On this episode we talk about the human factors that can prevent and enable digital government innovation. We start with Alistair Croll, Founder and Content Chair of FWD50, and the results of their 2023 Digital Government Content Survey. There's some really interesting results about what digital government practitioners are seeing as priorities, and the challenges they face in pushing through innovation within their organizations.

We then talk with Nilufer Erdebil, Founder and CEO of Spring2 Innovation and an Associate at Think Digital, who talks about her new book, "Future Proofing by Design". She talks about the importance of design thinking, not just as a methodology, but as a way of approaching problem solving in government that can make your life, the lives of citizens, and even your boss' life, easier.

Related Links

• FWD50 2023 Digital Government Content Survey Results
• Future Proofing by Design, by Nilufer Erdebil

Watch the Video Version of the Episode

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXVsrNi_al8

I'm Ryan Androsoff, welcome to Let's Think Digital. Today we're talking about you, or more accurately, what you and other innovators are thinking about when it comes to digital government. Forward50 is the world's largest public sector digital innovation conference. Every year to help plan the conference, the organizers run a digital innovators survey. It always provides a really interesting look into what those who are in the trenches of digital innovation are prioritizing and the challenges that those folks see that are holding us back from making progress in digital government. To go through all the results, first up on today's episode joining us we've got the founder and content chair of Forward50, Alistair Croll. But today's episode is not just about challenges. In the second half of the episode, we're going to talk about a way forward. We have Nilufer Erdebil, founder of Spring 2 Innovation and an associate with Think Digital, who's joining us to talk about her new book called Future Proofing by Design, and how design thinking can not only serve as a catalyst for innovation, but make your life, the lives of citizens the government serves, and even your boss's life easier in the process. So let's dive in.

So I'm really excited to have Alistair Croll with us on Let's Think Digital today. Alistair is the founder and content chair of the Forward50 conference, amongst many other things that he does. Alistair, great to have you with us and wondering if you could maybe just tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do, and importantly about the Forward 50 conference. And what inspired you to start this event, I think now almost seven years ago?

Sure. My name is Alistair Croll. I'm the founder, as you said of Forward 50, which, over the years has become the largest gathering of digital modern- modernization of public servants around the world. My background, I have a background as a tech product manager, originally, I actually worked on some very deep, like web performance tech in the 90s. And then started a company called Coradiant in 2001, to do web performance management. Along the way I've run a few conferences, I've been very lucky to kind of get involved in new content as it emerged. So in the late 90s, when bandwidth was everything, I was running a bunch of content for Interop, which is the big network interoperability conference. And then in the early Audis, we launched a conference called Cloud Connect, which kind of defined what cloud computing was, you know, if you hear the infrastructure platform and Software as a Service words, and that kind of three layer model that was us. And then O'Reilly asked me to launch a conference called Strata. At the time, they didn't know what it was called, they were like, hey, we want to do a conference on big data. could you come up with a name? Strata became the world's largest conference on data science, continued until the pandemic hit, and O'Reilly decided not to do that. And then, I've always held a conference in Montreal called Startup fest, which is Canada's original startup conference, done a couple of others. And I have... we launched Forward50 in 2017. So my background is kind of working in tech. But I had also done a lot of work with O'Reilly Media, Strata was our conference, and O'Reilly is very close to Code for America. So after one of my books, called Lean Analytics, came out back in 2013, Jennifer Pahlka, who was at the time the Deputy CTO for the US government under Todd Park asked me to come down to Washington, and basically talk to the Presidential Innovation Fellows. And so I've been very lucky to kind of be in the intersection of technology and society for a few key technologies. And that, I guess, helped me understand what we might talk about as we tried to modernize government.

Well, and you know, and as you said, I agree with you, you know, Forward50 since it first launched in 2017, I remember being there at that very first episode, you know, or edition of it over six years ago now. I mean, there really has become, I think, a highlight in the digital government communities calendar, if we if we want to kind of call it that. So I'm curious, you know, as you're starting the preparations for Forward50 2023, which is going to be happening in November. How does the conversation that's been happening at Forward50, how has it evolved in your mind over the years?

Well, I think there are two big shifts. The first is we stepped in after an event called Gtech ended. Gtech was a much more commercial conference. So it tended to have sponsors who were there to get leads and you know, it was number of people that came by your booth kind of vibe and it died, in part because it's very hard to support margins in this space. I mean, we, Forward50 for us is a labor of love. We're a team of six people, I think. And we, we run the conference. And it's a lot. And as I'm sure you know, from the things that Think Digital produces, you know, everyone takes out the trash kind of job. What we found at GTech was very commercial. And when we came in, we were very lucky to be supported by a number of sponsors who recognize that rather than this being about lead generation, it's about appetite. It's about preparedness, it's about when someone has a new digital initiative, you know, people are ready for it. So initially, we were kind of replacing Gtech, and there was an expectation that we would be very focused on the tech stack. So we did a lot of stuff on AI and cloud computing, and all these kinds of things. But that's never the problem in technology. The problem is never the technology, the problem is the processes, the culture, the training, the digital readiness, the sort of red team, what could go wrong, pre mortems, like, those are the things that really matter. And so our focus has always been to gradually shift the conversation from the tech stack to the to the culture and the people in the digital preparedness. And I think that really gets underscored, like last year's closing keynote was literally called How Minds Change. And we brought in a best selling author who spent years researching the science of changing your mind to talk to people about how to update their thinking. So I think we've really shifted more towards culture and digital transformation. And I think we continue to be challenged, as everybody does in this space, with preaching to the choir, not the congregation. If I had one wish, it would be that the people who don't think they need to be in the room or in the room, right? Because so many of we, it's a great, it's great to see the annual reunion of hundreds of friendly faces at the pinnacle of digital transformation, but they're not the people that need to hear the content the most.

Yeah, I mean, I often say, you know, the mark of success for events that we're running or events that I attend in the digital government space is when I don't know the majority of the people there because it means you're getting some of those fresh faces in for sure. You know, so one of the things I think that you do really effectively in the lead up to this is you always run a survey of digital government professionals that's open to anybody who's you know, potentially interested in Forward50. And in the themes of it, to be able to get some of their views into the planning process. So you can tailor the content. And I know you just recently released the results of this year's survey, which we'll share the link for it up on the screen and in the notes for today's episode. And I want to dig into some of the findings from it, because it was actually quite interesting in a few different areas. Before I go into some specifics, I'm just, I'm curious at a high level, was there anything that really surprised you coming out of this year's survey results?

I think I was surprised at how little people realize that large language models and chat GPT and its related technologies are going to transform the world. If you're paying attention in tech, that's as big a change as the internet. And I, I- People might criticize me for overstating that. But I will tell you one very simple fact about it, which is that this is the first time we have ever developed a piece of technology that literally has no learning curve. Like even your iPhone has a learning curve, right, or even your TV has a learning curve, this thing will sit there and in plain English, tell you how to use it. We have never developed a technology with no learning curve. And the simple fact that it went from zero to a million users faster than any other technology shows how easy that is. And if you are in the public service, and you want to meet citizens and residents where they are, in the words that they are, you know, you can literally say explain this to me, like I'm a five year old. Explain this to me like a PhD. And it will change its responses. There is by definition, nothing more accessible. There's no more accessible software interface. So I was very surprised, given the amount of focus that people in government have around, you know, accessibility, and tailoring services to people that hear you have a perfect text and voice interface that can adjust itself to users. And very few people thought that was a priority. I suspect we'll see a big difference next year.

Yeah. And I'm actually just interested to unpack that for a second because that one stood out for me as well, right, that that, you know, AI and understanding tech like chat GPT and large language models wasn't listed as a priority, though it did show up fairly high on the list of what people said mattered most in terms of technologies. So there was a weird, there was a weird gap there. Right. And I mean, here's my theory about it. But I'm curious to kind of bounce this off you and get your reaction is you know, I think sometimes the types of people who participate in Forward50 we might kind of call the digital government community can almost, have sometimes, have a bit of a like counter cultural narrative where they instinctively want to push back against anything that seemed to be kind of high in the hype cycle, which I get. And, and, you know, I think sometimes that can be a useful pragmatism. And as possibly why things like blockchain we saw in the survey and 5G have kind of dropped a little bit further down in the rankings. I do wonder though, sometimes if it also means that by dismissing something as hype, they, it can be missed when there's really transformative changes coming down the pipe.

There's ridiculous hype, there's total lack of awareness. LMs are one technology, but we're seeing the same advances in image rendering. And the related scandals. I mean, you know, you're you're, you're seeing Getty Images suing Stable Diffusion and Mid Journey for use of, for inappropriate use of content, right, cause it's been trained on a public set. So I think part of it is, people are waiting to see what happens rather than committing because, you know, it may turn out that these things are all illegal or subject to copyright. But there's no way to put this genie back in the bottle.

No, that's a great point. And you know, and even though I think for some folks, they might see some of this technology as being kind of out there, and not impacting them in their day to day work in government. You know, the reality is companies like Microsoft, and they're, you know, they're, they're bringing some of these tools into things like copilot.

It's gonna be on teams by the end of the year.

Exactly, so it's very quickly kind of coming into the firewall. And I think it'll be actually shocking between now and November, when Forward50 happens, I think there's going to be a whole bunch of change in the space.

So Startup Fest, which we're running in July, one of our two big themes is augmentation. And I would argue that in the startup world, you're gonna see a Moore's Law level collapse of the cost of writing software in the same way that we've seen a collapse in the cost of processing or networking. But that also means that every startup, you know, 97% of all startups get an exit by acquisition. Well, that means that somebody's gone "Hmm I can't build that myself, I better buy a startup," if it got easier to build things yourself, what happens to the market for startup exits?

Right.

Yeah, well, and this actually, it's interesting segue into, into the next kind of piece of the survey results, I wanted to talk to you about, you know, this notion of keeping up with disruption. And the flip side of that is being able to innovate and keep a pace. You know, one of the things that really stood out from the survey results this year is that, you know, 84% of respondents said government doesn't innovate enough and, and over half of those were similar, almost half of them are saying the government innovates like far too little, they were quite strong on that statement. You know, in our last episode, on the podcast, we had Robyn Scott from Apolitical joining us, and one of the things she was sharing was, you know, they have this global network of public servants. But she really remarked that she finds the Canadians who participate in Apolitical events are, on the one hand, some of the most enthusiastic about digital innovation, and on the other hand, are the most likely to be vocal about being concerned about their organization's willingness to innovate. You know, you've spent obviously many years working in this space and through Forward50, engaging with public servants and this. Curious to get a sense, from your perspective, why do you think public servants are so dissatisfied on this question about innovation, and if you have any hints as to what's holding them back, kind of structurally, from being able to actually put innovation into practice in their work?

Okay, I'm gonna go a little off piste here and probably say some things that will make people upset. I was testifying in Ottawa in October- in December, Canada built an app, it was a pretty good app, it cost $54 million, which is way too much money. It was attacked, largely because people were unable to protest medical restrictions on border crossings, so they went after the app itself. And it revealed some really bad processes around markups and costs of hiring consultants, because the government hasn't invested in an internal talent. And because it was the opening days of the pandemic, and everyone was going digital. The ArriveCan app serviced millions and millions of travelers. It had over $4 million in hosting costs alone. And people are like, Oh, I could build that in a weekend. No, you couldn't. It's not an app. It's running a border. They published the first release of the software 20 days after the pandemic hit. And then they updated every week for 18 months. Go ahead. Let me see you do that. That's, that's a huge success. It worked pretty well. It managed to avoid millions of face to face contacts, and avoided the alternatives of either shutting down the border or letting a pandemic rip through the border. And, and yet it was heavily criticized. People were taken to task for it. People who were told money is no object, this is a pandemic, let's keep the economy going, were called to testify, 18 months later, on revisionist history. Like Hindsight is 2020, nobody knew what was going on. I was I broke my leg at the start of the pandemic right around the time they were building this app. I watched two episodes of Tiger King while the ambulance figured out what kind of PPE to wear, like really that there's no more pandemic story than having a broken leg and watching Tiger King to get through the pain. Nobody knew what was going on. And the reality is if we keep treating the public service like that, we're never gonna get anything built. So when I was asked to testify, I think everybody expected me to either crucify or defend the price. And I opened up by saying, look, the price is too hard. I make my remarks are on the record, they're as a matter of public record now. But I said, you know, the thing we should be concerned about is that in 2010, the United Nations conducted a survey of 193 member countries, and Canada was number three. And in 2021, it was number 31. And some of the critics on this committee, immediately, full credit to the member from the Bloc Quebecois, who immediately was like, I don't want to talk about ArriveCan, I want to talk about why we went from third to 31st.

That's what we should be furious about. We had a digital government minister, nope, gone. We had a Canadian Digital Service, it's been merged. There's, there's no doubt that modern technology can dramatically reduce the costs, improve the satisfaction, and deliver the efficiencies and customization that existing legacy processes simply cannot. And when I talk to people from Estonia, even from Ukraine, we had Gulsanna, get up on stage and talk about their app, they delivered features for an app in a war that we struggle to implement. I don't know why, part of its confederation, part of it's the fact that we have a variety of different digital identity systems for health care and transportation, and you can't build things that identity, there's tons of reasons why. But when I talk to people in New Zealand, or Portugal or some of these other countries that are doing amazing things, they're thrilled to be working in digital government, they brag about it, they're, they've got an overwhelming number of applicants who want to do this. In Canada, every public servant I talked to confidentially is like, I'm burned out, I'm exhausted, everything is a landmine, the goals and regulations I have are written to protect people and cover their ass rather than to allow us to take risks. And until we fix that, which is a mixture of compensation, culture, risk tolerance, and quite frankly, telling the politicians to stop taking potshots at public servants, and instead take potshots at people who are not moving like going after the people who are the luddites and the laggards and saying, No, you're gonna build things. Until we stop doing that we're not going to see any change.

Right. Yeah. And there seems to be something holding us back. I mean, at this past year's Forward50, you'll recall, we ran a workshop as Think Digital on what I kind of call our Pac Man model, right?

Oh, I love the Pac Man model.

Yeah, and this whole notion of, you know, culture eats strategy, but that incentives, eat culture, and structures eat everything else. And that's been, you know, that's been kind of my working thesis for the last few years now, you know, having worked in the space.

And nobody wants to change the structure, because the structure is inherently self reinforcing. That's the thing I love about your model, is that any structure in the public service, the number one feature of government is self perpetuation, no matter what. Anything else, like that's the reason why treason is the biggest crime. That's the reason why free and fair elections must happen, is that the number one job of any government is to perpetuate itself, because that's how you introduce stability. Perpetuating yourself means resisting structural change.

Yup, yup.

So you nailed it when you said structures at the top of the problem is we got to, I mean, I get furious at the fact that we have technologies we don't use. I'll give you one concrete example. Last elections, my watch buzzed. I looked at it, it says, watch the election debates. I tapped it on my phone for the debates. We do that once. Why don't we do something every three months where all citizens can go post stuff to a subreddit, vote up and down? And then the top questions that get voted up, we have a quarterly debate among all the party leaders to answer those questions. And the first two or three times it's gonna be a nightmare. They're gonna yell at each other, and they're gonna use it for punching bags and stuff. It'll be like question period, and then when they realize they can't evade the questions, let's have a debate. We have the ability to stream things immediately. And we don't use it. We're like, oh, you know, just do it when there's an election. No, they report to us, we should get them to debate every three months.

Yeah, it's, you know, a lot of our kind of institutions and structural ways that we work, including elections. I mean, they were in most cases designed centuries ago for a very different reality, right? You have the rhythm of these things, the way we kind of engage in-

Representation!

and representation, parliament itself, and I think there's some pretty deep questions around there. And to me, you know, this ends up becoming the litmus test of, is some kind of digital government modernization or reform a real thing or not? Is, is it shifting those structures or incentives in your organization? Because if you're, if you've got a nice strategy, but none of those fundamental things are moving, I think you're kind of doomed to repeat the past.

We are, we are naive to think that the current systems of government will last will endure that kind of change. And we should be iterating and experimenting. And I think that's what we're hearing in the survey to get back to the the content of the survey, is a sense that we are not taking risks innovating, experimenting, at the level that the world's technologies and how they affect human society are changing.

And so, you know, I'm curious, there's a few different ways, obviously, one, think about how do you start pushing the conversation in this direction? How do you start moving governments in this direction? I mean, that's obviously part of the impetus behind Forward50, right, is to ignite some of these conversations and to make it happen. I mean, one thing I'm wondering about is the actual participants, you tend to get at Forward50, as you said, sometimes it's a little bit of preaching to the converted, you know, are there people who you think should be there that aren't there? And and, you know, thankfully, we've got a bit of a lead up to Forward50. This fall, you know, if our, if our listeners, you know, could be convinced to kind of bring somebody along with them, who would you want them to bring to Forward50 this year, who you typically have not seen attending the conference?

I think the, the challenge is that, first of all, a lot of Canadians don't even know that we run the world's biggest like, we're host to the world's biggest gathering, we should be very proud of this, right? This is a this is a soft power kind of thing that's great for recruiting talent. And we've seen the federal government recruit people who they've met through Forward50. Canada, joining the digital Nations was part of us connecting the DN people to Scott Bryson. I think that what I want to see is, I want people to realize it's not a technology conference. I mean, it obviously is about the impact of technology. But you've been there, It's not a technology conference, we had people talking about following a piece of paper through Washington to try and figure out where the bottlenecks were, that's not technology. I would like to see, and this is something that that you do a very great job with Think Digital targeting as well. We are all trying to get the executives to realize that structural change has to happen. A lot of that structure comes from budgeting, procurement, those kinds of things. So I think people who can affect the structure of government should be there. Because those, that's the only way this is going to change, right? That's the first group. And the second group is I would say the people that are like one below the EX1. So if you're aspiring to be a digital leader, the reality is you're not going to be able to get a role in digital government unless you are comfortable and conversant in, in digital trends and the way that technology is shaping service delivery. And so if you aspire to have an EX1 or higher job at some point in your career, you should probably be there.

Yep. Yeah. So anybody listening, bring your bo- boss to Forward50 this year. Because we want to make sure, I think you're right, you know, getting that that leadership cadre kind of aware of these issues. And exactly to your point that this is not about IT in tech stacks, necessarily. It's about the implication of those tech stacks on the change management question of how organizations exist today. So I think that's a great call out on that. You know, this kind of makes me think about one of the other issues that popped out in the conclusion of the survey, which was around staffing, and, you know, this whole bucket of issues around compensation, retention, hiring, upskilling, you know, how to deal with underperforming workers, you had mentioned in the survey results in the blog post that you published that this, you know, figured more prominently in this year's feedback than in past years. This is a particularly pertinent issue. You know, this week, as there is discussion around, you know, collective strike action around bargaining with some of the federal unions by the time this episode goes live, we may be in the midst of a federal government strike. And so obviously, labor relations in a whole variety of ways is kind of top of the agenda. I mean, I hear time and time again, that that issue about being able to kind of recruit and retain talent in the digital era is something that really keeps up people at night when they're trying to, you know, push some of this modernization agenda. Well, I'm curious, you know, from, from your own insights and conversations, you've seen at Forward50 In the past, if you had a wish list on what you would change around how government's approach these kinds of talent issues here in Canada, what would be top of that wish list, what are the what are the, what are some of the, some of those tough you know, sometimes difficult to talk about issues you think we have to kind of dig into.

Well, you left one out, you said recruit, retain, you forgot replace.

Yep.

There is, it is incredibly demotivating to someone who is working hard and talented to have a neighbor who's phoning it in. And there were, so one of the things you know, as we do the survey, we publish a lot of quantitative stuff, the qualitative stuff I have to summarize. I have to read through hundreds of responses and kind of get a sense of what they are. So I do this by like, putting the responses into one of seven buckets and looking at them but and I do tag clouds and other stuff to try and process the data. There's a lot of people mad about a lot of people who are just phoning it in and don't want to change. They just want to collect a paycheck and have a nice big vacation. And I think we often hear from the public how resentful they are of what's perceived as government workers who are lazy, although if you listened to Pierre-Luc Pilon, talking about working crazy overtime and checking himself into a psych ward, last year, like one of the most courageous talks I've ever seen. We, the public sector has a monopoly. You have to pay your taxes, you don't get to choose which taxes to pay, you don't get to choose which driver's license to get. And that can make it complacent, because you don't need to please your users. Right? There's no competitive pressure. It's not like if I don't use the Quebec driver's license, I can use the alternate Quebec driver's license, so it tries harder. Remember, the old Avis ads? Were number two so we try harder?

Right, yeah.

Right. That's the truth. When you're number two, you try harder. You're a challenger brand, when there's no challenge, it's very easy to get complacent. The only challenge that Canada faces is competition from other economies, competitions from other governments. So when I say you know, the UN scorecard, there's a big deal for that. But the other side of being a monopoly is you don't get to quit, like the government has to keep going. If nobody wanted to work on driver's licenses, we would pay an almost infinite amount for people to work on driver's licenses. So that monopoly cuts both ways. There is no respite, there's no rest. And so we pay, and we, we compensate, and we negotiate, and we have public unions and so on, because the government is unique in a monopoly position. The problem with that is that that allows complacency, because we are creating very protected work classes, because we're creating pensions, you know, you have to reward people for choosing to devote their life to public service in ways that the private sector doesn't have- if you're a gig worker driving for Uber, you're genuinely not, you know, looking for a pension and stuff. But you gotta hustle, how much money you make is, how many hours you drive and how hard you work. And I think that we often talk about retention, and we often talk about recruiting, but we don't talk about replacement. There are, based on the answers I've seen, a significant percentage, 20-30% of respondents who are like, get rid of the people that are weighing us down, we should be able to do twice as much work with half the people. Now, that's a horribly mean thing to say, there's lots of people that are working very hard, and I don't want to paint anybody into the corner here. But we don't talk about the elephant in the room, of either early retirement, retraining, and for those that aren't willing to retrain, or aren't able to retrain, finding them something else to do, because we cannot have luddites in the most important transformation journey this country's been on in the last couple 100 years. And nobody's comfortable talking about that.

Yeah, you mentioned training, one of the questions in the survey kind of asked people to think about if they had an additional 10% of salary dollars to work with, you know, what might they want to allocate that towards to address some of the issues and interestingly, vast majority people did not pick higher salaries or hiring more people, it's actually training was the number one on that list of where they would want to be able to invest into.

That was my attempt to get some answers out of people orthogonally, one of the options was use the 10%, to pay for severances. And some people liked that answer. And I got a lot of responses. But I was trying to be indirect about it, you know?

Yeah. And it's, you know, there's, I mean, having spent a number of years inside government now being outside of government. I mean, I've lived that on both ends. And I think there are some real challenges around the classification system, you know, kind of these boxes, literally people talk about boxes instead of hiring people, right? And even the terminology around some of that, becomes a little dehumanizing.

Well, it's even worse than that, when you're in a box, and you know, we have a guy named Daniel McCallum, from the 1800s, who was a civil engineer post Civil War, who invented the org chart. And his whole idea was you can repla- it's replaceable parts applied to humans, right? There's inputs and outputs, which means that the person in that box has no reason to be curious and say, Why are these inputs coming in? Are there better inputs? Why do these outputs look this way? Are there better outputs? There's, by putting someone in a box you are not doing- and in the private sector, we have something called value chain analysis where you look at the price process by which value is added to a business and that business gets compensation in the form of margin or profits, right? So businesses are constantly analyzing their value chain as a whole and looking at ways to consolidate or modularize, or optimize or outsource these components. We don't do value chain analysis for digital services nearly well enough.

Yeah, yeah, it's, you know, and this is always a struggle, I think, in the public sector, we don't have that clear profit driver to be able to make that determination. But to your point, I don't think it's an impossible thing to do. And it does require- it requires attention. And again, a bit of that change of the incentive structure within the organization, on how it values it. And just, I'll just kind of add, I think the retention issue I'm hearing from people inside the public service is particularly becoming acute right now. And that's linked to the whole issue of remote work. And, and, you know, and kind of the, the post immediate pandemic outcomes. You know, we had this kind of opening up towards saying, Hey, we don't have to have location dependent work, we have the ability for many roles to have, you know, a diversified workforce kind of geographically. Now, that's kind of clawing back. That's one of the flashpoints in the current, you know, union struggles around collective bargaining. And I'm hearing that departments are really having a struggle holding on to people, particularly with tech skills, or digital skills, who can much more easily go to the private sector, where they are maintaining this in the long term. And, you know, I just, I see a lot of potential kind of warning signs for government's ability not just to recruit people, but to hang on to the talent they already have for all the reasons you've mentioned.

I mean, it's a fascinating conversation. And, and we could dive, I think, much deeper into these meaty issues and well, we will. And that's the good news about Forward50 is that it is exactly a venue to have these kinds of conversations. You know, so to close out the conversation, I mean, obviously, the survey results, and some of the discussions we've just been having, you know, are designed to inform the programming at Forward50 conferences. So curious if you could let our listeners know what they should expect from the 2023 edition, what do they have to look forward to in November?

And it's going to escalate because it's, there's a multiplier in here, when someone goes to private sector, they get hired back as a contractor, when they get hired back as a contractor, they're getting hired back at like two and a half times what it would have cost to do it internally. Right, between the outsourcing upscale up costing and the, you know, all the other things. So I think we are recognizing that, that we do not have the the structure, the culture, the will, the risk possibility, we have to recognize that government is different from the private sector in a number of ways that we don't look at what's different between the public and the private sector enough. And we have to stop comparing it to the private sector, because it's completely different. Like it must always go on. If you said, if everybody who was a developer refused to work in the government today, the government would have to go find developers either by outsourcing or, because we would have to build those things. Right. So the government must deliver services.

Sure. So I mean, one of the things that's nice about some of the data is that we've now got some longitudinal information. So we can see over time, what's growing, and what's what's shrinking, and so on. Interesting to see how the pandemic affected sort of concerns around protecting health care and the most vulnerable and so on. But we are seeing like a return to, I think, a more concrete, tangible set of deliverables, partly because of budget shortcomings. We also are seeing people concerned about, for example, tackling fake news, making a- preparing for digital resiliency, preparing for climate change. These are things that I feel like are part of the zeitgeist of like, our democracy is under attack. And we have to provide these, these underpinnings, perhaps because of political upheavals we've seen in other countries in the UK, in the US and so on. I think that there's definitely a sense of, we've now got the memo. People, you know, the first year we were like, This is why digital government is good. Now everyone's like, yeah, I use apps, I get it. I don't want to go to the restaurant I want to use Uber Eats like, we've seen that. And if anything, the pandemic was a huge accelerator in digital adoption. I think that we are now in the it's time to cash the checks, like we've written the checks. Now let's see if they bounce. There, the other one is, is giving up the not invented here in us. If you have a service that you build, any of its utility components, like you know, cloud storage, or content delivery networks, or backup and recovery should be part of a shared service. There's no reason to build that yourself. It's a utility, if you could buy it by the by the drink, you should be able to get it from shared services. And then any components that are specific to government, but not specific to your department should come from a common digital service. So like, if you have a form, there's no reason that the forms Canadians use to connect with health care should be different from fisheries, should be different from transportation. And if everybody used the same form components, then when it gets upgraded, or when there's changes to it, everybody gets that benefit. When the translations, they're there, the translations work, the accessibility works. And so I want to see a lot more reuse of components unless there's a very good reason not to do so. Like, like, to me that should be how many components did you reuse? And for every component where you didn't reuse something you got to explain to me in a long and arduous process, why it was necessary to make your own. And then demonstrate all of the things you're doing to make that thing you built something everyone else can use as well.

Yep.

And if we just said, that's the number one thing we use to judge whether you get promoted in government for a few years, we'd fix so much of this.

Yeah, I love that, you know, that that kind of incentive based approach to redirect behavior, I think could be so powerful, and it's so underused right now. No, that's, that's wonderful. I think that'll be some very interesting topics to be able to dive into in this year's edition. I mean, we're from Think Digital, proud to be a collaboration partner again, and looking to being involved.

Nice workshop last year. So good. Yeah, your Pac Man workshop was amazing.

No, thank you, and we're hoping to bring some interesting new content for discussion this year as well. Alastair, thank you so much for spending some time to talk about the conference. But I think, to be able to go behind the curtain a bit on you know, what's on people's minds on this.

Thanks, Ryan. It's always great to talk to you. And I gotta say, thank you so much for being one of the people who, you know, took a bet on this years ago. It's, it's amazing to see what it's become, but it wouldn't have gotten without people like you.

Well, thank you.

I think one of the clearest sentiments from the Forward50 survey that we just heard about is this real visceral disappointment by public servants who want to innovate, but are frustrated by their institution's ability to do so. So what's the way out? Well, as we talked about in the previous segment with Alistair, changing the structures and incentives of government organizations is one key part of this puzzle. In my experience, ensuring that public servants at all levels are able to think in a more user centered way, and really be able to put themselves in the shoes of the human beings that they serve, can have a transformative effect on how government works. Our next guest has done some thinking about this and has written a new book called Future Proofing by Design. Nilufer Erdebil, welcome to Let's Think Digital, happy to dive into this conversation with you.

Thanks, Ryan, for having me on board. I'm super excited to have this conversation.

So, Nilufer, tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to write this really interesting, and I think timely book about bringing design thinking processes into the public service.

Yeah, it's it's been a journey for sure. I started my organization probably about 12 years ago, and I was doing a lot of information... providing a lot of information to organizations around innovation. And they started, people that I was talking to started asking me, Well, how can I be more innovative? And I had, not knowing at the time, been using design thinking. And so I started teaching the design thinking mindset and framework. And as we did more and more organizations, that some folks from the public sector reached out. And so for about seven or eight years, we've been working with the public sector. And as we did more and more training, I realized that we can train up groups of folks. But in order for more people to understand it, we need to provide them a way of getting an idea of what it's all about, and what are some of the tools and techniques in there too, and how they could combine it all together. And with our work with so many public sector organizations, we've tried to bring in some high level organizational examples, as well as from people internationally that I've been doing this so that we can provide them information on how it's been done. And so make it actually tangible and real for people so that they know how they might be able to start applying all of it end to end, or aspects of it.

Yeah, that was one of the things, I've got the book here right in front of me. And as I was reading it, you know, I saw one of the things that really stood out for me was both the tangible examples, but also, you know, templates and guides that you put into the book that actually lead people to kind of conceptualize how to bring some of these different approaches and techniques into the design thinking process. And actually just you know, as we're talking about design thinking is kind of a process or a concept. In our previous segment, we were talking to Alistair Croll from Forward 50, about their digital innovators survey. And you know, one of the interesting things is a lot of people who go to Forward 50 tend to come from kind of management or policy roles. And it's actually probably people in the software development and engineering fields, who probably have had the most experience to design thinking, certainly it has kind of a longer history in some of those circles. And now we're kind of hearing about applying more broadly to the type of government work, you know, that happens beyond just those technical fields, wondering if you could give a little bit of kind of a one-oh-one on what design thinking is for any of the listeners who might not be familiar with the terminology.

So a lot of people think of design thinking as looking at things from an end user perspective, and it is, but it's also a fantastic way of solving complex problems, problems that are so big and hairy that you don't know where to begin, design thinking is great at figuring out what the challenges that you really need to be focusing in on, so that you can better define it. And then people in your team in teams, or the organization can come up with solutions. So when we pull back and think about, what are some of the major steps in the design thinking process, it's a lot about first identifying who are the people that are involved in your challenge and understanding and discovering them, empathizing with them, so that you know who they are, and then what are some of the things that they are doing? What are some of the things that they're saying, thinking, and then understanding their journey with you. When you take the time to really understand what your problem is, then it's so much easier to come up with solutions. And it gives an opportunity for your team to have better alignment, and start speaking the same language so that after you come up with a challenge, you can come up with ideas, and then prototype and test them with your end users.

Yeah, that ability to really kind of focus on you know, the problem statement, right? At the forefront, like to me always kind of jumps out around design thinking approaches. And and, you know, and I think is an interesting stretch for a lot of people who are in government, because I find folks who are in public service tend to get, you know, hard wired a little bit to kind of be very solution focused and like sometimes for good reason. But being able to stay in that, that problem space, you know, longer can sometimes be uncomfortable. And, you know, it's interesting, one of the things the book talks about a bit, and certainly from my experience is that you really do need a multidisciplinary skill set to be able to approach design thinking and to do it effectively. I'm curious, you know, in the work that you do, you know, particularly with training with government employees around design thinking, do you have a sense of if there are particular skills or particular like mindset approaches, that where there might be a bigger gap in terms of of where government needs more training, or need more focus to be able to kind of really make it a part of their work?

I think, I think everybody has natural aspects of- and skills that are needed for design thinking, I think some people need a little bit more help in certain areas of design thinking, I find folks that are more in analytical roles are a really great at understand the concepts of the prototyping and testing. Whereas if you're in an environment that is, is not as data driven, and it's maybe a little bit more policy, then you understand a little bit on the empathizing component a bit better. It all depends on the organization and the culture that they have within the organization. What areas that they're going to be better at. And, and you mentioned earlier, design thinking is used in so many different arenas. And it's so fascinating the types of people that we get into our training, whether it's people from HR, people from IT, people from policy, from regulation, and the types of projects that we help them out with and we help them train also their their clients, even for regulators. It's always super fascinating. One of the projects that we've been working on the last couple of years is on regulatory redundancy. And so with so much regulation happening from a federal, provincial and municipal component of it, what are some overlaps in there, hack will make it easier for for businesses and yet maintain that safety and some of the the regulations in there too. So the realm of challenges that you can solve with design thinking is so huge. And I was thinking the other day, it's, it's really fascinating because at the end of the day, people could think that design thinking is adding more work. But it's actually simplifying their life.

It's worth probably mentioning, you know, when we talk about the design thinking process, there's, there's a number of different models for this. And in the book, you share a few different ones. There's there's the D school one from Stanford that I often tend to use. And it has those five steps, which you've kind of referenced, you know, which is empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test, you've got your own model that you developed at Spring 2 Innovation as well, which kind of builds on that.

Yeah, I find in larger organizations, especially the public sector, we already have a certain amount of funding available, or a group has been gathered for some reason. And so you already have an initial definition of what your challenge is. And so then once you figure that out, A) get everybody to agree on that wording. And have a little bit more alignment that way, but also figure out what does success look like? What are your measures of success, before you even think about empathizing with your end users, because I've gone into small teams, even teams of three, and I talked about it in the book. And I asked them their top three measures of success. And with three people, and three measures of success, they come up with eight different measures of success, and so already when you feel like people have a different definition of what success looks like, no one's gonna be happy at the end of the project.

Yeah.

So that alignment is super important, especially in large organizations. And then the empathizing.

Yeah, well, and you had this line in the book, which actually really stood out for me, which was that design thinking can in some ways, be a bit of like the canary in the coal mine for an organization, because there's a lot of work that you have to actually do in that early stage of figuring out common measures for success. And if an organization is not willing to invest the time into design thinking, it may not be ready to really have kind of user centered outcomes more broadly.

Yeah, absolutely. And we actually, we did some training in Toronto, and one of the nearby municipalities, someone was taking our training and messaged us a month later going, this is phenomenal. Because now they're able to figure out what types of projects are ready to move forward, and which ones aren't, if they haven't taken the time to understand who this is intended for, and what the team's measures of success are, then they haven't passed that rigor of design thinking. And so it's not worth funding yet. And so they have actually used it as a as a way to figure out which projects are worth funding at that moment, and, and how to get projects that haven't had enough thinking that has gone into it to get to that level of maturity.

I love that. I mean, I would personally love to see kind of having done user research as being like a basic kind of entry point to any kind of funding, because as you said, you know, being able to kind of invest the time and effort into doing that, you know, in theory derisks things over time. Right. And yeah, and I think that's, you know, I think sometimes anything that's new is sometimes seen as a risk. But I actually think, you know, the, the evidence out there shows that by actually taking that kind of human centered approach from the get go over time, you're actually derisking some of these initiatives.

Yeah.

And, you know, and what strikes me is like, like, often when I talk to groups about design thinking as well, like a lot of this seems like common sense, right?

Yeah.

Like from the outside, it's like, okay, this all makes sense. But the paradox is that in government, but I think this is true in the private sector as well, it's not that common in a lot of cases, right? Like, this still is kind of going against the traditional ways that we develop projects that we, you know, we run projects within, within most government frameworks. And, you know, we talk on this podcast a lot about, you know, incentives and structures and organizations and how we start changing some of them. I'm wondering, from your experience, you know, when it comes to trying to get a greater adoption of design thinking methods into government, if there are particular kinds of incentive or structural issues that you think are kind of holding back the public sector broadly, on being able to bring these approaches in, and maybe just the contrast with the private sector, because I know you do a lot of work with the private sector as well. And you know, where you might see some real differences between design thinking approaches in the public sector versus the private sector.

Yeah, I think some of the, some of the things that we hear often and we help people in our training with is they take the training, they love it, and they want to know how they can sell this internally, how they can help senior executives understand design thinking and how it fits in and and how it's going to improve on what's actually going on right now. And part of that is showcasing and, and experiencing how it fits in with other current methodologies as well, too, because there's so many different methodologies that people are currently using. And it's that understanding that is, I think the the missing piece, especially for senior executives. And so we'll go in we'll, we'll speak to senior executives, we have training for senior executives, whether it's self led, or specifically for senior executives to understand the mindset as well as the methodology. Once you see design thinking in action, it's hard to go back, it's like, Okay, I get it. And I think it makes it a lot easier in organizations for greater adoption, once one group does it. And then the other one sees the benefits of it, ongoing, long term, and they start to adopt it as well, too. And they want a lot more of it. And so I think people that I've chatted with in the public sector, one of their biggest challenges is that senior leadership and... and how to showcase the value of it. And the other challenge I find in organizations is that common understanding of what end user perspective means? What does people first mean? And so design thinking is a framework to help them describe this, but it's a matter of being able to use it. And you're right, a lot of this is common sense. But it's when to use which tools to move things forward. And, and I'm sure a lot of people have, have process maps. And so how do you convert process maps into journey maps? And every time we work with a group, there's so many great insights that people come up with to apply it to their own work environment. A few weeks ago, we did some training. And one of the senior leaders there mentioned that even though everyone has the same process, they have a different experience. And that's what journey mapping is about is every different type of end user has a different journey. Certain things work really well for them, certain things don't work really well for them. And large organizations as a whole traditionally have been delivering services in a way that's best for them, rather than than than what's best for the clients, those that do a really good job of delivering services in a way that clients are thought of do really well.

Yeah, but I think one of the points you, you do make in the book, too, is often in a in a government context, it's your own staff who sometimes your end users, particularly for internal systems, and I actually think that gets overlooked a lot, you know, in my experience is that when government is building new systems, it sometimes doesn't think about its own employees and its own people behind that.

Yeah, definitely. And it's not it's not just government, private sector has challenges, especially in large organizations as well as is who is this actually intended for? And, and oftentimes, if we're delivering training to a particular type of a group, we like to go in and actually talk with them beforehand, to understand their perspective and to see the ways that they like to learn as well, too. And so constantly trying to think of that end user perspective, but also in large organizations. You're right, people are so good at jumping into solution mode, because there's so many challenges that are happening all at the same time. So many changes happening all at the same time. And, and the beauty of design thinking is it helps you figure out what are the top priorities and what needs to be done about them? And in what order?

Right.

The challenge, though, is, there's a slight difference in private sector and public sector in terms of what they value more. I find, I like to go into organizations and ask the people working in the organization, what does your organization value more, time or money? And oftentimes, in the private sector, people value time more, and in the public sector, people value money more. But there is a direct correlation between the two. And people forget about that aspect of it. And because in the private sector, people value time more, they're willing to invest in methodologies that are going to reduce the amount of time that it takes to get to market to stay ahead of their competitors, globally. And so they're investing a little bit more in terms of understanding how design thinking fits into their organizations, whether it's delivering services internally or to their customers a lot more.

Yeah, that's a really interesting insight on that, that kind of time versus money prioritization. I like that a lot. One thing I'm also wondering about is, you know, the implementation of making design, you know, approaches real within within government organizations in particular. And like speaking of structures, and org charts, like one thing we certainly see in some government organizations, is them setting up kind of specific design thinking or innovation teams, right, that are kind of almost like an in-house center of expertise. And I'm wondering your thoughts on this like, like, is farming out kind of design as one team's responsibility? Is that the right approach? Or is this something that we should try embed into everybody's work?

Yeah, it's fascinating. Actually, I've been chatting with some of the design groups in governments, I had a chat with one last week, and they're of the same opinion, design thinking is everyone's job and everyone's role, I shouldn't say job. It's, it's a framework and a mindset that they should have top of mind as part of how they view life, and how they view their work environment. And so that's, that's why we focus a lot more on the knowledge transfer component of it, and providing that knowledge transfer, whether it's through formal training, or through initiatives that we do with them, so that people can do it at the end of our engagements with them themselves afterwards. And so the key to allowing people to be able to do design thinking is showcasing how it's done. And if the design centers and organizations allow them to do that, that's amazing, and most of them do. But sometimes, actually, a lot of the time, people need to pull back a little bit more. And think through and understand what design thinking is all about and how it can be applied in their own unique environment. And so whether it's doing training with an organization, or through one of these labs, helping them understand that. The beauty of of our work you and me- Ryan, you and myself, is that we're across government organizations, as well as in the private sector too. And so it's easy to see some of the trends that are starting to happen, and bring forward things that are working well in organizations and be able to share that knowledge. And there's so many common challenges every organization has. And so once we can help one organization, it's a little bit easier to help other organizations along the way and be able to, to teach that experience and and how they've done it and make it work in their type of environment. And public sector is slightly different than the private sector, in terms of being able to speak to end users. Internally, it's a lot easier to talk to your clients, if they're internal to government, external, there's still a little bit more apprehension and more delay in terms of being able to do that. We find that when we do talk to those end users, they're really happy to be able to have open conversations in psychologically safe zones. Like when I think about the projects that we did for regulatory redundancy, we had regulated organizations saying how amazing the conversations were.

Yeah, and my experience has been exactly the same. And I think there's a real hunger out there. And and, you know, we talk a lot about declining trust in public institutions. And I actually think having those types of end user conversations can be a way to build up trust over time. But it's a challenge, right, because I think doing design and the environment where you're in the public hot seat sometimes is frankly, probably much more challenging than in the private sector, where sometimes you can be able to do it in a bit more kind of confidentiality under the under the guise of product development. Government is in this spotlight almost constantly. And that can bring some risks, even though we know that design, you know, long term is able to have those real kind of risk reducing benefits to it.

Yeah, and I think that's when having people that have done this in different types of environments really helps out too. And in terms of the the guidance component of it, so that it's a little bit easier once you've done it a couple of times, to do it again, and to know what to look out for and how to guide an organization or a team in a way that's going to get to their end goal a little bit faster.

I want to end on an optimistic note. And you know, we talk sometimes on this podcast about some of the challenges that governments are facing and public servants are facing, particularly around innovation. But I want to kind of leave you with a question on the flip side of that is, you know, in the work that you're doing with public sector organizations, you know, here in Canada and in internationally too, what gives you hope about government's ability to innovate?

I honestly feel that people working in the public sector want to make the world a better place. I see that every day, with every project, every training session. And I think sometimes they need the tools in order to be able to do that. And they need to have that common language and understanding. And as they see things like the design thinking training that we deliver, and as they see more of those projects happening within their own countries, within their own jurisdictions, and then outside, they get an idea of what the art of the possible is and they start doing more and more of it. And I also find that as people, for example, take our training, and their career evolves, they move on to other organizations and, and spread the word. And so I think it's happening more and more, the clusters of people using it and being more innovative is increasing. And so now it's making it even more mainstream and bringing the senior executives on board as well, too, in a way that worked for the senior executives, helping them understand how much better their life is once they start to adopt this type of framework and mindset, too, because it's two things. It's not just the structure, but it's also how you see the world how you think about the world.

Right. Yeah. And that network effect, particularly for trying to shift mindsets is so incredibly important. And I know that, you know, the work that you do the work that we do, you know, and jointly, you know, Think Digital is so important to kind of try to try to spark that. No, that's a great point. And I think you're right, that the mission driven nature of so much of the work that government does, I think lends itself so naturally to the design thinking lens to it.

Yeah, absolutely. And they get to see the impact on on citizens.

Listen, the book is called Future Proofing by Design. It's a great primer on design thinking for anybody who's interested. Nilufer thanks so much for joining us on today's episode, was great to chat with you and learn a little bit more about the work you're doing in this space.

Thanks so much, Ryan, great chatting with you always.

On today's episode, we heard from Alistair, who shared some of the biggest issues and concerns that are on the minds of digital innovators in government today. The challenges are real. But we also got a helpful dose of optimism from Nilufer on how putting people at the center of our work in government through approaches like design thinking can transform our institutions. Our goal with this podcast is to foster a network of digital innovators, not only across Canada, but around the world. And it's conversations like these that helped to keep the momentum going. So what did you think? What do you think digital innovators and governments should be paying attention to? Let us know, we'd love to hear from you. You can email us at podcast@thinkdigital.ca or use the #letsthinkdigital on social media. Check out the show notes for today's episode and find links to the Forward 50 survey results, and where to get Nilufer's new book Future Proofing by Design. If you're watching this on YouTube, make sure to like and subscribe. And if you're listening to us on your favorite podcast app, be sure to give us a five star review afterwards. And finally, we're a new podcast and we really want as many people to hear about it as possible. If you like what you just heard, make sure to tell others about it and share it with colleagues and friends. Today's episode of Let's Think Digital was produced by myself, Wayne Chu, Mel Han, and Aislinn Bornais. Thanks so much for listening. And let's keep thinking digitally.