Forward momentum

by Kent Aitken

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A while back, Nick wrote a post about "Chekhov's Gun." It's short and you should read it, but if you'd like to just keep forging ahead, the central idea is the following consideration for novelists: 

"If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."

That is, if you've made it seem to everyone that something is important or that something is going to happen, you need to follow through.

Nick applies it to organizations, giving examples of innovation lab mandates, Blueprint 2020 goals, and employee/stakeholder engagement. And that last one is broad: promises to employees, strategic plans, and any communication that includes the phrase "stay tuned."

Different definitions of "the gun went off"

Here's an additional caution: we all have different definitions of what constitutes a satisfying gunshot. Returning to Chekhov's one-liner, if the main character takes a short break from the action to go hunting, it doesn't count. If you make a gun hanging on the wall a plot point... well, a primary character is going to have to take a bullet. Sorry.

Novelist Robert Jackson Bennett takes on the show Jessica Jones in this way, in a piece called Jessica Jones and the problem of forward momentum – or, Marvel needs a goddamn editor. As he sees it, things keep happening in the show. Conflict is introduced and resolved. Chekhov's guns are described, then fired. But his problem is that none of it truly matters, and the core state of the show never changes. In episode one, this is the concept:

Jessica Jones is a cynical, traumatized superhero being harassed and threatened by the incredibly powerful mind-controller Kilgrave, who can strike at her at any moment.

Bennett then walks through each episode and checks against that baseline after each, concluding that it doesn't budge.

In the professional world, we do this test as "The Five Whys": asking why something is the way it is, then asking "why?" about the answer, continuously. 

For example:

"Why is communication to Canadians important?" 

"To raise awareness." 

"Okay, why is awareness important?"

Etc.

Yesterday I heard this referred to as the "What do you do?/Bullshit, what do you do, really?" test.

How has the core state of things changed?

That's the main question Bennett has for storytelling, that he says Jessica Jones fails: how has the core state of things changed? It's easy to write content that seems like a conclusion, but it's often communicative fondant, all structure with a vague, unsatisfying flavour.

But we're definitely not fooling our readers and stakeholders.

What's different now, because of what we've done?

 

If nothing's different, what have we been doing?

Put differently: the gun went off. Did it matter?

Personal Stories and Testing Assumptions

by Kent Aitken

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Recently a few of us spent an evening deconstructing the idea of storytelling: why we're drawn to it, how it works, and how we use stories personally and professionally.

(I've written about storytelling on CPSRenewal before (see: Towards a New Professionalism in Government), as has Nick, probably multiple times (see: Purposeful Story Telling).)

We looked at a number of angles, but the one that stuck out for me might be called the stories we tell ourselves. Ashleigh Weeden opened this rabbit hole for me with her fantastic blog post on the subject, and most of my post, today, is just encouraging you to go read it.

Humans have a deep-seated tendency to find patterns, categorize, and sort things in our minds. These can turn into heuristics about how we see ourselves, which could be as simple and innocuous as saying something like "I'm very intuitive." It might be true, or it might just be rationalizing shortcuts on decision-making. In other cases, some stories that may well have been true at some point can outlive their usefulness. And they influence how we approach the world and our jobs, for better and for worse.

Examining our stories is an incredibly useful exercise, a healthy testing of assumptions. But we also noted two things about this kind of introspection during that evening:

• it's deeply uncomfortable - and full of cognitive dissonance - when we realize that some of the things we tell ourselves and others aren't true
• it must be highly deliberate, with others challenging us and prodding; it would otherwise be as easy to rewrite our stories with just new, different fictions

I'll forgo the temptation to apply the above to public service renewal and change initiatives.

All of that to say. If you're interested, and you should be, you should read Ashleigh's excellent and courageous post. With the warning that it may lead to an uncomfortable but ultimately worthwhile exercise of introspection. 

On the Stories You Tell Today

by Nick Charney

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The most thought-provoking conversation I took part in this week was a one-on-one with Director General of Communications about how technology is impacting the civil service; in fact, I'm still trying to parse out precisely what I think it means.

We were having a discussion about Blueprint 2020 (which, if you haven't heard of yet, is the Government of Canada's latest visioning exercise) and started going back and forth about what we think may be on the horizon; what does the civil service of 2020 look like?

He told me that one of the core differences between the policy and communication worlds is that the communications world is largely concerned with the next 5 minutes while the policy world has the ability to focus on the long game. 

"The stories policy people told 7 years ago, are just starting to come into play now."

There was no panic in his voice, no sense of urgency, and as though it was the natural progression of things. He said it with a certainty rooted in an experience that far outweighed my own and that was in of itself reassuring. 

It made me question my own impatience with change; wonder about the stories I've helped shape; and prompted me to think harder about the stories am about to - because the only thing I'm sure of after that conversation is that the stories you tell today are likely far more important than you think they are.

Towards a New Professionalism in Government

by Kent Aitken

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Last week I compared Sir Ken Robinson's views on the success of Finland's educational system to the way organizations are managed [see: Escaping Death Valley]. Success due, in part, to the attribution of a high degree of status to the teaching profession.

Status is an odd word, with less than ideal connotations. But public service carrying status is a necessary state for the sake of public trust, attracting talent, and – importantly - because status is a natural result of a challenging, high-performance workplace.

Regardless, I'm not going to call it status. I'll look instead at the road to a new professionalism in government, over a couple posts. And because everyone is so - rightly - jazzed up about it, I'll start with storytelling. The new professionalism is less formal. Messier at the edges.

 

Storytelling 

For that virtuous cycle, above, we don't enter at one particular node. Organizations have to build the performance scaffolding to raise the talent attraction scaffolding, which then allows the performance scaffolding to go even higher.

There are several angles to why we need good storytelling in terms of performance and talent. We need it when pitching to decision makers, to convince them of the value of projects and programs. Our peers' storytelling provides inspiration and good ideas. And our public storytelling builds understanding and trust - vital both for relationships as we work for and with those we serve, and to convince talented Canadians to become public servants.

I've been very inspired by my colleagues who work on user-centred design in government*. I hit on this recently [see: What We Don't Know]: it doesn't matter how technically impressive a product is if people don't use it well. It doesn't even matter if they can, or can't. Just that they don't. But you can design for this, test assumptions and prototypes, and create useful products that people will use productively.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the U.S. exists largely to protect citizens from suffering because they don't understand the exceptionally hard-to-understand financial system. Doesn't matter if they can, or can't. In a spectacular move, they hired Audrey Chen away from Comedy Central to serve as their Creative Director (in government?!). Chen, who was nice enough to speak to us a while back, conducted usability testing on their websites, informational documents, and templates for, say, student loan forms. The goal was maximizing the likelihood of people understanding what they were getting themselves into, and minimizing the likelihood of personally and socially expensive financial issues down the road.

They're making sure things aren't just broken, as Seth Godin would put it.

Good storytelling is essentially akin to usability for ideas. It's the same principle. It doesn't matter how good our ideas are, if people - decision makers, citizens that influence outcomes, or peers whose support you need - don't understand them, they aren't useful, and we have failed in our duty as public servants. And we can work on this.

Nick pointed towards George's authentic storytelling in Canadian Government Executive magazine, and I'll echo his hat-tip (oh, it's vortex rings we're on now? Okay).

I also respect my friend Dave Fleming's approach on his blog, as he takes a role as Executive Director of Halifax's North End Business Association:

"I’m going to introduce myself with a list of 13 things about me – a little about my vision for our city, about my experience and business knowledge, and a few which are about the person. If you want an answer to something I haven’t covered, please get in touch."

It's a simple, authentic step, but necessary for working productively with those whom he serves.

When Nick posed a question about faceless bureaucrats [see: Can Bureaucrats be Interesting when the World Demands that They be Boring?], there was some disagreement about whether bureaucrats can be, or should be, faceless. But the reality right now is that we have scrutiny without visibility. And thus, without understanding. We have availability without transparency. I don't think it's enough to simply post PDFs of receipts online, dust off our hands and say job well done. Nor do I think it's a good idea for us. We could storytell what we're doing, what is meaningful, and communicate it in such a way that people have a reasonable chance of understanding it.

Hell, we can even be boring ourselves. But I doubt that our work, which materially affects Canadians, is. So I agree with George: it's time to tell our stories. And it might even get us here:

And talent, understanding, and impact might get us into the first virtuous cycle.

Professionalism isn't APA formatting. It's results. Jargon, opacity, and bullshit don't achieve them.

*As a side note, this is not a sentence lightly said. The UX experts in government, and their excellent story, actually blow my mind. Their dedication, capability, and professionalism inspire me to be a better public servant.