November 5th, 2021
In the spirit of transparency and candour, Kevin and Jill publish weeknotes reflecting on the what and why for their team.
Kevin's notes
Taking a break from the weekly play-by-play to do a longer yarn on one of my favourite topics: design for policy.
What do you do when the organization has accrued decades of spaghetti policy, the byproduct of successive political regimes, updated legislation, associated funding/priorities, and the natural turnover of the bureaucracy?
This accretion can render the intent of the policy stack — for example, to provide the BC Parks visitor with a safe, seamless, and positive time camping — illegible through the service experience. That is, the service journey through which the user actually experiences the policy. We often forget how opaque the policy framework can be when one seeks to map the concrete relationships to service interaction. And in organizations of scale and complexity, 'policy' is often the result of normative values and behaviours and implied/implicit prioritization, ways of knowing and doing which informally codify through time (and inertia).
It's important to actively steward policy's intent (per above, a phenomenal camping experience). As Body & Terry remind us,
By the time a public policy is implemented it is not uncommon for several hundred people to have been involved in its design, development and delivery. With each different team involved there is the opportunity for the policy intent to be distorted or lost. Frequently what gets delivered into the community is not what the original policymakers intended. On occasions, what is delivered can be diametrically opposed to the original policy intent. Too often in the policy design process there is the implicit assumption that once the new government policy has been decided, then the implementation of this policy will naturally follow. This division between the people who design the policy and the people who will implement and administrate the policy promulgates the loss of policy intent. (2014, p. 179).
This disintegration of intent to deliver compounds over time — in our example, decades. From the macro of change of government and ministerial directive to the micro of policy documentation in internal repositories, decades are a long time. Eventually, some kind of crisis jars the organization into objectivity, wondering how intent became disconnected from the whole of the service experience, and how to rectify it.
Sidebar 1: this may be obvious, but what's the big deal with policy?
Here I reference Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System:
[in increasing order of effectiveness]
9. Constants, parameters, numbers (e.g. subsidies, taxes, standards).
8. Regulating negative feedback loops.
7. Driving positive feedback loops.
6. Material flows and nodes of material intersection.
5. Information flows.
4. The rules of the system (incentives, punishments, constraints).
3. The distribution of power over the rules of the system.
2. The goals of the system.
1. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system
— its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — arises.
Policy establishes both the rules and goals of the system. Policy is the substance of the system and can be manipulated as such. What exists has been designed and can be redesigned!
So when it comes time to transform the service experience of the org, how can this become an opportunity to audit the policy stack for its efficacy and impact on the contemporary value you're looking to deliver through these transformed services? This is service design 101 — connecting policy to delivery — but we often take the status quo as a given when focused on delivering out the front end. Designing good services in the public sector is a feat in itself. It's even harder to create the (safe) space to dispassionately interrogate the value of the policies which may have contributed to your service challenges in the first place. So what might be the right approach in rendering what we'll broadly call 'policy' — that is, the rules, principles and goals for action and interaction by the org to the public — legible, understandable, and material in mapping to new and improved service experiences and outcomes?
Sidebar 2: what do we mean when we talk about making something 'legible'?
As Venkatesh Rao states in this excellent piece, 'legibility' is not a metaphor; the actual visual/textual sense of the word (as in 'readability') is what is meant. However, the complex realities of our (post)modern organizations can turn this intention on its head; it can be easier to comprehend the whole by walking among the trees, absorbing the gestalt, and becoming a fractal part of the proverbial forest than by hovering above it. But in parsing and compartmentalizing parts of the whole, we must render bounded territory legible — in our running example, the policy stack underpins the camping experience. Without experiential artifacts like maps, it becomes challenging to even define the problems to be solved.
Enter the methodology and methods of human-centered design (HCD). In most public sector organizations, the policy is set by the political agenda/associated legislation, then developed through literature/jurisdictional reviews and various quantitative methods. Rarely do thoroughly qualitative ways of knowing to enter the equation. However, through HCD, creators — from policy wonks to the interface designers who ultimately deliver the policy — attempt to immerse themselves in the experiences of real people. We seek to understand needs, motivations, challenges, etc. We engage in prototype and feedback loops. We deliver value in increments, learning by doing. The idea is to build things that don't just advance the organizational mission, but more importantly, are acceptable and usable by the end-user (or as a stretch goal, joyful). What is this if not stitching policy to delivery?
We're at an inflection point with Parks. In transforming the digital services that catalyze (and frame) the larger service journey for the public user, we must re-establish policy coherence and intent to service delivery. Mapping provides an opportunity to create a current-state baseline from which we can make decisions. Why map? Designerly ways of doing leverage tangibility in driving common understanding (alignment) and consensus. The generative practices of design — e.g., workshops with stickies — often elicit hesitation from participants, as this playful and vulnerable type of knowledge creation sometimes shines a light on our blind spots. But in rendering policy legible — through nodes, connections, relationships, value transfer, feedback loops, etc. — we create useful provocations in advancing the iterative understanding of the space/thing.
You can't just talk about the thing. We have to be able to see the thing.
What will this process look like? I'm not quite sure yet — though writing this piece helped arrange my thoughts. My rough plan is to:
- Gather all documentation that exists, disparate as that may be (thanks Jane for the help thus far!).
- Use a mapping tool — likely Kumu — to categorize, link, loop, etc.
- Bring this to folks in the org to knock down, build up, and generally use as a prop from which to establish an understanding of the current state.
- Create a part 2, which maps the service experience in component parts, and connects the policies to all aspects of the service (interactions, requisites, outputs, etc.).
- Leverage this fulsome view of the 'system' to identify opportunities for transformation and improvement — based on the service experience we want to deliver, how might we address the policy stack to enable and achieve these outcomes?
I'm excited at the potential in this novel process, and big thanks to rumon carter and Jill for enabling. I love the opportunity to structuralize design in ways that pushes the practice (and, by extension, the org), and working in the open is only a positive. If anyone knows of reference material I should be up on from other jurisdictions, please send me an email! Stay tuned for how this process comes to life 😄
Jill's notes
In awe of Kevin's thoughtful and incredibly relevant notes — I shall do the usual.
What a week. I don't know about you, but I'm not great at following up with an "I'll watch that recording later" commitment. How many times do you say that and never watch the recording? I'm all intent and little delivery. So I dragged myself out of bed in my jammies at 6 am Tuesday to Friday this week to tune into the FWD50 annual conference. What a great event. I loved that it exposed me to topics I don't usually spend time with — like the impact of satellites on astronomers and the successes of my peers across the globe during the pandemic. 100% worth the extra coffee. Many details will come out as presentations are made public in the coming months, so I'll reference them in future rather than brain dumping today — my brain still feels mushy, if I'm honest.
One call-out, though, is the fantastic presentation by Joy Bonaguro — chief data officer for California. Hopefully, the screencaps will be forgiven! I can't wait to share her talk in full when it is available — Put down your digital hammer — Design the right thing, and then design the thing right. The presentation looked at some behaviours and remedies to uncover if we're really innovating or just perpetuating bad policies. For me, the emphasis on balanced and thoughtful policy design stood out.
As a presentation geek, her graphics and narrative were next level — complete with superheroes, dogs, elephants, and sausage making. I mean, what more could you ask for?
And to top it off — she wrote a Memo on why we need Memos AND Demos — so good!
A confusing narrative
The conference was entirely online. I have to admit I found it mildly entertaining how many folks discussed how working from home was so liberating and healthy — humanized them to their colleagues with dogs barking in the background (my life) and a few family interruptions. It reduces the time wasted travelling, gives them more space to learn and reflect, and minimizes the environmental impacts of jet-setting across the continent. And in the same stream of thought, they would banter about how great it will be to be in person next year.
What?
I get it, we crave in-person networking, and there is something different about it. But if it's so good online, how do we find some balance? It’s the same reality many of us will face as many of us move back to the physical office space more consistently. Those of us with teams across program areas and with varied execs (which I love) will end up back in person all the time. With limited standardization, which again is a tough one, I anticipate a face-to-face meeting daily. All those work-from-home benefits will vanish (as will my coffee budget savings). On the positive side, I missed listening to commuting podcasts. I filled that space with work, and I didn't realize how much I missed it. I guess I’m just as confused about which narrative to follow [insert shrug emoji here].
Weekly rundown
Working in an organization as big as ours is never easy. I learned this week that communication can ALWAYS be better, always be more clear, and always more open.
- I had lots of conversations around implementing the new vaccination policy in the BC Public Service. I'm always fascinated by the roll-out of these significant processes and the downstream effects on supervisors and staff. It's a great organizational case study and an opportunity to learn. I would love the opportunity to dive deeper into the privacy end of this with more consistent use of the technology we have available to share this information securely. It's not a lack of trust that my peers and colleagues will treat this sensitive personal information with the respect it deserves, but instead re-thinking why they should even have to?
- I met with David Hume, ADM Government Digital Experience, to support and contribute to CleanBC and continue to enrich our public-facing content.
- Mines Digital Services (my former team), led by Aaron Unger as Product Owner and Katie Menke as Scrum Master, exemplified collaboration in their latest release planning this week. They brought together a mine operator and multiple ministries for their multi-day planning — marching towards a vision that simplifies data flows, reduces duplication, and improves transparency across the major mine authorization process below (snippet below). I'm incredibly proud of this team, not just for the outcomes they've realized but also for how they show up to deliver them. It's thoughtful and it's inclusive.
Lots of other pieces in-flight this week, but I'll be digesting FWD50 all weekend and beyond, I'm sure.
