Blog Series — Reflections about Canada’s Free Agents — Part 4
Last week I had the great pleasure of being a special guest at the latest #LeadersGC twitter chat. In case you’ve never heard of it, every month or so during their seasons, LeadersGC hosts a virtual chat on twitter using the hashtag #LeadersGC. It was very kind of the organizers to invite me. It gave me a chance to expand a bit on some of the thoughts I expressed last week about managers. In particular, I was interested in clarifying what I see as the difference between leaders and managers. Here is the two part video:
I also got to answer a bonus question about autonomy, which you can find on the LeadersGC twitter feed as well. My gratitude goes out to John Price for the invitation and to Walid Sharif and Brenna Maher for making me feel so welcome at the event.
I’ll admit I haven’t been highly engaged with the LeadersGC community since it was launched a few years ago. My hesitation has had mostly to do with a possible misperception of the purpose of the community. I’ve always favoured being part of communities that had a bias towards action. For example, I loved being part of the Federal Youth Network because I always felt like we were directly supporting positive actions being taken by members in various roles. Seeing all the activity and the huge following the LeadersGC community has, it’s obviously a useful outlet for some. For me, I am a bit impatient and need more tangible outputs.
To the credit of LeadersGC organizers, I had the chance to speak to a few after the event last week and I’m excited to hear that there are plans to use the Twitter chats to move people to post-chat action — including guests and supportive senior executives. I’m truly excited to hear that and have offered my help if it’s useful to further that objective.
And so this is a great segue into my first topic of reflection for this week — action-orientation.
Reflection # 7 — We need more action-orientation in the public service
In my experience, public servants do a lot of talking. We hold a lot of meetings, we write a lot of briefing notes, we send a lot of emails, and we use a lot of buzzwords. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with talking. In fact, good communication is obviously essential for high performing organizations. We know that effective communication and good relationships provide many positive benefits for organizations. But can you have too much talking?
I’ll admit, this is another area where I’m basing my argument on my experience in my short career. But it’s been an incredible frustration of mine that sometimes decisions get made and work gets done at an incredibly slow pace. We hear terms like “analysis paralysis” and we’ve all been in those terrible recurring team meetings that go nowhere.
So let me be frank — talking about things doesn’t get things done anymore than building an innovation lab creates innovation.
My strong feelings about talking probably arise from a personal affinity for action. I’ve mentioned before that I have a significant preference for doing things over talking about doing things. I prefer to learn by doing and experiencing. I can cook using a recipe as a way to inspire new ideas, but I’m always having the most fun when I’m experimenting. Inevitably, this leads to some failures. But it often leads to delightful surprises. And that’s what I think we need more of in the public service — delightful surprises.
I’d consider Canada’s Free Agents to be a delightful surprise. When the idea was first conceived, I think what we imagined was very different than what we have since created. We knew the ingredients of autonomy and mobility were a winning combination and we knew managers were in need of talent. But we didn’t fully understand what opportunities there might be around broader discussions of the future of work. And had we spent what feels like a “normal” amount of time planning, discussing, meeting, doing more planning, analyzing risks, more meetings, etc., etc… well we may have created a mobility program, but I doubt it would look anything at all like what we have today. I doubt we’d have generated the spark and cultural undercurrent that I’m most proud of with our community. Given enough time, we love to create frameworks, and policies, and charters, and plans until we suffocate the energy from our humanity. It’s a tale as old as Westminster.
I think the key for us was that we were willing to learn by doing and so we spent little time talking. We spent a few months consulting with stakeholders, meeting with corporate services, planning the mechanics, and running an intake. I’m not certain that normal public service conditions would have allowed us to move at the speed we did. But I’m certain it was a factor in our success. We were ready to succeed quickly or fail quickly and so far we’re doing OK.
So I’d love to see public servants move more quickly to action so we can have more pleasant surprises, even if it means having some unpleasant ones occasionally. I love the OneTeamGov concept of “microactions” that Kit Collingwood and the gang came up with — achieving change through the aggregation of thousands of small things that anyone can do every day. This is the sort of movement that I can get behind because it favours actions over words through practical work. I’m hopeful that this will increasingly be the norm for us as we move from snoozy bureaucrats to action-oriented reformists.
Having said all of that, I have also come to realize that eventually all startups get to the end of their runway, their angel investors start to expect a return, and the focus goes from energy and action to stability and integration. Making that transition while adhering to your principles seems critical in terms of the opportunity for long-term impact. But there’s trouble in them there hills. And that brings me to my next reflection.
Reflection # 8 — As systems change, tensions are high
The trouble with trying to create a new system within an existing system is that eventually the system wakes up to you and sees you. This, I’ve come to realize, is a necessary part of disruptive change — the point in time when rule-makers and rule-keepers feel the tension of inevitable rule changes.
But this, I think, is the beginning of some painful tensions. Think about it — an incredible amount of time and energy is put into the designing, implementing, and enforcing the rules. In the bureaucracy, entire careers are proudly made in this area. One can only imagine the threatening feeling of change. Even in the best case scenario where the benefit of change is clear and the system is self-aware enough to know why it is being disrupted, I still believe this transition is difficult. We all want change, but who wants to change?
And I think this tension is as difficult for the disrupted as it is for the disruptors. Change seems to often be won through gradual influence with much give and take. This is a painful process for change-makers who are optimistic and impatient. We are optimistic because we believe that there’s a bright and positive future for the public service. We’re impatient because we don’t see that future materializing for us.
This is the tension that exists between yesterday and tomorrow— big tensions around what remains of the status quo and what we need to discard to make space for a better future. Even our biggest supporters often return to applying old principles and outdated models to corral our work into the existing system. I’ve personally very recently felt myself incredibly uncomfortable as we’re being confronted by a system of rules that we ultimately hope to change. At a recent meeting of our program’s Steering Committee, I gave some opening remarks that sum up my feeling about the dangers here:
The spirit of this program today is one that encourages rebels. Free Agents are people who challenge norms and conventions. We question the status quo. We don’t fit into most normal places in government. And we like it that way. This program is successful because it provides space for divergent views and encourages fearless advice. Something that we very clearly lack in our culture. This program won’t succeed if we mold it to fit our existing preconceptions about how public service organizations are run. We’re imagining something new and different and that simply isn’t possible if we use old ways of thinking to inform our decisions. This makes people uncomfortable. That’s a good thing. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Discomfort creates debate which creates ideas which creates improvement. So my hope for this committee is that we’ll embrace discomfort and challenge ourselves to let go of old and tired conventions. Please don’t ask us to build a mini bureaucracy with more suffocating rules and processes. I’m asking for your patience as we figure this out and your leadership to trust us that we can.
We’re getting to the point of the story where there are a lot of unknowns for me. The future is unclear and I’m unsure about what path to take to success. We have people’s attention, but if we want to sustain change, we have to do more than just make a lot of noise.
I know that at the very least we’re contributing to some small positive changes to our public service culture. And I’m optimistic that we’ll influence the course of some more significant — if perhaps gradual — systemic transformations. Tensions will be high, but if we engage each other with open minds, hearts, and wills, I think there will be a lot to look forward to.
That’s it for now. Join me next week for the fifth and final edition of this series. My final blog post will be focused on being human.
