My GC Entrepreneur Presentation

I gave this presentation on June 14th 2019 in a competition with 8 of my fellow innovative colleagues from the CRA, to win a spot on the GC Entrepreneur task force.

The following is a transcript and has not been edited to improve the flow.
I say ‘so’ a lot. You have been warned.

“ I believe that the cheapest way to innovate the public service is by sharing information.

So, I have been looking into the data from two events:

• the public service employee survey results which came out recently, and
• the recent OneTeamGov global unconference.

At the unconference we brought together 300 people from across Canada and internationally. They were from the three levels of government . We had municipal, provincial and federal public servants there, and we were brainstorming the 40 big ideas that they felt could change the public service. What was interesting to me, as I went through the extensive participant feedback notes, is how much people were constantly putting forward ideas to improve our communication.

So I looked into the data a little more closely from the public service employee survey and I saw that only 48% of our employees felt that information flows effectively from senior management to them. So that means that 52% might be feeling that they are left in the dark and don’t have the information to do their job.

This restriction of information is limiting the government in a couple of key ways. It makes public servants feel that they are a little bit not trusted and it’s possible that they are working on solutions that are already available elsewhere that they could have leveraged. We have professionals that are putting through ideas and making decisions — and maybe they are missing a few key pieces of information. Meanwhile, we are reinforcing complacency through single pointed perspective.

Luckily there are a lot of ways to address this. And I’m very thankful - and I see some of them in the room - that there is a lot of talented and passionate public servants who are working on the software and tools that can enable this communication. We have examples of advancements that have already come out like GC Tools and the use of Confluence Wikis. We have the OneGC initiative that has come out to aim the government towards an open by default position.

But I feel that innovation does not have to rest solely on technology. I want to understand the influencing behaviours that encourage people to actually use and leverage these tools in their daily job.

So I think a great place to start is with our performance expectations. Right now we base our entire expectations on this one question, which is ‘What did you do?’ What did you get done this year? I think this can be limiting in a couple of ways. It’s great if you want to create something tangible — if you want a tangible deliverable if you are wanting to streamline, simplify and have a more efficient public service, then I think there are a couple more questions we should be asking.

Recently, Microsoft went through what they would call a ten year innovation slump. In order to respond to this, they decided to change the questions they were asking for their performance expectations. So now they expect their employees to answer:

• What did you create?
• What did you share?
• What did use of what others created?

So this took that competitive attitude and added real collaboration into the mix, so that all of the employees could work together to achieve the company’s mandate.

So my goal is that we eventually value evolution over production. Instead of asking ‘what did you do? Show me what you did.’ We can start asking
‘what did you make better?’
‘what did you make more efficient?’
‘What did you share?’ and
‘Who did you help along the way?’

I want to make this a reality.
*laughs* — this is my bitmoji — *laughs*

My hypothesis is that we can make the public service more innovative by encouraging people to share what they are working on. We can encourage them to use what other people are working on. We can look and analyse the OneGC initiative to see where there is an opening other government departments to onboard. I want to research and I want to test my hypothesis to make sure that it has the outcome that I expect it will. Further, I want to live by these values that I’m presenting. I want to work in the open, I want to ask for help, and I want to share the lessons that I’m learning along the way. Further, I want to arm public servants with the resources they need to make this a work class public service. I want to be better together.

Thank you.”