Week 2 — Don’t Forget To Human No Matter Where You End Up In Life
The Week That Was
Hi there! Thanks for reading week 2 of my week that was. In case you missed week 1, you can read my Week 1 weeknotes — Drinking from a Fire Hose. This weeks title is from the OneTeamGov breakfast where one participant said “Don‘t forget to human no matter where you end up in life” in response to another comment that said managers lose empathy as they climb the ranks.
My weeknotes being published can mean only one thing… it’s Friday!
OneTeam Gov
I’ve been off for 6 months on parental leave. In the 6 months I was off, my world was my daughter (who is so cute). This means I disconnected myself from everything government, innovation and public service. Everyone should take a detox. Technology is stressing. A break is a good thing.
As I plug myself back into the government innovation space, I appeared at my first ever OneTeam Gov breakfast. There’s a sticker for that right?
During the breakfast, I posed a question inspired by discussions I’ve had with other smart people: does the public service have a talent problem? Lively discussion followed which more or less concluded that the public service does not have a talent problem but it has a “mis-using the current talent” problem. I continued the discussion over Twitter which led to a lot of lively discussion.
I believe the public service does not have a talent problem in the sense that vacant positions do not go unfilled. Assuming that the public service has a talent problem is asking the wrong question. The right question is whether public servants have the right competencies and skills to be ready for the demands of an ever evolving world and changing expectations. For an organization to be effective, it needs people who enable it to be effective.
One must keep things in perspective. Canada is a well-governed country which provides public services to citizens and businesses with limited corruption. It is important to keep this context in mind. The public service is not the leader in many areas. One often points to companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon and other governments like the Ontario Government and Estonia as the leaders to emulate. However, looking to the best has its faults. It ignores the strengths and hard work by public servants every day to keep the country running relatively well. I am not saying to stop striving to be the best; I am just providing a word of caution that Canada is in a better position than our doom and gloom can sometimes make us think.
Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and All Things Innovation — Oh My!
As I integrate myself into projects, I am re-entering familiar territory and familiar discussions. As I listen, see and listen even more, I get a sense of optimism mixed with concern. Optimism that public servants are challenging the status quo and pushing boundaries. Concern we underestimate the impact of disruptive change. My mantra has always been that the technology is the easy part, the rest is the hard part. Many of our processes, policies, templates and other nuts and bolts are from a different era. In a world where automation has sped up decision making or artificial intelligence can tell me which financial transactions are fraudulent the impact on people, processes and policies requires a fundamental change.
Briefly, I am diving into two Artificial Intelligence projects in the regulatory space looking into using natural language processing to support incorporation by reference and to support the comparison of regulatory requirements across jurisdictions (e.g. similarities in the same regulation between Canada and other countries).
With blockchain, I have begun work on a project to support the use of blockchain in a major food industry. A plug-in is being discussed so the government’s data can be added to the blockchain and provided to consumers. My fascination is on the policy, regulatory, legislative, process, and people impact that a plug-in would create. With new data available at your fingertips and potentially feeding government data into the blockchain, how does this impact existing business processes? What does this mean for regular business activities? What legal issues are there?
If you are doing digital and not thinking about change management (people, processes, policies etc.) you are doing it wrong.
Other Work
I’ve also started work on a project looking to overcome barriers to collaboration in the science community. This work is a direct mandate from the DM Committee on Science. There are many administrative, financial and policy structures that prevent effective collaboration between science-based Departments who should have every reason to work together. Departments do not have cost sharing structures in place nor do they can share resources. Not too much more to add on this file as it is day 2 since I received documents.
I’ve advanced my thinking on how to measure the impact of innovation and whether an innovation is supporting public policy outcomes. Thanks to a few Twitter discussions and a few coffees with smart people, Local context is important. It is very hard (if not impossible) for large-scale change to be successful at a whole of government level, other than legislative change. Measuring impact of innovation needs to account for local context and conditions recognizing that the reason a team or Department does innovation can vary significantly. The maturity of performance measurement in a Department is a factor and must be taken into account when deciding on how to measure impact. I am left wondering why or how performance measurement is not a central part of our work. One has to wonder how the rush to move fast and fail fast gets in the way of measuring how far our money goes and whether it was a good investment.
Over Twitter, I had a discussion about whether return on investment was something we should measure in the innovation space. Does the public sector have a return on investment? Can we place a value on program outcomes? How much is a life worth? It’s a question that will need an answer if we are to measure the impact of innovation.
In non work stuff, my wife and I will buy a cottage soon. We are both reclusive creatures who enjoy nature. Nothing beats a day on the dock, soaking in the sun and catching up on the books I always say I will read but never find the time to read. For us, this is as much an investment for ourselves as it is for our infant daughter. We want her to enjoy nature and a cottage will be a great thing for us to hand down to her someday.
What’s on my mind?
What’s on my mind? Get in touch if you want to chat or have an insight to share.
- Does the public service have a talent problem? Do we have a problem using the talent we have?
- How important is the local context? If large-scale change only works locally, how do we replicate and/or scale?
- Is it ok if the output of an innovation project fails if the process used to get there proves that “doing things differently” is possible?
So with that out of the way, happy weekend and I’ll be publishing Week 3 of my weeknotes next Friday.
“It may take some hard work. But the more you say no to the things that don’t matter, the more you can say yes to the things that do.”
