Transcript
Transcript: Public Goods of Public Service: Emerging Roles, Risks and Opportunities for Governments, with Aaron Maniam
[00:00:00 The video opens with Taki Sarantakis speaking from a chair on stage. The camera angle widens to show Aaron Maniam seated beside Taki in another chair.]
Taki Sarantakis: Hello, everybody, my name is Taki Sarantakis. I am the President of the Canada School of Public Service, and welcome to another stimulating event that we have programmed for you today. Today, as always, we have a real treat. We have Aaron Maniam.
[00:00:20 Taki Sarantakis appears full screen.
Text on screen: Taki Sarantakis, President, Canada School of Public Service.]
Taki Sarantakis: And I pause there because Aaron doesn't know that next week we have our big marquee lecture at the Canada School of Public Service, and that is called the Manion Lecture, so everybody's thinking about Manion right now, but for the next hour we'll think of Manion-mum.
[00:00:40 Taki Sarantakis and Aaron Maniam appear full screen.]
Aaron Maniam: Good to know.
Taki Sarantakis: Good to know.
Aaron Maniam: And I have an aspiration now.
Taki Sarantakis: Yes, exactly.
Aaron Maniam: I'll come and give the Manion Lecture sometime.
Taki Sarantakis: Well, actually, you know somebody that did give it – Geoff Mulgan came.
[00:00:48 Taki Sarantakis appears full screen.]
Aaron Maniam: Nice.
Taki Sarantakis: He gave it 10 years ago, 15 years ago, so it's kind of the annual lecture for the public service.
So, Aaron is a really, really interesting young man. He was one of the rising stars of the public service of Singapore. And as those of you who know anything about public service and know anything about me, I'm a big fan of Singapore. And Singapore is one of those areas that I think we, as Canadians, could learn a lot from because so many times, we hear, "Oh, Canada's small. Oh, Canada, we can't do the things that the Americans do." What's the population of Singapore?
[00:01:35 Aaron Maniam appears full screen.]
Aaron Maniam: 5.9 million.
[00:01:37 Taki Sarantakis appears full screen.]
Taki Sarantakis: 5.9. So, they're a little smaller than us, but they do a lot of very, very impressive stuff, mostly because they apply their brains to public policy challenges. They don't have oil. They don't have natural resources. They don't live in the safest neighbourhood in the world. But they apply a lot of thinking, a lot of intelligence, and a lot of foresight to public policy. So, Aaron, you've spent the last little while hanging out at Oxford.
Aaron Maniam: I have.
Taki Sarantakis: Which means you're even smarter than you were the last time I saw you, because Oxford, apparently, it's a big deal.
[00:02:16 Taki Sarantakis and Aaron Maniam appear full screen.]
Taki Sarantakis: So, we will turn it over to you to talk about what I like, because we spend a lot of time talking about risks, and we're always looking at the bad sides of things. You're going to talk a little bit about that, but you're also going to talk about opportunities. So, over to you, my friend.
[00:02:29 Aaron Maniam gets up from his chair and walks to the lectern on stage. The camera shows various angles of the stage, including parts of the audience, as Aaron speaks.]
Aaron Maniam: Thank you very much, Taki. I'm going to speak from the podium, so I'll just walk over. Thank you so much for the invite, first of all, to the School. I first came to the School in 2010, actually, so it's been a while since I visited.
Taki Sarantakis: Were you 6 years old?
[00:02:46 Aaron Maniam appears full screen.
Text on screen: Aaron Maniam, Fellow of Practice and Director, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.]
Aaron Maniam: You're very, very kind. I haven't been called young for a long time, actually. So, I'm just going to enjoy that and revel in it for a bit.
When I was thinking about what to share today for the next 25 minutes or so, we bounced around a few different ideas. Should we talk about strategic foresight, which was one of the jobs that I did in Singapore, setting up the Centre for Strategic Futures, which is our internal government think tank. Doing long-term thinking, a bit like Policy Horizons here in Canada. And I teach a bit about it now as well.
And I thought, well, I could, but I'd rather talk about something a little bit broader. And then Taki said, "Well, maybe talk about AI, and talk about digital transformation", which is also what I teach about at Oxford now, having done my PhD on digital adoption by governments. And again, I thought I could, but I feel like there are bigger themes. And with an audience as discerning as this one, I really wanted to get to something a bit meatier than just another kind of run-of-the-mill governance talk.
So, I settled in the end on this topic. Public Goods of Public Service: What Are the Roles, Risks, and Opportunities for Governments. And I'll make clear what I mean by this idea about Public Goods of Public Service. I hope you find that it resonates.
[00:03:55 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: And it all begins with what expectations we have of the state and of public service. Does anyone recognize the picture right on the left here? Anyone?
It is not William Blake, no. So, that is a print by Gustave Doré, who was a French artist working in the 1800s, the precursor to today's digital artists. He was doing a lot of print work. That is "The Killing of Leviathan", Leviathan being the large serpent-like monster from the Old Testament in the Bible.
Later on, of course, Thomas Hobbes used the image of Leviathan as a metaphor for government to refer to how powerful the state needed to be if it was to manage the problems of competition for resources as well as individual preferences. Thomas Hobbes famously referred to life as "nasty, brutish, and short" if the Leviathan is not there to impose some amount of authority and order.
But there have been other expectations that we have of the state. Weber, when he was writing, talked about "The Iron Cage of Bureaucracy", and we see one depiction of the iron cage on this slide. Two windows of iron cages, each window telling you to go talk to the other side. And we've all met bureaucracy that's like that. I hope we are not responsible for bureaucracies that are that way, but they do exist in different parts of the world.
Some have referred to the state as needing to be a control tower, and you see there the control tower of Ottawa Airport. At least from some time ago. And the idea of the state as a control tower is powerful, isn't it? Being that the state must have information and be able to call the shots, telling planes where to land, when not to land, how far to go, and to just wait. We've all sat in planes before where we're suddenly told, "Oh, we can't land yet because air traffic control hasn't given us permission." And the control tower is the source of that authoritative, not-to-be-disputed, source of information.
Now the challenge with all these canonical expectations is it's very hard to be the Leviathan, to be the iron cage of bureaucracy, because sometimes there are things that the state cannot see. And we saw that written about very eloquently by James C. Scott when he discussed what the state does not see. The things that are on the ground, the ground realities, the ground preferences that individual citizens might end up also experiencing. And when we start to ask the questions that Scott asked in his book, "Seeing Like a State", what we start to get to is the fact that, well, maybe the state can't always be the Leviathan. It can't always be the iron cage, neither can it be a control tower.
[00:06:41 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: So, these canonical expectations are broadening now, or they're at least shifting. Some people have started to refer to government as the vending machine. This is Donald Kettl writing from the US. "A vending machine where because each of us is a taxpayer, and we pay money into that vending machine, we should be able to get whatever we want from the state, even if it is bad for us." If it's an example of sugary food or corn nuts, Taki. All those –
Taki Sarantakis: You were eating corn nuts?
Aaron Maniam: I was eating corn nuts, yes. I thought they would be a source of energy.
But that's the state as a form of vending machine, where we give it money and we expect returns no matter what the larger macro concerns might be.
But that's not the only way to look at states. Tim O'Reilly, who owns the massive media company O'Reilly Media, talks about government as a platform. Now this might sound like something out of the AI age, but Tim actually wrote about this in 2011, so a good 15 years ago. He envisaged the idea of government as a platform, as an open space within which lots of interesting things can happen because the government enables, the government facilitates, and the government aggregates. This is another way of thinking about what it is that a state apparatus might be able to do.
And more recently, Mariana Mazzucato and her colleagues at the Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose at University College London have written about the idea of the entrepreneurial state. That the state is now expected not just to be a platform or to provide for citizens, but to proactively set an agenda, to be entrepreneurial, to come up with innovation, and to do what the American state in its great days of setting up DARPA was able to do, to drive research, to drive innovation, and to drive societal transformation.
In order for this to happen, it's not that bureaucracy need not exist anymore. That's what Rainer Kattel and his colleagues in the second book there, "How to Make an Entrepreneurial State", actually explore. They actually tell us that you need new types of bureaucracy, not a killing of bureaucracy or a removal of the Leviathan, but we need a new kind of Leviathan. Perhaps a less monster-like Leviathan, but one that is nonetheless as far-reaching and pervasive in what it is able to do.
[00:08:57 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: So, one way to think about how this this canonical expectation of states is actually evolving is in this diagram here. And I wanted to give you a slightly simpler way of thinking about it than the books that I shared so far. One way to really look at this is to think that, at one point, states were expected to provide security. The basic services and the basic functioning of society. This is what the Leviathan was meant to do in terms of its provision of authority and order in order to impose that order on an otherwise unruly lifestyle.
So, that's one way to think about it. But I think over time what we're seeing, especially in the years since the Second World War, is we expect governments to also now deal with challenges of scarcity. To be cost efficient, to be reasonably productive in what they do, new Public Management in particular has pushed the idea that government can learn from the private sector in using things like performance metrics as well as competition in order to function better and be cost efficient.
But over time, I think what's becoming increasingly clear in research institutions like the one I teach at, but also in public sector institutions like the School, is that states need to deal with far greater challenges. Challenges of volatility, for example, where institutions need to be built for the long run. Complexity, where change readiness and adaptivity become quite critical. And the challenges of diversity as well. How can states be engaging and empathetic to the needs of citizens even as they are trying to manage the existing challenges of security, scarcity, volatility, and complexity?
Because what you'll notice, I hope, from this diagram is just because we add on the new layers here, the old layers don't go away. Security persists even in a world of scarcity. As we need to deal with volatility, complexity, and diversity, the blue, the red, the green, and the purple of the earlier more fundamental government priorities continue to be there. And different thinkers about governance have thought about this in many different ways. But this is kind of the core idea, that the needs of the old are persisting, but there are new challenges, new demands that are being placed on the apparatus of the state.
[00:11:10 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: And this becomes really challenging, because in a world that where what was needed was security, then the state knows what it needs to do. It provides the public order that is necessary for basic services to continue functioning.
In a world of scarcity, the state becomes necessary to provide public goods. The market can be left to do a lot of things, not everything, but in a good number of things the market can suffice. And where the market doesn't suffice, then public goods and externalities need to be dealt with by the apparatus of the state.
But what about a world of volatility, or complexity and diversity? What do we need to do in that kind of world? And what is it that states can be expected to do given that they have to do all of these things while maintaining their existing functions and dealing with the challenges of resource efficiency. Where we don't always have enough money to do the many, many things that are being expected of governments. I think this is one of the core challenges. How do we fill the question mark that's on this slide in a way that allows states to responsibly do their jobs?
[00:12:10 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: So, here's where I want to start telling a few stories, about things that governments have done in response to some of these challenges. Some of the responses to volatility, for example, have been to set up strategic foresight or futures functions in different parts of government.
The top left of this slide is the ecosystem in Singapore, centred around an entity called the Centre for Strategic Futures in the Prime Minister's Office. That was an entity I was very privileged to set up back in 2009 or 2010, and then watching the ecosystem burgeon into the rest of the government system. And, in fact, nowadays the foresight work also happens among some of the think tanks within Singapore.
Just below that you see the example of what the Welsh Commissioner for Future Generations is looking at. So, not a civil service function, but looking at what a parliamentary legislative function bringing in the long term can also be able to do.
You should be no stranger, of course, to the middle top part of the diagram. Policy Horizons Canada has always been a really, I think, important part of the global Foresight ecosystem. They were important partners for us in Singapore. We learned a lot from them. And I think now we try and continue that interaction and mutual learning.
Just below that, what you see is the initial text of the Foresight Act in the state of Estonia. So, foresight in Estonia has been enshrined as being done in a centre that reports to Parliament. So, again, a legislative function.
And then on the rest of the slide, you see the depiction of the Finnish ecosystem, one of the most extensive ecosystems of public sector foresight, with the public sector and civil service interacting with Parliament, but also working with an entity called Sitra, the Finnish innovation fund, as well as academic institutions to do good preparation for the future.
The last diagram there is from the UK. Futures, foresight, and horizon scanning, which is done out of the entity they call the Policy Lab that reports to the Government Office of Science. Lots of different ways of preparing for the future, but all trying to deal with the challenge of volatility. And all this comes to a point, I promise. I will share what that point is as we go along.
[00:14:19 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: But there are a few other things that I thought would be useful. Another aspect of my work in Singapore was to try and bring complexity more systematically into the vocabulary of government. And here we learnt a lot from this entity called the Santa Fe Institute, in New Mexico in the US.
And one of the core ideas there is that complexity, as we see in this four-quadrant diagram, is not the same as a world that is clear, where outcomes are predictable and cause-and-effect relationships are obvious.
Neither is it a world of complicatedness where you can do research and understand what's coming out of it. The world of complexity is a world where we deal with vast amounts of interdependence, that are both constraining as well as coupling different parts of the world.
And in that world, we have complex relationships. Relationships that are nonlinear, that are interdependent, and that produce interesting outcomes that we may not be able to predict in a very clear way. Then, of course, you have a world of chaos as well.
But this work here, coming out of Santa Fe and out of a group called the Cynefin Institute. This diagram that you see is called the Cynefin Diagram, developed by a chap called Dave Snowden and Mary Boone back in 2007. And it was meant to help us understand that if we are operating in the complex quadrant, then the standards of clear, predictable, outcomes that we would have in the complicated and clear worlds are not the right standards to use. We need to find new ways, new experiments to actually run in order to function well, and states need to learn how to do those experiments rather than be purely constrained by bureaucratic regimes.
[00:15:57 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: So, here are some examples of the kinds of experiments that have come about. The left-hand diagram is an experiment that our Land Transport Authority in Singapore tried, where we offered free rides on our local metro for people who clocked in before 7:30 am. And the idea was if we can use that to shift some of the largest volumes of morning traffic, why not? Maybe that will help deal with the rest of the congestion that was taking place between 8:30 and 10:00 am every day.
What we found from this experiment is that the desire for sleep is far greater than free things. Very, very little uptake in it. But we learned from it.
[00:16:40 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and Taki Sarantakis.]
Aaron Maniam: And I love the fact that we tried it because at least now we know. And because we tried it in a fairly localized way, we didn't waste a lot of government funds on it. So, I think it enabled a huge amount of learning, and that's what experiments do.
[00:16:51 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: They allow us to probe the complexity of the world and learn from them.
So, the other examples that you see here, the Accelerator Labs from the UNDP, or the effort to develop policy experimentation in Portugal. All of these are examples of trying to probe the world using experiments in order to respond to the needs of a much more complex operating environment.
[00:17:13 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: So, we've dealt with volatility, we've dealt with complexity. What we've also found increasing needs for are the ability to respond with empathy and understanding to the growing needs of citizens. The world that is more diverse is one that requires the state to not just be a leviathan, but to be an entity that can care for citizen needs.
Things like design thinking that were pioneered in places like IDEO have been one aspect of that. The ability to frame questions, to prototype, to understand in an ethnographic way what the needs of citizens are. All those are really quite critical priorities for governments these days. No longer are we just dealing with the needs for a world of efficiency to dominate what a state must do.
[00:17:57 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: And increasingly, I think we're finding that in many countries, deliberation is becoming more important. The involvement of citizens in creating policy, not just in responding to the ideas that the government might have but responding to governments and actually providing ideas for what they feel are necessary for their needs to be met. That is increasingly, I think, what governments need to be able to provide.
So, some of these ideas are captured in the book called "Citizens", which a very dear friend, John Alexander, has written. The diagram that you see on the bottom left here is a piece of artwork that was created from a large citizen deliberation process in Singapore done in 2011. And now the ecosystem is much more developed whereby there is actually a government partnerships office in our Ministry of Community, Culture, and Youth that is spearheading this work to speak to citizens much more and ensure that their voices feed into the policy formulation and the policy delivery process.
You do some of this work in Canada as well. I love that publication on the right here, which is from the Centre for Media Technology and Democracy in McGill University, looking at how deliberation can be used to understand AI better and figure out what we need to do in policy responses towards the artificial intelligence challenge.
[00:19:11 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: Now, you'll notice that in all of these I have called the heading of the slides "Some stories that became less parallel over time." So, I told you a story of futures, of design, of complexity, of experiments. This is a slide that's about digital transformation. And all of these look like very different phenomena, but they do become less parallel. And I'll explain to you why this is an important thing. But on digital transformation, you in Canada should be no strangers to this effort. You have two global treasures, at least, amongst your thinkers and doers here. Anybody recognize the two folks you see here?
[00:19:50 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and Taki Sarantakis.]
Taki Sarantakis: They're regular visitors here.
Aaron Maniam: Excellent, yes. I've definitely seen posts from David having been here. So, on the right, we have Amanda Clarke.
[00:19:58 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: I always tell Amanda that she is one of my great claims to fame. My PhD supervisor and hers was the same woman, Helen Margetts. Amanda and I are both part of Helen Margetts' genealogy of people who have studied digital government.
I said to Amanda once that her thesis was one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I have ever read in scholarship. And it's a really wonderful piece analyzing digitalization in Canada and the UK and looking at how increasingly states are adopting tech in ways that feed the kind of entrenched and prevailing structures that already exist in those states rather than in transformative ways. And we'll come back to that theme shortly.
David, of course, has been pioneering digital transformation for a very, very long time, and is doing it now out of UCL.
[00:20:45 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: So, all of these, whether futures, complexity, experiments, design, citizen engagement, or digital transformation, can appear very different. They have all had their own movements, their own dynamics. They've been different parts of government systems at different times in history.
But what I want to suggest to you, and this is probably the core of my argument today, is that these stories are not parallel stories. They are becoming less parallel over time, and they all reflect the same underlying dynamics and the overall phenomena that I think suggest a lot of similarity.
[00:21:20 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: They are also similar to a few other trends out there, the trends of behavioural insights in governments, of using AI and digitalization and their applications in different parts of government.
[00:21:30 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: And what do I mean by this? You'll notice that in each of these examples, there is something happening, the planning for the long term, the planning of citizens, incorporation of their views, designing for citizen needs. There's something happening that is not vertical in its domain. It doesn't apply only to education, or to technology, or to science, or to what the Ministry of Finance would do. It applies across the government. The benefits of these things are felt across the entire system. Sometimes there are experiments that are done in ways that de-risk similar experiments in the future, that allow us to learn that people don't actually want to wake up early even if you pay them a little bit of money.
And I like to think that these are examples of public goods. You're all in public service, you will know what a public good is. A public good that is non-rivalrous and non-excludable and gets provided by the state for citizens. And this is captured somewhat in this diagram, which is from Elinor Ostrom's Nobel lecture, which she received for the work that she did on common pool resources.
But I think this diagram is very, very instructive for us because it tells us that some things can be public goods not just given outwards to citizens, but they're also public goods that are developed internally to government.
[00:22:49 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: And what I would suggest to you, if we go back one slide, is all the things that you see here – futures, foresight, complexity, digital, citizen engagement – they are public goods that are internal to the public service.
[00:23:00 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: They have very low subtractability because, just because I use design thinking, doesn't mean another agency can't use design thinking. And I can't exclude potential beneficiaries. If we've done the design work, the system will benefit.
[00:23:18 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: Now the problem with public goods, of course, the most classic textbook problem is that they are under-provided. Because their benefits are horizontal, they accrue to the entire system, and they are therefore under-provided if we don't have some kind of intervention to ensure that they get provided.
And often that intervention will be to interrupt an otherwise laissez-faire system. It might be central direction, by public entrepreneurs who happen to be senior in a system, or it might be the hiring of consultants through things like new public management. And there are 4 examples here of the kinds of public entrepreneurs who have actually introduced some of this work into their different systems.
On the top left, you see, that's Peter Ho, who was the head of civil service in Singapore between 2005 and 2010. And he was responsible for bringing a huge amount of foresight and innovation into the Singapore system.
The picture underneath his is Jocelyne Bourgon, who many of you will know, former president of this institution, who, when I first met her – I have a huge amount of hero worship going on for Jocelyne's work. I have so much respect for it. I think it is defining for what governments need to be able to do. And I think the idea that she brought in of the new synthesis brings to bear what exactly the public goods of government need to look like.
On the top right, that's David Sengeh, currently Chief Minister but formerly Education Minister in Sierra Leone. And if you look at Sierra Leone's digital transformation path especially, it all began in education. And political scientists like to look for reasons for that. Why did it start in education? Was it something to do with education? Was there some circumstance that happened? And the real answer is David Sengeh, because he was Minister for Education and began therefore pushing the digital transformation efforts because he saw the value that technology could bring.
Just under his picture is Mike Bracken, who began a lot of the digital transformation of the UK and its Government Digital Services. And a lot of what they still do in their GDS I think comes from the kinds of reforms that he put in place.
So, we can rely on these powerful personalities to ensure that the public goods or public services are provided.
[00:25:39 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: But I worry that that is the only thing that we do. Because if we do that, then we are kind of consigning ourselves to the fact that this work will always be idiosyncratic. It will always rely on a charismatic individual coming along and wanting to do this work. And increasingly, if public sectors across the world are not able to attract good people into the ranks of their staff, then we may not have those public entrepreneurs in our systems.
So, if we don't have that, then how do we do this work? I think there are 3 trends that I'd like to suggest to you [are] important for how these public goods actually get used. And then, we'll do a quick example of AI, and after which I'll end.
The first of these to remember is that, if we're not careful, we will adopt these public goods in ways that don't transform but actually entrench our current systems. You'll adopt futures in ways that actually are kind of pro forma but don't actually allow you to go deep into what exactly the transformative potential might be of thinking for the long term. Similarly, design can be done in ways that are mechanical rather than actually meet individual citizen needs.
The second big trend to remember is that there's always a temptation with any of these things, behavioural insights, complexity, or digital transformation, to rely on vendors. To say, all right, we'll let the consultants come in and do this work, but we won't do it ourselves. And there's a real danger in that, because when we do that, we can create a lot of over-reliance on those consultants.
We should use the private sector, because you don't want the government to reinvent the wheel, but where we use the private sector, the government must also have the right skills to be discerning and to ask the right questions in the procurement processes so that we don't end up getting substandard material for the work that we're trying to do.
And then finally, we need to ensure that we have a centre of government and domain agency balance. There's a tendency – because of the public entrepreneur role and the fact that so many of them are often either political leaders or heads of civil services or their equivalents – there's a tendency for a lot of this work to focus on the centre of government.
And some of it must be there. Centres of government provide leadership, coordination, cross-pollination, and they build capacity for this sort of work. But at the same time, we want our other agencies to also develop expertise, the ability to customize these tools to their domains, and build a system resilience such that we're not reliant just on those strong individuals.
So, ideally, these public goods or public services will permeate both the centre, as well as the domain agencies. And if we are not able to do that, then we end up with quite significantly lopsided systems.
[00:28:15 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: So, let me show you what I mean about this with the case study of public sector AI, very briefly. We assume in a lot of cases that AI is going to be deeply transformative. When the internet first came into being and became pervasive, John Perry Barlow wrote this piece of text called, "The Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace", where he addressed governments of the industrial world as weary giants of flesh and steel. This was a world that he envisioned of deep, deep freedom and a huge amount of liberty for individuals.
And the AI version of that today is there in all sorts of different quotes. Sundar Pichai from Google says that "AI has the potential to be more transformative than electricity or fire." Never mind that AI needs electricity, but well, he must know something that the rest of us may not all be aware of. But look at these other quotes here:
"AI will enhance the very human experience that we have." "AI will reshape every industry and every job." "AI will help us understand and solve many of the world's most complex problems."
[00:29:24 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: And it could, AI could do all of this, but there is the reality that AI might also entrench how we live. And this is developed in the idea of Conway's Law. Melvin Conway wrote in the 1950s about the idea that when we design systems, we reproduce the structures of our internal communications. I see a good number of people nodding here, as if you're ruefully recognizing that this has happened in your organizations.
[00:29:46 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: What are the examples of this? Amazon and Google and Facebook – or Meta now – Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle are all using exactly the same technologies, but they're using them in very different ways because their cultures are different.
Amazon has always been a fairly organized hierarchical system. Google is organized around search. Facebook, now Meta, are organized around networking. Microsoft is organized around some level of competition amongst its different teams, as you see from the guns here.
[00:30:18 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and Taki Sarantakis.]
Taki Sarantakis: <inaudible>
Aaron Maniam: Well, I don't know, man. Anyone who's used Teams will probably realize that this is kind of still like that. You wonder whether the Teams team has spoken to the Excel people and the Word people. But anyway, this is going to go on video, so I shall stop there.
[00:30:35 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: Apple is centred around one person, whether that's Tim Cook today or Steve Jobs before. Oracle is essentially a legal company with a small engineering outfit that is kept separate. And what's really interesting about all of these – I will not ask you at this stage what are the structures of the Canadian government, or the agencies that you work in – but the reality here is that we can end up with this kind of entrenchment.
[00:30:58 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: If it's happening in the private sector, it's going to happen amongst public sector agencies as well.
And that entrenchment affects the kinds of scenarios that we will face in dealing with different aspects of AI. If AI truly transforms, then it can transform both the positive and the negative effects that we're seeing on this two-by-two. And if it's going to reinforce, it can also reinforce with positive and less positive effects.
So, these are kind of 4 scenarios, in a 2x2 matrix that might give us a sense of the different possibilities that AI might have. We can have a world of abundance, a world of darkness and really difficult consequences, a world of inequalities, and a world where the status quo is roughly maintained but made faster, more efficient, and more productive.
[00:31:47 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: These then have very, very different consequences for policy, because in one, in the top right-hand corner, you have a world of multiplicatively powerful use cases, genuinely transformational sets of ideas. In the bottom right, you have a world of culture wars, of mis- and disinformation, and of online harms becoming much more pervasive. You have inequalities on the bottom left, and a world of convenience and efficiency gains on the top left, which means that the policy responses have to be very different.
They will range from skills challenges and skills policies for the top right; regulation and legislation on the bottom right; ensuring of parity through subsidies and policy transfers on the bottom left; and governments keeping space through skills on the top left.
Now why is this important? Because this is the kind of world where governments are not just dealing with problems of public order or scarcity anymore. This is the world where volatility and complexity and empathy and diversity start to become increasingly important.
[00:32:50 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: And I'll quickly just go through this. I won't go through the table, but I just want to say that a good national AI strategy, from what I've seen in my research, and we've examined the AI strategies of the top 20 governments in the UNE Government Digital Index. And what we found is all of them actually have 6 levels of infrastructure that they're using well.
They have a good digital infrastructure, a hard infrastructure, despite playing mostly in the virtual space. The hard infrastructure is important in terms of cables, connectivity, compute, and data centres. There's a legal and regulatory infrastructure, the right rules being in place. A people infrastructure for the sorts of skills and development that need to happen at the workforce, in the public sector, as well as amongst research communities.
You need a cultural infrastructure of experimentation, of responding to complexity and adaptivity in a system. You need agility infrastructure to prepare for the future. This is the institution building that we mentioned earlier. And you need a civic infrastructure that brings citizens on board that process and makes them part of the conversation of using AI in the best and most meaningful ways. And that's the infrastructure of diversity and dealing with the need for empathy.
[00:34:00 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: So, the reason I wanted to share that with you is I think governments can provide the Public Goods of Public Service. We know that it is possible, but for it to be done well, we need to ensure two things.
One, we need to ensure that our systems are geared to deal with the problems of genuinely transformational use, and we need to deal with the effects that public goods will always be under-provided unless there is some strong intervention at the system level for how these goods will actually get used.
But secondly, and I'll end off on this idea, public goods aren't everything. We also need to remember that public goods are about the capacity of the states, which is the vertical axis on this 2x2. We also need to have the intent of our states become an important, overriding concern, I would think. Because if you have positive intent and high capacity, that's hopefully the kind of government that Canada and Singapore and other governments are aspiring to be. But if we don't have those, then we end up in one of these other three quadrants, which can be quite dangerous. Because, whether you're muddling through, being a failed state, or dealing with high-capacity negative intent, through kleptocratic and authoritarian systems, those can be very damaging for what citizen welfare is trying to achieve.
[00:35:14 Split screen: Aaron Maniam and slide, as described.]
Aaron Maniam: So, I'll end on this note with a bit of a nod and an homage to Jocelyne Bourgon's work on what she called, "The New Synthesis of Public Administration", because I think it captures the kinds of public goods that I've been referring to throughout this little talk.
We want to achieve public results as well as civic results. We want to exercise collective power as well as government authority, and this means we have to play in the dynamic space in the infinity diagram that you see here, moving fluidly between performance, emergence, resilience, and compliance, in ways that allow us to create value for citizens even as we adhere to the responsibilities of what public sectors are meant to be able to do.
So, I'm looking forward very much to any questions, thoughts, or responses that you might have. But otherwise, Taki, I think you and I are going to have a bit of a conversation first around this, aren't we?
[00:36:04 The audience applauds as Aaron takes his place beside Taki on stage. The camera shows various angles of the stage, including full screen views of Aaron and Taki as they speak.]
Taki Sarantakis: That was a wonderful tour de force, Aaron. We're going to talk a little bit. Put up your hand so I catch your eye, and we'll start incorporating people into the conversation.
[00:36:28 Text on screen: Taki Sarantakis, President, Canada School of Public Service.]
Taki Sarantakis: So, Aaron, I wanted to start where you started, which is the notion of the state. And I think one of the things that I took away from your presentation today is that our notion of the state is changing.
And fundamentally, I think, there's no disagreement from anybody, that first and foremost, the state is responsible for security. If the state cannot secure the physical well-being of its citizens, it's not really a state. It has already fallen into one of those bad quadrants, which is, in this particular case, is the failed state.
And we've seen those, Venezuela, Syria, Guatemala, and in fact we're seeing too many of those failed states going forward. So, after that though, it's a bit up for grabs.
Aaron Maniam: Yes.
Taki Sarantakis: So, how do you see the Western state reconceptualizing itself during this period, beyond security?
[00:37:45 Text on screen: Aaron Maniam, Fellow of Practice and Director, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.]
Aaron Maniam: I think what I often latch onto here is the fact that we basically need a new metaphor, for what states are able to do. The older ones that I mentioned in the slides, the iron cage, even the government as platform, are not quite enough.
And I think we need to think of the state as much more of a complex ecology, bringing into bear the old functions of security, definitely, but recognizing that security is also now defined in ways that intricately enmesh with other issues. It's very hard to be secure if you don't have a strong economy as well. So, the needs of the world of scarcity and the world of security are starting to interlink.
At the same time, if we don't involve citizens in the processes of the state, then the state may not always be as legitimate as it would need to be in order to engender trust and achieve some of the broad functions that it needs to do in a world that is much more complex and volatile. So, that's where the deliberative infrastructure, the need to get citizens on board, and for citizens to know that their needs are being met, that becomes really important for what states are able to do as well.
So, I tend to think of this as much more about a world where the state is both enabler as well as a maintainer of the basic infrastructure through which the needs of everyday living that citizens have are actually going to be met. So, that's why the 6 infrastructures in the AI example become so important.
Taki Sarantakis: So, we have seen in many Western states, including unfortunately Canada, dramatic increases in things like food insecurity, dramatic increases in things like housing insecurity, dramatic increases in availability of healthcare, which causes its own type of insecurity. Is that basically a redefinition, not so much of the state, but of security, and then therefore that the state has a role to play, or a function to play, or at least when those things aren't working as well as they historically have worked in Western states, does that then bring up – another word you just used a moment ago – the legitimacy of the state?
Like, what is the state good for if I'm having trouble feeding myself, if I am having trouble housing myself, and if I get sick, I'm going to die in an emergency hall room?
Aaron Maniam: Yes, I think that's a very, very profound question. And I don't think it's only about security though. What I think is happening here, if we go back to Amartya Sen's work on capabilities, for example, which I think is actually a really important metric for us to use.
States are here not just to provide utility in an economic sense, neither are we here to provide access to resources. We're here to help citizens lead flourishing lives, ultimately, in our best, most fully formed functioning. And the ability to flourish depends on whether or not citizens have access to these basic needs and the capabilities for that flourishing life.
So, that's where I think things like food insecurity, healthcare, education all become quite critical. So, at that basic level, I think the states have to provide those forms of capabilities or provide the ability to find those capabilities among citizens.
But what's also really interesting is this is not an argument for endless provision by the state. At some point people are going to – I think there's a legitimate argument for most states to say we expect 5-year-olds to 10-year-olds to maybe even 15-year-olds to go through compulsory education. Why? Because that gives them the scaffolding from which they can build a flourishing life. But states are not going to tell someone you must go to university because they recognize that not everybody needs to do that in order to lead a flourishing life.
So, I think the flourishing is an important part of that base infrastructure of what states provide, but there's also then the sense that states provide the ability to make informed choices, especially once we have acquired the ability to choose. And that I think becomes an equally important aspect. And that's why the government as a platform, the government as facilitator image becomes so important.
Taki Sarantakis: Yes. Now, we also are seeing there's another dynamic happening. Let's take the word capacity to run it through that particular filter, which is we are seeing private sector capacity and capabilities soar. Just soar. We have a handful of private sector actors who have powers now that rival those of the nation-state not that long ago. Things [like] only the state could send something up to space. Only the state could launch satellites. Only the state could tell you where certain parts of your population were.
And at the same time, we've seen Western states in particular suffer with basic things, delivering the mail; answering the phone; the fact that they still deliver mail; websites that crash when more than 3 people are on them at a time. What does that do to the notion of citizenship? What does that do to the notion of, I am in this collective thing, I want more public goods?
Aaron Maniam: I think the simple answer there is that it increases citizen expectations of what states can do, and legitimately. I think that's a good thing, because it holds us to higher standards in terms of what we're able to provide for citizens. I'll give you a personal example of this, well, two personal examples actually.
So, I lost my wallet a couple of years ago while living in the UK, and it was very, very telling how different my experiences were in terms of getting redress on that. So, I had my Singapore credit cards. I went into my banking app. I deactivated all of them. 2 days later, I cancelled all of them, and it was all done on my app. It was very safe. I lost no money from anything.
Then I had to call my British bank. So, I called Barclays and said, "Hey, I've lost my wallet." And they said, "OK, we'll get you a new card. It'll come to you in a week." And I'm like, "Yes, but I need to eat before that, so what do I do?" And they said, "OK, don't worry, don't worry. It'll be fine. Here is the number that you need to key into your Apple Wallet. Here is the 3-digit code that you need and everything will be fine." And it was. That took me an hour. Not great, but an hour is still pretty good. I had to wait for the phone call to get through. And then I spoke to someone, and they gave me guidance.
I also, at that point, lost my physical British Residence Permit card, and that – take a guess, Taki, how long do you think it took me to do? So, it was 5 minutes for the Singapore credit cards, 1 hour for the British credit card. How long did the BRP take to get replaced?
Taki Sarantakis: So, I'm not going to guess, but I will say, woe is you.
Aaron Maniam: Yes, it was not great. It was 6 weeks. I had to redo everything, all the biometric stuff, everything, even though it was already in the system. So, there was no once-only data in any of this. It was redo everything from scratch.
And I get that governments need to be accountable in ways that the private sector may not always have to be. But I still think the difference between a 6-week wait and a 5-minute wait is egregious. And I think more of us should be pressuring our governments to provide better for us, because what we have in the rest of our lives, from the private sector is actually pretty good. So, that's one example on the more positive side. But you're absolutely right that there can be a really nefarious various aspects about what the private sector can also do. And this was actually the subject of my whole PhD.
When I studied digital transformation, one of the biggest things I found was that the difference between a successful and a non-successful digitalization project lay in whether there was enough internal capacity within the state to run those projects well. And that's, I think, what is necessary. We can't replace what the private sector can do, and some of that's actually useful for moving the outer cusp of overall societal and economic transformation.
But we need to be able to manage that. And the only way states can manage that is if they are informed themselves. They need to ask good questions; they need to procure well; they need to pick the right people to do vending; they need to hold those entities to account and not be taken for a ride by the private sector; they need to hire more good people to come in so that they can have a perpetual cycle of skilled civil servants. And if you don't have that, then you end up in a really vicious cycle.
So, I think the response there has to be about how governments up-skill.
Taki Sarantakis: So, we're going to go to our first audience question in a moment. I want to stick with your example for a second. Your Singapore credit cards, instantly. Your UK private sector stuff, an hour. Your UK public sector stuff, 6 weeks.
People would say in the old days, especially state actors and public servants like us, we would say, "Well, we'll get you your ID back when we get you your ID back." We're a monopoly. You're not going to quit the UK state and go to another state, although some people do, if it takes 6 weeks instead of an hour, wait your turn. The same with healthcare; the same with filing out your tax returns; the same with dealing with your Internal Revenue entity. We have a kind of a monopoly mindset.
Aaron Maniam: We do.
Taki Sarantakis: If I could call it that. I think that's one of the things that's killing us.
Aaron Maniam: It's that and the fact that there are no – I mean, there are budget constraints, but they're not as binding or as ruthlessly set as what a private sector entity would go through. So, I think that is part of what is going on here.
And I think that the pity with that is that monopoly mindsets don't have to lead to that. A good monopoly mindset can also say I want to stay ahead; I want to keep making myself better. And I think that's the core idea of the entrepreneurial state, the mission-oriented state that the Mazzucato work is trying to get to. And I think we need a lot more of that. Precisely because our citizens are able to make these comparisons far more intelligently now than they were able to before.
Taki Sarantakis: And in real time. Sir? If you could tell us your name and what organization you're with.
Alberto Garcia-Vargas: Thank you. Very enlightening, Aaron. Thank you very much for sharing with us today. Alberto Garcia-Vargas from Treasury Board Secretariat.
I have two questions that are related. The first one is about the role of the public service in supporting the state in its agenda. So, what is that role of the public service in getting a government in that upper right quadrant? And the second part of it is, is there anything from Singapore's 1980s public service reform that impacted where the country is today?
Aaron Maniam: Great, thanks Alberto. They're both great questions. First of all, on what you said, the public service supporting the state agenda. This may be a language difference, but I don't think of the public service as separate from the state. I think the state is, overall, what governmental capability can provide, and that includes political capabilities where people acquire a mandate, especially from things like elections in most countries. And then the civil service supports that process as well, but also as part of the state apparatus.
And I think some of the core things that are necessary there are, in particular, the long-term capabilities, the things that are not going to be subject to the needs of a specific electoral timeframe. The things that we know will transcend, the civil service needs to have capabilities on those issues.
They need to be able to analyze them, to make recommendations, and to ask nonetheless for the ability from their political leadership to say, "We will make a stand on some issues, and we will say that we want to take certain steps, even if we know that the consequences of those steps will outlast a particular term of government." The analysis for that, the ability to figure out the pros and cons, needs to come from the civil service and that means building up genuine expertise and skills and capabilities.
What's also important I think is delivery capabilities. So, this might seem less long-term but it's equally important. Delivery, not just in terms of the state imposing itself on citizens, but in a lot of cases co-delivery with community organizations or citizens themselves. And we need this because it is part of a civil service's job, I think, to support the mandate that has been gained by the political leadership. And that means delivering on the election promises and whatever was in their manifesto when they stood for that vote.
Taki Sarantakis: And this is interesting because when I mention this to Canadian public servants, a lot of them kind of recoil at the notion that we are all, as federal public servants, we are part of the executive branch of government. We are not part of Parliament, we are not independent, we are not part of the judiciary. We are part and parcel of the executive branch of government, and it is our job to support the executive branch of government. As Aaron said, the legitimately elected government of the day in their agenda.
Nick.
Nick Erdody: Nick Erdody, Director of the Geopolitics National Security Program here at the School. I just want to pull on a little bit of a thread that I think has come out in a few of the questions, and it's essentially decision-making is about when and how to stop intervening and start winding things down. I'm wondering what your research says about criteria, and what we should be thinking about as we get out of certain business lines or get out of certain areas? How should we be thinking about transformation in that sense?
Aaron Maniam: Great, Nick, thank you for that. And, Alberto, I realized I missed one of your questions earlier. I'll come back to that in a bit.
I think there's two ways I would approach the question of what to not do, or what to stop. The first is, in Singapore we have something called the Yellow Pages, meaning if something is provided – and this may be something that dates me a bit, the Yellow Pages, those big phone directories – and the idea basically is if something is found in there, if it's already being well provided by the incentives of market demand and supply, then the state does not have to intervene in that. The state intervenes where the market fails in some way.
So, the Yellow Pages rule was a way of civil servants holding themselves to account and saying, if something is already provided by a private entity, then go through the process of procuring for it even if it is a bit inconvenient. Work with that partner rather than try and do everything yourself. Because if the state does too much on its own, then it bloats. And it becomes, I think, an unnecessarily inefficient outfit. Because there's probably things that the state will try to do which it can't do as well as an entity in the Yellow Pages.
Then the second question is, when it does intervene, when to stop. For me, the line is quite simple. You stop when you start moving from being an enabler to being a crowding out entity. For as long as the state intervention enables things to get done, if it creates civic capacity, it can encourage that. A state convening a deliberative process through a citizen jury, for example, can create capacity. But a state doing too much can sometimes crowd out further capacities whereby it either reduces the incentive or reduces the maneuvering space for community organizations to come on board.
So, I would say that that becomes for me the lodestar of what we do. As long as we're enabling and creating capacity, either civic or executive, great. If we start to crowd out capacity, then we should stop. And some of this links then to Alberto's question about stuff learnt from Singapore's transformation processes in the past. You mentioned the 1980s, but what I would actually say is Singapore's learnt to be in a kind of dynamically and continually transforming state.
We don't use the word reform a lot in Singapore, basically because reform suggests that something is wrong, you deal with it, and then you kind of stabilize again. Whereas what we've realized is we don't live in a normal world. We live in a world where there are cascading disequilibria that we continually have to deal with. And so, we're always trying to find the new normal, the next normal, the never normal even.
And so, we use the term transformation and innovation a lot more than we do terms like reform. Transformation, I think, helps us to remember that we're engaged in a process of continual change where maybe something that was relevant 20 years ago is not relevant now. And we need to therefore have the courage to re-examine it, to change it where necessary, and make adjustments on it.
And this then goes back to, Nick, your question also about intervening. We intervene where that change has value, but we stop intervening where the circumstances are such that the value stops being created.
Taki Sarantakis: Before we go to our next question from Paul, I want to talk a little bit about foresight and looking forward. For some governments, thinking about this afternoon is foresight. They're always kind of just barely keeping up. The urgent is always overwhelming the important. How do you carve out consciously that thinking, that time on the cabinet agenda, to think not just about how do we get through the rest of this afternoon?
Aaron Maniam: I love that question, Taki, because I think governments genuinely do have needs to prepare for the long term, but they also have needs to meet the needs of the here and now. And both of those are important. A government that only takes care of the long term is not going to be meeting citizen welfare needs of today. And a government that only deals with today's needs is going to be derelict in its duty of planning for the long term.
So, the way I like to think about this is to say that some people should be thinking about the future all the time, and all people in the public sector should be thinking about the future some of the time. What I mean by those two things is some people thinking about the future all the time, those need to be your dedicated futures units. The ones who are always asking themselves, what is next? What's out there? What are we assuming wrongly about the world, and what do we do about it today? So, that's Policy Horizons, that's the Centre for Strategic Futures, it's the Policy Lab in the UK.
All people looking at the future some of the time is a different thing. For that group what it means is, most of the time, go do your work. Make sure that the roads function, make sure the buildings are safe, take care of the needs of today, make sure that parliamentary questions get answered. Those are the urgent stuffs that you need to do.
But at least a few times each year, set aside moments to think a little bit more about the long term. And those might be retreat days, they might be away days, they might be – in Singapore, some of our organizations like to say they don't have retreats because retreats are moving backwards, so they have advances instead. So, they have days when they move ahead. It's always quite amusing to see.
But whether you call it a retreat or an advance or a learning day or an innovation day, it doesn't matter. The fact is you're setting aside time to reflect and think about the future. And if good organizations can do that 3 to 4 times a year, then those are the moments where the first group and the second group can talk to each other. The ones who are looking at the future all the time and the ones who are looking at the future some of the time, they find a way to have a strategic conversation. And that, I think, is really quite key.
But a healthy system will have both of those groups. And I would even venture to say that the group looking at the future all of the time doesn't need to be that large.
Taki Sarantakis: Absolutely.
Aaron Maniam: 5% of an organization, maybe. Maybe even 1%. If it's a really good 1%, that's what matters.
Taki Sarantakis: Paul.
Paul: Hi, Aaron. Thanks for coming. Appreciate the presentation. Really hard to disagree with anything you're saying. I think it's all great. One of the slides that you had that really caught me was on the 6 pieces of infrastructure required. And it's something I've been reflecting on for a number of years as well. And again, I would agree with everything you had up on that slide.
One thing I think about in that context is the difficulty sometimes that we face in public services particularly in the Western world in terms of some of the real or perceived barriers to actually doing some of those things. So, it's one thing to say let's have them, which I think we can all agree on, but how do we actually get there?
And so, when I think about things like people management, there are real barriers built into many systems for people wanting or finding the drive to up-skill, for example. There are real barriers, or perceived barriers, in terms of maybe security, let's say, when it comes to utilization of new software, hardware, in the context of public service. Any lessons that you've been able to draw from your research or across the world of how people have overcome those barriers? So, more getting in terms of the how those things get achieved. Thank you.
Aaron Maniam: Yes, that's a really great question, Paul. I'm thinking of at least 3 levels in response to what you've outlined.
First of all, there are going to be rules in place, and we need to make sure that the rules are there to help those valuable things to happen and don't end up stymieing them from happening. What you described, for instance if you can't even test out new technology because your security rules are so prohibitive, then you don't really have space to do any kind of experimentation.
But at the same time, I would say responsible experiments are important. So, you might want to say, "Okay, we don't change the rule yet, let's try things out in a few different settings, and then once we've figured out how the rule needs to be tweaked, then we can deal with a situation where the tech adoption needs to happen." I do think public sectors, for example, rightly don't adopt newest versions of any piece of software, because you want to give time for some of the kinks in the software to be worked out. But having said that, waiting for years and years before you adopt even a version of Microsoft that's 5 years old is probably not going to lead to any kind of healthy system. So, I think rules need to make sense, first of all.
Second, our protocols and processes need to be such that they reinforce the mindsets and the culture that we're trying to build. And what I mean by that is, it's all well and good to say, "Oh, we need the right sorts of culture, we all need to adopt tech-safe practices, we must all have great passwords", but if we don't then have routines that reinforce that, then I think it's very easy to forget about it.
And sometimes it's very simple. In Singapore, I'm sure you have a similar system here, we have a process each year whereby we have to update our declarations of independence and impartiality basically, and also of non-indebtedness as public servants. So, when we do that, we can't actually fill out the form until we've done a quiz that reminds us of all the public sector values and norms that we need to be part of. And it's a simple thing, just something that whereby the process has been designed in such a way that you remind yourself of what you're doing at this first week of January period where hopefully things are not quite as frantic as before.
We've now done the same thing with cybersecurity. You have to pass a cybersecurity quiz every year because otherwise we don't set in place the right sorts of mindsets. And then along the way, we now get phishing emails from our own tech agencies. So, if you click on something, you will immediately be sent a note with big giant red font, saying you should not have clicked on that. And I'd much rather do that with an internal email than one that was an actual phishing scam. So, the routines there I think can help us a great deal.
The last thing I would say is I think it's really important for the back-end support structures to be in place in order for those levels of infrastructure to be developed. Because I really feel for you when you say things like if we want to have the right people, infrastructure, or the right cultural or agility infrastructure, but we don't have the right sorts of rules in place, and not just rules, but back-end processes to support that, then I think we're in trouble. We need to be able to hire well, we need to be able to procure well, and I do think HR and procurement, for me, are two of the greatest enablers out there.
You know, I'm part of a little –
Taki Sarantakis: Did you say enabler?
Aaron Maniam: Well, they should be the important enablers.
Taki Sarantakis: They should be the important enablers.
Aaron Maniam: That is where I was getting at with this. And it's interesting, because I'm on a group in the World Economic Forum which is looking at digital public infrastructure and govtech. And you'd think we'd all be there talking about ID systems and how data exchange needs to be designed. And we do talk a bit about those things, but a lot of the times when we get together, we're talking about procurement. Because if you don't get the procurement rules right, nothing else can happen.
Same thing with HR. You don't get HR rules right, you won't hire the right people, and then you have a problem of in-skilling, which will not allow you to deal with the skills deficit that I mentioned in response to Taki's question earlier. So, I think the back end needs to get fixed as well.
And if you put that together – rules, mindsets, procedures, and backend – hopefully we start to have a little bit of hope, that we can build those infrastructures in the right way.
Taki Sarantakis: So, Aaron, we're going to close by I'm going to poke you a little bit on each of the three thinkers you introduced us to in your first slide. We'll go in the opposite order.
So, James Scott, a giant in this world, he actually started as a bit of a – I think he became famous as a bit of an anti-government anarchist. And then I think to his great surprise – he passed away – but he will be known, I think, going forward as one of the canonical thinkers of the state.
And "Seeing Like a State" – he just wrote a book on rivers, which is fascinating – but "Seeing Like a State", one of the things that that taught a generation of public servants is the state doesn't see things the way you and I do. It doesn't see things the way companies do. It doesn't see things the way volunteer organizations do. The state has its own requirements that it imposes on us.
Talk to us about that, because I can give you a couple of specific examples from "Seeing Like a State" like, you can't have two streets called Main Street. One of them has to be some other name, because the state can't bring the fire department there, or the police department there, if there are two streets called Main Street. Or the state needs to have an army, therefore the state needs to have taxation, therefore the state will always need a coercive source to make sure that it generates.
Talk about James C. Scott and the state for a moment or two, in today's world.
Aaron Maniam: Yes, so I think this goes back to that diagram I had with the overlapping circles. I think the state that is doing all the types of seeing that you mentioned that functions well in the first two worlds I outlined. The world where the needs are basically needs of security, or needs of dealing with scarcity. The state has the right machinery and mechanics to be able to respond to those things.
But what I would also argue, actually, is that in the other three worlds, the worlds of volatility, complexity, and diversity, is not just that the state sees differently, but the state doesn't see at all. It doesn't have visibility, and things are not legible to it because it has a veil through which it already has made pre-decisions about what it is going to prioritize and what it's not going to prioritize.
Simple example for you on this. At one point in Singapore, one of our agencies wanted to modernize its Work Pass division. So, these are the folks if you come to Singapore as a foreigner or an expatriate, you need to get a work pass of some sort. And the question that the team had was, "How do we make that process of applying for and being given the work pass a more efficient one?" That was the question they began with.
And when they worked with the consultants from IDEO, what they realized was they were already at 99% efficiency. So, they could spend the next few months doing a business process re-engineering. Now we've all heard that acronym before. Lovely thing called BPR. They could have done that and then they would have had maybe 0.9% improvements in what they could do.
Or they could change the experience entirely, because what they realized was the biggest pain point that people had with these passes was not the speed, it was the fact that they were applying for the passes when they arrived in Singapore, they didn't yet have a home, they didn't yet have childcare. They had nowhere to put their children, so they often had to bring their kids with them to collect the passes or apply for them.
And so, the simplest thing we could do for them at that stage was not make the process faster. It was give them a little corner where the kid could go play with the simplest of toys so that the parents could get on with the administrative tasks that they had. And so, that's what they did.
If they were seeing like a state, they would have seen it in terms of efficiency, and the imposition of more structure and protocols. But here I think what they saw was to try and see the way other humans would see the experience. And that visibility changed entirely the kind of experience they ended up providing.
Taki Sarantakis: Our second last thinker is Weber.
Aaron Maniam: Yes.
Taki Sarantakis: In many ways, the theoretical father of modern bureaucracy. You quoted "The Iron Cage". You didn't quote the other part. Who's the human being that lives within the iron cage who you've told us is a bureaucrat? What are the characteristics that Weber said of that human being?
Aaron Maniam: Yes, so that human being is bound by rules, first of all. And those rules are there to protect them from vested interests. They also have deep expertise and can therefore make decisions based on the expertise that they have.
And I want to stress, I don't like the iron part of bureaucracy, but I do think some bureaucracies are important. The kinds of structures that bureaucracies can bring to processes that are otherwise deeply, deeply fluid are actually really important. They allow for a level of standardization and fairness amongst different groups that is critical.
What I think is important though is bureaucrats need to remember two things. One is pure bureaucracies will not innovate, and we need more innovative capacity in a world where there are far greater instabilities. And so, there's ideas around the academic literature about the neo-Weberian state, for example, which I think make eminently good sense to me. They are Weberian in the sense that they are still structured, they're still focused on expertise, but they are neo because they are focused a lot on the instabilities and the complexities that are out there, which Weber did not necessarily write about. So, I think we need both of those things.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, Aaron is really nice and really sweet and just a wonderful man, so he won't actually say what Weber said, but I will, because I'm none of the things that Aaron is. Weber said that the people in the iron cage imagine themselves to be the greatest thing that humanity has ever achieved, that there is nothing greater, that we write the rules, we know what is right, we know what is wrong. And he said, but actually sometimes that's not true. And I think that's important for all of us to remember because our reality is within a system. It is not the world outside of that system, per se.
Then our last thinker that you introduced us to in your first slide, Thomas Hobbes, and you quoted the "nasty, brutish, and short." If we look around the world, we are living in the age of abundance. We are living in the age of increasing life expectancy. We are living in the age of increasing inoculation rates, education rates. Yet I think in the back of our minds, a lot of us are kind of going, it feels like we're going back to nasty, brutish, and short.
Is there an incongruity there that you can help us grapple with?
Aaron Maniam: I don't know about incongruity. I think we're living in a K-shaped world where there are different trajectories that different groups are taking. And some of us are indeed experiencing all of those forms of abundance that you mentioned.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are writing about the age of abundance, but we're also dealing with conflict coming back, we're dealing with an age of mercantilism, where that's kind of the economic version of the life that is nasty, brutish, and short. And I think those are very, very real as well.
And, in a way, I suppose they are kind of necessarily correlates of each other, that some of the anger that has driven the inequalities on the one hand are what's causing the shortness, the nastiness, and the brutishness of a lot of life. And part of it also comes from a sense that not everybody feels they are able to play and are feeling the dividends of the abundance that's also out there.
[01:12:56 Text on screen: Aaron Maniam, Fellow of Practice and Director, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.]
Aaron Maniam: And that I think is an important role that responsible states will want to be able to take on. To say, how do we ensure that everybody receives at least some of the dividends of growth and the dividends of what we used to call globalization, although we don't hear the term quite as much anymore.
If states can do that, if states can help to make sure that the least empowered are supported and that some of the benefits that the most empowered receive are also redistributed, then I think we'll end up with much more balanced and much less top-heavy systems.
[01:13:20 Text on screen: Taki Sarantakis, President, Canada School of Public Service.]
Taki Sarantakis: So, Aaron, you are one of my favourite thinkers, and I think you've given a good indication to the audience here today and online in this last hour and a bit as to why you are one of my favourite thinkers. Thank you so much for coming and spending some time with us at the Canada School.
[01:13:30 The audience applauds. Taki and Aaron stand and shake hands]
Aaron Maniam: Really appreciate it. That was fun.
Taki Sarantakis: Thank you, my friend.
[01:13:40 CSPS animated logo. Text on screen: canada.ca/school-ecole.]
[01:13:47 The Government of Canada wordmark appears.]
