Fully, completely.

by Nick Charney

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The last three-ish years have been busy both personally and professionally for me. In that time, I played a critical role in helping design a new challenge-based government program, took on management responsibilities within that program, and had the opportunity to assemble a crackerjack team that is absolutely crushing on its delivery. We're a weird hybrid of policy advice on innovation and impact, and experimentation with program delivery. Our team works well not because of a particular governance structure, but rather because of the culture we've been able to cultivate, the quality of the our team members, and our trusted relationship with our executive cadre.

Over the same period of time, I stopped writing. It was a slow but continuous denouement that culminated in me hanging up skates and declaring that I used to write things on the internet. I was a new manager, we were a new team, we were working on a new program. It was all very exciting and I wanted to dig into the substance of the task at hand. Doing that took significant amounts of time, mental energy, and was (at times) all consuming.

It was a tremendous learning opportunity, but entailed certain sacrifices. For example, I had always told myself that writing about my experience in the public service was something that I wanted to do throughout the course of my career. That being able to look back on this blog as a sort of journal of public service things would be valuable to myself and, if I struck the right tone or raised the right issues, to others. I thought it was an all or nothing proposition. I've always been an all or nothing kind of person, to quote the late (great, and highly influential to me personally) Gord Downie: "Either it'll move me or it'll move right through me. Fully, completely".

But careers are funny things, they ebb and flow, and while everyone's opinion may differ, mine has evolved to a place where I feel like there's neither a right nor a wrong way to go about making decisions about them. I was speaking to a friend of mine recently about relationships but his advice applies equally to careers and other human endeavors (paraphrasing): "You've only got some much energy to give, if you make a withdrawal in one place, someone else has to come in and pick up the slack. That or the relationship suffers." Or put another way by another friend (again, paraphrasing): "Time is your most valuable resource, and you once you've spent it you can't get it back".

I was so busy doing the work -- designing a program, delivering it, managing the day to day operations of the team -- that I simply didn't have the time to share what I was learning with others the way I had previously. Sure, I was still having conversations, exploring issues and positing solutions, but I was hyper focused on the immediate issues and people in front of me. Reporting back on what I was dealing with and learning along the way didn't seem as important, or if I'm being honest, interesting, or even fair to those who were living through it with me.

Often I was just trying to keep my head above water, but along the way I learned that solving real problems in front of you, and seeing the impact of their resolution first hand, is an incredibly meaningful experience; that helping the five people immediately in front of you can feel (and be!) more meaningful then writing some esoteric think piece that gets loaded into 5,000 anonymous web browsers (the impact of which is hard to quantify and more importantly, qualify).

Last year I also had the good fortune of being able to spend ~3 months in Denver, Colorado on a temporary duty assignment as a Trade Commissioner. The experience was unlike any other in my career and forced some introspection -- I'm in the middle of what I'm jokingly referring to my 'early' mid-life crisis.

When I got back I started to reflect on how much I've learned by doing, how many different people, ideas, and issues I've collided with over the past few years and what I find the most rewarding about my work.

Embracing interesting ideas and even more interesting people is what made me who I am today, it's what put me on the path, gave me the skills, and created the worldview that I continue to bring to bear on difficult but important tasks such as creating new programs, building new teams, and learning how to continue to be a positive influence on the our systems of governance.

I feel as though I'm emerging somewhat from the personal and professional ether, and if I'm being completely honest with myself, I'm not sure what this all means.

Maybe it means taking time to pause, reflect, and share more. If that's the case then sharing a new updated version of Scheming Virtuously: A Handbook for Public Servants.

The new version includes new content under both the Scheming and Virtue headings as well as hints for both employees and managers. You can also watch me deliver the handbook as a talk should you be interested. Thanks to the Canada School of Public Service for making the video available online.

Scheming Virtuously for National Public Service Week

by Nick Charney

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Yesterday I was at the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission delivering my Scheming Virtuously presentation as a part of National Public Service Week. It's something I've continued to for some time now and always enjoy spending time talking to civil servants about the human side of our organizations.

If you haven't seen the handbook it's available freely here; if you haven't seen the presentation and would like to drop me a line and we can work something out.

I hope you all had a great National Public Service Week.

Cheers

Dissent in Public Organizations

by Kent Aitken

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Last week Nick and I delved into the long-term arc of communities and the people that comprise them. I was thinking about how public servants of a certain stripe will spend their careers navigating tension between short- versus long-term results, their intuition versus their instructions, and even different tenets of the Values and Ethics Code versus each other (see: Tricksters, Hackers, and Schemers). Nick explored the arc of the #W2P community in particular, summing up and offering theories how such communities evolve (see: The Gentrification of #W2P).

It’s important for a couple reasons. It’s partially because #W2P, even from my biased perspective, was significant in the Government of Canada. The community was tightly coupled with the learning curve into digital, and particularly social, communication. Many “members” of the community are now involved in transformation and innovation projects. (Ryan Androsoff started a wiki to map the community timeline - I encourage you to visit and contribute.)

But mainly? I just think that public organizations really, really need a healthy culture of challenge. Now more than ever.

In defence of challenge

When talking about challenge, I’m referring both to organizations systematically fostering dialogue and deliberation, as well as individuals being willing to step up when they feel something is awry - the tricksters referenced last week. But, first a quick word on that latter option.

At it’s worst, this could be seen as a rationalization for questioning others’ experience or judgment, justifying roguish behaviour. Perhaps anyone who thinks in trickster terms isn’t actually a prime candidate for public service - we all know the rules of the game we’ve signed up for. But that all depends on the interpretation of those (and many other) rules and a philosophy of public service (try Dwight Waldo’s Twelve Ethical Obligations of public servants for an alternate take). Over the last few years the Values and Ethics Code and The Ethics of Dissent have been common topics on CPSRenewal. This is not taken lightly.

And truthfully, the "rules of the game" are often somewhat uncertain. The relationship between elected officials and the public service is explicit, but the relationship between members of the public service is murkier. It seems as though the rule of “fearless advice, loyal implementation” is applied throughout organizations, exapting the political-bureaucratic rule to a different context.

Why challenge is needed

Public servants' ethical obligations (to stewardship, respect for democracy, respect for people, and integrity) always require a culture that welcomes challenge. But the "now, more than ever" part is because our governance algorithms are better suited to some decisions than others. For the most part, everything gets the same treatment. The organizational structure for, say, policy advice is largely identical to that for process improvements, administrivia, communications, and manufacturing.

I’d argue that it’s often borderline unfair to ask people to make decisions under these parameters, expecting an authoritative direction in areas where there’s no experience, best practices, or precedence (see: Innovation and Rigour). For instance, I wrote a few months ago that essentially everyone - in and out of government - is only beginning to climb the learning curve for online collaboration (see: The Promise of Online Collaboration). In this view, few if any people are experts, and we'd be crazy to think that anyone would singlehandedly have the expertise to solve something truly complex that had never been tackled before.

We see symptoms like this: in any large organization, people often talk of “picking their battles,” the logic of which is uncomfortable. It’s essentially shorthand for “I believe we’re about to make the wrong decision, but I’m choosing not to say anything because I think things are such that saying anything will make everything worse off in the long run.” I think public servants in particular have a duty to avoid or mitigate such dilemmas.

This is where the challenge culture is required. We often hear that the pace and complexity of the world is increasing (the Clerk of the Privy Council’s speech yesterday is an example), and that we must be agile and responsive. I think there’s a compelling case that where a decision is characterized by complexity, novelty, and a diverse range of stakeholders, we might want to consider trading speed for diligence (see: What We Lost in the Fire We Gain in the Flood). In some cases, the appropriate role for government may be the slow, deliberative space. A space where challenge is welcomed, and we are cautious and intentional in how we manage power dynamics and systemic biases.

Or, as Rosemary O’Leary put it in The Ethics of Dissent

“Some [moments of dissent] are canaries in the coal mine telling us that something is awry… [employees willing to challenge assumptions]  just may become creative assets to public organizations if their dissent is listened to and channeled appropriately. 

That can happen is public organizations strive for a culture that accepts, welcomes, and encourages candid dialogue and debate. Cultivating a questioning attitude that encourages a diversity of views and encourages staff members to challenge the assumptions and actions of the organization is important.”

Tricksters, Hackers, and Schemers

by Kent Aitken

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In literature, trickster characters are the rule-breakers. They cross boundaries, put others outside their zones of comfort, and question authority. They "playfully disrupt normal life and then re-establish it on a new basis." They're often set in a world such that the rule-breaking appears, to the audience, to be understandable - if not downright virtuous.

In society, the tricksters might be the civic tech, NGO, social entrepreneurship, and hacker communities. Hackers, in this view, are those who take things apart to understand them and reconstruct them to suit their needs, be it technology, institutions, or machinery (try these pieces by Tanya Snook or David Fleming for this take). Dealing with government is just one lever to pull towards achieving their goals.

Inside organizations the tricksters may be called innovators, or perhaps mavericks or "rebels at work." Less flatteringly, they might be called "headstrong" or "naive".

There's always conflict between tricksters and those around them, including other tricksters with different levels of willingness to break the rules. The Fantastic Mr. Fox (the character in the image, above) revels in tricking farmers out of chickens until he realizes that his actions are endangering the other animals in his community by provoking the gun-toting farmers. In many stories, a common theme is discord between members of the counterculture: some people are willing to do anything to reach their goals, and their friends have to stop them from compromising their principles. Ideals and goals don't always get along.

Wither rebels?

Brett Scott's recent piece The hacker hacked gets into the conflict faced by the first group, those outside large businesses or institutions. 

"We are currently witnessing the gentrification of hacker culture. The countercultural trickster has been pressed into the service of the preppy tech entrepreneur class. It began innocently, no doubt. The association of the hacker ethic with startups might have started with an authentic counter-cultural impulse on the part of outsider nerds tinkering away on websites. But, like all gentrification, the influx into the scene of successive waves of ever less disaffected individuals results in a growing emphasis on the unthreatening elements of hacking over the subversive ones.

 In this setting, the hacker attitude of playful troublemaking can be cast in Schumpeterian terms: success-driven innovators seeking to ‘disrupt’ old incumbents within a market in an elite ‘rebellion’."

(See also: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." - Jeff Hammerbacher)

I highly recommend reading the full piece. For one, it's as a fascinating take on the arc of the technology and digital world - once considered a disruptive, democratic, playing-field-leveling force. Two, there's an obvious parallel for anyone trying to remake an organization around themselves.

The trickster's dilemma

Akin to hackers being subsumed into the tech entrepreneurship scene, change-wanters will face a practical dilemma in efforts to drive change. Sometimes, after years of suggesting X project, someone will say "Ah, now you have your chance to put your money where your mouth is: we'd like you to do X. But by our rules." This invariably means that you won't actually get to spend much of your time on X, instead worrying about HR, finance, proving the value of X, building partnerships, and navigating internal politics. And you'll realize that they're using a different definition of X. But, you're finally getting the chance, so you can't rock the boat now. You need to succeed, even if it's not exactly what you wanted to succeed at, to gain the credibility for future such projects. Besides, if you decline the opportunity they'll ask someone else anyway, and it won't be done as well. You're stuck.

Last year I had the opportunity to speak on a topic I was passionate about and I was pumped. When I accepted, I heard the parameters: it was an "un-panel," and I'd be "randomly" selected from the audience to ask a question and then join the panel. My question was scripted and a speaker would magically have a presentation ready to answer it. I backed out, but the principles versus impact debate is rarely so lopsided.

So you believe in change and doing things right. But do you do things less than right for the opportunity to do things right in the future? Or dogmatically stick to your guns, but end up alienated from the organizations and people that can facilitate progress? Do you stay as a garage hacker, or join an organization that limits your freedom but expands your impact?

Ryan Androsoff was recently musing about whether the W2P (web 2.0 practitioners) community in the Government of Canada had withered, and he captured the discussion. It seems I'm not alone in viewing the people in that community as innovators and schemers, but that they've moved on to "operationalizing" their goals or simply "doing."

In the US, the Presidential Innovation Fellows program exists to get bright and talented tech experts into government to revamp systems, build tools, and shake established mindsets. My anecdotal evidence from conversations with public servants south of the border is this: one, that the "not-quite-in-government" position allows the freedom to question established practices and push through solutions. Two, that institutions have had problems following through and maintaining Fellows' projects after they leave. The program was made permanent this week, which could help the latter problem - but might hurt the former advantage.

For the Fellows and W2P, there's a power in being distant enough from portfolios that you can truly speak your mind. Once institutionalized, operationalized, or made responsible, these Fantastic Mr. Foxes may realize that other animals are counting on them and that playing with the rules - even if virtuously done - isn't the right approach anymore.

Which is not to say that accepting positions of responsibility is inadvisable. It's actually the core of the public service ethos. It's why we're here. If you have a meaningful job and your work actually impacts citizens then it comes with responsibility. But there will be constant tension: is the value you had as a trickster being left behind?

A last word about naiveté

Naiveté is the true enemy of tricksters, hackers, and schemers. But it comes in two different flavours.

• Failing to understand or appreciate the value of "the way things are". Ever complain about something and have a friend respond "Actually, there's a perfectly good reason for that"? The more you learn about something, the more you'll see both its flaws and its virtues. If you're trying to change things, you have a responsibility to understand them.

• Failing to understand or appreciate the value of ideals. There's a reverse-image naiveté to the above and it manifests in Machiavellianism, acting as though everything is strategic, pragmatic, and political. As bad as the naive tricksters, the naive institutionalist can't tell when the tricksters are right, and falsely believes that the rules of the game can never change.

A blast from my own personal past

by Nick Charney

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A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of sitting in on a presentation by Gilles Paquet as a part of the Institute on Governance's (IOG) Executive Leadership Program. It had been almost 7 years since I last saw Gilles and he's still a firecracker at the age of 79.

I first met Gilles back in August of 2008 when I was asked to sit as a discussant at an internal seminar about Leadership as Governance at what was then HRSDC (See: Speaking Notes on Leadership as Governance). At the time I was less than 2 years into my career in government and only about 4 months into blogging about the public service. At the time I was both nervous and excited. It was the first time I was ever asked to speak publicly about the public service. It was also one of the most transformative experiences of my life. I can honestly say that Gilles sent me down the path that has lead me to where I am today. What is most impressive is that he did it with a simple challenge. He simply asked me to put my money where my mouth and scheme virtuously.

Scheming virtuously not only immediately became the tag line for the blog but also inspired Scheming Virtuously: A Handbook for Public Servants which I published a few months later. The handbook was well received and everything just kind of snowballed from there. A year later Gilles called me out of nowhere to tell me that he dropped a note into his latest book entitled Scheming Virtuously: The Road to Collaborative Governance pointing people here, telling them to visit the site to gain greater insight into the practical application of the book's findings. A few years later, I took the time to review the book and I've been trying my best to keep scheming virtuously every since.

When I found out Gilles was the speaker for the evening I was naturally excited. I hadn't seen the man in years and was eager to take some time to speak with him and share my appreciation for his little nudge early in my career. Much to my amazement he took the time to speak with me prior to giving his remarks, made a handful of references that only I would understand given our past, and generally made me laugh aloud. I hadn't realized how much of Gilles style, attitude and ethos I had appropriated until I saw him speak to a crowd again.

There were two things that really amazed me about my interactions with Gilles that night. The first was that he had details about my career path that I hadn't given him, that he must have gleaned from others. To me that signalled an interest that I didn't know was there, and to be honest it was incredibly humbling. The second was that he knew exactly how to push me again on the way out:

"You think Nicholas is dangerous now? You should have seen him when he was young. What I love about him is that you can push him a bit and watch how far he runs."

Time to dig in I suppose.

Keep scheming (virtuously) everyone, I'll see you on the road to collaborative governance.

We used to be rockstars

by Nick Charney

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I still remember when I got my first invitation to speak.

It was a Scheming Virtuously double bill in Calgary then Edmonton. I took vacation from one department while another paid my travel because it was just easier than getting approvals. I'd never done any public speaking before so I volunteered in the Career Centre at Carleton University where I could demo a presentation I built from scratch that was up until that point just a handbook. I bombed in Calgary but did better in Edmonton. I recorded both deliveries and listened to them on a constant loop for the duration of the flight home, meticulously taking notes on what worked and what didn't so I could deliver better in the future, not knowing whether or not there would actually be an opportunity to do so.

As it happens, there were many.

They came from all over Canada and down into the United States. I eagerly said yes to every one of them and just as eagerly refused any financial compensation that was offered. I believed in the gift economy, and to a certain extent, still believe it. An early friend along the journey once joked that I would have agreed to speak at the opening of a window, and you know what, at the time he was probably right.

Over the next few years I was lucky enough to build a practice off the side of my desk and with the help of the fellow travellers I met along the way I slowly moved that practice from the corner of my desk to the centre of it. I invested heavily, reading, reflecting and writing on a weekly basis. I published, encouraged others to do the same, read their blogs, hung around more on twitter, left comments on their blogs, and engaged them in conversation. I was building, we were building. The energy was palpable, and easy to caught up in.

Surely at times our efforts misdirected, but on balance they were well placed. At the very least they were always dynamic and thus a welcome change from what we perceived as the stifling normalcy of the bureaucracy that others so readily accepted.

At least that was the feel of it.

We found and built our niche on a platform that the status quo didn't seem to anticipate and certainly didn't understand.

This is how we understood ourselves; we were the new movers and shakers.

Plane tickets, hotels, stages, bright lights, and new friends in crowded bars, everyone genuinely interested in you and what you had to say, as long as you could conjure up some evidence and conviction. Never once did we anticipate that the miraculous run would end, not once did we ever talk about what happens when others would cease to be interested in our talents or how we would deal with the eventuality of competition among us when mind share, attention, and opportunities became more scarce.

These were just some of our blind spots; looking at the forest, forgetting all the trees.

Don't get me wrong. I'm speaking of great people, accomplished people, whom I was fortunate enough to forge bonds with, build relationships with.

I have fond memories; we did some great things.

We seized opportunities others didn't see, we conjured up new influence models and delivered our fair share of five star performances. Sure there were casualties along the way but that's just a part of the biz.

We learned our lessons, shared them and moved on, our skin still firmly in the game, even as the game changed.

I reflect on all of this not out of some sense of longing for glory long past but because things are different; at least for me. It's hard to say for certain and while my memory is imperfect I recall more experimentation, more genuine curiosity, and grass-roots enthusiasm then than I feel now. Perhaps I was just closer to it back then. Or perhaps I'm more cynical than I used to be, time eroding my enthusiasm, like others before me. Perhaps it's just simply the evolution of a career path that you only get to walk once unknowingly, without a clear set of directions or the benefit of hindsight.

All of this struck me a few months ago when I was at a meetup on systems change organized in part by Kent and in part by a handful of other familiar and friendly faces. I stood in the back of the room and took it all in, overwhelmed by the tremendous sense of déjà vu as I mingled with new allies and a handful of the usual suspects. The fact of the matter was that I'd been to dozens, if not hundreds, of the same meetups across the country in my career; and while the thematic focus of past meetups were obviously different (e.g. social media) the underlying trend towards levering new insights (e.g. design thinking) to influence positive change was the same.

I get it. Things change. People change.

We're all shifting, moving between different pieces of the puzzle, our networks changing concurrently, forming and reforming around those pieces in the ways that only the omnipresent web makes truly visible and serves up confidently, algorithmically and asymmetrically.

Some of us have since gone on to be doers; happy victims of our own success, implementing that which we were once passionate advocates. Some of us have undoubtedly lost our influence as our markets became saturated, crowded out despite our first mover advantage. Some of us have undoubtedly made the transition to the next thing, having understood that building a career around the higher order questions will always yield better results than building expertise around set of tactics. While still others among us are in the unenviable position of having to attend to more pressing and personal priorities: building, dismantling and/or rebuilding their relationships, families and/or mental health.


I'm not sure whether or not you'll find this reflection valuable; but to be honest it's something that's been weighing on me for some time now. I'm not sure publishing it accomplishes anything other than getting it off my chest. That said, before I queue this up for publication, I wanted to be clear on a couple of things. I'm not saying we don't still share a sense of community, because we do. Nor am I saying that we aren't doing good work or seizing new opportunities, because we are. I'm just saying that things are different now then they were then.

I'm just saying, we used to be rockstars.

Keeping Yourself Honest

by Nick Charney

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Last week was amazing.

I hit the road with a friend and went down to Washington DC to deliver a couple talks, well actually it was one talk - Scheming Virtuously - but I delivered it twice, once to the US Census Bureau and again at a federal workplace training expo.

Despite the talk being over 5 years old, it's still fresh and resonates with audiences on a level I never really anticipated when I wrote it. I love delivering it because it keeps me honest. It reminds me of the kind of public servant I aspire to be and the strategy and tactics I ought to deploy to ensure that I get there. It also reminds me of both the best and worst parts of my career thus far and forces me to take stock of where I am at that particular moment. In short, it grounds my thinking, brings me back to centre and renews my drive to push forward. I always build lots of time into my talk for interaction with the audience because it requires introspection and provides an opportunity to walk the talk.


Why did you leave your job at the Ottawa Senators Hockey Club?

Because I wanted to do something more with my life than throw big parties for people with a lot of money. Don't get me wrong, I loved my job, but I wanted to give back to the community, to the country, in a different way. You don't necessarily have to have that public service motivation to do a good job. Maybe you are satisfied in other ways, and that's great. I'd rather work with someone who is motivated than someone who isn't. It's takes all kinds of people to power our organization and not everyone is interested or suited chasing the bigger picture. All I ask is that if you don't have aspirations larger than your current set of tasks, don't get in the way of those who do. Don't stick a spoke in someone's wheels for no good reason. It happens more often then we realize and it's a major impediment to change.


How do we break out of the culture of email and get back to the basics (talking to one another) when people get upset when I walk into their office?

You've got to remember that whenever you walk up to someone else you are interrupting their workflow. Often the frustration isn't about you it's about how often their flow has been interrupted today. Live interaction is synchronous. The person you are talking to has to stop doing whatever they were doing and deal with you solely on your terms. Email on the other hand is asynchronous the other person can get to it later without stopping. Often the challenge is that you are waiting on something from someone before proceeding. We think we've designed these smooth and slick organizations with neat little org charts. We assume people and tasks fit together like puzzle pieces but in fact wherever those things meet the edges are jagged and messy. Proactive, honest and human communication is the only way to smooth these edges. That takes work. We've got to lean in.


How do you track and build support for a change initiative?

Print your org chart and get three highlighters. One green, one yellow and one red. Hide the org chart in your top drawer. If you are particularly bold, pin it to the outside of your cubicle. As you meet with people colour code them. Green lights are your go to people, yellow lights are on the fence and can go either way, red lights are obstacles. Always approach green lights first they are you go to's. Approach yellow lights second, find out what it's going to take to turn them green and give it to them. Approach red lights last and take two greens for every red you meet. Overwhelm with numbers, exert pressure, and be strategic. If you are serious about change you need to get serious about how you execute it.


Finally I just wanted to thank both my contacts at the US Census Bureau and the Federal Workplace Training & Expo (you know you are!) for the opportunities. It's always great to meet people who have dedicated their lives to public service. If you read this blog but haven't read the handbook yet, it's available for free here, the prezi (embedded above) from the presentation can be found here, and, as always, if you are interested in seeing the presentation live and in person, drop me a line we can work something out.

Cheers