Weeknotes June 18th, 2021
In the spirit of transparency and candour, Kevin and Jill are publishing weeknotes reflecting on the what and why for their team.
Kevin’s notes:
I’m going to take a break from the play-by-play model I’ve been running in weeknotes recently and focus on a few key ruminations instead. It was a great week of designing the grey matter of the org and its intersecting projects. I’m grateful to be surrounded by enabling folk, wild-eyed optimists who know how much better we can be if we lean in together and expect the unexpected. Remember,
Reflection time: alignment with corporate
Since my first ever project as a service designer at GDX working out in ‘ministryland,’ I’ve wondered: why aren’t they up on the best practices coming out of corporate? The question/frame itself is subjective and perhaps reductive. Nonetheless, it’s a recurring theme across government, the great work and codification of principals, playbooks, guidelines, and systems coming out of the centralized organizations in government lacking widespread:
- Knowledge of their existence. Literally no idea that the resource has been worked on (often for years) by centralized teams (often in deep collaboration with partners across the sectors) and published to the public web (with varying degrees of fanfare).
- Acumen how to leverage these resources on ministry initiatives. Complex project work isn’t paint-by-numbers; you can’t just read a thing and be proficient at its application.
- Understanding of the value. To the point above, if you’re not familiar with a way of working (and associated practices/methods), it’s challenging to understand why it’s a useful approach.
I want to take a moment to be super clear on something: This is not a critique of people working in the crunchy business of ministries. Far from it. Subject matter experts, frontline, IT, managers, exec, everyone is stretched, whether it’s keeping the lights on with an antiquated legacy system, strategizing how to delivering modern value to the public, working through the bureaucratic churn and grind, dealing with staff turnover and knowledge loss… the list goes on and on.
This presents a litany of challenges. I won’t attempt a comprehensive list, but speaking from my recent experience working on [digital] service delivery projects, a basic familiarity with the Digital Principles for the Government of British Columbia by all contributing parties would be very helpful. ‘Alignment’ is a word over-utilized in government, but the value of a common understanding (north stars) can’t be overstated. So when someone starts talking about considering the entire service ecosystem, it doesn’t just receive pro-forma acknowledgment. So when we talk about the necessity of diverse, multidisciplinary teams, the utility is already socialized. Not to belabour the point, but when we’re all starting from the same foundational concepts in how to ‘do’ the work, it’s going to flow a lot smoother.
So how do we bridge this gap? I’m just riffing here, but I think it’s relational and longitudinal. Corporate should consider investing in the long-term embedding of these initiatives into sectors/ministries through people, inside-out, who carry the expertise to establish new normative behaviours and epistemologies in their organizations. The transactional delivery of knowledge hasn’t seen the uptake, and 1-day how-to workshops don’t make practitioners (although they can be useful as exposure points). We need purposeful patterns of dialogue that carry the work and disseminate to where it’s really happening: in the business lines that design and deliver the core services of government.
How might this happen, and what could it look like? I’m not sure, but if I’ve learned one thing working in the public sector, it’s that relationships drive everything, especially success. I’d love to see corporate continue to build bridges to the deepest parts of the bureaucracy, refining the signal to noise ratio. Coupling the great artifacts (playbooks, guidelines) with deep personal connections. Like many things Jill and I bandy about, this could use flushing out in longer form, and likely some qualitative research to better understand the context. All in the name of doing better, together.
Reflection time: working in the open
Back to those Digital Principals:
5. Work in the open: Collaborate, co-design, and co-create with product and service users transparently. Default towards open licenses, open and interoperable standards and open-source code. Share information and data whenever possible.
Another definition from Ben Holliday:
Working in the open means fully owning and sharing your story. It includes your successes and your failures (drawing from design-led or agile approaches to delivery). It’s not about positioning or political spin. It means transparency in what you’re working on and why, and ideally includes sharing what you learn from user research and how this is shaping the decisions you make. [source]
As I work on multiple projects concurrently, I want to take a couple of moments to champion some of the value propositions of working in the open:
- Deconstructing our culture of expertness. Working in the open forces us to admit what we don’t know and expedite solutions through collaboration. This doesn’t happen when you’re working in a vacuum.
- Abolishing false notions of perfectionism, especially right out the gate. More straw dogs, less investment in great first ideas.
- Generative thinking, collaborative making as default. Jill excels at this, often rendering ideas legible on a shared canvas in real-time during meetings. There’s tangibility to conversation and reference points for posterity—an easy way to remove ambiguity.
- Accountability. This one is obvious. When you regularly share what you’re doing, it’s hard to misrepresent progress and understanding.
For something we talk about a lot within the lexicon of modern work, ‘working in the open’ has little shared definition or practice. I suppose these weeknotes are our attempt at practicing what we preach, although I view them less as purposeful transparency and more as reflective exercise, a way to index and distill my thoughts. But I do know I love reading/hearing the experiences of my colleagues, for both its empathic effect and for the learning, which enables me to do my job more effectively.
We work in an ideological system hundreds of years old, predicated on specialization and expertise. Why would you work in the open when you already have the answers? The wicked problems of our time don’t lend themselves well to silos and linearity. Working in the open is just part of the toolkit in grappling with the exponentiality of the challenges in the deeply synergistic ways required.
Jill’s notes:
This week built on the momentum of last. We continued our exciting work with BC Parks spending a good amount of time learning and understanding. I’m absolutely shocked at the complexity, and I know I’m not alone!
In brief:
- Work continued on ENV Concept Cases for submission to the OCIO next month. Again, I’m incredibly impressed with the team at the Environmental Protection Division for digging in and really committing to actively learning about the work across branches.
- Kyle Murray has been an absolute star bringing his cross-sector experience to developing a really great Compliance and Enforcement case. Fingers crossed, we can move this forward and really make a difference in this space.
- Really constructive conversations continued with Development and Digital Services staff on how we can bridge the great divide (see last week's post) and build the capacity and structures for a well-resourced intake team.
- I facilitated another instance of Digital Era Leadership for The Exchange. We had over 25 aspiring leaders join us for a full day on Tuesday to learn some good practices and how to lead multi-disciplinary teams in our new reality — reflections from the morning below:
- I spoke about the Mega-thon at Quarantine and Quaffee — an opportunity to build community and learn about other teams hosted by The Exchange and the amazing Ari Hershberg. If you work in the BC government in an agile environment, drop him a line to get invited.
- HR Jenga continued — shifting products, bolstering teams, writing job descriptions. You name it, and we did it this week.
Reflection time: Cross-silo leadership
As I learn more about my role, I am reminded that no matter how many times we say it, breaking silos is really hard. And maybe, though we say it a lot, it’s not the right thing to focus on. My role, after all, is to create effective and sustainable structures within program areas that enable and accelerate service transformation (I think).
Leaders need to help people develop the capacity to overcome these challenges on both individual and organizational levels.
I love the breakdown in this HBR article by Casciaro, Edmonson, and Jang, focusing on creating more value by connecting inside and outside the organization. This article has been rehashed and published in various locations over the years, but a few things remain as key as their four key takeaways.
Dedicate people in your program/business areas to promote cross-boundary work as a bridge — a go-between — or as adhesives — bringing people together.
How do we as a branch identify and support these people?
Teach the art of inquiry — ask good questions.
Remind ourselves how and model it with our partners. Then, continue to support the good foundational design and deep problem exploration.
Urge people to actively see others’ points of view by architecting cross-silo dialogues and hiring for curiosity and empathy.
We can certainly facilitate these and highlight the value they provide (think mega-thon). The hiring part is a bit tougher, but something that many already excel at.
Create opportunities for exposure across different initiatives and create space for more distant connections.
This is exactly what we do, and we can do more to begin to instill this in each branch’s culture.
You can’t lead at the interfaces if you don’t know where they are.
Lastly, we’re taking bets on who gets the KO, Shark or Buoy?
