Canada has fallen from 3rd in the 2010 UN e-gov rankings to 47 in 2024. We’re stuck when it comes to modernizing government for the digital era. But our guests this week, recorded on location at this year’s FWD50 conference in Ottawa, have a new playbook that they say can help get governments in Canada out of the rut and back on track.

Anna Hirschfeld and Alex MacEachern and are two of the authors of a new report from the UK-based digital government advisory firm Public Digital called A Radical How for Canada (https://public.digital/where-we-work/canada/a-radical-how-for-canada). It takes inspiration from a similarly titled report that Tom Loosemore and others from Public Digital published last year focused on the UK. It lays out concrete recommendations on the steps that governments in Canada need to take in order to change how government works for the better.

Anna has been with Public Digital since 2020 where she is now their Regional Director for Canada. She has supported work with the Nova Scotia and British Columbia provincial governments, as well as other projects back home in the UK. Before that, she worked in the UK government including as the Senior Product Manager on the UK Universal Credit programme, scaling it up from a proof of concept to a live service supporting six million people.

Before recently joining Public Digital, Alex was Chief of Staff at the Canadian Digital Service as the team grew from just 30 people to 150, and was involved in a number of significant digital transformation projects in the federal government.

Related Links

• A Radical How for Canada

Watch on YouTube

https://youtu.be/kA0cc1mdQ7s

Chapters

00:00 Welcome and Introductions

02:41 Interview and Anna and Alex

07:40 A Radical How for Canada

16:34 Reflections on ArriveCan

24:48 Political Transitions

38:38 Funding and Procurement

46:47 Conclusion

Ryan 0:04

Anna Hirschfeld 2:41

Hi. Thank you. Really great to be here.

Ryan 2:43

And you know you have both run some interesting sessions here at the conference. You've got a new paper coming out, and we're going to dive into that in a second, but maybe just to start out with, if you both want to maybe introduce yourselves a little bit, give a little bit of your background and maybe tell our listeners about what public digital is?

Anna Hirschfeld 3:01

Ryan 4:20

And I know, you know, some of our listeners will be familiar with the Government Digital Service in the UK. And I know a number of the co founders of Public Digital were some of those same co founders of GDS, like Mike Bracken and Tom Loosemore and others.

Anna Hirschfeld 4:32

Ryan 5:33

That's great. And Alex, a little bit about yourself?

Alex MacEachern 5:37

Sure. So I'm Alex MacEachern, and my background is in law. So I started off practicing law on Bay Street, then went to Parliament Hill and was a political staffer to several cabinet ministers. Held the digital file, which at the time looked a little bit different, but I've spent the last seven years of my career at the Treasury Board, starting as the Chief of Staff to the CEO of the Canadian Digital Service. And at the time, the CEO was Aaron Snow. So was there for the scaling of CDS. I think we were about 30 folks when I joined, and presently the team numbers nearly 300. So got to see CDS really scale, and it scaled based on a lot of the advice that was given by Public Digital. So a number of the founders that Anna has mentioned also wrote Digital Transformation at Scale, which is a great book and a blueprint that has a number of different lessons learned from across the world. So CDS tried to implement that within the federal government. I got to be there for that. Also spent some time on the digital credentials file, but I found myself just really eager to keep learning, and especially learn more from our provinces and learn more from other governments internationally. So I joined the public digital team seven months ago as their director of digital delivery, and first Canadian hire in Canada.

Ryan 6:52

Which is great, so. No, it's always nice to see that that kind of cross pollination, you know, between some of these digital teams, you know, across different countries. And yeah, Alex, you and I kind of, we didn't, we weren't together at CDS at the same time, but it was very interesting, you know, as you said, you got to be part of that journey as it was growing and going through its growing pains in some ways inside, I was been following very carefully from the outside. And, you know, and I think it kind of brings us to this interesting moment that we're at, because we've been talking a lot at Forward50 this week, and I know on the podcast over the last season or two about the sense that we're kind of stuck here in Canada, right? You know, I kind of describe it as being stuck in the mud. And I think a lot of the discussion we're having on our podcast interviews this season, and we're having here at the conference is, how do we push ourselves, you know, out of the proverbial ditch, so to speak?

Anna Hirschfeld 7:40

Yes.

Ryan 7:40

And so one of the things that you're here for is releasing a new report called The Radical How. And there was a UK focused version of this that came out last year, I believe. This is the Canadian version. So I'm wondering if you can share a little bit about, you know, the report, and maybe, just to start with, you know, the title, The Radical How. Because when I was reading it. I mean, the kind of contradiction almost is a lot of the advice in there is not actually that radical, but it seems radical by contrast to how we tend to do business in government.

Alex MacEachern 8:09

Yeah, 100%, so, yeah, Radical How is slightly, probably slightly a British humor thing of it's not radical. It feels, it probably does still feel quite radical to some people in government who are not in these rooms all the time. But actually a lot of this is common sense. So yeah, I definitely want people to recognize when we say The Radical How, we're not saying Hi, we've, we've come up with these grand new ideas. This is really about kind of trying to get a wider group of people interested in them. And that's, that's a bit of the back backstory to it. So, as you said, we had a first version of The Radical How, which came out last year, that was very much pitched at the fact that we were having an election in the UK. It was very likely we were going to get a new government. And it was really an inflection point for digital in the UK, because I think whilst we've made a huge amount of progress, I would say digital in the UK was getting more and more stuck in the mud itself. And it's like, okay, we've got so far, here's how do we shake ourselves up and get to that next level of maturity, and how do we bring this next generation of leaders and politicians and senior civil servants along with us on that journey. So it was really about kind of setting out a stall, of, here's how we might deliver services and do things differently in the UK with this next, with this next government coming in. So that's, I think, if you read the kind of the UK version, it's very kind of, you know, it talks about what's working well, but it also talks about what's not working well in the UK, and where we are stuck, and where we need to kind of keep progressing. You know, we've, for example, we've taken a step back in procurement, like we've, we've not, we're not where we were in terms of being able to do very, you know, more agile, iterative work through smaller vendors, like some of that's gone back. So how do we push to kind of make that happen again?

Yes.

And so we did that really just with a UK audience in mind, but it got such a global response, which was fantastic. I don't think we were really, that really wasn't kind of in our heads at the time, but it had a really fantastic response from lots of different countries, lots of people around the world, and particularly from Canada, we've had an awful lot of people who are like, I read it. I really want to talk to you about it. Really want to understand it. And also like, how would you frame that same set of questions which which are around like, how do you do service delivery and policy design and digital in a different way? How would you frame that for a Canadian audience? And so Alex and I were like, well, let's have a think about it, and let's try and write something so so yeah, so we did that.

And Alex, I know you were quite involved in pulling a lot of the report together and framing it for the Canadian audience. I'm curious. You know, what did you find was kind of unique about how Canadians might view or approach these issues, versus kind of a more global audience.

That's an interesting question. So I think Canadians we've observed tend to be very interested and deferential to the experience of other jurisdictions. So if you're the City of Toronto, you want to know what Montreal is doing, you want to know what Vancouver is up to. If you're the government of Prince Edward Island, you want to know how Nova Scotia has approached it, and then similarly, the federal government will often ask, What have the Australians done? What are the Americans doing? What can we learn from others? So we see a humility and an appetite to learn from other folks, however, don't always apply those lessons, or we can struggle to maintain the momentum that some of those folks have brought forward with us.

It's, well, it's this interesting paradox, and I saw this myself when I was in government, and I see it now outside. We are, on the one hand, you don't want to be first, and we want to follow what others do. But then when push comes to shove, sometimes there's almost a sense of, like, Canadian exceptionalism, where we're like, well, that's interesting, but we couldn't do that here because of X, Y and Z and like, maybe that's true sometimes, but I don't think it's true as much as people think it is.

I agree. We are a big place. We do have expensive broadband, we are bilingual. We have a number of historically disadvantaged groups. However, that should be a call to action and not an excuse.

Yeah, yeah. So maybe, you know, we can talk through the report a little bit. We'll post a link to it as part of the show notes for folks who want to read the whole thing and dive into it a little bit more. But what are some of the highlights, in terms of the types of advice that that the Radical How paper for Canada highlights and brings to the forefront?

Sure, so once more, I don't I don't think it's truly radical, but I think much of what we focus on is take the time to be outcomes driven. So what are we actually trying to do? And let's take a moment up front to really be clear about that and orient ourselves around that. Create multi-disciplinary teams that are un-siloed, let's have the right people in the room from the beginning, empowered to make smart and thoughtful commentary, and then have a test and learn environment. So don't design everything up front, you know, take it in small pieces, test it, care about it. And we used a housing example to demonstrate that this really isn't about the technology side of it, and it's not necessarily pure digital. These are ways of working that apply in a number of different ways and that have been successful at major corporations and any number of governments with all sorts of their own unique service delivery challenges, for a long time. So at a high level, that's really what we advocate for. We do get into more detail about how to be more transparent, some of the procurement reforms we'd like to see, how to fund a team and what what good looks like, with a bit more nuance. But it, there's sort of the three high level takeaways, it's outcomes, multi disciplinary teams, test and learn.

Yeah, and we'll, and we'll come back to the funding and procurement in a minute, because I do want to dive into that a bit more. But, you know, on things like multi disciplinary teams and like showing the thing. And, you know, demonstrating through prototypes. Like a lot of these don't require legislative or policy change, right? They're just behavioral change or mindset changes. And I'm curious, you know, both your experience in the UK and globally, but also here in Canada, do you have a sense of what's holding people back from actually putting this into practice?

So I think, I mean, I talked a little bit about some of these yesterday in my talk. I think some of those things are like other, the existing structures and culture and processes that have been embedded in government institutions for decades, if not centuries. So you are trying to break down, you know, very entrenched ways of working. And you know, culture eats strategy for breakfast is is a cliche, but it's a cliche for a reason. So I think for me in government, one of the biggest things is the appetite for full certainty. People are looking to understand what's going to happen for real, legitimate reasons, but it drives a lot of behaviors around wanting to know how things are gonna work when we just can't know. Which goes very counter to that test and learn approach to iterative, to starting small, because they want to know what the end is.

Yeah, and when you say false certainty is when you know at the front of a project, they want a 10 year budget and a 10 year, you know, kind of set of KPIs and action plans.

100%.

Beforr they've even done user research or talk to anybody.

Yeah, and we had that on on Universal Credit. We had a 10 year operating model which, like, knew what, knew what technology we were using, knew the roles we would have in the organization, like numbers of staff, all of that, trying to build to that is almost impossible, because you are trying to boil the ocean all the time. So I think that's one of those. And then from that comes risk aversion. So not comfortable with trying new things, worried about being able to show enough process that you can kind of prove that you've done the right things, whether actually, in reality, you have is a different slightly, actually, a different thing. One of my favorite things to do with a new organization is look at their risk register, because tells me an awful lot about an organization and what they care about. And I think those are hard things to break down, and that's why I think that's the radical bit of it, probably, for very senior leaders in government and for politicians is it is asking you to make some leaps of faith about a different way of working and treating risk and certainty in a different way, which we do in lots of other parts of our lives. But not, not here.

Not here, yeah. So let me ask you about a spicy question. So you know, one of the, you know, I think we can call it digital government failures that has gotten a lot of attention in Canada recently is ArriveCan, right? Which I'm sure a lot of people listening will know what that is, but it was the the border app, essentially, that was created during COVID. You know, there has both been, there were some functionality concerns about how it worked, there have been some procurement concerns around how the contracting was done. There have been some cost concerns around how much it cost for what it was. I have probably some complex thoughts on it in a variety of different ways, but I think, you know, clearly, there's a bit of a consensus that it wasn't ideal, right? And and, you know, it was a tough set of circumstances. Obviously, they ran in the middle of a crisis, but it still, I think, was an example, and you talk about it in the report, of some lessons learned from that. So I'm curious, you know, just to kind of dive into that a little bit, because that's been in the news so much. But I think sometimes the coverage is very surface level, and people haven't really got into it. Like, what are some of the big lessons from things like ArriveCan that, particularly in the Canadian context, we should be taking away from that?

Sure. So I think ArriveCan, for me, is sort of like Canada's technology Telenovela. And it's very easy to become really interested in the characters and what's happening there, because it was very theatrical, and what happened in a variety of different committee appearances was really gob-smacking and but that's quite distracting from, I think, some of the major lessons we can learn. So for me, ArriveCan really shows how challenging it is to do hard things in a crisis. We didn't have the right people in house to deliver it, which is not a unique problem that's ubiquitous to many civil servants, but I don't think we had the right people to know what to buy, which is unfortunate, and we didn't have the right, good vendors available to provide service that Canadians deserve. We didn't have the accountability to stop this thing once we learned that there were problems, and by problems, I mean that it failed at its core functionality, in that it instructed 10, 10,000 people to quarantine when they didn't need to. So now we have a constitutional law case about a breach of potential civil liberties. It didn't work for the visually impaired, so the Canadian Institute for the Blind had to complain. So it failed accessibility standards. It didn't work for francophones, so we now have a language complaint brought by Mr. Bosse, so we know that it's failing on all of these core deliverables, and yet there didn't seem to be anyone in the room who was really keeping track of, we're doing this without user testing, we're failing Canadians, and now what? And all of that came out much later, only after a number of, you know, ombudsmen really had to go digging around. There was no transparency as to what they built. We still don't know what the code base is. We still don't really know what Canadians bought for $63 million, which wouldn't be the case had they used something that was openly shared. We don't know what the IP is that Canada owns, and we saw that the parliamentarians are still trying to extract really important data about who actually built this thing. Did they have security clearances? And some of this really basic data that had it been built in house, we would absolutely have and we'd have more faith, and just the lack of really, really basic data on what this thing is, is shocking, and I think that can be lost in the mix of sick notes and, you know, admonishments and everything else that happened in the house, but at its core, it's a really stark cautionary tale of how bad things are and how poor of a service we were willing to accept.

And I mean, and the interesting contrast, which we talked about in the report, is another COVID era project that came out of the Canadian Digital Service, which was the COVID Alert app, which, you know, wasn't perfect either. I think, I think everybody, including CDS would admit that, right? And I think there was, there was a set of kind of policy related questions to COVID Alert. And I know one of the challenges they had was our multi jurisdictional nature in Canada, that a lot of health data comes from the provinces. They had to play along to make this kind of self reporting app work. But that aside, I think with some of the issues you raised about ArriveCan, COVID Alert is an interesting contrast, where same kind of emergency conditions, but built in house because that team existed. And I think interesting point which people haven't talked about on the code base, right? COVID Alert was an open source software project that the code was open. And I think, Yeah, Alex, you were there at the time when this was being built at CDS. I mean, if I remember, right, you know, you had kind of citizen coders who were actually helping the team contribute to looking at code and suggesting improvements along the way?

We did. So that was, that was, I mean, firstly they, we were solving different problems, different sets of challenges. And COVID Alert is not offered as an example of like the best Canadian service ever to be delivered. It's offered as a very public facing example of ways of working, chief among which is it was built in the open. We did a public data, we had engineers who caught things that were genuinely helpful. We had Shopify engineers who were helping to code, the Ontario Sigital Service built this with us and did a great job. And it was really important for us to build public trust. And so we wanted to show the public our homework and make sure that anybody who was suggesting that this was a tracking app or that this was collecting private data would have to make that argument, arguing that everyone who saw the code base was in on that, and then it let us actually demo for the Ontario Privacy Commissioner and for the Federal Privacy Commissioner ahead of time, something which I don't think is often the case, and it let us get privacy advocates like Michael Geist on board, which is also pretty rare for the government. So it was, I think, very helpful for us to do it in the open.

Yeah.

Well, and I yeah, I remember at the time like following along on like Reddit threads where people were talking about the app and folks who were skeptical, exactly as you said, about whether this was a tracking app and what that was going to mean, and the fact that they could actually inspect the code helped to alleviate a lot of those concerns. And I think it did move some skeptics over in a way that, you know, the traditional black box development process doesn't.

Yeah, and both happening in the same crisis, and both, you know, and that's not just a crisis in a sense of like there was a pandemic, but you're also in a crisis of public trust.

Yes.

Because there are so many things going on around, around COVID 19, that just meant you had to really think about that. And I think you can see just two so different models of how to deal with a crisis. And one is, hide away and do it in the background, and just they broke rules, but they broke rules for not necessarily, I would say, the right reasons, whereas the other side of that is, well, let's be open. Let's be frank and open also about where it's not working as well as where it is working. And that in a crisis, I think, is so important, and for me that that's one of the biggest kind of failures, for me, is like it's not taking that opportunity to go taking that opportunity to go, Okay, this is going to be something that impacts everybody at a time when everyone's sense of freedom, sense of access, sense of citizenship, is heightened, and that's a real shame, but yeah, yeah.

Well, and that idea that working in the open can help you build trust, is I think a really important one that doesn't get talked about as much as it should in some cases.

And it's hard. I mean, we struggled to do that very much on Universal Credit. Like, I will put my hands up to that. It was something we struggled to do a lot of because of the nature of what we were building. You know, one of our security team's favorite thing was, like, we could be creating the world's biggest free bank if we're not careful. And you're like, Yeah, okay, we're not gonna be super open about everything. But we wanted to be transparent where we could be transparent, and that that, I think, is the thing. It's like, okay, well, what can you do? What can't you show? But how can you explain we can't show this because, like, this is the scenario that we're talking about. So yeah, I get that it's hard to be open and transparent, but it's, it's doing the hard work to get it right, is the thing.

So let's talk about another spicy topic, political transitions. So you know, you mentioned the original Radical How was written in the context of U- UK elections that were happening last year, or earlier this year, I should say, in the lead up to it.

Feels like a long time.

Feels like a long time ago. You know, we are, we've just gone, are going through a season of provincial elections here in Canada. We've had at least four, by my count, and a number of changes in government that have happened as a result of that. We've got a federal election coming up sometime in the next six months. You know, likely, one way or the other. And you know, we may have a change in government federally. Certainly, it looks like it's goint to be quite competitive, regardless of what the turnout is, you know, what the outcome is, you're going to have a government with a new mandate in Canada sometime in the next year. And so, you know, my sense is these are always kind of really important, you know, transition points where, whenever you get a new mandate for a government, you can see some major change happening. And maybe, you know, and I'm wondering if you can speak to the UK experience a little bit. I mean, both would be interested in what's happening right now with the new labor government coming in. I know there's been some changes in the UK in terms of how they're approaching digital, but also maybe just a start we can go back in history, because you had mentioned, you know, the Government Digital Service, which a lot of folks pointed to as one of the first of these kind of digital service units that was created around the world, was formed in 2011 but this came out of an election in 2010 in the UK, which brought a Conservative government in, brought in a whole bunch of austerity measures. And at least, you know, my understanding of it is, I think that change politically actually led to some of the conditions for GDS to emerge.

100% Yeah, so, yeah, 20- the 2010 election was, I think, quite a similar inflection point as to this government to the change in government we're having right now. Because you'd had a, an incumbent government there for over 10 years, which in many ways often means that things, from a political perspective, new ideas and new ways of working can become very stagnant. And so you had a labor party that was kind of very much locked into like the traditional kind of ways of delivering services, infrastructure, all of that, and had spent so much money that when we were hitting that austerity point, that was a point where we had to go, Okay, we can't quite run and deliver things in the way we were.

Yes.

So I think that Tory coming, government coming in, whatever you think about austerity and how they handled that, because that's a very mixed political space. It did give an opportunity to review and refresh and look at how government was delivering, and they very, very much focused on that as an, as a party and as a government. And so Francis Maud, who was the minister, who was the kind of the backing and support behind GDS that was kind of where he came in. It was like we could do this differently. Digital could actually save us a huge amount of money, both from a kind of less paper, less, potentially less people, staff, but also like changing the way that we procure and buy things and trying to make that cheaper as well. And things like Cloud Hosting and stuff like that. So, so that was the kind of moment that GDS kind of came in on. I think the other part of that, not just the wave of opportunity around austerity and a new government and a fresh look, but it was having that minister that was their champion. So Francis, Francis Maud was incredibly invested in supporting GDS, making that a success and the outcomes that it was trying to achieve. And it was Yes, from an austerity perspective, but also like, how can we actually make government services better? Because they weren't great for users at that point. That was not the first point that people were thinking about when they were building things. And he was really quite a big proponent of that as well. So having that voice did help us move a big, a number of those institutional blockers. So, you know, the great example that Tom Loosemore likes to talk about is, you know, hiring in developers, like into government, the amount that we paid developers in house in government was just way, way, way, way too low to get any of the kind of skill sets or experience that we actually like needed to come in and like, do Agile, deliver software delivery. And so having a minister who was in the cab and having GDS in the Cabinet Office at that point was like the Central Park government. He we were able to kind of go, Okay, actually, we can create a band for this group of developers to bring them in at this level, which is in the UK, was called a grade six, which is quite a senior level. You could be in another part of government, running a prison at that level. So quite senior, quite high salary, still lower and less competitive than the private sector for those skill sets, but much, much higher, and like having that support and that buy in meant we could bring those skills in house, which just was. That really, really transformational.

And so what's happen, and so now in the UK, and since we've had the more recent election with with labor coming back into power, my understanding is there's now been kind of a consolidation of some of the digital teams across the UK Government?

Yes, so it's kind of, it's moved, so it's out of the cabinet office into the Department for Innovation and something, can't remember what. I knew I was like, I knew this is gonna happen.

A new department.

A new department. It's moved into a new department which is more focused on kind of innovation. And so there had been a sort of breakup of the old government digital service into GDS and CDDO, which was worried more about architecture and standards. Those are now coming together with a kind of more, with another layer of support around, like bringing all that together as one strategy. So actually, one of our previous members of staff, Emily Middleton, who's who was one of the partners at PD, left and has now become part of that team that's trying to work on that at the moment. So it is, again, another inflection point, again, we have a fantastic minister who's really passionate, who wants to look at things and do things differently. He's really interested in what AI can do for government. He's also, I think, can see where we are falling backwards into old ways, and how do we kind of stop ourselves from going back a bit so that that's a really nice opportunity, because I think we had started to. I think the institutional antibodies had really started to to eat at GDS. And this is an opportunity to come back again. And my example would be procurement. We lost some of the ways that we could procure smaller vendors, more, in more outcome based ways. Hopefully that's one of the things that we will be able to get back. Don't know, but hopefully that's one of the things we'll be able to get back.

It's interesting, and I want to come back to procurement in a moment, because I think it's an important issue. In the Canadian context, I mean, you know, you made this comment about the the importance of consistent political leadership.

Yes.

You know, which comes out in the report. And we talked about in the UK example, that has been important in the times where the UK has been thriving in digital, if we can put it that way. So in Canada, you know, we're going to likely have some type of government transition in the next year. And what I thought was really interesting in the report is there's a section on advice for ministers. So we often think about digital in terms of, how do we help public servants become more modern in their their approach to digital? But what I thought was interesting is you're actually saying, not only, not only do they have to adapt their behaviors, politicians have to adapt their behaviors too. I'm wondering, Alex, maybe you could kind of speak to that a little bit. I was like, you know, what is the advice in there for, you know, a new minister who might be responsible for digital or service in the Government of Canada? How should they be thinking about doing their roles differently as well?

Sure. I may broaden the question slightly, if that's okay?

Please.

So one of the impetus for us writing the report was also the United Nations egovernment survey. That came out, and Canada ranked number 47 having lost the 46th spot to Mongolia, and having previously been third. And so our ranking continues to plummet. Our score remains stagnant. And so we wanted to give advice that would apply for all of Canada, regardless of whether it's the federal government, the regional governments, municipal. And so while this is advice for ministers, I'd like to think of it as more of a shorthand for, advice for anyone who's been chosen by and accountable for a people. So a city councilor, someone who sits in a provincial legislature, a member of indigenous government. And a lot of the advice is really just to get to know the work more closely. So it's very tempting to have the most senior person brief you about these issues, but you should really go deeper, and you should try to meet the person who is the closest to the work. So that might be a nurse, that might be a engineer, that might be a garbage collector, but you should meet those people and be briefed by those people. You should be asking to see the thing. You will often be provided with bespoke, sometimes beautiful, often hideous looking presentations instead of actually showing this is the code base. This is the bridge. This is the thing that we're doing. So ask to actually see the thing. Ask what real people think. Ask what the people who put you into power think, and watch what your civil servants will do with that feedback. So if they're collecting that feedback, that's great, are they actioning and pivoting based on that feedback, or are they burying it and serving their own needs? And a lot of this is actually really common sense and lends itself well to anyone who's worked in a constituency office, because you're often met with people asking you to make the Hail Mary plays to navigate the government for them, and so you're just reverse engineering that and trying to make it so that you have fewer people at your door, because government actually works to serve them.

100%, I mean, I think a lot of elected officials their constituency offices become overflow for immigration cases, for employment insurance cases, right? And they actually hear a lot of that frontline frustration when services don't work. My experience has been, I actually think political leaders are just naturally attuned to user-centered user research, because, you know, if nothing else, they have to do it every four years when they're back on the doorstep at election time. And it struck me. I mean, this notion of letting elected officials or senior decision makers get closer to the work and hearing from the people doing that work directly. I mean, it strikes me. I mean, you know, Alex, you and I have both been political staffers in the past, and we've been, and we've been public servants, and I find in Canada in particular, when I talk to colleagues in the UK and elsewhere, we've just, at least the federal level, we've put in a lot of barriers between ministers and the people actually doing work in the public service, let alone citizens themselves. I mean, there's a whole unexplored issue, which we should do an episode on this podcast about the role of political staffers in Canada, you know, and kind of what you know, the benefits of, I think, some of the downsides of how much of a layer we put in there. Because my understanding is that, you know, for colleagues who worked in the UK Government, it's pretty normal that, like, you know, director or fairly kind of senior subject matter experts will be part of briefings for ministers to be able to give, you know, direct advice on this. Whereas I find in the Canadian system, like the Deputy Minister layer kind of like puts this really big barrier between the folks doing the work, getting to ministers and I, anyways, I'm puzzled as to why our Canadian system has evolved so differently than the UK, given that we have the same roots in terms of how our government is structured.

I mean, yes and no. So I think yes, you can get a bit further down the stack to get to the minister briefings. But I still think the way that those briefings are set out and and run, are not about showing them the work. It's about...

Having some good bullet points.

It's about meeting milestones.

Yes, exactly.

And having some good and, yeah, having some good bullet points, and showing them a great, you know, slide deck, or not great slide deck.

Rather than showing them working code that they can actually see what's happened.

So, you know, we would do that with, you know, when we had a new minister in our department, we would go and show them the thing, and they were blown away, because no one ever did that for them, particularly when they'd been in other departments. That was still quite shocking. And they were like, Oh, I've never actually seen this. Some wanted to see it somewhere, what kind of I don't really understand why you want to show me this until they saw it. And then, okay, I get it. And so I wouldn't say we are great there, but I think it's slightly different, but I would say, and a bit of a shout out to Nova Scotia, I have seen senior ministers who do want to see the teams and who do want to hear how it's going and, and I think that really does change the dynamic and the conversation, because they're also then much more aware of like, well, Why haven't you got to where you said you would, or what is happening? What? What's, what are your blockers and how, and what of those are things that ministers can do something about, or what are those things that he'd be looking to, or she would be looking to append to the deputy minister to consult?

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think we had, in our first episode of the season, we had Natasha Clark on from Nova Scotia, and I think she talked about some of the very interesting work that they're doing there. To, as you say, kind of change structurally, how they actually approach this in a way that leads to better decision making.

Yeah, and I've, definitely, I have, I've seen that in practice, and it's really, really good to see.

Yeah, let's, let's talk about funding and procurement. Because, you know, if I, if I kind of think about that list of things, as we said, some of what's in your paper are not things that require legislative change or policy changes, they're behavioral change. Funding and procurement start getting to that, into that zone where you actually probably do need, you know, in some cases, legislative change, certainly some policy change, certainly some political leadership to be able to drive that through. You know, and as I think about an agenda for a new government here in Canada, whether it's a new federal government or new provincial governments that are just kind of coming into their new mandates right now, what is your advice? You know, that you would give them on what we have to be tackling when it comes to changing how we fund digital projects and how we procure digital projects?

Sure. So again, I think we would give a lot of credit to Sean Boots and to Amanda Clark, who've written extensively on this, and full credit to them, but as far...

Both friends of the podcast have been here before to talk about this, yes.

Both big friends of the show, but, and I will also give credit to the government of British Columbia, who I think is doing this and doing it, you know, maybe more quietly than some would like, but, but doing it and doing the hard work of trying to have smaller projects and incentivizing folks coming in for smaller quantities of money, rather than larger. And then being very outcomes focused on what is expected, what does it mean to get a top up? What does good look like? And if you encounter problems and if it starts to go off the rails, when do you tell us about that? And what are the consequences? Versus you've asked for, so I'm asking you for 5 million as opposed to I'm asking for 100, and yet I'm gonna, I'm gonna catch just as much hell if it goes over budget in one camp as the other, and it's just as much work for my team to ask you for five, so I might as well go for 100. And maybe by the time that I've spent 100 I won't be here anymore, and I won't be accountable for anything. So incentivizing that sort of agile funding model. And there are a lot of different ways that one can look at it, but I think succinctly, it's lower dollar amounts, clearer expectations of outcomes, clear, and by outcomes, that includes the test and learn. So if you're going to ask for more money, who have you talked to and why and what's changed? But just sort of trying to lower that ceiling. And then I believe, from a more procurement standpoint, this is also easier if you're going to take a large thing and divide into smaller chunks and go for a more modular approach, so the two can be coupled quite easily. It's no small feat, but it is something that we've seen work well internationally, and it's something that is repeatedly called for. And, you know, scandals like ArriveCan may be a battle cry for some in this city.

Yeah. I mean, it certainly has gotten a lot more public attention in the last year than I think procurement normally gets, which I'm happy about, in a way, because I think procurement is very core to a lot of the unlocking some of the potential, right, of where we're goin to move on digital? No, and I think your list makes a lot of sense. I would add to that too, a transparency of outcomes. I mean, I, it's interesting, you know, now that I work with government from the outside and have to go through procurement processes, what's kind of shocking is like you're never actually evaluated as a vendor on the outcomes, right? You're evaluated on compliance. But then when you're actually competing for something, it's just about how well you can write an RFP. It's not about past performance. And I would far, as a small company in Canada, I would far rather compete on, like, the outcome and the performance of what I can deliver, not on whether I can compete with a multinational company that has a floor worth of people who just write RFPs for a living.

Yeah, 100% I think, I think for me, that's that's one of the things is like, how do you, how do you create the space for smaller companies who can come in and give that different experience and can meet those outcomes in a very different way?

And that was the core of the digital marketplace initiative in the UK, right?

Yeah. So, yeah, the digital marketplace, which, sadly, at the moment, is no more, but I'm hoping, fingers crossed, we may, we may get it back. And that was all about creating an outcome focused, very easy to use procurement tool for both sides. So both from a vendor's perspective, it was really easy to get set up, get on it, meet the, meet the kind of core requirements, but it was also incredibly easy for civil servants to use it to buy things as well, in a way that procurement just isn't really set up at the moment for anyone small or for civil servants to be able to navigate that and get what they want correct easily and get the outcomes that they want easily. So I think digital marketplace really did that. I think another thing that we don't know if we talk very much about in the in the report, and maybe we should talk about it more. But is the is also the economic benefit of that. So digital marketplace moved the needle on the not just the number of vendors, but the size and also the spread. So we've got a lovely, you know, there's a lovely map of vendors pre digital marketplace, and they're all the usual suspects, all very large organizations, all London based, bar maybe a couple. You look two, three years later, and you have a real range of small to medium sized organizations from literally all over the country. And that has value outside of just delivering services that has economic value, and changes the changes what the UK looks like in terms of how it delivers digital, wider than just government services. And I think that that's something, which I think is a hook that we should keep using more and more.

Yeah. And I think here in Canada, too, with a large, diverse country, there's a real argument to be able to do more of that? Yeah, absolutely. All right, I want to, as we kind of close off the conversation, I want to, I want to look positively towards the future, and essentially ask you, you know, are you hopeful the change is possible, right? I mean, we've talked about some of the barriers, we talked about some of the challenges, but with both of you, you know, working extensively here in Canada with different levels of government, do you seek glimmers of hope that we actually can make some of these changes a reality?

Yeah, I do. I think you see it one in, like one, you see at events like this, and I know this is, you know, this is a group of people who have, I think, a similar mindset, but it's still a wonderful range of people. You still see the passion when we're working with teams, you still see that. You still see the grit and determination as well to keep changing things and keep moving things on. So I think you see an awful lot of that in rooms like this, but also we definitely see it with teams. And I think you know, you know, like the Radical How is not news to them. It's about, how do we help them get those messages out wider across government, to senior leaders and to politicians be out. I'm always hopeful. But, yeah, I am hopeful.

Alex, are you optimistic as well?

I am. I think that this really, this is really about getting over that fear of being first and that it's okay to be first, like we're always happy to podium at the Olympics. We can podium elsewhere. We can we can get we can go for gold. We can be first. And so I'll give a shout out to the British Columbia energy regulators who recently hired a Chief Digital Officer, and they did that after taking a long time to think about what outcomes they were seeking, recognizing that their current HR structure wasn't quite teed up to deliver on that, and doing all of that hard work up front, and then finding a really amazing candidate that's going to work across the organization. And I just remember talking to their leadership, who, you know, admitted that they weren't super digital, and that's why they were asking for help. But the lesson that they learned at the end of that was we didn't know, we asked for help, and then we did the work to figure out what the outcome was and to bring in somebody who can work this way. And it's stuff like that where people just do the hard work and are willing to be first and willing to lead. That does make me hopeful.

That's great. Well, I think that's a great note to end off on. Anna, Alex, thank you so much for your time sharing your perspective, and I think our listeners will be very interested to read the report, which we'll post on our show notes. So thank you so much for being with us here on let's think digital.

Thanks, Ryan!

Thank you for having us.

Thank you. Many thanks again to Anna and Alex for taking some time to speak with us. You can find their report over on Public Digital's website, and we've also put a link to it in the show notes, and that's the show for this week. If you're watching on YouTube, make sure to like and subscribe, and if you're listening on your preferred podcast app, please leave us a five star rating and review. We always love hearing from our listeners, so get in touch by emailing us at podcast@thinkdigditital.ca, visiting letsthinkdigdigital.ca or using the #letsthinkdigital on social media. You can also find me on all the usual social media places, including now on BlueSky. We'd love to hear from you. Today's episode of Let's Think Digital was produced by myself, Wayne Chu and Aislinn Bornais. Thanks so much for listening, and let's keep thinking digital.