Reimagining Government is a podcast where we shine a light on government changemakers around the world, who are pushing beyond the current debate about what government does, in order to address the more fundamental questions of how government should operate.
Each month these changemakers will share their ideas on how to reimagine a new government equipped to face modern challenges and find real solutions.
Listen to the episode here.
Episode 5 - National government 2.0
What does it look like for national governments to adapt to the modern challenges we face today, and how can leaders share power with those best placed to act? In this episode, we explore what it takes to rethink government at a national level, and speak to the changemakers who are spearheading efforts around the world.
Part 2
For Part 1 of this episode's transcript, please click here.
Thea Snow: A government's priority should be to serve its people, but human beings are diverse.
SFX: These laws were notoriously discriminatory and the bureaucratic apparatus controlling the reserves maintained vigil.
Thea Snow: [00:29:00] If a national government doesn't provide equal opportunities for all its people without prejudice or discrimination, then it is not fulfilling its role. Only those who have known discrimination truly know it's evil. Luckily, we are now seeing increasing numbers of civil servants who are voicing their concerns around the equitability of government.
One is Jolene Head, Director of Indigenous Procurement Policy at Public Services and Procurement Canada. Jolene has recently completed her Master's research where she focused on the role of executives in deconstructing colonial mindsets and practices in the Canadian public service. I touched base with her to find out what motivated her to focus on this particular topic and what she's learned in her studies.
Jolene Head: Over the course of my career in the public service, I've encountered great leaders, terrible leaders, and everything in between. [00:30:00] I observed a particular leadership culture in the public service, and it was a culture that I really didn't agree with. This peaked my interest in leadership theory and wanting to understand it from an academic perspective rather than a government one.
Thea Snow: Jolene's own experience as both an indigenous person and public servant has shaped her interest in this topic and was something that spurred her to take action.
Jolene Head: Working within the very system that perpetuated the erasure of my culture, and by implementing the Indian Act, the colonial piece of legislation that manages First Nations lives, including mine, I was actively contributing to the ongoing colonisation of First Nations people.
When the Canadian government announced in 2015 its commitment to reconciliation with indigenous peoples, I was optimistic that we would see positive change. [00:31:00] Also, in 2015, I had the opportunity to lead engagement with families and survivors on the design of an inquiry on missing and murdered indigenous women and girls in Canada and indigenous women are seven times more likely to go missing or be murdered than non-indigenous women.
SFX: Canada, once again, under fire for the federal government's response to chronic problems in indigenous communities. The Native Women's Association of Canada has called the government's performance a failure.
Jolene Head: So I had the privilege of hearing families and survivors share their experiences with the various colonial systems in Canada and the negative impacts of these systems that has led to devalue the lives of indigenous women.
I realised after this experience that I could no longer be a part of the problem, but rather I needed to be a part of the solution.
Thea Snow: In recent years, the Canadian government has taken increased steps to rebuild relationships with indigenous peoples. However, as Jolene suggests, there is still much work to be done to combat the lasting impacts of colonisation.
Jolene Head: [00:32:00] I was offered a position to lead a department's reconciliation efforts. And I felt that this could be an opportunity to influence a large department, an opportunity to help steer at least one department towards understanding the truth of indigenous history and current reality towards deconstructing colonial practices and decolonising thinking and behaviour in this department.
So it was important for me to blend these two topics for my thesis inquiry. The role of public service leaders in supporting reconciliation by deconstructing colonial practices.
Thea Snow: As Jolene explains at the time of her research, not enough was being done to protect indigenous peoples in Canada. Jolene suggests that this was in part due to Canada's rigid government structure, which is based on the UK's Westminster model of governing.
Jolene Head: The Canadian public service operates in a hierarchy and command and control culture, and in the current governance structure is accountable to ministers and not directly to the Canadian public.
[00:33:00] This has led to a distrust of the public service. As well, the Westminster model, and by extension, the public service is mechanistic, linear, and was set up to operate in the known.
As the Canadian public service was modelled after the Westminster model, its command and control culture and hierarchical organisational structure has effectively stifled innovation and creativity. Instead, it maintains the status quo.
It has modelled after one knowledge system and has been operating largely unchanged for 150 plus years, and it has not kept up with evolving society.
In fact, it may actually be contributing to today's wicked problems because it has not evolved to acknowledge other types of democracies, other types of governance structures, other types of knowledge systems, which may be better equipped to address today's challenges. [00:34:00]
Thea Snow: The key findings from Jolene's studies paint a stark picture of the lack of equitable practices she observed as a public servant.
Jolene Head: The training that has been put in place is insufficient, does not go deep enough, and it is not mandatory for all public servants. When I engaged with indigenous employees on my research, many stories were shared with me of experiences of racism, which has resulted in trauma, health issues, lack of advancement, opportunities, the list goes on.
Thea Snow: Jolene notes that historically government policy has actively excluded more diverse communities.
Jolene Head: The impact that government policy has had on generations of indigenous peoples resulting in the loss of culture and language due to the government instituted residential schools where children were not allowed to use their language and communities had indigenous ceremonial practices outlawed. This has led to at least two generations, if not more, of language and culture loss. [00:35:00]
Thea Snow: Jolene also suggests that the political structures and election cycles in place can impede progress towards more equitable government.
Jolene Head: The political arm of government hinders large scale and long-term change in the public service because while the public service is nonpartisan, its funding and priorities are still impacted by the decisions and commitments made by the political party in power.
Generally speaking, the terms are four years in length and as a result of this, political priorities such as reconciliation are at risk during election cycles. However, reconciliation requires long-term commitment and long-term change in the public service.
Thea Snow: While Jolene has made a strong case that out of date governance models, the challenge of political cycles and more, make it difficult for government to pursue large scale and long-term change, [00:36:00] I wanted to know what can a national government in particular do to provide a safer environment for indigenous people and for all?
Jolene Head: In my opinion, the most meaningful way to truly understand the impacts of colonialism is by going into community, spending time, speaking to community elders, leaders and members, and witnessing the conditions and challenges that are faced every day that the majority of Canadians never have to deal with.
The lack of knowledge about indigenous people's individual racism, colonial thinking, unconscious biases, et cetera, can lead to perpetuating the status quo and prevent real change from occurring in the system. This is a journey and we won't get to the destination in four years or even ten years. [00:37:00]
Therefore, it needs to be embedded in the public service rather than be at the whim of whatever political party is in power. New leadership theory is, greater transparency, engagement, and accountability to the public. Innovation, creativity, risk taking, and experimentation are essential for addressing today's complex problems.
Complex problems are not linear. The solution is not known, and they are not mechanistic in nature. Yet public servants are expected to find solutions in a system not actually equipped to support them in this. I think it will be an uphill battle to normalise the incorporation of non-western knowledge systems into the Canadian public service and other similar public sectors.
However, I am seeing an upswell of public servants working at the grassroots level to enact change. These public servants are curious, motivated, and are demanding a more equitable public service. And a truly equitable and inclusive public service must include other knowledge systems.
Thea Snow: Jolene believes part of the solution lies in raising awareness and understanding of these non-Western knowledge systems amongst public servants. [00:38:00]
Jolene Head: In Canada, indigenous knowledge is collective and holistic. It is about distributed leadership and focuses on relationships. Relationships with other people, with the flora and fauna, with the earth, with the ancestors and future generations. It is through the education of public servants on non-western knowledges, such as indigenous knowledges that will bring about normalising their use in the public service, and I hope will lead to transformational change and that deconstructing the colonial and patriarchal system that is currently in place.
SFX: Saying sorry for the tragedies of the past is not enough. Only with our actions can we choose a better path, and that is what our government will always try to do.
Thea Snow: [00:39:00] The challenges we face today are as varied and nuanced as we are as people. Finding bolt on solutions will only take us so far and only delay the inevitable need for change. So what does this change look like?
What comes next and how do we look forward at what might be, rather than just backwards at what hasn't been working well? To explore some of these questions, I reached out to Aaron Maniam, a Singaporean civil servant and futurist.
Aaron Maniam: Hi there, my name is Aaron Maniam.
Thea Snow: He has served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Centre for Strategic Futures, Civil Service College, and the Ministry of Trade and Industry. His current role is Deputy Secretary at the Ministry of Communications and Information. Aaron spends a lot of time thinking about digital society.
Aaron Maniam: My specific areas of responsibility are to think about how we can grow the digital economy, how we grow the specific aspects of the digital sector, but also how digital tech can be used in all aspects of the economy in order to transform our businesses to be more productive and and more efficient.
[00:40:00] I think a lot about digital society as well, and there my job is to think about how individual citizens can play most meaningfully and most richly in the growing digital space out there, given all the opportunities that it affords.
This means thinking about what government needs to subsidise in terms of digital technology, what we can leave to the market, and what skills we need to help different people in society acquire so that they can participate as richly and meaningfully in the digital space.
Thirdly, I think a lot about international partnerships, the kinds of opportunities that exist when we and other countries who are also digitally inclined, might undertake cooperation or collaborative projects.
Thea Snow: The Ministry of Communications and Information has several exciting initiatives to help keep pace with change, centring on the economy, society, regulation, and security, all within the digital space.
Aaron Maniam: [00:41:00] We have teams that are looking at 5G infrastructure. Do we have the right infrastructure? Are we rolling out the infrastructure, especially for our standalone networks according to the right timeline? We also wanna make sure that there are use cases for this 5G that is, the infrastructure is not just there, but that it's being used to generate economic as well as consumer value.
And we want to find basically as many use cases as possible that create concrete benefits out of the use of 5G.
Thea Snow: Many governments around the world are increasingly looking at the potential of AI and how it can be used to improve public services, and Singapore is no exception. Aaron shares more about how the Singapore government is approaching this.
Aaron Maniam: Similarly, we have a strategy for AI. How we adopt artificial intelligence and how we ensure that we don't just regulate it well. We have good regulatory practices, I think, but we want to make sure those regulatory practices lead to genuine and meaningful and valuable use cases for citizens. This has meant, again, right, bringing AI to a range of use cases. [00:42:00]
Here the examples include healthcare, where we've used AI for retinopathy to make sure that, you know, we can do, um, retinal scans with much more precision. We've used it in education where we are trying to create bots and other, um, learning devices that allow for learning to become more interesting, more fun, but also more scalable.
I wanted to mention one other really important initiative, which is something we call the Digital for Life movement, and this is really an effort to ensure that as all of us are trying to be digital for life in all aspects of our lives, we are able to bring on board as many community partners as possible because government can't operate by itself.
And in this case, we need to bring in as many community partners, businesses as well as like-minded citizen organisations who are interested in ensuring that the benefits of digital reach as wider range of, uh, constituents as possible.
Thea Snow: Complexity is not an easy thing to define. And you get different answers depending on who you ask. Economist Eric Beinhocker defines a complex system as many dynamically interacting parts or particles where the micro-level interactions lead to the emergence of macro-level patterns of behaviour. [00:43:00]
While indigenous scholars Blaze and Ambelin Kwaymullina talk about complexity being a holistic view in which everything is interrelated and interdependent. Whatever definition you choose to adopt, Aaron feels the concept of complexity is highly relevant to the challenges national government faces in the future.
Aaron Maniam: Whether it's in the geopolitical aspects of the world, or identity politics and culture wars, we're dealing with situations where we don't quite know what cause is going to lead to what effect in a, in a stable and clear way. As a result, governments are not going to be able to do everything anymore.
Governments are going to continue to have to, you know, exercise authority. [00:44:00] They're going to, to administer taxes, to provide public order and safety, uh, you know, through things like defence and, and internal security. But they are not going to be able to act as sole or even dominant agents if governments don't actually have all the information that they need, where, like a control tower, they can tell people, fly here, don't fly here, land now hover for a while in, in airspace we don't have that, that kind of monopoly of information anymore. What I think we need to have is government as a platform, right? Governments are increasingly platforms that allow for the interlinkage of functions.
They bring together different, uh, roles and different possibilities and sets of resources in order to do this. That's what leads us to this third trend, really, which is that governments are going to have to do a lot more partnership work rather than trying to do everything themselves. Government has to convene, government has to bring partners together, government has to facilitate to aggregate, to synthesise. But we don't necessarily need government to be doing everything, um, on its own.
[00:45:00] This is partly why in Singapore we have had many efforts where we, we emphasise the togetherness of government, right? Government working together with citizens. Uh, we've had a process which we called Emerging Stronger Together, which was all about coming through the pandemic and making sure that we, we built on existing strengths, but really came together as government, businesses and communities to cross pollinate our strength with one another.
Thea Snow: Given the complexity of issues facing national government, Aaron argues that technology not only enables collaboration, it necessitates it.
Aaron Maniam: How do you deal with scams? Financial scams, especially. Government has a role. But telcos have a role too because you know, very often these scams spread through our phones and banks have a role to play in financial scams because they need to set in place the right rules to ensure that, you know, two-factor authentication and other forms of security-enabling, uh, devices are actually used. So we need, I think, to, to use technology because it necessitates that, that that level of collaboration. [00:46:00]
Thea Snow: As well as Digital for Life, the national government in Singapore has several collaborative processes between business and community groups to tackle complex problems they cannot address by themselves.
An ever pervasive issue is online safety, particularly for young people and women. Aaron was involved in Sunlight Alliance for Action. A collaboration seeking to address this.
Aaron Maniam: Similarly, I mentioned things like online harm, right? I mean the, the EU Digital Services Act, some of the material on online safety in the UK, what the Australians and Canadians are doing in the online safety space.
Singapore's just put out some new codes in our legislation for online safety. All of that requires collaboration with big tech. It requires collaboration with different companies who might be recipients of these sources of information. It requires collaboration with parents and with other adults in family life.
Thea Snow: So who are the key players government should collaborate with when creating a safe online space.
Aaron Maniam: [00:47:00] Businesses, because they often have the best ideas and are agile and have experimented with new solutions. Communities because they fundamentally will care about people. And they're often the ones, most invested, they know what's happening on the ground, so we need them.
We need individual citizens because sometimes it's all about people taking care of their own safety and the safety of their families in the online space. And if all of us do that, then we add up, I think to a much more healthy, much more resilient system. But we need to collaborate internationally as well.
We need better cross border data flows. We need harmonisation of rules where possible, or at least we want our systems to be interoperable so that our data and our AI and our cyber labelling can all talk to each other and allow us to be much more informed in the decisions that we, we are making. So we wanted to address issues whereby, you know, you might have issues around grooming, you know, or, or dangerous practices, illicit use of intimate photographs.
[00:48:00] And, and we brought a whole bunch of different entities together in this process. All the big tech firms in Singapore were there. We had a number of SMEs who were involved. We, we brought in our libraries. We brought in many of our universities as well as our polytechnics in schools so that we would have the perspective of educators.
We also brought parents in so that we understood what their needs were in terms of protecting their children, and, and the idea there was to diagnose the problem together, but then equally critically to come up with solutions together. And I do think that when this is done well, right, if these discussions are well facilitated, then actually we end up with really rich outcomes, which are far more refined, far more encompassing, and far more nuanced than if any sector had tried to deal with them alone.
Thea Snow: So what does the future of national government look like to Aaron?
Aaron Maniam: Think of three roles in particular. Government has to be a steward first of all. It has to know that the work it is doing is not work that it can control all the time, but it has to hold that work in trust to ensure that whatever happens in five, ten, fifteen years time is better for a population than it is today, right? That's what stewardship fundamentally is. [00:49:00]
But in order to achieve that stewardship, government cannot act by itself. It has to act in tandem with others, and that means being a partner. And sometimes government has to also work with others to resolve or at least mitigate and manage conflict. And in this case, government has to be a facilitator.
It has to be able to host discussions, pose the right questions, and allow for a generative approach to the different policy challenges that we, we might be facing.
Thea Snow: In addition to being a civil servant, Aaron is also a poet, which explains why when talking about his vision for the future of government, he quotes from a fellow writer. One known for his work in science fiction, no less, Alasdair Gray: “work as if we live in the early days of a better nation”.
Adrian Brown: [00:50:00] A national government cannot succeed by simply ruling from above. It must lean on local governments to better understand the needs of the people and collaborate with them in order to find solutions. It must foster experimentation between local government and communities. Take notice of successes and amplify them across boundaries and at a scale that local government cannot reach.
National government is a megaphone for those working on the ground and should be used to amplify the voices of those who are heard the least. Whilst national government doesn't have the luxury of working with communities at the micro-level, there are advantages from a macro viewpoint. It is the role of a national government to see the bigger picture, but to do that it must seek out strengths within communities, practice humility, and optimise for learning. In doing so, it will better serve its people, each and every one of them. [00:51:00]
Thanks for listening to this episode of Reimagining Government. The conversation on the theme of this episode, reimagining national government continues over on apolitical.co.
If you're a public servant or government official, we want to hear from you. How can national governments ensure decisions are made in the best interests of those they govern? Which other stakeholders should be consulted to influence decision-making at the national level? Head over to the apolitical Q&A link in the show notes to this episode, and share your experiences with other public servants from all over the world.
In the next episode, we begin to reimagine what government looks like internationally with Smita Jha, Head of the Centre for Public Impact in India. Make sure you don't miss an episode by subscribing to Reimagining Government on your favourite podcast platform.
Remember also to leave a review to tell us how we're doing. Until next time I've been Adrian Brown. Goodbye.
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Featured in this episode:
- Adrian Brown (Host) - Executive Director, Centre for Public Impact
- Thea Snow (Host) - Director, Australia and New Zealand, Centre for Public Impact
- Misha Kaur - Innovation Specialist, Observatory of Public Sector Innovation, OECD
- Ruth Glassborow - Director of Improvement, Healthcare Improvement Scotland
- Diana Hekerem - Head of Transformational Redesign Support, Improvement Hub, Healthcare Improvement Scotland
- Olli-Pekka Heinonen - Director General, International Baccalaureate Organization (formerly Director General of the Finnish National Agency for Education)
- Jolene Head - Director, Indigenous Procurement Policy, Public Services and Procurement Canada
- Aaron Maniam - Deputy Secretary, Ministry of Communications and Information, Singapore Government
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