Resilience and the Strategy Deficit
On how we need to address our strategy deficit in order to intentionally build resilient digital systems, services and teams
Last month, I had the honour of being invited to speak at the fifth annual Global Digital Services Convening co-hosted by the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and Public Digital on the topic of what it means to build resilient systems, services and teams.
I didn’t feel qualified to talk about resilience, and likely took the invitation and assignment in a direction that the organizers and attendees did not anticipate. However, I am glad I did … and I am also glad that friends and former colleagues helped me find my courage right when I needed it the most.
In the spirit of continuing to address the strategy deficit wherever I could find it and in the spirit of working and learning in the open, my slides + speaking notes and a quick summary are below.
The strategy deficit is very similar to technical debt. It’s the accumulated strategic compromises we make because we don’t have the time, energy or budget and are just really trying to get by. The deficit eats at our organizational resilience and agility very slowly, almost imperceptibly. And eventually, before we realize it, a gulf has formed between the organization we set out to create and the one we have.
I introduce three areas where the deficit happens — each one more urgent than the last — and offer up potential avenues to address them.
1 — Ambition
Like many public servants, digital government teams begin with the ambition to make government work better. However, when survival as a team that wants to introduce new ways of thinking and working into an old institution is at stake, the organizational priority instinctively shifts to “keeping political sponsors happy” at the expense of all else.
So while the strategy continues to be delivery, let’s be intentional about what and how we deliver so that it is a reflection of what our organization values and represents. Furthermore, let’s not lose sight of the larger ambition and cash in even just some of that earned political goodwill sooner rather than later so that future wins happen at a much larger scale.
[Not in my original presentation, but I would like to add: The above, although extreme, is the better scenario, where you can at least see the organization’s immune system resisting the change you are introducing, especially when your mission has no clear sponsor at the top of the hierarchy. There’s another, more pernicious route — let’s call it “benevolent assimilation” — and it’s fraught with an interminable barrage of stakeholder and committee meetings and never-ending word-smithing. Your organization’s ambition is chipped away one small organizational norm at a time for the purposes of “alignment” until before you know it, your vision has gotten so diluted that your team no longer recognizes it as their own and you have nothing tangible to show a year into your change mission except for a few “approved” decks with empty words.
In this instance, the only appropriate intervention IMO is a hard stop and reset: your leaders need to urgently intervene to keep your teams hyper-focussed on delivery and be proactively vigilant not only about how your teams are organized and allocated, but also how they are spending their days (all-day meetings with stakeholders instead of user research, for example).]
2 — Governance
There is no shortage of accumulated policy and process in government, and yet when we introduce digital standards as a set of new norms, we have a habit of not following through when it comes to revisiting existing norms or even showing how this is not governance as usual. If anything, digital service teams aspire to have their standards be “the one set of rules to rule them all, OR ELSE”. In other words, we too, can very easily fall into the trap of layering standards on top of an existing compliance-based regime or replacing it with something just like it when we can instead shift the frame to that of learning, not litigation.
My former colleagues write about this topic very poignantly. How we make the good path easy, create space for creativity and change how we relate to each other as public servants are great markers of us addressing this deficit. The change we want to see, after all, is a radical shift in how we regard levers of public policy and administration — not as static instruments that you layer on top of each other — but as a continuum of proactive and reactive supports that you wrestle with every day.
Even here, there is difficult, detailed and necessary work to be done. After all, we are talking about rewriting the machinery of government, rather than trying to get by one awesome bureaucratic hack at a time. However, change at scale only happens when the voluntary norms are easier.
3 — Talent
I don’t just mean HR operations, even though there’s so much broken about that, too. I’m referring to the deeply uncomfortable, cringe-worthy habit of mythologizing our change mission. We have all been there, where we feel like we ourselves have personally failed even though the sober approach would be to parse out which parts of said failure are the organization’s, not the individual’s responsibility. And yes, I am also referring to the unfortunate self-righteous saviour complex that arises from being put in “there’s nobody else, it’s just us” situations one too many times … The strategy debt around talent is massive, because digital teams were starting in that position from Day Zero.
And for this, our biggest challenge, my proposal would sound radical and bizarre for many of my colleagues: double down on accessibility and equity. “Our teams are empowered, flat, accessible and equitable compared to anywhere else in the public service”, many an outraged digital leader would argue. Our teams may be empowered and flat, but they definitely aren’t accessible or equitable when our own organizational culture valourizes the heroics that got our teams to deliver our next shiny object for our political sponsors faster, only to turn around when they burn out and say “Oh, they’re just not tough or resilient enough”. What is called for here is a critically uncomfortable shift in what we value in our recruitment, development and retention efforts. Otherwise, how else would we be able to create much needed space in our organizational backlogs for better government policies and services for all?
Parting thoughts
Believe it or not, I remain an optimist. I continue to mercifully and inexplicably have deep reserves of hope and energy about what is possible with government and the public service. Convenings like the ones organized by UCL and Public Digital definitely provide extraordinary opportunities to find, congratulate and commiserate with colleagues the world over. I am grateful that they provide a safe space for awkward and necessary conversations about this global movement. We need more of these.
In contemplating all of the above, I am also keenly aware that Canada’s digital transformation story is still being written and defined. We have imported many lessons from the UK and US to get started, but we also have an opportunity to introduce a transformation narrative where resilience is thoughtfully and actively considered and woven into all stages of our evolution.
Finally, sending deepest thanks for the candid conversations about this topic to Laura Nelson-Hamilton, Daphnée Nostrome, Jordan Storozuk and Aaron Jaffery.
