Let government screw up
16April 6, 2010 by Colin
*addendum: This post, while it references one particular example published in the blogosphere today, was prompted by a number of examples – on blogs, in person and on twitter – where people inside and outside government have rushed to comment and judgement on social media work implemented by government agencies. It’s a product of the rush to #fail – something of a new generation of “first!” in the comment field. I didn’t try to write it as a critique of that one particular post – which had a lot of spot-on observations.
A more transparent government. A more responsive bureaucracy. A more accessible public service. Those are the hopes and goals of Canadians no matter where they fall among a particular demographic or geographic segment. Whether they’re open data advocates, engagement gurus, social media consultants or simply public servants pushing for change as quickly as possible.
I would argue that governments across Canada are committing the time, money and staff to make these changes. We’re seeing new tools, new data streams, expanded outreach activities, even contests as government organizations assess which tools and strategies would work best for them.
I have the opportunity to speak to groups across government about the benefits, challenges and potential costs of social media. In the face of institutional anxiety, I’ve argued that social media is a positive environment that encourages experimentation. In fact, online users are willing to accept mis-steps and stumbles from government organizati0ns simply because it demonstrates initiative and ambition, if not expertise.
This seems to calm nerves among more traditional bureaucrats, who have been trained through repetition and repercussion to mitigate risk – especially the possibility of public embarrassment.
Which is why I find it upsetting – yes, upsetting – to watch when people in the “social media community” decide that there’s no better way to greet a new social media initiative than a detailed critique of its failings, distributed as quickly and widely as possible in the name of “creating a conversation.”
Senior civil servants, you see, are not comfortable with the rough and tumble dialectic that frames the development of most innovative projects in the online world. While they’re trying to adapt as quickly as possible, they still rely on the advice of their functional experts to plan and launch new projects.
Blunt criticism of a project, when published or re-tweeted widely, then has to be interpreted/deciphered for these senior civil servants by the very same technical and “social media” experts. This can become a Sisyphean challenge: spend months building internal agreement for a project, then days defending it from criticism leveled by your erstwhile allies.
For the individual or team who spent a lot of time convincing a senior public servant to launch a groundbreaking personal web site incorporating relatively new communications channels (the public service still has fax machines), it must be frustrating to be criticized for:
- using brown in your design;
- poor photo montage skills*
- a lack of “engagement”
Let’s keep this in perspective: the Clerk of the Privy Council is the head of the public service of Canada. It is a job that requires the greatest networking, engagement and communication skills of any in the public service, but these skills are largely targeted at ensuring the dozens of Deputy Ministers are implementing the government’s agenda, on an hour-by-hour, day-by-day, basis.
If you want to argue that we need a central online gathering point for public service renewal efforts, I would agree with you. That responsibility, though, has been delegated to a committee of Deputy Ministers and the Chief Human Resources Officer. There have been cross-Government experiments and pilot projects, like GCPedia and GCConnex. Dozens of departments are lurking behind the firewall with blogs, wikis, podcasts and videos. Some are even resorting to relatively sophisticated Sharepoint installs.
There is one consistent quality sought from every Clerk: the ability to delegate power. Depending upon our ambition and our inspiration, we all would like some piece of this delegated power. Members of the #W2P community would like to see a delegation (network access, software, smart phones, time for side of the table projects) that would allow them to launch and implement innovative new projects quickly and collaboratively.
Before these powers and resources can be delegated on more than a short-term basis, there must be awareness and engagement among senior leaders at the ADM and DM level. That will begin to build buzz-word worthy activities into the long-term business processes at the Branch and Department-level. We’re beginning to see that.
The fact that the Clerk is even experimenting with these tools is a tremendous step forward.
So get off his back and let the man (and the team behind the curtain) tweak their experiment.
*Don’t get me started on photos and graphic design. For the longest time, many departments had in-house photo, film, editing and production teams capable of producing clear, consistent and first rate multi-media materials. Through attrition and cost-cutting in the 1980s and 1990s, this capacity was slowly eliminated. (If you’re one of the few departments that still has this capacity, why don’t you share it with the rest of us??) Today, graphic design and pre-production layout is either contracted out, or given to someone with consumer editing software installed on their desktop. (Or someone with a Mac at home).
I couldn’t agree more with this post. I find it frustrating that many are saying he hasn’t gone far *enough*, without recognizing how big of a step forward this really is. If the goal is to get other senior managers to follow suit, and by proxy their departments, there needs to be a lot more support.
This doesn’t just mean accepting everything and saying “great job”, but it means providing critique to the right people to get things altered, or providing support as needed.
After all, the #w2p community is incredibly supportive of each other, and balanced critiques and assistance are often provided. Why should we treat someone who is trying to get into this community differently and more harshly?
If you’re gonna write a direct reply to my post and quote it, it would be appreciated to link to that post so your comments are not taken out of context.
Well said, Colin, and thanks for writing this post. Dave Fleet wrote something similar on behalf of private enterprise a few weeks ago too.
http://davefleet.com/2010/03/cut-companies-break/
It’s too easy for social media watchers to leap on every perceived fail without considering the broader context. To say this is one step forward and two steps back really misjudges the size of those steps, I think.
I can’t blame companies and government bodies for being reluctant to move into these areas given the overreaction to every perceived misstep – particularly when personal preference is mixed in with ‘best practices’ advice etc (I happen to like brown. Sue me).
The #FAIL tag has become virtually meaningless given how readily it’s tossed about. I credit the author of the post you linked to for at least itemizing his critique rather than simply bashing the effort but I still think there needs to be a better understanding of the context of these first steps.
Hi cornelius.
It is linked – right before the bullet points: “it must be frustrating to be criticized for:”
The problem is with my css – I haven’t written a blog post since installing the new theme, and am still trying to make a hyperlink look good without screwing up the lifestream on the main page.
Well said Colin!
As someone who works in private sector (though I did do a brief stint in public) but has many friends on ‘the inside’ I’m impressed at the amount of talent working on Gov initiatives and the dedication and passion of people like you, Nick Charney, Laura Wesley, etc, ,etc, etc.
Though I am sometimes shocked by how little of it gets communicated to the general public. However, progress is progress, so keep up the good work!
@joeboughner – you’re right. Cornelius did present a detailed critique of the page, and presented details in support of his arguments. That is much more productive than many people who #fail and run.
That’s why the post was framed around a bigger narrative, but drawing from today’s examples.
I hope you noted that I don’t necessarily oppose his argument in favour of open source, and I don’t necessarily disagree that the Clerk should “engage” more – but I think it’s optimistic to expect him to engage at the level of a W2P’er.
@colin Yup, that’s why I tried to keep my comments more general too. It’s a much bigger problem than one post or even one sector.
There’s this general feeling among some of the clients and people I’ve talked to that you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If you’re not engaged in any social channel, you “don’t get it” and you’re held up to ridicule. If you take a risk and make a mistake, you’re branded a failure and held up to ridicule.
I’m pretty sure I used this example in my comment to Dave’s post (link in my previous comment) but at one SMB Ottawa I attended, the presenter showed the audience what appeared to be Air Canada’s twitter stream, locked down with no followers / followees and no avatar. There was much guffawing and a general sense of “typical Air Canada, they don’t get it!” when what I saw was a brand at least being smart enough to know the importance of domain squatting until they figure out how to adapt to it.
Those of us on the agency side or others who are essentially (or literally) paid to keep on top of social media trends can sometimes forget that people like the Clerk still have their 9-5 (or in the Clerk’s case, I assume it’s actually much longer) job to do. They have to find ways to ease into these technologies while still doing what they do every day anyway.
The federal government is actually doing a pretty good job of things. Starting with small pilot projects and leaving enterprise-wide projects behind the firewall, they’re slowly building capacity and solidifying business cases. The fact that a champion is starting to emerge at the highest level is indicative of the good work being done in pockets below him.
Anyway, my comments are getting way too long. Short and sweet: Great post.
And if you’re fixing your template, line breaks between paragraphs in the comments might make me seem like less of a windbag
While incremental change is intensely frustrating to those of us who want to see a more widespread use of these tools, I agree that we need to remember that incremental progress is still progress. And there are serious questions that need to be answered in the development of a GoC-wide policy on social media and open government – things like official language requirements and national security and privacy laws. So overall, I see it as a positive step that the Clerk is getting personally involved in this. The GCPedia page he’s set up asking for feedback on workplace challenges is a valuable initiative (and one I need to set some time aside to contribute to).
Props to him and his team for their efforts.
The one problem I do have with the way they’ve gone about it is that, to me at least, it reinforces the idea that the only people who can be trusted to start meaningful discussions on the future of the Public Service are people in the most senior positions; he’s free to experiment in this manner while the rest of us have to sort of flounder around in the blurry edges while we wait for a committee that meets once a blue moon to maybe issue a policy that tells us what we can and cannot experiment with.
The Clerk wants to experiment with social media? Awesome, go for it. I don’t think anybody’s going to tell him he can’t. But while his authority is greater than mine, so are his responsibilities, and In the absence of a formal policy, it still amounts to public servants (whether it’s the Clerk to the lowly mid-level IS) deciding on their own initiative whether it’s okay for them to blog, or to use social media tools. The decision the Clerk faces over whether to blog or not is, from a statutory perspective, no different from the one I face. But at the end of the day he’s got one guy to report to so he can do it without interference. I’ve got several, so I can’t.
I’m glad he’s taking the first steps. I just wish he’d explicitly encouraged other people to do the same.
I’m torn. I’d love to talk to someone who was around when public servants started getting their first personal computers, and someone who was around during that technological learning curve. I think the collaborative technologies must display a similar learning curve, where you have the people who “get it” and those who don’t.
I wish I knew a way to introduce these technologies to people in a way that didn’t make them nervous and that didn’t take too much time. I think the issue is that they are real lifestyle technologies and to fully understand them, it needs to be more than that thing you check once a week…you need to engage and it takes time.
I also think that governments need to be held to very high standards – we are using taxpayer dollars, so the Canadian public has a stake in everything we do. SM endeavours need to be well thought out, with a solid strategy to back them up, or they aren’t worth the time taken to develop them. As much as I’d love to be let loose to create something engaging and effective, the reputation of my organization depends on its communicators to think long and hard about the perception they create through the comms they put out. Anyway…your post made me think a lot, and that’s never a bad thing.
Oh, and my department never got rid of our photo/graphic design team. We even have a print shop. It’s fantastic.
Hi Leslie. Damn you and your excessive internal resources!
Great points otherwise, especially about having a well-thought out strategy. I’m not arguing that these sorts of initiatives should just be launched willy-nilly – it’s just that there will be a learning curve, especially for a very large organization operating within particular financial, operational and political constraints.
*is that coded government-speak enough?*
Hi Colin,
A discussion provoking post – love it!
I had mentioned I was torn when I first read this and still am because I see two elements to this issue.
The first is the ‘social’ experiment (the Clerk’s GCpedia page and new twitter accounts.) The only way we can determine if this effort fails is if some key success indicators have been developed. Wouldn’t it be nice to see those. Regardless, let’s be supportive but I also feel that being critical (not negative) shows that our web and 2.0 community is growing more informed and holding a high-standard. To that I say bravo.
The second element pertains to the web design. It is here that I wear my 1.0 champion hat and ask we aim higher.
The GoC has been “officially” active in the web presence world for over 13 years now and I’ve been working in government online communications for that period. I continue to believe more people should be taking a very hard and critical look at our various web assets and recognizing the bar has been raised, standards established and we are still, for the most part, falling short.
With that, let’s support our efforts, share lessons learned and learn from them.
Perhaps at the heart of this is the issue that public servants have been critical of their boss in a public forum?? While I won’t argue for or against, I know some might say “what’s more open government than that?”
Great post – thanks!
@mjmclean
@Leslie Meerburg “I’d love to talk to someone who was around when public servants started getting their first personal computers…”
What would you like to know?
I was there when our dept switched from microfiche to dumb terminals in 1981 and have been through the gamut of tech change.
The learning curve for many has been (and still may be for some) almost vertical. Others adapt more easily.
I know of people whose only experience with PCs for a decade was through their workplace.
With regards to the use of social media, the technology is not currently the major factor for many when it comes to new and emerging technologies. It is the institutionalized boundaries that have been drilled into the psyché of the work-a-day public servant that presents the biggest barrier.
Many may be waiting for “direction from above” before they dive in, or even dip a timid toe in the waters. For them #FAIL is tantamount to a perceived Career Limiting Move (CLM).
@Colin
It’s all well and good to say “Let them screw up” but its another thing to be the one who has had 20 or 30+ years of “don’t screw up” beaten into their sense of self.
Colin,
Thank you for a persuasive and well thought out post.
It is even more compelling, coming from you, the creator of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner blog.
However, years ago, I saw you take a dramatic step forward with the Privacy Commissioner`s blog. You did not simply try out social media. You used it to post about arcane but important issues, talking intelligently and candidly about them. And in the process, you brought these issues to the attention of a broader audience. Which then engaged with the content, exploring and discussing it.
I applaud any initiative on the part of government, especially from the most senior executive.
However, I saw you take a dramatic (courageous?) step on your own initiative. Should we not expect the same intelligent initiative from others? While I applaud every initiative, it seems to me that some of the initiatives are, at best, baby steps. When the rest of the world has progressed far beyond that.
I am a proud Canadian. And a believer in the collective good that can be brought about by government action. But I fear that, at the current pace, the bond between government and citizen is being weakened as people see government as increasingly irrelevant.
Bottom line. I congratulate Mr. Wouters. However, I wish he would spend some time with @Canuckflack. If he did, I’m sure he would accelerate the pace of change. And that would be good for government, citizens and the bond between us.
Oh, to be a fly on the wall when you meet Wayne. Can I crash that party?
)
@Colin – great post! While I encourage dialogue; Steve’s revelation of the dominant position in government for the past 20-30 years being told not to fail makes for a pretty difficult barrier to overcome. The fact that some people find it easy and quick to proclaim #fail from the comfort of their own homes doesn’t really help people overcome that barrier, does it?
I consider Wouter’s foray using social media to engage the public and public servants to be refreshing and forward thinking. I don’t mind giving him a bit of time to figure it out and would never consider disrespecting someone who is that open to trying something new. Continuous improvement is all about starting small, failing small, measuring what we can, and learning through trial and error. Lots of us are trying to figure out what those measures should be, but then, it depends on why you’re doing them.
@Dan Besides using the tools himself, the Clerk has publicly stated his support of public servants finding news ways of serving the public in the Public Service Renewal Action Plan (http://www.clerk.gc.ca/eng/feature.asp?pageId=165). The Information Commissioner has also challenged government to think about how to use new tools to proactively serve the public.
Between those 2 senior champions (and many more internal to the bureaucracy) I find the path quite clearly laid out before me. I blog, microblog and use an assortment of tools to figure out how to do my job better as well as share that experience with others, both inside and outside government. The rules of engagement haven’t changed – I still aim to follow the Code of Conduct that I agreed to when becoming a public servant – but some of the tools have.
P.S. I really don’t care whether the site is brown, yellow or purple, what I do care about is being able to find what I need or want in my job or community. How freaking cool is it that we can tweet at our biggest boss and have him respond to us? Now, about that…