November 17, 2011
Storytelling at the heart of citizen engagement: @PSengage 2011 Preview from Alan Silberberg
How you tell the story of something whether your best friend’s recent golf incident – or the introduction of a new paradigm into an old channel matters. It matters more and more so in the instant gratification and short time frame attention span economy. How our brains process information now is based on how fast does it answer basic questions. If you cannot tell the story of why something should be done using outside references then figure out how to tell the story using those from inside.
Time matters. People’s time matters the more that you are demanding they contemplate either large expenditures or something technical in nature or both. If you can tell the story in a simple to understand, bite size version, you are more likely to get a buy-in from skeptical management or budget conscious bean counters.
So frame your story as if you were sitting around a family dinner table. Keep it simple. Use basic language. Sure you can let loose with fancy nomenclature and or highly technical terms to show you know your stuff. But – relate it to the here and now, why is something practical, applicable and affordable at this period in time? Tell the story of other Government agencies doing what you propose. Tell the story of successful wins from the actions you seek.
There will be more in the PS Engage talk, but this is the basic outline of what I am addressing in Ottawa on November 22, 2011.
Alan Silberberg
October 30, 2011
Questions and Answers with @Thumbtackhead
This is the second in a series of guest posts by @IM4Ward, on behalf of the PS Engage planning committee.
The PSEngage conference is happening November 22, 2011 and the line-up of speakers is inspiring. To give more insight to the knowledge and interests of the speakers we sent them each a set of questions tailored to their individual experience. We will be posting the questions and their responses over the next few weeks, so please keep checking back regularly.
Today’s interview is with @Thumbtackhead, John Weigelt, National Technology Officer at Microsoft Canada.
John’s participation at PS Engage 2011 will be to share examples of government 2.0 activities across jurisdictions. If you’ve read John’s bio and his blog,http://www.thumbtackhead.ca/, you’ll realize quite quickly that John has an interesting approach to innovation. Innovation for John is not a wishy-washy process, but rather something that requires rigour and structure to bring out, explore and ultimately exploit creative ideas to achieve the objectives. Perhaps this comes from John’s military training. Read the questions and answers below to come to your own conclusions.
Q1: Your biographic information says you went to military college – Do you think military training influenced your approach to innovation? If so, how?
A1: I think that my military training influenced my approach to innovation in several ways. The best way to consider this is to try to imagine the crosswalks between a military operation and a business process. For both it is critically important that leaders select and maintain the objective. By describing their objectives leaders can empower entire communities to innovate to help attain the broader goal. Military training also helps people think about broad and often innovative approaches to solving a complex challenge. When encountering a tough adversary, a military leader will consider a wide variety of factors, probabilities and build out several scenarios to test an idea. Rarely will the effective leader choose a single approach to victory. Full campaigns will include a main action, perhaps several auxiliary actions, feints, special forces etc. All must be performed with creativity and innovation, lest the adversary gain the upper hand by being able to predict what may happen. With innovation, it’s important to look broadly across the problem space to seek out new approaches. Finally, one last thing that it helped me appreciate is the concept of Exercising Empowerment. Sometimes people in very structured organizations like the military, government or large businesses project a sense that there is little room for independent thinking. I would suggest that it is actually the opposite and that great ideas are always welcomed. Not that I would encourage everyone in uniform to pick their own pace when on parade, but there are opportunities to innovate within all structures.
Q2: Technology is driving a lot of innovation and change – What can business leaders do to understand the innovation options presented by technology without becoming a technologist. What are the types of questions business leaders should be asking?
A2: I think that the business leaders need to consider the outcomes from innovation. The Boston Consulting Group identifies 5 outcomes from innovation:
- New to world products or markets
- Expanding your current customer base
- Reaching entirely new types of customers
- Incremental changes to existing products
- Improving efficiency in existing processes.
By focusing on the outcome, the business leader can abstract out the technology and explore the business outcome that will be driven. Rarely does innovation simply pop arbitrarily into mind, rather, it is usually as a result of hard work on a particular problem carefully extended through a connection with other ideas or experimentation. Business leaders should therefore focus on their area of expertise and look to harness adjacent innovation by extending their expertise through the careful application of technology.
Q3: In your blog post, “Hearsay and other crimes against innovation” you emphasize the importance of fact checking and conducting the necessary research to substantiate the proposal. Can you give some ideas or examples of how these elements can be built into a business case?
A3: Evidence based decision making is fundamental to managing the risks and opportunities presented by any change to the status quo. To make good decisions, it is essential that there be a thorough understanding of the evidence being used. There are any number of ways that statistics can be presented in a biased manner (as is well described in “how to lie with statistics” .In one case I saw an internet study where a very small percentage of a small global sample size answered (with a checkbox) that they had lost between $10 and $100 due to a particular type of fraud. The study went on with some gratuitous extrapolation by multiplying the $100 Maximum against the entire Canadian population to arrive upon a multi-billion dollar impact for this fraud. This created an alarming number, 4X any number previously proposed. Given the margins for error, the factor of 10 difference in the potential losses all multiplied 1000s of times created a completely fictional statistic that eventually made headlines. Imagine what would happen if the government program leader took that number at face value to look to resolve what was reported as a huge problem. Even worse that the potential loss of funds, the misdirection of resources or efforts due to mis-prioritization has the potential to torpedo not only service delivery programs but sink entire businesses.
Q4: The Fed. Government is pushing improvements in the management of information through policies and directives – resulting in the focus of efforts being on compliance, rather than on opportunity. What can you say about the relationship between information management and opportunity?
A4: Information is the lifeblood of government/ businesses and has been called the cornerstone of democracy. It is therefore paramount that information be properly managed throughout its lifecycle. Policies, directives, standards, guidelines and recommendations all play a role in providing advice and guidance for consistency across the organization. While compliance is a necessary part of business and government routine, I’ve always had a love hate relationship with the term and how some people approach it. In the worst cases, compliance is a sort of lowest hurdle to get over to be able to operate. Like the runner in the Olympic race, some organizations will look to barely clear their compliance requirements, or just hit them so that they don’t get into trouble with their oversight body. It has been shown that even though an organization meets its compliance checklist, it can completely fail in the meeting the objective of the compliance requirement in the first place. I believe that organizations should look broader than simple compliance to fully capitalize on the opportunities that can be garnered by going beyond the checklist.
Be sure to see John and other smart people at PS Engage, November 22, 2011.
October 23, 2011
PS Engage – Q&A with Andy Jankowski
This is the first in a series of guest posts by @IM4Ward, on behalf of the PS Engage planning committee.
The PSEngage conference is happening November 22, 2011 and the line-up of speakers is great! To give more insight to the knowledge and interests of the speakers we sent them each a set of questions tailored to their individual experience. We will be posting the questions and their responses over the next few weeks, so please keep checking back regularly.
Today’s interview is with @AndyJankowski Global Director, Intranet Benchmarking Forum
Andy will be speaking about the shift from traditional intranet and portal environments to digital workplaces. He has been working in the area of collaboration and communication for years and has seen how the thinking, experimentation and solutions have evolved to achieve business goals and objectives.
1. From your experience, how do companies and government differ in their approach to adopting social workplace practices?
Surprisingly, not as much as you would think. While both entities are different structurally, they share similar needs and interests; knowledge sharing, expertise location and employee engagement to name a few. Regulatory environments aside, the approaches to which these entities, whether private or public sector, take in adopting social workplace practices is more affected by organizational culture than any other attribute. I have seen the same type of approaches, as well as speed and success of implementation, in both public and private settings. It just depends on the culture, leadership and willingness of the entities to change.
2. How can a social intranet help a government workplace be more innovative?
Innovation often results from serendipitously connecting people and dots. Social intranets enable and speed this process by bringing unstructured information and previously unknown networks to the forefront of employee communication and collaboration. Government entities are by necessity hierarchical, structured and often complex. Social intranets can help a government workplace be more innovative by enabling information and person-to-person connections to flow freely without disrupting the necessary structures in place.
Andy has trained and competed for the past three years with the Heroes Foundation Cycling Team and we wanted to know if he was able to apply what he has learnt from his past time to his work.
3. What have you learned from cycling and racing that can be applied to bringing about change in an organization?
- It’s a long race, but that doesn’t mean you can’t sprint several times throughout it. [Don’t be afraid to push things a little faster from time to time]
- You do not know what is possible until you try and that’s when you realize that anything is possible. [Even organizations seamlessly adopting new processes and collaborating together]
- It is better to learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable than to try to live and work in a false world of comfort. [This is how progress and innovation happen]
- Your brakes can be your worst enemy and cause more accidents than they prevent. Be careful when to apply them. [Be careful when deciding to stop an initiative]
- A well organized team (peleton) will out race an individual in almost any situation. [A well organized team will break down barriers and silos and make more progress]
- The same road looks different depending on the day. [Do not be too quick judge your organization and its ability]
- A very slight adjustment (seat height, pedal stroke, gearing) can make a world of performance difference. [Small steps and improvements can cause big advancements]
- Time is a man made concept. If you are creative, there is always time. [Being too busy is no excuse]
September 26, 2011
Weaving a tapestry of ideas and people
As many of you know I am helping to put together a networking and learning event as part of the @PSLeader initiative started by Jeff Ashcroft, Jeff is the same guy that got me into doing the #GovChat series of twitter chats, it all started with a comment on a blog post here.
Anyway, when I was part of the Public Service I was involved in the first Collaborative Management day and was excited about it, basically I think the whole #w2p #goc3 thing is awesome. Sadly, now that I am Private Sector I can’t participate in the same way, so that got me to thinking and…
…a while ago, a group of us in the shadow public service were chatting and felt that it might be a good idea to create an event that builds on the #goc3 momentum for collaborative management. Of course if we were going to do something it had to have value over and above what an internal conference could provide. The logic we came up with goes something like this:
September 24, 2011
Avatars as the First Manifestation of Geo-politically Unconstrained Global Citizens
Abstract: Developing the appropriate behaviors and competencies to integrate into society is a crucial test for any concept of citizenship1. Virtual society today is a connected community of global citizens thriving across multiple platforms and social networks. People are dispersed geographically, culturally and politically and are unconstrained by whom they interact with and why they interact. In virtual worlds, the borders are fluid and physically unconstrained. The personal surrogate encoded as an avatar can move about freely and participate in dynamic, multiple states at the same time. The avatar is valued more for his performance, skill and abilities in the context of the virtual world, rather than by his race, pay grade or political affiliation.
September 24, 2011
46 countries commit to the international Open Government Partnership
The Open Government Partnership is “a global effort to make governments better“, led by Brazil and the USA.
The concept was announced a few months ago and countries have been rapidly signing up to the commitments required to demonstrate their willingness to take action to improve transparency and accountability in government.
As their website states,
Participating countries in the Open Government Partnership pledge to deliver country action plans that elaborate concrete commitments on open government. In each country, these commitments are developed through a multi-stakeholder process, with the active engagement of citizens and civil society.
September 24, 2011
GoC’s Shared Services Represents Only Part of the Solution
The Government of Canada announced an initiative to centralize services across the government, to develop consistency across departments, and most importantly cut costs by reducing redundant systems and contracts.
On paper, it makes sense. To improve efficiency and lower costs by consolidating services centrally and reducing contracts. Solid argument, seems very reasonable.
In 2006 Tokyo’s Department of Recreation launched their “Swimming Pool shared services” initiative resulting greater efficiencies and lower costs for pool administrators by combining the pools (and their staff) together and reducing pool hours. “Pooling resources” is always the right solution.
Sadly and unsurprisingly, in practice, there is no direct correlation between simply centralising services and realising cost benefits. Despite many attempts before to centralise services, the result hasn’t always been savings in cost, but instead the opposite.
September 24, 2011
The Rise and Fall of Public Sector Youth Groups
I’ve spent a lot of time around departmental youth groups since joining the public service; I’ve launched them, provided informal advice to chairs, and spoken at national conferences. My general observation is that public sector youth groups are forged out of a deep sense of frustration that plagues many new public servants. It is a frustration born out of over-promising during intake, under-delivering after the hire is made, and otherwise muddling through the logistical details of the on-boarding process (e.g. office space, ID badge, computer login credentials that often aren’t ready; managers with no time or materials to brief you with; and no clear articulation of duties in relation to mandate). Back in 2008, I interviewed a new hire who put it thusly:
“Despite coming in really pumped from the recruitment process, the first week on the job was very slow. My manager was away and the rest of the team generally kept to themselves. I spent the first week eating lunch alone.”
To be fair, I doubt everyone’s experience is terrible, however I would say that my own initial experience and many of the stories others have shared with me of theirs confirms the sentiment of the text cited above.
September 24, 2011
Launching the Open Technology Foundation with Dr Terry Cutler
On Wednesday the 14th September, we launched the Open Technology Foundation with the organisation’s new Chair, Dr Terry Cutler.
The Open Technology Foundation has been a couple of years in the making, and is an initiative about supporting the use of open technologies, methods and standards across governments. They have participation at federal and state level in Australia, as well as interest from governments overseas.
I think the OTF could be a really useful resource for Australian Governments at a federal, state and local level, not only with their use of ICT, but for the sort of cross-jurisdictional collaboration that will be vital in implementing the Gov 2.0 and open government agenda.
September 24, 2011
Leadership Evolves Because People Change
Leadership evolves because people change, but the principles remain the same, early in my career I was taught 10 basic principles of leadership.. while the words have changed over the years to reflect contemporary language and changing culture.. but these still hold true.
- Know your job
- Know your strengths and limitations always seek self-improvement
- Lead by example and be consistent
- Make sure your team knows your intent and then lead them to the goal
- Know your people and take care of them before yourself
- Develop the leadership potential in your people
- Make sound and timely decisions
- Train your people as a team and challenge them to their fullest potential
- Keep your people informed, provide clear vision and make your orders understood
We practiced Social Networking in a way back then, in the form of “O” groups, gathering everyone into a circle, passing on the days directions, accepting feedback and re-explaining the mission until everyone understood the intent and goal. Leadership then, as now was about people and communication and that is why I’m a SM advocate, it too is about people and communication. No matter where you are or who you are with, if you practiced these simple tenets you will be the leader… online or face to face it’s that simple (and that hard).