The Return of Don Drummond

"You need to look at what public services you want to deliver then what's the most efficient way of providing them," economist Don Drummond said in an interview with Tom Clark on The West Block.  "You don't arbitrarily constrain a certain outcome."

Drummond's not the only one who's suggested that clear-cutting the public service isn't the best way to nurture sustainable growth and efficient service delivery.

The Mowat Centre took a hard look at structural failings within the public sector and offered suggestions on how to fix them.

Through his Open By Default report on Open Government, Don Lenihan did the same thing.

The truth is that we have a oxymoronic silo-based system riddled with duplication, gaps, overlaps where title, process, position and information hoarding takes precedence over efficiency or results. Mid-managers are downloading the innovation imperative to staff, expecting them to include metrics on how they're going to think outside the box in their self-written performance reviews.

Clearly, they haven't heard of the candle problem.  You can't pressure people into being innovative. You can't force innovation through competition.  

Worse, a complete lack of communication flow leaves our public servants in the daily equivalent of shoveling water - they don't know what they're doing, why they're doing it or what result it's expected to have.

It should come as no surprise how heavily medicated our OPS is, but doing anything about that would mean a whole lotta culture change and a great number of entitled folk recognizing they're part of the problem.  

That's not gonna happen overnight, but it won't happen at all until someone takes ownership of the problem.  That ownership doesn't necessarily have to come from government.

But he pointed to an example of a recommendation ignored: restructure business subsidies.

There is plenty of money out there.  More than this, there's as ridiculous an amount of inefficiency in the private sector as their is in the public sector (we won't even get started on the NFP sector).  Like lighting a fire when all you want is light, a great deal of energy is being wasted to create new wealth without sufficient effort being spent on internal management.

This is particularly true where it comes to HR.  

Precious little time is spent on the "onboarding" process and few employers have the slightest grasp of environmental/work design impact on productivity, presenteeism, innovation and customer experience.  They just want things to work, damn it, without having to put thought into how to get the results they want.

Fortunately, there are best practices out there - people and organizations in the private sector that are adapting to the Knowledge Economy by improving how they do HR, how they consult and how they engage with their clients and the community at large.

Just imagine if there was a coalition of the willing that banded together and told government "we want to partner with you on these big, structural solutions - but we want your help, and we want to see you setting the example.

How likely is this to happen?  Not overly, but you might be surprised how many willing parties there are already.

It's a good kind of problem to work on, and to gain brand from being part of.

Just ask Don Drummond.

Political Morale and the Value of a Pivot

We work in complex problems and sometimes find ourselves as the ones who have to say, "hold on... what are we actually trying to achieve here?"

The other night I got to listen in on a fascinating conversation between the Globe and Mail's Adam Radwanski and Alison Loat, founder of Samara.  As part of the chat, Radwanski talked about how reporters/columnists get their information from politicians and staff (yes, it goes well beyond the scum).  

Some reporters read much into body language and mine the depth of every pause and every word unsaid as well.  Others are all about the phone call.  Adam said that his preferred method was actual conversations instead of just inquiries; as we're social creatures, that often means a coffee or a lunch together.

Radwanski shared a bit about his relationship with staff in former Premier Dalton McGuinty's office and how it changed over time.  At the onset, he had a more open conversations with them - not that they would leak exclusives or reveal inappropriate details, but that he could suss their mind out a bit on what they were trying to accomplish with a particular message campaign or piece of legislation.

For obvious reasons, Radwanski found this valuable - he could really get a sense of the intent and goals behind government activity that might not always turn out as intended.  This intel would inform his stories, allowing him to do a political reporter's #2 job (after making money for their outlet) - facilitate the public's awareness of why and how their tax dollars are being spent and their society being supported.

There was a shift though, Radwanski said, between McGuinty's first class of staff and the one that followed.  The second bunch, he said, were less open, less willing to have conversations and began instead to use tricks to get stories they wanted - leaking to one outlet, putting them in competition with others, supposedly making them more likely to print favourable stories so as to get the inside scoop.

What resulted was a more confrontational relationship between press and press secretaries, more like what we see at the federal level where the press are clearly considered the enemy by political staff.  Stories became less favourable and intent was read as more cynical; without some background on the thought process, there really wasn't much else for reporters to go on.

I spent a bit of time within Liberal ranks over this period.  Some of the happiest days of my career were during the end of the first term when there was a real sense of being part of something special and other staff were almost more like family than colleagues.  I attribute this sense of team primarily to two men - my former boss Jim Brownell who may have been just a backbencher but for many of us was the heart and soul of the QP Liberal family and the Premier himself, Dalton McGuinty.

As part of Team Brownell, I spent a lot of time connecting with other staff, figuring out what they were working on, what we might be able to help them with and of course, seeing how all of this tied in to the projects Jim wanted to deliver for his riding (he had a very long list over two terms and delivered every single project, save one).  It was networking, team building, capacity building, but also humanizing.  I wanted to be human to these people I might otherwise only connect with via email or phone and I wanted to understand them as people as well.

More than a couple times when I was making rounds, I would run in to the Premier himself, just popping by offices to see how people were doing.  There are worse people to have your thunder taken away from than the Premier, but most importantly to me was how obvious it was that McGuinty actually understood the importance of connectivity.  

McGuinty did more than just the odd staff visit, which was huge - he also showed personal interest in the projects and accomplishments of staff in their lives beyond Queen's Park.  I got nice, hand-written letters from him when I won a short story award from the Toronto Star and at the birth of my first son. 

The Premier made time to invite my whole family into his office on a day when I'd arranged for my grandfather, a World War II vet and Holocaust survivor, to be recognized in the Legislature.  And that was just me, staffer to a backbencher.  

I know he did similiar things for other staff.  There's a great picture of him at the wedding of two of his own staff; he's reaching into the aisle to congratulate them as they leave the church and they, so in love and focused on each other, don't even realize they're ignoring their boss/Ontario's Premier.

While I was at Queen's Park, there were directions and decisions taking that I disagreed with (and was never afraid to share my thoughts on internally).  At the same time, I felt I knew the people making those choices and respected them enough to figure out why they'd made the choices they did and maybe how better iterations could be arrived at down the road.

When I left Queen's Park, I became like anyone else - an outsider looking in, albeit with more connections and understanding of how the place operated.  Regardless, I began to feel like some humanity was slipping away from the relationships I had there.  This was in no small part due to what I'd left Queen's Park for - a job in the private sector as a Government Relations Consultant, but I didn't want that to become a barrier.  

Perhaps naively, I thought (and still think) that people from different sectors don't need to be competitive and cagey - it's much more effective when we're open, pull together and focus on shared solutions for everyone.

As partisanship has gotten worse, though at both the provincial and federal level and from what I hear, communication with the press are much more based on messaging than relationship, I can't help feel as though it's not just me.  There's been a significant culture change, a calcifying of government that has maybe been exacerbated by toughening economic times.

From the inside, I hear (and this from staff in all Parties) two main trends: 

- staff who are functionally fixed on reciting the Party lines, and not in the cheeky, fun way we used to, but either out of fear of straying, a Koolaid-drinking belief in The Word or perhaps most sadly, a lack of trust in outsiders.  It's fascinating how closely this mirrors some the approaches I find among community residents when I work in priority neighbourhoods here in Toronto.

- the second trend is that they're lost.  They don't know who's really calling the shots in their Party, can't figure out how or why the plans (if there are bigger plans) are put together and really have no clue what role they're supposed to play.

Funny enough, this is the same culture of stagnation and confusion that has been identified as a major impediment to efficiency and adaptability within the Public Sector.  We can get mad at bureaucrats who make decent wages but don't seem to produce enough work as being lazy and go on a cutting spree, but that ignores the fundamental problem with the system - 

People within the bureaucracy often don't know how decisions are made, don't know how their work fits into the big picture and get no idea what or how their work gets used, if it gets used at all.

In the military, they recognize the importance of morale - it's #2, right after the mission.  In far too many other sectors and egregiously in politics, morale isn't even considered part of the question.  It's My Party Right or Wrong, right?

This is something we have lost as we focus increasingly on numbers - funds raised, program dollars spent, votes cast, etc.  Our entire system isn't designed to support Political Parties who aren't even mentioned in our constitution, nor an invisible, insatiable beast called The Economy.

Government is meant to support the people.  The Economy is meant to be the food that sustains society, which is a support system connecting and ideally empowering people.  

We've gotten this all backwards; partisanship has taken supremacy away from Parliament and The Economy is being trumped as more important than people.  Is it any wonder so many programs are missing their target or so many people are falling through the cracks?

A big part of why we've gotten things all screwy is that we've decided that relationships - committing sociology, as it were - is a bad thing.  We've been going the transaction, laissez-faire route; as a result, we have poor communication, increased hostility and competition and vitally, less sustainable results.

We think we know where we're going, but we're not sure.  But we no longer seem to care.

We've lost our way and our tracking back in circles.  Which is why now, more than any time in at least my life time, we need leaders with vision who understand the value of people.  

Not as props, not as clients or audiences to be messaged, but as as real people.

I believe we need to pivot our perspective.  I also believe that Open Government/Open Data is the frame that will allow us to do this.  

But I also know that as it becomes harder and harder for a select, siloed few to know what to do next, we're going to see the opacity of politics get worse before it gets better.  But it will get better, one way or another - the historical turn of the wheel teaches us that much.

The Peaceable Revolution is at hand.

Could This Have Saved Ashley Smith?

From Calm, Alert and Learning: Classroom Strategies for Self-Regulation (Stuart Shanker)

Two six year-olds were playing at recess when one fell.  The girl reacted to her friend's fall and subsequent distress by laughing and hitting him on the back.  This, of course, upset her friend even further, leading the girl, in turn, to laugh even more and hit the boy again as she became more hyperaroused.  The teacher on duty, knowing that the girl had great difficulty with social conventions and controlling her motor actions when hyperaroused, intervened as follows: She showed the girl how to console her friend by softly telling him that everything would be all right.  She then demonstrated for the child to pat her friend gently on the back.  Almost instantly, both children down-regulated.

If we look at this situation and apply how we might instinctively act, we see that there is potential for the teacher to admonish the girl for being too rough.  In this instance, chances are that the girl (and her friend) would have become even more upset and dysregulated.  As it was, the girl genuinely wanted to be kind, but her poor social skills and problems with motor control made this difficult.  With the wrong kind of adult response, the girl might continue to have ongoing problems in the prosocial domain.  With her teacher's keen understanding and gentle encouragement, however, the girl was able to learn an appropriate response to the situation and model it.

According to her adoptive parents, Ashley Smith apparently had a normal early childhood.  When she started to hit puberty (the time when the neural systems of the human brain responsible for executive function start to mature), she started to display anti-social behavioural changes.  From there, Ashley Smith's life spiralled downward into juvenile court and prison, with some diagnoses of mental health issues along the way.  

Her sad life ended, as we know, in suicide.

What if Ashley's parents had been able to learn about strategies like the one outlined above and the cognitive science behind them?  What if her teachers or prison guards had knowledge of the neurochemistry behind behaviour and been able to approach Ashley differently?  What if those same prison guards knew to look for behaviour and causes in each other and felt comfortable in providing peer support?

Could such strategies and culture shift have also saved the life of Staff Sergeant Ian Matthews?  What about Canada's veterans?

Of course, this scenario is geared just towards teachers.  It was, after all, included in a teacher-resource manual. 

There is no reason why any teacher should proactively be looking to apply such behavioural comprehension and management strategies to a justice system tragedy.  There's no reason a correctional service policy-planner should be reading a teacher resource, either.  

We have silo-based systems that encourage people to stay on target, lest they get lost on tangents.  

The sorts of cross-pollination ideas which can and should happen don't, and for a well-identified reason that also goes back to cognitive function.  We like to tell ourselves we're rational creatures, but we really aren't.  We're reactive, using fight or flight (or punishment and isolation) when there's a better way.

This is the culture change Don Tapscott refers to when he talks about networked intelligence.  It's the power of behavioural insight the Mowat Centre wrote about.  It's the sort of innovation we keep talking about, but are challenged to actually realize.  

It's within our power right now to collectively do something to prevent the next Ashley Smith or Ian Matthews from killing themselves.  We can reduce bullying, reduce crime, increase workplace productivity and positively impact quality-of-life if we can just change the view from looking through a mirror darkly.

Or, we can focus on individual toughness and invest more in crime and punishment.  

That's what's worked so far, right?

UPDATE:  But a more precise application of the criminal law, based on a better appreciation of its limits, is not evidence that we no longer know where or how to draw the line.  Quite the contrary: We are drawing it with a sharper pencil.

Who am I to argue with Andrew Coyne?

Here's the new mentality - it's behavioural economics, stupid!





But a more precise application of the criminal law, based on a better appreciation of its limits, is not evidence that we no longer know where or how to draw the line. Quite the contrary: We are drawing it with a sharper pencil.

Government Services: Systems, not Silos

Conditions are often treated in isolation.  Individuals and families with complex needs are seen by multiple agencies and caseworkers, which is confusing and time consuming for clients and results in duplicated processes.

A lack of coordination and information sharing means interventions are not always sequenced to optimize results while early warning signs are missed...

Integration, for instance, can remove perverse incentives that cause providers to work in isolation rather than share resources and collaborate to achieve more effective interventions.

Nor cost-effective.  Duplication, gaps and overlaps are easy to miss when you don't have a service map - but we tend not to think in maps.  We demand simple, straight-forward bullets and picture-perfect clarity of message.

There's a lot of amazing work being done by governments around the world on social/human service integration. but the information I've seen to date is still being presented in old-school formats; boxy flow charts or spectrums.

Thinking about this led me to recall a couple of infographics I did a couple of years ago, first on a scrap of paper while sitting in a food court, then later on a computer with my amateur skills - the system today (silos) and the system tomorrow (an actual system).  

My entry-point into this world of service design was mental health, particularly socio-cultural impacts on individual states of mental fitness and the actual process that lead us to make (or not make) the choices we do.  Both trains have since come to the station; now everyone is getting on board.

Through a better understanding of how people think - from biases to defaults - governments are redesigning services in ways that encourage citizens to choose healthier, safer lives.

That was two years ago.  We've all come a long way since then, and the journey's just beginning.