Tag: gov20

Takeaways from FWD50 2022

TL;DR: An overview of my insights from FWD50 2022, including the talk I gave, and the responses to the questions submitted to my talk 🙂 In short, it was awesome! Apologies for the long post!

Every year I attend (or participate in) FWD50, a Canadian conference that I consider the world’s best government transformation event. It is such a special conference because it purposefully doesn’t specialise in just one domain (like the plethora or data, digital, procurement or other events I normally see), but rather it brings together all disciplines around burning questions of the day, and how might the public sector become fundamentally better for the people and communities it serves. FWD50 manages to simultaneously be a social platform for public servants to connect, evolve and be brave together, as well as being something of a petri dish where everyone can participate in co-creating a fundamentally more humane approach to public service. The participants are highly diverse in all respects, with over a hundred government jurisdictions represented from around the world, and thought leadership exhibited from up and down the usual hierarchy chain, embracing the expertise and experience that we all have to share. Some of the most mindblowing sessions often come from junior public servants 🙂

FWD50 is the brainchild of the Croll siblings, Alistair and Rebecca, with a small army of conference experts and public servant volunteers. I can’t recommend this event enough, and the leadership the Crolls have shown, not just in what they’ve built, but in how they continue to deliver it through kind, inclusive, collegial and respectful sharing and provocations. They and their army of awesomeness have also managed to grow and evolve through the pandemic, simultaneously running an in person AND online event, drawing from all the lessons of the last few years, and delivering something both excellent and exemplary for organisations trying to work through their post-COVID existential crisis 🙂

It was also an opportunity for me to connect with colleagues and friends in the Canadian Government, including my old DECD (Digital Experience and Client Data) team at Service Canada. It was SUCH a delight, such a joy, to meet, hug, and hear about how the team are going, including Aaron Jaffrey, who took over leading DECD. I could not have asked for a better person to take care of this very special team, thanks again Aaron! DECD continue to design and deliver amazing things, to be an exemplar for purpose-led, kind and calm culture, and to truly put people at the centre of the design. I miss you all and continue to be your biggest fan 🙂

Below are a few take aways and lessons from the event, shared in the hope they will be helpful, and to encourage more folk to tune in to the discussions and content from FWD50 as a provocation to help plan holistic government transformation in all your own teams 🙂

Key insights

  • I LOVED Alistair’s talk on the second day, where he reminded us that we are using a system of government that is hundreds of years old, and that the next generational shift in “government” is likely in the process of happening, and we won’t even be able to recognise it. He used the Gutenberg Press as an example of how enormous a change we are living through with the Internet, and it was great to go so big and ambitious in thinking, while we set new horizons.
  • Openness and working openly remains the most commonly proposed strategy for building trust, designing and delivering better policy/services, continuous improvement, public engagement, and for genuinely responsible government in the 21st century.
  • Energy is not something you get from someone else. It is something you co-create. I’ve had a few people say my talk energised them, but actually, the energy was a result of us all participating enthusiastically in the topic 🙂 When you think someone else energises you, you are potentially missing the vital role you play in the equation 🙂
  • If we don’t solidify the gains made throughout COVID, then we’ll lose ground, which may in fact lead to losing a large chunk of the workforce who could leave in frustration. People will simply leave if we don’t normalise and support gains like flexible working, greater transparency/openness of work, improved trust and delegation further down the hierarchy, inclusive and geographically diverse hiring, virtual teams, and more streamlined and rapid delivery of services to the general public.
  • Change has never succeeded as a top down strategy. True change requires an approach that invites all staff into the process of designing a meaningful and purpose based future state, identifying how they can each work towards it, and supporting/trusting them to be a part of it. Frontline and SMEs in gov want to see positive change, they just don’t want change for the sake of change, which might in turn negatively impact their clients and the communities they serve.

COVID changed our minds, but not yet our systems

I was surprised by the enormous gap I observed between senior executives and the broader community of public servants, a gap so large it had an almost tangible weight. I’ve always believed change can only happen when you first change your mind. For most public servants, COVID has fundamentally changed our minds. The pandemic irrefutably proved that our systems, structures, processes and ways of working are not capable of responding effectively or humanely to the speed of change/need in the modern world. Sure, we can leverage all kinds of emergency superpowers to push things through in weeks/months instead of years, but we always revert to “normal” after the emergency, and in any case, the more pressure there is, the more insular we become in how we operate. 

We have entered a time of continuous emergencies, and most public servants intuitively know that we need to fundamentally rethink how we do public administration and governance in a mission, purpose and values oriented way. Though many of the talks at FWD50 touched upon the changed world since COVID (check out the agenda here), they seemed to fall into three broad patterns: disruptive reform, building public trust, and what I’ll cheekily call “Hello 2019”. 

We heard incredible stories of disruptive reform in Ukraine, US Veteran Affairs, the importance of a “moonshot” mindset from X, policy transformation, and what “winning” could look like if we be more purpose and outcomes driven. We heard about efforts and models to improve public trust and confidence, to identify and meeting public expectations (beyond a “customer” imperative), how to design for legitimacy, to value and engage employees in a transformation agenda, how to govern AI, and the need to consider the undeniable (but usually overlooked) relationship between the quality of government services and public trust.

But we also heard several “Hello 2019” talks that would have been completely great 3 years ago, but felt just a little out of touch with the heightened expectations and new challenges from almost 3 years of COVID. The talks about “we just need some better platforms”, or “policy should just focus on delivery”, or “it all starts with digital identity”. It’s not to say these aren’t important topics to explore, but it felt almost like there is a new gravity in place, where most public servants and the people we serve want us to urgently focus on the why, not just the what or how. In the grand scheme of things, it is easy to deliver new digital stuff, but public sectors need to create the ways and means for people to thrive in ambiguity, to navigate complexity, to be socially included and supported when things go wrong, and to live well, even through rolling crises. If public institutions can’t deliver values based and meaningful public good, and do so in alignment with public values and expectations, then tech, tools, platforms, design and other mechanisms for “how” will continue to distract us from delivering on our purpose.

I feel like for all the trauma we have experienced over the last few years, COVID has acted as a form of necessary intervention on several fronts:

  1. A personal intervention, as we all reconnected with family and friends, supported each other through loss and fear, realised how much work had taken over our lives.
  2. A work intervention, as we realised how thin and unnecessary so many things are that usually get in the way of delivering great public services and policy outcomes. We empowered people at all levels to work (micromanagers really struggled with remote teams), we worked more transparently, we really focused on the urgent needs in our communities, and we streamlined a lot of bureaucracy as we reached out a discovered we could, in fact, collaborate and deliver together, and focus on real human needs and outcomes.
  3. A human intervention, as we all had a genuinely shared experience with all other people around the world, regardless of where we are from or who we are. This has provided a sense of empathy with each other, something we might choose to maintain, so we can see more what we have in common with each other moving forward.

So when I see talks that basically feel like “Hello 2019”, it feels like either a missed opportunity, or perhaps like the speaker is slightly out of step with the changed environment they occupy, which is a real pity.

I suggest it is imperative that we all work diligently to change the systems we work within to reflect the change we have had in our minds, rather than allowing our minds to be reverted to the old world. This is not something to wait for others to do, or to “hope” for. Just get on with it, and be the change you want to see 🙂 

Structure eats Incentives eats Culture eats Strategy, for breakfast!

This workshop was just excellent, and one of my favourites this year. It was run by the Think Digital and Code for Canada crews with a few public servant volunteers. They invited participants to share barriers, using an expanded version of the old “Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast” idea. Their proposal was that Incentives eat Culture, and Structure eats Incentives, both of which I have certainly observed in my time working in and with public sectors. I thought it was a profound sentiment and one worth considering in any program or project. Often we get caught up with the issues created by fixing behaviours through better culture, or the lack of a “light on the hill” that strategy is supposed to provide, but both can be undermined or perverted by incentives and structure. For example, an efficiency agenda will always incentivise saving money for the sake of saving money, which always kills opportunities to deliver genuine or purpose driven public good, let alone new value to the public. 

Similarly, the current structure of most government departments was adopted during the NPM (New Public Management) years. It created functional segmentation of disciplines, which has led to a structural barrier to being outcomes focused. Basically, your policy people don’t walk to data, don’t talk to tech, don’t talk to program, etc etc. Collaboration is only possible with a hard won and years in the making cost centre, and cross functional engagement happens at the 11th hour (if at all) rather than from the first minute. Structures shape incentives by the function of your team, and this is most obvious when you talk to IT Departments who have been largely asked to just be efficient for the sake of efficiency, creating a huge barrier between those doing, and the policy or mandate outcomes that their department is responsible for. 

This framing was VERY helpful, and I’m thankful to Ryan, Dorothy, Winter and Luke for the wonderful session 🙂

My talk: building for legitimacy in government

My main talk this year focused on how to build trustworthy systems in the special context of government (slides here). I started by talking about why trust is critical for public sectors, and how trust is earned, not asked for. Public trust and confidence in public institutions is a necessary foundation for all that we administer and deliver in their name. Without trust, public sectors and governments everywhere run the risk of losing perceived and then actual legitimacy, leading to instability and chaos. I then talked about the key ingredients for trust: operating in good faith, with integrity, and as expected by the people/person we deal with. Good faith can be demonstrated in the public sector through a systemic and measurable commitment to human-centred and humane outcomes, strong governance. High integrity of gov can be demonstrated by operating in a way that is demonstrably lawful, accurate, high veracity, assured, consistently applied and appealable. Meeting public expectations of gov means reflecting public expectations, values and needs, doing no harm, being transparent and operating within relevant legal, social, moral and jurisdictional limitations of power.

I then used three use cases to apply this approach:

  1. The use of AI in public sectors, specifically the risky and difficult domain of Machine Learning (ML) based Automated Decision Making (ADM) systems. I laid out how although ML/AI can of course be very helpful in mary use cases, when it comes to ML based ADM, we lose both traceability to legal authorities (legislation, regulation, etc and explainability as required under Administrative Law) and we lose consistency of implementation (which conflicts with Rule of Law, as the system starts to get different outputs to common inputs over time as it “learns”). I presented a series of ways to identify and mitigate harm, but basically made the case that ADM systems in government that are subject to Administrative Law should most likely be rules based, not machine learning based.
  2. For government services, I spoke about key epics that a product team might include that would help services comply to the special context of government, such as recording and providing an explanation of service decisions, ways to measure and monitor for human impact (not just fiscal success indicators), ways to draw on representative and diverse knowledge systems in the design and governance of services, and how truly humane services require human centred futures, measures and design.
  3. For trustworthy operating models, public institutions need to establish humane work environments, empowered teams, a safe and high integrity culture, where anyone can speak truth to power, with all staff having the respect, capacity and support to think and act in the best interests of the public, not just working at 100% capacity on the most urgent thing all the time. This requires a systemic shift to servant leadership inside institutions, but also a strategic commitment to participatory governance, where the public can participate in and help ensure truly humane policies and services.

My final thought was we need a few additional tools in our toolbox to realise the vision and value of truly trustworthy and legitimate public services in the 21st century:

  • Clarity on purpose for a policy or service – if you don’t know the intended impact, how do you know it is working as hoped? We shouldn’t build for the sake of building, we need to design and build for a purpose.
  • Legislation/regulation as code – to test against, build upon, model with, explore and to help people engage with their rights & policy development in a more interactive and meaningful way.
  • Algorithmic/models transparency – to raise public confidence, but also to enable independent testing, research and policy proposals, especially from the academic sector and community advocates. 
  • Tiered risk approach (eg the Canadian Algorithmic Impact Assessment + categories of use) – to avoid the one approach to rule them all approach, and to align risk to how AI (and other systems) are used and their impact, rather than just intrinsic generalist risk.
  • Design for proactive explanation – this requires traceability to legislation/regulation (as code) and to case law/exceptions, it requires records keeping for decisions, and better communications to the public.
  • Participatory policy and governance
  • A human impact measurement framework, to complement fiscal measures
  • Real time monitoring & escalation mechanisms, that feed back into continuous service improvement, and critically, continuous policy improvement. Also to escalate patterns of harm that are detected as they emerge.

The questions submitted for my talk are below with answers 🙂

The famous bridge separating Government from the Public Sector in Ottawa, a visual reminder of the importance of an independent (albeit responsive) public sector.
  1. Where is the balance between meeting our expectations within ourselves and the parameters in which we are sometimes required to work? How do effectively manage expectations for the public?

Honestly I have found that being as open as possible helps build trust to best navigate those waters. We should be open about that balance, as much as we can be, and people don’t expect everything they say to be unthinkingly implemented, but they do expect to be heard. So open up channels for regular communication, for relationship building, for trust building, and you’ll get better policy, better services, better governance, and you’ll get more trust to deal with the things you can’t be as open about. Here is a blog post I wrote about balancing the three masters we all serve: the Government of the day, the Parliament, and the People 🙂 

  1. How do you separate trust in the public service, ie Government and politicians?

By being politically neutral and having a voice for the public sector. People will always be wary of politics, but they should be able to trust their public institutions. So have a voice, demonstrate your commitment and stewardship of the best public good, and maintain that healthy separation of politics and public sector. In Canada you have that lovely bridge demonstrating the division of power. Do your part to always do the right thing, not what’s politically expedient. And ensure you talk about the work of your department directly to the public. If you are only communicating through the lens of political speeches or media releases, you will likely have a problem 🙂

  1. Should there be more accountability for companies to level the playing field of trust, since (some) lack of trust comes from governments’ openness, which exposes all its beautiful disfunctions?

I think it is entirely reasonable for governments to ensure how they interact with companies includes requirements of openness and accountability. But it is hard to regulate behaviours in companies, some will be open by default, some won’t. But you can make certain things a requirement of contracts with companies that can at least ensure the ones who you work directly with meet the requirements of good government, good accountability, and meet the public trust test. But as above, the best way the public sector can grow trust is to have a voice of it’s own. People assume the worst of the public sector because a) it’s everyone’s favourite punching bag, and b) it has unmatched power in a society so people should have some distrust. The onus on the public sector to earn trust is higher than on companies, which is as it should be. So earn that trust by being trustworthy, rather than needing to expose the disfunction of others around us 🙂 All organisations have disfunction, and we can all learn from each other, but have confidence in our value to society.

  1. What is the first human impact measure to start with?

Great question! Honestly just starting is good, but if you ask citizens what they think, then whatever you choose will be reflective of their hopes and fears. It doesn’t need to be the best one, just start. If your jurisdiction is struggling with homelessness, make that your first measure. Similarly for employment, or health indicators, or perhaps trust in government? 🙂 This “Trust in Australian Public Services” report provides a good blueprint for baselining and monitoring changes in public trust over time.

  1. How do we build trust with groups who actively seek to see us fail?

    Like whom? If you are talking about nefarious actors or people who want the public sector to fail, then clearly they aren’t operating in good faith, so demonstrate your value and build trust with the people and communities who actually need to trust you 🙂
  2. Can you also talk how the “reputation” of a governing system is impacted by changes in trust?

    When people lose trust in the public sector, everything we administer is at risk of losing perceived legitimacy. It is as serious as that. Trust is critical for public sectors to operate with legitimacy.
  3. How do we shift how executives see AI & try to incorporate tiny improvements to make the backend better?

    Present a vision for what good could look like to get buy in, and then show how all the different ingredients needed make the cake (including the impact if you skip an ingredient!)
  4. You show a sensitivity to indigenous people. How can we use assisted decision making to increase indigenous peoples trust in government?

    Ask them 🙂 Involve them in the design, delivery and oversight of such systems. Isn’t isn’t just about understanding user needs, it is about including different perspectives in the decision making and governance.
  5. How do you feel about ADM responsibility certification initiatives?

    I can’t answer that as a generic question, because each initiative has strengths and weaknesses. I think it is critical that people realise that an ADM system of any kind is still subject to all the other accountabilities and responsibilities we have in gov, so they should be certified against that rather than yet another certificate that a person can tick which may or may not meet the robust requirements of Administrative Law. Most frameworks for AI I’ve seen only suggest, at the heart of it, two things: human in the loop, and consideration of some nice sounding principles. Both these mechanisms can be helpful but are so far from sufficient it is deeply concerning to see them help up as the baseline. The AIA at least provides a risk framework to scale up and down controls based on impact. I believe we need to be able to demonstrate at a minimum, the explainability with traceability to the legal authorities of the public institution for all gov ADM systems, which arguably requires 1) legislation/regulation as code to trace to. But I also think we need 2) human impact measurement and monitoring (to detect and mitigate harm), a 3) clear goal/outcome for all policies with a “test suite” for each that articulates what output should come from what inputs in a variety of scenarios to test against, and 4) a clarity of what type of AI should be used for what types of activities in gov. ML for research, patterns analysis, investigations, etc can be great (if you can tackle the bias in the data issues).
  6. In example 3, what do you mean by strong culture? Can you give an example?

    Culture informs behaviours. If you don’t have a strong culture that values expertise, that prioritises public good, that operates with integrity and independence, etc, then behaviours can sneak in that undermine the legitimacy of the sector. All public servants, no matter their job or level, need to operate with integrity and in the best public interest. When people are encouraged to just do the job and not contribute “above their pay level” then we lose integrity, we lose all the feedback loops that would otherwise support best public outcomes.
  7. What do you do when youre entire organization thinks differently than you when it comes to trust?

    Hmm, hard one! Well, if it was me (and it has been) then I would make the case, show the impact of low trust, propose what good looks like and how high trust supports the mandate and goals of the org, I would take every opportunity to demonstrate what high trust looks like, and if all else fails, I would seek a different public sector employer.
  8. How do separate trust in public servants from the large companies that work for us with a profit motive?

    By being loud and proud public servants 🙂
  9. What are 3 concrete things individual public servants can do to support legitimacy of government services?

    1) Take every opportunities to engage with communities, advocacy orgs and civil society orgs in your work, they don’t have to be formal comms exercises 🙂 2) always ask the hard questions: how will this benefit the public? how will we know if it is creating harm? Use my questions from the talk as epics in yoru product/policy backlog 🙂 and 3) Take just a little time to imagine what good looks like, to connect with others who are similarly values-driven, and to always, in everything you do, try to bring about something better for people. This last one sounds fluffy, but you’d be surprised how much it influences every concrete action, plan, decision etc in your life.
  10. Thinking back on yesterday’s intro, do we think the digital era may eventually usher in a new participatory democracy?

    Yes. I think it already is doing so, and the change in people’s expectations of government is just the start. We didn’t see a global wave of democratic systems of government until there was a critical mass of people expecting to be able to vote for their leaders rather than to just inherit them. Expectations change the world, and people today expect to have some say in how government operates, not just who they elect in the Parliament.
  11. How do you ensure participatory governance is legitimate when all too often we see it play out as superficial and insincere?

    By doing it well 🙂 Every time you create an example of genuine and valuable participatory governance, you will create a new baseline for people to build upon. Just do it.
  12. How do you deal with communities who earned trust but proved to have egregious motives?

    Will definitely need to unpack this one 🙂 Drop me an email or DM!
  13. How do we get public servants to trust that we can deliver when the system/organization works against us?

    By demonstrating success, working as openly as you can, and changing the system wherever you can. The system is changing, whether it wants to or not, and it is only by persistent commitment that we can steer it in the right direction.
  14. What caused us to get to a point where the legitimacy of gov services is so low? How do we avoid this happening again?

    Honestly I’ve been pondering this for a while. I think we all just adopted tech in an unthinking way in the first instance. Lawyers, policy folk, drafters and even executives considered “implementation” to not be their job, and that disengagement led to techies doing our best, with varying degrees of direction and disempowerment (usually operational policy people just throwing “business requirements” over the fence without any accountability as to the accuracy or legitimacy of those requirements). We used technology and technologists as a blunt instrument to simply mechanise the public sector, but now we have to reconnect all the different disciplines to reinstitute an approach to technology where it is an enabler for good government, not just a cost centre or means to save money. We need to move our mechanised sector to a responsive and policy/human-centred approach to how we use and deploy technology, and we need to have technologists at the table with policy, legal, drafters, now joined by design, to work together for the best public sectors that are both human centred, and trust building.
  15. Do you have examples of how NZ has overcome the ‘constant disempowerment’ as you mentioned in your presentation today? What were the steps that made you successful?

    When I worked in NZ we had a small team that was cross agency funded and cross agency governed. I can now look back and realise our success is because we lived in a small gap between the usual constraints of that system. Unfortunately the answer for NZ needs to be a systemic push to delegate more decision making further down. In Australia, significant authority is delegated down 3 levels (beyond the head of department), and sometimes even to 2 more levels beyond that. 5 levels of authority over funding decisions, program planning, team management, etc. In NZ most authority is delegated 1 level down (DCEs, etc) who then may or may not delegate further. If you want to unlock the brilliance and productivity of the NZ PS, delegation of decision making over budgets, staff, operational decision making etc needs to be pushed down at least another 2 levels to get anywhere close to where other comparable public services are at. Otherwise you need to build bubbles in the gaps, which is not sustainable.
  16. Thank you PIA!

    Aww, I’ll take that as a comment not a question, but thank you too!

Exploring and advising public sector reform across the ANZO region

TL;DR – I’ve taken on a new role, and this blog post explains why and how I came to the decision I did 🙂 Please scroll to the bottom or see my LinkedIn page if you just want to jump to the job.

If you’re reading this blog, you probably already know that I am passionate about and professionally committed to genuine and systemic reform/renewal of the public sector. I have spent the last decade in public service, and a decade before that in the tech sector, mostly focused on how to create better government services and policies, with digital/data transformation often providing a useful means for much needed reform.

I have written extensively about the many barriers facing systemic reform of the public sector, including on my blog. I know most public servants want change, but at this exact point in time there is a pressing need to:

  • create greater “demand” for genuine public sector renewal – demand is needed to prioritise investment in systemic reform, otherwise real transformation efforts become the can that continues to get kicked down the road, 
  • explore and invest in creating a more trustworthy public sector in a time of rapidly declining public trust, and 
  • explore what “good” could look like – especially in a world of rolling, continuous emergencies, where people understandably expect more of gov than ever before.

So when I left Service Canada, I realised I most want to focus on three key areas to address these pressing needs, to hopefully help make a real difference:

  1. A Transformed Public Sector: although we see a lot of effort around “service transformation”, there are still very few transformation programs that actually change the system. There are still significant barriers to create a genuinely adaptive, agile, human-centred, test driven and humane public sector, because it requires transformation of structures, budgetary approaches, program/project/product management, public engagement and culture across the sector, especially if we are to close the widening gap between policy and delivery. There is only rarely a planned or co-created future state being worked towards that would result in better, more equitable and more inclusive services and policies for all, and I suggest if you don’t have a clear and distinct future state, then you likely aren’t transforming but rather doing an iteration or digitisation of the current state. For example, RPA is usually used for just automating the status quo, and rarely a tool that enables process, policy, service or system redesign.
    Practically, I’d like to help shape future oriented, human-centred and adaptive policies, services, strategies and programs with governments.
  2. A Trustworthy Public Sector: public trust and confidence in public institutions is paramount to a stable and equitable society, but trust is in decline and communities are being gamed like never before. It is critical that public institutions take some time now to stop asking for trust (the “social licence” route), and to start focusing on how to be considered trustworthy. I think “trustworthy government” requires public participation as an important starting point but government systems and services also need to be reliable, traceable to their legal authority, testable against the law (regulation and legislation), audited in real time, easily understood by and appealable by citizens, and monitored for accountability. I’d basically like to see a modern implementation of Administrative Law coupled with a culture of openness, accountability and participatory governance with peer review, operational transparency and public participation. Finally, to be considered trustworthy, we need to collectively support the existential renewal of the sector, to support and demand a public service that is a long term steward for public good, not just a tool of the government of the day.
    Practically, I’ll be continuing to work on Legislation/Regulation as Code, explainable and high veracity systems, auditable and appealable systems, and of course, participatory governance/democracy initiatives. Imagine if we had a publicly available community repository of legislation as code to build upon and test against 🙂 What does a blend of participatory and representative democracy look like, that gets the best of both?
  3. An Augmented Public Sector: finally, I want to explore and support the timely concept of augmentation (rather than automation) in our public sector, whether it be service augmentation (“Alexa, I’ve lost my job, help me get support”), workforce augmentation (Hey Google, show me the human impact of this policy change across NSW”), or human augmentation (“I want to be the world’s best rock climber, so I might add a few more limbs for the Auglympics next year”). Augmentation to me is where a system purposefully supports humans and machines/tech to each do what they do best, without compromising our human values or the ethical and humane obligations we each have to each other. Too often I see “efficiency” projects that simply speed up or automate the status quo, or remove staff from a process, but we need to have better processes, more inclusive services, and more humane experiences with the public sector. There is no point speeding up the journey off a cliff 🙂 Rampant automation often undermines or misses the opportunity for better, more equitable, more ethical or more humane services and policies, so exploring and demonstrating the opportunities for service and workforce augmentation would be quite timely. Exploring and growing the understanding of human augmentation is also important as we will need to collectively deal with the potential implications for social cohesion when body hacking becomes more mainstream, given the human form is considered everything from sacred to irrelevant, depending on your culture and personal comfort or beliefs.
    Practically, this means exploring and demonstrating AI/AR/VR for the use cases above and getting away from pure automation uses of AI. Ideally in collaboration with others who are committed to more humane futures.

So, having decided these are the three areas I’d like to focus on, I had to consider where could I work to explore them? Where could possibly provide the breadth of opportunities to explore, build, influence, strategise and collaborate on public sector transformation? Sadly, many departments are pushed to stay within their wheelhouse and have become highly reactive to politics, and it is hard to drive a 5 or 10 year cross portfolio and systemic transformation agenda (let alone a 50 year vision!) within the constraints of an election cycle. Ideally, we need public institutions that are stable, operationally independent and confident stewards for long term public good, but this is a chicken and egg issue.

So I decided to work from the outside for a little while. A public service sabbatical of sorts, where I can contribute my expertise in the public domain, explore and demonstrate what “good” could look like, help build the demand and ambition for change (with executives, politics and the public), participate in community initiatives and grow my own experience. I plan to return to the sector to help drive systemic change when demand supports it 🙂

I’m pleased to say that after months of considering some very interesting and exciting options across different sectors, I was approached for a role as a Strategic Advisor with AWS, working with a small team called Strategic Development that works with the public sector across Australia, New Zealand and Oceania. Our focus is on supporting public institutions to dream big and explore new horizons, to achieve long term policy outcomes and sustainable public good, and to develop genuinely transformative plans with practical roadmaps to get there. As a team of accomplished public servants, we all understand the domain and want to help support and champion the sector and all public servants 🙂 I think I can both contribute a lot and learn a lot from this role, and it gives me a strong basis to drive my three objectives.

I will continue to work in the open, not just because it is my preference, but for peer review, collaboration and so you can all help me to keep it real and stay on track with the mission 🙂 Thanks to all those who advised me on this decision, and I hope to join a number of government advisory groups and boards where I can usefully contribute.

Please get in touch with me on piagov [at] amazon.com if you’d like to chat about any of the above! 🙂 I’m looking forward to collaborating on ambitious and transformative initiatives that create more mission oriented, values driven, humane and participatory public sectors across the region 🙂

In other news, my family had to return to Australia. Sick family + NZ travel policies at the time = having to move country again, but luckily the family member has recovered and we are now only a flight away from family 🙂 We decided if we were in Aus that we wanted to live somewhere glorious so we moved to Broome (WA), which has been just wonderful. I’ll be traveling for events and conferences, but am always available online and I’m looking forward to reconnecting with the Australian tech/data and public sectors after the last few years in NZ with the Canadian Government.

Personal thoughts for the Digital Strategy for Aotearoa New Zealand

On the 6th October, a public consultation about a Digital Strategy for Aotearoa New Zealand opened for feedback and participation. Contributions close 10th November, and I thought I’d share a few thoughts, and encourage you all to contribute 🙂 I also wrote a paper on two major issues I see facing us here, Service Delivery and Public Trust in New Zealand Aotearoa: a Discussion Paper which might be of interest, I hope these thoughts are helpful and I want to thank DIA and MBIE for engaging so openly on this topic. It provides a good opportunity to create a genuinely bold and visionary approach that serves us well into the future 🙂

The discussion paper paints a vision of Aotearoa New Zealand being a world leading digital nation built on trust, known for the ethical deployment of new technologies, and it defines success as predominantly: 

  • Higher productivity
  • Lower emissions
  • Everyone flourishes

The rest of the paper however, seems to focus almost mostly on the productivity goal, for example, talking about trust as “We have the right foundations to sell our products and services to the world with confidence, while all New Zealanders embrace the digital future because they feel safe and secure”. “Embracing the digital future” ignores that we are in a digital present, and ignores also the current stress, fears and uncertainty that many feel, as they are actively gamed online today. Ethical deployment of tech also needs defining, because what you can’t describe, measure or monitor for will not lead to an ethical outcome. For instance, to my mind, ethical means all decisions or actions taken are traceable back to a legal authority, are explainable, and are easily appealable by the people affected, and independently auditable. Ethical means a program, policy, service, etc demonstrably and measurable contributes to wellbeing, and does no harm. Define it how you wish, but defining it is critical to assuring it 🙂

This paper seems very focused on “digital” as just the adopting of technologies, but doesn’t really address what is needed to live well in a digital age. I would hope the draft digital strategy that is developed as a result of this engagement addresses the fact that to be meaningful, a digital strategy for Aotearoa New Zealand needs to address the paradigm shifts, future state, and the necessary systemic and structural changes needed to live well and thrive in a digital age. 

General comments

  • The Strategy provides no real vision for a better or different future state, no real mission beyond more use of tech, just a series of tactics clustered into the three themes. I would suggest it is important to use the opportunity to co-create a shared vision of “good” in collaboration with the public to have a future state to work towards. Otherwise, any and all efforts will simply extend the current status quo system, which will at best provide symptomatic relief, without addressing any causal issues or the potential of new opportunities. Driving faster in the same direction will not get you anywhere better than the current trajectory, and COVID has shown us irrefutably that our current direction is not sustainable, equitable or inclusive.
  • The themes are ok, but the goals seem very specific to, or intended to only enable, economic outcomes. It implies that to “flourish and prosper” are assumed to be purely financial, whereas I would hope that trust, inclusion and prospering are considered within the broader Wellness framework: economic, social, human and environmental. Why doesn’t trust talk about how to ensure critical sectors for social cohesion and democratic stability are made more trustworthy (like the public sector, research sector, and the 4th estate)? Why doesn’t inclusion talk about how to ensure people can participate in policy development, participatory democracy and shared governance arrangements? Where are the supports for self-sovereign systems, like an Iwi as an IdP? Why does growth not talk about cultural growth, digital taonga, etc? My suggestions for the theme goals:
    • Mahi Tika (Trust): All New Zealanders are supported by a trustworthy and accountable public service, which provides transparent oversight and appealability for all decisions and actions. People can see and trust their information is being protected and used appropriately, across all sectors in New Zealand, and have help available to navigate truth and authenticity online.
    • Mahi Tahi (Inclusion):  all New Zealanders have the tools, skills and nous to work, play and participate in society with confidence, with equitable access to inclusively developed public infrastructure, policies and services.
    • Mahi Ake (Growth): All New Zealanders have the right digital infrastructure, foundations and skills to build globally competitive new services, products and value in every sector.   
  • The Digital Strategy for Aotearoa is written like just a response to changing technologies, rather than a response to changing paradigms. Technological changes are only a part of being in the 21st century, and it is in the reimagining of our society, economy and sectors that we have a chance to truly become a digital nation. Otherwise we’ll continue to be an industrial nation with some shiny new toys.
  • A transformed public sector that provides trustworthy, reliable and extendable digital public infrastructure, inclusive and highly integrated public services, and a modern approach to regulation and compliance including regulation/legislation as code, and participatory governance where the public can play a part in defining the policies and services they need.
  • A national measurement framework that values and prioritises quality of life outcomes. Such a measurement framework would influence funding, grants, taxation and investment across all sectors, which would in turn influence the use of and outcomes from all technologies deployed, especially artificial intelligence.  
  • Where is the wellness framework in this Strategy? Why not set some targets from here https://www.stats.govt.nz/information-releases/wellbeing-statistics-2018 like “80% people trust the Parliament and Media”
  • Government systems that need to be governed under Te Tiriti need to stay within jurisdiction of Te Tiriti, therefore onshore.
  • The Digital Strategy of UAE was based on the OECD Digital Government Policy Framework, I suggest this be considered as part of this strategy https://u.ae/en/about-the-uae/digital-uae/uae-national-digital-government-strategy 

What would reaching this vision mean for us as New Zealanders? – Feedback

  • New Zealanders have better access to, and use, public services when and where we need them, with well supported online and offline choices so we are never left behind;
  • Small and medium sized enterprises (or SMEs) are increasingly able to grasp digital innovation opportunities and create growth and jobs;
  • A public sector that is digitally innovative, and provides reliable digital public infrastructure to democratise the creation of new value in the digital economy;
  • New Zealanders are safe, secure and confident in a digitally enabled world, can trust that their private information is safe and are able to view and appeal decisions when mistakes are made;
  • We would see ourselves as leading the world in the creation and adoption of responsible digital practices, across all sectors.
  • Policies are developed in the open, with public participation, which are monitored publicly and when policy objectives are compromised due to unexpected change or contradictory policies, it can be dealt with holistically. Policy reform will be holistic, easy and fast to implement, and result in less unintended consequences.
  • Compliance with government regulations will be much cheaper, faster, and more automatable for all sectors, through the provision of digital rules for public consumption and reuse. 
  • All government reporting and other obligations will be designed as digital first to reduce impost, improve compliance, and improve monitoring of policy objectives and real world impact.
  • All industries will be able to leverage technology and in particular, Artificial Intelligence, to augment the workforce, getting the best that people and machines can bring to the table, without losing the benefits of both. An augmented work force is far more innovative, sustainable, resilient and productive than an automated work force, because the former can adapt over time, whereas the latter is stuck in time.

Big issues – feedback

  • Public trust and confidence in the public sector and in the government – need to establish more trustworthy practices, processes, oversight and systems in the public sector, which must be perceived as independent of politics.
  • Deep fakes will dramatically heighten the misinformation wars, and will contribute heavily to ransomware and other attacks. Imagine being bribed about a damaging video that was generated by deep fake technology.
  • A lack of systemic measures will drive non-systemic outcomes
  • It is the processes followed in government that slows things down and makes it less responsive in a time of crisis. The fact that emergency powers had to be so leaned on shows that there is an opportunity to streamline and improve government processes. A review should be done into the entire policy lifecycle, and how it could be streamlined to improve policy agility.
  • Why does the paper say “susceptible to future of work”, paint an alternative.
  • The future of work is something people are scared of, so this area needs leadership on alternatives. An augmented workforce vision would provide a better balance than an automated one, but people are presuming the value of machines is only in automation, which is setting them up to be less adaptive, resilient or innovative into the future.
  • Promoting investment in IT R&D, including how to engage with the computer science and academic community around leading edge research. Perhaps make IT R&D tax deductible?

Measuring success – feedback

Whatever measures are created (there should be clear measures for all three themes) must be applied to all initiatives. If a department is funded to do something in the trust theme, then they must be accountable for demonstrating how that initiative contributes to the trust measures, as well as being accountable for how that initiative contributes to Wellbeing measures. Otherwise we’ll continue to see a lack of systemic pressure to drive the intended outcomes.

  • The ICT sector doubles its economic contribution to GDP by 2030 – (please include the number) 
  • All significant government services are designed inclusively, and have omni-channel options (online, phone and in person options) to ensure New Zealanders are fully supported
  • New Zealanders increasingly feel safe online (target)
  • More secondary school students are taking technology standards (or, just make it part of the core curriculum so you get 100% coverage?)
  • The numbers of tech-related graduates increases (and number of multidisciplinary, why not have tech literacy in most degrees?)
  • Our small businesses are more digitally capable (as measured by the SME Digital Index).
  • Government entities are more digitally capable (as measured by the same SME Digital Index)
  • New Zealand will boast 100,000 highly skilled IT and digital professionals across the economy by 2030 including to double the capacity within government to ensure enough internal expertise to deliver, to innovation, and to engage expertly with the broader tech sector.
  • Wellbeing target measures to improve quality of life for all people.

Opportunities for Māori – feedback

  1. Shared governance – rather than just building Te Ao Māori into frameworks, why won’t government agencies actually share governance with Māori?
  2. Government could provide support for self-sovereign systems for Māori to manage digital taonga, in line with Te Tiriti
  3. Government could provide interoperability with Māori self-sovereign systems where appropriate, including for identity solutions
  4. Government could ensure all services and policies are co-governed with Māori
  5. Government should use Te Tiriti as a framework for the digital strategy, and ensure all “digital whenua” is co-governed

Components that underpin our digital environment – feedback

I suggest adding the following, which are critical components for a digitally inclusive, equitable and consistent ecosystem.

  • Digital and Service Standards – to ensure consistency of high quality, inclusively designed and well supported public services.
  • Trust infrastructure – the records keeping, public access, traceability back to law, independent oversight and participatory governance to ensure auditability, appealable and trustworthy systems.
  • Digital government should include a digital public infrastructure, a digital twin of government, including legislation/regulation as code, all of government modelling, measurement and monitoring, the structures, functions, authorities and policies of government available as code, and reusable government as a platform components that the broader economy and society can rely upon and build upon.
  • Public reporting – all government reporting will be done publicly, including compliance to the algorithmic charter, digital service standard reports, policy and service measurements, and other areas of compliance and oversight, unless there is a national security consideration

Opportunities to improve trust – feedback

  • The opening paragraph paints a rosy picture that does not align to the Wellbeing Measures, which say the Media is trued by less than 50% of the population, and the Parliament only slightly more. There is more trust for the people, health system and courts than for the media and parliament. In fact, declining trust has had real world implications, from vulnerability and social exclusion to vaccinations and public compliance. So surely improving that trust is key to a functional and cohesive democracy? Growing trust in both the public sector and 4th estate should be a key focus of this strategy.
  • The issues with social media are named, and yet the Strategy doesn’t address the problem with any tactics. What are the “trust settings” mentioned?
    1. The embedding of ethics into technology sounds good, but if the government funding, budgets, business cases, grants, taxation and full financial management system doesn’t have “ethical” measures or requirements, let alone Wellbeing or human measures of success, then “cheapest” will continue to be considered proxy for “value for money”. Where are the digital rules to be able to get consistency of implementation and monitoring for how rules are being applied for adverse patterns, etc? Rather than seeking social licence, why not build a social contract, and build more trustworthy systems that protect privacy and dignity while also providing better services, through techniques such as verifiable claims, confidentialised computing, and user consent driven federated approaches to data, including integration with self-sovereign data sources from community-led data initiatives.
    2. Where is the strategy, guidance and approach for full stack security for NZ? How is national connectivity assured and monitored? Where is the all of system monitoring and patterns analysis? How are service analytics being used as a first line of defence?
    3. What “work is underway” across government to help people understand what can and can’t be trusted? This seems key but no details are present.
    4. Customer centric services would great but digital government is more than digital services. What is the strategy and investment approach for digital public infrastructure, how is policy being made more agile and real time, how is government monitoring itself for human measures of success for all policies and services, where are the digital regulations and digital legislation, and where are the reusable government systems or service components to make it easy for everyone else to build upon government as a platform? 

Inclusion section – feedback

  • It isn’t just about tools, services and skills. It needs to include participatory approaches to designing, delivering and managing public policies and services. This means the public sector should implement the new Public Service Act requirements to engage New Zealanders in the processes around design and delivery of the services and policies that impact upon and support them.
  • Anyone and everyone, given the wrong set of circumstances, will need or will want to choose supported services (phone, in person, through a trusted NGO, etc) if they are struggling with great complexity or some form of vulnerability. For instance, a person who recently had an accident might prefer to deal with a person because they are worried they might get their online applications wrong. Or a person who is escaping a domestic violence situation might be more comfortable getting services through CAB or a refuge than coming directly to government in the first instance. The notion that only people with a disability need support is both patronising to people with a disability, and missing the critical aspect of choice, preference or different types of service for different points in time. Inclusive services means designing government services that give people a choice, and provide the wrap around support for anyone if they need or choose it, as well as providing support through third parties.

To address social exclusion, I suggest you adopt all the recommendations from the Citizen Advice Bureau recent submission here https://www.cab.org.nz/assets/Documents/Face-to-Face-with-Digital-Exclusion-/FINAL-CABNZ-collated-submission-to-Petitions-Committee.pdf.

Growth section – feedback

There needs to be strategic investment in computer science as an area of hypothesis led research, looking at national issues. The regular use of computer science as just a means to commercialise something misses the critical need for research into bleeding edge and emergent opportunities/challenges as a critical pipeline for innovation across all sectors. Such research and input is also critical to inform government policies, services, infrastructure and regulation in an evidence based and non commercially motivated way.

Goodbye Service Canada, and thank you for everything

I recently finished my last day working for Service Canada, and I wanted to capture and share the journey and accomplishments, as well as a few thanks to the excellent people I have had the pleasure and privilege to work with over the last couple of years. But let’s start at the beginning!

Every year since it started, I have attended FWD50 (coming up next month!), which is my favourite government conference in the world because it actually explores true transformation of the sector, with a laser like focus on creating public good. FWD50 isn’t just a conference, but a community of people committed to the journey of changing and transforming public sectors to be fit for purpose in the digital age, including policy, services, culture, legislation and all of it! I came over to Canada for FWD50 in November 2019, and I spoke with several people about potentially working for the Canadian Government. I was invited by Benoit Long to present to his team about Government as a Platform and some of the other themes from my 2019 FWD50 talk, where I had presented the Public Service Pia Review and he talked to me about his vision for true transformation at ESDC (Employment and Social Development Canada).

I was subsequently hired under the “Interchange Canada” program (which itself is a wonderful Canadian Government innovation) as part of an ambitious and visionary agenda at ESDC, called the “Benefits Delivery Modernisation” (BDM) programme. BDM aims to achieve service excellence, policy agility, and a genuinely transformed organisation. It is rare you see an agenda that even vaguely scratches the surface of systemic transformation, but BDM is just such a programme. The breadth and ambitious scope of vision, and the commitment to change, reaches into every part of ESDC and is supported up to the very top of the leadership chain. It has been a highlight of my career so far not just to contribute to such a magnificent change agenda, but also to work with and learn from exceptional people all around me, at ESDC and beyond. I will always be thankful for the growth opportunity, support, encouragement and trust I have had at ESDC, thank you all so much. It is extremely hard to leave, but almost two years of sleep deprivation finally caught up with me, and my family and I look forward to being able to live a little more normal a life, without the 2am and 3am starts that extend into the weekend 🙂

I wanted to share a little about what we achieved in a couple of years:

  • We researched, defined and designed the framework and vision for a digital channel for Service Canada, both the service itself as well as the capabilities and operating model to ensure continuous and responsive improvements, innovation and user centricity. We also achieved organisational wide support for this framework, no small feat! We wanted to have a minimum viable capability to both deliver and then operate the digital channel for Service Canada, with continuous design, experimentation, effective feedback loops for client and staff input, and a CX pipeline and robust channel(s) management, all built into the business as usual operating model to tie it all together.
  • We worked with our colleagues to establish an omni-channel principle and service approach from day one, with the intent to manage Service Canada channels in a holistic way to ensure equitable and equally high quality of service, regardless of the channel of need or choice. 
  • Part of our framework was a clear purpose for the digital channel, namely:

To deliver a dignified, user-centric, responsive and integrated digital journey that delights, empowers and motivates people to get what they are entitled to.

Digital Channel Roadmap for BDM, 2020
  • Each part of that purpose was backed by definitions, metrics, strategies and clear deliverables. This purpose statement acts as both a sword to carve out our path into new territory, as well as a shield to ensure new ideas always are tested against and not diminishing any aspect of our purpose.
  • At the end of 2020 I spoke at FWD50 (again), and presented the vision, approach and progress we had made on defining, designing and planning a digital channel for Service Canada. At this stage we had grown a little, but were still in “Programme Definition” stage, so the fun delivery work was largely yet to begin.  
  • Early 2020 we all transitioned from the planning phase to ”Tranche 1” (delivery!) and continued to build out the team, starting with the original and excellent 8 staff (with a little external support) that I joined at the beginning of 2020, and we grew to over 140 people, a health combination of staff with service integrators, working together as one team. Over the last 2 years we have grown DECD into a formidable team, described by our ADM as “a rockstar team with arguably the best digital talent ever assembled in Canada” 🙂
  • We took the Government of Canada Digital Standards and built them out to a full process and assurance model, pegged to Service Design of course.
  • We launched an early deliverable, “Service Canada Labs”, to create an open way of inviting and recruiting the Canadian general public to contribute formally (or informally) to the design of their experience with Service Canada, and to test early concepts or services openly in the public. It also gave us a good dress rehearsal for delivering a product live in ESDC. 
  • We established the first ever Life Journey Program in the Government of Canada (that we know of!) to help understand and build our services to be sensitive to and helpful for the context of what a person is going through in their life. A huge thank you, as always, to the New Zealand Government, especially the SmartStart and End of Life services team for showing the way on the value of life journey based services.
  • Our team worked closely with the procurement teams to establish an innovative first for ESDC, and first potentially for the Government of Canada. We created a sprints-based procurement model, where we brought in delivery teams who had a combination of fixed and variable members, who work with internal product managers and product owners to an internally controlled backlog. This allows for multi-scrum product delivery, as well as flexibility for the vendor to swap out the variable team members to draw in expertise relevant to the particular sprint or product as it evolves over time. This also helps to ensure longer term decision making and client-centric design with accountability staying with the department, which is critical for a digital channel so that the department truly manages the direct relationship and interface with clients. The Australian Government Department of Finance did this a few years back, and it was also successful, enabling genuine partnership, with internal and external delivery teams working as one product team.
  • We had two Code for Canada teams join us to explore new areas of public sector reform. The two teams were Team Babel who created the world’s first “Policy Difference Engine” to explore, test and understand the real impact of policy changes. This has been a 10 year dream for me (with a hat tip to Lovelace and Babbage of course) so it was very exciting to see Team Babel bring it to life! The second project was Team TOAD who explored ways to meaningfully support a client online, not just in the short term, but into the future, with a wonderful combination of service design and speculative design, they created a first iteration product that is being testing with real users right now 🙂 We incorporated C4C into our program not just to explore some new areas, but to help shape how we bring design and dev together, and by having C4C teams join us every 2 years we will be able to plan a way to help ensure new eyes and fresh thinking on the many challenges to delivering highly ethical and excellent social services to Canadians.
  • Finally, we were pathfinders for several new capabilities for ESDC that will serve the department, and the people of Canada, well into the future. We established growing practices in product management, service design, multidisciplinary product teams (where IT was embedded rather than separate to the “business”) and omni-channel management, working closely with the newly formed CX capability in ESDC, and along with all the other capabilities required to run and continuously improve services.
  • Finally, we established a strong culture of being always the kindest, calmest person in the room, and working openly and collaboratively with all our partners and colleagues across the department. It is the team itself that I am most proud of, and I will continue to be a big fan from outside the department! 

I want to briefly say a few thank yous to my Service Canada friends:

  • To the initial 8, thank you for making me feel so welcome and for coming on this epic journey with me, with open hearts and open minds. We have achieved much together! Thank you!
  • To everyone who joined the team, thank you for contributing to the culture, ethics and delivery needed to create a digital channel for Service Canada. Every one of you has extraordinary talent, experience and heart to bring to the table, and I can’t wait to see you deliver the digital channel late next year!
  • A big thank you especially to Meg, Nicolas-Benoit, Grace, Wafa and all who contributed to DG Office, for all your support, care and help!
  • To Benoit Long and Tammy Belanger, my ADMs, thank you for trusting and supporting me and the DECD team, and for supporting the vision we developed together.
  • To all my colleagues across BDM, thank you for being amazing to work with and for engaging in the quest for what is best for all the people and communities of Canada.
  • To my fellow “vertical leads”, with whom I shared delivery accountabilities and who are, each one of them, inspiring and wonderful. Thank you for sharing, teaching and collaborating so closely and with such integrity every day.
  • To Martin Duggan, whose integrity, commitment and passion for better social services and systems around the world was inspiring. We collaborated, learned from each other, and enjoyed an occasional spar, but I truly enjoyed working with you Martin 🙂
  • To Nada and Brad, who showed selfless kindness at a period of enormous personal stress. Nada for when we moved into our house and needed help with some furniture, and Brad for driving us to Montreal to get on the plane at short notice, when we realised Ottawa airport was closed from COVID!  
  • And finally, I need to say thank you to my family, because without their support, this would not have been possible.
  • I have just one more thank you, but it requires some context…

On a personal note, the journey has been epic journey from the start. When I joined ESDC, I worked remotely from Australia for a couple of months before we travelled to Canada. This involved horrendous hours but I reassured my family it was just a temporary temporal displacement, words I later had to eat 🙂 We moved to Canada in February and had one week to familiarise ourselves with Ottawa, then one week in the office meeting my fabulous initial team of 8, before the COVID-19 lockdown started, and my family found ourselves physically and socially isolated in a hotel, in a new country. We had just a couple of friends and one family outside of work, with just the one set of kids in that family that had befriended our little one. Otherwise she knew no one and felt very alone in this new country stuck with only her parents. We struggled along until we moved into a lovely home about 5 weeks in. Globally, people were starting to be encouraged to return to their country of origin, with just a hint of the global shutdown that was yet to occur, but we were just relieved to have somewhere to live, and had committed to staying in Canada for 3 years. That intent was unexpectedly interrupted when our little one decided to ride her scooter off a step, crashing face first into the pavement, resulting in an immediate series of disruptive moves. The family above continued to show us great kindness over the subsequent couple of years, so I wanted to finish this post with the biggest thank you of all to Julie and Z (and your wonderful girls!), thank you both so much for everything. We couldn’t have done it (and stayed sane) without you, and we can’t wait, some day, to share a meal again someday, this time at our place 🙂 

So to complete this story, which I know is just one of 7 billion 2020/2021 COVID stories, we are actually thankful for the opportunities, the experience, and the kindness and support we have had along the way. From work, friends, family and even from strangers. There are many that have had a much, MUCH worse experience over the last two years, and for all the disruption we have experienced, at least we have had a lot of support and have come through it with our health, our sanity, and with each other.

I’m looking forward to some rest and reflection, and a new professional chapter, with so much learned and achieved from serving with this incredible team in Canada. I’ll miss you all, but will be delighted to continue to contribute to public service transformation, perhaps here in Aotearoa New Zealand 🙂

Trust, truth & authenticity (in Aotearoa NZ)

Background: When I got back to Aotearoa, having worked in NSW and Canadian Governments in the interim, I thought it might be helpful to share some insights and comparison of the service delivery models of Service NSW, Service Canada and the New Zealand Government. My goal was to share what truly integrated services can look like 🙂 The paper ended up also going into proposing a “Service Aotearoa” model, and inevitably touched upon challenges around public trust and the trustworthiness of public services and public institutions. This first paper is available here for folk interested and was framed around two problem areas, namely that fractured, inconsistent and confusing service delivery is ineffective at meeting and adapting to the diverse needs of New Zealanders; and trust and truth needed to make successful policy and operate services effectively.

When the NZ Government Justice Committee Inquiry into the 2020 General Election and Referendum was calling for submissions, I thought the issues of trust and trustworthiness might be helpful to contribute, especially with the rise and weaponisation of deep fakes, which will very likely affect coming elections globally. Of course, public trust is directly impacted by the public’s experience with the public sector, which is heavily influenced by their experience with services, so the Service Aotearoa model mode it into that paper 🙂

The full paper I submitted to the Justice Committee is available here, and key excerpts are copied below for convenience. I’ve included the introduction, problem statements, and final word on why these problems are urgent to consider. Some proposed solutions and the service delivery models analysis is in the appendix of the paper 🙂

Introduction

This submission was prepared by Pia Andrews on one of the themes of the 2020 Election Inquiry, namely:

Theme 2.  The integrity and security of our electoral system in light of emerging challenges, with a particular focus on technology and social media.

From the terms of reference for the Inquiry into the 2020 General Election and Referendum

The submission touches upon topics beyond this theme, and beyond the 4 themes outlined for the 2020 Election Inquiry. It addresses the impact of new technologies such as “deepfakes” and increasingly self referential social media echo chambers of misinformation, and goes further to address the key challenges of trust, truth and authenticity in the 21st century, and subsequent impact on electoral integrity. 

The New Zealand General Election is a core tenet for representative democracy with free and fair elections that have the trust and respect of the community. This supports a civil society where the Government may exercise power with the explicit consent and social contract with the electorate. The public sector in New Zealand has a special role in providing a social, regulatory and financial platform upon which the community and individuals should be able to economically, socially, culturally and environmentally thrive. However, the increasing gap between the needs of New Zealanders in a digitally enabled, globalised and artificial intelligence world, and the inability of the public sector to proactively identify, respond to and holistically meet those evolving needs, creates a negative impact on public trust and confidence that can quickly extend to declining trust in public and democratic institutions. 

The public sector delivery of an effective response to COVID, in partnership with the team of five million New Zealanders, initially drove public trust in some parts of the community to record levels. This trust enabled one of the world’s most effective responses, but is already declining. For trust is to be sustained and channelled into adapting to an increasingly uncertain post COVID world, there needs to be a conscious effort to address and prioritise public trust and confidence in public institutions. 

If one part of the public sector is considered untrustworthy by the communities served, then we all are at risk of the serious implications of reduced public confidence and trust across the board. Reduced public confidence in the public sector leads to people simply not trusting, engaging with or respecting as legitimate the services, policies, laws or democratic outcomes administered by the public sector.

For this reason, the recommendations identified in this paper, whilst relevant to electoral integrity, go well beyond the mandate of the Electoral Commission. In the author’s view, even a strong Electoral Commission will not be able to maintain public trust or confidence in the New Zealand electoral system if trust in the broader public sector continues to decline.

My thanks to Thomas Andrews, Sean Audain, Brenda Wallace, Hamish Fraser, James Ting-Edwards and others who helped edit and peer review this submission. I hope it provides useful context, ideas and discussion points to help with future elections, but also to contribute in some small way to reforming the New Zealand Central Government public sector for the benefit of the people and communities of New Zealand Aotearoa.

The problem areas: an overview

The paper focuses on two key problem areas, both of which apply to the electoral integrity theme above and to the public sector more broadly: 

  1. Problem 1: Authenticity and truth – people tend to believe what they see and are grappling with the way computers can convey misleading information. Deep fake technology can automate the creation of believable videos of anyone saying anything – no matter how offensive or outrageous. We are about to enter a very dark age where individuals, governments and communities are increasingly and proactively “gamed” or “played” en masse for profit, crime, sabotage or even just for fun. Beyond the authenticity of information, facts, fiction and fakes coexist online, and citizens are increasingly struggling to navigate truth. On one hand, one person’s truth is another’s lie, but there are possibly some better ways to help support citizens and communities to navigate truth in the 21st century, and to help populate the public domain with robust and trustworthy data and facts, where and when they exist. 
  2. Problem 2: Trust in public institutions – Governments and public sectors the world over are facing an impending trust and confidence crisis, and must carefully and collaboratively engage on the question of what structures, processes, oversight and forms of transparency and public scrutiny would be considered trustworthy by the public today. Otherwise, public institutions will lose trust, as will the democratic outcomes, social and economic services, policies and laws that they uphold.

The recommendations in this submission aim to help create a sustainable pathway and meaningful progress on these two problem areas in the short to medium future, in advance of and in preparation for the next general election. The New Zealand public service is far from alone in emerging from the COVID-19 crisis into a world that has experienced profound changes. Internationally, these changes have led to a clear divergence in strategy between:

  1. governments who desire a “return to a pre COVID normal”; versus
  2. governments for whom “return to normal” is considered infeasible, undesirable or unwise, and seek instead to transform themselves in response to new economic, social and climate realities. 

Governments in the latter category are prioritising major policy, structural and service delivery reform to ensure greater policy agility and improved quality of life outcomes. This crisis is a key motivator for writing this discussion paper to encourage the New Zealand Government and public sector to discuss immediate and systemic reforms and consciously decide whether New Zealand intends to “return to normal” or genuinely “build back better”. 

Key recommendations in this submission fall under two high level proposals, both of which would include a range of initiatives:

  • Proposal 1: That the New Zealand Government establishes a Taskforce to understand what New Zealanders need to better navigate truth and authenticity and explore the potential role(s) of the public sector, fourth estate and other sectors in supporting this, now and into the future.
  • Proposal 2: That the New Zealand Government establishes a program [which includes building trustworthy governance, decision making and infrastructure, as well as building trustworthy public services] to improve and safeguard the trust of New Zealanders in public institutions, including the critical establishment of participatory and trustworthy governance that improves quality of life for New Zealanders.

Please see the problem areas and respective proposals outlined below. 

Problem 1: the general public has decreasing means of effectively navigating truth and authenticity online

A key problem facing democracy and electoral integrity internationally is the growing reach and sophistication of misinformation and deepfake technologies in a context of declining trust in information institutions (such as news media, science, academia and public sectors). These concepts are not simply headline-grabbing or political soundbites imported from other jurisdictions. They are serious and growing challenges to truth, and are increasingly being used for gaming public opinion by foreign and domestic actors (human and machine), with very few mechanisms to effectively counter or mitigate the effects thereof. We can consider misinformation and the dissemination thereof, as two problems:

“At a US Senate intelligence committee hearing in May last year, the Republican senator Marco Rubio warned that deepfakes would be used in “the next wave of attacks against America and western democracies”. Rubio imagined a scenario in which a provocative clip could go viral on the eve of an election, before analysts were able to determine it was a fake.

“Democracies appear to be gravely threatened by the speed at which disinformation can be created and spread via social media, where the incentive to share the most sensationalist content outweighs the incentive to perform the tiresome work of verification” (Parkin, 2019).

Parkin, S. The Rise of Deepfake the the Threat to Democracy, (2019), The Guardian

The New Zealand Law Society commissioned a report into deepfakes in 2019 (Distorting Reality: Deepfakes and the Rise of Deception), which has a range of recommendations worth considering but it also makes the point that the main threat is from international and machine/AI sources, so domestic laws will not provide much protection.

The issues of truth and trust are integral to the relationship between government and citizens, and as seen from developments in other democracies, and the threats from digital deep fakes, social media misinformation campaigns and similar technologies has become a realised and growing danger. In the past we have relied upon independent media institutions and broadcasting controls to identify and mitigate these risks but with the disruption and bypassing of these channels through self-reinforcing social media echo chambers online, combined with exponential growth in misinformation, it is clear that the implications for future elections, public messaging, public policy and social cohesion are potentially dire. The question for government is what role, if any, should the public sector or the judiciary play in trying to support citizens to navigate these treacherous waters? 

It is critical to start this work as soon as possible, so that New Zealand is in a position to have a well supported general public (or at least means to support the general public) prior to the next election, which will likely be rife with deep fakes that will create chaos for public dialogue, civility and perceived electoral integrity. Such misinformation also creates profound security threats, and whilst our intelligence agencies have traditionally provided a degree of protection against such threats, the highly permeable, borderless and individual worlds created by social media suggest that partnership with more community based methods will be required to ensure the sector can continue to meet the challenge of higher order threats to New Zealand’s security.

Problem 2: Proactively building public trust in public institutions is important to social, economic and democratic stability in New Zealand

Public sectors globally are struggling to shift from simply seeking permission (or social licence), to actually operating in a more trustworthy way. This means reimagining public institutions and governance in the digital age to take into account the impact, opportunities and challenges of the internet, of increasingly empowered individuals and communities, of economic and cultural globalisation, and of greater public expectations for effective and human centred public services. In an era also characterised by increasing change and rolling emergencies (pandemics, environmental, terrorism, regional instability, cyber threats, etc), it is critical and urgent to improve and stabilise trust in public institutions, and establish participatory, trustworthy and beneficial (to society) governance that people can rely upon with confidence. This includes necessarily reimagining and transforming the public sector to be holistic, proactive, collaborative and citizen-centric. To enable this stability and advancement, the public must be able to trust in a public sector that conducts itself on a reliable, referenceable and transparent foundation of truth and trustworthy accountability. 

Operating in a trustworthy way means first acknowledging that the public needs to be confident in public servants’ decisions and actions to be able to trust the outcomes of our efforts. To operate in a trustworthy way, the public should be engaged up front in co-designing what “good” would look like, which would necessarily involve public visibility to the accountability, transparency and oversight mechanisms of governance. This includes ease of appealability and auditability of government policies, services, regulations and programs, and parity across the system. One department operating in a way that erodes public trust has a net trust deficit impact on all public institutions, so certain norms must prevail across the sector. For instance, taxation rules are quite easy to find and apply, and yet entitlement and eligibility of social services are hard to determine and are kept more obscure. Another example is how some statistics are readily available to the public, but the respective success metrics and reporting of individual programs and policies is far harder to find. 

Public institutions exist to support public good and quality of life, so there should never be a stronger imperative than ensuring and promoting that New Zealanders get the support and services they are eligible for and entitled to. Yet, we often see short term pressures (like reduced or reprioritised budgets, failing IT systems or the latest Ministerial priority) drive a lot of reactive behaviours and short term planning in the public sector. It is critical that the public sector always take the long view and plan resources accordingly. It is important that the public sector equally serve the Government of the day, the Parliament and the People, in a balanced, independent and sustainable way that maintains the trust of them all.

The concept of public infrastructure as it relates to public health, public education and public transport is fairly well understood, but where is the public digital infrastructure that our communities and various sectors should be able to rely upon and trust? For instance, where is the publicly available reference implementation of machine readable legislation and regulation for ease of service delivery, compliance and public scrutiny? Or the list of all public services with the respective eligibility and calculation information? Or the proactive and public modelling tools to understand the impact of change or emergencies? Where is the publicly accessible record of key decisions and actions taken, with traceability to their legal or policy authority? There is so much confidence the public sector could inspire by simply working more in the light, and less in darkness. To be fair, much of the opaqueness of governance is simply a matter of habit and inherited practices, but the lack of genuine systemic transformation has led us to a point where the New Zealand public sector is, as a whole, several steps behind the society and economy it purports to serve.

Public sector services must also be considered trustworthy, as citizens want to feel supported, empowered, respected and confident in the public sector to help them when they need it. Reform of public sector services is a critical part of ensuring and growing public trust in public institutions. Modern government is complex in any dimension, be it scale, number of services or processes followed. As the public sector seeks to embrace tools like AI to deliver outcomes and greater value to taxpayers, it is important to understand how these technologies interact with NZ laws and institutions. In this respect, New Zealand would be better served by an informed democracy than it would be by just a data driven governance. In aiming for an informed and participatory democracy, the explainability and transparency of a decision is a key building block. 

Explainability and transparency of AI and data analytics components is vital to understanding issues of bias, exception and application within these decision making processes and are critical to upholding the principles of Administrative Law in an increasingly technologically powered public sector. In short the advice and actions of the public service derived from digital tools must be able to be seen and explained. Capturing and assuring the explainability of a decision or action taken by the public service is critical for the ability to audit, appeal, and maintain both the reality and perception of integrity of our public institutions. It is also critical for ensuring the actions and decisions are lawful, permitted, correctly executed and properly recorded for posterity. It is also important to ensure and regularly test the end-to-end explainability and capture of decisions and information for the work done in the public sector, especially where it relates to anything that directly impacts people — like social services, taxation, justice, regulation, or penalties. Moves like the Algorithm Charter from StatsNZ are only a first step to addressing these issues.

To be a trusted advisor for an informed democracy, the public sector has ALWAYS required to explain administrative decision-making. It also means a high requirement on public servants to differentiate fact from fiction. Administrative Law principles require that decision-makers only make decisions within their delegated power, take into account relevant evidence, and provide their decision together with reasons and authority for the decision and avenue for appeal. The public sector is uniquely experienced and obligated in this respect. The public service challenge is to mobilise this experience and ensure the principle and practice of Administrative Law is upheld in an increasingly complex technologically and data-driven public sector.

As we plan for the potential impacts enter the age of Artificial Intelligence, public sectors should also be actively planning what an augmented society and public sector looks like, one that embeds values, trust and accountability at the heart of what we do, whilst using machines to support better responsiveness, modelling, service delivery and to maintain diligent and proactive protection of the people, whānau and communities we serve. There is a serious opportunity to combine modern tools with participatory governance to reimagine and humanise government policies and services. As it stands, the incremental and iterative implementations of new technologies, including most AI projects, are likely to deliver more inhuman and mechanised public services. New Zealand risks missing the opportunity to design a modern public service that gets the best of humans and machines working together for the best public and community outcomes. The worst possible outcome is to be continually playing catch-up against the rapidly evolving misinformation technologies that already exist and which have already been deployed against the general population.

There has been recent precedent on the legitimacy of automated decision making and auditability in the Australian courts. In late 2018 the landmark court case of (Joe Pintarich v Deputy Commissioner of Taxation) ruled that an automated piece of correspondence was not considered a ‘decision’ because there was no mental process accompanying it. This creates a question of legitimacy for all machine-generated decisions in Australia as was stated in substantial detail by the dissenting judge. But it should also be a major driver for agencies to invest in and mandate explainability for all significant decision-making, recorded for posterity, so that decisions can be trusted. 

The important work to transform the public sector to operate in a more trustworthy way would result in open, engaged, auditable and fair government for the digital age, with high quality and trusted services that provide a dignified experience for New Zealanders and a genuine increase in public trust and confidence in public institutions. This would position government sectors, services, policies and capabilities as trusted and adaptive foundations of New Zealand’s future.

The Proposals

The proposals in full are in the full paper I submitted to the Justice Committee is, available here. Below is the high level overview of proposals to the problem statements above:

Proposal 1: establish a Taskforce or programme to understand needs and develop strategies for supporting New Zealanders to navigate truth and authenticity online, ahead of the next election

Below are some specific recommendations a Taskforce could consider for the next election and beyond::

  • It would clearly be impossible to provide a service to verify the authenticity of all information on the internet for citizens. The scale of new content being generated, by humans and increasingly by bots and software, is impossible to manage through traditional escalation and review methods. But there are some types of information that could be made available in a more verifiable way, for example official or political content. The Electoral Commission could provide a realtime electoral, political and public sector messages/information validation service. Citizens could use such a service to check the authenticity/source of political and official messages about the next election and to distinguish deep fakes from authentic official materials. This can be complemented with public awareness campaigns.
  • Provide education services, directly and in partnership with trusted community entities and organisations, with a campaign to raise public awareness about misinformation, deep fakes and the increasing likelihood of being actively gamed by domestic and international actors, especially around election time. f 
  • The Electoral Commission could engage with, and support, trusted and community initiatives that identify and mitigate misinformation, such as the recent efforts by Tohatoha and other organisations in New Zealand. Ideally this would be done in collaboration with the Fourth Estate to help rapidly debunk emergent misinformation campaigns quickly for and to the general public.
  • The New Zealand Government could consider all information for which the public sector is authoritative, to be mandated as being publicly available for reuse, for validation and to help contribute facts and data to the public domain.
  • It is worth noting the New Zealand Police and intelligence agencies already monitor for and engage with the community around misinformation, as it is directly linked to security threats and radicalisation efforts. Some of the intelligence from these operations could potentially feed into broader public engagement efforts early, as they are likely in a position to identify early patterns of misinformation. The Taskforce could work with the NZ Police and intelligence agencies to consider the flow of information and early patterns and indicators of misinformation and better leverage these systems and operations for broader public engagement and support services.
  • The people of New Zealand have a broad range of independent organisations they trust and engage with every day. If the New Zealand Government collaborated with and shared information, patterns, and insights to entities and organisations that the public trust, including Iwis, public libraries, and Citizen Advice Bureaus, it would help them support their communities navigate truth and authenticity. Such information services would need to be constrained to factual information because if such a pipeline of information was set up and used in any way for political or ideologically motivated information sharing, then those organisations would disengage entirely.

Proposal 2: A programme of public sector reforms to improve and safeguard the trust of New Zealanders in public institutions

In order to grow and sustain public trust, the public sector needs to be more accessible, transparent, responsive to and engaged with the people and whānau served. Generating trust is difficult and complex due to collective experiences, and the personal nature of relationships that trust is built from. Trust in the public sector could be dramatically improved in two key ways, both of which apply to the Electoral Commission, but must also apply across all portfolios:

2.1 – Establish and implement dramatically more trustworthy and participatory practices and governance of public institutions, public policies and public services, that takes into account and plans for modern and emerging technologies, increasing change of community needs and the environment in which we live, and the need to partner with people and communities in shaping policies and services.

2.2 Dramatically improve the quality, availability and delivery of public services to the people and communities of New Zealand, to better serve people and ensure they get the help they need and are entitled to.

Last word: What changed? Why is this urgent now?

Public sectors around the world are facing increasing challenges as the speed, scale and complexity of modern life grows exponentially. The 21st century is known as the anthropocene – as large, complex and globalised systems enmesh our societies on a scale unseen in previous history. The 20th century saw a global population rise from 1.6 billion to 6 billion, two world wars that spurred the creation of global power and economic structures as well as enduring global divisions, and the number of nations rose from 77 to almost 200. The twentieth century also saw the emergence of a global middle class, an enormous increase in living standards and the emergence of the internet and digital technologies. These global megatrends have changed the experience, connectivity, access to knowledge, and empowerment of individual people everywhere. As humanity has bound itself together in integrated global systems this has also integrated the shocks and stresses experienced by those systems into global experiences such as climate change, COVID19 and fundamental restructurings of the global economy. The public sector must continue to serve in this evolving, integrated context leading to new challenges for democracies worldwide.

The public sector has an important role in a society like New Zealand Aotearoa not only to a) serve democracy, but also to b) support a high quality of life for New Zealand, and c) maintain economic and social balance through various types of direct and indirect regulation, services, and public infrastructure. It  is therefore critical that we take a moment to consider the role(s) of the public sector in the 21st century, and whether there are any new areas of need that the public service could play a unique role in supporting or regulating.

“Traditional” approaches to policy, service delivery and regulation were designed in an analog and industrial age and are increasingly slow and ineffective, with increasingly hard to predict outcomes and unintended consequences given the dramatic increase of complexity and interdependency today. The functional separation between policy and implementation over recent decades further compounded these issues, and created unnecessarily siloed operations with limitations on end to end visibility of policy delivery. Most public sectors are now simply unable to meet the changing needs of the people and communities we serve at the speed of change with any level of certainty or agility. Decades of austerity, hollowing out expertise, fragmentation of interdependent functions that are forced to compete, outsourcing and the inevitable growing existential crisis have all left public sectors less prepared than ever, at a time when people most need us. Public sectors have become too reactive, constantly pivoting all efforts to the latest emergency, media release or Ministerial whim, whilst not investing in baseline systems/capabilities, transformation, programs or new services that are needed to be proactive and resilient. 

Policy and delivery folk should be hand in hand throughout the entire process and the baton passing between functionally segmented teams must end.

COVID has been a dramatic reminder of the broad ineffectiveness of government systems to respond to rapidly changing needs, in three (3) distinct ways. We saw:

  1. the heavy use of emergency powers relied upon to get anything of substance done, demonstrating key systemic barriers, but rather than changing the problematic business as usual processes, many are reverting to usual practice as soon as practical. 
  2. superhuman efforts that barely scratched the surface of the problems. The usual resourcing response to pressure it to just increase resources rather than to change how we respond to the problem, but there are not exponential resources available, so ironically, 
  3. inequities have been compounded by governments pressing on the same old levers with the same old processes without being able to measure, monitor and iterative or pivot in real time in response to the impacts of change.

With COVID driving an unprecedented amount of change in public sectors globally, it makes sense to consider machinery of government assumptions and what “good” looks like in the 21st century. 

In late 2020, there was a major UNDP summit called NextGenGov, where all attendees reflected the same sentiment that public sectors need significant reform to be effective and responsive to rolling emergencies moving forward. Dr Sania Nishtar (Special Assistant to the Prime Minister of Pakistan on Poverty Alleviation and Social Protection) put it best:

‘it is neither feasible nor desirable to return to pre-COVID status quo’. 

Something to reflect on, for all of us. It is a final and timely reminder that if we are to transform our public sectors to be trustworthy and fit for purpose in the 21st century, then we need to take just a little time to collaboratively design what “good” would look like for New Zealand Aotearoa, and by extension what is required from the public sector to support that vision. Otherwise we run the risk of continuously just playing whack-a-mole with emerging problems and reinventing the past with shiny new things.

Reflections on public sector transformation and COVID

Public sectors around the world are facing unprecedented challenges as the speed, scale and complexity of modern life grows exponentially. The 21st century is a large, complex, globalised and digital age unlike anything in the history of humans, but our systems of governance were largely forged in the industrial age. The 20th century alone saw enough change to merit a rethink: global population rose from 1.6 billion to 6 billion, two world wars spurred the creation of global economic and power structures, the number of nations rose from 77 to almost 200, and of course we entered the age of electronics and the internet, changing forever the experience, connectivity, access to knowledge, and increased individual empowerment of people everywhere. Between Climate Change, COVID-19, and globalism, nations worldwide are also now preparing for the likelihood of rolling emergencies, whether health, environmental, economic or social.

“Traditional” approaches to policy, service delivery and regulation are too slow, increasingly ineffective and result in increasingly hard to predict outcomes, making most public sectors and governments increasingly unable to meet the changing needs of the communities we serve.

Decades of austerity, hollowing out expertise, fragmentation of interdependent functions that are forced to compete, outsourcing and the inevitable ensuing existential crises have all left public sectors less prepared than ever, at a the time when people most need us. Trust is declining and yet public sectors often feel unable to be authoritative sources of facts or information, independent of political or ideological influence, which exacerbates the trust and confidence deficit. Public sectors have become too reactive, too “business” focused, constantly pivoting all efforts on the latest emergency, cost efficiency, media release or whim of the Minister, whilst not investing in baseline systems, transformation, programs or services that are needed to be proactive and resilient. A values-based public sector that is engaged with, responsive to and serving the needs of (1) the Government, (2) the Parliament AND (3) the people – a difficult balancing act to be sure! – is critical, both to maintaining the trust of all three masters, and to being genuinely effective over time 🙂

Whether it is regulation, services or financial management, public sectors everywhere also need to embrace change as the new norm, which means our systems, processes and structures need to be engaged in continuously measuring, monitoring and responding to change, throughout the entire policy-delivery lifecycle. This means policy and delivery folk should be hand in hand throughout the entire process, so the baton passing between functionally segmented teams can end.

Faux transformation

Sadly today, most “transformation programs” appear to fall into one of three types:

  • Iteration or automation – iterative improvements, automation or new tech just thrown at existing processes and services, which doesn’t address the actual needs, systemic problems, or the gaping policy-delivery continuum chasm that has widened significantly in recent decades; or
  • Efficiency restructures – well marketed austerity measures to reduce the cost of government without actually improving the performance, policy outcomes or impact of government; or
  • Experimentation at the periphery – real transformation skills or units that are kept at the fringe and unable to drive or affect systemic change across any given public sector.

Most “transformation programs” I see are simply not particularly transformative, particularly when you scratch the surface to find how they would change things in future. If you answer is “we’ll have a new system” or “an x% improvement”, then it probably isn’t transformation, it is probably an iteration. Transformation should result in exponential solutions to exponential problems and a test driven and high confidence policy-delivery continuum that takes days not months for implementation, with the effects of new policies clearly seen through consistently measured, monitored and continuously improved delivery. You should have a clear and clearly understood future state in mind to transformation towards, otherwise it is certainly iteration on the status quo.

There are good exceptions to this normative pattern. Estonia, Taiwan, South Korea, Canada and several nations across South East Asia have and are investing in genuine and systemic transformation programs, often focused on improving the citizen experience as well as the quality of life of their citizens and communities. My favourite quote from 2020 was from Dr Sania Nishtar (Special Assistant to the Prime Minister of Pakistan on Poverty Alleviation and Social Protection) when she said ‘it is neither feasible nor desirable to return to the pre-COVID status’. It was part of a major UNDP summit on NextGenGov, where all attendees reflected the same sentiment that COVID exposed significant gaps in our public sectors, and we all need significant reform to be effective and responsive to rolling emergencies moving forward.

So what does good transformation look like?

I would categorise true transformation efforts in three types, with all three needed:

  1. Policy and service transformation means addressing and reimagining the policy-delivery continuum in the 21st century, and bringing policy and implementation people together in the same process and indeed, the same (virtual) room. This would mean new policies are better informed, able to be tested from inception through to implementation, are able to be immediately or at least swiftly implemented upon enactment in Parliament and are then continuously measured, monitored and iterated in accordance with the intended policy outcome. The exact same infrastructure used for delivery should be used for policy, and vice versa, to ensure there is no gap between, and to ensure policy outcomes are best realised whilst also responding to ongoing change. After all, when policy outcomes are not realized, regardless of whose fault it     was, it is everyone’s failure. This kind of transformation is possible within any one department or agency, but ideally needs leadership across all of government to ensure consistency of policy impact and benefits realisation.
  2. Organizational transformation would mean getting back to basics and having a clear vision of the purpose and intended impact of the department as a whole, with clear overarching measurement of those goals, and clear line of sight for how all programs contribute to those goals, and with all staff clear in how their work supports the goals. This type of transformation requires structural cultural transformation that builds on the shared values and goals of the department, but gains a consistency of behaviours that are constructive and empathetic. This kind of transformation is entirely possible within the domain of any one department or agency, if the leadership support and participate in it.
  3. Systemic transformation means the addressing and reimagining of the public sector as a whole, including its role in society, the structures, incentive systems, assurance processes, budget management, 21st century levers (like open government), staff support and relationship to other sectors. It also means having a clear vision for what it means to be a proud, empowered and skilled public servant today, which necessarily includes system and design thinking, participatory governance skills and digital literacy (not just skills). This can’t be done in any one department and requires all of public sector investment, coordination and cross government mandate. This level of transformation has started to happen in some countries but it is early days and needs prioritization if public sectors are to truly and systemically transform. Such transformation efforts often focus on structure, but need to include scope for transformation of policy, services, workforce, funding and more across government.

As we enter the age of Artificial Intelligence, public sectors should also be planning what an augmented public sector looks like, one that keeps values, trust and accountability at the heart of what we do, whilst using machines to support better responsiveness, modelling, service delivery and to maintain diligent and proactive protection of the people and communities we serve. Most AI projects seem to be about iterative efforts, automation or cost savings, which misses the opportunity to design a modern public service that gets the best of humans and machines working together for the best public outcomes.

COVID-19

COVID has been a dramatic reminder of the ineffectiveness of government systems to respond to changing needs in at least three distinct ways:

  • heavy use of emergency powers have been relied upon to get anything of substance done, demonstrating key systemic barriers, but rather than changing the problematic business as usual processes, many are reverting to usual practice as soon as practical;
  • superhuman efforts have barely scratched the surface of the problems. The usual resourcing response to pressure it to just increase resources rather than to change how we respond to the problem, but there are not exponential resources available, so ironically the
  • inequities have been compounded by governments pressing on the same old levers with the same old processes without being able to measure, monitor and iterative or pivot in real time in response to the impacts of change.

Sadly, the pressure for ‘good news stories’ often drives a self-congratulatory tone and an increase to an already siloed mindset, as public servants struggle to respond to increased and often diametrically opposed expectations and needs from the public and political domains. Many have also mistaken teleworking for transformation, potentially missing a critical opportunity to transform towards a 21st century public sector.

Last word

I’m planning to do a bit more writing about this, so please leave your comments and thoughts below. I’d be keen to hear how you differentiate transformation from iterative efforts, and how to ensure we are doing both. There is, of course, value to be found in some iterative efforts. It is when 100% of our time and effort is focused on iteration that we see public sectors simply revert to playing whack-a-mole against an exponentially growing problem space, hence the need to have SOME proportion of our resource on genuine transformation efforts. Proportional planning is critical so we address both the important and the urgent, not one without the other.

Sadly leaving the NSW Government

This week was sadly my last week with the NSW Government, Department of Customer Service, formerly the Department of Finance, Services and Innovation. I am sad to be leaving such an exciting place at such an exciting time, but after 12 months of commuting from Canberra to Sydney. The hardest part of working in the NSW Government has been, by far, the commute. I have been leaving my little family every week for 3, 4 or 5 days, and although we have explored possibilities to move, my family and I have to continue living in Canberra for the time being. It has got to the point where my almost 4 year old has asked me to choose her over work, a heart breaking scenario as many will understand. 

I wanted to publicly thank everyone I worked with, particularly my amazing teams who have put their heart, soul and minds to the task of making exceptional public services in an exceptional public sector. I am really proud of the two Branches I had the privilege and delight to lead, and I know whatever comes next, that those 160 or so individuals will continue to do great things wherever they go. 

I remain delighted and amazed at the unique opportunity in NSW Government to lead the way for truly innovative, holistic and user centred approaches to government. The commitment and leadership from William Murphy, Glenn King, Greg Wells, Damon Rees, Emma Hogan, Tim Reardon, Annette O’Callaghan, Michael Coutts-Trotter (and many others across the NSW Government senior executive) genuinely to my mind, has created the best conditions anywhere in Australia (and likely the world!) to make great and positive change in the public service.

I want to take a moment to also directly thank Martin Hoffman, Glenn, Greg, William, Amanda Ianna and all those who have supported me in the roles, as well as everyone from my two Branches over that 12 months for their support, belief and commitment. It has been a genuine privilege and delight to be a part of this exceptional department, and to see the incredible work across our Branches.

I have only been in the NSW Government for 12 months, and in that time was the ED for Digital Government Policy and Innovation for 9 months, and then ED Data, Insights and Transformation for a further 3 months.

In just 9 months, the Digital Government Policy and Innovation team achieved a lot in the NSW Government digital space, including:

  • Australia’s first Policy Lab (bringing agile test driven and user centred design methods into a traditional policy team),
  • the Digital Government Policy Landscape (mapping all digital gov policies for agencies) including IoT & a roadmap for an AI Ethics Framework and AI Strategy,
  • the NSW Government Digital Design Standard and a strong community of practice to contribute and collaborate, 
  • evolution of the Digital NSW Accelerator (DNA) to include delivery capabilities,
  • the School Online Enrolment system,
  • an operational and cross government Life Journeys Program (and subsequent life journey based navigators),
  • a world leading Rules as Code exemplars and early exploration of developing human and machine readable legislation from scratch(Better Rules),
  • establishment of a digital talent pool for NSW Gov,
  • great improvements to data.nsw and whole of government data policy and the Information Management Framework,
  • capability uplift across the NSW public sector including the Data Champions network and digital champions,
  • a prototype whole of government CX Pipeline,
  • the Innovation NSW team were recognised as one of Apolitical’s 100+ teams teaching government the skills of the future with a range of Innovation NSW projects including several Pitch to Pilot events, Future Economy breakfast series,
  • and the improvements to engagement/support we provided across whole of government.

For the last 3 months I was lucky to lead the newly formed and very exciting Data, Insights and Transformation Branch, which included the Data Analytics Centre, the Behavioural Insights Unit, and a new Transformation function to explore how we could design a modern public service fit for the 21st century. In only 3 months we

  • established a strong team culture, developed a clear cohesive work program, strategic objectives and service offerings,
  • chaired the ethics board for behavioural insights projects, which was a great experience, and
  • were seeing new interest, leads and engagement from agencies who wanted to engage with the Data Analytics Centre, Behavioural Insights Unit or our new Transformation function.

It was wonderful to work with such a fantastic group of people and I learned a lot, including from the incredible leadership team and my boss, William Murphy, who shared the following kind words about my leaving:

As a passionate advocate for digital and transformative approaches to deliver great public services, Pia has also been working steadily to deliver on whole-of-government approaches such as Government as a Platform, service analytics and our newly formed Transformation agenda to reimagine government.

Her unique and effective blend of systems thinking, technical creativity and vision will ensure the next stage in her career will be just as rewarding as her time with Customer Service has been.

Pia has made the difficult decision to leave Customer Service to spend more time with her Canberra-based family.

The great work Pia and her teams have done over the last twelve months has without a doubt set up the NSW digital and customer transformation agenda for success.

I want to thank her for the commitment and drive she has shown in her work with the NSW Government, and wish her well with her future endeavours. I’m confident her focus on building exceptional teams, her vision for NSW digital transformation and the relationships she has built across the sector will continue.

For my part, I’m not sure what will come next, but I’m going to have a holiday first to rest, and probably spend October simply writing down all my big ideas and doing some work on rules as code before I look for the next adventure.

Digital government: it all starts with open

This is a short video I did on the importance of openness for digital government, for the EngageTech Forum 2018. I’ve had a few people reuse it for other events so I thought I should blog it properly 🙂 Please see the transcript below. 

<Conference introductory remarks>

I wanted to talk about why openness and engagement is so critical for our work in a modern public service.

For me, looking at digital government, it’s not just about digital services, it’s about how we transform governments for the 21st century: how we do service delivery, engagement, collaboration, and how we do policy, legislation and regulation. How we make public services fit for purpose so they can serve you, the people, communities and economy of the 21st century.

For me, a lot of people think about digital and think about technology, but open government is a founding premise, a founding principle for digital government. Open that’s not digital doesn’t scale, and digital that’s not open doesn’t last. That doesn’t just mean looking at things like open source, open content and open APIs, but it means being open. Open to change. Being open to people and doing things with people, not just to people.

There’s a fundamental cultural, technical and process shift that we need to make, and it all starts with open.

<closing conference remarks>

Government as an API: how to change the system

A couple of months ago I gave a short speech about Gov as an API at an AIIA event. Basically I believe that unless we make government data, content and transaction services API enabled and mashable, then we are simply improving upon the status quo. 1000 services designed to be much better are still 1000 services that could be integrated for users, automated at the backend, or otherwise transformed into part of a system rather than the unique siloed systems that we have today. I think the future is mashable government, and the private sector has already gone down this path so governments need to catch up!

When I rewatched it I felt it captured my thoughts around this topic really well, so below is the video and the transcript. Enjoy! Comments welcome.

The first thing is I want to talk about gov as an API. This is kind of like data.gov.au on steroids, but this goes way above and beyond data and gets into something far more profound. But just a step back, the to the concept of Government as a platform. Around the world a lot of Governments have adopted the idea of Government as a platform: let’s use common platforms, let’s use common standards, let’s try and be more efficient and effective. It’s generally been interpreted as creating platforms within Government that are common. But I think that we can do a lot better.

So Government as an API is about making Government one big conceptual API. Making the stuff that Government does discoverable programmatically, making the stuff that it does consumable programmatically, making Government the platform or a platform on which industry and citizens and indeed other Governments can actually innovate and value add. So there are many examples of this which I’ll get to but the concept here is getting towards the idea of mashable Government. Now I’m not here representing my employers or my current job or any of that kind of stuff. I’m just here speaking as a geek in Government doing some cool stuff. And obviously you’ve had the Digital Transformation Office mentioned today. There’s stuff coming about that but I’m working in there at the moment doing some cool stuff that I’m looking forward to telling you all about. So keep an eye out.

But I want you to consider the concept of mashable Government. So Australia is a country where we have a fairly egalitarian democratic view of the world. So in our minds and this is important to note, in our minds there is a role for Government. Now there’s obviously some differences around the edges about how big or small or how much I should do or shouldn’t do or whatever but the concept is that, that we’re not going to have Government going anywhere. Government will continue to deliver things, Government has a role of delivering things. The idea of mashable Government is making what the Government does more accessible, more mashable. As a citizen when you want to find something out you don’t care which jurisdiction it is, you don’t care which agency it is, you don’t care in some cases you know you don’t care who you’re talking to, you don’t care what number you have to call, you just want to get what you need. Part of the problem of course is what are all the services of Government? There is no single place right now. What are all of the, you know what’s all the content, you know with over a thousand websites or more but with lots and lots of websites just in the Federal Government and thousands more across the state and territories, where’s the right place to go? And you know sometimes people talk about you know what if we had improved SEO? Or what if we had improved themes or templates and such. If everyone has improved SEO you still have the same exact problem today, don’t you? You do a google search and then you still have lots of things to choose from and which one’s authoritative? Which one’s the most useful? Which one’s the most available?

The concept of Government as an API is making content, services, API’s, data, you know the stuff that Government produces either directly or indirectly more available to collate in a way that is user centric. That actually puts the user at the centre of the design but then also puts the understanding that other people, businesses or Governments will be able to provide value on top of what we do. So I want to imagine that all of that is available and that everything was API enabled. I want you to imagine third party re-use new applications, I mean we see small examples of that today. So to give you a couple of examples of where Governments already experimenting with this idea. Data.gov.au obviously my little baby is one little example of this, it’s a microcosm. But whilst ever data, open data was just a list of things, a catalogue of stuff it was never going to be that high value.

So what we did when we re-launched data.gov.au a couple of years ago was we said what makes data valuable to people? Well programmatic access. Discovery is useful but if you can’t get access to it, it’s almost just annoying to be able to find it but not be able to access it. So how do we make it most useful? How do we make it most reusable, most high value in capacity shall we say? In potentia? So it was about programmatic access. It was about good meta data, it was about making it so it’s a value to citizens and industry but also to Government itself. If a Government agency needs to build a service, a citizen service to do something, rather than building an API to an internal system that’s privately available only to their application which would cost them money you know they could put the data in data.gov.au. Whether it’s spatial or tabular and soon to be relational, you know different data types have different data provision needs so being able to centralise that function reduces the cost of providing it, making it easy for agencies to get the most out of their data, reduce the cost of delivering what they need to deliver on top of the data also creates an opportunity for external innovation. And I know that there’s already been loads of applications and analysis and uses of data that’s on data.gov.au and it’s only increasing everyday. Because we took open data from being a retrospective, freedom of information, compliance issue, which was never going to be sexy, right? We moved it towards how you can do things better. This is how we can enable innovation. This is how agencies can find each other’s data better and re-use it and not have to keep continually repeat the wheel. So we built a business proposition for data.gov.au that started to make it successful. So that’s been cool.

There’s been experimentation of gov as an API in the ATO. With the SBR API. With the ABN lookup or ABN lookup API. There’s so many businesses out there. I’m sure there’s a bunch in the room. When you build an application where someone puts in a business name into a app or into an application or a transaction or whatever. You can use the ABN lookup API to validate the business name. So you know it’s a really simple validation service, it means that you don’t have, as unfortunately we have right now in the whole of Government contracts data set 279 different spellings for the Department of Defence. You can start to actually get that, use what Government already has as validation services, as something to build upon. You know I really look forward to having whole of Government up to date spatial data that’s really available so people can build value on top of it. That’ll be very exciting. You know at some point I hope that happens but. Industry, experimented this with energy ratings data set. It’s a very quick example, they had to build an app as you know Ministers love to see. But they built a very, very useful app to actually compare when you’re in the store. You know your fridges and all the rest of it to see what’s best for you. But what they found, by putting the data on data.gov.au they saved money immediately and there’s a brilliant video if you go looking for this that the Department of Industry put together with Martin Hoffman that you should have a look at, which is very good. But what they found is by having the data out there, all the companies, all the retail companies that have to by law put the energy rating of every electrical device they sell on their brochures traditionally they did it by goggling, right? What’s the energy rating of this, whatever other retail companies using we’ll use that.

Completely out of date and unauthorised and not true, inaccurate. So by having the data set publically available kept up to date on a daily basis, suddenly they were able to massively reduce the cost of compliance for a piece of regulatory you know, so it actually reduced red tape. And then other application started being developed that were very useful and you know Government doesn’t have all the answers and no one pretends that. People love to pretend also that Government also has no answers. I think there’s a healthy balance in between. We’ve got a whole bunch of cool, innovators in Government doing cool stuff but we have to work in partnership and part of that includes using our stuff to enable cool innovation out there.

ABS obviously does a lot of work with API’s and that’s been wonderful to see. But also the National Health Services Directory. I don’t know who, how many people here know that? But you know it’s a directory of thousands, tens of thousands, of health services across Australia. All API enabled. Brilliant sort of work. So API enabled computing and systems and modular program design, agile program design is you know pretty typical for all of you. Because you’re in industry and you’re kind of used to that and you’re used to getting up to date with the latest thing that’ll make you competitive.

Moving Government towards that kind of approach will take a little longer but you know, but it has started. But if you take an API enabled approach to your systems design it is relatively easy to progress to taking an API approach to exposing that publically.

So, I think I only had ten minutes so imagine if all the public Government information services were carefully, were usefully right, usefully discoverable. Not just through using a google search, which appropriate metadata were and even consumable in some cases, you know what if you could actually consume some of those transaction systems or information or services and be able to then re-use it somewhere else. Because when someone is you know about to I don’t know, have a baby, they google for it first right and then they go to probably a baby, they don’t think to come to government in the first instance. So we need to make it easier for Government to go to them. When they go to baby.com, why wouldn’t baby.com be able to present to them the information that they need from Government as well. This is where we’re starting to sort of think when we start following the rabbit warren of gov as an API.

So, start thinking about what you would use. If all of these things were discoverable or if even some of them were discoverable and consumable, how would you use it? How would you innovate? How would you better serve your customers by leveraging Government as an API? So Government has and always will play a part. This is about making Government just another platform to help enable our wonderful egalitarian and democratic society. Thank you very much.

Postnote: adopting APIs as a strategy, not just a technical side effect is key here. Adopting modular architecture so that agencies can adopt the best of breed components for a system today, tomorrow and into the future, without lock in. I think just cobbling APIs on top of existing systems would miss the greater opportunity of taking a modular architecture design approach which creates more flexible, adaptable, affordable and resilient systems than the traditional single stack solution.

Returning to data and Gov 2.0 from the DTO

I have been working at the newly created Digital Transformation Office in the Federal Government since January this year helping to set it up, create a vision, get some good people in and build some stuff. I was working in and then running a small, highly skilled and awesome team focused on how to dramatically improve information (websites) and transaction services across government. This included a bunch of cool ideas around whole of government service analytics, building a discovery layer (read APIs) for all government data, content and services, working with agencies to improve content and SEO, working on reporting mechanisms for the DTO, and looking at ways to usefully reduce the huge number of websites currently run by the Federal public service amongst other things. You can see some of our team blog posts about this work.

It has been an awesome trip and we built some great stuff, but now I need to return to my work on data, gov 2.0 and supporting the Australian Government CTO John Sheridan in looking at whole of government technology, procurement and common platforms. I can also work more closely with Sharyn Clarkson and the Online Services Branch on the range of whole of government platforms and solutions they run today, particularly the highly popular GovCMS. It has been a difficult choice but basically it came down to where my skills and efforts are best placed at this point in time. Plus I miss working on open data!

I wanted to say a final public thank you to everyone I worked with at the DTO, past and present. It has been a genuine privilege to work in the diverse teams and leadership from across over 20 agencies in the one team! It gave me a lot of insight to the different cultures, capabilities and assumptions in different departments, and I think we all challenged each other and created a bigger and better vision for the effort. I have learned much and enjoyed the collaborative nature of the broader DTO team.

I believe the DTO has two major opportunities ahead: as a a force of awesome and a catalyst for change. As a force of awesome, the DTO can show how delivery and service design can be done with modern tools and methods, can provide a safe sandpit for experimentation, can set the baseline for the whole APS through the digital service standard, and can support genuine culture change across the APS through training, guidance and provision of expertise/advisers in agencies. As a catalyst for change, the DTO can support the many, many people across the APS who want transformation, who want to do things better, and who can be further empowered, armed and supported to do just that through the work of the DTO. Building stronger relationships across the public services of Australia will be critical to this broader cultural change and evolution to modern technologies and methodologies.

I continue to support the efforts of the DTO and the broader digital transformation agenda and I wish Paul Shetler and the whole team good luck with an ambitious and inspiring vision for the future. If we could all make an approach that was data/evidence driven, user centric, mashable/modular, collaborative and cross government(s) the norm, we would overcome the natural silos of government, we would establish the truly collaborative public service we all crave and we would be better able to support the community. I have long believed that the path of technical integrity is the most important guiding principle of everything I do, and I will continue to contribute to the broader discussions about “digital transformation” in government.

Stay tuned for updates on the data.gov.au blog, and I look forward to spending the next 4 months kicking a few goals before I go on maternity leave 🙂