Thoughts on Problem Definition from NYU's GovLab

by Nick Charney

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Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Alan Kantrow from NYU's GovLab who was in Ottawa to frame up a collaboration with the Institute on Governance (where I am currently on interchange). In addition to back of house discussions, Alan took the time to speak to a number of different groups including the IOG's Executive Leadership Program (which is currently recruiting it's next cohort) about the importance of problem definition. It was a great talk and Alan made some key points that are worth sharing:

• We are more likely to pursue solutions that are locally optimal but globally suboptimal, this is problem shifting not problem solving.
• There is an interesting incongruence between hierarchical incentive structures that reward solving small problems and problem shifting which generates animosity among peers horizontally.
• Making the system known – the up front costs/benefits and embedded logics – explicitly puts people in an uncomfortable position because the outcomes from a good systems map are (in most cases) predictable.
• Shift the bulk of your resources upstream to problem definition, if there has been any central lesson in the work of the GovLab thus far it is that poor problem definition creates poor outcomes. Don't short change yourself upstream (problem definition).
• You need both a theory of change and a theory of action; these are not synonyms. The former is about how does a project touch people, how do they respond and what are their incentives, whereas the latter is about how you cause change to happen within that context, at what points of intervention and in what sequence?
• Far too many people ignore the risks when defining their problem; they genuflect in their direction but fail to go beyond a discussion of type and probability. There is tremendous value in assessing risks against other criteria, time, location, human resource resiliency, cash flow, etc. Resiliency against certain risk types is an important competitive advantage, it allows people to bid on risk.

As a side note, I left the talk wondering about the tension between the amount of time and effort required for proper upstream problem definition and the super-fast superficial culture that reinforces heads down doing instead of heads up thinking.

Are Public Servants Interchangeable?

by Nick Charney

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On Tuesday I attended IPAC's Summer Policy Conference on the New Government Leader. I was a participant, a panellist and a sponsor; life's complicated and lines are blurred but that's neither here nor there. During the course of the day there were a number of threads that wound themselves through the conversations. The one that seemed to be of the most interest was that of interchange (and the suite of related issues such as talent management). Uncharacteristically, I bit my tongue as the conversations unfolded, and when I had the mic as a panellist I offered to share some thoughts on the matter. Since the focus of the panel was on collaboration, data analytics and networked policy development, no one took me up on my offer, though some people did approach me afterwards. Here are my thoughts:

On the whole, interchange is a great program; at least is has been for me thus far. It was an opportunity to try something new, lose some baggage and rediscover the art of the possible. The deal took a long time to get inked and there were some minor complications, but once there was agreement on terms, it was a fairly straightforward process.

What I found fascinating about the discussion was that despite the fact that everyone is so quick to admit that the public service has lost its monopoly on policy advice – which again, I take as a proxy for influence (See: Is Innovation is Service Delivery a Blind Spot in Canada) – they are so beholden to working within it. In other words, while everyone seemed interested in using the interchange program to gain outside experience, their interest is tempered by a palpable reticence to simply pursue the experience on their own accord; leaving the public service is off the table.

Now, don't mistake my observation. I knowingly make it from the privileged position of having already secured an interchange and I fully admit that I was reluctant to report to my new employer before the interchange ink was dry. There's something cultural here worth exploring, when even the heretics among us are reticent to walk away. In other words, does this cultural homogeneity consistency lend itself more readily to the question of whether or not public servants interchangeable, rather than the question of whether or not they ought to go on interchange?

The Underappreciated Impact of Digital

by Kent Aitken

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I still read articles that discuss how digital technology and connectivity are transforming democracy, unlocking avenues for communication and governance. Entirely, totally true. No argument. But there’s an angle that seems underappreciated to me.

Most articles talk about it as we have found these people interested in what we’re doing, and we can connect to them, so we will. However, the far more interesting thing to me is that these people were always here, we just didn’t know how to find them.

The digital era both revealed the problem - that our decisions touch far more people than we once realized, and can impact their lives significantly - and presented a solution.

But, two things:

First, it's a solution, not the solution. Just because we can find people through digital means doesn’t make it the default interaction channel forever. There’s a reason online communities hold meetups. We need to know when to deviate from digital.

Second, recognizing that in the past we had a measurement problem, underestimating the breadth of our impact, we shouldn’t assume that we’ve solved it completely. Rather, we should be deeply concerned about who we haven’t found yet. Even for those on the easy side of the digital divide, not everyone raises their hand.

We always talk about digital technology as a solution,  but the problem that hyperconnectivity revealed is at least as interesting. This is the underrated impact of digital technology: not that it enabled government to connect and engage, but that it made us realize that we should have been doing so all along.

Note: this is an argument I've partially made in different forms before (See: Complexity is a Measurement Problem, People Act, Technology Helps, or Collaboration: Overhyped and Underappreciated), so apologies if this is old hat. But I wanted to explore this particular angle of it, and it'll play into a forthcoming deeper dive on this idea from last week: The New Nature of Process.