What Innovation Feels Like (Part 2: Lack of Trust)

by Melissa Tullio

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Public servants go through a rigorous process to become full-time, permanent employees. I won't get into detail, but it usually requires a lengthy HR process with at least two to three stages of vetting to find the right person for the job. And then, if you’re one of The Chosen, you’re on the inside. Yay, you; your knowledge and expertise were tested against dozens, sometimes hundreds, of other candidates, and now that you're inside, you can get to work and start making use of all that creativity, energy, and expertise you've been specifically chosen to provide. Right?

The experience on the inside is very different than what you expect. When you try to provide that expertise, you’re beaten down by process, by politics (big-P), or by conflicting personalities (little-p). You thought you had something to offer the world, to make things a little bit better for people you’re serving, but by the time you’re able to get something you create through the processes, it doesn’t at all resemble the passion and energy you put into it.

When good people are crushed by process

Most of what we do as public servants resembles the following.

Step 1: Create this [product]. Use your knowledge, expertise, evidence, research, and best advice to create it.

Step 2: Next, slap this template approvals form on top, which requires (minimum) 10 signatures to be approved, and get every single pair of eyeballs listed on that sheet to give you their two cents on it.

Step 3: Use outdated linear proprietary approvals mechanisms to track and incorporate remarks, changes, vague comments, and illegible handwritten markups from all parties involved. Update. Revise. Update. Revise. Co-ordinate/negotiate changes among parties.

Step 4: Lose track of version (due to outdated linear proprietary approvals mechanisms). Backtrack to find original version buried in an email. Re-incorporate all changes you just lost. Repeat.

Step 5: (Miraculously and with much lost sleep) Meet deadline, feeling mangled. Start at the beginning for the next one.

Don't get me wrong; the product we start off with isn't ever perfect, and none of us should be immune to critical feedback, or fresh eyes to take a look at something to make it better. But if you step back and look at the baked-in approvals process, underlying it is an inherent lack of trust (perceived or real, which is basically the same thing to the experts that are hired to provide their best advice).

My Big Idea

Earlier this year, I pitched an idea to change the way we do approvals. It's an interesting play off of one of Kent's posts from the summer – see: Government, Citizens, and Power. What I proposed (without realizing it) would be something like applying the IAP2 spectrum internally to our processes by empowering staff to have a real stake in outcomes and decision making in government.

This approach would start with cross-functional/cross-ministry teams (5-7 max) of senior advisors – those responsible for developing products/policies at the ground level. Some authority would be relinquished from decision makers so that teams are expected to reach all final decisions on the products/policies they developed (ie, ditch the approvals sheet/mechanism all together).

The role of deputy ministers, assistant deputy ministers, and directors would shift: they'd be expected to provide feedback and direction as an advisory committee (which would be decided on before the project begins, meaning leaders from different ministries might be assigned to certain projects, depending on the nature of the work). This advisory body would check in periodically with the project team, and the feedback they provide would be more holistic, bringing in perspectives from all ministries/areas identified as "leads" on the project.

Managers/supervisors would be included on teams as quality control agents, and to ensure advisors have all the information and context they need for any piece of the products/policies. They would also play a facilitating role, determining who teams might need to work with to do their work.

An early sketch of the project flow looked like this (I'd revise this and move DMO (deputy minister's office) and legal to the advisory committee):

I'd also add to this: project teams and advisory committees would include experts (lived experience counts) from outside of government, too.

There's more to explain about how I see this proposed process working in real life (hint: we'd have to change how we do our work, too), but I'll leave it for another day and another blog post.

Let It Go

(#sorrynotsorry for the earworm.)

More and more of our work in government these days depends on all kinds of collaboration: between ministries/departments, and beyond our own level (municipal, provincial, federal) or sector (private, non-profit, community-based/grassroots). The approvals system I described at the beginning of this post does not work any more. It is seriously broken. And what needs to replace it would depend entirely on trust.

Trust means letting go of control, and the current model favours (and rewards) control freaks and micro-management.

Trust means letting go of authority, and the current model presumes that traditional power structures have the final say in everything.

Trust means letting go of fear, putting risk in its place (ie, risk management rather than risk aversion, as a rule), and experimenting with stakeholders instead of believing we have all the answers ourselves.

Richard Pietro, self-proclaimed open government fanboy and all around amazing human being, recently produced the world's first short film on open government, open data, and open source. I'm going to spoil it for you (you should watch the whole thing) and skip to the end. This is what trust feels like.

"You have to let it all go; fear, doubt, disbelief... open your mind."

...and open the processes, starting with the premise that we trust the people we so painstakingly selected for the jobs we've asked them to do.

On the Trust Gap

by Nick Charney

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There's been a lot of discussion as of late regarding the so-called "trust gap" between the non-partisan civil service and the duly elected government; here's my take.

It's easy to snipe from the sidelines

Amidst the talk, the focus seems to be on the senior ranks of the public service. It's a narrow slice of the civil service and while an argument could be made that it's the most important juncture in the system it's also the one that the least amount of civil servants have any direct experience with and there's the rub. There's a big difference between first hand experience and conjecture and I'll give the former the benefit of the doubt before the latter any day of the week.

The gap is not restricted to the federal family

I've spent a fair bit of time speaking to bureaucrats in other jurisdictions lately (especially those heading into elections) and the gap is a common theme. Politics aside, the truth of the matter is that the motivations, incentives and time horizons of professional non-partisan civil servants are different than those of elected officials. That's not a condemnation, just an observation.

Unsurprisingly I'm of the view that the gap is likely little more than a natural by-product of these different world views coming together. I admit that the arrangement is inherently antagonistic but I'd argue that its more a function of design (Westminster) than of aesthetics (the colour of the banner at the helm).

The gap isn't necessarily where you think it is

I've already mentioned the fact that the focus seems to be on the senior ranks, but what about the gap(s) between rank and file civil servants? Between you the person sitting next to you? You and the person who manages you? The person who manages you and the person who manages them?

I've written in the past about trust (See: Trust is the Only Thing That Scales, On Fearless Advice and Loyal Implementation, and On Risk, Fearless Advice, and Loyal Implementation) and it's a frequent topic of discussion whenever I get behind a microphone.

Frankly, when the rubber meets the road I don't think we trust each other, at least not on the scale that we should. We're more apt to avoid difficult conversations than we are to engage in them. We are more likely to hang a Dilbert comic on our cubicle in a passive aggressive show of resistance than we are to champion a mature conversation on its underlying, and often sad, truth. We opt for impersonal emails over phone calls, typefaces over people's faces.

But the higher order question, the question of trust — genuine trust — permeates every aspect of our work with each other and the public we (civil servants and elected officials) collectively serve. Governance is trust. So what happens when, as Kent points out in Risk, Failure and Honesty, trust in government declines?

Where's that discussion? 

Where's the discussion about whether or not we ought to be citizens before taxpayers?

Public servants before bureaucrats?

Leaders before politicians?

That's the discussion I'm interested in, and that's the discussion I think we ought to be having.

Trust in the Age of Information

by Kent Aitken

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Last week Bill Eggers from Deloitte was in Ottawa, explaining his view of The Solution Revolution: the idea that for-profit businesses and social enterprises will solve societal needs before government can, in creative, interesting ways. The question post-presentation was "How can government help this ecosystem of solutions?" One of the themes we hit on in response was that supporting such counter-intuitive approaches is a hard road. The Triple Bottom Line There's a common case study in business literature - whether it's about innovation or marketing - about Gilette's "safety razor." This is the standard now: you buy a handle once, and expensive disposable blades frequently. But when introduced, it was a disruptive innovation, undermining barbershops' monopoly on shaving. From the marketing standpoint, it's a example of knowing what your customers want. As it turned out, they didn't want a steady hand with a straight-razor in a nice barbershop, they actually just wanted a clean-shaven face. Or as Harvard's Ted Levitt put it: "No one ever buys a shovel. What they're buying is a hole." But for governments, this level of disruption and slight counter-intuition doesn't go far enough. Government isn't looking for a shovel or a hole. It's more like government wants a vibrant environment in which kids can grow up. The hole is just for a post, which supports a volleyball net, which isn't even really for volleyball at all - in the long run, it's actually just an interaction device for the neighbouring kids, to build friendships and community. So the savvy marketer, when approached by someone looking to buy a shovel, might then say "Are you sure you don't want a soccer league, instead?" With so many stakeholders, this actually is the level of complexity governments are experiencing in their outcomes, whether or not they actively pursue it. Or even know it. It's the idea of the Triple Bottom Line, taken to extremes. Former Clerk of the Privy Council Jocelyn Bourgon provides case studies from this future: what she describes as a New Synthesis of Public Administration. There is a fascinating common thread running through each case study. Not only do the programs she describes solve the short-term problem at hand, they actually work to obsoletize the government's involvement in that solution in the long run by building communities around the problem. That would be part of my True Bottom Line for Government. (Another would be organizational learning being a core component of any approach to solving problems. For another day.) The Sound Bite World The problem is that this level of nuance is really - and understandably - hard to explain to taxpayers. An example: a few months ago a House Committee in the US released a report detailing $50M in spending on conferences for the IRS between 2010 and 2012. Outrage, predictably, ensued. It seems extravagant until you take the step of dividing that figure by the three-year horizon and by the organization's 106,000 employees. All of a sudden they're spending about $157 per person per year on conferences. Which seems borderline paltry, especially if you compare that to what they spend on each of those employees. To boot, the longer and more accurate story about conferences is that their key benefit is the interaction and relationship building between colleagues and industry partners, far in excess of the value of simply having ideas changing hands and minds. Or for an analogous example, as Clay Shirky put it yesterday at the Code for America Summit: "The product of a hackathon isn't running code. It's the social capital people created among the people in the room." Or what about building civic awareness by gamifying recycling with rewards, which Eggers explained has raised recycling rates from 30% to 90% in some U.S. neighbourhoods? These are harder ideas to sell. Why hasn't the information age changed this? Trust in the Age of Information Even fifty years ago, the machinery of government would have been largely opaque to many Canadians. But as the availability of information has increased, Canadians' trust in government has not. Today, I would posit, we're at an awkward point in this evolution where we have information without understanding; availability without transparency; content without context*. But this situation may be a side-effect of The Connected World: that of radio, television, photojournalism, and globalization, which is giving way to a new one. Which dotted line path will it be, as even more information becomes available? What happens to the trend in public trust in The Hyperconnected World? As the age of Open Government unfolds? Are we going to see an acceleration, or a slowing and reversing? I don't know, and I think much hinges on it. But if government lacks the relationships, willpower, and evidence to pursue messy, complex outcomes - to return to my original analogy, communities, rather than holes - The Hyperconnected World will be characterized by a lot of getting the wrong things done, with stellar efficiency. * Another link to come out of the Code for America Summit yesterday: Transparency is Not Enough, by Danah Boyd. Suddenly I feel bad for having partially rehashed a three-year old argument (I wrote this over the weekend (and to be fair, this is actually somewhat of a synthesis of a handful of themes I've already gotten in to)), but considering that we still haven't moved past weak transparency yet, I'm okay with it.

Towards a New Professionalism in Government, Part II

by Kent Aitken

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I was hoping to get to the heart of how I view the future of public service professionalism. But the road turned out wordy, so I've split it into two posts, this one continuing the link between the discussion that's been going on here lately and professionalism (See: Embracing Authenticity Means Embracing Complexity).

Before I bolted east for vacation (and got that photo, above), I decided that I'd explore what a new professionalism in government would look like, and prefaced it with a post on the importance of authenticity and storytelling. I wondered if it would seem like a non sequitur (See: Towards a New Professionalism in Government).

Evidently not. Ashleigh Weeden handily beat me to the segue:

The amazing by-product is that when I am grounded in my own authenticity, I am in a much better position to receive the stories of the colleagues, citizens and agencies that I work with because I am open to hearing what they have to say and not preoccupied with the mind-reading that comes from filtering what I hear and see through the voice of my own gremlins. By engaging my wholehearted self, I am better able to connect with other individuals as well as connect the dots of concepts and see patterns in the anecdotes that lead to important questions about the way we do things.

In other words, we need to be open, authentic, and genuine with those we serve. In doing so, we'll understand the human context and feedback that will motivate us to swing for the fences – to which I'll return next week. And we'll understand people's needs and perspectives, how we need to communicate, and how complex our issues really are.

Professionalism is results. Results achieved sustainably, with integrity, and with a stronger public service emerging through their achievement. In the short term, solid policy and services. In the long term, a trusted and strong public service. Remembering that neither horizon is served by working in a vacuum.

Complexity versus Voltaire's Bastards

From John Ralston Saul's website, about his book Voltaire's Bastards: 

A simple truth which our elites deny: far from being a moral force, reason is no more than an administrative method. Their denial has helped to turn the modern West into a vast, incomprehensible, directionless machine, run by process-minded experts - “Voltaire's bastards" - whose cult of scientific management is bereft of both sense and morality.

I've referenced Saul before (See: Left and Leaving). He both chastises technocrats for oversimplifying things from ivory towers, and – related – laments the erosion of honour, status, and trust in the Canadian Public Service over the last half century. He paints a vicious cycle of the decline of professionalism.

This is the virtuous cycle I posted a few weeks ago. I discussed how public trust through authentic interaction is key for status and, thus, attracting talent. I'd propose that we add that such interaction bolsters the cycle significantly at the performance stage as well, because it helps us understand the complexity of what we're up against.

I don't think the world is much more complex than before. Honestly. It may be faster, but the force far outweighing increasing complexity is increasing awareness of complexity. We weren't spraying DDT on fields 50 years ago because ecosystems were any less complex – we did it because we had no idea how complex they were (See: What We Don't Know).  Now we have:

• A better lens on complexity
• The lessons learned that more or less every time we learn about something, we find out it's more complex than we first thought
• Knowledge of the ramifications when we fail to appreciate complexity

And thus we have a duty to change our approach to problem solving, appreciating all that.

I feel as though we have fallen prey to various memes*. One is that we're smart enough to make decisions from Ottawa on behalf of those we're imposing them upon. We're not. The world is large; it contains multitudes. 

*To be returned to next week.

We don't trust each other

I just wanted to share some thoughts about trust in the public sector and rather than wax poetic I figured I'd just share this excerpt from the Scheming Virtuously presentation I delivered at the Next Generation of Government Summit in Washington DC (I've also transcribed the excerpt below)



"You don't have physical control over the structures within which you work, but you do have control over how you operate within those structures. Don't let the physical nature of a very square environment box you into very square thinking or very square approach to relationships.

We need to build trust with other people. Trust is like the secret sauce and it is what is lacking in our organizations like nothing else. No one trusts anyone. Its the CYA email, the cover your ass email. Where we have a conversation, you agree to do something, and as soon as we leave I go back to my desk and send you an email that says what you've agreed to do and I cc our bosses on it. So, just so, because, you know, the implication is you aren't going to do it. So I want to be able to hold you to that.

That's not trust, that's a slap in the face. We might as well have a meeting and I could just walk up and slap you in the face [laughter] and be done with it. That's... That's .. We laugh because we know its true. We don't actually change the culture we put up Dilbert comics in our cubicles."



Originally published by Nick Charney at cpsrenewal.casubscribe/connect