Project update: governance in the digital age

by Kent Aitken

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I've been slacking on posting here for a couple weeks - I've been writing long sections of a research project that I'll chunk up into smaller posts later (I usually work for the Government of Canada; I'm on interchange to Public Policy Forum for a year). Though my once weekly rhythm seems to be long gone regardless, perhaps for the better. With my apologies for the occasional mammothly long post.

I wrote a project update over on the Forum's Medium channel, if you're curious: Governance in the digital age. There's a lot left out that makes me think "How can I write about this and not mention [thing]?", but a lot had to hit the cutting room floor - my first draft was 11 pages and this is it whittled down to two.

Kent

The dark side of community engagement as a public servant

by Kent Aitken

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Last week I had a dark thought. I considered the possibility that my stakeholder community would possibly be equally well off if I was an anonymous public servant who never got out of the office. You might imagine that this goes against my general philosophy on modern public service, and you’d be right.

So I want to share my experience as a public servant for the last few years, with an emphasis on the "public" part. I recently wrote this on Twitter in response to Amanda Clarke, on the trend towards public servants having digital presences linked to their roles in government:

@KenRasmussen1 @kentdaitken It may also be a necessary feature of open, networked policymaking. PS needs to have an online presence.

— Amanda Clarke (@ae_clarke) October 16, 2016

@ae_clarke @KenRasmussen1 I'd second this. I can't imagine being good at my job without the presence.

— Kent Aitken (@kentdaitken) October 16, 2016

And I believe that, but I have to nuance it.

Three years ago I joined the Government of Canada's Open Government team (I've since taken a year of interchange). I took a broad view of Open Gov, and considered the principles and in a way the ideology in how I worked and wanted the team to work: open, engaged, collaborative, empathetic. I didn't think we could run a successful Open Gov program if our world was an office in Ottawa.

I wanted to get the know the community, hear from stakeholders, and look for opportunities to work together with groups in and outside of government. And I feel as though I did a reasonably good job of that.

In three years I've learned so, so much from people. Over Twitter, over beer and coffee, in meetings, and at conferences. My understanding of the problem space is immeasurably richer for those conversations, and they made me better at my job. 

Here's the downside.

For all of those insights and partnership possibilities, I was able to act on them and help change things maybe, maybe 10% of the time. Which, in my view, means I couldn't fully respect the time and effort that the community puts into helping governments and government employees. Increasingly, I started telling people that I'd love to help them but that they may want to contact my senior executives directly and try that route as well. Which is time-consuming for everyone, and hamstrings the analyst-level value of adding context and considerations.

I don’t think I was delusional. In many cases, executives in my organization responded positively to the ideas and partnerships discussed. But people in such organizations rarely make complete decisions; instead, they make parts of decisions while this complex amorphous thing called an “organization” is responsible for the overall picture.

So where does this leave me? I’m going to stick with being a public public servant. I’d feel like I had earplugs in and blinders on otherwise. But that impact gap concerns me. In a vacuum, the more senior a public servant is engaging with a community, the better it is for the community - except for the fact that available time to engage in “rigourous hanging out” decreases in proportion to seniority (see: relevant Matt Bailey Twitter essay). This concern, like so many others, has common roots in big governance questions, including how well we align expertise, responsibility, accountability, and authority. And I don’t know if we can get to an open, user-centric, empathetic, and ultimately a more effective government without addressing those questions.

A marker for digital government

by Kent Aitken

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Over the last few weeks I've spent some time sketching out my starting point for a few concepts: what I thought digital governance and digital government mean. Still working on the former, but here's the latter. I'm laying this here as a marker, curious to return to it in a year's time to see what I got right and wrong - and I welcome thoughts in the meantime.

What is digital government?

1. Government that understands fully, and exists fully in, the digital world
2. Government that is connected to citizens and stakeholders through modern - and multiple - channels
3. Government through which an informational layer extends through everything (like the Force) and helps both citizens and civil servants; through which information serves people, rather than people expending effort to serve informational needs

And, what it is not

1. Government that is tech-savvy, digital, modern, or innovative as an end goal (those characteristics must always be connected to the public good)
2. Government that is digital-only
3. Government that merely uses IT better than it does today

Even if the above is uncontroversial, it's still aspirational.

And while it's easy to say that governments need to better understand the digital world, how an "informational layer" evolves for government will need attention. A topical example would be those countries that now pre-populate tax returns for citizens and simply ask for an okay via a secure login or even a text message. A couple years ago Accenture put out a report about going from "looking digital" to "being digital:" i.e., going from bolting-on digital services and presences to embedding digital means into how people do their work. It's the difference between tracking something in a spreadsheet (manual entry, manual retrieval, but digital) and the way Google recognizes tickets in your inbox and reminds you about events. It's a much higher level of both sophistication - and actual impact.

The other I'll note for now is that digital government shouldn't be digital-only. Digital by default? Yes. But the digital system has to break well. That is, the experience should still be as seamless as possible for people with outdated equipment, low bandwidth, no internet, or no interest in using the internet to interact with government.

But for now, the above is a marker to return to later, with a lot of work required to test and develop those premises in the meantime.

Thoughts on how we think about online collaboration

by Kent Aitken

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I threw some of these thoughts out on Twitter the other day; if this is redundant,  you have my apologies.

In October I presented at the Conference Board of Canada's Public Sector Social Media Event on the topic of online collaboration, drawing heavily from a post called The Promise of Online Collaboration. The short version is the hypothesis that we are probably not good at online collaboration - we meaning everyone (not just government), and online collaboration meaning digital-based working groups, citizen engagement, or participation in online communities*.

In the talk I suggested that it's the responsibility of those convening online collaborations to become familiar with a much wider variety of formats so they can more appropriately design interactions (as Jared Spool has written, "design the design meeting").

In response, one of the questions in the Q&A was along the lines of "It sounds like you're suggesting more tools, which hasn't really worked for us in the past."

Fair point, though I'd say it's actually a handful of things:

1. Breaking the standard mental model for online collaboration
2. Being wary of the defaults that tools drive people towards

1. The mental model

There are some beautifully creative online systems, but as a general rule there's one core: threaded comments. This forms the core of most collaboration spaces (e.g. Github, Basecamp, GCconnex, blogs and websites, Jive, citizen engagement platforms). Which seems like a close analog to group discussion, but imagine this:

Let's say every time you wanted to work with a group, your only option was to open a large room, hand people a document to read, then invite them towards an infinite number of flipcharts. They can start their own, or add to others'. Depending on what time they get there. People can vote on which flipcharts are close to the front of the room. And sometimes, but not always, the person that invited everyone there would summarize the content and send it around.

Because at the heart of it, that's often how we work together online: "Here's a thing. What do you think? Feel free to add your own ideas, too."

That's crazy.

It might work. Heck, it's something we do on purpose in person sometimes. But we tend to assume that it'll work every time, for everybody.

2. Be wary of defaults

I originally had three sections, one of which would have been about choosing between platforms. For today, let's assume we have the tools we already have.

The problem is that the design of the tools pushes you towards a small set of default approaches. An obvious example would be meeting lengths. Outlook's default is 30 minutes, thus we end up with a ton of 30-minute meetings. I love getting 15- and 45-minute meeting invites, if only because it shows that the person organizing it has thought through the discussion to be had.

A collaboration environment built around threaded comments leads us to the default of posting a document, blog, or some framing thoughts, then asking people to respond.

But there are options. The question - as it always is - is what serves the goal. What'll work. For example:

Blaise Hebert's approach to a GC-wide collaboration on Red Tape Reduction was to throw the "What do you think" approach out the window and ask people simple, short questions wrapped in pop culture, once a week: "If you could personify your challenges at work, what would such a villain be called?" Once people launched in with creative answers, then he'd dig into why, and what their reactions might mean.

Or, author Sam Sykes recently spent an evening turning Twitter's poll system into a crowd-based roleplaying game, starting at this point:

Thou entre thy dungeon, yon Halles of Cataclysm. Thou spyeth paths to ye north and ye west. What is thy action.

— Sam Sykes (@SamSykesSwears) November 10, 2015

Even with a very vanilla platform, there are a raft of design questions:

• Ask for ideas first, or post a document for discussion?
• Ask broad questions that require long answers, or short specific ones?
• Organize an activity in stages and build on the discussion that takes place, or launch into everything all at once?
• Allow people to go in any direction, or provide parameters?
• Stick to one space, or supplement the main platform with other channels?
• Get involved in the conversation and try to spark interactions, or stay back and listen?

The obvious approach may not be best, and there's probably more room for creativity, design, and intentionality than it first appears.

*In fairness to our digital prowess, we don't get off scott-free in in-person forums, either. Try Thinking, Fast and Slow, or Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink of Make Groups Smarter, or Too Dumb for Democracy, or the wealth of research on our subtle gender- and ethnicity-based biases that persist in group decision-making.

On Transformational Leadership in the Digital Era

by Nick Charney

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On Monday I had the opportunity to speak to a room full of Ontario Public Servants about Innovation and Digital Transformation; my Prezi and speaking notes are below.



Good morning everyone.
My name is Nicholas Charney.
I am currently the Director for Engagement and Innovation at the Institute on Governance (IOG); which is just fancy way of saying I got to pick my title.
Before I launch into my remarks this morning I feel as though I should be a good corporate citizen and tell you a little about myself and the IOG.
We are small not for profit organization whose mission is to advance better governance in the public interest.
We pursue that mission through our virtuous circle of advisory work, courses and research programs.
I'm a policy professional by trade and am currently on a two year interchange from the Government of Canada where I've spent the last 8 years working at the confluence of people, public policy and technology.
My core responsibility at the IOG is to help build out or digital governance applied research program.
The program is based on the premise that two forces – digital and governance – are meeting like tectonic plates, shifting the landscape and giving rise to new peaks and valleys around key governance questions that all citizens need to be concerned about:

• Who has real power?
• How should decisions be made?
• How can all players make their voices heard and ensure that account is rendered. 

We've divided the research into a number of applied domains: policy analysis, service delivery, regulation and accountability.
You can learn more about the project, how to get involved and even watch the star studded panels from our launch event at iog.ca/digital.
Now, with that out of the way, there are a number of things I could say to you about digital transformation. 
I could start by saying that having the right skills is essential.
Or, that a talent-focused culture is critical.
Or, that organizational agility is the key to effective outcomes.
But I could say all of that and have said nothing.
I'd rather start out by saying that digital transformation is what you as leaders make of it.
That there is no shortage of wicked problems, demand for ideas, or need to bring them bear.
That technology and the Zeitgeist are combining in some interesting ways and changing the nature of the public service.
That these changes are creating both challenges and opportunities that require us to think differently than we have in the past.
That's what I want to spend the majority of my remarks on today: thinking differently.
I'm often told that I think differently about problems than others do.
And to be honest I'm not entirely sure it’s a compliment. It gets me into trouble with my wife and it gets my children into trouble too.
Case in point, I have a very particular view on innovation (See: Innovation is Tricky, Literally and Finding Innovation).
My view on innovation is largely informed by a book by Lewis Hyde  – a cultural anthropologist – entitled Trickster Makes This World: How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture.
According to Hyde, Tricksters are classical cultural figures.
They represent a certain flexibility of mind and spirit, a willingness to defy authority and invent clever solutions that keeps cultures (and stories) from becoming too stagnant.

• crosses physical and social boundaries
• traveller / nomad
• blurs distinctions between right and wrong
• invents new cultural goods or tools 
• sexually over-active, irresponsible, and amoral. 
• creative liars 
• tells stories that make people laugh and inspire

Wait – let’s just redact a couple of lines there to keep the FIPPA people happy.
There we go.
Tricksters have something to say about how culture gets created, and about the nature of intelligence.
They steal fire from the gods, give it to man, and remake the world. 
In contemporary innovation rhetoric: they break traditional trade-offs, create new markets, and reveal the art of the possible.
In collaboration rhetoric: they use flattening communications technologies to cut across hierarchy, create new channels for influence and show the stark contrast between the world out there and the command and control culture in here.
Admittedly that’s how I go my start: experimenting with social media for collaboration behind the firewall.
As you can imagine I fancy myself a bit of trickster. 
I think it’s an incredibly important role, and one that I've chosen purposefully, because I'm willing to accept the risks, bear the consequences, and reap the rewards.
Now you may have noticed that this idea of innovation as tricksterism is a cultural approach to innovation rather than an institutionalized approach to innovation – say in the form of innovation labs.
I prefer to focus on the culture because whenever someone points a finger at what isn't working in the bureaucracy its almost always the culture. 
I prefer prioritizing people to structure and think that in many ways the root of many of our problems is the fact that we often prioritize them the other way around.
But rather than get up on that soapbox I’d rather show you something that tricksters can get up to when you put a little technology in their curious little hands.
In the federal government there is this thing called the Treasury Board Policy Suite.
Essentially it’s all of the rules that all federal civil servants need to abide by and is commonly referred to by public servants as the web of rules.
Here's what it is supposed to look like according to Treasury Board.

• 1 Code of Conduct - Values and Ethics; 
• 8 policy frameworks; 
• 73 policies; 
• 76 directives; 
• 56 standards; and 
• 59 guidelines.

For a total of 273 different policy instruments. 
Now I took some time and went through the suite and mapped the actual relationships between these instruments (See: Redux: Visualizing the Entire Treasury Board Policy Suite). 
Truth be told the web of rules looks more like this.
As you can see the two are very different beasts.
First a note on methodology.
There's a 'related instruments' tab on each instrument that provides a hyperlink to instruments that ought to be considered in conjunction with that which you are currently reading.
The visualization simply represents those relationships.
Size depicts prevalence, e.g. the number of connections the instrument has to others.
Colour depicts instrument type.
Line type and arrows – which are there but impossible to see at this distance – represent directionality and type of relationship. 
The first thing worth noting is that the placement of Values and Ethics is not central as it was in the official representation.
The heart of the suite is right here in what I call the culture cluster is right here.
You can see how tightly wound up it is.
And why it might be so hard to innovate in these spaces, there’s simply too much oversight and control.
The cluster is pretty much exactly what you would expect: 

• Policy on Government Security | 88# | 33%
• Policy on Internal Control | 71# | 26%
• Policy on Management of Information Technology | 59# | 22%
• Policy on Privacy Protection | 56# | 20%
• Policy on Information Management | 55# | 20%

Conversely, if you look at the periphery, where there is likely more room to innovate you will see that there is very little of consequence out there to innovate on.
Transformational institutional change is unlikely to be found in the Workplace Fitness Program Policy, the Uniform Directive or the Policy on Workplace Daycare Centres.
That said, I'm more than sympathetic to an argument that much good could come from innovation in those areas from an employee wellness perspective but that is likely a conversation for another day.
Now I put this thing together in my free time with some free online tools that I've never used before.
I published it to my blog along with some of my preliminary thoughts.
The thing went viral – or at least it went government viral, meaning that a couple of thousand people saw it.
I got a phone call from a Director General’s office whom I've never met who wanted a briefing on my work.
She just so happened to be the person responsible for the renewal of the policy suite.
I went in to brief her and her team.
Later I went in to brief her ADM.
Everyone wanted to know why I would do such a thing?
For me the answer was simple, because the opportunity was there waiting for someone to pluck it out of the sky.
Because I crossed social boundaries and knew the policy suite renewal was coming down the pipe before it was officially announced.
Because I was an outsider and was free to experiment.
Because I was curious and wanted to blur the lines a little.
Because I was able to use new tools and technologies to create a new lens through which we could look at the problem.
Because I was looking for an opportunity to be creative.
Because I wanted to be able to tell the story.
Because that’s what tricksters do.
Pretty impressive right?
Truth be told this data visualization is fairly bush league when you think about the scale and pace of changes that are on the horizon. 
I mapped something a handful of bureaucrats care about. 
It’s the wild west out there right now.
Governments services are being compared to private sector services.The media’s business model has imploded and created a perverse incentive structure that rewards muckraking, click bating and faux outrage.
Your staff email, text, Facebook, Twitter and snap-chat, each other all day and can circumvent any attempt you make to limit their ability to communicate with someone else.
In many cases they can send a direct message on Twitter directly to a Minister. Directly to their Minister.
Their online profile can be analyzed, partisanship inferred, and then targeted for scandal through a freedom of information request
And that’s just a fraction of what’s going on. 
Everyone carries a government issued GPS device in their pocket, you could collect, aggregate and analyze that data to know exactly how big of a physical footprint you need, how to better plan public transit to your office locations, when and where elevators should rest in those office locations and even what unit should be located next to another.
And what about drones, don’t even get me started on drones.
An engineering student in Europe built a prototype of a drone that is equipped with a defibrillator.
There’s a great Youtube video, I suggest you go watch it.
This is a major technological advancement in public health.
But what about liabilities?
What happens when urban drone hunting becomes a pass time?
What about drinking and droning?
I could go on at length.
But instead I want to close out my remarks by giving you some advice on where I think you can find innovators in your organization. 
As leaders if you aren't trying to identify and groom people who see the world differently than you do you aren't doing your job effectively. 
Transformative leaders incubate the next generation of transformational people, curate their ideas and lay the ground work today for them to be successful tomorrow.
I want to close out my remarks by giving you some advice on where you can find innovation within your organization. 
Look to immigrants or nomads.
Those who are new to your organization or those who move around a lot may in fact be your most innovative.
New arrivals bring fresh eyes, instinctively connect their new experiences with their previous ones creating a new middle ground for the organization to explore.
Look to people who can take more than a single world view.
They have a diversity of interests that drives them to read things from and maintain relationship in different sectors.
As a result they bring in ideas that seem foreign to many but yet always seem to contain some kernel worth exploring
Look to those who are willing to start from square one, willing to walk away from sunk costs and challenge the fundamental assumptions that dominate the discourse.
People who don't accept that the answer "because that is the the way we've always done it here”
Look to people who are good communicators.
People who make you feel at ease about things that you are usually uneasy about, who easily bridge the gap between those at the working level and senior managers, knowing how to couch their words with either group.
Look to the people who are comfortable with change.
They see everything as an opportunity and welcome whatever the newly reshaped world has in store for them.
Finally, look to the troublemakers.
The peoples whose transgressive nature exposes the more deeply problematic roots of more systemic and pressing problems.
They use intellect, humour and satire whenever possible, nothing is off limits, and as a result they wind up getting into hot water now and again.
Your job as transformational leaders is to inspire, encourage and when necessary, protect, them.
The future of your organizations depends on it.
Thank you.

Our Governance Algorithms

by Nick Charney

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I spent a couple of days this week attending the Marcom Forum in Ottawa. I've been on the conference's advisory board for almost as long as I've been a public servant and its always a nice change of pace to spend a couple of days locked in a conference room full of marketing and communications people. It gives me the opportunity to apply a totally different lens on my work and is a healthy signal check with respect to how different vocations prioritize strategies, tactics and ultimately, outcomes.

One of the things that stuck out for me from the Fab Dolan's (Google) keynote address was the idea that the pace of technological growth is no longer linear but exponential. That single purpose technology is now being widely diffused and applied to other areas (e.g. IBM's Watson to Health Care) and that consumers (and thus citizens) are increasingly interested in immersive experiences rather than static ones. In many ways this isn't necessarily a new insight but I found being reminded of it in a different context extremely helpful.



The other thing Dolan mentioned — the thing I want to reflect on today — was the idea that ethnography generates insights too slowly for today's marketplace whereas data allows you to test all of your hypotheses immediately and at a fraction of the cost. Dolan went on to illustrate his point by talking about machine learning in the context of video games and explain its marketing corollary dynamic creative.

Dynamic creative is a fancy way of saying continuous and concurrent A/B testing. Think 'nudge' not in the policy innovation sense but rather in the classic marketing sense, generating conversions. Essentially dynamic creative allows marketers to perpetually test and improve their marketing algorithm in real time using the behavioural data people generate when using the web.

But here's the rub.

Yes our current institutional array – our governance algorithm – is under pressure because in many ways it remains linear when everything else around it is becoming exponential, but its also the result of hundreds of years of the evolution of our thinking. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure there's a natural corollary to the world of public policy.

What does dynamic governance – or cognitive government (See: Open Gov, Values, and the Social Contract) – actually look like?

Where's the data that governments can tap into, use to test hypotheses against and lever to improve its governance algorithms in real time?

And, more importantly, even if we could do such a thing, should we?

Food for thought.

The Promise of Online Collaboration

by Kent Aitken

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I think one of the most fascinating questions of this point in history is whether we, as a society, are awesome or terrible at online collaboration. Personally, I’m rooting for terrible. I actually would be happy if we were completely wretched at it right now.

The promise of collaboration

Why? Well, for starters, we've been promised much by online collaboration. That it "changes everything":

 

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

Mass collaboration, facilitated by the internet, has been touted as a powerful, world-changing opportunity. And so far, there have been amazing successes: Wikipedia, Open Street Map, Ushahidi. In my own experience, online collaboration has been astonishing, opening opportunities I could never have imagined even five years ago. I think the promise of the digital era is (mostly) real, and that over time it's going to reform governance. 

Yet, our days as professionals are still spent in face-to-face meetings. Digital democracy has hardly taken root. Most people don’t engage in online communities; the content is largely created and debated by a small subset of power users. When people do engage online, it’s usually for “light” collaboration, leaving the heavier or more complicated tasks for in-person work.

So there are a few possibilities to explain this state of affairs:

1. We’re good at online collaboration, but only for certain cases and situations
   
   or
   
   
2. There are fundamental differences between in-person and online collaboration
   
   or
   
   
3. We have no idea what we’re doing*

*But impressive examples (like Wikipedia) are inevitable by virtue of the sheer number of collaboration experiments between the sheer number of people on the internet

I think that we have no idea what we're doing

Or at least, we have little idea. And that's good news, in a roundabout way. Consider this:

1. Innovation labs are the order of the day for governments. They’re built around tools, processes, techniques, and understanding what sort of space and conditions people require to innovate.
   
   
2. If you go back thirty years in the Public Participation research, you run into articles like Citizens Panels: A New Approach to Citizen Participation. Ten years later, other researchers were still sorting it out:
   
   “...most citizen participation techniques have been judged to be less than adequate tools for informing policy makers about the people's will. Recently, having planners or policy analysts work closely with long-standing citizen panels… panels can overcome many of the limitations to effective citizen participation.”
   
   
3. The roles of facilitators and guides are increasingly recognized as crucial for organizations. Some (very worthwhile) examples from the Government of Canada:
1. National Manager’s Community Tools for Leadership
2. Or their Tools for Building a Learning Organization 
3. Or Policy Horizons’ Learn and Grow Together: What is a learning organization?

Which I'm taking as evidence of this idea:

We’re still learning how to collaborate in person, let alone online.

The above examples demonstrate the realization that inviting a bunch of people into a room and hoping for the best is a terrible approach. We still do that online (and sadly, sometimes, in person). 

And we're pretty new to online (the Government of Canada declared “mission accomplished” on Government On-Line only nine years ago). It’d be perfectly reasonable if we were not that good at online collaboration yet. Online is different. There are similarities, but it’s different. We'd be crazy to think that we simply understand how to do this intuitively. Instead, it will be part art, part science. It will merit rigour and some degree of professionalization.

This is good news. It means that the lofty promise of online collaboration remains intact. It's a matter of scaling a learning curve, which we've just begun, towards truly and fully understanding (and becoming effective at) online collaboration. 

With that in mind, I stand by my seemingly hyperbolic opening line. I think one of the most fascinating questions of this point in history is whether we’re awesome or terrible at online collaboration.