Beyond the Crisis
The Rationale for a Parallel Learning Structure in Government
I have recently been tasked with designing and testing a parralel learning structure to aid in the capture and sharing of insights and recommendations for systems change. The intention is that this will enable my government to remain agile beyond the crisis.
Knowing that many other governments are launching, or in the midst of similar initiatives, I wanted to share our thinking to date. As we roll out the initiative we will be sharing lessons and cases as much as possible.
This series documents the rationale, the problem, the opportunity, ideas about the solution (parallel learning structure), and a conclusion. I tried my best to link to accessible versions of articles used to inform this initiative. Many of the articles reviewed didn’t make it in the series. Let me know if you are interested in seeing the list. Note of caution: I chose expediency over consistency with resepect to format and citation. I only hope that grad school Nick can forgive bureaucrat Nick.
Note of thanks to Jason Pearman and nicefutures for their invaluable help with this.
It is absolutely critical to learn from each other in these times (as you will see I have been doing). Largely this is a compilation of many people’s ideas and research. I hope it helps!
Renovating Government
Knowing the Difference Between Drywall and a Load Bearing Wall
Renewal in government feels a lot like renovating your home. As a homeowner I have so many ideas for change and improvement. Most often those ideas remain just that: ideas. “Better not pull up that floor, who knows what I’ll find under there”, I caution myself. “Don’t want to have the roof fall in trying to open up this room, better just stay in the dark”. So usually I resort to doing nothing or something superficial like painting.
Then the basement gets flooded and… we have no reason to avoid the changes. Doing nothing, or simply doing the superficial, are no longer reasonable alternatives to making the changes we need and want. In some ways, it’s an opportunity!
There are lessons in this commonly held experience of homeownership. The metaphor can be extended to renting as well — relating to transitory intention or power — “if I was the landlord (i.e. the executive) I would do X to improve Y, but I’m not so I’ll just keep my head down”.
The experience we’re having now has many of us learning the difference between policies, processes, practices, and behaviours that are “load bearing walls” and ones that were only ever “drywall”. The barriers to things like remote working, e-health consulting, virtual court hearings, user-friendly online applications, and easy access to social benefits were rooted in habit and perception of risk, not its reality.
When my basement flooded, it was the most stressful moment of homeownership. I worried about my finances, my family’s experience, and not being able to have guests stay. Half of our house was no longer usable, the kids play room was there, it’s where we have Friday movie nights, and where our friends and family slept when they visited from out of town. I momentarily lost sight of all the changes I wanted to make.
Crisis means to sift. What is left when you go through a crisis is what matters.
– Glennon Doyle in Love Warrior
Then we started picking out new floors, light fixtures, paint colours, and redesigning rooms. We came together. Make no mistake: it sucked. The result however was a decluttered, newly renovated basement; a fresh start and a reset.
Bright Spots
When Government Surprises and Delights the Public in Crisis
Crises can create fertile grounds for the emergence of bright spots and positive deviance: departures from business-as-usual rules and norms that produce improved outcomes. Perhaps the most illustrative example to emerge so far from the COVID-19 Crisis is the Canadian Government’s roll out of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) and the Red Cross administered benefit in NB. This facebook post by a CERB user captures the significance of the example:
“I have to say, I am SO impressed with the programs the government has put into place for us. The $900 benefit and the CERB were both honestly the EASIEST application process that we could have ever hoped for. Both programs took a few short minutes to apply for and approval was almost immediate. I was SO stressed to get started this morning and getting papers organized and I completely thought too hard into it. I simply needed minimal personal information and it took me less than a minute ! It was almost too good to be true; but it’s complete! I am sooooo thankful!”
This testimonial is significant because it illustrates both the negative experience of the status quo, as well as the bright spots emerging through the crisis. The user describes the emotional experience typical government processes conjure for the public “I was SO stressed”, undoubtedly damaging its reputation. Then we see the counter-narrative elicited by a user-friendly process, spurred by the crisis: “It was almost too good to be true… I am sooooo thankful”. This was also the experience of many other users. How was it possible for the government to surprise and delight the public in the midst of a crisis?
Aaron Snow, CEO of the Canadian Digital Service described the factors behind the scenes that resulted in the application experience being so good in a recent tweet storm. To summarize:
- The design of the #COVID — 19 benefits policies themselves, particularly the pivot from ex-ante to ex-post eligibility enforcement.
- In doing so the government kept the application process simple and fast, and will largely deal with errors and fraud come tax filing season next year.
- The ruleset for obtaining EI, had itself been radically streamlined enabling ESDC to burn through their application backlog.
- While the case was a tremendous feat of IT and UX, if the policies were complex, the user experience would have been, too.
- emergencies have a way of exposing false choice and force everyone to rethink their risk/reward analysis.
Mr. Snow’s summary touches on many shifts in policy, mindset and service delivery, and the significant role crisis plays in the emergence of alternative paths. The CERB case, among others, has set the new standard for public service delivery. How might we ensure these lessons as well as the positive outcomes endure beyond the crisis?
In non-crisis states, there tends to be insufficient motivation for staff at all levels to change behaviour, reduce procedural burdens or remove bureaucratic barriers to timely, human-centred, service delivery. As the 2017 McKinsey report “How the public sector can remain agile beyond times of crisis” states:
“without an imperative to act (such as the profit motive in the private sector), it’s rational to seek ever more information, to conduct additional analyses, to await permission, or to optimize for the interests of the “tribe” rather than the organization as a whole”.
In a crisis, agile execution is often made possible because staff are less internally focused and institutionally-centred (ie silos, superfluous processes and procedures) allowing for human centred, needs-based service delivery. The focal point is collectively on a clear, common purpose: the delivery of services the public urgently needs to weather the crisis. “Suddenly, it becomes obvious that the force behind many rules is habit, not law.”
In the same vein, the employee experience can be radically different. In a crisis, staff often report that it feels better to work for government because they “get clear directions about how to achieve their mission and enough autonomy to make decisions at the front line; a burning platform for change replaces the cultural aversion to risk taking that’s characteristic of public-sector organizations; and teams work within and across agencies to achieve rapid results”.
These cases of positively deviating from the norm are powerful sources of insight that can illuminate new paths forward for organizational transformation. With a structured approach to learning from these cases, governments can seize opportunities for change that will stick.
Refocusing on What Matters
What’s the Problem Anyway?
With endless thought-pieces on the opportunity for change in the crisis, it’s important to reflect on the problem being solved through this opportunity. The urgent problem that needs to be solved is that in non-crisis states “bureaucratic public-sector institutions lack the speed and nimbleness to keep pace in a rapidly changing world”.
Additionally, these organizations tend to be inwardly focused on internal process optimization and technical issues rather than an outside-in focus on service design that is centred around the end-user. This apparent lack of flexibility and internal focus create negative experiences for the public that can contribute to an erosion of trust, confidence, and reputation.
This is not a new problem and while there is widespread recognition of it, individuals can often feel powerless in the face of structural inertia:
“On one hand there is an ever-increasing demand for more flexible or even fluid “new” organizational forms. On the other hand, studies stressing organizational inertia and the historical imprinting of decision making have come to the fore in management and organization theory. There seems to be a broadly shared feeling that we need to understand better how organizations can lose their flexibility and become inert or even locked in.” ORGANIZATIONAL PATH DEPENDENCE: OPENING THE BLACK BOX
Why is it so difficult for organizations to break free from legacy patterns and adopt better alternatives?
“Management needs access to information and insight distributed across divisions and levels of the organization to develop creative policies and strategic direction while maintaining current production. Management’s search process for information and insight, however, often inhibits information flow, impedes analysis, and arouses defensive protection of the status quo.” Parallel Organization: Policy Formulation, Learning, and Interdivision Integration
The concept of path dependence is used to describe how organizational rigidities, timeworn routines, structural inertia, and change-inhibiting forces emerge in organizations. A state of path dependence “renders a system potentially inefficient, because it loses its capability to adopt better alternatives.” These dependencies are not inevitable, but the opportunities to break free from them are rare. A global pandemic is one of those rare occasions.
“Path dissolution may occur through unforeseen exogenous forces, such as shocks, catastrophes, or crises; these are likely to shake the system, thereby causing the organization to break away from the path” (Ibid).
In a crisis the byzantine patterns of government are disrupted, and an opportunity to imprint new ways of working opens, along with examples, real-world experiments, that demonstrate how the organization might renew itself.
“[Crises] create not only severe devastation, but a unique opportunity for systemic change and fundamental re-invention. In normal times, such fundamental change would require long-term strategic efforts as well as major investments of time and resources without guaranteed success. Crises, however, disrupt the status quo in basic ways allowing for new assumptions, methods and organizational values to emerge. Many outdated assumptions, impediments, inertia and political resistance to change are removed during a crisis. Attention and energy are focused on the immediate and obvious need” -Post-crisis discourse and organizational change, failure and renewal.
Through crisis comes opportunity for renewal; to refocus on the immediate and most obvious needs of the public.
Business as Unusual
People are doing things they’ve never done before
In response to the global COVID-19 challenge, many governments have engaged a focused and agile group of civil servants and leaders to deliver a time-sensitive, agile, data-driven response. There is an opportunity to leverage key learnings and practices to engage the civil service in transforming operations for greater efficiency and effectiveness beyond this crisis.
Leading through a crisis requires a unity of purpose that is compelling enough to override standard practices and eliminate bureaucratic barriers found in business-as-usual.
In a widely shared blog Toby Lowe describes the opportunity for learning through crisis. Crisis provides unique learning opportunities for organizations because “during a crisis people will do things they have never done before. The situation will be complex or even chaotic, so the ‘business as usual’ rules do not apply. People will probe complex problems to see what might work, or just take direct action in a chaotic situation. Some things will work, some things will fail, but each and every action is an opportunity to learn ‘something’”.
While agility tends to increase during and immediately following a crisis, there is a tendency for relapse. “Three main internal forces of resistance make it hard for public-sector organizations to become agile without a crisis and to maintain that agility after it ends: a cultural aversion to risk, functional silos, and organizational complexity.”
Instituting a Parallel Learning Structure in government may facilitate organizational learning in a way that mitigates the usual forces of resistance preventing organizations from remaining agile beyond a crisis.
As Angela Hanson, Innovation Lead at the OECD recently wrote:
“This war-like consensus around the problem [Covid-19] as well as the messy shake-up of the status quo together create opportunities for learning and innovation, both to solve immediate problems at hand as well as learn what we want to keep, what is missing, what we want to revisit under more orderly and stable conditions, and what we want to remember to prepare for the next crisis.”
It is not enough to recover to the status quo. What has been experienced through the crisis is that there are elements of the status quo that were undesirable; elements that were inefficient, negatively impacted employee experience, and were barriers to meeting the needs of the public.
As former senator Tony Dean recently wrote:
“Canada’s public servants should not go all the way back to normal. They should be empowered to continue embracing uncertainty, learning through experimentation,& continuing to work more collaboratively across sectors & jurisdictions to bring different perspectives to the table”.
This moment in history can be an opportunity to transform and leapfrog the status quo, if governments are intentional about learning.
Path Finding and Sifting
Being intentional about learning from the crisis
In order to ensure that the organization doesn’t ‘let a good crisis go to waste’, learning mechanisms are needed:
“Learning mechanisms are planned proactive features that enable and encourage organizational learning. An assumption is that the capability to learn can be designed rather than left to evolve through the normal activities of the organization.” From Crisis to Success
“The concept of “organizational learning” has been cited in the managerial literature since the early 1980s. It describes the internal capacity of organizations to learn from experience, to examine and adopt new ideas and transform them into policy and action plans in order to obtain a competitive advantage” (Ibid)
One approach to accelerating organizational learning is a Parallel Learning Structure (see also Parallel Organization). An Innovation Lab is an example of a “parallel learning structure”. The role of a lab is to create the conditions for experimentation in a lab environment in order to accelerate learning. In a crisis however, the experiments are happening naturally outside of the lab. It is important to study these ‘naturally occurring’ cases in order to better understand the conditions that allow for improved efficiencies, user experience and outcomes, and employs strategies to preserve the desirable conditions post-crisis.
A parallel learning structure (PLS) will document and synthesize organizational and staff behavioral changes that have transpired during the crisis that have enabled the effective and efficient delivery of public service; share insights broadly throughout government; co-design formal management practices that could be sustained post-COVID-19 to deliver improved outcomes; examine the friction points that have made previous attempts to improve organizational/behavioural practices; and make recommendations for policy changes that create the conditions for continued agility and human-centred service delivery beyond the crisis. A draft terms of reference available here.
The goal of the PLS might be to identify 50 cases where outcomes are better now than before (e.g. delivered more efficiently, cheaper and more impactful) and seek to understand what elements of the current context contributed to the success and how they might become the new normal. Measure cost savings, improved experience, and better outcomes for clients.
Guiding questions to explore:
What behaviors were adopted during the pandemic that we want to preserve?
How might we restructure to position our organization for success in the future?
How might we reinforce new behaviours and build the right culture?
How might we stop our organization from sliding back to business as usual?
This last one requires a real good discussion and reflection with all perspectives because it is unequivocally where all the required elements connect/mutually reinforce. We need to design and act like a system, in ways where we’re greater than the sum of our parts, and aren’t blinded by our organizational silos and professional biases. If the focus is too heavily on one part/perspective and light on others it’s a “weakest link in the chain” dynamic, and the “elephant parable”. None of these parts alone will be successful.
To start the PLS could (h/t Martin Stewart):
- Identify the innovations that are being driven by the crisis
- Identify breakthrough policy, operational, and/or behavioural changes that have happened where previously there had been resistance
- Categorize these innovations and new practices, triage where immediate or longer-term action is needed to maintain them post crisis, and make recommendations for what would be needed to sustain the change
- Ongoing capture of these innovations and ‘next’ practice examples, as well as their assessments in weekly case reports
- Track innovations that are emerging from other governments around the world, and how they could further strengthen innovations
Case reports could describe:
- The outcomes achieved
- The novel practice employed
- The conditions needed to sustain the innovation
- Recommendations
Recommendations could be categorised in one of three ways:
- Action list for things immediately and obviously relevant today or tomorrow — these should be fast-tracked to those who have some ability to act on the information, including those at the top
- Watch list for things that need to be watched closely and revisited soon to see if there is a pattern — these things should be shared with the rest of the team in the short term. For things changing rapidly — these should be shared with the team and considered for flagging to those managing the response/recovery
- Revisit list for things that are concerning or curious but are not actionable in the near term — set a date to revisit these.
Building on this beyond the crisis, a PLS could then continue to seek the next 50 opportunities for public service transformation, nurturing a broad learning network, and supporting the development of MVPs.
Path Building and Renewal
Who do we want to be beyond the crisis?
Change in large bureaucratic organizations is difficult during non-crisis states which can be explained by the phenomena of path dependence. Path dependence is present when organizations become locked-in to routine decision-making behaviours from a limited range of choices, thus preventing it from adopting better alternatives and achieving better outcomes for the public.
Crises cause a disruption in the routines and habits of organizations that provide an opening to break free from the existing path because outdated assumptions change and business as usual rules do not apply. The necessity created by the crisis leads to the emergence of positive deviations from the norm that create unprecedented levels of agility, cooperation and support. These bright spots point out directions for renewal.
While these deviations often dissipate over time, instituting a parallel learning structure can aid in the capture and sharing of insights, and recommendations for action and policy change, and allow government to remain agile beyond the crisis in order to respond to tomorrow’s challenges that the citizens face.
As with technological disruptions, crises are often misidentified as the cause of, or opportunity to solve problems. These transformative events are neither. They are better understood as offering a magnifying lens to witness what was already there.
What we do with what we see through the magnifying lens will largely determine if the disruptions are opportunities, or if we continue to worsen the same patterns as before. A lot depends on our ability to be intentional and reflective about what we learn, and deliberate about what we keep, discard, and introduce in the next normal.
