Tiny Costs and Potential Benefits of Helping Each Other

by Kent Aitken

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Last year I wrote a post called Painfully Obvious: Find Links, about seeking out the existing knowledge in a field. While we should be respectful of others' time, the cost/benefit calculation is pretty solidly on the side of reaching out - it only takes a minute to write and read such emails, and the effort only has to work out occasionally to be incredibly worth it (often for both parties, on top of being just generally enjoyable). And people still have the option of accepting or declining.

There's a cost to being too reticent, here. I think we still reinvent far too many wheels.

Looking back, I continue to be amazed by how generous people can be with their time and expertise. It has become our standard to invite authors when we discuss books (which turns into the Impossible Conversations/Monday Book Review series), and I've been surprised at how often the response is resources, regrets based on scheduling, or acceptances. The same goes for some research I wanted to learn more about recently.

However, even with that cost/benefit calculation in mind, and knowing that those I reach out to can certainly decline, I occasionally feel bad about it. It's largely because I feel as though I'm more often on the receiving end of this kind of help and advice, which I chalk up to being relatively early in my career, and somewhat less so to being a generalist. My theory is that balance will shift towards the providing side over time.

It recently struck me that this theory may be true - or it may be a total cop-out.

With That in Mind

If anyone ever thinks that I could be of help - for discussions, resources, or anything - please, please feel free to contact me (there's a Gmail icon at the top of every post).

For the record, I've noted that I often feel unqualified writing and sharing my thoughts publicly (see: On Writing). I'm not suggesting that I have a tremendous amount of expertise. Instead, I'm extending the invitation based on the same principle with which I ask others: because it takes so little effort to offer, and because it only needs to work out and really click once or twice to be worth it. The cost is so low that even if I can provide a tiny benefit, it works.

Post Script

This post is very much so based on my personal approach to navigating government and academia. But it's perhaps worth noting as a reflection that the more comfortable we all get with striking up discussions with those in our fields, the better government will be.

Lastly, a genuinely huge thank you to those described above, kind and generous with their time.

Painfully Obvious: Find Links

by Kent Aitken

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At the outset of my public service career, I listened to a conference keynote entirely dedicated to networking. It was presented through the lens of career-building, and to me, sounded like sucking up and charlatanism. I switched off.

A few years later, I was at a table with a handful of municipal, provincial, and federal CIOs discussing how they handled their career evolution toward managing people with more, and more current, technical expertise. Here's the simple, but showstopping solution from one of them:

“I've spent the latter half of my career building business skills, but also building a network. I have twenty years worth of friends I can call any day to ask “Hey, can this consultant do a good job on X project?”

By that time, I understood the importance of networks (and it avoided the language of "networking" as an activity, which has negative connotations for me). So it stuck.

Yet, I've realized that the relationships we should invest in aren't always obvious. In July, a series of chance events landed me in the basement of a pub in Washington, DC. I ended up sitting next to a bright American public servant, and after talking for a few minutes we realized that we were working on exceptionally similar projects, facing many of the same challenges. So now, we're setting up videoconferences to compare notes. But, it struck me that I could have found that connection through three minutes of Googling, with plenty of context to reach out.

This is you in your career: a massive room, with a tiny flashlight.
You know there's a lot of good stuff to be found, but not what, and not where.

One of the authors of The Metropolitan Revolution, Jennifer Bradley, had this to say after interviewing a slew of city stakeholders:

"When we go around the country, whether it was all the mayors in the Denver Metropolitan Area, or the philanthropies in Northeast Ohio, they would say, "We never got together."...It’s the most simple thing, and you do feel like a dork the first few times you tell people "no really, just get everyone in a room," but over and over again we heard that that was a huge step. And I think it has to do with the fact that people are so busy doing what they think of as their day-to-day job, they forget to step back and look laterally and think about what somebody else might be doing."

That excerpt is from an article called A Lot of Civic Leaders Need to Listen to This Painfully Obvious Advice.

If you take the time to seek those who can shine light on things, suddenly it's all that much easier.

On the surface, yes, it's painfully obvious: talk to people who can help you do your job. But sometimes you won't know them yet - they'll be just outside your network. Just outside the part of the map you can see. It doesn't always seem easy to find and initiate contact with people you haven't met yet, particularly if they're experts in your field. Here's what I've been trying to remember:

1. We have policy cover to use the internet for "participating in professional associations, knowledge sharing and career development." Which is pretty broad. ("I'm writing as a X enthusiast who happens to work for Y.")
2. The world will almost certainly not end if you email a possible contact. In fact, the opportunity cost of not trying far outweighs the risk.
3. If your job is important (and it is), dedication and diligence in establishing relationships with colleagues and counterparts isn't a career move. It's just your job.

So I pushed my mind through that lens, and I'm pulling my body after.

CPSRENEWAL.CA Weekly: The Importance of Informal Networks and All Things Digital

Lately a common thread of my discussions with public servants has been the importance of informal networks and of all things digital. The fact that these discussions are always informal and almost always digital seems either definitively ironic or more deeply indicative of their importance, and the importance of technology in facilitating them.

A couple of columns ago we put it out there that we would like to see some more direction from the centre on some things (i.e. providing us with concrete examples of how we can get involved in the renewal process). We received some good feedback and ended up having to ‘reload’ our weekly column.

The comment left by Renewalist spoke to the need for “regular and influential people inside of government [to use] their melons and [adapt] to the inevitable realities [in] their own ‘corners’ of the public service.” Renewalist also spoke of the need for courage at all levels, “It's about people like you and me stepping up and stepping into places and things that need to change.”

Given the lack of official means to participate in renewal in the broad sense, that is to say beyond taking it upon yourself to engage in your own work, informal and behind-the-scenes activities become critically important to advancing renewal efforts. We whole-heartedly agree that renewal is about people stepping up to effect change.

If the renewal environment is categorized by both a cross-section of individual movers combined with a lack of overarching means to participate, than informal networking and the use of new technologies are two of the most important means through which Public Servants are able to get in touch with one another and participate creatively in the broader renewal discourse.

Online Activities

CPSRenewal.ca is happy to have started to make some critical (yet informal) connections on the web recently. Last week Etienne Laliberté posted a consolidated list of Public Service Blogs on Contrarian Thinking, and was even ‘inspired’ to write a very sensible piece on his blog. Peter Smith followed up with a post on Spaghetti Testing. In between all of this there was undoubtedly a flurry of behind the scenes emails between people who have never formally met but share a common interest in the future of the public service. Moreover, there is a clear connection between ‘renewal’ and ‘web 2.0’. Perhaps you have heard of government 2.0?

Offline Activities

I am not sweeping formal associations aside as being unimportant in the present environment because this is simply not the case. I participate in my department’s youth organization and sit on relevant committees (e.g. Intranet Committee and Training and Development Committee). It is through these committees that I try to push for ideas in official capacities and proper channels.
Having said that though, my most rewarding conversations about renewal often happen outside the traditional channels. Put simply, I make the effort to get out there and talk to my fellow public servants. In fact, a couple of weeks ago I finally had the pleasure of having lunch with a colleague who is highly (officially) involved in renewal efforts.

Two things stick out from our offline conversation.

The first is that the conversation lacks a definitive start and end point. The conversation did not start when we met for lunch, nor did it end when we finished. It both started and finished online, moving seamlessly from virtual to real space and back again.

The second thing is a pointed statement he made about technology/social media and the government. It went something like this:

“If we don’t provide the [digital] tools that new recruits want or need then they will step outside the public service and provide those tools themselves. Under these circumstances we should be actively managing risk by providing the tools and space to maneuver internally. If we fail to act out of fear of inevitably internal setbacks or abuses we are making a grave mistake. The potential for questionable digressions in internal space pales in comparison to that same potential born out on externally.”

The Confluence of Activities

It boils down to what Colin Mckay addresses in a section entitled Kneecap the Red Tape Brigade, in The Secret Underground Guide to Social Media for Organizations (reproduced for your benefit below):

I’m often asked if the introduction of social media tactics requires new human resources policies - you know, to deal with the slander, the leaks, the allegations, even the sexual harassment.

No.

Any organization worth their salt has already put policies in place to deal with:

• Interpersonal conflict
• Confidentiality of information
• Who acts as a spokesperson
• Sexual and physical harassment
• Protection of personal information

Social media does not cause a new range of human behaviour – it simply magnifies the faults in that behaviour.

In other words, fear of possibly magnifying currently existing human behaviour does not sufficiently justify our aversion to embracing new technologies to work with. I have a feeling that perhaps there are many of us struggling with similar problems but we don’t know it or, even more frustratingly, do know it, but are held hostage by lack of information. One would think that given the technological advantage we have over previous generations of bureaucrats we should have broken down communication silos a long time ago. The idea of sharing best practices widely is nothing new, yet for some reason when best practices are still relatively new practices sharing is anything but wide. Technology is supposed to not only improve processes but facilitate information sharing, which is why the denial of access to new technologies or best technological based practices is at best counter-productive.

Our inability to do something as simple as consolidate an online repository of renewal best practices, be they in staffing, development programs, internal communications, intranets, online tools, stakeholder involvement, or youth organizations is both frustrating and highly problematic.

All I want is a single place to go to get information on all things renewal.

Maybe then we can all stop wasting time trying to convince others that this will work and show them that it is already working.