Thinking, Fast and Slow about Online Public Engagement

by Nick Charney

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I was pouring through some course material on a behavioural economics earlier this week and got to thinking about how to apply the lessons from Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow to the world of online public engagement. I would suggest reading Kahneman's book in full, but If you haven't you can watch the video below for an overview of his thesis.

 

TL;DR Thinking, Fast and Slow 

Kahneman's core thesis is that the human mind is made up of two different (metaphorical) systems: System 1 (fast) and System 2 (slow). System 1 operates automatically, intuitively, involuntary, and effortlessly — like when we drive, recognize facial expressions, or remember our name. System 2 requires conscious effort, deliberating, solving problems, reasoning, computing, focusing, concentrating, considering other data, and not jumping to quick conclusions — like when evaluate a trade-off (cost benefit analysis) or fill out a complicated form. Kahneman says that these two systems often come into conflict with one another, essentially:

• System 1: Fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, subconscious 
• System 2: Slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, conscious 

The problem is not that people have two systems of thinking, but that they often rely on one system in situations when they should be using the other.

Where Thinking Fast and Slow meets Online Public Engagement 

So, here's the rub. The majority of the popular communications technologies (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) are designed for speed/ ease of share and as a result are likely to prime users to use their automatic (system 1) rather than reflective (system 2) muscles. This is perfectly fine given that their business models are based on usage, however what it also means is that the majority of online communications technologies are simply unsuited for meaningful (deliberative) public engagement, if in fact that is what we are after. The corollary of which is that there is likely a future market for slower online engagement technologies that prime people to use their more reflective systems. It also means that there will be demand for people who can structure online engagements in ways that nudge citizens to more conscious and deliberative participation in governance.

On slower technologies 

I think it is reasonable to expect to see a resurgence and/or second more refined wave of public crowdsourcing platforms. I also think – given what I've articulated above – that it is reasonable to expect that the success of this second wave hinges not only on a more mature technological solution but also on the ability of those deploying it to carefully calibrate it around specific problems, purposefully include relevant stakeholders, and deliberately design the process to unlock slower and more reasoned public engagement.

Innovation is Information

by Kent Aitken

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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

Quick Notes from the GTEC Conference

by Kent Aitken

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Monday's notes

I've been attending GTEC - the Government Technology Exhibition and Conference - for four or five years now. My first public service job was (a non-IT job) in an IT branch, and I wanted to dig in. I went once, and it stuck.

The underlying, unofficial theme since I've been going is that technology leaders have to be business leaders, capable of managing people and portfolios, acting as strategic partners to CEOs. This is what I've found most interesting: how do subject matter experts become managers and leaders? How does one develop a sense of strategy?

It's these broad, business-meets-IT questions that I'm drawn to, and they form the basis of my shortlist of interesting snippets from last week at GTEC.

• We can think of leadership in multiple ways: business leadership, thought leadership, and change leadership. The point made here was that as interesting and appealing as thought leadership is, and as necessary as change leadership is in turbulent times, 85% of what keeps organizations humming is "good, old fashioned business leadership". That which is unexciting, normalized, day-to-day, and hopefully effective.

• Engaging all employees is not as simple as communicating to all employees, and often the best way to figure out what people want is not necessarily to ask them what they want. The quote here was to work with "the right people, in the right way" - which sounds simple but is often overlooked. If I may editorialize, there are very few skills we learn for which the intuitive approach is the most effective. Think golf swings, card games, cooking - anything. There's always some level of sophistication we eventually reach, or can be taught. The term beginner's mistake is common for a reason, yet we often apply intuitive (and wrong) approaches to management, leadership, and in this case, employee engagement.

• Security and privacy are, and will be, the foundation of every government decision on information technology. You could tell because every other sentence was about security and privacy. Don't get me wrong: this is actually the level of importance that should be assigned, and it provides the reassurance that security and privacy sit duly highly in government's decision-making framework. But the fact that governments are taking it seriously needs to become a boring base assumption, so that government IM/IT leaders can actually talk about information and strategy instead.

That's the shortlist, but there was much more. And there are two other talks with a shared theme that I'd like to highlight, but I'll do that in a standalone post later.

Thoughts from the other side of Interchange

by Nick Charney

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A lot of people have been asking me about my new job (See: Today is My Last Day in the Public Service) so I figured I'd share some of my initial observations about working on the other side of the wall.

Change is refreshing

Admittedly I'm still technically in the honeymoon stage having only joined the IOG a month ago. That said I can say with a fair degree of certainty that I was definitely due for a change of scenery. I won't bother you with all the details but suffice it to say that the sight lines between my work and what I deem important were blurred. I still believe wholeheartedly in public service but felt like my work was too heavily weighted towards the transactional when my interests, skills and drive is biased towards the transformational. In short, I was looking for a better personal fit, and from I can tell thus far, I have found it.

Technology can be easy

Integrating into the IT infrastructure at work was seamless. I walked in, was handed log in credentials and sat down at my iMac (yeah that's right), hooked up my iPhone to the wifi and connected my office calendar and email with my other Google accounts.

Every organization has its own language

We often get so wrapped up in the nomenclature of the business we fail to understand that sometimes it can hinder rather than help; and the same can be said of organizational structures. This is playing out right now within our institutions of government, between them and whenever they interface with the publics they serve. It's creating real barriers to engagement across the board, causing people to dig in their heels with partisan rhetoric and otherwise eroding the middle ground of compromise that I've always thought was the inherently Canadian way forward.

A lot of people are looking for greener pastures

I'm not sure if it's where I am relative to my career trajectory cohort or symptomatic of some larger issues out there in the ecosystem (e.g. the one I pointed out above) but a lot of talented people I know either have or are now broadening their horizons and looking beyond the walls of the public sector organizations they currently work for.

You are always more valuable to an organization after you leave it

Whether it's Murphy's law or the fact that its human nature to take things for granted, your worth to an organization is never truly understood until you're no longer there when they need you.

Give people something to strive for

by Nick Charney

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The last time I wrote for the GTEC blog I shared a story about a young boy named Jared and in so doing I explained how an enabling office environment creates a culture where employees can do amazing things for the clients they serve. The flip side of that equation - the one I want to explore today - is that it also allows organizations to do equally amazing things for its employees. Engagement is, after all, about both external and internal stakeholders.

Something else very special happened in that same hotel the year I met Jared. It exemplified the collaborative spirit and demonstrated the enabling power of even the simplest of technologies. The hotel had a voice mail box whereby employees could call and leave a message commending their colleague for a job well done. There was no hierarchy, no silos, no approvals. Just a phone with an answering machine on the other end of it. Every morning the Human Resources Director would listen to the messages, have her morning coffee and write down the names and actions of those recognized by their colleagues. She would notify the managers on duty and they would in turn single out and congratulate the staff member who was recognized by their peers and reward them with a voucher worth $10 of company funny money. In addition to the peer rewards managers had discretion to reward employees on the spot for exemplary service if they witnessed it first hand. For my work with Jared on Christmas, I earned $250 worth of company funny money. Now the thing about the company funny money is that it is funny money. There is no real cash value but they can be redeemed in for a set of official rewards; my $250 worth could have gotten me a $25 dollar gift card for example.

What was fascinating about this type of intermediary reward system is that increasingly more emphasis was placed on the act of peer to peer recognition and that ethos started to spill over among the working level employees. Colleagues starting commending their peers on their good work in difficult situations and redistribute the rewards they received back into the ecosystem. We created a simple rewards and recognition economy without even knowing it long before gamification hit the mainstream. Soon an emergent culture was starting to form whereby your shift wasn't over until you found a colleague worth commending. You started to look for and identify precisely the culture that you wanted to be a part of; and this is where things started to get interesting.

There was a housekeeper named Zophia. She worked the public spaces of the hotel, was incredibly hard working and fabulous with the guests. Over time we got to know her better. She was a Polish immigrant, was working seven days a week across two jobs, and she was the proud single mother of a daughter who was about to graduate high school. When we learned that Zophia was not going to be able to attend her daughter's convocation because doing so meant giving up a shift at work, we knew we had to do something.

A day off with pay was a whopping $1500 of company funny money, but everyone agreed that it was achievable. We started to pool our resources, soliciting donations in secret from our colleagues from other parts of the hotel and making sure that we upped our overall performance to earn maximum recognition from our managers for the instant rewards that we could put towards the larger goal. This was one of the most exciting times to be working for the company. The atmosphere was electric, great service to guests fuelled rewards that drove better performance that brought us closer to our goal which made us want to perform even better; it was a virtuous circle.

We reached our $1500 company funny money goal quickly and immediately approached HR and Housekeeping with the news. We – some 30+ employees – had collectively decided and worked towards giving Zophia a day off with pay so that she could attend her daughter's convocation.

When Zophia found out what we had done (because we obviously kept it a secret!) she was floored; I wasn't there but I imagine her face lit up like Jared's did on Christmas morning.

What's the lesson?

Forget the hype, good company culture is the secret sauce, the technology can be as simple as monopoly money with the company logo on it.

In other words, give people something to strive for that they believe in and they will adopt whatever tools you put in front of them to do it.

*This blog cross posted to the GTEC blog*

Using the disruptive web to your advantage

I'm excited to be off to Toronto today (vacation) to deliver a pair of workshops to students at Humber College.  As you likely know by now I am very particular about my presentations. I spend countless hours agonizing over images, placement, word choice and the relationship between the different elements; here's what I've come up with:

(Aside: Yes, I take vacation days to deliver pro bono workshops to students about the intersection of social media and the public sector.)

Given that this has eaten up most of my time this week, I wanted to (again) share some key messages from my presentation. In many ways this presentation is the natural extension of some of the ground I covered last week (see: Thoughts on the Disruptive Web), it runs the gamut from the philosophical and the practical and back and while my speaking notes are quite extensive (each workshop is an hour long) what follows is the hard and fast of it because, quite frankly, my flight is less than 8 hours away.
Use the Disruption to your Advantage
You need to get out ahead of the curve and build your brand. If you don'd define yourself, someone else will (or, perhaps, they already have).
Find your Niche
Draw a Venn diagram and pencil in 3 of your interests; this is your niche. This is your new wheelhouse. Google the three terms together. Start reading, make notes. Who are the big players? What are the big ideas? Where is the controversy?Find the boundaries between these three things are explore them; be a Trickster. Mash things up that others tell you have no business being mashed up and see what shakes loose.
Start Writing
When you write, include hyperlinks to the things you've read recently that have informed your opinions. Whenever possible comment on the works of others and leave a link back to your own site. Avoid bullshit comments like "great post". First of all those comments don't add value to the conversation, second it doesn't help you build a rapport with the author. Tease something out, build on something they wrote, or challenge (not troll) them.
Start Sharing
Have a plan on how to push your content to all the big services. Explore a service like If This Then That (see: What Organizations Can Learn from If This Then That) to automate your cross publication. Be predictable, check in regularly. Something that doesn't do well on Facebook may play well with Twitter. And don't underestimate other subscription options, especially email.Start Connecting
Spend time being helpful to other people online, share things you think may be valuable to them (not just things you write) and ask them to reciprocate. Ask people to guest blog, offer to guest blog, find places to syndicate your content to that help you reach your niche audience.
Set up Google Alerts
To let you know when people are talking about you (your name) or linking to your site so you can engage them (or defend your position).
Find 1,000 True Fans
A true fan is someone who can't wait to see your next work. They subscribe to it, read it, comment on it, push it to their social graph and help you amplify your reach. In other words, they help you find other fans. 1,000 people might sound like a lot but it’s a completely achievable number. Govloop – a large US based online social network for government workers –  already has over 60,000 members and if you are writing on issues in the public sector it is a perfect place to start. The community managers actively curate and promote content via their main page, RSS feeds and daily email newsletters. It's in their interest to help you connect with your true fans.Understand the Risks
If you choose to try your hand at influencing old systems with new technologies you will likely be challenged along the way. The culture inside large public institutions is often at odds with the culture outside of it. There is evidence however that the culture is changing, that we are transitioning from the early adopters to early majority (see: Mapping Internal Policy to the Hype Cycle), but there is still a lot of distance to cover. The government of Canada has recently launched a Deputy Minister's committee on Social Media and Policy, HRSDC ran a call for concepts related to social finance that has been called a crowdsourcing by many exercise, and yesterday's budget announcement had a number of social media elements.

Walk the Line
In short there is still much work to be done and if you want to engage in it you need to be prepared to alienate some, be ignored by others while also exciting and engaging those whom are interested. Ultimately the choice is yours, but I can say with conviction that the public service – that all public services – are in desperate need of new blood, new thinking, and new energy.Is that something you are up for?

Originally published by Nick Charney at cpsrenewal.ca

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Thoughts on the disruptive web

I spoke to a group of civil servants this week as part of their development program's lunchtime speaker series; the talk covered a lot of ground and I wanted to take the opportunity to share some of my key messages from the discussion.

The web is disruptive

The internet has disrupted, is disrupting, or will disrupt every business model currently in use today. To think it hasn't, isn't or won't disrupt the public sector is naive at best. Understanding the impacts of these changes is critical to understanding the role of the public service because context is key and the context is now constantly changing.

GCPEDIA is a microcosm of a larger problem

GCPEDIA is still the only open communications tool that holds that could help us mitigate our geographic, ministerial and hierarchical information challenges and yet we have tremendous difficulty integrating it into the fabric of our business. The fact that as an organization we have such difficulty understanding how to best lever a technology (wikis) that is (conceptually) almost 20 years old concerns me (see: Debunking the Myths of Working More Openly).

But this is likely just a symptom of a larger problem. The cognitive dissonance we create by expecting new recruits to use desktop computers, blackberries, and slow, heavily blocked internet connections when they have spent their time at university learning how to collaborate over iPhones, MacBooks, and uninhibited internet is even more unsettling. Surely there is a rising productivity cost associated with maintaining the status quo that could be minimized by moving to bring your own device (BYOD) environments.

The culture is falling behind

The web gives us a window into the best in class work cultures and sets global expectations around what a work place could offer; in other words, like it or not, this is the workplace culture your office is competing with.

I understand that government offices can't compete with Google in terms of technology but that doesn't mean that we can't build a culture that places greater emphasis on key motivators such as autonomy, mastery, and purpose (see: Motivation and Incentives in the Public Service). Ultimately I think these these qualities not only effect how motivated we are but also our ability to deliver the fearless advice that has historically been our hallmark. Autonomy is closely linked to impartiality, mastery determines quality, and purpose sharpens our focus. The lack of cultural emphasis on these elements has likely contributed to what I view as the skewing of the balance between fearless advice and loyal implementation (See: On Fearless Advice and Loyal Implementation and On Risk, Fearless Advice and Loyal Implementation).

The fix is in new ways of thinking

The solution to our technological and cultural challenges - I think - is to encourage more public servants to be tricksters; encourage them to explore and integrate ideas that typically "don't have a place in the bureaucracy"; encourage them to take the risks, reap the rewards, and most importantly, accept the responsibility (See: Innovation is Tricky, Literally and Finding Innovation)

These are not easy things to do, but they are the things we must do.



Originally published by Nick Charney at cpsrenewal.casubscribe/connect