The World Needs a More Creative Public Service: Here’s 5 Ways to Make That Happen
By Rahul Chandran and Shannon Mullen O’Keefe
The headlines are alarming: war, pandemics, climate-change, and recession. We need to feed billions and preserve biodiversity; become carbon-neutral and enable a just transition.
Of course, the constant is change. It just seems to be getting faster, and harder to keep up. Our public sector institutions are critical to addressing challenges that exist on a societal scale — as we’ve seen during COVID-19 — and will need to be deeply creative to do so. At the end of December, Ngaire Woods called for “more public servants.” She’s right. But we need to go one step further — we need to build a creative public service.
Public institutions and their systems are often designed to constrain. There’s a good reason for this. The reach and power of the state is amazing at best — and at worst, terrifying. Out of a healthy respect for that power, cultures in our public institutions are often careful — because their mistakes can have huge consequences. As a result, experimentation and innovation often take a back seat.
The problem is, experimentation and innovation–just this sort of creativity, is what we need to grapple with the challenges looming on our horizon.
We see an opportunity to help our institutions evolve — by starting small. Not by changing the norms of public service, but by rethinking some of our everyday strategies. Not by upending public health guidance, or laws, but by scrutinizing the invisible aspects of public-sector practices — the things we do that reinforce the constraints in an unhealthy way.
Things like our daily habits.
The things that we do because they are just how we work. The practices that shape our culture of work that — if we do them a bit better — might help the public sector to be able to tackle the threats we face.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: Culture is mutable. Leaders have significant power to shape an organization and its people. We’ve both observed this in our professional lives, seeing large institutions shift, rapidly in response to personality. You’ve seen it too. It may not be easy to do with intention, but let’s not pretend that it can’t be done.
With that in mind, we propose five simple ideas to help the public-sector unlock its creativity.
Principle 1: Double down on values.
Values are a crucial part of culture — in fact they underpin it. Yet, according to Gallup, just 23% of U.S. employees strongly agree that they can apply their organization’s values to their work every day. When values are clear, they inform decisions and enable the people closest to a specific problem to make choices that both address the challenge AND respect values.
Consider humility as a value: A leader, demonstrating a humble approach to a complex challenge might be a leader whose deep confidence allows them to say, “I don’t know, we’ll have to find a new way.” That simple statement can be the approach that opens the door for teams (and organizations) to embrace the uncertainty about future pathways that is the reality in which we live; to be open to new perspectives and external sources; and to understand that leaders will have to make decisions as best possible — rather than perfectly.
Consider humility as a value: A leader, demonstrating a humble approach to a complex challenge might be a leader whose deep confidence allows them to say, “I don’t know, we’ll have to find a new way.”
We’re not saying that it’s enough to “be humble.” Though it’s a start — be humble. It’s more that we see that values exist within the public sector that can be translated into ways that allow creativity as the response to complexity. We want the public sector to consciously embrace its values and articulate them — and see them as a tool for managing complexity with creativity, rather than as a constraint. You could build the above case from the core Canadian public-sector value of “respect for people” for example.
Here’s how it gets harder: Imagine a public-sector working group trying to accelerate pathways to Net-Zero will have to manage economic and social risks in the present — and in the future. Such a group will have to recommend decisions that impose costs on both groups. Financing risky short-term bets takes limited resources away from, for example, schools and hospitals. There are no right answers in these cases, only values-enabled choices.
A deep understanding of how values animate their work might help the public sector to frame these ethical choices for their political masters. As the first line of the US Code of Ethics for Government Service states, “put loyalty to the highest moral principles and to country above loyalty to persons, party, or Government department.” Values, when used as a purely defensive tool for reducing corruption, are themselves corrupted. Values, when used to shape and inform choices, and provide a north-star, illuminate difficult decisions and make them better.
Principle 2: Embrace choreography.
A leader can’t possibly ‘know it all,’ but they can ‘know who knows.’ Moving at the speed of the future requires a mindset that embraces the beauty of orchestration.
This brilliant Dan McClure ThoughtWorks article describes how choreography might look in practice in the workplace. Arts professionals like choreographers “reach a creative goal through the elegant use of the diverse elements that are at their disposal. [They] are not locked into a fixed plan but adjust in complex and creative ways to achieve an effect that they may not entirely understand in advance.”
In this way, as problems emerge, a leader can embrace the beauty in orchestration to adapt their approach. This may mean that project teams coalesce around specific problems and projects. Once the leader has articulated the problem to be solved — the goal — they can embrace the beauty in orchestrating the right team to tackle it.
Like a choreographer — they choose which artists they need in the mix — “but can work out many ways of getting there, changing on the fly, while keeping the goal in mind.”
How does that work in the public sector? We need to give leaders the ability to reach across departments and find the right dancers for their tune. Again, let’s take the Net Zero example above. A choreographed approach to government innovation means pulling expertise as needed with more flexibility and fewer “Inter-Agency Taskforces, where people are opted in based on rank and position, rather than expertise relevant to the problem. Do you need to figure out how to support reduced emissions for municipal bus networks? Call in a municipality — not just your federal peers. Do you need to design a public-health campaign for a pandemic that is spreading most virulently among an under-represented group? Go to other departments that have executed on specific outreach, and learn from their expertise.
Like a choreographer — they choose which artists they need in the mix — “but can work out many ways of getting there, changing on the fly, while keeping the goal in mind.”
It also means we need to give leaders the ability to reach outside of government, and to push its senior leaders, in particular, to more frequent interchange programmes. The public sector is not the private sector, but it would be more effective if it understood how the private sector worked. The application of AI to complex problems is, simply put, an area where governments are weak. Funding structured exchange programmes, where senior government officials can bring their serious policy and process competence to the private sector — who might in return support the public sector with specialised expertise and fresh ways of thinking — could help reinvigorate both the public sectors ability to adapt, and the private sector’s social impact and corporate responsibility.
Principle 3: Radical inclusion.
Perhaps one of the greatest attributes to a great choreographer is that they see and value each artist for who they are and what they uniquely bring to the table.
A digression:
The Pitmen Painters, a play about “aesthetically adventurous miners,” was about coal miners who took part in The Ashington Group, an amateur group of artists who illustrated their thoughts and feelings about their work and lives in paintings. It began as an art appreciation class but became a way for this group of workers to make sense of their lives. As one miner noted, “It’s easy for people outside to see us as a bunch of miners. But we don’t see ourselves as that. We see ourselves as individuals, don’t we?”
It’s a simple statement. We think of miners as, well, miners. That isn’t how people view themselves. We each contain multitudes. Civil servants as well. And the most effective leaders for the future are going to be those who value people in their entirety — who enable people to belong, rather than just fit-in. Civil servants paint. Civil servants hike. Civil servants sing in the shower.
Which links back to values and choreography. Radical inclusion needs to become a fundamental value for multiple reasons. It is how choreographers will become able to access all kinds of different expertise in the face of complexity. It’s equally how we can help the public sector become a place where people can bring their full selves to work, so that it becomes a world in which many worlds fit and where creative people want to find a home. Admit it, you don’t think of the public sector as a home for itinerant creatives, do you? But you should. And we need to make it possible.
But here’s a word to the wise — that also means a frank reckoning with the ways in which the culture has not been inclusive for generations. Which means facing up to our own sins.
Principle 4: Go wild. Cancel some meetings.
Humans crave routine. It’s easy to get in the habit of meeting and before we know it, we’re just meeting for meetings sake. Ask yourself, is every zoom/Teams call you did today, strictly necessary? In other words, we might not be accomplishing all we’d hoped for in our meetings– but we stick to our regular cadence. We gather at the same time every week–even when the purpose for getting together may have grown dim.
How do we think less about structure and more about purpose and desired outcomes? How do we make space for shifts in the music — shifts in the choreography? Meetings, in addition to being interminable can create a structural constraint around how we tackle a challenge.
And hey, sometimes, that’s good and necessary and helpful. But we would argue that the public sector would do well to simply cancel many meetings and to leave some space to see what grows. It might be ideas. It might be ways in which people bring their whole selves to work. It might be miners, meeting to make art. Make space for possibility!
Principle 5: Trust — more slack, less surveillance.
All these meetings often happen for a reason. Scorecards. KPI’s. Performance management. Again, some of these are necessary and helpful. But some of them obfuscate the mission — instead of ‘helping the country to tackle climate change’ we are ‘collecting information from ‘x’ departments on their current thoughts on potential strategies for tackling climate change’. Instead of…being a little flexible, we’re making sure that every minute of every public sector workers’ day is ‘productive’.
Guess what? Everyone hates that. It’s often astounding to us how much we trust civil servants with the future of the country — yet how little we trust them to manage their time or make good choices. We’ve created a culture of precisely the wrong accountability — instead of being responsible for implementing our “highest moral principles,” we’ve made civil servants accountable for each marginal cent.
Penny-wise, pound-foolish.
We need to hold people accountable to the mission — to solving complex problems for society with a values-based approach — not to their minutes. And the first step to doing that is to give people slack. Space to figure out how to create. Cancelling meetings is a good start. Not asking people what they did in that newly created time — trusting them to work towards their mission, using clear values and new ways of collaborating — is a critical next step.
Conclusion
5 simple ideas: Trust. Cancel some meetings. Include. Let people find ways to make music. And do it all framed by a clear set of values.
It might not sound like the pathway to tackling climate change. But it’s a start.
Rahul Chandran is a senior public sector executive who was the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for Humanitarian Innovation, the Managing Partner at Care Impact Partners, and has run policy, innovation and sustainability teams for the United Nations, Export Development Canada, among others. He occasionally opines on sustainability, reform and poetry on linkedin, or twitter.
Shannon Mullen O’Keefe is a writer and strategist, dedicated to imagining what we can build and achieve together. She is also curator for The Museum of Ideas a project that invites leaders, thinkers and everyday experts to express the ideas that will shape our better future. She practiced the art of leadership for close to three decades, leading workplace engagement and culture change initiatives. She has served in leadership and executive roles in a global professional services firm and in a nature-based nonprofit organization. Find her leadership thinking on linkedin.
