This not a random picture, it is how I envision the government, the Canadian federal government. Each ship is a department or agency. The ships have commanders with considerable authority. Communication at a distance is very bad, (they did it with flags, we do it today with email and private conversations). Groups of ships are supposed to work together and sometimes they do, but collaboration is difficult with many strong egos and conflicting agendas. The current administration wants the public service to be more efficient and outcome focused, something I can very much agree with, but have also heard before.
The goal of this post is to try and share some of the lessons from an extraordinary experience that I and many others were part of some time ago. The experience was leading the collaborative tools team that created GCpedia and GCconnex across the Government of Canada (2007-2010).
This part of my professional journey began with the 2000 tech bubble burst and the ride that preceded it ended. Looking for new consulting challenges I looked to government and found a world of opportunity for improvement. Over the next few years, I undertook dozens of interesting projects in a variety of departments that eventually led to a three-year executive interchange appointment that changed my life, and I dare say, changed the Government of Canada.
When my interchange ended, I realized that this was a career highlight that would be difficult to surpass. So I wrote a paper about it. The paper reflects on the origin story of what is certainly one of the most successful government collaboration platforms in existence. In the paper, I look at how the project managed to transcend cultural and institutional barriers to change. My hope is that as we embark on the next round of public service renewal the lessons of the past will help improve our odds at success.
Reading it today I am struck by a few things:
we need to adapt
The world has changed a lot in the almost two decades since GCpedia was launched, but government has not. A Westminster system that has its roots in the days of sail, is still challenged by the concept of collective instantaneous communication, whatever will we do to adapt to the age of AI?
Executives need to understand the concept of complexity
Large organizations of people are complex adaptive systems and not enough senior executives know what that means. In a complex adaptive system, neither use nor content can be fully anticipated, this has serious implications for how we think about management of information, technology, people, policy and services.
CHange is hard
Introducing change to an organization requires a willingness to manage by exception —the long tail does not easily fit in a boardroom (page 20). A senior central agency executive who is willing to risk manage and lightly “govern” can enable wide-spread innovation.
stealth works
Formal approval mechanisms cannot be expected to understand and preemptively approve the specifics of innovation. A small group with sufficient “policy cover” and lean governance can sometimes achieve good enough for next to nothing.
Conflict of interest is real
Governance and funding models are something we should be looking at and talking about to deal with our shared accountability issue (see the governance description starting on page 13). Existing models have inherent barriers and conflicts of interest that should be acknowledged and addressed if we hope to make collective progress.
I would be delighted to hear your thoughts.
Here is the presentation to accompany the paper.
The icons in this post come from Peter Stoyko’s brilliant systemviz codex. The header image of the sailing ships comes from Wikipedia Battle of the Saintes which took place in the Caribbean of all places.
Last week (June 2011), I had the great pleasure of being part of the Canadian Public Health Association conference in Montreal. I attended the three days, participated in two panels, met a lot of great people and generally learned a bunch. During the plenary panel that I took part in I mentioned a couple of papers that might be of interest. I am putting them here to make them easy to find and to encourage feedback. Apparently there was video of the session as well, if and when I get my hands on it I will share.
