The Right Time…?
This is the second in a series I’m writing about my experiences taking an in-person event online in response to the COVID crisis. If you want to know more about why I’m writing the series, or how we decided we could move the event online and still provide a quality experience for participants, you can find the first in the series here.
By now, it is obvious that the federal public service will continue working from home to some degree for at least a while yet, and that we need to start thinking beyond the immediate crisis response and find ways to adapt and continue to deliver the multitude of services we are responsible for. But six to eight weeks ago, in the midst of the planning process for our Behavioural Insights Applied Learning Pilot, it didn’t feel so obvious. I wasn’t sure that just because we could adapt the Pilot to accommodate virtual learning and collaboration that we should move forward at all.
At that point, the federal public service was just starting down the path of WFH, pivoting huge numbers of public servants to deliver on the immediate needs of Canadians (like getting the desperately-needed CERB up and running). The crisis response was probably the most galvanizing priority driving the public service in recent memory and in the early days, it felt like you were either supporting that priority or doing your best to get out of the way of those who were (e.g. keeping the VPN open for critical work).
Further, public servants are only human. We, like everyone else in the country, must navigate the pandemic not just in professionally but personally as well — figuring out how to work from home, trying to balance full-time work and full-time care giving, worrying about family members who are now out of work sick or isolated, and generally grieving the loss of plans and the normalcy of day-to-day life. The ambient uncertainty, stress, and grief, rising and lowering in volume every day, often drowns out the more productive angels of our nature.
With all of this going on, there were times I felt my project was akin to shuffling deck chairs in the face of more urgent needs. Don’t get me wrong — I believe in the pilot. So much so, that I asked my managers to work on it despite the fact that it’s not in my immediate team’s mandate. Context, however, is king, and continuing to work on this (let alone going out and seeking others to come on board) felt tone deaf at best. I also questioned whether now was the right time to try and teach people something new — would anyone have the emotional and mental bandwidth to really dig into a new tool for building effective policy and programs?
After internal discussions, we decided that the fastest, easiest, most accurate way to determine if now was the right time for the pilot was to actually talk to the people we were interested in recruiting to participate. We started with friendly audiences: there were a few people/groups around town we knew we would be honest with us, even if they thought the timing was terrible.
It wasn’t a resounding yes, but there were significantly more yeses than nos. The hesitant replies came (unsurprisingly) from groups who were heavily involved in the crisis response. One thing about the pilot that I think worked our favour was that, because it is based on the concept of ‘learning-by-doing,’ it didn’t require teams to step away from their work to participate. Instead, the pilot is designed to help teams work through an issue there are facing in their day-to-day work which, in at least one case, actually enticed a team working on a crisis response to participate, as they needed a new solution to an old problem exacerbated by the crisis and saw the pilot as a way to try something different quickly.
I’m really glad we went out and spoke with people because if it had been up to me in that moment I’m not sure I would have proceeded. It was an excellent reminder that no one can give you a better idea of what your users need or want then they can and taking the time to speak with them before making a major decision is worth the effort.
