Do The Right Thing: Solving The Wrong Problem

If that spring campaign fails to produce a clear winner with a majority of seats, Ontario could be plunged into a contentious post-election scenario as rival party leaders vie to form the next government.  Against that backdrop of increasing uncertainty, Prime minister Stephen Harper's plans to replace Lieutenant-Governor David Onley have been placed on hold.

There are so many smart, competent people on all sides of the political divide right now.  Most of them have no training to do the jobs they're technically tasked with doing (and receiving partisan pressure to do a different job besides) but the latent potential is staggering.  

Add to this an Ontario Public Service on the early edge of transformational change, with many of the functionally fixed players weaned on the ways of government during the tail end of the Industrial Age retiring and making way for a new generation that's grown up with social media and a whole new way of engaging.

Yet it all goes squirrely when it political sales and power comes into the question.  

We have budgets designed as campaign platforms being released in advance by political aides through one-off announcements, yet preemptively being leaked by disgruntled bureaucrats sending not-so-subtle signals that they're not willing to be treated like trained seals, as they have been under successive governments for decades.

I keep hearing from the smart people at the top of the political ladder "you have to identify the right problem if you want to find the correct solution," yet they keep ignoring their own advice.

Look, I get it - politics is about winning, power, the corner office, so on and so forth.  Yay, power.  

But the people in those corner offices have at least some inkling to how influenced they are by the people who put them in power - political organizers and funders in the private sector with their own agendas at play.  So, being in power isn't the be-all and end-all because you're still beholden to someone else.

And it's even messier - Parties are beholden to stakeholders, MPPs are beholden to Parties, but also constituents.  Often these interests don't add up.  When you have a Member (or candidate) forced to choose sides between Party platform (and Party support) or constituent concerns (and actual votes) you can't but end up with at least a partial analysis paralysis.

Look at the budget documents and platforms we're getting.  They are all check-lists of one-off projects or funding designed to appease a given stakeholder group.  There are no carefully-research structural reforms, cross-Ministerial service studies or revisions to internal operation with an eye towards making what exists now work better.

Political Parties are throwing starfish back in the ocean one at a time while tens of thousands of others are left to bake in the sun.

We have completely forgotten the whole point of Political Parties in the Legislature - it's not so that they can fight for power and dominate the agenda with one perspective or the other, it's so that they can find balanced solutions that represent the best interests of varied constituencies.  

That's been lost.  It's been lost largely because our system was never designed to have Parliamentarians in Cabinet in the first place.

We can keep at this merry-go-round of political-pendulum swinging, but the people are starting to get motion sick and want off the ride.  That includes the politicians themselves.

The problem we face isn't that one Party is more corrupt than the other, more beholden than the other.  It's that our entire system is antiquated and inadequate to meet the demands of today, from the political operation all the way down to how the front line of public service is supported.

Potential solutions exist.  Whole new processes are available.  Inside and outside government, there are good people who aren't entrenched in the system who are ready, willing and able to work with whoever to fix the real, structural problems that are gumming up our provincial works.

But they need people on the other side willing to work with them.  And that means recognizing that being in power isn't the solution - empowering the people is.

Not by handing them fish, not by throwing them in the deep-end, but by building trust, sharing information and re-designing the process with their input, every step of the way.

We've lost our responsible government.  It's time for a peaceful revolution paving the way for an Open Government serving as a social synapse for a responsible society.

Political Parties can continue to position each other as the problem, or they can collaborate with the rest of us on the solution.  

That's their ballot question to consider.  And they will be held to account for their choices.

Sanitation Engineers: The Value of Training

 

Disinfecting a patient room involves more than "dipping a rag in a bucket," Zoutman added.  Bacterial spores require hospital-grade level disinfectants.  It can take 90 minutes to two hours to do a thorough and complete clean if a patient with an infectious disease has occupied the room.

 

But Zoutman isn't convinced more money is the answer.  "We need to look at how we're cleaning, and what we're doing, before we just say we need to hire more people or pour more money into it."

 

Smart man, this Zoutman.  Money isn't a solution; it is, in some cases, a facilitator for a solution, but money by itself does nothing.  We're too quick to spend (and too quick to cut) without actually making an effort and investing the time to find where the problem lies.

 

First and foremost - how are hospital cleaners treated?  How much training do they get?  Do they have HR support to turn to if they have pressing issues, especially if the wages aren't fantastic, or are they expected to leave personal problems at home and thoroughly clean room after room in monotonous yet rapid fashion?

 

I don't know.  I haven't done any research on this front.

 

That's what we pay policy people for, isn't it?

 

Cracking the Drug Crisis

 

 

One thing's for sure, the ever-present problem is escalating into a crisis.  The Associated Press reported that the number of new drug shortages occurring each year has tripled since 2006.  As of November, 251 new drug shortages were reported this year (2014).  The majority of the drugs in short supply are potentially life-saving treatments for cancer, infections and cardiovascular disease.

 

 

What's the issue here?  Big Pharma clearly likes making money, so you'd think they'd be all over production.  They're international in scope, so it's not like access to the raw materials is an issue.

 

So why would people reliant on medication be threatened with a drug-shortage crisis?

 

Funny you should ask.

 

Drugs (brand name drugs, in particular) are incredibly expensive.  And more people need them.  And someone's gotta pay for them. 

 

When it's private individuals, there's an issue of prioritization (don't buy insurance, can't afford drugs when you need them) but also of base income (can't afford rent and groceries, certainly can't afford insurance or drugs when you need them). 

 

With public health plans like Ontario's, though, the cost of healthcare (including drugs) comes out of revenue, which includes taxes.  Politics is like sausage, we're told - we don't care what goes in to it so long as it's cheap and available.  The same applies to healthcare. 

 

This is where it gets sticky.  Governments that aren't good at internal organization (silo-based work culture) are terrible at finding effective efficiencies, so instead efficiency becomes code for "offer less."  As in cuts.

 

It's not difficult to reframe a cut as a social benefit, however, and sometimes it's actually true.  There is a massive pill-popping problem in Canada that costs a ton of money; in some cases, its like people leaving their lights on when they're away from home, it's just easier that way.  In other cases, there are serious addiction issues that need to be resolved.  This is particularly true on mood-changing drugs like Oxycodone or Dexedrine, both of which serve as legitimate treatments for mental health issues.

 

But this last one is much more complicated than we give it credit for.  We're not quite there yet, but we're slowly starting to grasp the social/environmental factors that impact mental health in the way poor physical working conditions can be detrimental to physical health.

 

It's through recognizing this that Canada came up with the idea of psychologically safe workplace standards.  They're voluntary, though, so nobody's taking them seriously - not even the government that enacted them.  The PMO is definitely not a psychologically safe working environment.

 

This means that we can't just divide the "sick" people that need drugs from the "well" people who don't and should be working; in fact, poor work design is making people sick and in addition to leading to an increased drug use, also impacting performance and innovation.

 

While in some cases you can reduce the addictive reliance to drugs by changing the environment, you can't remove the drugs, keep the environment and then just expect people to "get over it."  That's delusional.

 

But that's what we're doing.  Governments are reducing drug access and looking for the ones that are culturally easy to pull back on, like those related to mental health issues, so as to reallocate pressure dollars to treatments for physical illnesses like cancer, diabetes and cardiac concerns.

 

There's a butterfly effect of consequences here that adds to a host of other multi-impact policy pieces (e.g. less social service, worse health outcomes, more anxiety, more need for relief, more need for service, less productivity, so on and so forth).

 

But this is all complex theory.  We don't do that anymore; we message soundbites and microtarget issue outreach.  That is, after all, what the people want, isn't it?

 

The confluence of all these ripples are pushing our society in one direction that will not deviate until the system itself deviates.

 

Which, I guess, is true of any emerging crisis.

 

It's Just Good Business: Caring Promotes Sharing

 

 

Simple practices also win the day.  For example, the CEO of a Toronto-based growth-driven technology company launched a monthly gathering where staff could join their boss for breakfast.  Employees loved his efforts and connection, and engagement and innovation rose.  The additional benefits of simply walking the halls and production lines, and having meaningful conversations with employees about who they are, their concerns and ideas, can work wonders.

 

The best boss I ever had was never a boss - he was a mentor, a collaborator, an inspiration.  His name was Jim Brownell, and he had a bar night named after him.  With Jim's encouragement and support, those of us on his team made the impossible, unrealistic happen. 

 

A man I will always have a great deal of respect for is Dalton McGuinty.  I don't agree with everything he did as Premier, but I never once questioned that his commitment was pure and his heart was in the right place.  The reason for this is because I continuously saw him make time to connect with staff, to recognize and support completely non-political activities of team members and 9 times out 10 you could count on him to be the adult in the room in any situation that got messy.

 

The worst kinds of bosses I have seen are those who staff dread to see making rounds, because it's sure to come with criticism, rebukes and undermining challenges.  A close second are those bosses who can't be bothered to connect with their staff at all.  When it takes two years for a boss of a small business to sit down for a chat with an employee, that employee knows they and their ideas don't matter.

 

We like to talk about "different leadership styles" and how people need to adjust to them.  To me, that's a bit like saying every problem has to reshape itself as a nail if the tool that's hitting it is a hammer.

 

Leadership is a tool, a method of catalyzing action.  It's a completely different function than management, which itself is a completely different model than micro-management.

 

Yes, there are certain jobs where adverse pressure can improve results - traditional manufacturing fit this bill.  Offer bigger carrots and drive your donkeys hard, they'll move faster for you.

 

When it comes to cognitive labour, though, it's not necessarily speed your after.  Measure twice, cut once, etc.  Because we don't look at work culture this way, we focus on speed and who's getting to market faster. 

 

Is it better to have a crap product (or policy) out the door before the other guy finishes designing their quality product?  We tell ourselves yes, but really it's marketing and oppositional undermining that most detracts from another brand.  Regardless, if people don't like the product they're buying and have no confidence in any other products on the market, they're perfectly capable of keeping their money (and votes) at home.

 

I don't think even Stephen Harper would consider that smart business, and he's an economist after all.

 

Where innovation, or participation, or brand loyalty are the goal, hammers don't work.  Shrinking the platform doesn't work.

 

If you don't need people or creativity for your business, knock yourself out.  But if you want to grow in the modern economy or in modern politics, you gotta commit sociology.

 

It's just good business.

 

Come Outside, Pierre Poilievre - Spring Is Coming!

On a matter of democratic principles, which should be above partisanship, the government feels no need to work with the other parties, to consider proof or to provide it, to consult experts or, god forbid, to listen to them.  It is government disconnected from the rules of evidence, and it points the way to government disconnected from the rules.

Rules?  What rules?  The Globe and Mail has clearly missed that the only rule that matters when a Party feels they have an empire - they act, they create their own reality... they're history's actors.  All of us, we're just left to study what they do.  We commit sociology by studying, they just do.

Which, of course, is the ideology that's fueling Stephen Harper and his point men/women (but not, I would say, his whole Party).  Poilievre is poster boy for the smug entitlement that has corroded the institution Harper inherited from Preston Manning.

But there's something else going on here, something meta that the hyper-partisan and delusionally confident mud-slingers like Poilievre are missing (when you feel like you shape creation, you do tend to miss both the nuances and the bigger picture).

First - does no one else see the irony in any Members of Parliament (which serves the sole purpose of holding Government to account) serving as Government (so, holding themselves to account?) now reshaping the laws around democracy to better suit their interests?  It's like Magna Carta in reverse.

This is a key point I don't think enough people are paying attention to.  We've gotten so used to relying on Parliamentary traditions and conventions that we forget just how much of the current operation of Parliament is not reflected in our Constitution.  In fact, our Westminster Parliamentary system wasn't actually designed to have Political Parties duking it out over which gets to form the Monarch's government.  

It's no wonder our politics have gotten so squirrely and that Party Leaders now serve as partisan lords and stand-in monarchs both.  Political Parties evolved out of the Restoration, when the Horse Drivers (Whigs, now called Liberals) and Outlaws (Tories, now called Conservatives) were at odds over the religion of the King.

These were different perspectives that formed groups within Parliament, the body meant to hold Government to account.  It's by convention only (it being easier to tweak an existing system instead of implementing a new one) that we're now at a place where the politicians elected to hold Government to account on behalf of the people are now acting as Government and holding themselves to account.

Is it any surprise we now have Governments acting like Monarchs and focused on doing whatever it takes to win majorities so they can act, essentially, like empires?  When they are accountable to themselves only, who's to stop them?

Which brings us to point number two.

Given this reality of win-focused, self-serving partisan groups (largely directed by unelected, unaccountable to the people backroom operators) it's no wonder why there has been a notable shift in how civic protest against the closed-door, unrepresentative nature of our politics is manifesting itself. 

While the tough-minded alphas at the top insist that people are sheeple and that any changes they implement are etched in stone, discontent with the system entire (and the people nudging it away from true democratic operation) is swelling. 

Occupy was a lot of noise, little action and has been easily dismissed.  Idle No More brought more action to the table, but has not been seen as a wide-spread movement.  

It's really hard for people who don't believe in committing sociology to recognize emerging social trends until it's too late.

Both Occupy and Idle No More still exist, but more importantly they have fed into a longer-gestating Open Data movement that's started within bureaucracies and aims to completely transform how our government functions.  The partisans can bark orders, micro-manage and catalyze all the scandals they want; they come and go from government all the time.  The Public service has to take a longer-term view and, as such, is becoming much more strategic in how it both plans and positions policy for their "political masters." 

That's before you take into account Samara's almost ethnographic deconstruction of our system's failings, non-partisan GOTV training for less-likely-to-vote (and therefore, be engaged by partisans) communities and of course, the broader Open Data/Open Government movement.

Make no mistake - there is a movement out there, and it's growing stronger.  

You can call it the Canadian Spring (which, as a Game of Thrones fan, I enjoy) or, for historic relevance and bodacity, the Peaceable Revolution.  However you brand it, the direction is clear - change is on the horizon.  The further this or any government tries to tighten its grip, the more public trust - including that of their own partisans - will slip through their fingers.

In trying to recreate a mythical past, folk like Poilievre aren't further entrenching their power for perpetuity - they're merely expediting their fall from grace.

Which is why it pays to commit a little sociology every now and then; it actually helps overcome blindness.

If, that is, you're open to seeing.

Let Go of Winter

Who doesn't love a good meme?

Winter made a great metaphor for the freezing over of Canadian politics; it was all very Northrope Frye, with governments "letting go" of accountability and nestling comfortably behind their walls of ice.

Now, though, Spring has come in the form of the Peaceable Revolution that's moving towards a Responsible Summer.  If Spring is about rebellion and romance, summer tends to be about more mature relationships with a sad eye towards fall, which also comes inevitably.  

Of course, there are some who refuse to believe winter ever left and conceal/don't feel, never leaving their palaces.

It's no wonder Harper so enjoys his Arctic tours!

But that's a meme for another day.

Some Advice for Tim Hudak via Leslie Noble

For his trouble, Mr. Hudak has received a cease-and-desist letter from the Premier's counsel.  But the bigger concern for his Tories should be that he has served up a reminder of why many Ontarians have struggled to warm to him.

I've had the privilege of learning from many of the brightest political operators in the country over the years.  It may surprise some that the best, most enduring advice I've received from any of them came from Leslie Noble.

Many moons ago when I was in her employ, Leslie gave me this sage bit of wisdom: "in this business (Government Relations, which is really just an extension of politics), the client's best interests has to come before all else, even your own partisan feelings."

As a Conservative, she was referring to then-Premier Dalton McGuinty.  She then mentioned a couple of brilliant wins she'd scored for her clients (to learn more about her services, visit here) that the Liberal Government she opposed was also able to cite as wins.  

Her message was plain; in a service-based industry, the client comes first, period.

This is a piece of advice I've turned to again and again over the years as I've seen leaders in the public, private and Not-For-Profit sector lose sight of this mandate and shift to focusing on their own interests.  Inevitably, these bosses fall.

It's a great tragedy that Tim Hudak has Leslie Noble in his corner, but is failing to heed her advice himself.  By focusing so intently on getting hits in on his opponents, Hudak is failing at his responsibility to serve both his Party (his antics have yet to help bolster their numbers) or the people of Ontario (how many opportunities for legitimate opposition over misguided initiatives has he missed because he went for the over-the-top attack?).

What's even worse - he's either forgetting or simply doesn't know that, to most Ontarians, there's no difference between Parties or leaders.  When one Party Leader blasts another with the basest, crudest of attacks, they wear more than a little bit of the blowback.

By focusing so narrowly on short-term partisan hits, Hudak is chipping away at public faith in the institutions of Government and Parliament themselves.

I don't expect Hudak to listen to me, to the countless reporters telling him he's gone over the line and he clearly won't listen to his Opponents, but one would hope he'd heed the counsel of one of his own advisors.

When it becomes about wins for yourself rather than service for the people, you've lost.  

And, sadly, we've lost, too.