Innovation is Information

by Kent Aitken

---

In August, the Clerk of the Privy Council delivered a speech titled “A National Dialogue On Policy Innovation.” Elsewhere, #policyinnovation is one of the most used hashtags by Canadian public servants. It’s somewhat of a hot topic right now. But what is "policy innovation" in the first place? 

For starters, it could refer to "new and interesting ways of developing policy." Or, "new and interesting policy." (See: On Prioritizing Policy Innovation) We tend to use both versions almost interchangeably, but this post tilts towards the former usage. I’ve heard the term used to refer to crowdsourcing and challenge prizes, deep dives into technological and social trends, improvements to government services, behavioural economics, and much more.

But within that nebulous concept, I think there's a central core to the entire idea that may be a useful way to think about how we gather and understand evidence, and how we make and implement decisions. It's all about information.

More options means more precise application

To back up slightly, let’s consider another arc of innovation that is both an analogy and a predecessor, that of telecommunications. We’ve gone from letter-writing to printing presses, telegraphs, telephones, the internet, and now to low-cost ubiquitous mobile connections. Every combination of one-to-one, one-to-a-select-few, one-to-many, public forums, with every combination of attributed or anonymous, for every combination of formats, all at a vanishingly small cost.

But here's the key: at one point, to communicate long-distance you had one option: handwriting a letter. Later, you had two: handwriting a letter, or paying to have something reproduced many times on a printing press. You didn't have to rely on a letter when it wasn't the best option. As more and more options became available, you could match your communications goal more precisely to different ways to achieve it.

Likewise, now we have a wider range of policy development approaches and policy instruments, which means there’s a greater chance that we can match the right approach to the right situation. We have a wider range of options partially because we get inventive over time, but far more so because policy development and implementation often is communication and so we’re simply piggybacking on telecommunications advances.

The information

Which isn’t much of an insight, I recognize. Yes, the internet opens up options for how government does things. But if we start to think of policy innovation as communication, instead of as enabled by communication, it starts to shed light on what we’re really trying to accomplish, and where “innovative” approaches fit in more “traditional” approaches. Using the terms in quotations lightly.

Basically, the approaches that get pegged as "policy innovation" often boil down to two key actions:

• transferring information between people
• arranging information for people

It’s the crux of crowdsourcing, policy or service jams, innovation labs, open data, design thinking, challenge prizes, and citizen engagement approaches like consultations, townhalls, and social media chats. Someone has information that policymakers can use: ideas, problems, slogans, lived experience, or academic expertise (see: The Policy Innovator's Dilemma). Then it’s a matter of finding the best way to access it, which is a question of format. You just have to learn the formats. Similarly, once you've crossed the threshold and learned a new telecommunications approach (case in point might be parents and grandparents on Facebook), it becomes part of a passive mental algorithm that takes a need or goal and instantly knows how best to accomplish it.

Talk of policy innovation tends to go hand-in-hand with the idea that policy issues increasingly cross jurisdictional or societal boundaries, and are a part of an increasingly complex environment (see: Complexity is a Measurement Problem or On Wicked Problems). Which is where arranging information becomes invaluable.

Let's say  you get ten informed stakeholders of a given policy question in a room, and ask each for their concerns. They each reveal a different way of looking at the issue, revealings its complexity and pointing out legitimate pitfalls for policy options. The problem is that by the time the tenth stakeholder spoke you forgot the concerns of the first five, so it's impossible to understand all ten in context. It's Miller's Law: human beings can only hold seven things, plus or minus two, in our working memory. Which is where techniques like journey mapping, system mapping, and sticky noting everything are crucial for policy. They're the policy landscape equivalent of doing long division on paper so you can remember everything in play - what we might call mental scaffolding. 

Many approaches include both transferring and arranging information. For instance, a public consultation might include a call for ideas with a voting mechanism that creates a ranking, signaling importance. Some deliberation platforms include argument mapping systems that use algorithms to arrange the discussions for participants, almost like Amazon bringing complementary products to the forefront. ("Are you outraged at your government about X? Many people outraged about X are also outraged about Y, perhaps you should consider lambasting them on that topic too.")

In other cases, governments can (and should) map out what they already know about a given policy issue to get it out of working memory and focus on change drivers and relationships between forces. This will become increasingly important if we truly want to get out of siloed policy-making, find hard-to-see connections between once-distinct policy areas, and genuinely understand entire systems. Our governance model was built for a world we falsely believed was simpler than it was, and within that we're running into our own cognitive limits. We literally cannot hold all the elements of a complex policy issue in our heads without some kind of mental scaffolding, be it tools, other people, or paper.

Metadata

Two notes on metadata, or information about information (an example would be how DSLR cameras automatically include date stamps, aperture, shutter speed, iso, and more information in image files).

First, some approaches that get lumped in with policy innovation don't fit perfectly with the transferring and arranging information categories. Behavioural economics, for instance (and its service delivery cousin of user testing), seems more like creating new information through research. But viewed from a policy lens, I'd suggest it's actually more like metadata.

Let's say government wants to maximize the rate of tax returns, so tweaks the language on letters to taxpayers to see what framing resonates with people. Here's the UK example:

"...replacing the sentence “Nine out of 10 people in the UK pay their tax on time” with “The great majority of people in [the taxpayer’s local area] pay their tax on time” increased the proportion of people who paid their income tax before the deadline."

The core policy instrument here is a law, and the letter sent to taxpayers is supporting education about the importance of filing tax returns. In this case, the information is in the letter. The behavioural economics piece is metadata about that information: how many, and which, people acted upon the information they received. It's still really about transferring information between people, which puts tools like behavioural economics and data analytics in this common framework and may help practitioners navigate between possible approaches.

Second, there's a meta-level to the idea of transferring and arranging information that changes the value of different approaches and formats. We might call it "conspicuous innovation" or "conspicuous engagement." Basically, the transfer and arrangement of information is not the only goal achieved by these approaches - someone emailing a policymaker a vital piece of information for a policy question is worth less than that same person posting it publicly during an official consultation. The metadata for that piece of publicly posted information includes the number of views from other people, the signals about government's attitude towards governance and transparency, and the future value to others. 

So what?

The "policy innovation" toolkit centers around two actions: transferring information between people and arranging information for people. Past this common core, it's often a question of forums and formats (increasingly, but not uniquely, about how we transfer information from non-governmental actors) (with exceptions, of course). So what?

One, I think it's worthwhile to examine what binds the idea of policy innovation together, to refine our working concept of the term.

Two, I think thinking in these terms highlights what we're actually trying to accomplish through these approaches, and might make it easier to choose between them.

Three, putting them in a historical context puts the perceived risk in context. I mean two things here: first, that policy innovation is very similar to our personal experience with telecommunications advances: more options allows more niche approaches, and eventually they become routine. Second, that if some of these approaches are at a fundamental level analogous to things government has been doing for ages, they seem less daunting. For instance, there are dozens of consultations ongoing at http://www1.canada.ca/consultingcanadians at any given time. It's just a different way of transferring information between people and policymakers.



Thank you to Blaise Hebert and Nick Charney for super interesting conversations on this topic.

Also, two recent posts from Melissa that are good general fodder here: What Innovation Feels Like, Part 1: Fear; and Part 2: Lack of Trust

The Next Big Thing

by Kent Aitken

---

Almost a year ago, Tariq, Nick, and I caught up for drinks and to bounce around ideas for CPSRenewal. We felt that the vibe of the blog had been changing. Nick had originally envisioned it as “Lifehacker for government,” which led to posts that made sense of trends and provided advice on how to make the most of new platforms and tools*. And we agreed that as time went on there were fewer of those future-focused posts.

For a while I worried about that change, as if I was missing something. But now my theory is this: I don't think sensemaking the future is as unique and valuable as it once was, for a few reasons:

1. People can choose to ignore ignorable things

2. The future is becoming less predictable

3. Being hyper-networked isn’t special

Ignorable things

Organizations will change for at least two reasons: when there is a burning platform (an urgent need or pressure for change), or when the benefits of change are obvious (and the opportunity cost of not changing is great and obvious). However, public organizations have a high threshold for what constitutes a burning platform. Ten years into Twitter's existence, governments worldwide are using still social media as a broadcast-only channel. There's really no possibility for catastrophe resulting from a cautious approach here.

Calculating the benefits of change is tricky here too. Any change, no matter how obvious a win it would be in a vacuum, requires one of an organization's scarcest resources: management attention. It doesn’t work if a requirement to realize an activity's benefits (or avoid costs) is the attention and approval of an executive who can provide neither. There is a vast and powerful attention economy within public institutions.

The future is becoming less predictable

I highly recommend that you read Wait But Why's piece on artificial intelligence. In particular, the opening section on why we can’t picture the magnitude of changes coming in the future. It opens with a graph, and the question "What does it feel like to stand here?"

"It seems like a pretty intense place to be standing—but then you have to remember something about what it’s like to stand on a time graph: you can’t see what’s to your right. So here’s how it actually feels to stand there:"

We have a growing body of evidence suggesting that change is occurring on an exponential scale, in several ways. And we can understand that idea rationally; we've pretty well internalized it.

"We have all heard this before, but constant change is the norm and the speed of change is staggering...

The complexity of the issues we face is also growing across all domains—fiscal, health, environment, security, diplomacy, development, defence, transportation, to name a few. "

- Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council [source]

But, like the figure in that second graph, we tend to revert back to thinking that we can manage that level of change. The problem is that our brains are swapping one question for another without us knowing it. Instead of answering "Will the near future look very different from the present if we’re experiencing an exponential rate of change?" we're answering "Can I personally imagine the effects of exponential change on the near future?" and the answer is actually that no, we can’t. We tend to just mentally extend the trendline from the last few years.

How we deal with a largely unpredictable future merits much longer shrift. For another time.

Hyper-networked isn't special

In the earlier days of the digital (and particularly social) world, finding insights in other fields or sectors of the economy and being able to imagine them applying to government was a really useful skill.

The thing is, it no longer takes research or even much insight to recognize useful tools or credible change drivers. We can replace "Aha!" moments with mental shortcuts, and the way we find information provides cues about people's intelligence and authority. For instance, if X colleague and Y scientist reference Z person's idea, and we think X and Y are smart, we'll probably think Z is smart and the idea holds water. An extreme example would be when Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates warn about artificial intelligence. They're smart, and when other smart people agree with them, the idea is credible. It doesn't take any understanding of AI on our part to catch a glaring hint about its importance - all we've done is compare the claim against a mental rolodex of trusted sources. Search algorithms, human curation, and the existence of instructions for pretty much anything have hugely leveled this playing field.

It was easy to see Uber coming, but much harder to prepare for it. Which is why taxi drivers were still protesting in Ottawa yesterday.

The next big thing

So I’m left thinking that the Next Big Thing is that we get better at how we make sense of purported Next Big Things, and we get better at how we handle constant Big Things that we won’t really see coming. Which would mean we need to dig into and dissect the concepts of foresight, change management, adaptability, agility, resilience (agility and resilience being two very different things), and take them far, far more seriously.

*A quick note on future-focused posts: long before I joined the site, posts like this hugely impressed me: Signal to Noise. I still find those kinds of posts to be strong, and they seem to garner more interest:

• How Nudges Work for Government
• Does Government Need a Prediction Market for Policy Options?
• Side note: I think Nick was right to single out prediction markets and I think they merit further exploration. Their success is pretty astonishing compared to individual expert prediction.
• Blending Public Sentiment, Data Analytics, Design Thinking and Behavioural Economics
• Why the Sharing Economy is Inevitable

Unsolicited Thoughts on Destination 2020

by Nick Charney

---

On Monday, the Clerk of the Privy Council Wayne Wouters released Destination 2020, the response to the government-wide Blueprint 2020 engagement process. The report comes on the heels of both the 8th Report from the Advisory Panel on the Public Service and the 21st Annual Report to the Prime Minister (See: Thoughts on the 8th Report from the Advisory Panel on the Public Service). While I could just cut to the chase and offer my take, there's actually a lot at stake here so I have to tread lightly.

A couple of high level thoughts

First, the report wasn't written with guys like me in mind. Clerk's reports generally speak to the early and late majority, not the innovators or the early adopters. If you are on the left side of the adoption curve like me, you likely thought the report fell short; and while perhaps that is true for you, you (we) need to remember that it's pretty progressive for those on the right of the chasm.

Second, if the report rattles the cages of the status quo and rallies the troops around change, then it's something that we all need to get behind. We need all the momentum we can get and holier than thou attitudes from guys like me aren't productive. We can disagree on execution but let's at least agree that we have consensus on the vision. Can we do better? Of course, we always can. But let's not allow perfection to be an enemy of the good. That tendency is old-school bureaucracy, and if we fall victim to it now, we'll become everything we profess to hate.

What I thought was most interesting

The recognition that the public service brand (as a profession) was in need of a major overhaul. While it was clearly an overarching theme of many of the conversations I took part in when I was on the inside, I was surprised that it made it's way into the final report. It's obviously a theme we've explored at length here (See: When did the Public Service become an ignoble profession?) but it's also one with no clear-cut solution. Engaging civil servants in profiling their work online will do little to stem the tide of sniping ministers, rhetoric filled unions, prosecutorial journalists, self-censoring bureaucrats or apathetic citizens. In short, while the problem here is well-defined, I have trouble reconciling the depth of that problem with the response. 

What I thought was cause for concern

A common thread through the entire report was connecting senior managers more directly with the rank and file employees. Many of the actions the report proposes would do just this (tiger teams, innovation labs, dragons dens, etc); and while creating new feedback loops is important, so is unclogging the existing ones. It's a point I've raised before and won't belabour further (See: On Dragon's Dens, Hackathons, and Innovation Labs). That said, while dens, 'thons, and innovation labs may work for some people, they definitely won't work for everybody. By their very definition they are exclusive and exclusionary, they benefit only those who have access and how one gains access is still not well defined. In my estimation, access is likely to be left to middle managers and early career executives to operationalize. They are the permission seekers, the vetters, the filters. How will selection for these new endeavours be any different than the selection of who gets what training opportunities, what briefing notes make it to the deputy, etc? Isn't the filter issue the thing we are trying to address here? Would we be exploring these novel approaches if more information managed to permeate the clay layer? What's the old adage about letting the inmates run the insane asylum?

Ironically (or perhaps more rightly, sadly), the Association of Professional Executives (APEX) recently urged the government to take more action on mental health because it's most recent study found that the organizational commitment of executives was on the decline (from 64 per cent to 52 percent) and that about 32 per cent of them are disengaged, disconnected from their work and unable to deal with the demands of their job. I'm not being glib, mental health in the workplace is an important issue that ought to be addressed. I'm not trying to liken middle managers to inmates or the public service to an insane asylum, but sometimes you just need to use a metaphor to drive home the point. Truthfully, I have plenty of sympathy for the challenges facing middle managers. It's something we have written about in the past (See: The Plight of the Clay Layer and Where Good Ideas Go To Die) and something I speak to frequently during presentations. I won't belabour the point but there is still something here that just doesn't sit well with me. It strikes me as avant-garde but guarded by the old guard.

What I thought the report did well

Give people hope. While I wasn't in the room (I'm an outsider now remember — arguably I've never been an insider, but that's another discussion altogether) I was told that the energy in the room was palpable. The twitter stream exploded with a cacophony of support from across the country with only a few (quickly buried) objections (why we are so desperate for hope is another conversation for another time).

There are hundreds of briefing notes and decks being written across the public service as your read this that are using the Clerk's report as leverage. A quotation from the report on the front page, a photo of the Clerk and another quotation on the back. If an initiative can be tied to any of the report's pillars, it will be.

This is to be expected. After all a Clerk's report is never about the actual report — it's about what we all do with it.