What About The Slightly-less-big-but-still-big Big Ideas?

In May 2019, in Victoria BC, a crowd of energetic public service enthusiasts got together and shared some pretty super ideas about how to make public service better.

A graphic artist draws the One Team Gov Logo

The question everyone was asked to answer was:

“What is one super bold, super ambitious thing we need to do to shift government towards an open approach?”.

Now, some months later, a few rather busy public servants have managed to gather and encode the data, and start making some sense of it.

In remembering that OneTeamGov is a mindset, a movement, a suite of principles, and a core of diverse individuals who are all passionate about making government more effective, I set out to find the similarities in the data. Now, remember that there were two sets — the 32 Big Ideas that made it onto the agenda at the Unconference, and the 190 that didn’t.

That doesn’t make any of these leftover ideas any less big. It just means they didn’t resonate with enough people. So, perhaps they weren’t worded quite right. Maybe they weren’t radical or practical enough. But also, maybe, their time simply hasn’t quite come yet.

So what do these leftovers tell us?

Well, firstly, they tell us that a whole lot of people care about public sector reform. The people in the room came from across the country, though with an emphasis on some federal public servants from Ottawa, and many more provincial public servants from British Columbia (19 federal departments, 19 BC and 2 Ontario provincial ministries), and with some municipal and international ones, and some non-public servants keenly interested in the public sector such as academics and non-profits and sundry.

Everyone opted in. Everyone was keen. The energy in the room was palpable, as people excitedly wrote down, passed around and debated the Big Ideas. The experience was about breaking down formalities and accepted wisdom and obstacles, and the Big Ideas reflect that.

The Big Ideas that made it onto the agenda were things like:

• Rethinking and restructuring the public sector to address climate change
• Using well-being factors as key social government success factors
• Exchange programs and talent pools across ministries, jurisdictions, and levels
• Hearing from voices who have not been traditionally heard, exposing public servants to community realities through field trips, and addressing power and privilege
• Empowering public servants to make decisions
• Co-creating policy and involving citizens
• Increasing risk tolerance and embracing failure, and allowing freedom to work on passion projects and develop new ideas

In contrast, the Big Ideas that didn’t make it onto the agenda were things like:

• Better sharing of budgets across departments and levels of government, including across fiscal years
• Flattening hierarchies
• Limiting work terms for both junior and senior staff, to force mobility and interdisciplinary learning, as well as prevent empire-building
• Learning from the private sector — and the opposite, distancing the public sector from private sector influence
• Having public servants sign personal green contracts
• Becoming more citizen-focused, increasing dialogue and touchpoints with citizens, and investing in and embedding the public sector into communities
• Automating mundane tasks, embracing technology, and becoming more digitally agile
• Empowering staff, improving hiring practices, and increasing cross-functionality
• Sharing information better, faster, more accessibly
• Being mission-, project-, outcome-based, not process-limited

But most, most, most of all — reducing silos and barriers and making it easier to work together. The resounding theme in the non-agenda Big Ideas was that public servants so very much want to work together towards the common good — and frustratingly can’t, or can’t as much or as well as they wish to.

A badge that says “Kind but badass”

There were some very bold, high impact ideas — like giving rights to nature legally (could you imagine that? A piece of land or sea that has its own legal rights, that individuals and corporations and governments and possibly even nations have to be accountable to through some courts? Environmental personhood? We have Ecuador, Bolivia and New Zealand to thank for pioneering this work), and eliminating HR classifications systems (or unifying them?).

And there were some definitely not so practical ideas, like random citizens getting to be Prime Minister for a day. But the point is — there were ideas.

There were many.

So what has One Team Gov actually achieved?

One of our OneTeamGov colleagues in the UK, Sam Villis has likened OneTeamGov to a box — a structure with a solid foundation that includes an “ever growing network of engaged, enthusiastic volunteers around the world”

I think this Unconference, like the first OneTeamGov Global Unconference in 2018 in the UK, the many meetups, larger events like Wellbeing Camp and Hackathons succeeded in the ongoing, mammoth-and-yet-also-really-simple intent to bring digital and policy roles closer together. But it also succeeded in (if we’re going with the box and foundation concept) adding to the content, the furnishings, the stuff in the box.

OneTeamGov is, loosely, a structure. But it’s about as far from command and control traditional hierarchies and classifications as it’s possible to be.

When you’re a OneTeamGov-er, you’ve got your name, your passion, and your public sector keener whole self helping to bring people and ideas together. You don’t have your title. You might not have your department. Like me, you might be the only person you know in your organization who knows there are others like you out there, others who have cared enough to begin building something of enormous significance and resilience and presence — something structured, solid, both with a foundation, and foundational.

These Unconferences are proving that your name, your passion, and your ideas are so much more than maybe you thought they were.

Want to see for yourself? There’s another OneTeamGov Unconference coming up in Canada.

In Ottawa, Ontario, the nation’s capital, where there’s already a mass of federal and municipal public servants buzzing about, and lots of provincial ones not very far away in Toronto and Québec City, tons of non-profits, lots of universities and colleges keen on public sector issues — a treasure trove of public sector enthusiasts who have not yet had the opportunity to experience the OneTeamGov love in person.

It’s happening on December 17, 2019.

It’s going to be radical.

And practical.

Experimental and deeply caring.

We’re going to work in the open, positively and across borders.

It’s going to be everything the OneTeamGov principles are all about. Because that’s what we’re all about.

I’d like to leave you with a thought. As Kit Collingwood says, “reform happens through a million small steps, not a few big ones”. Some of these Big Ideas are indeed big, but many might be on the smaller side. Or perhaps could be broken down into smaller steps. Achievable steps. A million small steps.

Someone writes on a card at One Team Gov Global in London 2018 “How can I help”