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. 

Meritocracy

by Kent Aitken

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I'm a little late to the game, but I've been fascinated by reactions to a proposed idea for Canadian politics: an equal number of men and women in cabinet. The subsequent debates about diversity and the perceived conflict with the idea of merit are interesting, even setting aside politics, because those concepts are fundamental to the Canadian public service. From the Public Service Commission:

"The merit system has been the foundation of a competent, professional, non-partisan public service for almost a century."

But many people get the relationship between merit and diversity wrong.

The title of a recent Andrew Coyne piece suggests that such a "quota in Cabinet leaves out the principle of merit":

"If merit is defined in traditional terms, this is obvious nonsense. Suppose, in a governing caucus of, say, 180 members, one-third are women (their current proportion of the House of Commons is 25 per cent). And suppose that the talents and experience to be desired in a cabinet minister are distributed equally between the sexes, such that a fifth of either — 12 women, 24 men — might be considered cabinet material. If nevertheless the cabinet must have an equal number of women and men, then in a cabinet of 36 six women who should not have been appointed will be, and six men who should have been appointed will not be. That may be many things, but it is not the merit principle. 

The only way you can square that circle is if you redefine merit to mean diversity."

In response, Laura Dobson-Hughes wrote on the Policy Options blog:

"‘Merit’ is not itself a neutral concept. We can, for example, define merit as someone with expertise and lived experience in aboriginal affairs. Merit could be policy expertise in policing in black communities, or an understanding of healthcare provision for newcomers."

I could jump in with opinions, but it's the wrong argument. The issue is that merit, as it's colloquially understood, is a complete red herring. When a "merit-based appointment" is considered to mean "the most qualified person for the job", the provisions for diversity do indeed seem at odds, as Coyne describes. But what lurks just outside the conversation is that whether or not someone is good at their job isn't actually the ultimate goal. It's secondary to whether the system on the whole generates good outcomes.

In an environment where many people feed into decisions - through research, consultation, committees, governance structures, and the provision and consideration of advice - it's the dynamics and results of the group, the collective, that matter. To return to Dobson-Hughes's example, one's experience with healthcare provision for newcomers is moot in a committee stacked with colleagues that discount that knowledge.

In Collaboration and Creativity: The Small World Problem, a pair of researchers worked out a "u-shaped" benefit curve to group cohesion. Some familiarity bred comfort and collaborative norms, leading to better results. But too much meant that everyone had the same information and mental models, which inhibited those groups' ability to think outside the box and limited their results. In their model, appointing "the most qualified person for the job" would be sub-optimal - repeatedly and predictably. Turning back to the Canadian public service, such an approach would sacrifice another foundational principle: stewardship.


In the Canadian Public Service

The Public Service Employment Act seems to have squared the circle (emphasis mine):

"Under the PSEA, merit has two components. 

1. First, everyone who is appointed must meet the essential qualifications, which includes official language proficiency. 

2. Second, the manager (or other delegate of the deputy head) may take into account:

• qualifications that are considered an asset for the work, currently or in the future; 

• any current or future operational requirements and organizational needs that he or she has identified; and finally, 

• the current and future needs of the public service, as determined by the employer, in deciding on the needs of their organization."

Not so at odds

Merit and diversity only seem to be in conflict if we conceptualize people's roles in government as the execution of their job descriptions in a vacuum, rather than the role they play in the broader system. 






Note: please don't take this to mean that I think we should aim for diversity 'even when someone isn't the best person for the job'. I'm really not saying that, merely questioning the debate itself. I'm also not defending a partisan platform - this topic was around long before that.

Efficient vs Effective

by Kent Aitken

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Government is constantly advised towards greater efficiency. I think we need to become far more conscious of the word "efficient."

Efficiency is the hallmark of the industrial era and modern capitalism. It is the great boon of the division and specialization of labour, of economies of scale, and its pursuit has done wonders for our standards of living. Efficiency is the only reasonable approach in a world of finite resources, and in the era of knowledge work, we must largely discard it to actually achieve it.

Largely. If we can spend a few extra minutes finding a better way to do something more efficiently, such that we save more in the long run than we invested in the improvement, we should. For example, making an extra phone call and finding a place that will print ads for 10 cents per page, rather than 12. Or taking time to learn a faster way of designing the ad layout. XKCD conveniently mapped that cost/benefit analysis for us:

However, it's impossible to run the entire ad campaign efficiently (regardless of research suggesting that the efficacy of online ad campaigns is still frequently a mystery). Because the entire campaign is driven by actions taken long before it starts, before we start poring over data from A/B testing. Can we run it effectively? Yes. But the knowledge of the people running it, the relationships between them, the mentor that encouraged the copywriter to stay in their job? We can't capture that complex system well enough to navigate it efficiently.

A colleague can efficiently, at 60 wpm, type us an email warning us of a major problem coming down the pike. But it might not be efficient in the context of their mandate, and we certainly didn't worry about efficiency building the relationship with that person. Coffee meetings aren't, at the individual level, very efficient.

But at the organizational level, coffee might be the killer app. Even 12-person lunch tables are more effective for software developers than 4-person ones, in that they lead to less compatibility issues in the code.

Even the potential of the digital era to feed us the information we're looking for algorithmically is increasingly driven by human relationships: what the people we interact with are reading, who are we following, and who can we trust to act as amplifiers and filters.

ConocoPhillips reports that they've saved $100 million by encouraging employees to help each other solve problems. At the macro level, it's clearly "efficient". At the individual level, hardly.

We can't take an efficient approach to knowledge work. It's too complex. Instead, we have to trust ourselves and rationally apply macro-level knowledge, such as that collaboration works for organizations. Even when it's hard to see how it serves the pressing needs of the individuals within the system.

The factory-driven logic of efficiency may still apply to tasks and processes, but even there the logic is messier than you'd think. What if a theoretically less efficient system gets more use because it better matches the culture of a community? Or because it has buy-in, having been developed locally?

Digital interactions with government are an easy efficiency win. Filling out health care paperwork online is a far cheaper, quicker transaction for both parties, but what if the visit to the office creates the opportunity to discuss an emerging health concern? Expensive in-person contact with health care professionals is often worth it, in keeping people from needing even more expensive hospital stays later. In a few years we may be working on how to strategically get people through government doors at key intervals to bolster a digital by default strategy.

Knowledge work is a relational game, and we need to tread the language of efficiency cautiously. When combined with inevitable oversimplification and incentives designed for parts, not wholes, efficiency just isn't effective.

In Between Disruption and Incrementalism

by Kent Aitken

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In Tragedy in the Commons, Alison Loat and Michael MacMillan quote columnist Andrew Coyne: "People often ask: how can we reform politics? And the answer is: we can’t. There are very few institutional changes that would do any good, and whatever would has no chance of being enacted."

I'd like to stress that I want to consider this quote as a reflection on institutions, which I think can stand quite separately from the context of the column in which it was written.

This hits on a truth about many institutions: the changes that make the most difference are unlikely, precisely because they're changes. And institutions are structured as they are because of the way things have been.

Coyne applied this to politics. It can apply equally to corporations, trade organizations, policy and legal environments, governance bodies, or bureaucracies. And it does not assume a priori that change is necessarily good. It's simply a feature for organizations, of any kind, for would-be changers to consider.

So I'd like to explore a thought experiment for those who are interested in change, but have watched others before them try and fail.

Snowball Policy

One common example of behavioural economics applies to retirement savings. When people are asked if they'd like to increase their savings rate today - through increased deductions to their paycheque - they pass. They'll increase it later, after they pay X off, when things are less tight, etc. However, when asked if they'd like to commit to increasing their savings rate in the future - same deduction to take-home pay, but synced up with their next pay raise - they sign up.

The principle is simple. We can be rational about our long-term good, but immediate, emotional, and visceral needs often supersede our rationality. So what's the institutional version of that approach to retirement savings, scaled up?

It's not committing to political reform for the next time an election is called, and it's not committing to governance changes for the next time a CEO retires. Such systems are vastly more complex than even retirement savings.

The deck is stacked against anyone simply volunteering to dramatically alter the institutions they control. At the very least, it's uncertain, it's change. But it seems that many players would agree to future commitments: an algorithm, a series of if, then statements that would improve institutions, level the playing field, and leave a legacy. Especially when it's hard to predict which side of the playing field one will be on in the future.

A Thought Experiment

Take an idea like proportional representation for voting, where (in one form or another) parties gain numbers of seats based on popular vote. It's complex, a major change from the status quo, incredibly contentious, and almost certainly fits Coyne's assessment of "no chance of being enacted." That is, if a motion was to introduce legislation establishing proportional representation. What if, instead, a motion was made to introduce legislation that required parliament to do the following? (Excuse the sheer volume of variables, denoted by capital letters.)

"If voting rates were below a certain threshold in year A, form a committee of B nature to provide C number of options on electoral reform including some form of D, E, and F, and if G level of public consultation led to H result, a public referendum would be held and if I percentage of the Canadian population agreed, parliament would hold a binding vote of J nature."

Convoluted, yes, but I'm trying to draw as extreme a thought experiment as possible. Regardless, it strikes me as more likely of enactment than a straight call for a vote. And if the principle is sound, then it's really a question of degree. What's the balance of reliability, effectiveness, and distance into the future that people will actually agree to? That's the key. Great ideas with a snowball's chance in hell of success are not great ideas.

There are examples of governance through this mechanism. Consider radio spectrum auctions. These are characterized by well-entrenched interests, massive stakes in potential profits, and complex institutions. Yet, all the players agree to a complex set of conditions for future decision making and (generally) abide by them, which can maximize both fairness and public good. This isn't out of reach. It's the social contract, the legitimacy of democracy, scaled down.

Typically we consider our options for change as disruption or incrementalism. A third option has always existed, which is stealth: a disruptive plan masquerading as incremental. System consensus - in which actors agree to the conditions and systems of future decision-making, without necessarily agreeing to the decisions made - strikes me as a fourth option ripe for additional exploration.


Within the Public Service

I used a massively thorny, nation-wide concept for the thought experiment. I'd also see it as the most likely solution to persistent trust gaps (see: Risk, Failure, and Honesty and On the Trust Gap). However, I think this could apply throughout any organization.

The most likely arena for this approach to change would be where bureaucrats and elected officials intersect, in the advice and options put forth to Cabinet on big-P Policy. But here's a smaller example: the fall 2013 Policy Ignite session, in which public servants pitched innovative policy ideas to a Dragon's Den of senior executives. The executives then further explored the top pitches - which suddenly makes them responsible for the ideas.

Consider, instead, if the rule had steadfastly been that the top ideas would get piloted as presented. In this scenario, those executives are responsible for the decision to hold the competition but less so for the outcome of the pilot. Obviously there'd have to be other parameters built in, but this approach could in many ways provide the more stable platform for experimentation and testing unconventional ideas.

The question is still defining the problem, then considering all of the tools at one's disposal. But this could be one to consider adding. Maybe disruption will work, maybe the slow and steady approach, or maybe, asking for a commitment to a long-term future.