Tag Archives: public service

The Financial collapse and the unsaid thoughts of public servants

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Fascinating week in Ottawa. Been having a great time, enjoying brown bag lunches and meeting with friends old and new.

I’m here to talk about public service sector renewal and as the the issue comes up on many occasions people ask me if I think the financial crises and the poor economy will make the government a more attractive choice for gen Yers.

I think the generation lens is the wrong one, because the public service needs not only good gen yers, but also good gen xers. That said, I think the answer, broadly, is no. The crisis will not have a big impact on applications. Richard Florida hit on the reason why on Monday in his Globe and Mail piece about the asymmetrical distribution of unemployment the recession will visit upon the work force.

Critically, government needs to recognize that, these days, it is hiring creative class workers and that this group, by and large, will be significantly less hurt by the economic collapse than service sector and blue collar workers:

Unemployment rates among the working class have been more than triple the rate of those in the creative class and about double the rate of those in the service class over the past decade. Service-class unemployment has been about double the creative-class rate and has not diverged from it in the past 20 years.

And look at the last recession in Canada. Unemployment rates among the working class rose to nearly 16 per cent in 1991, while the creative class and service class experienced much more modest increases.

So will there be an uptick in people interested in working for government? Mostly likely. But expect it to be modest. But also remember. those who decide to apply may be motivated by safety and security, not a sense of public duty.

Oh, and one other thing. I’ve had several friends tell me that people who’ve applied for jobs that have had to wait 6, 9 or even 14 months before getting an offer. For those who are really made to wait, by the time they find out they have a job, the recession could be over…

Which government embraces Facebook? (hint: it's not ours)

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A few weeks ago Dave D. kindly sent me this article out of England about how junior public servants are teaching their senior colleagues how to use facebook.

And just in case you think this is an ad hoc thing…

Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson yesterday said Whitehall mandarins had been given new guidelines ‘to encourage civil servants to take the first steps to engage with online social networks’.

I wonder if any Public Servant or Conservative Cabinet minister would be willing to share the same idea with our PM… likely not.

Oh, to live in a country with an open government

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So the British Government doesn’t just release masses of data so the people can mash it up – they are now offering a prize to the best mash-up. Sadly, our (Canadian) government couldn’t be more secretive with it’s data.

Government EntropySure there are some low hanging fruit that I (with the help of my trusted colleague Jeremy V) was able to get and use to create this mash up of the location of government offices. Sadly, their ain’t much (that is publicly available!) to mash it up against…

Ah, the things the public would do with the data it is supposed to own and have access to, if only its government would let it…

Sometimes it’s hard not to feel like we’re uninspired, secretative and falling further, and further, behind.

The Open Source Public Service

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Consider these to quotes side by side:

First,

“Human beings generally take pleasure in a task when it falls in a sort of optimal-challenge zone; not so easy as to be boring, not too hard to achieve. A happy programmer is one who is neither underutilized nor weighed down with ill-formulated goals and stressful process friction. Enjoyment predicts efficiency.

Relating to your own work process with fear and loathing (even in the displacing, ironic way suggested by hanging up Dilbert cartoons) should therefore be regarded in itself as a sign that the process has failed. Joy, humor, and playfulness are indeed assets…”

– Eric Raymond, The Cathedral & The Bazaar

(BTW: Who would have thought that the entire line of Dilbert cartoons – their humorous reflections on how organizations (dis)function – could be made depressingly painful in one brief phrase.)

Second,

“Disability claims and stress leaves are soaring. For many public service managers, the work-life balance is so unhealthy that one major federal department has tried to implement a BlackBerry ban between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m., so that people can reclaim some of their personal time. Management scholars are using the public service as a laboratory to study workplace dysfunction…

…The discussion about public service renewal is ongoing, but one valuable contribution arrived this week. In a report released Wednesday, the Public Policy Forum, an Ottawa-based think tank, succinctly identifies some of the key problems facing the public service. Few of these observations are likely to surprise Ottawa insiders, but it’s useful all the same to see them legitimized by respected researchers.

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The report confirms, for example, public servants feel so tangled up in procedure and regulations they are unable to get meaningful work done… Yes, public servants need to be accountable, especially in the post-Gomery universe, but if the “web of rules” is completely extinguishing every spark of innovation and producing the most risk-averse organization in the country, then there’s a problem.”

– The Ottawa Citizen Editorial Board

The narrative of the public service as a byzantine, rule bound place has become so accepted it is now unquestioned gosple. The truth is always more complicated. I know of, and occasionally hear from, people who work in places where (usually small) teams of public servants work in flat collaborative groups that are able to achieve great things. But the narrative exists for a reason – as the above Ottawa Citizen piece attests. This is why where you work in the public service (and often who you work for) is far more important than what file you work on.

So how much work in the public service falls within the optimal-challenge zone described by Raymond? More importantly, how many public servants would continue to do their job if they weren’t paid? 10%? 35%? 50%?

My suspicion is that the open source community for public policy is actually quite large. It includes those in the public service – who are tied up and tied down in their silos, but also extends much further. The problem is that it is tied down by process and an industrial model to “churning out” policy that doesn’t work well with today’s knowledge workers.

Canada25 showed that hundreds and indeed thousands of young people wanted to think about, engage in, and write about public policy in their spare time. All we did was allow them to focus on whatever they wanted and create as frictionless a process as possible. The result? Four well received policy papers in 6 years on top of numerous smaller projects, debates, discussion groups and countless other outcomes I don’t even know about.

The main point is that “open” can work in policy development. So maybe it is time to set the public service free? To allow policy analysts to self-organize and focus their attention to where they believe they can best contribute, rather than having hundreds if not thousands of them babysitting files that simple don’t move?

Why not treat policy challenges like open source software programs. Create a policyforge (modeled after sourceforge) where the policy can reside and where the module policy owner, can foster a community and accept its ideas, opinions and edits.

Will it work? I can’t guarantee it. But we’d better start experimenting because the one thing we do know. The current system is beginning to crack.

The Public Service as a Gift Economy

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In his description of why Open Source works Eric Raymond notes that open source communities don’t operate as command hierarchies or even as exchange economies. Instead they often operate as gift economies:

Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance. They arise in populations that do not have significant material-scarcity problems with survival goods… Abundance makes command relationships difficult to sustain and exchange relationships an almost pointless game. In gift cultures, social status is determined not by what you control but by what you give away.

What is interesting about the public service is that it, in theory, could operate like an open source gift economy. Indeed, there are no survival necessities for those who work in the public service – their salaries are generally acceptable and their jobs secure.

This isn’t to say scarcity doesn’t exist within the public service. But it is driven by two variables – neither of which is intrinsically scarce – but have been made so by the public service’s cultural history and industrial structure.

giftThe first is resources, which are siloed into various functions and cannot allocate themselves to problems without the consent of a centralized administrator.

The second is information, which for primarily historical corporate cultural reasons is rarely shared, and is hoarded in order to maintain control over resources or agendas.

Neither of this are necessary for the public service to function. Indeed, it would function a whole lot more efficiently and effectively if such a scarcity model were abandoned. This is why I’ve been such an advocate for a social networking system within the public service – it would serve as a clearing house to allow information and resources (people) to move around the system more freely and allocate itself more efficiently.

Such a clearing house would reduce the benefits of hoarding information, as it would be increasingly difficult to leverage information into control over an agenda or resource. Instead the opposite incentive system would take over. Sharing information or your labour (as a gift) within the public service would increase your usefulness to, and reputation among, others within the system. Nor would this mean political actors at the centre of this system would have to abandon agenda control – a central authority can still have enourmous influence ascribing value to what should be worked on. It would simply no longer have absolute authority over that agenda (It is worth noting that under the current model this absolute agenda power is merely theoretical anyway – public servants have an amazing ability of doing whatever the hell they want regardless who which party is setting the agenda).

Indeed, the above contrast also explains, in part, the challenge around recuiting. As gift styled economies become more prevalent, the command hierarchy model of the public service is becoming an increasingly undesirable system within which to reside.

Update: Think a gift economy built around reputation and recognition still doesnt make sense? The Ottawa Citizen’s Katheryn May recently noted that “The “churn” of the public service, characterized by the rapid and high turnover of people in jobs, has been identified as a big problem. The APEX survey showed 64 per cent of executives think of leaving their organization at least every month. More than half want to leave because of lack of recognition. (H/T to CPRenewal)”

Public Service Recruitment

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My friend Mike Morgan published a web-exclusive op-ed in yesterday’s Globe entitled “Attracting talent: How to make the civil service a sexy thing.”

The idea of having government pay for university tuition in exchange for a term of service is worth exploring. Interestingly it isn’t just the military that uses this model. Numerous elite consulting firms – such as McKinsey – often offer to pay the tuition of employees graduate school work in exchange for a period of service. If the employee elects to leave before the term of service is up then they take on a portion of the tuition. The model is not perfectly analogous since this is for graduate and not undergraduate work, but there are companies out there doing something similar.

One thing is for certain however, the government needs a scalable program that is front, as opposed to backend loaded. At the moment the “reward” for being in government comes after 20 plus years of service when you start gathering your pension. I know of few 20 year-olds who are thinking 25 years down the line, or who want a single employer for their entire life. Knowing that your entitlement is 25 years out isn’t as strong an incentive these days. Mike’s idea flips this, creating an immediate and tangible incentive – a university education – that can be leveraged for other opportunities across one’s career, not just at its end.

Most importantly, it is scalable. It addresses a system wide demand for talent, not just demand at the elite level, which is the focus of the Recruitment of Policy Leaders and Accelerated Economist Training Program target. We are not going to solve the recruitment problem by attracting 50 RPLers and 14 AETPers every year.

Special shout out to Jascha J. who caught a typo in this post. People regularly email me when the notice something is amiss – I’m deeply grateful to everyone for that.

Government social networking

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Again, as a follow up to my talk at DPI on web 2.0 technologies and government, Nicolas sent me a brief article on IBM’s internal experimentation with of Socian Networking.

Those at DPI will know that one of the reasons I believe social networking for government is important is that enables employees of massive organizations – both in terms of geography and number of employees – to find and engage with one another. As such it is a clearing house for ideas and people, helping them find and connect with one another. Hence this paragraph in the article obviously tickled my goat (yeah, I said tickled my goat):

…in a global company with nearly 400,000 employees, most people are too far away to plop down in a teammate’s cubicle or grab a cup of coffee. These social tools, IBM hopes, will provide a substitute for personal connections that flew away with globalization—and help to build and strengthen far-flung teams. “People are putting up pictures of their family, the same way they’d put them up in the cubicle,” says Joan DiMicco, one of the research scientists.

People may not think of the public service as globalized (or like IBM) but it does have over 325,000 employees spread out over 3 and half time zones across a 5,187 km axis east to west. That’s pretty globalized and IBM-like right there.

Make Government easier (part 1)

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The other week I had the pleasure of giving a keynote at the annual DPI conference – put on by the Association of Public Service Professionals. (I’m hoping to slidecast the presentation soon – just trying to get my hands on a recording ofthe presentation).

In the audience were something like 800 IT professionals from the Public Service – a great group of people – many of whom I’m had a great time connecting over email with this past week.

direct.srv.gc.ca_direct500_images_english_titleObviously, I spent some time talking about social networking in a government context – Facebook.gc.ca as I’ve come to refer to it. As many people know (but don’t think about in these terms) the government does offer a social networking piece of software, its called the Government Electronic Directory Service or, for short, GEDS.

As I’ve mentioned before GEDS has limited functionality, it only helps you find someone whose name, phone number or title you already know. But that can still be useful and so a ton of people – both within and outside government. However, after talking to a number of people, I’ve discovered that not one person I’ve met actually knows how to get to the GEDS website. They all have to search for it in Google to find it! Talk about making one of the best IT tools within government difficult to find/use!

Why is that?

Because the GEDS URL (or web address) is the easy to remember:

http://direct.srv.gc.ca/cgi-bin/direct500/BE

Really? Why did the people who created this IT directory simply not make everyone’s life easier and make it:

http://geds.gc.ca

Now, while I think GEDS should be replaced but something more sophisticated, I nonetheless bet that its usage would be much higher – or at least, its users would be much happier – with this little address change.

It’s a simple change – but exactly the kind of thinking that applied more broadly, could make our government run just a little more smoothly.

My first 911 call – lessons for open systems

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So this Saturday morning, on my way downtown to conduct a negotiation workshop for several wonderful people in Vancouver’s environmental NGO community, my friend Rikia and I were stuck behind a white 16 cubic foot box van that began weaving very erratically (I mean, into oncoming traffic erratically).

After some initial hesitation I made my 911 call ever.

(As an aside, I think I’m a pretty lucky guy to have made it to the age of 31 before feeling like I was in a situation where I had to call 911 – and frankly while this situation was dangerous, I myself was never in danger)

During the call I was struck by how patient and restrained the operator was. Although he never sounded cavalier, nor did I pick up any sense of urgency – likely a tactic to ensure callers stay calm. In addition, I noticed how the operator never doubted the underlying veracity of my story.

This observation got me thinking about a post I wrote a while back about how 911 is a perfect example of how public services already use open source principles. Accepting this argument, my 911 experience actually affirmed some things  I’m sure many open source veterans already know.

Any open system (and many closed ones) rely on a community of people to provide it with important data (e.g. where eradic drivers are, or where critical bugs may exist in the code). Since people often come into the 911 community (or an open source project) with a problem or concern they are likely predisposed to be agitated. Consequently, I suspect that open systems that retain the most users are those that are predisposed to assuage them and keep them calm. Indeed this probably not only improves retention (increasing the likelihood a caller/bug register calls again) but likely also helps maintain the sanity of those helping them. So lesson one: a little patience is essential for long term success.

In addition, I mistook the road the truck was driving on not once but twice (talk about testing one’s patience!). However, if the operator was annoyed,  I didn’t know it. While it is important that 911 get accurate information a worse outcome would be for a call where the operator and the caller get into a dispute – if a user has a negative experience with 911 they may never call again – significantly diminishing the value of the system and increasing the risk to society. Obviously the stakes aren’t quite so high for an open source software project, but putting a premium on accuracy above all else probably isn’t wise either. While we want users to be accurate – a system that penalizes inaccuracy so heavily that they never return is probably not wise either. So lesson two – always lead by trusting, but of course, verify.

The Public Service is from Mars, We are from Venus

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Last week the Clerk of the Privy Council gave a speech this speech in Vancouver. There is much in the speech that is promising, and some that remains problematic.

That said, I want to key in on the last part of the Clerk’s speech. Myth number 8: “The Public Service is out of touch with Canadians — they’re from Venus, we’re from Mars.”

In this piece the Clerk touches on the traditional critiques of how the public service is out of touch. He goes out of his way to outline how the geographic, linguistic and ethnic, are or have been addressed. In addition he outlines why – through outreach – the culture gap between private and public sector can be overcome.

We can debate if these concerns have been sufficiently addressed, and if not, how they should be. I think it would be hard to argue with the notion that enormous progress has been made on this front in the past few decades. However, none of them represent the differences that concern me most.  One which I do not think we can resolve and so requires further thought.

Today, public service employees are members of a union, enjoy life long job security, are eligible for a generous pension plan, and, by and large (particularly in the more senior ranks) live in Ottawa – a city shaped by and dominated by, the public service.

There was a time when the first three traits meant that employment experience of a public servant – such as one’s notions about: job security, opportunity, the expectations of their employer, and relationship with their boss and peers – was not dissimilar to that of many other Canadians.

Today however, this is less and less the case. Fewer and fewer Canadians are unionized, enjoy job security, or a pension.

Simply put, there is a culture gap.

A public servant’s career, life choices and opportunities are shaped by a system that is far removed from that experienced by the vast majority of Canadians. This, in a city where your average public servant comes into contact with non-public servants less and less.  I’m not saying this shouldn’t be the case. What I am saying is that the capacity of a institution to make policy for a public it resembles less and less, and whose experience is increasingly far removed from its own, is troubling and worthy of further exploration. It’s a culture gap I think is on few people’s radar – even the clerk’s.