Inverting Thoughts on Thinking

by Nick Charney

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Last week I quickly threw down a video from Geoff Mulgan at Nesta in the hopes that you'd watch it (See: Thoughts on Thinking).  At the time I had a bunch of notes sketched out on a pad of paper (yes I still use those!) but didn't have time to pull them together into something coherent.

This week I wanted to share what I took away from the video because, as I indicated previously, there are some great nuggets of information in there. Mulgan divides up policy process into three parts:

1) Creating Mutation

Mulgan starts his presentation by arguing that novelty is the purview of iconoclasts and radicals; it's an explanation that conjures up support for the innovator as trickster hypothesis (See: Book Review: Trickster Makes This World, Innovation is Tricky, Literally and Finding Innovation) given that, tricksters seem well positioned to:

• Reassert old ideas and infuse them with new ones 
• Apply a different lens altogether (e.g. carbon)
• Ask new types of questions (e.g. can it be a market?)

Whereas, as Mulgan argues, conformist institutions aren't a good source of creative mutation given that new ideas, by their very nature, have no evidence to support them.


2) Selection Principles

Mulgan goes on to outline a number of selection principles that determine which ideas tend to make the cut and which ones don't. It's likely not a coincidence that he starts his exploration by naming political convenience and ends it with evidence and reasoning. While I'm not trying to situate the two on a dichotomous spectrum I did get the sense that his ordering is purposeful and informed by his experience.

In an ideal world there is obviously at least some synergy between these and the other factors — coherence, 'appealingness', and the failure of alternatives — that Mulgan names. He goes on to explain that one of the core challenges of the selection phase is the tendency to promote a particular narrative structure (that which fits the mould, sustaining, do more with less innovation) rather than on what evidence supports (that which breaks the mould, disruptive, do different with different innovation).


3) Replication  and Spread

According to Mulgan, policy ideas that make it through the selection process require translation by intermediary bodies to enter into the policy bloodstream and that alternative approaches more easily replicate in the wake of failure created by an excess of orthodoxy. In other words, a history of failure creates a climate more ripe for disruptive innovation rather than one that has even a modest history of successful incremental innovation.

What if we reversed their order?

While Mulgan presents the above as sequential stages (e.g. moving from creative mutation, to selection principals, to replication), I wonder what would happen if we simply reversed their order? If we stand Mulgan's explanation on its head, the path to policy innovation seems to be:

1. Look for a policy area with a deep history of failure (because the ground is fertile) 
2. Identify intermediaries with a vested interest in the solution (because they will help you)
3. Identify solutions that meet selection principals (because decision makers will support it)
4. Apply a new lens that creates the mutation (because it leads to innovation)

Flipping the process — putting support first and ideation last — looks like a faster track for policy ideas and I'm interested in hearing if anyone has any tangible examples that I can learn from that have put this type of approach into practice.



Note: I've decided to re-embed the video below in case you missed it.

Rethinking Government Grants and Contributions

I have spent the last 5 years working at the confluence of People, Technology and Public Policy. I've spent those years struggling to understand how these things inform one another both as a citizen and as a public servant; it is a complex and often confusing undertaking

As an early adopter of new technologies and proponent of a more collaborative and open approach to government feel as though we are quite literally staring into the chasm.

As a citizen, I am eager to find a way across it.

As a public servant I understand that the chasm can often be intimidating.

It is simultaneously full of the unknown and opportunity, of terror and excitement, and of risk and reward. I also realize that this dichotomy is giving rise to an interesting tension. Bureaucracies around the world continue to resist change while those working inside them are growing increasing frustrated by creed of business as usual.

This tension is boiling over all over the globe; so much has changed in past couple of years. We've seen revolutions, riots, and the occupation of our city streets.

We must ask ourselves how much longer can we simply stand at the edge of the chasm staring into the unknown.

We must be open to rethinking the role of government in an ever changing society.

It was Albert Einstein who said, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them"; yet if there is one thing we as a society are guilty of is it is clinging to old mental models of what the public service ought to be, of what it ought to look like, of the types of solutions it ought to offer up.

I want to position an alternate vision for government grants and contributions, but before I do that, I want to take a minute to speak to grants and contributions more broadly.

On paper grants and contributions programs are quite simple, the transfer of government money to organizations, businesses, individuals, or other levels of government in order to achieve a specific outcome. In reality, they are an incredibly complex environment.

In Canada alone the federal government allocates approximately 27 billion dollars a year through grants and contributions programs; in the province of Ontario that number is roughly 85 billion. Federally these transfers are managed through over 800 different programs. Provincially, I couldn't even ascertain a number (feel free to update any of my numbers). The throughput of these transfers are usually reported at the departmental level, making cross-cutting or macro analysis difficult, if not impossible. But that is just one side of the equation.

Now, I've never applied for government monies myself, so went out and spent some of my personal time speaking to those who have. I sat down with a handful of small business owners, community associations, charities and researchers.

Their experience was varied, but a number of trends emerged. First, many had to hire consultants as intermediaries because they were unable to navigate the process themselves. The felt that the process was too complicated and that they required additional expertise to ensure they completed it properly. Second, many reported that the cost of securing the grant often outweighed the benefit of receiving it; some even saying that they had decided to abandon the process altogether. Third, the entire process is on lock down. Applicants are left in the dark as to the likelihood of their application being approved, how much competition they face, or when they will actually receive the funding. Fourth, everyone I spoke to identified the process as adversarial, that government officials are more likely to be gatekeepers looking to check boxes rather and hand out monies rather than be active stewards seeking the best possible return on government money. Fifth, the process is incredibly slow, and little consideration is given to the time sensitive nature of some requests, forcing many recipient organizations to live hand to mouth.

I should admit to not having worked directly in government grants or contributions programs and thus am unable to speak directly to the experience of those working on the inside. But let me be clear, I'm not trying to trying to be critical of those in that line of work nor the evolution of the system thus far. What I am trying to do is posit a more participatory and open model of grants and contributions (under the larger rubric of open government) that addresses the specific concerns raised by recipients during our conversations. Accordingly, I'd love to hear what you have to think about the alternative model I am about to present.


Characteristics of an alternative model

silueta by cardrea

For a new model to be truly transformative it must break the traditional trade-offs of the status quo. It must eliminate money contingent on things like hiring intermediaries, diverting labour away from core activities, being left out of the process, meeting minimum government set thresholds and moving slowly.

To my mind it starts by moving to a single window online; its client recipient focused not administration focused (which is to say it focuses on the user experience from the citizen perspective). Information should be easy to locate; and search should be central (like it is with the city of Calgary's web site).

It should make recommendations to citizens like Amazon does its customers; "People who applied this grant program also applied for these ones" or "People who spoke to this government official also spoke to this one".

Application criteria should be clearly articulated and as uniformly presented as possible across the spectrum of grant niches. There shouldn't be a different form for every program but a persistent set of reusable tombstone data that follows applicants and never needs to be re-entered into a form.

Applicants should be able to access examples of both successful and unsuccessful applications that citizens can see and learn from; they should see success, attrition, and failure rates on the grants they are applying for, and be able to instantly access online support. It could pair applicants up based on key markers like geography, program applied to, interest areas or desired outcomes. It could directly connect applicants who are competing for the same limited pool of grant money and provide them the information they need to decide whether or not to abandon their bid, team up with their competitor(s) or go head to head with them for the cash.

Imagine the efficiencies that could be gained by connecting like minded charitable organizations or art groups, or the innovation generated by connecting small business owners. Why not allow citizens to easily leverage their existing social networks in order to gain support, insights, or measure sentiment around their applications.

It could also build in persistent online profiles for public officials that indicate their expertise and make that expertise more universally accessible.

This vision of grants and contributions is one of government as convener. One where government officials could pull large applications out of the mix and put them up for larger public consultation should the application merit it. It could even target those consultations based on the geographical areas or interest communities that will be impacted by the grants.

This vision is one that ensures that public servants bring their expertise in public administration to bear, using more complete information to them to make more effective recommendations to elected officials, who are ultimately responsible for making the tough decisions.

After those decisions are made, public servants would work directly with recipients to ensure funds were transferred promptly, that they were allocated under the conditions of the grant and stay tuned in to the process, and finally evaluate the grant throughput and make those findings available within the window.

Governments could even go a step further and provide the tools to manipulate the data for further analysis or create a parallel incentive structure for entrepreneurs looking to build applications or data visualizations. Keeping the data accessible means that it can help inform anyone who chooses to look at it, be it other applicants, the media, public servants or elected officials.


The art of the possible


Often in government we think that there is little place for re-imagining things; we get so bogged down in day to day operations within the status quo that we forget that we aren't just responsible for delivering our mandates today, but also ensuring that they are delivered in a relevant manner tomorrow.  

This vision, I think, is one that could help governments do just that.





Originally published by Nick Charney at cpsrenewal.casubscribe/connect

Like Monetizing the Margins: On Creating Public Value around the Public Service

Last week I sat down with Alex, an Epidemiologist (and fellow public servant), and we worked through a redesign of the information systems he and his team use to track infectious diseases that may be threatening Canada. Although to be honest, that was never the intention. We originally met to discuss how (if) tablet computers could help field researchers gather data more efficiently. To get a sense of what Alex is working on, here is youtube video he sent me:

The road we traveled down may have started there, but it quickly got a whole lot bigger. I wanted to, with Alex's permission, share some of the key insights from our discussion.

[Note: after publishing, Alex sent me a note indicating that the work shown in that video was done by Dr. Kamran Khan via the Bio.Diaspora project.]


Can tablets help gather data in the field?

The short and obvious answer is yes; the long and complicated answer is that any mobile device can, but in order to for that to be useful, the rest of the chain needs to support the input from the device. In order to understand what we were talking about I started sketching on my iPad as we spoke. In the end the sketch became incredibly complex so I cleaned them up and broke them out into two sketches (click to enlarge):

After determining whether or not it was viable, our conversation shifted toward more traditionally bureaucratic concerns, namely cost.

How much would this thing cost the government?

We agreed that given the current climate public servants would be put under incredible pressure to be better managers of scarce resources, but we also both agreed that this was not a negative force but rather a force that creates an environment incredibly conducive to creativity and innovation if you know how to create a compelling narrative (read: articulate an argument, back it up with the facts, infuse it with passion, and deliver it with non-partisan conviction).

Where we run into difficulty is when we start to formulate that narrative strictly around cost savings. If there is one thing that I've learned from watching the Open Yale Courses on Game Theory it is that thinking strategically means doing a lot more than a simple uni-stage cost-benefit analysis. Here's a clip from lecture #19 (Subgame perfect equilibrium: matchmaking and strategic investments):

My key takeaway: being more strategic means looking more closely at how behaviour changes.


So how is behaviour changing?

I want to pull in what I've observed from the evolution of successful companies like Twitter, Google and Facebook. More specifically, I want to look at how they generate revenue. For example, Twitter has promoted tweets, Google has ads next to search, and Facebook leverages a users personal data to target advertising with ridiculous precision. These companies have embraced an ethos of delivering strong core services while generating revenue around the periphery; in essence they've monetized the margins.


So what does this have to do with public service?

While bureaucracies may not be revenue-generating in the strictest sense, we do generate public value. It stands to reason that we could adopt a similar approach to value-generation as successful businesses are currently using to approach revenue generation. For government, and here is the crux of my argument, we need to look at the margins of our core public services and find new and creative ways to create public value. To an extent, some of us may already do this but I have a feeling it isn't part of how we generally understand or approach public service.


So what does it look like?

In the models shown above, I'm tempted to say that we could create significant public value by simply opening the data set to the public. But realistically, the lack of public engagement to date around open data generally leads me to believe that publishing data without support activities around it is insufficient.

A more conducive approach to creating public value around core public services is to look at the specific niche opportunities for value-creation. In this case, what assets does the service make use of, who would be interested in those assets, and how do we partner with them in order to maximize the co-creation of public value. In other words, how do we do more with less (an undoubtedly popular adage for our times)?

So what are the assets in Alex's area of expertise? Well data is clearly one asset, but there is also the breadth of expertise along the supply chain of the institution’s work.

Who would be most interested in those assets? Academic institutions with a strong focus on public health are an obvious one, but so are public administration and management programs.

How do we partner with them in order to maximize the co-creation of public value? Offer a series of three pre-packaged partnership agreements (so as to avoid one-off negotiations) similar to online services (e.g. tiered systems of "free", "premium" and "pro"). Here is quick back-of-the-napkin example of the type of thinking I'm talking about:

Free

• 5 internships in data analysis (y hours)

Premium (contribution of x dollars)

• 5 internships in data analysis (2y hours)
• 5 in public administration/policy (2y hours)
• Access to public health data for given number of students/classes

Pro (contribution of 2x dollars)

• 5 internships in data analysis (3y hours)
• 5 in public administration/policy (3y hours)
• Full access to public health data for academic institution
• Guided tour of facilities / ride-alongs with field researchers
• Guest lectures by field experts/researchers
• Exclusive partnership with local health authorities to study any government action in real time

Everything listed above, regardless of tier, creates some sort of public value while decreasing the overall cost of providing the core service (through either financial or in kind contributions). It is by no means exhaustive; if anything it is but a small tip of the iceberg. From where I sit, emerging public sector leaders facing demographic challenges and budgetary constraints are going to need to get more creative, and to my mind, there is no better way to do that than to look at opportunities to create public value at the margins of our work and seize them.

Originally published by Nick Charney at cpsrenewal.casubscribe/connect