The Massive Gap in Leveraging Digital Opportunities

I was chatting with a friend recently who is newly retired from a municipal public service position. I was sharing some ideas about an upcoming IPAC TRG event (Follow @IPACToronto on Twitter where info will be provided soon) and he provided an account of related organizational issues he witnessed when a very significant investment in a geomatics application showed no return. 

His observations:

• The software was adopted on the all-too-common belief that in some magical way it was self-operating and its introduction would solve some informational problems without further ado
• As a result, there was no attempt to design or deliver a work process that would leverage the software (and no one accountable for that since it wasn't even imagined that it would be necessary)
• There was no consultation with anyone who might have to use it, and even had there been, given the fetishization of the software and the failure of accountability for a strategy to leverage it, consultation probably wouldn't have netted much value. 

It's not surprising that there was little or no interest in learning the software.
Now multiply that a few hundred thousand times and we have the modern workplace. In the meantime, it's left to the IT and admin to make whatever they can of it without full awareness of its potential value or purpose.

Onto that pile of blockage for moving into the 21st century, add 

• The governance map naturally resists being changed and collaborative technologies and their fruits can be seen as subversive

The Wisdom of Crowds...

I have seen talks about social media by people with expertise who objected to the "everyone's an expert" phenomenon. The issue that concerns me, though, is not so much that some opinionated bloggers :D can claim more of a following than people who know what they're talking about but it's about the nature of influence and the apparent malleability of public opinion.

People's cultural beliefs are generally, well, cultural, historical, inherited and then mussed around by messages that support the economy (the economy is how we are organized and then interact to get what we need from nature.) We know why we need a public broadcaster in a world where messages are dominated by the power-houses of the economy. What's to stop the same people who created so-called "populist" sound-byte news from dominating the social media web-o-sphere and having an even greater influence on public opinion?

Charles Taylor decried the emphasis on the economic machine as a cultural ideal in an article entitled "The Agony of Economic Man" (1971). More generally, and very much related, are the warnings of thinkers like Maslow and Gadamer about our conflation of means with ends in an increasingly instrumentalist society.

Our real social ideals have become seen as "merely" subjective values. A sizable majority of people seem generally keen on aligning themselves with whatever version of "the divine right of kings" plays out in public discourse. Far from being either populist or grass roots wisdom, where each person contributes his or her own carefully thought-out view to the common good, what seems to be the case is that, as Matthew Taylor says in his RSAnimate talk, 21st Century Enlightenment (also posted below), people pursue "simplistic and inadequate ideas of freedom, justice and progress." They're simplistic, IMO, because they're not framed as cultural ideals, but as ideological supports for the "economy", i.e., as supports for the instrumental requirements of the economic power-houses.

With public opinion as the opinion of the electorate/tax payers, whose side do the politicians need to be on when public opinion is so readily influenced?

What is the role of the new media government communications person or policy analyst when this question needs to be taken in to account?

(I'd recommend the article by David Blacker, linked on the side, if you're up for a bit of a think.)

These are all difficult questions.

How Organizations Remain Bureaucratic

When people mistake efficiency for effectiveness (means for ends), there is a pointless adherence to the administrative rules (i.e., bureaucracy in its pejorative sense.) To avoid making this mistake, what has to happen in organizations is a cultural change around the reporting requirements, because people will do (and generally restrict their attention to) what they are measured on.

If the measurements are all about either efficient transactions (e.g., in purchasing, staffing) without reference to context and objectives, or an assessment of the value of the objectives, then nothing has been measured. How can you measure efficiency without some reference to a strategic, big picture, generally not-easily-measured end, especially in public sector and non-profit organizations?

When bureaucratic controls slide from being necessary evils to being just plain counterproductive , something is dreadfully wrong. Controls need to be aligned with goals.

A very crucial element in remedying such a situation is to help people understand that reports are not results, they are just means of getting information, which might be more or less (but is quite often less), helpful to broader planning and information sharing.

A report is information subset covering some aspects of what happened. It is not identical to the concrete events that actually happen. Neverthlesss, some people seem to spend more time bean  counting  than doing, following procedures, rather than innovating, challenging, and leading change. Their efforts need to be undertaken with a view to deep, quality results. Quality and depth of results is important, and that does not mean pulling out an army of accountants immured in a quantophrenic vision of quality control. It means having inspiration, courage, and support to use one's own judgement and discretion in assessing how to best align one's activities with the organization's goals, or even to question the broader social value of the ends being sought.

So it's not just a web of institutional regulations, it's the stifling amount of reportage that is not aligned to anything other than short term means and efficiencies that makes an institution overly bureaucratic (and therefore less efficient). And this adminstrative kind of bureaucracy eventually becomes an entire focus, even a way of life, providing some (i.e., the uninspired and officious) expediencies and a sense of power and accomplishment, having done everything "by the book".

The rest just wither away, eventually.

And thus bureaucracy sustains itself.

Emotional Intelligence: It's just small-p politics

Some people are brilliant at coming up with routines, processes, tools, and methodologies to manage meetings and address the difficulty, in corporate circumstances, in talking about the subject of their creativity and curiosity (while some techies have "permission" to do that, most people working in large organizations don't.)

People who are members of a community of practice are excited by their work and sharing their expertise as an end in itself. For these people, meetings aren't tainted by having to negotiate a plethora of hidden agendas. And people have the courage to own and speak about their creative ideas without needing some cumbersome legitimating routine. Other groups are more caught up in institutional politics and therefore they need a hand creating "safe spaces" for themselves to have what really should be ordinary conversations about things that interest them as human beings (other than small-p dominance and getting ahead.)

It's not a healthy situation to need some kind of negotiation strategy just to have a conversation about what inspires people's thoughts, hopes and imagination. Perhaps the ability to do that is considered emotional intelligence, but in my book, it's called Promotional Intelligence.

In my opinion, we should learn about emotional intelligence from people enthusiastic about sharing the opportunities for discovery life affords. We should emulate people from communities of interest. We should not emulate those supposedly "emotionally intelligent" members of the narrow small-p politics set who find enthusiam embarrasing generally, or their complements, i.e., those waiting for permission to speak.

Irony of the Audit

Do public organizations overspend in the effort to demonstrate that they don't overspend?

A lot of time and work goes into reporting, but what is being reported? Is it the money spent, services provided, or the needed social change accomplished?

I wonder why people are so interested in things like expense accounts and less worried about how their money is working to provide services and enhance society. Perhaps what the Minister spent on lunch is just much easier to measure and report on. Or maybe roads, garbage and wastewater management are not that big in terms of the media-sexy factor and don't interest the politicians. It's equally likely that the narrow focus is because the work of the public service is too varied and complex to be summed up in any kind of number, but numbers are what people think is objective, even though they're only meaningful when what is being counted really counts.

It would make a lot more sense, in terms of what gets demonstrated, and may increase public engagement, to emphasize more strategic goals, showing what the public service actually does, rather than what it spends.

The public service is not a business and does not exist in order to make a profit, or even to be "fiscally responsible." The correlate of private sector profits for the public sector is the the public good. Fiscal responsibility is not a goal, but a means.

There is usually an inverse relationship between what is worthwhile and what is easy to measure.