Professional and Non Partisan Thoughts on Renewing the Public Service

Three Horizons: an Exercise in Pivot Points

noreply@blogger.com (Kent Aitken) — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 18:53:00 +0000

by Kent Aitken

In fall 2019, I wrote my first couple posts on CPSR since September 2017, and tried to set myself a commitment device to start writing again. Which failed, and epicly. This is my first since.

I really enjoy writing, and it helped me think through things I was seeing and reading about. I felt like it was an important weekly habit. So I’ve both missed it and felt guilty for a couple years now, and tried to push myself back into the habit. (I still write, just different stuff in different places.)

I had misdiagnosed the absence as just that I’d broken the habit, and subsequently was trying the wrong fix of simply rebuilding it. After a long time, I started to get a better sense of why I wasn’t writing:

· The stuff I wrote about and my day job became increasingly closely knit, which made critical exploration feel less appropriate

· For personal reasons, I stepped back a bit from community spaces and events (who and which I also miss), and a lot of my posts were direct results of great conversations with people, both for reasons of insight and inspiration

· I felt like I was increasingly better off deferring to others with more expertise in difference spaces

The last one is of particular interest for today. I’m a generalist. For a while I felt that there was a value in exploring change and how it fit into the wider ecosystem. But as “collaborative culture” increasingly became the norm, and technological adoption went from “figuring out a tool” to “patterns for finding and figuring out the right tool, in context,” I felt I had less to say. The general trends splintered into niches, and other people had those covered better than I could. A lot of what felt like trends, changes, and innovations in public service was really more like an internet-enabled mass transfer of information across geography and contexts. We’ve gone from primarily expending effort to find information, experts, and practices, to expending effort to filter and distill it. Once that deluge settled from discovery into productivity or dismissal, it became about use in context. Less of a need, I thought, for turbo-meta trend posts.

Everyone goes through pivot points and moments of reinvention. Sometimes it’s borderline accidental, when you take on a new role and change to fill the new space. But I suspect between the mass forced introspection of 2020 and the fact that hyperconnectivity and collaboration are no longer competitive advantages as public service and internet culture increasingly meet in the middle, there are a lot of people thinking “what’s next for me?”

Three Horizons

I borrowed and bastardized the Three Horizons model that Policy Horizons and Blaise Hebert showed me (if you Google it, there are two models, both good, but for different things). Generally, we’d use this to explore changes to an industry, market, society, or a paradigm.

In general: the things that got us here aren’t necessarily the things we need in the future. So we draw three horizons, representing the fading past, the present in some stage of emergence, and the coming future.

Y axis being importance, X axis being time.

I wrote out the skills, knowledge, and behaviours that had served me in getting to where I am. Then, what I was using currently. Then, finally, what was increasing in importance, what I was finding myself using and leaning on more and more, and what I thought the future looked like.

This, of course, relies on knowing where you’re going, which was also a mystery to me. So I also used this process to explore whether the future direction was desirable and felt right.

Everyone I know has had moments where they’ve given something up for some reason and wanted to “get back into it.” Time passes, and they still haven’t, and then you eventually reflect on whether it’d be worth it now. Would you be happier if you restarted and rebuilt the habit? Or was it just that old you valued it, and now you no longer do, but it’s hanging on as part of your imagined identity?

For me, it was closer to the latter. There wasn’t much concordance between the first and third horizons. I still valued elements of the first horizon. But it wasn’t a portrait of me or my future. The third horizon felt closer to home.

This 20-minute exercise unblocked a long-standing uncertainty for me, and pointed to practical steps, gaps to fill. Might be worth a shot if you’re feeling the same.

Thoughts on the Public Sector amid the Pandemic

noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Charney) — Fri, 22 May 2020 12:30:00 +0000

by Nick Charney

First let me preface my thoughts with a well worn -- and probably utterly useless if pressed -- disclaimer: what follows is series of interconnected thoughts on political theory, policy ideas, public institutions, and the public sector writ large. It's a sector I've worked in and written about for nigh on 15 years now, so while my reflections are familiar, the are not intimate. They are based on what I'm observing out there and not what I'm working on in here. I'll try to be succinct.

On Political Theory

I find it incredibly interesting that -- as former Clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick remarked in the Hill Times -- (paraphrasing) Canadians have instinctively turned to the public sector for help. Undoubtedly, the role that government(s) play in shaping societies is becoming increasingly more apparent as the Prime Minister, Premiers, and Public Health Officials announce new measures and provide updates to citizens and civil servants successfully deliver on those measures at breakneck speed. Whatever the history books have to say about the public sector's response to the pandemic will undoubtedly come to shape societal views on the role of the sector in society for the foreseeable future.

The role of the media is also far more prominent as the demand for information increases, so too does news consumption, and the importance of reliable, evidence based reporting. Literacy is even more important as the battle between reliable information and misinformation unfolds across a myriad of platforms, legitimate or otherwise, that are either hand curated or algorithmically served to users. Make no mention of people in key leadership positions -- ranging from big 'P' political to small 'c' community -- spreading misinformation (by design or by neglect) and putting others at risk. As your average upper-middle class, university educated human being, I am consuming everything from thoughtful public affairs programming (i.e. TVO's The Agenda w/Steve Paikin) to random reddit threads highlighting the absolute breakdown of social fabrics and basic human niceties. That said, I take some solace in the fact that the latter of which doesn't seem to be as bad in Canada as it is elsewhere.

I'm also interested in the relationship between Canadian's sense of civic duty and the pandemic. Voluntary stay at home orders seemed to been taken seriously and we've avoided having to invoke mandatory lockdowns. I'm wondering how much of this is rooted in la politesse Canadienne and our relationship with our healthcare system. It stands in sharp contrast to much of what's being reported on from our neighbors to the south.

There's a lot being written about mission-orientation, how mission-driven governments have fared better in the COVID-19 crisis, how the pandemic creates an opportunity to develop a new, public-interest-based approach to innovation, and ultimately, how we should recognize the state’s power to create value. A successful mission-oriented strategy is one that mobilizes all sectors of society (i.e. public, private, not-for-profit, academic, etc.); it requires that governments play a strong shaping and convening role, that the media act as an independent check and balance on progress, and that citizens accept the fulfillment of the mission as a part of their civic duty.

There is equally increasing attention being paid to modern monetary theory (MMT). Some have argued that the Coronavirus has destroyed the myth of the deficit, others that MMT is the only appropriate response to the pandemic, and still others that we ought not be worried about public spending to stabilize the global economy. There are also a couple of policy ideas that are gaining attention (discussed below) that are very much linked to the MMT school of thought even if discussions about them don't invoke the nomenclature.

In short, the Overton window seems to be opening more widely and the range of what is being discussed as viable policy options is broader. Many are citing Rahm Emanuel's old adage, "Never let a good crisis go to waste," but are cutting the quotation short, leaving out the equally important second half: "It's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." Surely there will be consequences to missing the opportunity.

On Policy Ideas

The pandemic has had an incredible impact on global economies and (for some) completely obliterated their work-life balance. As our economies re-open, some are arguing for a shorter, 4-day work week, including the Prime Minister of New Zealand (who is currently the country’s most popular leader in 100 years thanks to her pandemic response).

With countries creating a myriad of new economic supports, some countries (e.g. Scotland, Spain, Finland) are looking at Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a potential solution. In the United States, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has given former presidential candidate Andrew Yang $5M to build his case for UBI, which is starting to look like a viable policy option. Here in Canada, David Dodge (former Governor of the Bank of Canada) remarked in a recent Public Policy Forum podcast that this is the closest Canada has every been to having UBI. Former Senator, Hugh Segal (a long time UBI advocate) made a compelling case for the underlying economics (and simplification of our social safety net) in a recent Recovery Project webcast, and the Macleans editorial board just asked whether or not UBI will be this country's pandemic legacy. It's also worth noting that a few weeks ago, the Prime Minister rejected the idea for now, but that doesn't mean it isn't being discussed.

In the midst of stabilization attempts, Governments are also concurrently planning their stimulus/recovery measures. Recognizing this, many are calling for Green Stimulus. The UN chief asked governments not to use public funds to save polluting industries, the International Energy Agency has said that the crisis will wipe out demand for fossil fuels, and more recently here at home, a new advocacy group (with some notable names) is pushing for a green recovery plan (joining the likes of organizations such as Smart Prosperity and Pembina). We know the pandemic has had an impact on global emissions but that much more needs to be done if we are to meet our climate objectives. Using stimulus money to advance climate (and other societal) goals (i.e. diversity and inclusion) seems to make sense. In fact a recent study indicates that it would be the most cost-effective way both to revive virus-hit economies and strike a decisive blow against climate change. Perhaps it could even put to bed the false dichotomy of economy vs environment.

On Public Institutions

Often when I speak to folks about innovation in the public sector I start by asking them to engage in a thought experiment. For a minute imagine that you can throw away all of the existing structures of government, name your five biggest policy priorities, and explain to me how to most effectively tackle them. Chances are it looks different then the current institutional array. That said, it likely includes government institutions, many of which likely look a lot like those institutions we currently have. However, what folks usually describe is something broader and less restrictive. More often, it sounds a lot like mission orientation, mentioned above, without necessarily invoking the term. The truth is that there is an incredible amount of value in the current institutional array, and we should be skeptical of anyone who argues we should tear it all down and start from scratch. Everything isn't broken, we don't need to change everything. Let's take what works and build around it. One needs to look no further than the how the pandemic has impacted the United States to see the cumulative impacts of winding down various state run programs, departments, and agencies. Again, our conceptualization of what public institutions can and can't do could shift dramatically against the backdrop of the pandemic and the actions taken (or not taken) by governments around the world.

On Technology within the Civil Service

Civil servants at all levels, regardless of their opinion, now have to deal with working from home. Resisting telework and/or flexible work arrangements is now impossible. In retrospect many of the arguments against it seem silly in retrospect seem silly. Or do they? While the usual suspects were quick to issue their "I told you so(s)" and "the genie's out of the bottle(s)", there's still a lot to be done. To invoke a quotation favoured by the technologists, future is here, it just is unequally distributed. Not everyone has access to hardware they need to connect to government networks securely, not everyone can be on the VPN (which never expected to carry a full workforce for an entire 9-5 workday). Hardware is in demand and networks are actively managed, certain tracks of work are being prioritized, others de-prioritized. We may have been thrust into the deep end of flexible work, but not everyone knows how to swim, and there simply isn't enough room in the pool for all of us to be in there at once, less few of us drown (to continue the metaphor at risk of straining it). While the experts in digital and/or open government and/or public engagement have historically focused their attention on the tools of the trade (social media, data, dialogue, etc.) what we are in most need of is more of what I will call 'meat and potatoes' IT infrastructure. Whether or not your department's IT department blocks social media or your Minister is on Twitter is moot when you don't have the tools you need to get on the network in the first place. The importance of 'hard digital infrastructure' cannot be understated, its a core business enabler.

The successful deployment of the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit could not have been possible without digital technology. The deployment of the benefit has proved that governments can deliver IT projects effectively and efficiently -- and quite frankly, calls into question why years later public servants are still dealing with pay issues arising from the Phoenix Pay System (but let's park that). By all accounts, the project has been an incredible success and is helping millions of Canadians access benefits almost immediately, without issue. That said, the underlying technology or the digital skills needed to develop, deploy, and maintain it, are only as valuable as the analogue, old school, policy chops, needed to design and implement the policy measure. Analogue threads the needle, digital delivers the goods; we should be talking more about the policy choices we are making and less about the digital infrastructure we use to make good on them.

On the Culture of the Civil Service

Much like the status of individual civil servants IT infrastructure, results may vary. If your team culture sucked before the pandemic, it likely sucks now. Good teams, and good teams with experience working flexible work arrangements have a distinct advantage. My team was just getting its feet wet with flexible work arrangements and we fared pretty good, but there was definitely an adjustment period, and we are constantly working to improve the experience for everyone. Job mobility is also incredibly difficult right now -- unless you are in a rotational program or moving to Pandemic related files -- and on-boarding on new teams virtually is the new normal. In short, we are in this for the long haul. Personally, I'm mentally preparing myself to work from home for the next year. As a manager I'm quite comfortable managing people remotely. As a people person, I must confess that I miss daily face-to-face interactions my team members tremendously.

On Linking it All Together

How governments respond over the next year will be more important than ever. They could embrace MMT and leverage the value public institutions to create country (or global) missions that fundamentally reshape the fabric of societies. They could take advantage of a wider Overton window, enact green stimulus measures to mobilize all sectors of society, and introduce conditionality on government support that helps ensure non-government actors continue to work towards that mission. They could introduce measures that incorporate changes to how we work and how we are compensated for that work with a view to creating a more diverse and inclusive society. They could appeal to our renewed sense of civic duty, and build that mission safely from our homes, strengthening the current institutional array where is makes sense and creating new supports where they are most needed. Or, they could just let the opportunity pass them by.

Ultimately, the choice can be simplified: will governments work to get 'back to normal' despite the pandemic exposing the holes in our social fabric, or will they try to mend them, and build something better?

Book Review: The Value of Everything by Mariana Mazzucato

noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Charney) — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 12:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I received an email from Stewart Fast. Stewart is a fellow public servant and wanted to share his review Mariana Mazzucato's The Value of Everything.

He can be found on Twitter @S_Fast_ and on LinkedIn, his review is below (Thanks Stewart!)

The Review

Mariana Mazzucato’s “The Value of Everything” provides a compelling critique of economic assumptions of value-creating activities, innovation policy and the role of the public sector. At this moment of extraordinary government investment and intervention in the Canadian economy to withstand the COVID-19 pandemic, Mazzucato’s arguments for more recognition of the role that government plays in not only regulating markets, but in creating them are timely.

The book’s main argument is that many activities regarded as value-creating are in fact value-extracting with some nefarious consequences for societies. In a highly accessible fashion, Mazzucato documents a change in economic norms to narrowly regard value as anything that can be priced. As a result, many activities (e.g., financial services, specialty drug sales, Uber) that would be seen by classical economists as creating no new wealth and engaging in unproductive rent-seeking behaviour are instead immensely profitable activities aided by government policy. She uses this distinction to good effect throughout the book showing perverse examples such as huge increases in the price of drugs not invented by the companies that are enjoying the profits.

Mazzucato dedicates a sizeable portion of the book to “financialization”, or the spread of financial practices and attitudes into the “real” economy. She notes that until the 1960’s national accounts considered financial activity as outside of the production sphere and adding no value to GDP. In current assessments banks make a positive contribution to GDP calculated in part by the difference between lending and borrowing rates. While recognizing that financial services are important to the functioning of the economy, Mazzucato questions whether the intermediary function of financial institutions can truly be thought of as creating value. After all, the mortgage backed security market that led to the 2008 financial crisis was generating substantial interest payments and thus was tracking as GDP growth before being ultimately revealed as deeply problematic.

As a public servant working in research funding and science / innovation policy, I found Mazzucato’s extended assessment of financialization particularly provocative as it relates to corporate investment behaviour. She critiques the practice of maximizing shareholder value of publicly traded companies through share buy-backs which have the effect of increasing earnings per share. Earnings per share has become a measure of corporate success but chasing earnings per share in this fashion may be occuring at the expense of investment in plant and equipment and R&D. She cites evidence that investment rates for publicly traded companies under pressure to maximize earnings per share are substantially less than privately owned companies.

The challenge of how to increase business investment (expenditures) in research and development (BERD) has long been a priority for Canadian science and innovation policy-makers. The Superclusters initiative and a wide range of R&D support programs all aim to address this, yet Canada continues to rank lower than the OECD average in BERD. The Council of Canadian Academies 2018 report on the state of R&D in Canada comprehensively documents low BERD and suggests part of the reason is a high proportion of low-tech sectors in Canada. Mazzucato’s observations point to another possible factor at play. Perhaps Canadian industry is maximizing shareholder value through short-term financial strategies rather than long term investment in R&D.

The final chapters of the book advocate for a reorientation of the current innovation narrative to recognize, celebrate and advance the role the public sector plays in risk-taking and developing new technologies. This message will be familiar to readers of her 2013 book “The Enterpreneurial State” reviewed previously. Mazzucato returns to those arguments stressing that it was government, not private-sector, investment that led to key technologies including GPS and touch-screens at the foundation of whole new sectors. She advocates for the state to reap some return from successful investments and for state investment in infrastructure, R&D and in risky technologies especially in times of austerity.

My only real criticism with Mazzucato’s book is that it is light on analysis of her proposed solutions. We are told for example that policy-makers should broker deals that generate symbiotic private-public partnerships through state investment banks focussed on long-term finance to support risky endeavours, or that the price of drugs should be made to reflect the overall input from state supported research and not force the taxpayer to pay twice. Yet, there are real-life instances of government action for both of these examples. What can we learn from those efforts?

In “The Value of Everything”, Mariana Mazzucato has once again thrown down a challenge for readers to see government in a different light. While some may quibble with her assumptions, the overall call to look deeply at what value means in our economy is compelling. In this time of unprecedented public investment to face the challenge of COVID-19, the importance of government as a lender of last resort, a funder of life-saving discoveries and an economic stimulator is clear. Even skeptics may begin to look more seriously at Mazzucato’s invitation to recognize, celebrate and advance government as a risk-taking innovative co-creator of markets.

Turning Good Personal Habits into Strong Management Practice

noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Charney) — Fri, 07 Feb 2020 12:00:00 +0000

by Nick Charney

We all know that there seems to be a lack of support for employees transitioning to the executive cadre, but there is a similar lack of support given to employees making the transition into management roles. As a manager I'm responsible for a team of seven, myself included. In all honesty, learning how to manage other people effectively has definitely meant some muddling through. Lucky for me, my team has been pretty forgiving over the past couple of years as I learned the ropes. Lucky for them, I am someone who comes to the job with the mindset of being people inclined. I'm interested in management culture, I wrote a playbook on how to be more innovative, and my expectations of my team's approach and performance can be gleaned therefrom.

There's still much for me to learn about managing other people effectively. That said, there's a couple of things know to be true, for example, managing a team is a constant renegotiation of the terms to which everyone has either explicitly, implicitly, or complicity, agreed to come together under. That a team's culture, it's modus operandi, is constantly in flux. That it obviously changes when people join or leave but that it also changes to accommodate even small variances in how or to whom work is assigned to, what stories are told, and what stories people tell themselves. Misconceptions and a lack of clarity can be culture killers, I err heavily on the side of transparency and inclusion, tempered with honesty and a willingness to share my own feelings of (at different times) powerlessness, frustration, disagreement, but also empowerment, pride, and jubilation. I've been criticized for being too open and honest with my team, but I disagree with the criticisms based on the strength of those relationships. Being both physically and emotionally available to my team consistently throughout the work week (and at times beyond it) for both their professional and personal well-being is by far the most exhausting, challenging, and rewarding part of my job. We spend too much time together to be anything short of family, so we need to be functional. That doesn't mean that we always agree, or that we can't improve, it just means that we have a strong enough foundation to do those things in safe and productive ways. I was frustrated a few weeks ago and everyone on the team knew it, they quietly got together, wrote a very thoughtful card and organized a lunch for me. I've never been a part of a team that was as thoughtful, let alone been privileged enough to be at the helm of it.

As I embark further down this people management journey and start to look at (and yes, apply to) executive positions, I am focusing even more attention on turning good personal habits into strong management practice. Below are some of the tools / approaches we're using in the team right now. Remember, this is all in flux, we oscillate often, try new things, etc.

Flexible Work Schedule

We have recently created a weekly schedule that outlines when each of us will be in the office and when we will be teleworking (and over what hours). We are pairing this with phone number and a ground rule that we are to call anyone teleworking in the case of urgent requests, and that those calls will be answered and/or returned promptly. We will share the schedule / contact numbers with those who need it up the chain and make a hard copies available outside our offices to help deal with the passersby that might prefer to pop in on an item and be (unintentionally, and unfairly) frustrated to find us not in our office. The schedule acts as a baseline for our flex work but can be modified on a week to week basis. We are aiming to have modifications to the schedule known at least one week in advance for planning purposes. We also want to retain a critical mass in the office and have all committed to being the office on Wednesdays for our weekly moderated team meeting (detailed below). Within the flex work package, we have employees working compressed hours and in other cities.

Weekly Moderated Team Meeting

We diagnosed the need for an alternative approach to team meetings because they were largely caucus style meetings that weren't getting the best out of the team as a whole. We started a discussion about how we ran meetings, shared some reading, and decided to try to move to moderated format. Admittedly, this felt very weird at first but we are getting the hang of it. My biggest mistake when trying the moderated meetings was declaring victory too soon, assuming that we could do away with the formalities because the new culture had taken root, when it hadn't. I had to backtrack the next meeting. I apologized for the mistake and we paired back some of the formality without doing away with it altogether. By and large the team seems to dig the format and we are getting greater participation from everyone in the team. We have started discussing whether or not we should try to inject the format into broader divisional meetings, but that's still TBD. The moderated meeting can last between and hour and ninety minutes and is broken down into three parts: management updates, formal agenda items, and a priority round table. We start with management updates because its mostly just me sharing information and answering follow up questions. I transition into a moderator role when we move to formal agenda items. Agenda items are determined and communicated in advance of the meeting. Team members may put themselves on the agenda and lead the item or they may ask their colleagues to prepare something and lead. Everyone is given amble lead time to prepare their item. After formal agenda items are complete, we move to a priority round table. Team members can use the time to flag issues, ask for help, or signal their availability to help. No one is allowed to put another person 'on the spot' with a demand during this time and team members are free to 'pass' if there is nothing that they need to raise. I remind everyone regularly that the round table is not a 'justify your work week to me' meeting or check in. We try not to juggle these meetings and prioritize them as they represent a cornerstone our time together. That said, we proceed regardless of numbers of people and with our without me.

Stand-up Meetings

We run 15 minute stand-up meetings twice a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) at 1pm. Given that these are flex days for some, we are using Google Hangouts as a platform for a video call. This is largely to cover off anything that is 'exploding' and/or needs attention. I also try to flag any absences or (corporate) reminders that need flagging. These proceed regardless of turn out. We've only been doing this for a few weeks but I think they can be effective, especially as a quick check in on a flex day (I flex Tuesdays), although the video call element does mean we need to look presentable!

Bilats (aka Office Hours)

I reserve thirty minutes each week for each team member to be used (or not used) at their discretion. We treat them like a university teaching assistant's office hours. Team members know I will be available if they need me, but they don't always need me or are dealing with work that takes priority. We often speak about work, career development, and even personal matters. We often do it in my office, while going for a walk, grabbing a coffee, or even over lunch. Its a two way dialogue and forms much of the basis upon which I get to know my team members. Again, this isn't a 'tell me why you are getting paid this week' meeting. My only rule of thumb here is that I check in with the team member if they haven't been to office hours for a couple of weeks.

Information Sharing & Tools

I'm an over sharer generally speaking, so its no surprise that I share a lot of information with my team. Not all of it is actionable or required reading but I think its important for them to see what information flows in the department look like and know that I'm not intentionally holding things back from them. Often I will share something with a qualifier, i.e. this is important to this context, or see page 5 for the crux of the argument. The qualifier allows people to cut to the heart of the issue, it also gives them a sense of how engaged I was or wasn't with the content I am forwarding.

We are also experimenting with tools like Slack and Trello but we don't have those things locked in culturally yet. Slack will likely cut down on general email chatter, esp. with offsite employees and I'm mainly tracking to do lists on Trello.

Friday Appreciation Emails

Every Friday I have half an hour blocked in my schedule to send the team an email outlining what I appreciated about them that week. At the start of the week I open an email and write each of their names down. I save the email to my draft folder and anytime throughout the week I see something impressive, I jot it down in the email. I write it up in greater detail on Friday afternoon and send it before leaving for the day. I make a concerted effort to also use the opportunity to practice my second language, drafting parts of the email in french.

Parler ma deuxième langue

Je fais un effort concerté pour parler le français le plus que possible avec mon équipe. Cela comprend à la fois les francophones qui apprécient l'effort et les anglophones qui (au moins dans mon équipe) essaient d'apprendre le français. It's not perfect, but it creates more space for french in the workplace.

Succession Planning

Rather than hire from outside the team, we are moving through a succession plan that will give each team member an opportunity to act in the position prior to opening it to a competitive process. As a hiring manager this is significantly more difficult than simply pursuing an external hire. It takes more time, it takes more paperwork, and creates the risk of hard feelings and/or flight after the results are in. Investing in your people is also (in my view) probably the right thing to do.

Performance Management System

Last Performance Management Agreement (PMA) cycle I drafted standard language for objectives and criteria for everyone on the team, we vetted the list together, I incorporated feedback and distributed the list to the team. Individual team members were free to select objectives from the list for use in their PMAs. We are also documenting any/all training and acting assignments for posterity. It's not the most useful tool in the tool kit but I did find being regimented on the language helped bring the team together around a set of shared objectives and understanding.

Other things I'm thinking about

How to better balance and value work, work styles, and preferences against dichotomous variables such as longer tasks vs short turn arounds, big picture thinking vs detailed and discrete tasks, etc.
How to hold team members to account on things you are encouraging them to do (i.e. meeting new people)
How to better acknowledge the traditional lands we are meeting on (i.e. prior to interdepartmental meetings, etc.)
How to best honour the spirit of ideas brought forward by team members

Things we tried but didn't work

We tried to discuss the team's training and development in the context of participatory budgeting -- which was brought forward as an idea by a team member -- but ultimately failed in part because our resource base eroded but also because training and development can sometimes be something that people don't feel comfortable speaking to in a larger group setting.
We created a shared outlook calendar for flexible work but it got unwieldy, creating a table in word was much easier.

How to interview (For an entry level Government of Canada Policy Job)

noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Charney) — Fri, 24 Jan 2020 13:00:00 +0000

by Nick Charney

I've interviewed a lot of candidates over the past few years supporting my department's Policy Analyst Recruitment and Development Program (PARDP). I love helping out on interview panels. It gives me a window into new talent and role in shaping the future of the organization. That said, not all interviews are created equal, In my experience, the difference between a good interview and a not so good interview really boils down to two things: structure and preparation.

Structure

As a candidate you will almost always receive information about what knowledge and competencies will be tested in advance of the actual interview. Sometimes you can glean the list from the job poster, other times it will be in email / correspondence from the department, and it will also usually be repeated by the interviewers during the actual interview.

Knowledge criteria is pretty straight forward, you have to know about the department, its mandate, priorities, and relationships with other governments departments and agencies, etc. All of this is publicly available information on the department's website.

With respect to competencies, while It seems obvious, it is paramount that you speak directly to the competency being tested in as concise a manner as possible. Being short and direct can often be a more effective strategy than spinning an elaborate tale. Interviewers are looking for specific things and the more explicit you can be about serving those up the better. Your job as a candidate is to make it as easy as possible for the interviewer to screen you in.

You may wish to restate the competency when you frame the response. For example, if you are being tested on 'collaboration', use the word 'collaborate':

"In my current role as a junior policy advisor I collaborate with my colleagues on a regular basis..."

Then speak to how you do it, use the words again if you have to:

"This collaboration often takes the form of email exchanges, meetings, jointly writing documents, assisting in briefings ... "

Speak to how you approach the issue and what result it yields in general.

"When collaborating with colleagues I prefer in person meetings because I find it helps build consensus. It allows us to work through issues in real time. My colleagues appreciate my open, down to earth style, and I appreciate theirs. It lets us build rapport."

Then speak to a hyper specific example (if possible) where your competency was required to overcome an issue or solve a problem. Provide as many pertinent details as you can. You want to demonstrate that you can put the competency into practice:

"When I was working on the division's TPS Report I was responsible for X ... We faced Y challenge ... Ultimately we were able to overcame it together by collaborating on Z."

Finally, circle back to the competency in your concluding statements (close the loop):

"In sum, I collaborate regularly as a part of my core responsibilities, this takes many forms but my demeanor always garners positive response from my colleagues, especially in more difficult situations such as the one I outlined previously. "

Preparation

Again, knowledge criteria is pretty straightforward -- do some research (study!).

On competencies, questions often take the form of "Tell me about a time when ..." (e.g. you faced a challenge, you took on additional responsibility, you tried to innovate, you had a workplace conflict, etc). Therefore I recommend identifying compelling, work-related stories that demonstrate competencies in question,

Further, for ease of use / re-use, I would recommend that you use some of your down time to identify situations that you could use to speak to multiple competencies during an interview. You want to be able to tell a compelling story during the interview, so think about these scenarios as short vignettes and write out the important details in advance (remember, preparation!). It doesn't have to be overly complicated but even having a rough sketch of the situation, most important details, and knowing what competencies the story demonstrates in advance can prove incredibly helpful.

I did this type of advanced preparation when I interviewed for my current position. I took note of the competencies being tested, thought up ideas days before the interview, chose the best among them and gave each vignette a title that included the competencies being tested. I then took some time to write out the pertinent details (think story board). When it came time to do the actual interview, the first thing I did when I walked into the prep room (for my 30 minutes of prep time prior to the interview) was write down the titles of my vignettes. I used the remaining time to flesh them out on paper, writing down key points I wanted to get across. The interview itself was probably the smoothest one I have ever participated in because I walked in with a plan and was able to clearly articulate my story and demonstrate the competencies in question. Being prepared also has the ancillary benefit freeing up cognitive resources that would otherwise have to be expended thinking about an example on the fly and triangulating that example against the competency profile.

One other thing about preparation: it will almost always feel awkward to use some of the question answering time to quietly outline your approach but resist the urge to just jump into the question and start talking. Don't be in a rush, it is very rare for a candidate to use all of the allotted time actually answering the questions. So take your time. If you jot down key words before you launch into your answer you can check them off as you speak to them. This helps ensure that you hit all the major points you wanted to hit. Also, don't be afraid to come back and add more details later if you missed them on the first round. You aren't penalized for coming back to revise an answer, but you would be penalized for an incomplete answer.

Putting it all together: Structure and Preparation

I've had a lot of discussions over my career about the usefulness and effectiveness of formal interview processes, and while they aren't perfect and can obviously be improved, I think they can be incredibly useful. In short, in the absence of actually being able to get to know a candidate, or when dealing with high volumes, using interviews is an effective way to determine if a candidate can bring structure to their ideas and whether or not they take the time to prepare, both of which are incredibly important to me as a hiring manager.

Uninformed bellowing into a cacophony

noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Charney) — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 13:00:00 +0000

by Nick Charney

Last week Kent published "Group Hugs and Stating the Obvious" and while it just barely scratches the surface of what is I'm sure to come, there was a lot in there worth reacting to.

Quotations and Musings

"In 2010 I attended an event variously called GOC3/Collaborative Culture Camp and Collaborative Management Camp. This was back in the halcyon days of our youth when events had tweet walls, displaying the inner workings of the hivemind ... At one point, the tweet wall showed someone’s assessment that the event was “So far, mostly group hugs and stating the obvious.”

... Which serves today as a launching point for thinking about that community, how it has changed, and where we are today. (Crowdsourced timeline here: http://gc20.pbworks.com/w/page/99478487/FrontPage.) ..."

I was one of the organizers of the event, I can't recall how many folks were involved but it definitely included the myriad of (at the time) usual suspects with whom I've a lot of great memories -- back when as Kent mentioned, the community was largely knowable.

The event was premised on the notion that public servants needed to understand how to collaborate before they could understand how openly accessible, web based technology can help (or hinder) that collaboration. It arose primarily as contrasting approach to the Government Technology Exhibition Conference (GTEC) which was heavily focused on enterprise wide technologies. I recall at the time trying to brand it as the 'anti-GTEC' and even at one point suggested we hold it on the same day in order to make a point. I was young and rebellious back then but luckily ultimately cooler, more experienced heads prevailed. We held it in and around GTEC but didn't in fact go head to head on the dates.

My fondest memories of the event was (1) Peter Stoyko's presentation which was entirely egg themed and culminated with him throwing one into the air while at the podium (showmanship!) and (2) playing a time lapse of the GCPEDIA wiki page that we used to organize the event. The video perfectly embodied the collaboration required to pull the event together while underscoring how simple open collaborative technologies can make organizing and documenting. It just felt like the right way to end the program.

Ironically, the next year GTEC swallowed GOC3 by integrating its focus, programming, and a selection of community members into its own. Kent himself wound up later being quite involved with GTEC himself and I started attending the event. C'est la vie, I suppose. In retrospect, while GOC3 attracted some new faces it was as much of a celebration / coming out party for the community as it was an event genuinely aimed at helping others build or augment their capacity for collaboration. There was a lot of youthful enthusiasm and great fun was had by (hopefully) all.

If you are interested in a deeper trip down memory lane, I suggest you read The Gentrification of W2P. GOC3 was a watershed moment for public servants online, but there's a lot that happened well before and after that that's worth noting if you want the full context. Anyone who's come into government recently may not have an appreciation for how new, novel, or risky their current -- seemingly natural -- online behaviors once were. Early movers faced a lot of criticism, skepticism, and even punishment for things that would generally go unnoticed in today's more (to channel Kent) 'cacophonous environment'. In fairness, this is something many of us predicted happening given that tight oversight of online communications doesn't scale well to a national organization of 250,000 people because trust -- not oversight -- is the only thing that scales (post circa 2012).

"At one point in 2006, there were zero public servants on Twitter – because there was no Twitter. By 2010 it was probably in the scant hundreds; you could reach the end of the community, so why not follow everyone? We could figure out the “why” out later..."

These were exciting times. Full of meetups (tweetups really), energy, information sharing, and informal problem solving. We mapped which departments were blocking access to social media and discussed the merits its use for official communications and less official policy analysis. While social media opened new channels of communication the universe was -- again as Kent said -- still knowable, manageable, and one could log off at the end of the day feeling they had a good understanding of the 'public servants on Twitter' online discourse of the day.

"That was before the era of information overload and much need for Twitter hiatuses or culling who you follow ... The community matured, grew, and one of the driving common problems – bringing government into the social media era – started looking like a solv-ed/able problem. So people started subdividing into more niche and specialized sub-elements ...

... the other increasingly plausible lens was that additional voices were as likely to just be uninformed bellowing into a cacophony. My standards for what I posted about and why went up."

The community of public servants online now -- if such a boundary even exists -- is unknowable, and every follow, retweet, or click is a potential rabbit hole in the making. On this I have many thoughts but mostly they always come in a way that makes me look like an old man shaking my first at the sky. In short, I'll simply say, I don't subscribe to the hype nearly as much as I did when I was younger. I'm far more likely to be skeptical than I am to be excited by new technologies, or more specifically what people are purporting to do with them. The worst of the cacophony is a self serving mix of branding, bias, and well worn stereotypical tropes about culture change. Rich coming from me I know, perhaps it's audacious to bite my thumb at what I was actively engaged in for years. I recall a friend of mine characterizing (jokingly, I hope) my early zeal for the microphone (in real life) or megaphone (on the internet) as "a willingness to speak at the opening of a window". Maybe that's too harsh a characterization of the current state of affairs. After all, the best of the cacophony is replete with honesty, introspection, and unique, meaningful insights.

The challenge is that both the bad and the good are all swimming in the same soup and can require a careful, resource intensive, sifting that can undermine the value one would otherwise derive from wading in at all. My solution, often, is -- if I'm being honest with you -- to no longer try. Things change, people change, as do the equations that determine the value they bring or don't bring to you. Often we think things are more valuable then they are. I wonder how much of online activity is actually the sunk cost fallacy masquerading as nostalgia for simpler times. I'd much rather have a real, in person conversation with someone I know is thoughtful, than go searching for thoughtful thoughts in the perpetual noise machine that is the internet.

"... So now, in a cacophonous environment characterized by information overload, Nick and I have both returned to posting at around the same time, and again for some of the same reasons. A little bit more professional and personal space, but at the same time, I think there are some useful things to discuss about the cacophony. One of my strongest conclusions from a year of interviewing people about digital-era governance was how warped our discourse can be about technology and change. Talking points can enjoy years of repetition before critical voices and evidence emerge to correct them – and even then likely don’t stand a chance against the ingrained memes."

There's a certain palpable irony in coming back at yourself through the years with a critical lens. I haven't had the time to go back through the post history like Kent did to see what stands up. I'm sure there's at least a metric tonne of fluff and off target remarks, hindsight being 20/20 and all that. Maybe I'll peel back the the layers of that onion at another time.

Group Hugs and Stating the Obvious

noreply@blogger.com (Kent Aitken) — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 12:59:00 +0000

by Kent Aitken

In 2010 I attended an event variously called GOC3/Collaborative Culture Camp and Collaborative Management Camp. This was back in the halcyon days of our youth when events had tweet walls, displaying the inner workings of the hivemind. Some of this was insights and connections between speakers’ points, though most was essentially live-tweeting quotes from the on-stage conversation. At one point, the tweet wall showed someone’s assessment that the event was “So far, mostly group hugs and stating the obvious.”

Which serves today as a launching point for thinking about that community, how it has changed, and where we are today. (Crowdsourced timeline here: http://gc20.pbworks.com/w/page/99478487/FrontPage.)

At one point in 2006, there were zero public servants on Twitter – because there was no Twitter. By 2010 it was probably in the scant hundreds; you could reach the end of the community, so why not follow everyone? We could figure out the “why” out later, but for the time being it was good enough to be connected around a general ideology of sharing, collaboration, experimentation, and openness (see: Millenials, Lego and the Perimeter of Ignorance). I wrote about the value of writing in the open as a way to create “rough edges” that could create connections with people learning the same directions or trying to solve the same problems (see: On the Importance of Being Earnest (and Open)).

That was before the era of information overload and much need for Twitter hiatuses or culling who you follow (though one of Nick’s most popular posts, a full decade ago, was about using Yahoo! pipes to fast-filter articles shared through social media (see: Signal to Noise)). The community matured, grew, and one of the driving common problems – bringing government into the social media era – started looking like a solv-ed/able problem. So people started subdividing into more niche and specialized sub-elements, and taking the natural step of expanding networks across sectors (though there’s still a serious core of “people on Twitter outside government that people inside government know”).

In parallel, the double-edged sword of asking “What problem are we really trying to solve?” emerged as a guiding principle. I say “double-edged” because an impact focus is, of course, a healthy lens. On the other hand, it may have undervalued community-building efforts where the “goal” was really a Venn diagram of many different goals for different people. In many ways, “group hugs and stating the obvious” was exactly what many people needed to start growing into a new and wider community. The first time I heard this question answered really well was Heather Remacle in the BC gov: success for a collaborative community is “growing people who fulfill the vision.”

Which roughly leads us to why posting on CSPRenewal.ca fell off for me. Like Nick (see: Fully, Completely), it was a combination of factors: new and challenges roles in my career, a busier personal life, but there was also an element of the GC collaborative community changing. Where once I agreed whole-heartedly with Andrew Kjurata’s “Shut up and say something” call for people to raise their voices in public spaces, the other increasingly plausible lens was that additional voices were as likely to just be uninformed bellowing into a cacophony. My standards for what I posted about and why went up.

So now, in a cacophonous environment characterized by information overload, Nick and I have both returned to posting at around the same time, and again for some of the same reasons. A little bit more professional and personal space, but at the same time, I think there are some useful things to discuss about the cacophony. One of my strongest conclusions from a year of interviewing people about digital-era governance was how warped our discourse can be about technology and change. Talking points can enjoy years of repetition before critical voices and evidence emerge to correct them – and even then likely don’t stand a chance against the ingrained memes.

Which I don’t purport to be able to correct, but it does mean that I continue to find this space interesting. And I wrote way too much stuff a couple years back (see: Governance in the Digital Era) that I had always intended to chop up into somewhat more digestible sections, which seems like a worthwhile project. I enjoyed Laura Wesley’s description of writing in open spaces as talking to her future self, and I’d like to keep making deposits in that collection rather than just withdrawing all the time.

And if we’ve met recently and you’re new here, here’s a few starting points from the past years that I think remain non-embarassing. Also, holy shit. The current count is 715 posts (more Nick than me and the other contributors). I’ll leave Nick to note his own, if he so chooses.

Best,

Kent

Two pieces of unsolicited advice

noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Charney) — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 13:00:00 +0000

by Nick Charney

I give these two pieces of advice often and have come up repeatedly in recent conversations and they apply both personally and professionally: (1) don't make other people's decisions for them and (2) have the conversation with the other person rather than about the other person.

Don't make other people's decisions for them

The only way people get better at making decisions is by having to make them. Decision-making is a key learning activity, and you do your team members a disservice if as a manager you take that decision making away from them. Similarly, if you don't ask your management team to make tough decisions (say by preemptively deciding that they are likely to say 'no' so why bother asking) you deny them the opportunity to experience making them.

Have the conversation with the other person rather than about the other person

Often we spend time trying to understand where someone is coming from by speaking to people we trust about them, validating our thoughts, and reflecting on how to address the situation (conflict? issue?) at hand. While I would never advocate against confiding in and seeking the counsel of those you trust, I would argue that more often then not we fail to close the loop with the actual person about the issue at hand. This is inherently problematic as far more can be achieved by speaking directly with the person than by speaking about them. This requires a certain amount of courage but establishing more courageous and direct interpersonal relationships will always solve more issues than meandering through or around the issues.

Putting the advice together

Weighing trade offs, making compromises, and being able to both give and take 'no' for an answer are important skill sets that will serve anyone well in their person or professional lives. This of course means that we also need to get better and giving and receiving direct feedback, understanding our biases, and being comfortable disagreeing openly with others when its appropriate to do so.

In short, engaging in difficult and direct conversations and their resulting decisions -- while at some times can be painful -- makes everyone better.

Our Search for Meaning

noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Charney) — Fri, 08 Nov 2019 13:00:00 +0000

by Nick Charney

Understanding how you derive meaning from your work is incredibly important. But that understanding only comes with experience, or more rightly experiences — breadth, depth, variability, trial, error.

It takes both successes and failures.

Exposure. Reflection. Self awareness. Vulnerability. Honesty, with yourself but also with others.

Understanding what brings you meaning in a visceral way — which is to say when you feel it in your bones — can be an incredibly empowering experience. It can help you dial in your career, cut the noise, and focus on what is driving you in the service of a larger mission.

It can also be frustrating.

If you aren't deriving enough meaning from your work, you start to wander, get distracted, and lose sight of of how your work connects with those around you.

The easy part -- what I find meaningful.

Personally, I derive my meaning from — and forgive me if you've heard me pronounce on this before (i.e. See: Innovation is Tricky, Literally and/or Finding Innovation, and/or Book Review: Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes the World.) — from being a 'trickster', from being the conduit between different groups of people, introducing new ideas, translating knowledge between them, and bringing new ideas to life.

It's why I'm fullest when I'm meeting directly with stakeholders, briefing senior management, helping public servants scheme virtuously, or mixing it up with my team during times of personal and professional growth.

In short, I thrive in environments that are high volume and high velocity, in the collision prone spaces where new ideas and relationships flourish.

The hard part -- shaping meaningful experiences for others.

I've been thinking about the role of meaning not only in my own personal context but also in the context of managing a team. I feel as though — and views may vary — that as a manager I am responsible not only for not only finding meaning in my own work but also helping my team find meaning in theirs.

This latter part is complicated. What if what drives your team isn't what drives you? What if team members differ significantly when it comes to what they determine is meaningful? How do you steer work in a way that maximizes meaning and employee engagement on a daily basis?

Some incomplete thoughts.

First, you need to accept that shaping meaningful experiences for your team is a part of your role. Some managers would argue its not their job to worry about such things but I disagree, understanding that this is no small feat, that it takes work, and can often be resource intensive.

Second, you need to recognize that your ability to actually deliver on this part of your role is often severely limited. At best managers can help shape what people find to be meaningful experiences.

Third, you have to engage in explicit conversations about meaning and motivation with individual team members and reconcile the needs of each individual team member with the overall needs of the team. Again, no easy task, and honestly something I could be much better at.

I want to talk with more managers struggling with this issue because I'm not sure its something organizations are taking very seriously at the institutional level, that is to say helping employees understand and find meaning in their work might not be a widespread management practice.

As always, if you are interested in discussing these issues, please let me know.

5 things about people management

noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Charney) — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 12:00:00 +0000

by Nick Charney

Let me start by saying that I love managing people. I find it one of the most professionally rewarding things I've done in my career to date. That said, there's a number of things I'm still figuring out:

How much information to share. Ideally you want to give people enough context to understand the environment within which they are working without overburdening them with superfluous details or distractions. In practice I tend to share much more than was ever shared with me when I occupied their positions, my team seems to value it, though it has definitely led to a handful of more difficult conversations.
How to balance individual needs with the needs of the team. Not everyone has the same work style or preferences, optimizing the work environment to get the best out of of everyone isn't easy, especially when some team members may feel as though they are either benefiting from or being held back by a more laissez-faire approach.
How to best manage interpersonal relationships with people outside work. I'm a social being and bring my whole self to the job, but being a manager naturally creates a degree of professional distance that can be difficult to navigate in healthy and productive ways. I recall a conversation I had with a Deputy Minister who told me that the worst thing about their ascension was how the tone always shifted whenever they entered a room. I'm not there by any stretch, but that story still weighs heavy.
How to measure success. It's not too difficult to evaluate whether or not you are delivering on expectations with respect to the work. You can ask simple questions, are we meeting deadlines, or are we meeting expectations? However its nearly impossible to evaluate whether or not I'm managing effectively with respect to the people. I have little to go on other than overall satisfaction / engagement of my team and the quality of their work. Moreover, we don't help people learn how to give constructive feedback. We are all kind of meandering through.
How to turn good habits into practice. I keep telling my team that we need to build our practice up so that it can endure any shifting winds -- new hires, departures, re-organizations, change in mandates, etc -- and I'm mostly doing this by trial and error right now. I'm not even sure where to look for support on this and its always the first thing to fall off whenever duty calls.

Where is the conversation about thoughtful people management happening right now?

It's got to be happening somewhere, I've been doing some reading but surely there's a place where there's a more active discussion about people's practical experiences.

Someone connect me to the conversation?

The internet is up to things again: thoughts on some-thoughts.org

noreply@blogger.com (Kent Aitken) — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 00:56:00 +0000

by Kent Aitken

Note: hey, Nick posted something recently too.

Way back in the early years of the internet, online political mobilization was studied as a question, a hypothesis, a phenomenon. 20 years ago the following was a novel, while perfectly reasonable, statement in academia: “Well into the twenty-first century, the Internet is no longer an exotic political medium.”

Since, we’ve gone through a bit of an emotional roller coaster. The internet would level the playing field and usher in a new era of democracy and a country-wide public conversation. Now we’re in the era of fake news, website content farms, bots scripted to vote en mass on public consultations, and, worst of all, newspapers’ online comment sections. But there's lots of good stuff, too. Today, it's not even a question; of course the internet can be used for dialogue and community mobilization.

Happy belated 50th birthday, internet.

The above is a dramatic, exaggerated, and unreasonably short overview in order to set the backdrop for a project worth note: some-thoughts.org.

Some Thoughts launched with a social media push on that aforementioned 50th birthday. It’s a collection of just shy of 100 articles covering “an idea, policy, strategy, or best practice” for the future of cities, organized into 14 “conversations.”

Contributors span community organizers and activists, not-for-profits leads, think tank analysts, public servants, academics, CEOs, journalists, and beyond. There are names like Jim Balsillie and John Ralston Saul (whose contribution title takes a somewhat “didn’t I warn you all about this in 1992?” tone).

Skipping merrily past any assessment of the conversations themselves and into the meta, I want to describe a few reasons why this project is interesting within that history of the internet as a public discourse platform.

It’s coordinated, but independent

There was a time when Lead Now and MoveOn.org might have been the likely bets for observers guessing online political game-changers: getting massive amounts of people to sign petitions with single, one-size-fits-all statements. Or, in the same vein, open letters penned by <10 people, but written generally enough to get general agreement from a large section of the general interest community. Some Thoughts makes no statements of solidarity, nodding instead at the idea that discord and contradiction are a part of the project. However, the collection and the collective networks of the contributors made this project impossible to miss for anyone working at the intersection of technology, governance, and community.

(Perhaps, one day, the history of governance discourse in Canada may one day point to this coordinated but independent approach and recognize the humble but rugged Civic Access Listserv as a foundation.)

It aims deep, not shallow

While the internet permitted increasingly broad public discourse, it simultaneously encouraged brevity. You can interpret any number of votes, read a fair number of short comments, but full conversations and back-and-forths break quickly at scale. This feature of online discourse is common, replicating a feature of the public townhall, people-get-a-few-minutes-with-the-mic problem described by Dr. Robin Gregory:

"When hundreds or thousands of stakeholders are asked to (a) speak before a panel for ten to fifteen minutes, (b) submit short written statements to a government body, or (c) participate as representatives of identified interests, then the invitation contains an implicit request to be either superficial or one-dimensional."

While Some Thoughts was clearly designed for internet reading, and to encourage people to read multiple essays, it’s hardly one-dimensional. Some of the more academic contributors, for instance, produced short but reference-packed miniature journal articles.

Which, in a way, starts to return us to the public engagement pedigree of the GC: technical, wonky, and long papers submitted in response to proposed changes in federal regulations, every one of which has to be announced via the Canada Gazette and opened for comment.

It rejects the convened space

There’s an idea I think is wildly important for government public engagement, and accordingly I quote it (too?) often. It’s the reminder “that communities and individuals have power of their own that is not conferred on them by the decision-maker.” This project was born out of the public engagement process around Sidewalk Labs in Toronto. For the last few years, organizations and governments have endeavoured to create and foster spaces for public discourse on issues, experimenting with new platforms and formats. However, the “official” spaces will always be situated in the much-less-controllable and much-more-densely-trafficked mass media, social media, and community spaces that already exist around those topics. Some Thoughts in this case, represents a parallel, community-generated but net new space for discourse. It’s not the first such platform, but noteworthy in its reach and execution.

In sum

If you’re interested in the future of cities, go read and explore. If you’re interested in trends and ideas of how public discourse takes shape and can shape public engagement processes and policy option development, go explore and reflect.

I’m deliberately maintaining an observer stance with this post, but the one opinion I’ll offer is that models that create fuller, more thoughtful, and more constructively combative discourse should be warmly welcomed. We’re still experimenting with the best balance of reach versus rigour in online dialogue.

Fully, completely.

noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Charney) — Fri, 25 Oct 2019 13:00:00 +0000

by Nick Charney

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.

I used to write things on the internet

noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Charney) — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 17:48:00 +0000

by Nick Charney

I wrote about the public service.

I wrote about where people, public policy, and technology collide.

I can't claim responsibility for the evolution of our views on these matters over the last 10 years but I'd like to think that I made a meaningful contribution to it.

You can still leaf through those contributions.

But I'm not writing anymore.

Cheers

On Halftime: Moving From Success to Significance

noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Charney) — Fri, 12 Jan 2018 10:00:00 +0000

by Nick Charney

If you've read any of my recent and fleeting posts here, you will know that professionally I'm doing quite well. Everything is humming along better than it ever has. What you are less likely to know is that personally, I've hit a bit of a rough patch. Nothing too close to home, my immediate family is great, everyone is happy and healthy. However just beyond my immediate family circle lies my difficult relationship with my father, and a host of surreal circumstances and recent experiences that most find hard to believe.

I'll withhold the exact details but it was in the middle of these extraordinary experiences that I met Claude -- a chocolatier -- in an airport bar, waylaid after a work trip to Whitehorse and Banff, and after completing a difficult and unplanned stop in Saskatoon. Claude sat down next to me and made a joke about wanting to order breakfast for dinner and I encouraged him to go for it. Next thing you know we got to talking about life, parenting, family, and what brought each of us to Saskatoon. Whether or not he knew it at the time our conversation was precisely what I needed in that moment and the selfless tenderness he showed me when I needed it most was almost overwhelming.

Its one of those conversation that simply sticks with you.

Over the course of our conversation he recommended a book written by Bob Buford entitled Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance I made a mental note of the title, gave Claude a business card, paid for his breakfast as a gesture of good faith, and thanked him deeply for his kindness.

At its core the book is about the midpoint in your career (i.e. halftime) and the transition people make from the first half of their career where they focus on finding success to the second half where they focus on finding significance. Now, while the book is dated and decidedly Christian (and I am neither), it does however provide a useful frame of reference and focus attention on what I would consider a natural pivot point for most career professionals.

Upon reading and reflecting on the book, I would assert that I am very much coming into my own halftime, and discovering the nature of the substance thatI want the second half of my career to be about. Its more of a process of discovery rather than a cleanly delineated break. The book uses the metaphor of overlapping waves, which I think is apt. Buford reduces the search for second half substance to a seemingly simple question: 'what's in your box?'. What's that all encompassing thing that will guide all of your activities in the second half of your career / life. For Buford it was religion and he dedicated the second half of his life to his.

I'm leaning towards, 'For Queen, Country, and a smashing good time' but I'm still in discovery mode. That said, I'm learning a lot about myself through the process. For example, I've learned that while there was merit in building an experience base by 'following the work' there also comes a time where much more can be gained by transitioning to a more actively managed my career trajectory, that one can credibly ask for specific opportunities, and that there is an inalienable value to bringing not only enthusiasm and a different way of thinking to a given problem, but also the body of knowledge and experience (gained by 'following the work') that makes them invaluable.

I'm learning that what motivates me is evolving and changing, but also that I still enjoy sitting down, thinking through a problem set, and taking the time to write those thoughts down and share them with others.

Simple Thoughts On Policy Complexity

noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Charney) — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 10:00:00 +0000

by Nick Charney

Yes, the world is complex.

Pursuing a given public policy objective (i.e. an outcome) brings that complexity into view; and bringing that view into focus, by gathering information and weighing evidence and opinion, means drawing boundaries around the issue(s) in imperfect ways.

This imprecision has real world consequences. Draw the boundaries too wide and it can produce paralysis by analysis, draw them too narrow and you can end up with governance by gut feeling. Neither of which are ideal, and both can have profoundly negative consequences.

Complexity is really about spillover from one policy domain to another. Determining a logical order or hierarchy isn't always possible because none of the issues can be isolated from those that are adjacent. This complexity is further complicated by the fact that spillover is both omni-present and omni-directional and in a constant state of flux.

This leads me to conclude that the crux of the challenge facing policy makers is calibration; it's about knowing who and what to include and, where where to draw the lines, understanding the inherent consequences and trade-offs, and being willing to accept them.

When trying to solve for especially pernicious problems this becomes exponentially harder because the conventional wisdom is that their solutions lie in the innovation of the adjacent possible (i.e. somewhere in the messy spillover). The same conventional wisdom argues that you ought to spend 95% of your time defining the problem and 5% solving it. That means not only are you actively pursuing work in the messier parts of the problem set you are also spending the bulk of you time calibrating and re-calibrating within it as the landscape continues to shift around you.

I guess its not so so simple after all.

Actively cultivating a patient appreciation for the richness of experience

noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Charney) — Fri, 10 Nov 2017 10:00:00 +0000

by Nick Charney

As I mentioned previously, my interests have shifted (See: On Professional Maturation). In sum, I have been thinking about life differently than I have in the past. If I had to describe the feeling, I would say it was something akin to a patient appreciation for the richness of experience.

I can’t pinpoint the source of the feeling but it’s starting to permeate through every facet of my life. The best way to describe it is to borrow an explanation from Angela Duckworth, who wrote a book entitled Grit about perseverance, which I currently reading. I did however catch her on Freakonomics Podcast over the summer, and her explanation – the one I want to pull from – struck me.

She spoke about the need for novelty in one’s life; how it is natural to seek out new experiences but acting on that need too often can have negative consequences. Pursuing novel work for example, through a series of lateral moves comes at the cost of depth in a particular field and produces generalists.

The trick, according to Duckworth is being able to satisfy your need for novelty by pursuing the nuance in your field. The best way to do this is to look at everything in your known universe and break it down into its smallest component parts, pick one, and focus on maximizing your understanding, appreciation, or performance of or within that particular subset. This approach simultaneously satisfies your need for novelty but also increases your mastery of your given domain.

I find Duckworth’s logic compelling and I think it applies more broadly. Not only to my work but also in my personal interactions with others and in how I use the internet. I’ve committed mentally to working in my current field for the foreseeable future, I’m pursuing more meaningful relationships with others, and I’m far less interested in what's popular online. In so doing, what I’m finding is that not only do I have a patient appreciation for the richness of experience, but that I enjoy actively cultivating it.

Tax policy and open government

noreply@blogger.com (Kent Aitken) — Tue, 19 Sep 2017 08:59:00 +0000

by Kent Aitken

The Government of Canada has proposed changes to the tax framework, which has struck a wide variety of nerves. Moving swiftly past any discussion of that policy proposal itself, it provides a solid example of the environment in which government works today. I still get interest in explanations of what the idea of open government actually means, and this lets us move from the abstract to the practical.

It’s worth noting that while this public debate has emerged recently, the proposal comes from the 2017 federal budget, including some of the tax strategies the government was examining. Any policy discussion exists in the context of the government’s agenda, which shows up in party platforms, budgets, and the Speech from the Throne. And that agenda, of course, came from somewhere in turn: long-standing party positions, industry lobbying, think tank research, government advice, concerns of MPs’ constituents, international agreements, etc. There’s a complex ecosystem of inputs.

The Department of Finance started inviting comments on July 18. Far from the lightweight budget consultations of years past (essentially a webform and the question “What should the government prioritize?”), they posted a brobdingnagian backgrounder with rationale, data, and their calculations. If they posted the raw datasets, I couldn’t find them; the open government ideal would be linking to the same data that government analysts are using (i.e., on open.canada.ca). Economists, researchers, developers and transparency advocates have long been scraping or copy and pasting information from government websites, which is a barrier to use.

Finance has asked that people read the 27,000+ word backgrounder and provide written comments. There are design decisions baked into this.

One, it’s an email inbox, not an online discussion forum. The written comments aren’t automatically publicly visible, and organizations can consent to publishing or stay mum for privacy.

Two, while the consultation and backgrounder is public, their target audience is clearly a limited group of experts, academics, and businesses (most likely industry organizations that are funded and mandated to analyze and respond to such proposals). The most visible government consultations in recent years have been questions like Ontario Budget Talks, federal electoral reform, or the Innovation Agenda. Those are geared towards broad audiences. However, most government consultations, running quietly for decades under the radar, are closer to this Finance example. The standard has been that government posts an analysis or a draft regulatory change and asks a small community of experts for detailed comments (e.g., on wildlife management strategies or chemical allowances in products). Anyone could respond. But most wouldn't have any fun doing so.

There’s no right or wrong on these two items, just different approaches for different contexts. Making every comment publicly visible can be disenfranchising to many would-be participants. And governments should (generally) design and promote for their actual target audience of stakeholders.

For most people, including many small business owners, their engagement with this consultation will not be in reading the backgrounder and commenting. Instead, they’ll read analyses, op-eds, and updates in the media. Others may contact their MP with their concerns. Others will continue to pay dues to lobbying organizations to do this work on their behalf and trust that their views are represented. This reality will be true of most examples of “open government;” most engagement is through “info-mediaries” rather than direct contact.

The next important feature: government can strategize and plan for the public reaction, but once in the wild, it’s to a large degree out of government’s control. There has been a flurry of media articles written since July 18, taking many different tacks (e.g., that it’s unfair and disincentivizing to doctors specifically) (again, no value judgment here).

For the potential value for government, let’s use Dr. Kevin Milligan as an example. The start of his Twitter thread on the proposal is probably the most-liked tweet ever that starts with “I’ve made spreadsheets…”

I've made spreadsheets to explore tax on private corporations.

Blog post: https://t.co/MdayJmFtKE
Google docs: https://t.co/cUoYWr16px 1/
— Kevin Milligan (@kevinmilligan) September 4, 2017

Milligan, an Economics professor at UBC, reworked and re-calculated a lot of the data from Finance (and, admirably, posted his work and spreadsheets publicly for government officials or other observers to review). His analysis supports much of Finance’s work, calls some parts into question, but definitely adds value. This is the entire point of of open government and open data: recognizing that expertise exists outside government’s walls and creating ways to work it into public decision-making. Milligan’s analysis, alongside a number of other prominent Canadian economists who contribute actively to public debate, turned into blogs or columns in print and online media. That community, plus pundits and other observers, also debated parts of the proposal and each other’s analyses in short form on Twitter.

The email inbox is still central - Milligan encouraged people to write into it - but it’s one of many ways that people will try to influence the decision, even during a formal consultation with an “official” avenue for input.

Milligan’s work (here’s his blog post) is not far off what we’d trendily call “civic tech” (admittedly it’s relatively low-tech civic tech)*. The more common examples are people creating tech platforms for others to find and understand data and information (e.g., theyworkforyou.com or openparliament.ca). But the point isn’t the platform, it’s the analysis and the value in the context of a public decision. So Milligan’s analysis and spreadsheets meet that goal and that description for me.

Lastly on the timeline, there’s one big step left: the government will decide what it wants to do in Cabinet. The proposal as originally written by Finance will almost certainly still be the starting point, but the public reaction and expert comments will change or at least flavour that. While the final advice to Cabinet and the discussion is held in confidence, Access to Information laws, modern government communications, public engagement, and social media make that a more limited concept than it was in the past. The black box is getting smaller and smaller. But the point remains: even if the elected government talks to everyone about a proposed policy, it’s still on them to make the decision and to be held accountable for it. And they do this out of the public eye, by design.

So having walked through the example, what’s left? A couple closing thoughts:

One, a common theme is that as open government and telecommunications technology make the world horizontal and connected, government policy analysts will be less subject matter experts and more facilitators and convenors of stakeholders and external experts. I think this take is wrong, and Finance provides the counterexample. They started with a 27,000-word backgrounder, and I’d bet that there’s a much longer version behind it. They need to be able to understand, fact-check, and contextualize technical input from experts. They need to know if Milligan’s numbers are right or wrong when they lead to game-changing conclusions. So I’d actually propose that government analysts have to be better than they’ve ever been to navigate the modern governance environment.

Two, open government can’t be about changing governance models. How government does things always has to serve the things government needs to do. Open government is better found, in the long run, in the nuts and bolts of government policies and programs. In this case, in the data, principles, and analysis behind tax policy.

Alignment and Competition

noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Charney) — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 09:00:00 +0000

by Gray O'Byrne

“Let’s set up a meeting to make sure our initiatives are aligned and we’re not duplicating effort.”

I have become wary of this line. On the surface, I couldn’t agree more. We want our time to be well spent. The phrase taps into my human aversion to waste, but like everything else, it can be taken too far.

First off, duplication is sometimes necessary. In a sense it’s impossible to replace an existing system without duplicating it. As we build digital services for citizens, we are duplicating the existing ones. Introducing digital services may not be controversial but what if the existing system is trying to slowly digitize itself? How do we decide if it’s worthwhile trying something new rather than invest more in the improvement efforts?

In a lot of cases there is no clear answer and rather than investing in the new idea, we align ourselves with the existing initiative to avoid duplication. This could be contributing to how long it is taking governments to built digital-first services.

When developing new services we also have a choice to make about what tools or approaches to use. Sometimes a single team has the resources and expertise to try out several options instead of picking just one, but what happens when it’s two different teams each with their own idea? We seem to have very little tolerance for allowing both teams to continue even if it’s unclear which idea is more promising.

In this scenario, instead of waiting to see what we learn from each team, we tend to ask one of them to stop. I’ve seen several promising initiatives shut down this way. The project team eventually met with a group who had more authority and who felt their own project would be doing the same thing. “Why would we create two solutions to the same problem?”

These tendencies to stop others from trying different approaches to solving the same problem are what I am pushing back against. We need to be investing in a variety of approaches because they can all teach us something. Sometimes the alternative projects will result in better services, sometimes in wasted effort but if done properly we will always learn.

Unfortunately multiple groups tackling the same problem means there will be competition between ideas, projects and even the people who want to see their own approach succeed. But there are benefits to competition as well! We’ve come to accept that it is a net positive and helps drive innovation In the private sector and just because there is some competition between groups, it doesn’t mean we need to have winners and losers vying for space in government.

Rather than aligning on execution we can align our goals. Through collaboration we can ensure each project takes a unique approach so it will generate unique insights. Information sharing at all stages will be key, we need to experiment and learn as a whole. The hard part will be for everyone to come together once individual projects have been tested, but it can be done.

I’ve had some success with this approach.

When collaborating to build a micro-tasking platform for the federal government, my team took a conscious step back from the working group. We knew we could rapidly deploy something in our organisation and felt the group could learn more from us building an advanced prototype than if we participated in the same way as everyone else.

We kept in touch, we built in the open and challenged our colleagues to make something better. This was deliberately duplicative but we got to benefit from our prototype quickly and were able share our work and insights back with the group. A year later when the working group had their solution in place, it had many of the features we had designed. At this point we shut our prototype down so our users would join the superior platform and benefit from the broader community that had access to it.

The strength and weakness of this approach are the same to me: we are working with humans. On one side, a little competition and a strong sense of ownership are both extremely motivating. Trying out a few different ideas in earnest can also help when our intuitions are wrong. On the downside, competition is uncomfortable. If people feel like “it’s us or them” they could stop sharing openly and even create barriers for others. As a believer in human awesomeness, I think these downsides can be managed by aligning our goals (not our approaches) and collaborating openly within our organisations. To get us started though, we will need to become comfortable with the idea that attacking a problem from multiple angles is an acceptable form of duplication.

On Professional Maturation

noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Charney) — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 09:00:00 +0000

by Nick Charney

Apologies in advance for another long meander through my psyche. I've been struggling with these ideas for some time now and have yet to come to ground with precisely how to frame them. What follows is more personal philosophy and storytelling than lessons public service.

First, life's good.

I love my job. I've never felt more supported, appreciated, important, challenged, trusted, respected, and fulfilled in my public service career than I do now. It's equal parts roles and responsibilities, colleagues, and the ability to play to my strengths while leaving ample room to grow. I'm not sure I've ever been able to say that as earnestly as I can right now, and that's pretty awesome. I'm working with two cracker jack teams on two hot files and my days are full to the brim and just as rewarding.

The flip side of loving one's job of course is that one loses the sense of outrage at all of the parts of the bureaucracy that one would normally find offensive. As someone who primarily identifies with archetypal characters who buck the system (i.e. tricksters) this feels a lot like 'losing your edge' or -- as I've put it previously -- gentrifying (See: The Gentrification of #w2p). For a long time the idea of gentrifying to me felt like betrayal. As a self-stylized perpetual underdog, it's been a slow and difficult progression away from that mindset, but despite popular belief, maturing is never easy.

Relatedly, one of the most interesting pieces of advice I've ever received was from an executive who said "the one gift I really wish I could give you but can't is the gift of experience". The irony of course being that that advice would become increasingly salient over time and with experience. It means more to me now that it did then, and I appreciate it more now in hindsight. In all honestly, at the time I took it as validation of what I had already learned (i.e. I'm ready for more responsibility, bring it on!) rather than a confirmation of how much more I had to learn and how much better I could be at what I do.

What I think I'm learning about what I will call professional maturation is that -- for me at least -- it is about being less reflexive and more reflective. While one may think this understanding comes naturally, one's reflexes are their strengths honed over time through repetitious positive reinforcement. Reflexes are always at play and feature more prominently in stressful situations. If you're like me and on balance you feel as though your reflexes have served you well and are prone to throwing yourself into high stress files, its even harder to step away from them.

That said, if being reflexive and being reflective were on opposite sides of a continuum than what I've been doing is trying to increase the distance between them. This requires one to understand the nuance that reflexes are there to fall back on but that one should lead with reflection.

In practice this means digging in more, reading more closely, asking more poignant questions, being more methodical, writing notes and lists, verifying that everything has been covered off that you wanted to cover. Some people do this more naturally than others, others (like me) have to work at it more.

Second, my interests are shifting.

I'm still interested in the confluence of people, public policy, and technology but I'm investing my time differently than I used to. I used to spend a lot of my free time trying to learn about what new (shiny!) thing was coming around the corner and how it would eventually impact the business of the public service. This has generated a lot of interesting lines of thought that I've shared over the years on this blog. That said, I'm growing increasingly tired of the meta-narratives around engagement, openness, and innovation that underpin them, so I'm less inclined to feed them with greater reflection. It's not to say that meta-narratives don't have value, only that they no longer pique my intellectual curiosity in the way that they once did. Another aspect of professional maturation seems to be shifting away from simply holding strong views to a model of strong views weakly held.

There's a number of reasons why my interests have shifted, but one of the most predominant is that while these narratives all share the same roots, they've all branched out into their own unique paths. There are now simply too many players and viewpoints to put one's arms around in any meaningful way (See: The Many Challenges of Convening the Policy Innovation and Experimentation Ecosystem). When there were fewer networks, nodes, and information flows it meant that certain voices were amplified and one could reasonably expect to know who most of the key players were. Moreover, information networks have grown in number and been flooded with users, making keeping up simply impossible. Another likely reason is that my work has taken me to the coalface of the innovation discourse/implementation disconnect enough times to temper my enthusiasm for meta-narratives (See: The Innovation Discourse Disconnect). A couple of recent lessons here include the importance of not being a tax on the productivity of others and the perils and intellectual laziness of invoking specters of the powers that be, but I'll save those for another time.

Third, I'm (re)investing my time accordingly.

I'm pursuing a healthier lifestyle (exercising more, eating healthier, drinking less), investing more in interpersonal relationships (being more social IRL, putting my phone away when with others, retreating from social media), and reading more books (paper books, non-fiction books about things I'm interested that aren't work related). All of which takes time and energy away from engaging with and writing about the civil service.

I'm at fewer meetups, I'm writing less, but I'm still coming to work everyday and killing it for Queen and country.

I'm just doing it a little differently.

On the Canadian Digital Service

noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Charney) — Fri, 21 Jul 2017 09:00:00 +0000

by Nick Charney

Budget 2017 announced the creation of a new Canadian Digital Service (CDS):

Informed by similar initiatives in the U.S. (the U.S. Digital Service/18F) and the United Kingdom (the Government Digital Service), the Government will adopt new ways of serving Canadians. Better use of digital technologies could improve the ways in which businesses can access government services, speed up immigration processing times through better-integrated information, or make it easier for Canadians to access benefits or tax information online.

Earlier this week, their website and social media feeds went live. I checked out their site and (unsurprisingly) there are a lot of friendly and familiar faces on the team. These are good people looking to do good things and I'm looking forward to working with them on my core work (having had a kickoff meeting thereon a few weeks ago).

Now, all that being said the reaction to the CDS is unlikely to all be positive, one only needs to speak to folks working in any of the agencies listed above (e.g. 18F) to know that a couple basic rules of the internet are probably going to apply, haters gonna hate and come at me bro, spring to mind.

Haters are going to hate the CDS

Why? Because it's different, plays by different rules, and gets the fast lane. Or at least those are likely the charges that will be laid against them. I can hear it now, 'of course they could do x, they aren't restrained by y'. That CDS may have all of its T's crossed and I's dotted by the highest echelons of power is unlikely to influence people's perception of the service.

Look at 18F, good people looking to improve the way government delivers its services but the organization has also dealt with watchdogs coming down on their poor financial management in 2016 and their disregard for IT security policies in 2017. It also was flying close enough to the sun to publicly debate whether or not the agency's talent should continue to serve after the change in administration, but on this I'll reserve any further comment.

CDS will likely have to adopt a come at me bro attitude

Why? Because it can't come out swinging (that wouldn't be very collaborative!) but it will need to defend itself when others start taking aim. The reflex here is likely to be "delivery is the strategy" (or in old fashioned terms "putting its money where its mouth is") but that reflex may be insufficient when the criticism isn't aimed at the end but rather the means (i.e. the aforementioned CDS fast lane).

Final thought on CDS

One of the more interesting things to watch with CDS will be how they reconcile their personal social media with their official organizational online presence. As of right now their contacts page lists employee's Government of Canada email address, their personal Twitter account, their personal LinkedIn account, and/or their personal GitHub account (as applicable). To my mind it's the first such conflation of personal and professional online media on a Government of Canada website.

10 tips for building supportive government fellowship programs (and convincing participants to stay)

noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Charney) — Fri, 07 Jul 2017 09:00:00 +0000

by Nisa Malli

In the name of innovation and openness, many public sector organizations have committed to porousness and career flexibility, grafting more agile HR mechanisms onto existing systems through short term fellowships, internships, and exchanges. It’s a model used to bring in temporary technical and subject matter expertise, attract mid-career professionals, and to recruit graduates from fields outside of public policy and political science. But as these initiatives expand, we need to think carefully about how to design these programs in order to support participants and create the conditions for success for their projects. As I wrap up a year in municipal government with the Toronto Urban Fellowship, I’ve been thinking about what makes an effective government fellowship and how we can use these kinds of programs to fill gaps in our recruitment strategies by convincing participants to stay.

Think carefully about the purpose of your program when designing it: What gap in existing HR mechanisms and recruitment are you trying to solve? What is the ideal role of participants and program alumni in your organization? If you want people to stay on after their placements, what combination of experiences will best prepare them for future careers in your organization?
Consider expanding your eligibility requirements beyond your organization's usual constraints. Do you really need participants with graduate degrees or would other training and professional experience suffice? Can you open this program up to other academic fields? Could participants work remotely so that they don’t need to relocate?
Create cohorts so that participants will have peer community no matter where they are placed. If you are air-dropping a brand-new government recruit into a branch or division, they will need connections to other parts of the organization and peers to commiserate and problem-solve with.
Ensure that the placements and projects you offer match the skillsets, experience, and interests of your recruits and your program objectives. Even early career professionals have developed expertise and experience in specific fields. Boring, frustrating, or assigning your participants to known bad managers increases the likelihood of mid-program dropouts.
Build an onboarding and training program. What do recruits need to know about your organization before starting their placement? What training can you provide them in advance and during the program that will make their immersion in government easier? Remember that if your participants come from diverse backgrounds they may not all need the same training modules; an urban planner doesn’t need City Council 101; a policy analyst doesn’t need to learn how to write a briefing note.
Give them the tools they need to excel at their jobs. For some roles, this might look like specific software or technology, for others it might just be remote access to email. For everyone, quick access to health and dental insurance, vacation days, and sick days can go a long way towards preventing burnout and recruiting the best from other sectors. New employees, especially ones in short rotations, will face challenges getting support from corporate functions like HR and IT. Clear some of the red tape cobwebs away for them in advance if you can to make sure they don’t waste the first week or two just trying to get an ID badge and a computer login.
Pay them at a level appropriate to their experience and the level of work expected from them (this might mean jumping some internal HR hoops to give participants higher seniority or pay than other new recruits). Student debt and increasing rental prices are making it harder to accept pay cuts, even to work on worthwhile causes.
If your program has rotational placements, ensure they match the length of the projects. Four months isn’t usually enough time to start and finish anything; consider 6-month, 9-month or 12-month placements.
Develop an exit strategy. Your organization is investing a lot of money in program participants; if you want them to stay, create bridging mechanisms to make it easier for their placement hosts to keep them or give them preferential hiring in open competitions. Maintain their access to internal job postings if they aren’t hired on right away and make sure gaps between postings don’t impact their benefits in their next position.
Document success and failure! Track and report on what past participants worked on and learned and their recommendations for future iterations of the program. Fresh eyes can provide useful perspectives on how your organization operates and the work you do. This might look like failure/impact reports, exit surveys and interviews, a project database, or bringing alumni in to present to next year’s cohort.

Hope is not a strategy

noreply@blogger.com (Kent Aitken) — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 08:59:00 +0000

by Kent Aitken

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.

Bootstrapping culture in government

noreply@blogger.com (Kent Aitken) — Fri, 23 Jun 2017 08:59:00 +0000

by James McKinney

When I started to work in government last year, I discovered that little was documented in a clear, accessible, or easy-to-discover way. This was especially common when it came to tasks that are done once (like getting a key card) or that have no business value (like accessing bike cages). The main way of sharing knowledge was word of mouth—or ‘lore’. Alternatively, instead of gaining knowledge to do something yourself, you asked others to do it for you (like asking the IT help desk). The government-wide onboarding information was about compliance (accessibility, safety, etc.), and the ministry-specific onboarding information was about roles and responsibilities. Nothing explained how to actually do anything.

So I started documenting everything.

Although everyone agrees that documentation is important, that belief—even strongly held—doesn’t translate into a culture of documentation. You need to be surrounded by a culture for its customs to become natural to you. My reason for documenting everything I encountered wasn’t a completionist obsession; it was a deliberate strategy to create that surround. For example: If you spend your first day at a new job working through a well-written onboarding guide, you come to expect that future tasks will be well documented. With that expectation, when you encounter a new task, your instinct will be to look for documentation, rather than find an expert to pass on the oral history of installing printers. If you see a large catalog of how-to guides on your team’s wiki, you intuit that the team has a practice of documentation. With that understanding, when you encounter a task that’s undocumented, you may consider documenting it yourself. In ways like this, members of a team can incorporate the value and custom of documentation.

People often quip that culture change in government is hard. Many efforts to change culture focus on policies and trainings and speeches and measures of performance. But those are the tools of maintaining and enforcing a culture. They are overt, hard, foreground gestures. To change beliefs, expectations, values, approaches, you need more covert, soft, broad interventions. You need to change the background to change the culture.

Changing the foreground (the policies and procedures) without changing the background (the beliefs and values) produces a culture where people know the words but not the music: a culture in which people self-censor and otherwise change their overt behaviour—in order to conform—without changing their beliefs or valuation of their work and colleagues. Silent, dutiful compliance is short of vocal, enthusiastic support.

The important opportunity here is that it doesn’t take everyone to change the background. You can bootstrap it. A small team, working full-time, can produce enough documentation to normalize it as a practice.

My earlier work on open data provides an example of bootstrapping a norm (of which cultures are made). In 2014, no municipality in Canada was publishing its elected officials’ contact information in a standardized machine-readable format. Over two years, I solicited 18 municipalities with open data initiatives to adopt a standard for this dataset, out of about 60 such municipalities. Today, municipalities starting open data initiatives adopt the standard independently. The standard has become part of the background. When a municipality looks at neighbours’ open data catalogs for inspiration, they see this dataset and the standard it uses. The question of whether to adopt is not even asked. In this case, it took one person’s work to establish one norm that is self-sustaining.

If you’re on a team that wants to change a culture in government, explore ways to make the practices and values that you want to instill across the the public service (like ‘putting users first’ if you work in digital) part of the background—the surround, the default, the assumption, the first example that comes to mind. Much of that relates to better documenting, communicating and supporting existing cases that exemplify those values. If you need to constantly win the same arguments until everyone who disagrees leaves or retires, you aren’t changing culture; you’re just outlasting.

The Innovation Discourse Disconnect

noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Charney) — Fri, 16 Jun 2017 09:00:00 +0000

by Nick Charney

I couldn’t help but feel a certain sense of irony walking through the annual Innovation Fair a few weeks ago on the way to a kickoff meeting for a new initiative I'm working on.

I’ll spare you the detail but my observation is that there is a fundamental disconnect between the public face of public sector innovation -- which manifests in events such as the well-attended, high energy, social media friendly innovation fair – and the quiet and difficult backroom discussions about policies, exemptions, expected results, and (of course) accountability.

Now, the following comes with all the usual caveats. There’s a lot at play. No one has all the answers. I'm not naming names. And it's always easy to be an armchair innovator and call out the problems.

But all that aside, there are a number of things that seem self-evident and far too often I’ve seen our own Canadian politeness get in the way of calling a spade a spade and unlocking the value that can bring to the table. So let's be honest about a few things (excuse my stream of consciousness):

Policies exist for a reason – they set the frame and baseline.

There’s a whole accountability infrastructure in place to ensure those policies are followed.

This is a good thing, accountability is important. But so too are achieving outcomes in the public interest. There's an equation we've yet to define about complex relationship between accountability and outcomes that we've all got views on and they differ greatly. This is playing out all over our organizations at all times.

One can never mount an argument against accountability. Which is to say that no one is against accountability. One can however, be against risk -- the foil of accountability. Everyone is against risk.

This makes accountability culture the dominant in government, it sets normative behaviour and creates incentives.

Innovation by its very nature seems to fall outside of standard operating procedures. It provokes the accountability infrastructure and those whose job it is to enforce it.

This creates conflict. This conflict is about things that are open to a degree of interpretation (rules, norms, etc) but plays out inter-personally among people.

The balance of power in this equation is always tipped in the favour of those enforcing accountability by virtue of policy (and history) being on their side. This means they set the bar, and theirs is the language for negotiation. Even when we speak about taking 'smart risks' we do so in the language of accountability (otherwise we'd simply take action).

This means that the burden of proof always falls to those who propose something new. They have to martial evidence and present a compelling case and even then the result is typically time limited agreement (e.g. a ‘pilot’) on condition of additional oversight and compliance measures.

During these negotiations (which is often theatre), we spend a lot of time hypothesizing about what the 'powers that be' actually want or need to feel comfortable about with the 'inherent' 'risks' posed by a given 'innovation', but we rarely just pick up the phone and ask them for an early signal check. This often takes the form of invoking the name of the organization, a position of authority, or even an elected official when asking a question or demanding evidence. In other contexts some may even call it fear-mongering. Conjuring threats that haven't actually been substantiated and too few are willing to call someone's bluff.

In practice this means doing what we've always done is always easier than trying something new. This is likely where the idea that "innovation requires heroic effort" comes from and reinforces an 'us versus them mentality'.

This is why we end up with perpetual skunk works at the peripheries of our organizations rather than addressing systemic barriers. Innovative forces are finding individual paths of least resistance. These paths tend to be personality driven rather than organizationally decided. This is innovation in fits and starts, not innovation as transformation.

All of this is exacerbated by the fact that the pro-innovation discourse is often initiated by the same centers of power that have the ability to grant or withhold the authorities required to actually execute meaningfully against that discourse. Speaking to the importance of innovation -- sending the signal -- may be important but it pales in comparison to actually leaning into the hard work of systematically setting the stage for it.

Finally, (and in fairness) those who would give permission -- even the most permissive of permissions -- will always fall short of the expectations of those who would seek them because the givers bear the burden of having to consider the whole system at once while the seekers enjoy the luxury of entertaining only their own ideas and machinations.

Enjoy the Theatre

noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Charney) — Fri, 09 Jun 2017 09:00:00 +0000

by Nick Charney

Last week I sat down with a former Deputy Minister to get some advice. During our conversation I registered my disdain for having to sit through some of the more theatrical elements of public service when I'm fairly certain that decisions have already been taken. In short, I find things like invoking hierarchy, rules (written or otherwise), or processes, exploiting information or influence asymmetries, or just plain old small-p politic-ing, to be frustrating.

His advice was simple: enjoy the theatre. There's lots to be learned in how people posture, invoke their ministers or the machinery of government. If you are only ever frustrated by it then you are more likely to shut it out when what you need to do is let it in just enough to allow the lessons to register without getting caught up in the underlying behaviours.

So I guess its on with the show!