Tag Archives: public service sector renewal

think big?: the clerk and public sector renewal

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Last week I was hanging out with a former public servant who has made the transition to the private sector. As is often the case (please don’t judge me too harshly), the conversation drifted to the subject of public service sector renewal.

It was a bleak topic. And I thought I would repeat what my friend said:

“The Clerk of the Privy Council has made public service sector renewal one of his priorities. Moreover, he’s staked his career on creating change and in pursuit of this, one of his top initiatives is the Government of Canada Fellows Program.

So what do we have to show for it? It took a year and a half to get going and so far. In that time, 4 people have gone from government to the private sector and eight have moved from the private sector to government, each for 6 months terms.

So 12 people in all.

This is the transformative policy that the Clerk has staked his career on? We aren’t going to achieve generational transformation at this scale. If this is all the Clerk can achieve – you can see why I left.”

I’m a fan of the Fellows program, but my friend has a point. This is less than a drop in the bucket. A fact made all the worse when, as he pointed out:

“One fellow who came into the public sector was a Human Resources (HR) expert. And yet they asked him to work on pandemics. The fellow was thinking he would be most effectively leveraged if he focused on HR – exchanging best practices, learning the similarities and differences between the private and public sector – but the government kept pushing pandemics. It seemed to me a great learning opportunity was being lost.”

I’m not certain my friend has all the details right. But it is hard to argue with his conclusions.  If the clerk really is tracking this program, then it says a lot about how serious and widespread public service sector renewal is really going to be. 12 people a change will not make.

This initiative also says a lot about how the government has diagnosed the problem. The fellows program suggests they believe that people simply need more information about how other executives work – in short, that this is an information driven problem. While this is certainly part of the issue, I suspect it is only a small piece. Most executives likely behave the way they do because they are incented to. Showing them alternatives won’t create change.

What the government needs to find are the high leverage points in which a small change can create a series of cascading crises which will force line executives to rethink and adjust how they manage.

Government Networks – Easy or Hard?

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At the IPAC conference last week I did a panel on creating government networks. Prior to my contribution fellow panelist Dana Richardson, an ADM with the Government of Ontario, presented on her experience with creating inter-government networks. Her examples were interesting and insightful. More interesting still was her conclusion: creating networks is difficult.

Networked Snail - a metaphor for government

What makes this answer interesting is not it is correct (I’m not sure it is) but how it is a window into the problematic manner by which governments engage in network based activities.

While I have not studied Richardson’s examples I nonetheless have a hypothesis: these networks were difficult to create because they were between institutions. Consequently those being networked together weren’t be connected because they saw value in the network but because someone in their organization (likely their boss) felt it was important for them to be connected. In short, network participation was contrived and mandated.

This runs counter to what usually makes for an effective networks. Facebook, MySpace, the internet, fax machines, etc… these networks became successful not because someone ordered people to participate in them but because various individuals saw value in joining them and gauged their level of participation and activity accordingly. As more people joined, the more people found there was someone within the network with whom they wanted to connect – so they joined too.

This is because, often, a critical ingredient to successful networks is freedom of association. Motivated individuals are the best judges of what is interesting, useful and important to them. Consequently, when freedom of association exists, people will gravitate towards, and even form, epistemic communities with others that share or can give them, the knowledge and experience they value

I concede that you could be ordered to join a network, discover its utility, and then use it ever more. But in this day and age, when creating networks is getting easier and easier, people who want to self organize increasingly can and do. This means the obvious networks are already emerging/have already emerged. This brings us back to the problem. The reason mandated networks don’t work is because their participants either don’t know how to work together or don’t see the value in doing so. For governments (and really, any large organization), I suspect both are at play. Indeed, there is probably a significant gap between the number of people who are genuinely interested in their field of work (and so who join and participate in communities related to their work), and the number of people on payroll working for the organization in that field.

This isn’t to say mandated networks can’t be created or aren’t important. However, described this way Richardson’s statement becomes correct: they are hard to create. Consequently, you’d better be sure it is important enough to justify creating.

More interestingly however, you might find that you can essential create these networks without mandating them… just give your people the tools to find each other rather than forcing them together. You won’t get anywhere close to 100% participation, but those who see value in talking and working together will connect.

And if nobody does… maybe it is because they don’t see the value in it. If that is the case – all the networking in the world isn’t going to help. In all likelihood, you are probably asking the wrong question. Instead of: “how do we create a network for these people” try asking “why don’t they see the value in networking with one another.” Answer that, and I suspect you’ll change the equation.

IPAC Conference

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Today I’m doing a panel on Networks and Networking in the Public Service at “Beyond Bureaucracy” a conference hosted by the Toronto Regional branch of IPAC.

As the description states “Informal channels of communication are vital networks that allow people to socialize and collaborate and, arguably, work more efficiently. Technology can make these networks indispensable, as shown by user-driven wikis and social networking sites like Facebook. ”

True and true. And then here’s a kicker. These networks exist whether organizations sanction them or not. Although not perfect, social networking software at least brings old hidden networks out into the open and at best helps subject them to other societal norms (think gender parity and racial diversity). Telling employees they can’t use facebook doesn’t destroy the network. It just forces it somewhere else, somewhere where you have even less visibility into how it manifests itself, who it benefits and how it grows.

In essence you strengthen old hidden networks. That thing we use to call the old boys club.

Consolidated list of public service posts

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Someone asked me yesterday for all my blog posts on public service sector reform.

This isn’t all of them, but it is a list of many of my favourites:

Public Service Renewal – If you’re explaining, you’re losing

Crisis Management? Try Open Source Public Service

Don’t Ban Facebook – Op-ed in today’s G&M

Centralization of Foreign Policy & the Role of DM’s

Public Service Reform: The Myth of Failure

Public Service Reform: Starting at the Apex

Thoughts on Azzi’s Biography of Walter Gordon

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Frankly, no one reads enough Canadian history… so I’m trying to do my part. I just hope Rudyard takes note.

For those who’ve never heard of Walter Gordon, he was Lester Pearson‘s first Finance Minister. Of course, he was also much, much more. For Liberals, Gordon was the man who organized the party back into fighting form while it served in opposition to Diefenbaker and, in doing so, won the Liberals the 1963 election. Perhaps more importantly however, Gordon was one Canada’s first nationalists who, among other things, founded the Committee for an Independent Canada the predecessor (or inspiration of least) for the Council of Canadians.

Azzi%20-%20Walter%20GordonWhat makes Gordon such an interesting study are not only his accomplishments, but the numerous, and often contradictory threads that made up his life. Here is a man who founded several firms, including one of the most successful private sector consulting firms in the history of Canada. As a consultant, he was thus able to keep one foot in the world of public policy and government – advising ministers and deputy ministers – while keeping other foot in the private sector, advising presidents and CEO’s. As head of these firms that he also helped broker the sale of large Canadian firms to American buyers. And yet, here is a man who was a strong Canadian nationalist, who sought to introduce structural limitations on foreign ownership in Canadian industry. He was also, on the one hand, a man with incredible organizational skills and yet, when given strategic control, had a modus operendi that was often problematic. According to Azzi he seemed to always identify problems, solve them hastily, and then apologize for the shortcomings — however dramatic — of his already implemented plan.

Azzi’s biography of Gordon was also illuminating in how it reminds one of the old adage “plus ca change…”

For example, Gordon’s first major postwar appointment was as chair of the Royal Commission on Administrative Classifications in the Public Service. In other words, Public Service Sector Reform. Needless to say this issue is once again a hot topic (one I happen to take great interest in and write on occasionally). Interestingly, this report had negligible impact – a fact Azzi attributes to poor research and analysis – but nonetheless hinting at the fact that public service sector reform may have been as difficult in 1947 as it is in 2007.

Ironically, Gordon inability to effectively draft and garner support for his Royal Commission Report may have contributed to some of the frustration he later experienced as Finance Minister. His frustration with the public service seems straight out of an episode “Yes Minister” or possibly the diary of our current Prime Minister. This passage sums it up beautifully:

When Gordon’s private secretary, Nancy Burpee, ordered a red typewriter, a high official in the treasury Board sent a long memorandum explaining why government issue typewriters had to be grey. Douglas Land summarized Gordon’s attitude: “If you can’t get a damn typewriter, how can you draft a municipal loan fund in a month?” Incidents like this led Gordon to doubt whether the bureaucracy could draft a bold budget… Despite these problems, he still wished to move swiftly to carry out his plans. After a few days in Ottawa, Gordon described the situation to Douglas Land: “I thought I was back at the Royal Commission with everybody explaining why no idea could work and why everything would take ten years to do. I have ordered some dynamite and hope to stir things up.”

The real focus of the book however – mirroring Walter Gordon’s life – is the rise of Canadian nationalism or, more specifically, Canadian economic nationalism. In many ways Gordon is the grandfather of the various forces that in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s would first oppose free trade and then, globalization. It was this topic that both ended Gordon’s political career – after his disastrous 1963 budget – but that also made him a folk hero among particularly left-wing nationalists. Interestingly, based on Azzi’s assessment, it is hard not to feel that Gordon was less of a nationalist then simply anti-American. Today we can see how these roots of Canadian nationalism have shape the tree’s growth. Even 30 and 40 years later many ardent nationalists on both the left and right cannot separate out anti-Americanism from their Canadian nationalism.

Azzi never passes judgment on Walter Gordon the man. However, he is clearly deeply uncomfortable with his essentially protectionist and nationalistic economic policies. And for good reason. Gordon’s construction of the problem was, at best, less than scientific. As he himself stated, his views “cannot be analyzed scientifically or proved absolutely. But the fact that judgment or belief is arrived at in part intuitively or through personal experience does not necessarily make it any less true.” It’s a somewhat shocking statement, analogous to saying “he felt it in his gut,” exactly the type of thing the Left would justly mock President Bush about today.

Azzi spends some time talking about some of Gordon’s true accomplishments, specifically helping transform the Liberal Party into a progressive, thinking institution. Sadly, he spends very little time talking about Gordon’s contribution in the ultimate implemention of this agenda, largely set out in the Kingston conference of 1960. The policies implemented by, or initiated by Pearson and Gordon, such as the Canada Pension Plan, Medicare, Canada Assistance Plan, regional-development programs, unemployment insurance and a government student loan program, along with the foundation Gordon later created, are probably his real accomplishment. Indeed, many these institutions embody, in part, what it means to be Canadian. This alone should prompt one to overlook the book’s dry style and encourage you to get acquainted with a major influencer of Canadian history.

Centralization of Foreign Policy & the Role of DM's

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Yesterday Taylor and I had this oped published in the Toronto Star (PDF version available here). Had a tremendous amount of positive feedback from many friends, including those in the foreign policy community. Please keep sending me your thoughts. Among the most interesting was from David B. who commented that

“Prime Minister Mackenzie King resisted inviting opposition leaders into the Privy Council during the Second World War because he believed it was the duty of the opposition to oppose; he feared that co-opting the opposition would lead to government tyranny. An interesting counter-perspective.”

Fantastic historical anecdote and important counterpoint! In our example, it should be noted that even after Mulroney invited the opposition leaders into the Privy Council they continued to opposed the war. However, his act shifted the discourse from a political debate to a policy debate – although we could debate if that is desirable. Thank you David.

In addition, yesterday’s post on the role of Deputy Ministers and public sector service renewal generated a large amount of email – all of which was deeply appreciated. Many agreed, although some thought that DM’s can’t be completely divorced from the policy process (which was not my intent, but I concede the piece is easily be read that way – my error). My larger point was that, in the conversations I’ve seen, the leadership keeps looking for a policy solution to this problem – a document or combination of changes that will solve the problem. I just don’t think it exists because this is not a policy problem. It’s a cultural issue. This means it requires a different type of solution and in particular some leadership and behavioural modeling from the top (which is not necessarily lacking, its just not focused or sustained on this issue).

In another fun, albeit tangential historical anecdote. Andrew C. noted that JC Watts was not only an African American Republican Congressman, he was also a veteran of the CFL. Who knew? Apparently Andrew.
One final comment (excuse the pun). Many of you wrote me emails yesterday with your thoughts – and every one was both great and appreciated. I’d like to also encourage you to write comments on the blog. This whole project is made much more interesting when people build off of or critique what’s written. While this isn’t the globe and mail, there tend to be 100-200+ people passing through each day, so please keep emailing, but also consider sharing your thoughts with others.

Public Service Renewal – If you're explaining, you're losing

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Today and tomorrow the Deputy Ministers (DMs) of the Federal Public Service will gather to discuss the current state of affairs in Ottawa. In light of this event, I thought I would riff off my APEX speech and write the following post on public service sector renewal.

Towards the end of his famous lecture on Free Culture Lawrence Lessig quotes JC Watts, an African-American Republican Congressmen who once famously said that, in Washington: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”

JC Watts could have easily been talking about Ottawa, and the problem of public service sector renewal. On this subject there has been a tremendous amount of explaining, exploring and diagnosing. And it has been going on for a long, long time. So much talk, and for so long, that I sometimes wonder if we’ve come to believe we can literally talk ourselves out of the problem. Sadly this is not the case. Our talking has not solved the problem. In fact, all it has done is repeatedly lift, and then burst, expectations.

At its core, I believe public service sector renewal isn’t that complicated. It’s about creating a better, more responsive and effective culture, a goal that, at its root, is a management problem. However, we can talk this problem until we are collectively blue in the face (and, yes, I’m aware of my own guilty contribution to this discussion) without getting anywhere. So let us instead ask a more basic question. Why has public service sector renewal not already happened? Is it structurally impossible? Or, are those at the apex unwilling or unable to prioritize it? In short, why, after all these years, are will still explaining and not doing?

The truth is that both structural and incentive factors are at work, feeding off one another and making change almost impossible.

At one end the problem lay the very role of the DM and the culture of the public service. As the Public Policy Forum’s recent report “Leadership in the Public Service of Canada” describes, DMs’ essentially have three roles: provide operational and policy advice to their Minister in support of their agenda; oversee program delivery and the management of their department; and help facilitate inter-departmental co-ordination. The problem however, is that for whatever reason Ottawa’s culture is firmly grounded in the notion that policy is the main game in town. Those who want to move ahead, who wish to rise to the rank of ADM or DM all know: do policy. Ask almost anyone, the public service rewards policy experience over operational experience virtually every time.

Which brings us to the other end of the of the problem – a lack of will to prioritize or address the problem. The public service’s culture has created a DM cadre who are more incented to, interested in, and focused on, providing ministers with policy advice than with addressing the operational and management issues of their ministries. This is not a critique of DMs – simply an observation that they are creatures of the culture that reared them. However, given these influences, why are we surprised to see that those leading the public service have so far proven unable to pull the leavers of management to shift the culture of these complex organizations? Is it any wonder that our efforts to date have been to think, intellectualize, or explain our way out of the problems renewal seeks to address? Or maybe it is the logical outcome for a group, who by their own admission (according to Public Policy Forum Leaders Survey), are strong on analytics, weak on management/decision making, and whose time is split between three highly demanding tasks.

The fact is most DMs manage incredibly large organizations that require full time dedicated managers. The notion that a DM should be advising a minister on a day to day or even weekly basis may have been rational back when ministries were composed of 200 people and the relevant information could conceivably flow through one person, but in today’s world it is preposterous. Many Ministries contain thousands of employees tackling an enormous array of subjects. In addition, thanks to modern technology, that information flows at an exponentially faster rate. It is foolish for a DM, or even a Assistant Deputy Minister (ADM), to believe they can advise a Minister on any of the relevant material. Somewhere in the organization, much further down the chain, is a policy wonk who can, and should, explain the issue just as well.

At the same time, the executive cadre of the public service, and public servants more generally, are desperate for better management. And yet, their model, the person from whom they are taking their queue from, is the DM. When a DM opts to sacrifice spending time on mentoring, professionally developing junior staffers, improving operations, and generally solving management problems, and instead focuses on a policy issue, they send a powerful message to everyone in the ministry: policy matters and management doesn’t. It’s a perverse message, and one that is killing the public service. Indeed, can you think of any other large organization in the world where the most senior executives are involved in producing the final product (in our case, a policy document)? Does the head of IBM design or even brainstorm new services? Does the the head of Blackberry think up new products? No, the heads of these organizations manage. Their job is to foster and create organizations that enable those beneath them to do their work – the real work – more effectively.

And this is what – at its core – public service sector renewal should be about, enabling public servants to do “the real work” of making policy and rolling out programs more effectively. However, until Deputy Ministers can fix their own role and acquire the tools to accomplish this end, we’ll be forever stuck explaining, and not doing, public service sector renewal.

Crisis Management? Try Open Source Public Service

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Does anyone still believe that government services can’t be designed to rely on volunteers? Apparently so. We continue to build whole systems so that we don’t have to rely on people (take the bus system for example, it doesn’t rely on constant customer input – indeed I think it actively discourages it).

So I was struck the other day when I stumbled into an unfortunate situation that reminded me of how much one of our most critical support system relies on ordinary citizens volunteering their time and resources to provide essential information.

Last Sunday night, through the review mirror, I witnessed a terrible car accident.

A block behind me, two cars hit head on at a 90 degree angle – with one car flipping end over end and landing on its roof in the middle of the intersection.

Although it was late in the evening there were at least 20-30 people on the surrounding streets… and within 5 seconds of the crash I could saw over the soft glow of over 15 cellphone LCD screens light up the night. Within 60 seconds, I could hear the ambulance sirens.

It was a terrible situation, but also an excellent example of how governments already rely on open system – even to deliver essential, life saving services. 911 services rely on unpaid, volunteer citizens to take the time and expend the (relatively low) resources to precisely guide emergency resources. It is an interesting counterpoint to government officials who design systems that pointedly avoid citizen feedback. More importantly, if we trust on volunteers to provide information to improve an essential service, why don’t we trust them to provide a constant stream of feedback on other government services?

Public Service Reform: The Myth of Failure

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I’m getting ready to give my talk at the Public Service’s Executive Summit conference – a group that includes the CIO’s of all the federal ministries and other IT people engaged in service delivery. Although many of the themes will be reminiscent of the APEX talk I hope to blog on some of the newer themes later.

Leading up to the talk I’ve been reflecting on this notion of failure in the public service.

Frequently, when discussing the issue of public service sector reform, public officials seem to be of two minds. On the one hand I hear some advocates – let’s call them the entrepreneurs – argue that the public service needs to be more forgiving of risk and support innovation. Others – let’s call them the caretakers – regularly remind me of how government is different from the private sector. That unlike the private sector, which can take risks and fail, the government cannot. The consequence of the ‘caretakers’ predominance is everywhere: it explains why the government is slow to adopt new technologies and ideas, as it prefers to observe others figure them out and then move cautiously.
Myself, I’m a big supporter of the entrepreneurs – if you can’t fail then you can’t experiment, and while that means it’s hard to make things worse, it also makes it very, very difficult to make things better.

More importantly however, I find the latter statement interesting…  and also troublingly evasive and unrealistic.

It is true that many government services are essential – and the costs of a failure (however defined) can be high. But this is not true of all government services. All across government there is latitude for experimentation and new ideas – and indeed it takes place – but slowly.

More importantly however, the caretakers statement ignores reality. Government programs – like those of many organization – fail on a regular basis. Ask anyone whose worked in the public service, they’ll tell you of programs that never launched, got killed because they didn’t work, or that are continuing to operate and receive funding, but essentially don’t work (indeed, entire ministries come to mind…).

These can even include critical services. Aboriginal policy in Canada has been broadly “failing” for over two decades – and the consequences have been pretty atrocious. If one thought there was a zero risk threshold issue, I might have through this was it. While I believe that ‘caretakers’ are genuinely concerned that new technologies and approaches may increase the risk of failure there may be another, more troubling reason. ‘Caretakers’ may rightly fear that new technologies and structures because they create new types of failure. Failures that the bureaucracy is not practiced in the art of discretely hiding.

This is a powerful motivating factor. Failure, particularly failures that become public can at best cause Ministers great discomfort, discomfort they are likely to recreate for those who work for them. It’s an understandable and real concern. But in many instances the status quo of service and policy can also be dangerous. Experimentation – and as a result risk taking – is the only path I can see out.