Transcript
Transcript: The Government of the Future Series: Adaptability and Resiliency
[00:00:00 The CSPS logo appears onscreen.]
[00:00:03 The screen fades to Sarah Plouffe in a video chat panel.]
Sarah Plouffe: Welcome, everyone. My name is Sarah Plouffe. I am an executive faculty member here at the School of Public Service. And on behalf of the School, I want to welcome each and every one of you to today's session. I am pleased to introduce today's event, entitled, "Adaptability and Resiliency." We hear these words all the time. What do they mean? How must we leverage them in the context of the public service? This is the second event in the miniseries on adaptability in the Government of the Future series. But before going further, I would like to recognize that I am coming to you today from the traditional unceded territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin people. I come from a region called the Pontiac, which is named after Chief Pontiac. He was better known, or well known, for bringing people together on a common cause. I'm very grateful to be here with all of you today. Adaptability. As we consider the concepts of resiliency and adaptability, sometimes they are used together, sometimes they are differentiated. When should we use or kind of lean in to resiliency? When should we go into being more adaptable? Given the situation that we are all confronted with today, I think that today's discussion is going to be really, really welcomed by all of us.
So, we have an esteemed guest, which I want to introduce to all of you. Mr. Sunil Johal is the David and Ann Wilson Professor in Public Policy and Society at Victoria College in the University of Toronto.
[00:01:50 Professor Sunil Johal appears in a separate video chat panel.]
He has held senior executive and policy roles at all levels of government. In 2021, he led transition activities for Employment and Social Development Canada at the ADM level. Previously, Policy Director at U of T Mowat Centre, where he was a thought leader in issues such as the future of work. In 2019, he chaired the Expert Panel on Modern Labour Standards for the Federal Minister of Labour. Currently, the Vice Chair of an expert panel advising the Ontario government on portable benefits scheme for nonstandard workers. Also, Public Policy Forum Advisor and Vice President of the Public Policy at CSA Group, where he's leading, thinking and advising organizations, globally recognized organizations, like the OECD and the G20. Welcome, Professor Johal.
Professor Sunil Johal: Great. Hi, Sarah. Nice to chat with you this morning. Really looking forward to our discussion.
Sarah Plouffe: Excellent. Well, knowing that this is an important topic for all of us as we are all confronted in our personal lives, in our professional lives, with so many different things that keep coming at us, evolving technologies, the crises that seem to be hitting us on a global or national scale, the need for us to be more transparent in our work, building that trust, that eroding trust factor at times in a democratic society, looking at how we can leverage innovation but still do a proper job at managing all the risk that is inherent to changing things and managing how people react to all of the change that's happening around us, taking care of ourselves in that context and taking care of our teams. We really seek your guidance here today on explaining why should we care? Why do we talk so much about adaptability and resiliency?
Professor Sunil Johal: Yeah, really great question. And obviously, some big challenging topics to unpack. So, maybe I can start with the first question you asked, which is why should we care about these concepts of adaptability and resilience? And I think you kind of hinted at the fact that we are in a time of disruption. Things are moving very quickly. We have a lot of uncertainty in the world around us today. And you also hinted at the declining trust that particularly public institutions face, but many other actors in society as well. And we see all of those challenges manifesting themselves in lots of different ways. I mean, if we think about something, for example, like the social safety net, as we can think of it in Canada. I mean, we know our health care systems across the country are facing real challenges. They've seen significant losses in terms of staff over the course of the pandemic and due to demographic change and retirements. People are very stressed in the health care systems, and almost on a weekly basis now across the country, you'll see newspaper articles that the E.R. in a certain hospital is going to be closed for the weekend, or people are facing a 20-hour, 25-hour wait at the emergency room. We also know that, aside from social safety net, we're seeing significant advances in digital technologies.
I mean, most of us are probably very familiar with ChatGPT and generative A.I. But what we're not quite familiar with or sure about is what exactly are the implications of those technologies going to be? Is ChatGPT going to be a bit of a flash in the pan, or will it really change the nature of jobs or what we do, or is it going to be a hugely transformative force? And that kind of uncertainty is very challenging for policymakers. Should we completely overhaul our skills training systems to account for these new disruptive technologies? Should we completely overhaul our immigration policies to account for challenges in the health care system? How do we account for demographic change as our population continues to age? How do we think about climate change in the context of all of these issues? And all of these issues and trends that we're thinking about, they tend to overlap and play against each other, so they can accelerate or attenuate the impacts of another trend. And again, what it means for people working in the public sector, whether at the federal level, provincial or municipal level, is less certainty and less awareness about what's going to work and even what we should be doing. And that's overlaid against this challenge of fewer and fewer Canadians necessarily trusting what their public institutions and what their elected leaders are telling them. So, the margin for error becomes ever smaller still. If the public sector gets something wrong, that margin of trust, that level of trust tends to decline a little bit further, which puts more pressure on the public sector for the next big decision or next set of big decisions that need to be made.
And the more pressure there is, the more likely it is that something might go wrong because people feel that they can't make a mistake. And when you feel like you can't make a mistake, of course we're faced with challenges around innovation because we know that if we want to try new things, we might make mistakes. And that's a part of innovation, is trialing new approaches to policy and service delivery. So, all of that to say that when we think about concepts like adaptability and resilience, they're really cross-cutting themes throughout all of these issues around uncertainty, and complexity, and lack of trust or declining trust. And you can think of them as two sides of the same coin. I mean, they're certainly related phrases. So, I mean, I like to think of them as not ability or resilience. It's more adaptability and resilience. And if we were to try and give a simple definition to the two terms, I would think of adaptability is the attribute we have, or as either individuals or institutions, for responding to disruption. So, adaptability is how we respond to disruption. Whereas resilience, we can think of more as how we respond to adversity. So, when we think about a changing operating environment, the world around us is changing. That might not be a bad thing. I mean, we might be changing into a better situation. I mean, if I'm about to retire and I'm going to enjoy a lot of time on the golf course and spending time with my family, that's going to require me to adapt to new circumstances. And it might be for the better. I might have less work stress, I might have more time for personal pursuits. But it's a type of adaptation that I'm going to have to go through in my personal life and my behaviours.
Whereas resilience, we tend to think of with a little bit more of a potentially negative connotation, like there's some adversity, some challenging circumstances that we're facing and how are we going to respond to those challenging circumstances? So, I mean, that's one element of the distinction. And then the other one, I think, that is a useful shorthand for thinking about this is that when we think about adaptability, we are thinking about not just kind of bouncing back, which is what we tend to think of in the concept of resilience, but we're thinking about bouncing forward. So, adaptability, we're bouncing forward into a new state of being, into a new state of mind, into a new type of behaviour set, whereas resilience is we're faced with a shock and we bounce back from it, oftentimes maybe to the status quo that we were in before the shock. But we've bounced back and we're not kind of in a necessarily worse off situation. And again, it can get much more complicated than that and lots of people have written about this from different perspectives, whether from the fields of psychology or political theory. But I think that's probably the simplest way of thinking about these concepts, is adaptability is responding to disruption, resilience is responding to adversity.
Sarah Plouffe: And I love your explanation about adaptability being kind of us bouncing forward. I think that can stick to our mind as the, as an explanation. And I want to kind of pry a little bit more deeply into these concepts, knowing that the people that are listening to us today are all public servants and knowing that we've all been tried a little bit in the last few years at least, as public servants. And we've had to depend on our adaptability skills, on our resilience and building that, pushing it to some limits, I would say that, some would argue. So, in terms of public servants, what would you say are some of the key characteristics that distinguish, or that can help us distinguish, what it means to be an adaptable public service versus a resilient one?
Professor Sunil Johal: Yeah, and I think that's a great question. And again, we can, we should also think about these things in the context of, like, there is an individual level to think about. Like, am I an adaptable and or resilient public servant? How can I improve upon those attributes or work on them? And then also, the organizational or systems level is the public service writ large, whether we're talking about a department, or the federal public service, or the provincial public service, adaptable or resilient. So, I think we can, I mean, let's focus first on the individual level. So, I mean, when we're thinking about the concept of adaptability, I mean, some of it is pretty inherent in the word itself. Like, am I able to adjust to or anticipate emerging issues? So, am I looking over the horizon a little bit and thinking about what might be coming down the pipe? So, not just thinking about, like, what's right in front of me today, but what might be in front of me in 60 days, or 90 days, or a year, or in two years. And a part of my brain, and a part of my thought process and attention span is always attuned to that forward-looking and kind of future oriented mindset.
And I think when you do that, that also necessarily calls into question and kind of brings to the fore issues like creativity and collaboration. If I'm necessarily thinking about what's coming over the horizon, I'm probably going to have to be a little bit creative around how I respond to, or anticipate or might respond to at some point the issues that are coming over the horizon. And I'm probably going to have to collaborate with other people in other departments, and other levels of government or other sectors to respond to some of those issues. I mean, the reality of today's policy environment is that there are very, very few issues that can be dealt with by a department, or even by a level of government or even by government. I mean, we're talking about cross-cutting horizontal complex issues like climate change, or regulating digital technologies, or responding to demographic change or addressing the fraying social safety net. I mean, you name it. All of these issues require a whole-of-society approach. So, an adaptable public servant in today's world really needs to be somebody who is a collaborator at heart and who can think across departmental boundaries, but also across sectoral boundaries, because it's very rare that you're going to have all the answers to certain questions within your remit entirely.
And I think the third important thing to think about when we're thinking about adaptability from an individual point of view is am I am I somebody who's using evidence and data to inform the decisions that I am taking? I mean, we can have hunches and we can have intuition, and those certainly always play a part in the kind of work that public servants do, but at the end of the day, when we're dealing with scarce public resources, we need to think about what's the data demonstrating that what we're going to do or what we're planning on doing might work, and what will the results or outcomes of that intervention be? How am I measuring success? How am I adapting and changing the delivery of a certain program if maybe it's a little bit off kilter at the outset? So, I think that's a really important thing to think about too. And, I mean, in the context of public service writ large in Canada, I mean, we know that we tend not to have great data in lots of different policy spaces or service delivery spaces. So, how can we get better at leveraging nontraditional sources of data from the private sector, from the ubiquity of information that's being generated on the Internet today? And how can we use that information to evaluate what we're doing more effectively? I mean, depending on what study you look at, we probably only spend 0.1%, 0.2% of all program dollars on evaluation. I mean, almost everything is going to frontline services or to transfers. It's not going to evaluating what's working and what's not working.
But in a constantly changing and disrupted environment, it becomes really important to be able to course correct and tailor programs and policies much more nimbly and effectively than maybe we had to 40 or 50 years ago, where if you generally got the direction of something right, that would be fine because the operating environment would be shifting around too much. But in today's world, and we can talk about some examples, I'm sure, later on, where things are changing so quickly, I mean, I mentioned the ChatGPT example. Does that necessitate overhauling skills training at the provincial level right now and at the K to 12 school system level? Or should we wait and see? Or should we try some things, and see what happens and measure what we're doing differently? And will that work or not? So, I mean, all of those things kind of make it important to be somebody who can anticipate issues, be creative, be collaborative and be data-driven. And then if we think about resilience, and I'll keep this answer shorter, I mean, I think at the personal level, I mean, this, especially coming out of the pandemic where so many people, both in the public sector and outside the public sector, were put under enormous amounts of stress, how do we make sure that we're being mindful of the impacts of resilience on people's mental health and wellbeing? How do we make sure people have the right resources in place to grapple with some of these issues, whether that's in terms of supports and resources that they can consult with, or that's time off and kind of time to de-stress and kind of cope with all of the stresses that people have been facing and grappling with. So, I mean, resilience, I think it's great and it's something we want people to have, that resilience muscle built up, but it's not something we want to overstress. Because at the end of the day, that means we're putting people, time after time, under a lot, significant amounts of stress, and if there's not an off-ramp for them where they can get support to deal with that stress, that's just a recipe for burnout.
So, I mean, unfortunately, I think in a lot of organizations, both public and non-public sector, we're only going to start kind of seeing the impacts of the pandemic on that front now, and going forward for the next several years, because I think a lot of people have just kind of buried that stress and just got on with their work and they didn't take even their allotted lot time off, or they didn't kind of avail themselves of help where they needed to because they just felt they had to push on and go forward. That's probably not a recipe for success going forward. So, we really do need to think more broadly about how we have those supports in place for people so that they can avail themselves of help, they can be realistic about what they can take on. So, I mean, I don't think we should be putting people in a situation should where they feel they need to take on more, and more and more without the supports and the resources needed to do so, whether that's they might need more teamwork, or sorry, more teammates, or they might need other kinds of resources, or I.T. resources or mental health resources, I think we need to be realistic about what people can realistically take on in that regard.
Sarah Plouffe: Absolutely. And I loved your explanation, and we may go into it a little bit deeper because it seems like there are some risks inherent to focusing too much on the resiliency part and maybe less so on the adaptability part. How do we strike the right balance between change is going to come, I need to be adaptable, changes never stop coming. It's coming at a rapid pace. How do I protect myself? How do I kind of balance being resilient and building a resilient team but also being adaptable? Where is the right balance to strike?
Professor Sunil Johal: Yeah, it's a great question, and I don't know if there's a perfect answer to that. I mean, a lot of it is going to be super context-dependent for individuals, for teams, for organizations. But I think it goes both ways. I mean, you kind of mentioned we don't want to overemphasize resilience at the expense of adaptability, but it can go the other way too. I mean, if we overemphasize adaptability and think about the fact that, okay, we've implemented some large-scale, maybe very costly adaptation measures in a certain policy area, let's say. Like, we're thinking about the future of work and we think the gig economy is going to radically transform how people work. So, as an example. So, we start transforming employment insurance, we start transforming education and social services to account for the massive rise of the gig economy. And then five years from now, we look up and guess what? The gig economy really didn't take off as much as we thought it would. It's still only 2, 3, 4% of workers. We might take a hard, logical look at that and say we got it wrong. But oftentimes, as humans, what we do is we have what we call a sunk cost fallacy where we've put in so much effort, and time, and so many resources into anticipating the rise of the gig economy, we're going to keep trying to make that happen and we're going to keep sticking to the changes we've made in policies and service delivery frameworks, even if the reality around us when we stick our head up is things didn't really change as much as we thought they did. So, we might be very reluctant to abandon this course of action that we have taken.
And the other challenge with an overfocus on adaptability is it might make us overlook new or unanticipated shocks that are hard to (inaudible). So, we might be preparing ourselves for a certain set of shocks and then another shock comes along that we weren't even thinking about. So, I think it does really go both ways and you need to kind of strike the appropriate balance of we're going to be an adaptable organization, I'm going to be an adaptable individual, an employee and person, but I also need to be resilient because I'm never going to be able to predict everything. I'm never going to be able to jump perfectly and bounce forward perfectly into every new environment and there's going to be situations where I'm going to be facing a real adverse situation and challenge, and we just need to deal with it, and we need to grapple with it, and kind of address it and go back to how we were doing things previously. So, I mean, that's probably not a perfect answer because I'm not really getting you like on the dial at 60% adaptability, 40% resilience, because I don't really think you can do that. But I do think there's a danger in overcorrecting on either side. So, striking that balance is the way to go. And I if I ever do come up with a better solution, I will patent it and make billions of dollars, I'm sure.
Sarah Plouffe: You'll call us with your exact formula.
Professor Sunil Johal: Yes, exactly.
Sarah Plouffe: Perfect. We'll wait for that. And in the interim, maybe I want to leverage a little bit of your experience. We said you were a leader at multiple levels, municipal, provincial, federal, and as a professor and someone involved in education. Can you think up a few examples that you could share with us today of where adaptability and or maybe resiliency were used in the right way versus where, I mean, we fell short a little bit, or just that the skills that we were using kind of didn't give us the intended result?
Professor Sunil Johal: Yeah, I mean, I think the obvious example and the big one that everybody will think about is the pandemic for sure. So, I mean, this was kind of the classic example of the need to demonstrate resilience and adapt to new circumstances. I mean, we had this sudden, unexpected, major global shock that rapidly transformed the operating environment for all organizations in Canada, and around the world for that matter. So, when we're thinking about the federal public sector, for example, organizations had to rapidly adapt to this new environment. And it wasn't just in terms of the services and policies they needed to come up with to deal with this. It was also they were dealing with it while everybody was, or many people, I should say, not everybody, many people were shifting to working remotely and working in a different digital online environment, which was not the norm, obviously, prior to the pandemic.
So, it was dealing with this new environment, significant adversity, unknown challenges and lots of stress, high levels of stress. And I think we can argue, particularly in the opening months, let's say, to year of the pandemic, that the response from governments across the country was, all things considered, effective. So, I mean, given the scale and scope of the challenges that governments were facing in terms of the needs to provide immediate and very relevant income assistance to individuals, the need to provide assistance to businesses so that they could maintain their operations or keep people on the payroll. Most of those things happened to quite good effect. And if you can tilt your mind back four years ago, or I guess it's almost, yeah, almost exactly four years ago this month, a lot of conversations through like the May-June-July 2020 period were about we're going to build back better. Like, we're learning from this, we're doing things differently, we're collaborating differently. We're not taking two years to develop a new program. We're rolling out CERB in weeks. And that's something we never would have been able to anticipate doing prior to the pandemic. But all of a sudden we're doing it.
So that, I think, gave people some hope that going forward, post-pandemic, we can cut through some of the red tape, and organizational silos, and unnecessary approvals and kind of bureaucratic traps that exist that make us take a long time on things that maybe should move a little quicker, and that we're going to do that more effectively. And at all levels of government, I know I was working at the City of Toronto at the time in the economic development space, there was also a focus on the idea of equity so that certain historically marginalized groups, many of whom were being hit very hard by the pandemic, so people in frontline service roles, retail, restaurant workers, people working on the frontlines of the health care space, they, the conversation again was we're going to build back better. We're not going to let this happen to these people again, where they're in dire circumstances in terms of their working conditions. We're going to do something better about this. But if we fast forward to today, unfortunately, I think we can look back and say, by and large, we're probably still using the same toolkits, and processes and behaviours that we were so used to prior to 2020. So, we have kind of reverted back to the norm in terms of how we deal with big issues, and how we consult, and how we engage, and how we deliver policies and how we deliver services. And that's a shame, right? I mean, we haven't really kind of taken some of the positive lessons from the pandemic in terms of how things can be done more quickly and effectively and leverage them going forward.
So, the pandemic, I would say, is a bit of a mixed bag. So, I mean, early days, great, super adaptable, super resilient. But as things moved on, resilience yes, adaptability not so much. We didn't really bounce forward, we bounced back, and we kind of bounced back pretty hard to the 2019 timeframe. I would say another example, and I mean I hinted at this a little bit, but it's an area I've spent a lot of time working on over the past probably eight, ten years, is this idea of the changing nature of work. So, I mean, most people are probably familiar with this as a general concept, but in the post-World War II period, if you were graduating from high school or university, most people, and this was largely men because women weren't as active in the labour force back in the 50's and 60's, most men would enter the workforce and take a job which was permanent, full-time job, and had benefits attached to the positions. So, pension extended health benefits. If we fast forward to today, many people in the labour market are in what we call nonstandard forms of work. So, they're in temporary contract part-time positions, often without those extended benefits like, such as a pension. And the gig economy, it's not everywhere yet, but I mean, we're kind of bubbling along, 2, 3, 4, 5% of the labour market is involved in some kind of gig work through these large digital platforms. And that's also seen attached to it issues like wage stagnation, income inequality is much higher than it was 30, 40, 50 years ago. And these issues have received a lot of attention from a policy perspective. There's been a lot of conversations about them. I have sat on panels to advise governments about these issues. But we haven't really seen a lot of action in terms of adapting major policy frameworks like employment insurance or labour laws to account for this new world of work that many Canadians are in today.
And I'm not really sure why that is. I mean, I have some theories about that, but by and large, most of our big policy frameworks haven't adapted. So, there's been conversation, but not a lot of action here. Partly that could be because it's a complicated area and these are big, thorny policy frameworks. So, employment insurance is very challenging to tinker with. I mean, you kind of, if you're going to go in and change it, you've got to change a lot of things to do it properly. Labour laws are notoriously also very technical, very complex. Hard to go in and kind of make one change without some potential unintended consequences. But also, is there political will to do something about this? It might be to the benefit of employers and large corporations to have a labour market which is more fissured, where it's easier to hire people on contract and in a temporary way. That can be better from a pure cost-benefit perspective for some of these employers. And we know they can actively lobby governments on these types of changes. So, I mean, that's a good example to me of we are in a new environment and we should have bounced forward some time ago to adapt to this new environment, but we really haven't. And the frightening prospect here is with disruptive technologies like generative A.I., advanced robotics, looming and kind of rapidly accelerating in terms of their capacity, that new world of work that we already live in could be much, much different in even another three, five, seven years. So, I mean, we might see the same number and scale of changes in the next five to ten years that we saw in the past 50 years. And those have been significant. So, I mean, that's one example of a situation where we could probably do more, and we probably need to do more to adapt to new circumstances and situations, but we haven't seen it happen yet.
Sarah Plouffe: So, more changes to come is what I'm hearing. As we prepare for that, I know that a lot of our listeners here today are leaders within the public service, maybe they are executives, maybe they are managers, maybe they are team leaders, maybe they are thought provokers or change makers within their own rights. How can we leverage some of the adaptability skills, some of their resiliency skills in preparing and promoting these qualities within our teams as leaders?
Professor Sunil Johal: Yeah, another really good question, because we can talk about these things in theory all day long, but we know that at the end of the day, if it doesn't translate to things I can do with my team, or with my peers, or with my… or with my management team, then it doesn't really mean much, right? So, I mean, one thing that I have liked to think about this in the context of, is choice architecture? So, some people might be familiar with the concept of behavioural insight. So, if we understand more how people think, we can shift how they behave by understanding how they think. And this is something that's taken on a lot of notoriety and kind of been trialed in the U.K. and in the U.S. over the past 15 years or so, and Canada has at the federal level, and some provincial governments deployed this idea of behavioural insights to change the choice architecture in terms of certain policy frameworks.
So, I mean, a very simple example is organ donation cards. So, historically you would have to sign the back of your driver's license to opt into donating your organs in the unfortunate event of an accident so you could donate your organs to somebody who needed them. But organ donation rates under that system were pretty low because most people aren't going to make the effort to turn the card over, sign it. They're just going to ignore it. It stays in your wallet, you don't touch it. If we flip the default for organ donation and we assume that you are assumed to be an organ donor unless you sign the back of the card and opt out of the donation protocols, that dramatically increases how many people are going to donate because humans tend to be pretty lazy about those kind of things. We kind of sit back and we don't take the extra step. It's the same thing when in certain workplaces you can enroll in a pension. If you have to fill out a lot of forms and paperwork and mail them somewhere to enter into that pension at a new employer, most people aren't going to do it. But if we auto enroll you in the pension, all of a sudden, enrollment rates will skyrocket because most people aren't going to fill out the paperwork to opt out of the pension.
So, most of the focus of behavioural insights to date has been focused on those kind of public facing service delivery mechanisms. But I would argue, and it's something we wrote a paper about a number of years ago at the Mowat Centre at U of T, that we also need to think about how we can deploy those behavioural insights for internal culture change within the public sector. So, I mean, a good example of this is that we think about the idea of collaboration. We want, we keep talking, but we want people to collaborate within the public sector. We want you to work across departmental lines to get more effective results. But there are a lot of inhibitors to that type of behaviour in how the public sector is set up. So, it can be something as simple as I.T. systems. So, I can't, if I, let's say I work at Environment Canada, I can't easily access Health Canada's internal database of briefing notes and briefing decks that have been prepared. So, that makes it harder for me to understand what they're working on and I have to know who's the right person to talk to. Can they share something with me? And I know from my time in different governments, sometimes you'd ask somebody from a different department, "Can I get a copy of your briefing note?" And sometimes you might get it. Sometimes the answer will be, "Well, like my director, ADM wouldn't really like that. I can tell you something about it but I can actually share that with you." Which, at the end of the day, is kind of a wild situation.
We all work for the same employer. Why aren't we sharing this type of information? So, I mean, how can we change the choice architecture in the public sector to incentivize collaboration? So, how do we promote collaboration? How do we reward collaboration? That can be something as simple as showing on a Cabinet submission that, which departments have you collaborated with in the development of your Cabinet submission? It could be something like in your performance appraisal process, tell me how you're going to collaborate with people in different departments or with different departments, and you're going to get rewarded for that collaboration. This also applies in the area of innovation. I mean, a lot of people watching have probably been told we need to innovate more in the public sector, we need to innovate more, we need to come up with new ideas more. But the reality is innovation is not really rewarded in a lot of cases in the public sector because to innovate you have to try new things, and some of those new things are not going to work. And fortunately, in a public sector environment, when you try something and it doesn't work, and especially if it's something that's at a larger scale, guess what? It might end up on the front page of The Globe and Mail, and nobody wants that. So, that sends a very powerful signal out into the system that, don't try. You can try new things, but not too new and not too bold because that might go wrong. So, just incrementally try little things that are different and work with them.
So again, how do we change the choice architecture? How do we nudge people to innovate more effectively? I mean, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek piece about this a few years ago saying that we should set up a Ministry of Failure in the Federal Government, and for that matter, at the provincial government. So, your mandate is to fail. It's not to deliver a certain kind of service, it's to try new things and see which ones work and which ones don't work, and scale that out to different departments. I mean, obviously, no government would ever set up a Ministry of Failure because you wouldn't want to have a poor minister named a Minister of Failure, and that's probably not a great Cabinet role, and the Prime Minister would have a hard conversation with somebody who is named to be Minister of Failure. But, I mean, that kind of concept and that kind of thinking, I think, is really important. So, and so when we think about translating that at the systems level down to the manager level, how do you in small ways try to encourage some of these types of behaviours with your stuff? How do you try and kind of create some safe spaces for your staff to try new things, to collaborate in a different way where they feel like it's comfortable, but it's going to kind of push the needle a little bit? I mean, and the other thing is, I mean, some of the studies we have done on people we have talked to before, it can also be simple things like improving the sight lines of people's work. Like, one of the most dispiriting things most civil servants find is that when they work on something, like a deck that's going to the deputy or to the ADM, they oftentimes don't hear about what happened to that work.
So, they might have spent weeks on something and then it's never really clear where that went or what happened to it. So, even small things like letting people know what happened to the work you did. Like, what was the result of it? What went really well? What can we improve on for next time? That gives people much more of a sense of pride and ownership over their work rather than they are just a kind of a cog in a giant machine and once something leaves their desk, they'll never know what happened to it, again. And the more you can connect people's frontline work with outcomes for citizens, outcomes for Canadians, that also helps people remember why they joined the public service in the first place, and maintain an enthusiasm for their work and make them really excited to come to work every day, which at the end of the day is what you want. You want people who are excited to come to work and make a difference in the lives of Canadians. And I think sometimes, unfortunately, in a large bureaucracy we can lose sight of that and that can get, that can be a challenging thing to do. But I think if you're a manager, you're somebody who works with teams, the more you can kind of keep that at the front of your behaviours, in your top of mind for you, the more that trickles down to your team and then they kind of feed off your enthusiasm and your excitement, and you're building a positive feedback loop for everybody.
Sarah Plouffe: I love those examples are explanations. Thank you. And I have had my fair share. I've spent 28 years in the public service and I've had great, inspiring deputy ministers that wanted us to innovate, and experiment and fail forward. But as you mentioned, sometimes the system is not built for that and other processes or steps within the approval systems just aren't built for learning from some of the mistakes that we are making. And being, modeling some of those behaviors, I think, is key, as you're mentioning. What are some of the, maybe, are there tools or frameworks that organizations can equip themselves with in order to support the managers, and all the leaders and other employees within the organizations to bring these capacities front and centre?
Professor Sunil Johal: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a few things to think about when we think about what kinds of tools will help people become more adaptable, more resilient, more successful in this dynamic, chaotic, changing environment that we all live in. I mean, I think a really important one, and I know it gets some attention at the federal level through organizations like Policy Horizons, is the idea of scenario planning and foresight. So, how do we think about possible futures in the area that we're working in? So, whether it's health care, or agriculture, or fisheries, and planning forward five, ten, 15, 20 years. What are some of the unanticipated issues we might need to think about going forward? And how do we test assumptions about plans or interventions against a range of plausible scenarios? So, we're not just kind of planning against the likely scenario, but there could be some more optimistic or more challenging scenarios that could unfold, and how do we make sure we're getting ahead of that and we're thinking about developing policies or services that are going to be as resilient and adaptable as possible in a whole range of different scenarios, not just the likely or the two likely ones? So, I think that's a really important one. I mean, I think another one is how do we leverage diverse sources of data to inform our understanding of the world? I think it's really difficult, especially at the federal level, I would say, as compared to the provincial or municipal levels in Canada, to understand everything that's going on in the world. I mean, we're so… we're so much kind of susceptible to global events.
I mean, we have seen with various global events over the past couple of years how those have impacted the trajectory of Canadian policies and how we're thinking about things. They also trickle down and impact our domestic policies on things like immigration selection and immigration targets, for example. So, how do we leverage different sources of data to inform that understanding of the world? And how do we stay abreast of changes as much as we possibly can? We're never going to be kind of right next to the change in the world, but we can take the length from here and maybe reduce it to here so that when events do transpire, our response and our capacity for adaptability will be enhanced because we've been monitoring all the possible data sources and information that we can.
And then I think a third piece, which is related to the data piece, but kind of more on the stakeholder relations side, is building those really robust feedback loops with our stakeholders. Oftentimes, those stakeholders who are on the front face of issues, whether it's the housing crisis, or challenges with international students securing housing, or refugee challenges in the city of Toronto, for example. I mean, a whole range of different issues. We can get early warning signals from stakeholders and from partners if we have close connections and good relationships with those stakeholders. So, how are you developing a plan, depending on your role, obviously, to have a key list of stakeholders? Who are they? Are they keeping lines of communication open with them? Because what you don't want is to be calling somebody for the first time, right when a crisis is happening and you're having to explain, "Hi, I'm from the Federal Government. I'm here to help you but I don't know who you are and I've never spoken to you before." Not a great way to open up a conversation. But if you've had a couple of conversations with people to introduce yourself, find out about what their organizations do or what their role is in your policy chain that makes much easier for you to pick up the phone or send them an email when you really need some information. And conversely, it also makes them probably a lot more comfortable sharing information and intelligence with you early on.
So, I think this is something most of us probably don't do nearly well enough. Because we have such busy day jobs, it's hard to think about, well, I don't really need to talk to this person or this organization right now, but it's probably a good thing to do for a year down the road or six months down the road when I might need to, but just kind of maintaining some regular check-ins or, depending on how your department organizes itself, there might be just stakeholder advisory panels or groups who meet regularly, and that might be the venue for sharing those issues. I think that's really important in terms of a tool that can help you stay, again, not in front of an issue necessarily, but as close to the issue as you possibly can without that significant lag time. I think what really frustrates the public and stakeholders sometimes is something is happening or something has happened and then it takes months or years for a response to emerge. So, that is a particular challenge for governments because people are used to, in their dealings with the private sector, seeing things happen relatively quickly. Like, if my bank has an issue with my online banking, it gets resolved very quickly. Or if I need a new service, it usually will emerge because there are competitive market forces that compel the market to develop those offerings for us. But the nature of public services is oftentimes they can be quasi-monopolies or entirely monopolies. So if, without feedback loops, that's a very dangerous spot to be. So, having those feedback loops helps maintain some sense of your policies, your actions, your interventions being grounded and being connected to the real world.
Sarah Plouffe: Absolutely, and builds the trust and that exchange of information. And then sometimes as public servants, we even feel like we need to come up with all of the solutions. And stakeholders have ideas about solutions, not just feeding us the information in real time about what is the situation on the ground, but also what could be some minor correctives that could help the situation without a complete overhaul. So, absolutely echo that.
Professor Sunil Johal: Yeah, just to build off that, Sarah, I think that's critical, right? Like, the policymaking paradigm 40 years ago, 60 years ago, was government owned the policy paradigm. Like, they will go ahead and consult with stakeholders, but they own the levers and the kind of mechanisms for making decisions. In today's world where information is flowing freely, governments don't have that monopoly over certain kinds of information. A Cabinet minister can find out what's going on not because they're reading a briefing book prepared every morning by their communications team but because they can pick up the news and read what's happening across the world instantaneously on the Internet. And stakeholders have lots of valuable information to offer. So, I mean, we've seen lots of examples from many countries where governments are opening up that policy process more and more to outside stakeholders, recognizing that expertise is not solely the remit of the public service or the political class, but you've got experts in industry, in academia, in the non-profit sector, regular citizens who are going to have really good ideas that we should tap into and we should… and we should use technology to tap into, right? So, I mean, we are not limited now to in-person consultations. We can gamify consultations, we can open things up to hundreds or thousands of people, not just in Canada, but from around the world. And we have to do that carefully, obviously, and we have to kind of be prudent about how we do it. But expectations, I think, generally are much higher from the public that, hey, we've got ideas too, and we might have better ideas sometimes than government and government should be open to that discourse.
Sarah Plouffe: Yeah, as public servants become more adaptable in the ways that we use to leverage that information, I think it builds our resiliency as a whole and informs the government. So, I'm going to take us in a bit of a different direction now, if you allow me. In some of our conversations leading up to this session today, you mentioned to me an article that caught my attention, which was, "The Dark Side of Resilience." It's written by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Derek Lusk. It's published in the Harvard Business Review, and it talks about maybe some of the underlying or negative effects of building in hyper-resiliency or something like that. Could you maybe explain and extrapolate a little bit on that and those risks?
Professor Sunil Johal: Yeah. I mean, I think we touched on it a little bit earlier where we don't want to set up a situation where the default position or what we're kind of relying on is, hey, we're super resilient. Because that's just going to stress people out. It's going to make them too tolerant of dealing with adversity and difficult situations. And that's not a position we should necessarily be setting up as the norm. What we would rather do is anticipate issues, get ahead of them and avoid some of those difficult and challenging situations because we have planned ahead and we were able to anticipate something coming over the horizon, and we planned for it and we dealt with it before it even became a difficult adverse situation. Obviously, we're not always going to be able to do that. So, I mean, classic example, of course, the pandemic. There was nothing we could have really done in Canada, I mean give or take, I guess some people might argue that to have stopped the pandemic from hitting our shores, and we were going to all be thrust into a very difficult situation. But I do think kind of from my own experience that organizations and kind of work environments that get ahead of those issues, it's not just because they do a planning process or because they have a couple of people thinking about this, like this is the, at the heart of how they work and how they operate and at the heart of their DNA. So, I mean, they are data-driven, they have close relationships with stakeholders, they're looking over the horizon, they're focused on outcomes, they're creating a positive work environment for their staff. I mean, I don't think we can undersell how important that is. If people are happy, they're going to be more productive, and they're going to be more prepared to deal with challenging situations and prepared to be more adaptable as well. And conversely, organizations that struggle with these types of things probably are falling down on one, two, or three or more of those issues.
So, I think if you're thinking about it from a public sector point of view, it's easy to talk about tools. It's harder to talk about working conditions and what are people really thinking? Like, are people happy in their jobs? What kinds of supports can they use to be to be happier and more productive in their jobs? And we've talked about some of those things already in terms of like improving sight lines, to outcomes, seeing how their work can impact the lives of Canadians, getting people excited and kind of enthused about what they're doing. I think from my experience, like people often enter the public service with that mindset and then, unfortunately, it can kind of get chipped away at and it can kind of erode a little bit over time because there's just so many other competing factors, and kind of drags, and kind of holds on your attention, and on what you really want to be doing and why you're really passionate about joining the public service. So, how can we try and bring excitement and energy back to people who are 15, 20, 25 years into their career? And I think one key thing is, which that article talks about, I think in a good amount of detail, is don't give people the kind of false hope that it's okay to think that we're going to under-resource you and we're going to give you really difficult objectives and you're going to have to do that over, and over and over again. Like, that might work a couple of times, but over time, it's going to be dispiriting and demoralizing to people. Like, being a superhero is, should be reserved for the movies. It shouldn't be something we expect people to do on a day-to-day basis in their regular jobs. We should expect people to work hard and apply themselves, but with adequate resourcing and with realistic objectives. And my concern is, as we think about going forward, the future of the public sector, how is technology going to impact staffing and those types of things, that that's just going to become more and more the expectation, that we're going to put more and more on the shoulders of public servants and take away their resources, or at least not give them more resources to grapple with those objectives.
Sarah Plouffe: Yes. Thank you very much for that explanation. We're coming up, almost, on time here. And so, I want to ask you one last question, one last piece of advice in terms of dealing with our teams on adaptability, resiliency. How do we build it within ourselves, within the culture of our organizations? If there's any piece that you have left out, what would it be?
Professor Sunil Johal: Wow! I'm still thinking about how I patent my billion-dollar idea. So, that's…
Sarah Plouffe: A formula (laughs).
Professor Sunil Johal: I'll spend the next few hours doing that, probably. But yeah, I mean, I think seriously that it's a team effort, and like, you're not going to create all of the change you want on these issues from one individual, or a unit or a department. But it's really a groundswell of people working collaboratively together, working more effectively with outside partners, using data more effectively, creating fulfilling working conditions and work environments for people. And I think a lot of that also is just conversations between staff and management.
Sarah Plouffe: Yes.
Professor Sunil Johal: About what are the obstacles to us doing our jobs more effectively and to being more adaptable, being more resilient? Where we need to be. And again, we don't want to just overemphasize, be resilient, be resilient, be resilient because that's putting people on a fast path to burnout in all likelihood. But I do think having those conversations, and being open and honest about the feedback that you get from staff, and adjusting working conditions where possible or providing people the resources or tools they need is a huge component of this that we probably haven't talked about quite as much. I mean, my focus and my expertise is not really on the human resources, kind of staffing side of things, but I do see it come up a lot in the work I do and in the work I've done in government. But I mean, I think if I had to sum up and kind of give some advice, it would just be I really think that public servants are just so critical to the future of the country and have done just such a great job in the past several years particularly that I hope people can kind of take a step back and be proud of all the accomplishments they've had in this regard. They haven been very adaptable, they have been incredibly resilient, and I hope that people can take a breath, recover from the difficult strains they have been through and focus on creating those really positive societal conditions that people rely on the public service and the federal government to create.
Sarah Plouffe: That's amazing. Thank you. What wise words to conclude this session on. So, on behalf of the School of Public Service and myself personally, I would like to thank you, Professor Sunil Johal, for joining our session today and sharing your insight with us. I hope all of you at home or in the office enjoyed watching and listening. Thank you for being here today and taking part in this discussion. I want to encourage all of you to follow the School and to check out all of the other learning opportunities that we offer. There are so many of them, maybe more than you can chew on, but we look forward to seeing all of you participate very soon. Again, thank you to all who orchestrated this event and we'll see you soon.
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