and choices need to change. The strongest versions of this take the form of “government needs to take more risks” or “people need to just do [X].”

With apologies, as I’m about to disagree with people whom I greatly respect, but I see little utility in calling for courage as a way to improve our public sector.

Here’s an analogy. If you run a website and people consistently, repeatedly click the wrong page when they’re looking for something in particular, the response is to interview visitors, generate hypotheses, and test alternatives. The history of the internet is full of examples where the people running a business guessed wrong at what would work best for people. It happens. But the real mistake it to react to how people are using your site with “But all users have to do is click there, then there, and they’d find it.”

Sure, they can. But a predictable proportion of them don’t. And we have - or should have - the data to prove it. It’s the responsibility of the website owner to design for what people actually do, just like it’s the responsibility of leaders to design for outcomes.

In the private sector, these metrics - drop-off rates on transactions due to misconceptions, or misleading language or navigation - can be converted directly into revenue gained or lost. In the public sector, the carrots and sticks are blurrier, but should be taken just as seriously.

What people actually do is the David to all of the good intention Goliaths of policy.

We hear things like “Procurement isn’t broken, people can write contracts for agile development now.” But do they? If not, or if less than they should, then procurement is as good as broken. Maybe the procurement policy is fine. But the procurement system is broken. The answer might lie in any combination of training, communications, management, oversight, or making the policy more explicit towards the desired outcomes. The theoretical possibility of desired outcomes is no consolation if they’re not being achieved.

To be fair to those who call for courage and risk-taking: in most cases, they’re speaking to audiences asking to be inspired, less so to those people pulling the levers of the machinery of government. Encouraging people to do their jobs well is perfectly warranted in those forums. And as individuals we should always be asking more of ourselves, working towards outcomes in whatever system we work within.

But that's not a get-out-of-jail-free card. Because many people have their hands on those levers. A manager’s policy interpretation will trump their staff’s courage in an instant. (Courage needs to win every day; authority often needs to win only once.) So it’s a message that’s as dangerous as inspiring, were we to let it seep in: that all we need to improve government is for people to suddenly start behaving differently. It sounds nice, but it’s too unreliable for organizations responsible for stewardship of the public good.

Understand people. Get the data. Design for outcomes. 

A quick stock-take on public service renewal

by Kent Aitken

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Last week I almost wrote a post just to announce a hiatus for the summer. I’m getting into the home stretch of an MSc dissertation. A break would be a little about freeing up time, but at least as much about A) simplification of my weekly to-do list and B) trying to keep some semblance of a quality standard in my writing. I think I’ll stop short of a full hiatus, and just apologize for sparse posts for the next few months. Which probably feels to me like a much bigger deal than it is, but I like the weekly rhythm.

I’d like to keep it up because I do feel like writing these days. There’s a ton going on around the public service that is inspiring me lately and bouncing around my head. In 2012 I wrote about possibilities for tectonic change in the public service, and I’m starting to feel like some of those ideas are becoming real. Not for any one reason - it’s many things lining up and coming together.

When looking for something like “culture change,” it’s sometimes hard to differentiate between what’s actually different and what you, yourself, are seeing differently. It’s inevitable that the longer you've been around, the more you’ll see of everything: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

And with that massive bias in mind, I’m still more optimistic about the future - this whole 

“public service renewal” thing we keep banging on about - than I have been for a long while. I’m thinking of things like digital service redesign (maybe with some friendly competition from Ontario’s soon-to-be-minted Chief Digital Officer), citizen engagement on policy making, and more opportunities to work with the private sector and civil society - including more opportunities for civil society to hold government accountable to outcomes.

Part of the interest here is the potential to get out of our comfort zones a little bit and experiment with different ways of doing government. But there’s a value proposition much deeper than “experiment and we’ll see if it works” here. One of the threads that connects digital service, citizen engagement, and government releasing more information is that whole accountability piece: people and organizations having more information, and more avenues, to put pressure on government. Which will have its bad sides as well, but if nothing else will nudge government towards more honesty and authenticity.

I’ve felt the conversations - and communications products - changing over the last few years. It’s harder to respond with talking points to people who can talk back.

And, it’s harder to respond with talking points to people who you really understand and empathize with, which is one of other connecting threads. I’ve made this point before, but here it is a tad more bluntly: whether or not a given public servant truly understands their stakeholder communities may be the single biggest factor influencing their perspective on their work.

Jared Spool’s research on usability and design keeps coming back to this magic number: 2 hours every 6 weeks interacting with the end users of a thing. For everyone who influences the design (that includes senior executives) I’d argue that this principle would apply to a surprising range of things: products and websites, but also policies, service interactions, and communications.

The good news is that we’re all increasingly becoming front-line public servants.

Which means that not only are things poised to get better, but poised to get systematically better, which is the real kicker.

  

 

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

Process and Public Service Renewal

by Kent Aitken

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Just a quick post today. I was on the road most of August and am still mostly just catching up.

A few weeks back I wrote about The New Nature of Process, the idea that that organizations are at a pivot point akin to industrialization. But where that revolution occurred by standardizing and repeating processes for material goods, we're looking at standardizing and repeating processes for human learning in the context of complex problems. All optimized for efficiency, fitted within governance and business cycles.

(Albeit with a broad view of efficient. Sometimes expensively sending a nurse practitioner to someone's house is, in the long run, more efficient than optimizing the process within the hospital they'd otherwise visit.)

Let's call it standardizing processes for exploring and solving complex problems. At the time I considered it an interesting idea, a possible trend. But after thinking about it for a bit I realized that if it's true - that is, if we're just getting started but can get far better - it would assuage the doubt I feel about public service renewal. Even the elements of it that I personally support and suggest.

For instance, in the past I've wondered if a public service characterized by trust, decentralized decision making, and engagement is unrealistic or undesirable. If such a state only works well in marginal cases, such that the success stories for that approach actually represent most of the fertile ground. Or, after Chelsea highlighted some of the more negative possibilities of loosened hierarchy, I wondered if the style of management I considered ideal was too unreliable across a critical mass. That it would work well only if it was the only thing managers had to worry about (it isn't). Or take Hugh Segal's recent take in the Ottawa Citizen, about the need for stronger managers, less management layers, and more leeway for frontline decision making.

I generally favour these approaches, in a vacuum. But the real world is messier. However, if we can significantly and reliably accelerate employees's sensemaking of complex environments, such approaches may be very manageable in the real world.

And the sensemaking tools are there. How to map a network of stakeholders, how to help them (and you) understand each other, how to suss out side effects of policy, program, and service decisions. The question now is one of optimization and repeatability.