Beyond the crisis
The Rationale for a Parallel Learning Structure in Government
By Nick Scott
In 2020 I was tasked with designing and testing a parallel learning structure to aid in the capture and sharing of insights and recommendations for systems change. The intention was to enable the Government of New Brunswick to remain agile beyond the Covid-19 crisis.
I wanted to reflect on our thinking and lessons learned through the process. Essentially this is a compilation of many people’s ideas and research.
This series documents the rationale, the problem, the opportunity, ideas about the solution (parallel learning structure), and a conclusion. I tried to link to accessible versions of articles used to inform this initiative. Note of caution: I chose expediency over consistency with respect to format and citation. I only hope that grad school Nick can forgive bureaucrat Nick.
*Note of thanks to Jason Pearman and nicefutures for their invaluable help with this.
Renovating Government
Knowing the Difference Between Drywall and a Load Bearing Wall
Renewal in government feels a lot like renovating your home. As a homeowner, I have so many thoughts about change and improvement, which often remain as ideas. “Better not pull up that floor, who knows what I’ll find under there”, I caution myself. “Don’t want to have the roof fall in trying to open up this room, better just stay in the dark”. So I tend to end up doing nothing, or something superficial like painting.
Then the basement gets flooded and we have no choice but to make changes. Doing nothing or simply doing the superficial are no longer options. In some ways, the situation provides an opportunity for improvement.
There are lessons in this commonly held experience of homeownership. The metaphor can be extended to renting as well — relating to power — “if I was the landlord (i.e. the executive) I would do X to improve Y, but I’m not so I’ll just keep my head down”.
The early stages of the pandemic had many of us learn the difference between the policies, processes, practices and behaviours that are essential “load-bearing walls” and the ones that were only ever “drywall.” Barriers to things like remote working, e-health consulting, virtual court hearings, user-friendly online applications, and easy access to social benefits were rooted in habit and perception of risk, not its reality.
When my basement flooded, it was the most stressful moment of homeownership. I worried about my finances, my family’s well-being, and not being able to have guests stay. Half of our house became unusable, including the kids’ playroom, the space where we enjoyed Friday movie nights and where our family and friends slept when they visited from out of town. I temporarily forgot about all the changes I wanted to make.
But then, we decided to make improvements. We chose new floors, light fixtures, paint colours, and redesigned rooms. Make no mistake: it sucked. However, the result was a clean, newly renovated basement. It felt like a fresh start and a reset.
Bright Spots
When Government Surprises and Delights the Public in Crisis
Crises can create fertile grounds for the emergence of bright spots and positive deviance - departures from business-as-usual rules and norms that produce improved outcomes. One of the most illustrative examples to emerge from the COVID-19 Crisis was the Canadian Government’s rollout of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) and the Red Cross administered benefit in New Brunswick. This Facebook post by a CERB user captures the significance of the example:
“I have to say, I am SO impressed with the programs the government has put into place for us. The $900 benefit and the CERB were both honestly the EASIEST application process that we could have ever hoped for. Both programs took a few short minutes to apply for and approval was almost immediate. I was SO stressed to get started this morning and getting papers organized and I completely thought too hard into it. I simply needed minimal personal information and it took me less than a minute ! It was almost too good to be true; but it’s complete! I am sooooo thankful!”
This testimonial is significant because it illustrates both the negative experience of the status quo, as well as the bright spots emerging through the crisis. The user describes the emotional experience typical government processes conjure for the public “I was SO stressed”, undoubtedly damaging its reputation. Then we see the counter-narrative elicited by a user-friendly process, spurred by the crisis: “It was almost too good to be true… I am sooooo thankful”. This was also the experience of many other users.
How was it possible for the government to surprise and delight the public in the midst of a crisis?
Aaron Snow, CEO of the Canadian Digital Service, described the factors behind the scenes that resulted in the application experience being so good in a tweet storm.
To summarize:
The design of the #COVID benefits policies themselves, particularly the pivot from ex-ante to ex-post eligibility enforcement.
In doing so the government kept the application process simple and fast, and will largely deal with errors and fraud come tax filing season next year.
The ruleset for obtaining EI had itself been radically streamlined enabling ESDC to burn through its application backlog.
While the case was a tremendous feat of IT and UX, if the policies were complex, the user experience would have been, too.
Emergencies have a way of exposing false choices and forcing everyone to rethink their risk/reward analysis.
Mr. Snow’s summary highlights that during a crisis, governments can be forced to find better ways of doing things and make important changes in policy, mindset, and how they provide services. The CERB case, among others, has set a new standard for public service delivery. How might we ensure these lessons as well as the positive outcomes endure?
In non-crisis states, there tends to be insufficient motivation for staff at all levels to change behaviour, reduce procedural burdens or remove bureaucratic barriers to timely, human-centred, service delivery. As the 2017 McKinsey report “How the public sector can remain agile beyond times of crisis” states:
“without an imperative to act (such as the profit motive in the private sector), it’s rational to seek ever more information, to conduct additional analyses, to await permission, or to optimize for the interests of the “tribe” rather than the organization as a whole.”
In a crisis, agile execution is often made possible because staff are less internally focused and institutionally-centred (ie silos, superfluous processes and procedures) allowing for human-centred, needs-based service delivery. The focal point is collectively on a clear, common purpose: the delivery of services the public urgently needs to weather the crisis. “Suddenly, it becomes obvious that the force behind many rules is habit, not law.”.
In the same vein, the employee experience can be radically different. In a crisis, staff often report that it feels better to work for the government because they “get clear directions about how to achieve their mission and enough autonomy to make decisions at the front line; a burning platform for change replaces the cultural aversion to risk-taking that’s characteristic of public-sector organizations; and teams work within and across agencies to achieve rapid results”.
These cases of doing things differently during a crisis can teach us valuable lessons about organizational transformation. By carefully learning from these cases, governments can find new ways to transform themselves and make lasting changes that benefit everyone.
Refocusing on What Matters
What’s the Problem Anyway?
With endless thought pieces on the opportunity for change in times of crisis, it’s important to reflect on the problem being solved through this opportunity. The urgent problem that needs to be solved is that in times where there is no crisis, “bureaucratic public-sector institutions lack the speed and nimbleness to keep pace in a rapidly changing world”.
Additionally, these organizations tend to be too focused on their own internal processes and technical matters, rather than putting the people who use their services at the centre. This apparent lack of flexibility and internal focus create negative experiences for the public that can damage trust, confidence, and reputation.
This is not a new problem, and many people recognize it. However, individuals can feel powerless to make a difference when faced with the deeply ingrained ways of these institutions:
“On one hand there is an ever-increasing demand for more flexible or even fluid “new” organizational forms. On the other hand, studies stressing organizational inertia and the historical imprinting of decision making have come to the fore in management and organization theory. There seems to be a broadly shared feeling that we need to understand better how organizations can lose their flexibility and become inert or even locked in.” ORGANIZATIONAL PATH DEPENDENCE: OPENING THE BLACK BOX
Why is it so difficult for organizations to break free from legacy patterns and adopt better alternatives?
“Management needs access to information and insight distributed across divisions and levels of the organization to develop creative policies and strategic direction while maintaining current production. Management’s search process for information and insight, however, often inhibits information flow, impedes analysis, and arouses defensive protection of the status quo.” Parallel Organization: Policy Formulation, Learning, and Interdivision Integration
The concept of "path dependence" describes how organizations get stuck in old ways of doing things, with routines, rules, and resistance to change. A state of path dependence “renders a system potentially inefficient, because it loses its capability to adopt better alternatives.” Breaking free from these old patterns is rare, but a global pandemic is one of those unique times when it becomes possible.
“Path dissolution may occur through unforeseen exogenous forces, such as shocks, catastrophes, or crises; these are likely to shake the system, thereby causing the organization to break away from the path” (Ibid).
During a crisis, the byzantine patterns of government are disrupted, creating a chance to try new ways of working. We can experiment with real-world examples that demonstrate how the organization can be renewed.
“[Crises] create not only severe devastation, but a unique opportunity for systemic change and fundamental re-invention. In normal times, such fundamental change would require long-term strategic efforts as well as major investments of time and resources without guaranteed success. Crises, however, disrupt the status quo in basic ways allowing for new assumptions, methods and organizational values to emerge. Many outdated assumptions, impediments, inertia and political resistance to change are removed during a crisis. Attention and energy are focused on the immediate and obvious need” Post-crisis discourse and organizational change, failure and renewal.
Through crisis comes opportunity for renewal, and to refocus on the immediate and most obvious needs of the public.
Business as Unusual
People are doing things they’ve never done before
In response to the global challenge posed by COVID-19, many governments assembled a focused and flexible team of civil servants and leaders to deliver a time-sensitive, agile, data-driven response. Now, there's a chance to use what we learned from this experience to keep transforming how government works, making it more efficient and effective.
Leading during a crisis requires a shared purpose that's compelling enough to go beyond standard practices and eliminate bureaucratic barriers found in business-as-usual.
In a widely shared blog, Toby Lowe describes the opportunity for learning through crisis. Crisis provides unique learning opportunities for organizations because “during a crisis people will do things they have never done before. The situation will be complex or even chaotic, so the ‘business as usual’ rules do not apply. People will probe complex problems to see what might work, or just take direct action in a chaotic situation. Some things will work, some things will fail, but each and every action is an opportunity to learn ‘something’”.
While agility tends to increase during and immediately following a crisis, there is a tendency for relapse. “Three main internal forces of resistance make it hard for public-sector organizations to become agile without a crisis and to maintain that agility after it ends: a cultural aversion to risk, functional silos, and organizational complexity.”
One way to encourage learning and change in government is by introducing a Parallel Learning Structure. This can help the organization learn in a way that reduces resistance and allows it to remain agile even after the crisis is over.
As Angela Hanson, Innovation Lead at the OECD recently wrote:
“This war-like consensus around the problem [Covid-19] as well as the messy shake-up of the status quo together create opportunities for learning and innovation, both to solve immediate problems at hand as well as learn what we want to keep, what is missing, what we want to revisit under more orderly and stable conditions, and what we want to remember to prepare for the next crisis.”
It is not enough to recover to the status quo. The crisis highlighted aspects of the way things were being done that were undesirable, and inefficient, made employees unhappy and got in the way of meeting the needs of the public.
As former senator Tony Dean recently wrote:
“Canada’s public servants should not go all the way back to normal. They should be empowered to continue embracing uncertainty, learning through experimentation & continuing to work more collaboratively across sectors & jurisdictions to bring different perspectives to the table”.
This moment in history can still be an opportunity to do more than just recover. It is a chance to transform and leapfrog the status quo, but it will only happen if governments are intentional about learning.
Path Finding and Sifting
Being intentional about learning from the crisis
In order to ensure that the organization doesn’t ‘let a good crisis go to waste’, learning mechanisms are needed:
“Learning mechanisms are planned proactive features that enable and encourage organizational learning. An assumption is that the capability to learn can be designed rather than left to evolve through the normal activities of the organization.” From Crisis to Success
“The concept of “organizational learning” has been cited in the managerial literature since the early 1980s. It describes the internal capacity of organizations to learn from experience, to examine and adopt new ideas and transform them into policy and action plans in order to obtain a competitive advantage” (Ibid)
One approach to accelerating organizational learning is a Parallel Learning Structure (see also Parallel Organization). An Innovation Lab is an example of a “parallel learning structure”. The role of a lab is to create the conditions for experimentation in a lab environment in order to accelerate learning. During a crisis, these experiments happen naturally outside of the lab. We should study them to understand the conditions that allow for improved efficiencies and outcomes so that we can maintain advancements after the crisis.
A parallel learning structure (PLS) would document and analyze how the organization and its staff changed during the crisis to deliver public services effectively. It would share these insights widely, help design new management practices to use after the crisis, look at the problems that stopped previous transformation attempts, and suggest policy changes to keep the organization agile and focused on people's needs. A draft terms of reference is available here.
The goal of the PLS might be to identify 50 cases where outcomes are better now than before (e.g. delivered more efficiently, cheaper and more impactful). The aim would be to understand what made these changes successful and how to make them the new normal. That could be achieved by potentially measuring cost savings, improved experience, and better outcomes for clients.
To guide our exploration, we could ask questions like:
What behaviours that were adopted during the pandemic should we keep?
How might we restructure to position our organization for success in the future?
How might we encourage new behaviours and build the right culture?
How might we prevent going back to business as usual?
This last question needs careful discussion and reflection from different perspectives. We must design and act as a unified system, where we're stronger together and not limited by our separate parts. If we focus too much on one part/perspective and ignore others, we’ll end up having a weak link in the chain and miss the bigger picture. None of these parts alone will be successful.
To start, the PLS could (h/t Martin Stewart):
Identify the innovations that are being driven by the crisis
Identify major changes in policies, operations, or behaviours that faced resistance before
Sort these innovations and changes, deciding which needs immediate attention to maintain post-crisis and which can wait. Make recommendations for what would be needed to sustain the change
Keep track of these innovations and new practices ongoing in weekly case reports
Track innovations that are emerging from other governments around the world, and how they could further strengthen our innovations
Case reports could describe:
The outcomes achieved
The novel practice employed
The conditions needed to sustain the innovation
Recommendations for the future
Recommendations could be categorized in one of three ways:
Action list for things that matter now or soon. These should be fast-tracked to those who have some ability to act on the information, including leaders
Watch list for things that need to be watched closely and revisited soon to see if there is a pattern. In the short term, these should be shared with the rest of the team, and things that are changing rapidly should be considered for flagging to those managing the response/recovery
Revisit list for things that are interesting but not urgent, with a set date to check on them
Beyond the crisis, a PLS could continue to: seek the next 50 chances to improve public services; nurture a broad network of learning; and support the development of MVPs.
Path Building and Renewal
Who do we want to be beyond the crisis?
Change in large bureaucratic organizations is difficult during non-crisis states, which can be explained by the phenomena of path dependence. Path dependence is present when organizations become locked in to routine decision-making behaviours from a limited range of choices. This prevents it from adopting better alternatives and improving outcomes for the public.
Crises cause a disruption in the routines and habits of organizations. Suddenly, we don’t have to follow the same old rules, and we can try new things. The necessity created by the crisis leads to the emergence of positive deviations from the norm that create unprecedented levels of agility, cooperation and support. These bright spots point out directions for renewal.
Unfortunately, these changes often fade away once the crisis is over. But if we set up a special learning team (a Parallel Learning Structure), we can capture and share insights and recommendations for action and policy change. We can allow government to remain agile beyond the crisis, so we’re ready for the challenges of the future.
As with technological disruptions, crises are often misidentified as the cause of, or opportunity to solve problems. These transformative events are neither. They are better understood as offering a magnifying lens to witness what was already there.
What we do with what we see through this magnifying glass will decide if crises are opportunities, or if we keep repeating the same old patterns. A lot depends on our ability to be intentional and reflective about what we learn, and deliberate about what we keep, discard, and introduce in the next normal.