This week on Let's Think Digital we tackle the idea that government organizations are slow and resistant to change, and explore the idea that digital innovation is a necessary skill set for public servants to learn. Joining Ryan is Robyn Scott, the CEO and Co-founder of Apolitical, a global learning platform dedicated to supporting public servants in building 21st century governments that work for people and the planet. Robyn shares her insights on the types of skill sets public servants need to learn, the challenges of transformation in government, and the importance of connecting with peers from around the world.

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Watch the Video Version of the Episode

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

I'm Ryan Androsoff. Welcome to Let's Think Digital. People don't usually think that governments are particularly agile or innovative. Let's face it: when most folks think of bureaucracy, they think about lifers punching a clock, resistive to change and happy with routine. In the political realm, one of the easiest way to score points is to dump on public servants. But I think that's unfair. When I was working in the federal government here in Canada, helping to set up what became the Canadian Digital Service, I came across so many people working in government who wanted nothing more than to shake up the status quo, and to innovate in order to be able to serve their fellow citizens better. For these passionate professionals, their eyes were wide open to some of the downsides of the big bureaucratic machine. But they knew at their core, that government has to be there to solve the big challenges of today, and tomorrow. Of course, the desire to change things is one thing, knowing how to put that desire into action is another. So on this episode, we want to tackle the question, "Is innovation something that can be taught? And is this a skill set that public servants need to learn?" Our guest this week certainly thinks so. Robyn Scott is the CEO and founder of Apolitical, a global learning platform dedicated to supporting public servants in building 21st century governments that work for people and the planet. Apolitical has 10s of 1000s of members from around the world learning, sharing and building connections. And Robyn has a lot to say about what she's been seeing in her time running this platform. Have a listen.

Robyn is the co founder and CEO of Apolitical, an organization based out of the UK but with global reach, doing some really interesting work in the space around building public sector capacity for the digital era and to deal with modern challenges. Robyn, really glad you could come join us today, even though I know you're, you're battling a bit of a head cold, so thank you for fighting through that to come join for the conversation. We'd love to have you just you know, introduce yourself a bit and tell us a little bit about Apolitical and what you do.

Fantastic. Well, it's an absolute pleasure to be here, even with the cold. My voice sounds strange, at the best of times, being a product of the UK, New Zealand and Botswana. Now I've got the gravel and notes of a cold added to it. But great pleasure to be here. I'm, as you say, cofounder and CEO of Apolitical. Our mission at Apolitical is to build 21st century governments that work for people and the planet. So digital and data are threads that run deeply through that. And we are a network and learning platform for the public sector, the whole government stack, so local government right through to multilateral because we believe that actually, some of the biggest opportunities are by building connective tissue between the layers of government. And right now we are used by about 200,000 public servants and policymakers in 160 different countries to find and share best practice and to upskill themselves on 21st century challenges with short online courses.

Wow, no that, it's impressive. And Robyn, you know, Apolitical has been around since around 2015, right? And I think it's, it's quite impressive, the growth you've kind of seen since that time. You know, you mentioned that Apolitical is a learning platform, right? I mean, at its core, a political trying to kind of spark learning, what are the types of kind of skill sets and areas that you're seeing there's the most demand for amongst public servants?

Yeah, so as you say, we took our first baby steps back in 2015, really, really just an idea then launched a platform in 2017, and have been building since and it's been a really exciting time to build an organization like Apolitical doing what we're doing, because the context in government has shifted so much when, when we started the questions we got, the absurd, naive questions from outside of government was like, "Are there any innovators in government who would want to share best practice? You know, government isn't interested in learning". Some of the classic put downs of government and since then, we've obviously gone through these enormous shifts, technological shifts, geopolitical shifts, and governments are hungrier than ever to learn and adopt new ways of working. And the world writ large has kind of woken up to the fact that governments are critical to the rest of society running effectively, you know, witness COVID witness the debate now about the regulation of AI, etc. So that's been, that's been the time we've spend, which has been very interesting. In terms of themes, so as I said, we have this ambition to build 21st century governments. And the way we focus our work to enable that is around four pillars, which we consider to be the four critical pillars of effective 21st century governments. Those are digital and data, climate and sustainability, equity, equality, and inclusion, and the fourth one is a bit of a catch all, but we call it just 21st century government, which includes things like human centered design, citizen engagement, agile governance, leadership, etc, the tools of a modern public servant. And those four pillars are really interesting because you can, you should be incorporating the thinking that relates to them in almost anything you're doing in governments today. If you think about any big policy initiative, it's probably got digital and data, it's probably got a climate and sustainability angle, it's probably got equity, equality and inclusion, and it probably relies on some agile ways of working, etc. So those really are mainstreamed across any training we're developing on the platform. They tend to be where our conversations from our community aggregate around. You know, we see so much interest across those topics. Of course, there's plenty more that we cover, but those really form the pillars.

Yeah. Well, and that, you know, as you say, that, that intersectionality between those different pillars, I think, is an interesting part of that story, right? Because, you know, historically, in my experience too, back when I was in government, and now that I see it outside doing, you know, some similar capacity building work to, to the work that you do at Apolitical, you know, we tended to think about those domains sometimes as being off in their own silos. And, and I think, to your point, I mean, the complexity of modern policy challenges, really requires public servants to stretch themselves beyond some of those traditional boundaries.

100% and, you know, back to the problem space that we got excited about when we founded Apolitical. I founded it with a former US public servant, Lisa Witter. It was the fact that you've got the world's, one of the world's most significant workforces, certainly one of its most powerful and one of its largest, left behind by taking product innovation, and working in silos. So silos, suddenly silos between countries, but huge silos within government itself, sometimes within departments. And that comes at an enormous cost, McKinsey actually put a figure on it in 2017. And worked out that if governments just did what was already working elsewhere. So this is this is nothing new, this is status quo best practice. It would unlock $3.5 trillion dollars a year of savings for society. And that's, that's what galvanizes us, like how do we use network intelligence of this global public sector community to unlock that incredible value? And a lot of that is about intersectionality. And thinking, in terms of win-wins multiple dimensions of policymaking. Some of it is structural, right, some of it is to do with misaligned to center- centers between departments that we can't have direct leverage over fixing, but a lot of it is just about connecting people to each other, more swiftly, more organically. There's so much tacit knowledge in government. There's so much movement in government, between departments, that finding a way to keep people connected and stop the loss of institutional knowledge is, is really critical.

Yeah, I mean, that connective tissue, and that, that kind of network effect in government is, is incredibly powerful. But as you said, I find the reality is, you know, a lot of public servants, particularly those who are in kind of transformation roles, tend to frankly just not have that many free hours in the day. It's tough to kind of make that part of the practice. And I will say it's something that I appreciate about the approach Apolitical has taken, even myself, I've benefited from using the platform and connecting with public servants around the world who I wouldn't have had, you know, an easy opportunity to meet otherwise. And are you finding that's become a big use case for the platform, and obviously you have courses and learning you often- you offer, but are you seeing the public servants are actually using it for kind of a more informal networking and best practice sharing approach?

100% And we also design that informal networking and best practice sharing into our courses. So all our learning is social, because learning is so much better if it's about more than just the content, but it's about the experience. It's about the community you build while you're going through a course. Because that's where you make the jump to culture change and workforce transformation, right. So we think about learning in quite an expensive way. And we wire social through everything we do. So in our courses, they infused by case studies and user testing from our community you're learning, so you're learning from your peers, and then you're learning alongside your peers, you're doing lots of practical exercises. And it was interesting, we ran a series of courses for an agency in Canada, which is quite distributed, and one of the biggest takeaways they had was the the social and community benefits of having a shared learning experience that brought together people from disparate parts of the departments and help them identify ways they could collaborate better. So that's kind of how social infuses the more formal side of learning. But 100% on the informal side, the, the kind of organic collisions, what we're seeing a lot around, we, we run a lot of events for our community, and there's a lot of connection on those live events and discussion, we structure them so that what the speakers are saying is, is no less important than what, than what's been said on the chat. But we've recently released a new Q&A feature and we built that because there's this demand in government to often get really quick, specific answers to questions because public servants are so busy and because you've got this paradox where government kind of work slowly from the outside, but anyone who's been on the inside knows that a lot of stuff actually happens at quite short notice. And, and answers are needed in a week's time or a few days time. So with this feature, we wanted to say "Okay, how can we quickly get an answer out to the community". Had a question out to the community get an answer back in like a day or two, max. But off the back of questions and answers, we're seeing people connecting and a huge appetite to do more of that. It's a really difficult challenge, because profiles and you will know this, anyone listening who's in government will know this, the profiles of people don't necessarily tell you who you need to speak to. It is not as simple as saying, okay, that's the buyer, everyone knows that they're, they're the power brokers. They're the nodal people that the people who worked on projects that aren't visible at the profile level. So we're thinking a lot about how we can use people's answers to questions to help direct and nudge people together, where we're doing some really exciting work in the company right now, looking at how we can leverage GPT-4 and equivalents to help us... summarize ideas more easily. So synthesize insights from the community, because the time pressures are so great, and also help... help with those insights that could help us connect people better. So we really, it's absolutely critical to get right. It's absolutely critical that three point, to unlock that 3.5 trillion. But it's a hard problem. And I think we still we've done some really great work, we see great connections, but we are at the foothills of where that can go. The one thing I'd say just to add to that is, there's a, there's an interesting relationship where you're probably most likely most of the time to get most value from better connections in your own government or from analogous governments, so you get a lot of sharing as a result between, for example, Commonwealth countries. So we are headquartered in the UK. But Canada, in fact, is our largest user base in the world. And we have 10s of 1000s of Canadian public servants and huge engagement in Canada. And then we have, obviously a lot in the UK lots in Canada, sorry, lots in Australia and New Zealand, countries that have similar systems. And it's great to foster sharing between them and we're building on a lot of sharing protocols and practices and cultures that already exist. But you also want to engineer those more left field connections with countries that aren't like you because whilst for the majority of the time they might not be relevant, that's also where you get the completely killer insights. The ones that help reframe thinking about something, and digital is a fantastic example of that because, you know, you if you take wealthy countries and poor and middle income countries, which tend to not be comparable, often on a policy basis. In some respects, those low and middle income countries are also some of the greatest leaders on digital. And I think we need to see more humility in wealthy countries looking, looking to looking further afield for insights. I mean, India's an obvious one with with Aadhaar, and numerous others.

Well, and you know, we often kind of see that they've got, there's this advantage, actually, in countries, if you want to frame it that they're kind of coming to digital a bit later, is they don't have all the legacy around legacy technology, legacy policies, legacy processes, and I think you're absolutely right; they have that ability to almost kind of look at things with a bit of a clean slate and be able to leapfrog in some cases on that. Well, and it's kind of gets to one of the questions I wanted to ask you, because, you know, you've got this kind of unique global learning platform, you've obviously seen people from, from, you know, as you mentioned, you know, 100+, 160 countries around the world who have interacted, I mean, do you have a sense that there are some, some universal lessons, you know, amongst those four pillars that kind of apply everywhere? Or to what degree is, is kind of effective learning in this space, or are effective skills development context specific? Because this is even within Canada, we face this question sometimes, or sometimes people say, you know, the federal government is so unique from the provincial government, so unique from municipal government. And I'm torn on that, right, because obviously, like context matters, but I do wonder if sometimes everybody kind of thinks their context is special and there, there may actually be some universal, you know, skills and approaches that are- that could be applicable anywhere.

Yeah, I think the answers are yes and yes. Yes, they're universal approaches. And yes, there's context specific. And one of the things we grapple with a lot is how do we... how do we navigate that? And how do we help people share the stuff that's most universally applicable? And then foster the context specific stuff more through community sharing and exchange of tacit knowledge, etc? Because they are different ballgames. I think, first at a, at a principle level, we are seeing more universal approaches stemming from more work being done around digital data, especially in government, because those principles are often more fungible, right, they just, you know, digital translates more than other things often translate once you've got, you know, digital infrastructures that much more flexible than other policy infrastructure. So I think there's a trend towards more universal principles. If you then- or transferable knowledge- if you then look at what what else is shared, it's certainly true that, you know, learning tends to sit at this ten- has tended to be looked at in isolation of culture. And it cannot be. The extent to which learning sticks, and is able to be applied is incredibly culture dependent. So you can look at your, you know, your infrastructure, in terms of your policy infrastructure. If you're looking at how able you are to apply digital innovations, you might look at your pre existing digital infrastructure, which can be a legacy drag, but it can also be an enabler. But if you don't look at your cultural infrastructure, you are going to be really a bit hamstrung and constrained. So that's really important. And and that is, that is the same, right? There are certain principles around culture, like willingness to share, collaboration, value of learning that's held high in the organization, where you've got real leadership from the top, and you need that everywhere. Then I think some of the... some of the things that are clearly more context specific; scale matters a lot, right? We've seen how small countries are able to often launch innovations incredibly effectively and swiftly. You know, just look at New Zealand, the Nordics, the plenty of examples of these high functioning, agile countries, which are partly a product of being well run governments in many cases, but it's also just scale. And then you look at what's needed at the scale of a country like India or Brazil, it's just a different ballgame. So that is, that is kind of an obvious one. When you're looking at digital... there's a, you know, we're doing a lot of digital programs. We're looking a lot at what works in wealthier countries versus emerging countries and definitely your starting infrastructure is, is a, is a really critical, can be a critical impediment. One other thing, I think, you know the risk aversion, inherent risk aversion in the country back to culture makes a big difference around what sticks and what doesn't. I don't want to point fingers because we sort of in the business, we try to focus on celebrating what's working in government. But there definitely some countries, if you look at, take digital as an example, who talk a lot about wanting to change, but just can't get themselves over the initial hurdles, and that the risks and the changes that are required.

Well, no, I mean, listen, I'm happy to point some fingers and say, I think this is one of the challenges we have in Canada, right. I mean, I think we do in the public service here, certainly, from my experience, right. And I've seen there is that risk adverse culture, in some ways, I'm like, in the Canadian context, I might also might call it a bit of a kind of, you know, paralysis by consensus culture, where, you know, we tend to be very conciliatory, we want to get everybody's input into things, but it makes it very difficult, particularly in kind of a federated government, like we have with federal powers, provincial powers, and municipal governments playing a pretty big role in some areas, it's actually very, very difficult to bring everybody along at the same time. And I do find that I think that kind of in our context, here in Canada tends to actually slow things down quite a bit.

Yeah, I find the Canadian example completely fascinating. Because on the one hand, at the, at the level of the individual public servant, you know, witnessed the hugely high adoption we've had on Apolitical even though we don't have a physical office there for example, there's so much appetite, there's openness, our Canadian members are some of the most enthusiastic, they share frequently, they show up to stuff, but then they also complain disproportionately about how their government's not doing enough on digital. So there seems to be appetite at the individual level, but maybe something structural holding the government back writ large from making big changes, and perhaps that's inherent in the federated model.

Well, and it's interesting, because one of the things I wanted to ask you about was, you know, obviously, underpinning, a lot of, a lot of the work that you're doing is around teaching public servants how to be innovative, how to sometimes be disruptive, you know, in the systems, and certainly from that cultural aspect, if you think about the culture of the public servant. You know, I can speak to the Canadian context with some confidence. But I think this is generally true in a lot of places around the world, you know, governments tend to value stability, right. And sometimes the types of personalities that get attracted into government, you know, will value stability and even what's kind of that Canadian slant on it, you know, the, we always think about, you know, the US Constitution talks about, you know, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the Canadian equivalent is peace, order and good government, which right there kind of, you know, shows the, the distinction. And so I wonder, from your experience, I mean, can you teach public servants how to be disruptive how to be innovative, particularly when they may be in a culture, you know, within the organization that actually value stability more than those traits?

Yeah. So, short answer is yes, the more nuanced answer is, I think the culture tends to be more of a constraint than the people. So it is true that governments hiring processes and reputation might attract a slightly less risk averse crowd than your average group going into tech, certainly. But what we tend to see is public servants tend to be ahead of their governments when it comes to risk. And I'll give, I'll give two data points around that. The first is sort of an innovation in general, and it came in, we got it in early the early months of COVID, when we surveyed our membership on what... what was worrying them most as they contended with this unprecedented crisis. And at the top of the list, number one, and no surprises here was: how do you protect vulnerable, vulnerable citizens, people during COVID. But second on the list, and this did surprise us was, how do we preserve the innovations that have been forced through as a result of COVID? So there is real and I think part of the issue with disruption is we see it as binary, either slow or super disruptive. It's not like that, there's a whole spectrum. And I think there's a massive amount of appetite towards the middle of the spectrum from individuals in the public service to do things faster and better. And then just the other survey we ran, which was really illuminating on this was asking public servants about climate and the appetite for individual public servants to do more on climate than their departments were doing, and this was people in core climate roles and in adjacent roles, was huge. It was way, I can't- I don't have the exact figure to hand but it was like staggeringly high. So here you have again, the individuals saying "We want this, come on governments get with the picture." So you certainly can. And I think the way to do it, so you've got that sort of underlying appetite, you have to unlock senior support that, that really matters. You have to shift the culture along with the skills. So when you're teaching something like digital, you have to think of all the adjacencies, right. How more agile ways of working, and I know this is, you know, I'm, I'm talking to one of the experts on this, but it's not obvious to many people, but that the sort of soft surrounding enabling environment of digital and digital ways of working are absolutely critical. And then they're also, you know, there are a whole bunch of tactics that allow for more flexibility with lots of safeguards, you know, witness regulatory sandboxes, for example, small projects with containment, there's always a risk of pilotitus, one of the, you know, serious government diseases, but for the most part, they're ways of, of mitigating the, you know, the the impact and the risk. And I also think risk is talked about in the wrong way, in the public sector often, because think about the risk involved in these huge overruns of projects that are done in the most conservative way where you procure over a two year period. And by the time you've procured something, the technology is out of date, you know, that has its own risk, it's not a risk for which people get fired, but it's definitely a risk. And I think there's, there's more and more of a realization of some of those kind of hypocritical oversights in, in the public sector.

Yeah, it's, you know, I often kind of describe it as, it's not that the government doesn't take risks, it takes huge risks that often don't pan out, but it distributes the risks so that no one individual person is accountable for it, which I think is part of why it gets to perpetrate and kind of move on. And, Robyn, I'm interested to pick up on something that you were just talking about, because I'm you know, obviously this area around how do we move our organizations and transform them is, is core to the work that I do and the things that I care about a lot and have seen this kind of both from the inside and outside. I often think a lot about, you know, structures and incentives within our organizations, and how those either constrain or enable us. And, you know, I like this term, you used of pilotitus because I see this often, right, where government's actually pretty good at being able to do pilot projects, but it's not very good at being able to scale those pilots. Right? When something works, when an innovation works. I think government frankly just doesn't have a lot of the toolkit to be able to scale pilots and mainstream them. Have you seen any promising approaches about that, or, or any, you know, any examples of governments who have kind of done a good job of that or approaches that you've taken kind of the, the training methods that Apolitical takes to kind of help people to be able to kind of get over that that pilotitus, as you call it?

So I can't, I can't draw any nice, I wish I could, draw a nice direct line between the training and the benefits we're seeing from it and an example of where that's been avoided. But certainly what we observe is one of one of the critical things you can do at the front end, to avoid these projects being gummed up at the level of the pilot, and getting no further is around... and it sounds you know, it sounds so jargony but stakeholder engagement because for systemic change in government you need so many people on board, and you need them more than ever when things start to go wrong. And inevitably, any big ambitious project goes wrong at some point. So there's often this critical phase where the right engagement hasn't been done early, the right people haven't been asked. And then you get into any kind of trouble and it becomes a an albatross, you know, something that no one wants to touch, and then it dies and gets dropped. So I think consulting people who might be affected even tangentially early on is really critical. This comes back to silo busting, better networks, because you do that inherently. You know, building, building better pilots too, it's not just I think some of pilotitis is a result of the wrong kind of pilots where you don't think through the scale phases correctly. But you know, this is a very hard systems problem with lots of complexity.

Why, you know, as I often say, if if this was an easy problem to solve somebody would have solved it already. Right and, and I might just add to your list, which I which I agree with everything you just said Robyn, is also the ability to shut down things that aren't working. I think that's the other challenge we often have in the public sector is once something gets created, they tend to kind of linger, right? And we don't actually have good instincts to kind of say, "You know what, this didn't work," and we're going to sunset it and kind of focus our efforts elsewhere.

Yeah, and I think that's a, that's a great aspect of digital culture, which should be infused well beyond anyone working on, on digital. And that actually, that's one of the most exciting things we see right now about when we look at training around digital. So many of these digitally enabling cultural traits and skills and practices are so relevant to everything else in government, you know, the ability to learn fast, cut your losses, you know, be more flexible, be more collaborative. So there's definitely, I think, definitely a lot of transferability there.

Absolutely. So Robin, you're you're about eight years into this journey with Apolitical and I want to ask you a little bit about, you know, what's next, and where you see Apolitical going next. And, you know, curious, number one, if anything has particularly kind of surprised you from the last eight years, you know, if you kind of were to think back as to what's worked, or maybe what hasn't, and, and interested, you know, what's kind of next, as you carry your mission on, is there anything kind of on the horizon that you're particularly excited about, that Apolitical is going to be tackling in the, in the months and years to come?

On surprises, one of the biggest ones has been how much culture... that the culture of a global community matters to public servants. Because you've got this interesting dynamic where governments are so different, they, they run differently, the country contexts are different. But the people attracted to the Public Service often share very similar principles and motivations. And one of the things we've seen is just enormous valuing of that connectivity between different places. And where it came up most strongly without naming a country name, one of the very large country that got a populist leader, who was at the leadership level, very against kind of collaboration. And there was a lot of nationalist talk and all the stuff we associate with populism. So we expected that government to if anything be much more disengaged from our work, and what we saw was the moment this person was elected, a huge surge in signups to Apolitical from this country. It's been sustained since. And we interviewed some of our new members. And what they told us was, we're so, we're so angry at the leadership. And we need to stay motivated during this period, connections to a global community of people who are like us, to connect us to what we stand for and what we think will ultimately emerge back in the country. So that's been, been really interesting. We've had some cracker quotes over the years to this point too like, a Canadian policymaker actually wrote to us and said, you know, in an era of democratic recession, Apolitical is like Prozac for us depress policymakers, I love that one. I'll take it, I'll be the Prozac. Going forward, we are thinking a lot about scale. For one thing, you know, we've reached 200,000 people directly, many more indirectly. But that is just the beginning of the ginormous, global public sector. So scale, how do we run our programs, our training programs at a greater scale too? And how do we incorporate into them culture change, and workforce transformation. So we, we've recently launched on this, in this vein, a program on digital excellence with the UK Government initially, but we've, we've engaged lots of governments in, including the Canadian one on inputting into the design. And the ambition of this is to train 10s of 1000s of public servants a year in the government on all aspects of digital and across levels. So from senior down to the more implementation level, and the early results are just incredibly exciting, a lot of enthusiasm around that, and that we've done in collaboration with the London School of Economics, and EY in the UK and the government being deeply involved in it. So we, we hope to do more work around that. On, I just want to call out climate specifically. It's one of our pillars, but we've recently leaned into this very strongly with something called the government climate campus which it has an ambition to train 50,000 public servants in the next three years on climate skills, so these are in core areas like decarbonisation, but also adjacent areas climate and mental health, climate and equity, etc. That's Oxford University is one of our founding academic partners, the Bezos Earth fund has backed that. So that's very exciting. Climate is something we all need to be working on. And then just final note, going forward, leveraging technology, more AI, more to work to enable that scale ambition, and just to keep celebrating the fantastic people working in government, and not to lose sight of all of that a lot of what we do, relies on product and technology, and we've got to get that right. But so much has also the human side is just recognition of brilliant people.

I'm fond of saying, you know, we often think about government as being this kind of, you know, mechanistic type of organization, but it's actually made up of human beings. Right. And, and culture change and transformation at its core, I think, has to be a human endeavor. And so very exciting about, you know, the work that you're undertaking and where Apolitical is going. And, you know, personally, I can say it's been a great contribution to the global movement around, you know, government modernization. Robyn, as we as we kind of close off the conversation and anything else that you want to bring up or kind of closing words to leave with the audiences, as we think about, you know, how they can all you know, many of our listeners are public servants themselves, how they can kind of, you know, personally be able to build up their skill knowledge and modernize their work as well.

Well, I just want to end on a note of gratitude, really. First of all, gratitude to any Canadian listeners, because as I, as I said, you are part of our most the- one of the most inspiring parts of our membership, because you engage so much in what we're doing. So I would invite you to, to do that even more. We're launching new initiatives all the time, some of them are paid, but a lot of them, as you'll know, are free. And we're also are very open, we always work community first. So if you see a gap, if you are, you know, have a pain point in your organization, and you'd like, we really need to upskill on this, change the way we learn on this, we, we're always open to collaboratively designing things. We've worked a lot with Canadian organizations already. So thank you for your engagement. Thank you for your service. Thank you for keeping our team optimistic. It's why we have brilliant people joining Apolitical because they're so inspired by the people we serve, we served the public. And then just I guess, thanks to you, Ryan, and watch out, watch this space, because we are trying to find, Apolitical and Think Digital are trying to find ways to collaborate. So hopefully, we'll cook something cool up soon.

Absolutely, which I'm very excited about. And Robyn, for listeners who may not be part of Apolitical's network yet or on the platform. If they want to join the network and get in touch, are they best to do that through Apolitical's website?

Absolutely. So apolitical.co and it is free for any public servant anywhere in the world to join at any time.

Wonderful. Robyn, thank you so much for taking the time today. It's been a great conversation. Really appreciate having you on the show.

Thank you.

So on today's episode, we ask the question, can we teach innovation? And is this a skill that public servants need to learn? I think the answer is a resounding yes. I wouldn't be in this business if I didn't think so. And I think one of the really interesting observations from Robyn is that individual public servants are in many ways, more innovative and more risk taking than the institutions that they serve. Certainly, I felt that when I was in government, and if we're going to tackle the big issues of our time, climate change, social and economic inequities, a crisis of confidence in democracy and our institutions in the public sphere, we've got to find a way to let the passionate people working in government unleash their potential. So what do you think? Reach out to us at letsthinkdigital.ca Use the #letsthinkdigital on social media. Or you can email us at podcast@thinkdigital.ca. And let us know what you think about today's episode and the topics we discussed. If you're watching this on YouTube, make sure to hit those like and subscribe buttons. And if you're listening to us on your favorite podcast app, be sure to give us a five star review afterwards. And remember, if you liked what you heard, please help spread the word. let others know about this podcast who might be Interested in as well. Today's episode was produced by myself, Wayne Chu, Mel Han and Aislinn Bornais. Thanks so much for listening and let's keep thinking digitally