Building Trust and Transparency Through Failure

by Melissa Tullio

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A couple of weeks ago, I attended a communications conference. The theme was "Think, Think, Nudge, Nudge": how we might start applying some behavioural insights techniques in our work to deliver more impact/meaning in our messaging to audiences (not to mention using a more evidence-based approach to do things). Ontario's own behavioural insights team was brought in to present how they've used randomized control trials to improve outcomes for various Ontario ministries, and speakers from ideas42 provided a couple of hands on workshops for us to learn some of the methods.

The keynote speaker was Michael I. Norton from Harvard Business School, who delivered an amusing and thought provoking talk that gave loads of examples illustrating how people react in the randomized control trials he's run. An example that really stuck with me was the results from a prototype of Boston's Citizens Connect app. It's kind of a "fix your street" for Boston, where citizens can report potholes, graffiti, and other broken things in the city. The data is uploaded to a map, which shows the status of each of the submissions - the prototype had red flags for open tickets, yellow for recently opened, and blue for closed tickets.

The test worked like this. They showed three versions of the app to people. The first didn't provide an illustration showing that the city was taking action on the open tickets - it was probably just a form for people to submit problems to the city. The second showed only the closed tickets, which cast the city in a positive light (but wasn't necessarily the most honest). The third showed all the open tickets and closed tickets (the open tickets greatly outnumbered the closed tickets, which may leave a negative impression of the city). A key insight that came out of the test was that even the map showing all of the open, red tickets was received more positively by people than the version that showed nothing at all.

What's going on here?

Michael's research on consumer behaviour shows that people like to see the work. Transparency in the processes that we're using to deliver a service builds credibility and trust in the institutions we rely on. As a consumer, this seems pretty intuitive to me. It feels a lot better seeing the person behind the glass preparing the burger with fresh ingredients than to order it through an intercom and pick it up a few minutes later like some human vending machine.

In a previous blog post (See: Open Gov, Values and the Social Contract), I talked about values, and mentioned how we can't say, as government, that we're open, if we don't then follow through and act in an open way. Ryan left a really interesting comment on that post: "not everything can (or dare I say, should) be 100% open 100% of the time." I agree with this; transparency isn't about revealing everything, but revealing what we can in the context of protecting citizens' privacy (we're not a burger joint). And, as behavioural insights evidence shows us, it's also about revealing, when we're able to reveal things, both the bad and the good outcomes of the things we're trying (e.g., the map showing the red flags as well as the blue ones).

Vulnerability as a Value

This all left me thinking about a value we're not so great at demonstrating in government: vulnerability. I'm willing to bet that every public servant working inside government today has felt risk aversion from colleagues or superiors in some form. We're afraid to fail, and even more afraid to show that we've failed. We cringe at the thought of ending up as a headline in the morning paper because of a mistake we made (I literally just got goosebumps thinking about this).

But what if the spaces we built inside government supported experimentation? Kent's recent post proposes that we're already experimenting, and I think it's true. The part we're missing is transparency - showing people that we don't have all the answers, and we need their help to figure stuff out.

What if we let users/citizens into the experiments? What if we had spaces to try stuff out before launching programs/policies that might fail anyway, regardless of how much thought we've put into them to avoid failure? And what if one of the guiding values for playing in those spaces were vulnerability - demonstrating to ourselves, and people who rely on us for services, that failure is OK, as long as we learn and build something better from it?

Is it reasonable to believe that transparently demonstrating to people that we're good at failure can build trust between us and the people we deliver services to? And if you agree, how might we move the culture towards embracing vulnerability as a value?

You're Experimenting Right Now

by Kent Aitken

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You may be familiar with the trolley problem in ethics:

There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five people on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person. Which is the correct choice?

The latter option is better from a purely utilitarian perspective, but many people lean towards the first option, which absolves them of participation or responsibility in the outcome.

The current public administration zeitgeist would more likely point to behavioural economics to prove the power of defaults to provide a level of comfort and confidence in people’s decisions (see: How Nudges Work for Government). But the point stands: we are unduly comfortable with the status quo, and we wrongly absolve ourselves of culpability for outcomes generated through the status quo. In the trolley problem, doing nothing is a big decision*.

Duty and Responsibility

Let's say you're debating a pivot in your career. You've been working in a field for a few years, and you're considering trying something new. It could just be a different job within your organization, or it could be throwing everything out the window, including yourself, and taking a leap of faith. Everything along that spectrum comes with uncertainty, discomfort, and perhaps a degree of fear.

Or, let's say you're an politician debating a policy change: it could be a minor adjustment or something major like mandatory voting or a guaranteed basic income, both of which have been proposed in Canada lately. It's not the sort of thing you can pilot in a vacuum; you have to change the way things things work to gauge how people react. Like the career pivot, it's  uncertain, uncomfortable, and scary.

Who knows how such experiments will work out? Will they be worth the risk? It's impossible to say with 100% certainty, which is the nature of experiments.

It’s tempting to think that those changes are experiments, whereas the course we are on is not. But the status quo is not a valueless, neutral starting point. It’s an experiment. It represents a plethora of design decisions, all of which influence how people behave and make decisions. And you are — we all are — complicit. As Richard Thaler, co-author of Nudge has put it, “There’s no avoiding nudging. Like in a cafeteria: You have to arrange the food somehow. You can’t arrange it at random. That would be a chaotic cafeteria.”

You’re Experimenting Right Now

You've never gone through a career on your current track before. No one ever has, in today's particular environment. Are you in digital media, for instance? Exactly zero people ever have put in a 30-year career in that field.

Likewise for policy. Canada has never entered the 21st century before, our policies have never stood up in the economic, demographic, or technological context they're about to face.

You're experimenting right now. We all are. And we have to weigh the costs and benefits of both the changes we’re considering and the track we’re already on.

* If you find yourself finding holes and rationalizations, Michael Sandel will cure that in his amazing lecture on ethics.

Impossible Conversations: The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

Kent Aitken

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“Well, that’s the last bureaucrat hung with the guts of the last priest!” “Let’s all sing!” - title page comic

“Nightmare people shape our culture.” - Amazon.com review

Bureaucracy gets a bad rap, and the above sentiments are only a scant sampling of the charges leveled in its direction.  But critiques of bureaucracy often come in a knee-jerk format (e.g., “What idiot thought it’d be a good idea to spend six months ripping up an intersection to put in a roundabout?”) that tends to dissolve upon investigation or reflection. David Graeber went far, far deeper down the rabbit hole.

The Utopia of Rules is a sprawling series of essays on the nature of bureaucracy, its origins, and why people secretly like it - at least, why the people behind it like it:

1. Dead Zones of the Imagination: an Essay on Structural Stupidity
2. Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit
3. The Utopia of Rules, or Why We Really Love Bureaucracy After All

Graeber framed his book as an effort to start a conversation about whether or not bureaucracy (in its current forms) is an imperative in our world, which is fair. Much food for thought, few resounding conclusions or paths forward. And to reiterate: sprawling. Graeber will leave you hanging for a good thirty pages sometimes before you even get a sense of the point he’s driving towards. 

Nick Charney

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There’s a certain irony in Kent’s concluding notion that Graeber’s work is sprawling and leaves you hanging for extended periods of time before you get a sense of the point he’s trying to make … It kind of makes you wonder if his critique is intentionally analogous to that which he is critiquing. Regardless of whether it was by design or by neglect the result was the same, the number of pages I dog-eared declined dramatically the further into the book I read. 

That said, if you want some zingers about the bureaucracy, Graeber is your man: 

“The most  profound legacy of the dominance of bureaucratic forms of organization over the last two hundred years is that it has made this intuitive division between rational, technical means and the ultimately irrational ends to which they are put seem like common sense.” (p.40)

Again, like Kent said, zingers yes, solutions path, not so much and as a result, the book just didn’t live up to my expectations.

Kent Aitken

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Unlike The Black Swan, there's no way to quickly sum up the point or the key takeaways on this one. I was with Graeber through the introduction, calling for an investigation into the nature of bureaucracy. However, he followed that lead with a dive into interesting but highly abstract possible elements of bureaucracy — bureaucracy as the threat of violence, or bureaucracy as the elimination of the possibility for human play and imagination — which I don't see as a good starting point for most people who'd need to be a part of that investigation. 

Pulling the Trigger on Chekhov's Gun

by Nick Charney

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Anton Chekhov was a Russian author and playwright and is largely considered one of the best short story writers in history; the term 'Chekhov's gun' is said to have come from a piece of advice he shared with other writers:

"If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."

Chekhov's warning is simple: guard against extraneous detail
Guns are powerful images. They invoke a particular meaning, they carry with them great potential for danger and death. To give something as symbolic as a gun attention within a narrative is to signal to people that they should pay attention. However, if nothing comes of it, if it is never used, they can feel confused or let down. Chekhov's view is that every detail must have purpose and if you as an author give something significance early in a story, it is incumbent upon you to follow through and actually use it as a plot element.

The way of the gun
However, Chekhov's advice is neither limited to guns (it could be equally applicable to any detail, object, setting or circumstance) nor narrative story telling. As a principle, it applies equally well to both employee/stakeholder engagement efforts (e.g. Blueprint 2020) and innovation infrastructure (e.g. Innovation Labs). These are both highly charged areas where expectations run high and even the fine details matter.

The decision makers shaping these initiatives are no different than Chekhov's short story writers. They are responsible for crafting the narrative. They introduce elements, set the tone and set the action in motion. In so doing they create meaning and expectation, whether they intend to or not. If they don't pay close attention, a misstep or misleading detail will undermine the experience (and thus the resolve) of those working along side them.

My advice is simple
Success in these endeavours ultimately hinges on the willingness and ability of leaders to pull the trigger on Chekhov's gun.

Heritage Moments Had It Right

by Kent Aitken

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I had high hopes for a long deep dive of a post today, but got caught at a fascinating debate (and post-debate pub debate). So, for today:

In one minute, here's a Canadian innovation from 1980:

They had it right.

1. Understand and consider both old and new approaches.
2. The solution that's easiest for people to implement and maintain is often better.
3. What works beats what shines.