Hi,

I would like to request that people use plain language when they write or talk about these initiatives, or at all times for that matter.

Most of us are guilty at some time or other of using jargon that others, especially those in different professions, cannot understand. That is fine when one is communicating with people in one's own, narrow, field. However, with the push for increased cooperation across sector boundaries, there is an increased problem of being able to understand one another.

An example from the recent Wiki page describing these developments is: " new Science and Policy Integration function ". I have no idea what that means. My guess is that it means "A new way to integrate science research with policy development", but I am not sure. One should not have to spend time trying to figure out what was meant: it wastes time and leads to misinterpretation. Clarity should not be sacrificed in a desire to craft short statements or catchy phrases.

Just my 2-cents worth!

Kim

This Blog was helpful in explaining the rationale for the Policy Framework which for an Engineer used to concrete things. This is very a new thing but I will read the PF with renewed interest.

What about those parking meters at Booth st complex

Hello everyone,
is it just me that is wondering about those parking meters at Booth st complex. they will be installed because the city of Ottawa has failed to find savings and so we will all have to pay for it. Please write to them to tell the city what you think comments@ottawa.ca Deadline is May 8th !!!!

This is what i wrote:

As a Result of total failure on the City's part to reign in on increased costs.
with not a single cut to the 16, 000 + full time city salaries,
it is no wonder you will now be installing 118 parking meters along Booth st, Rochester st, etc.
If Dell would have the same FAILURE mentality they would keep all the jobs and start charging $3,000 a laptop.
How long do you think they would stay in business…?
Shame on this city for Poor management and a culture of failure. elie

Where the Rubber Hits the Road & A Flying High Five

It's count down time folks. We're holding our first official dialogue session on Friday. And it seems like just yesterday we were brainstorming and dreaming of skits and what ifs, and what's important.

Now I know there is a lot of focus on implementing. On getting people to frame their work within this common approach. And I know we all want to see success.

But I need to bring something up. We have come a long way as a department. Somebody said that recently. And it's true. We're already transforming the way we work. Yes, there's still a long way to go. And yes, we have to aim for the gold. But, wow! The changes we've seen so far have been fantastic. The wiki, and podcasts, and blogs, and knowledge cafes, and brain jams, and informal discussions, and content management, and collaborative tools, and one department planning, and a renewed vision, and learning organization tools and practitioners, and renewal.

And where do we work? Government. We're being proactive, innovative, and communicating like never before. At the recent Government Communications Conference I heard "I was proud to say I work at NRCan". This is because of all the wonderful work we're doing and the wonderful ways we're improving HOW we work.

Challenging each other through a conversation is a great thing. But it's not easy. It takes time, patience and understanding. And for the every1 team that has spent hours arguing, debating, planning, talking and learning, a big thank you. Thank you for juggling files, expectations and emotions. Thank you for taking yourselves out of your comfort zone and learning from your colleagues. Thank you for putting so much effort into all of this.

I'm sure this thank you will grow as every1 grows. In many ways I know this is still a beginning (even though I just said we've come so far). But there IS still a long way to go. But as I mentioned to a colleague today: I work at NR CAN not NR Can't. And I know we can get there, to a place where we've come even further in transforming the way we work. This is something very exciting for an employee - for me!

So let's keep it up. And a flying high five to all of you.

Scope of the Dialogue

This is the perfect time in our process to have a bit of a gut-check and address what is either a divergence in the team as to what the scope of our discussions are, or merely a question of different ways of framing the same photo.

Here was my train of thought: North Star is an organizational change process that asks EVERYONE in the department to start thinking about two things:

1. How we can be more integrated as a Department

2. How we can transform the way we work as a Department in order to be more collaborative, more evidence-based, an employer of choice, etc.


The way I understand it, the Policy Framework is the only product that addresses BOTH questions, with the horizontal task teams as the best EXAMPLE of how we can operationalize the policy framework from an institutional / organizational perspective.

All of the other products that have emerged over the last 18 months (wiki, CT business case, KM/CT plan, HR Renewal, SD course) address, in a specific/narrow way, parts of the 2nd question. In that way, they each contribute to (a) the North Star goals and (b) the Policy Framework goals.

I guess I'm starting to think that North Star is the process of reflection (identifying where to go when planning a road trip), the PF is the map (that outlines how you get to where you want to go on the road trip) and the other products are the tools that get us there (the car/bike/bus, the fuel, the food for the road, etc.).

The Dialogue Sessions should thus be about introducing the PF, because by doing so they introduce the goals of N*. Now, we can come up with better ways to introduce it than by saying "here's the PF dialogue session" maybe.

Anna's comments on the last post in the pedantic thread echoed what Jason was getting at with his idea of a 4th option --- starting with an essence based conversation about the kind of Department we want to be.

This could be a very different conversation, however - see, for example, the questions that I sent to the HR Employee Engagement Team (designing an activity where we talk about our ideal NRCan, and then situating HR Renewal in that context).

I'm thinking about this from a facilitation perspective, which always comes down to this: at the end of the session, what do you want participants walking away with? what questions/activities get you there? and how will you measure success?

For me, this is what I want employees to walk away with:

an understanding of:

1. How we can conceive of ourselves within one common story, thereby allowing us to represent our work using a common language.

2. How we can use the policy framework to enhance the way we work, improve our collaboration, be champions of SD, etc.

Pedantic Policy Post! About the Policy Framework Dialogue Session

Greetings all!

I thought I'd start a thread that focused not on WHAT the Policy Framework is, or its value (that thread will come soon though) but on HOW our team can create dialogue spaces that help to bring the PF to life in the lives of employees.

Recognizing that most people have neither heard of the PF, nor know why it was deemed necessary to create one, there is definitely an 'educational' component to the dialogue space. The educational component involves our desire to ensure participants in the dialogue sessions discuss certain pieces of information:

- why the DM felt there was a need for a PF (opportunity for some great anecdotes to be told here, I've already heard a few!)
- our departmental take on a "natural resources story"
- the role of the department in that story

In addition to ensuring employees have a chance to discuss those 3 items, there is also clearly a conversational component to the dialogue session (hence its name) in that we want to know what value the ITG products can bring to people's daily work.

We need to ensure whatever spaces / processes we create give people an opportunity to reflect on how the PF and the KM/CT action plan can contribute to people's daily efforts to achieve the North Star goals (which are simply professional good practice goals) of being more collaborative, more integrated and more evidence-based.

We have identified (on our workplan on the wiki) 4 streams of activities that can create spaces for dialogue:
· small group discussions
· large group discussions
· 1-1 discussions
· multi-media discussions (e.g. this blog)

This thread will hopefully catalyze some discussion on what that "how" could look like for the small / large group discussions.

EDUCATIONAL COMPONENT

(A) Presentations

The traditional approach to education assumes that the need to convey information will require some sort of presentation. I accept that there will be times where that is true (particularly where time is tight). If so, the 3 bullets noted above would likely be covered in a traditional powerpoint of some kind. That's fine when we only have a short amount of time.

(B) Beyond Presentations

Where there is more time, however, there is an opportunity to go about this in a very different way using popular education values/approaches http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_education.

Popular education approaches assume that much of the knowledge that you think you are going to convey actually resides in the group itself already. In which case, there is an opportunity to draw out this knowledge (and other pieces of knowledge you could not anticipate accessing) by facilitating conversations, using techniques that engage the group right from the outset.

For example: the natural resources story in the policy framework wants to highlight 4 things: the competitive global context, knowledge and the new growth theory, sustainable development and the role of NRCan. While all of these are important, we all know that the story could have included 3 things, or 6 things --- it's all a matter of where you draw the line. So, we don't need to control the discussion around only those 4 things.

Instead of doing a powerpoint presentation that walks people through this, we have the opportunity to design fun activities wherein people discuss their understanding of the natural resources story. Collectively, 99% of the time the group will hit all the points you want to convey and more. This information is then captured on the discussion page of the policy framework wiki page, making the PF page a living, breathing organism.

The role of the facilitator then is to weave the story together from what everyone has contributed and to highlight the 4 things that the ITG team decided to focus on.

You can then move on to the most important piece, which is: given the natural resources story, given the context within which we are operating, what is the role of NRCan - and of NRCan employees - in that story?

This is where we would turn to the eyeball diagram (the NRCan Panopticon - apologies to Bentham) and begin the second part of the session, which is about the value-added brought by the policy framework.


DIALOGUE COMPONENT

There appear to be two functions that the ITG hopes the PF will play in the lives of NRCan employees:

1. To help NRCan employees conceptualize, understand and explain their work in terms of a common set of ideas, a common story, a common vision (a unity in diversity approach).

2. To provide a set of lenses / questions that can support every employee / team in their efforts to work in a more integrated, collaborative and evidence-based way (which we all strive to do on a daily basis).

As a result, there should probably be two streams of conversation during the Dialogue Sessions:

Part 1. helping people situate their work within the language/themese/vision of the PF (mapping our work onto the framework)

Part 2. helping people learn to use the PF as a tool / lens through which to help them improve their own work (mapping the framework onto our work).

I suggest that the methodology we use to facilitate this 2-way dynamic should vary depending on the type of audience.

Audience 1:
· a group of individuals from different teams (e.g. a session with all the SPI folks working on the different horizontal task teams);
· an individual who is not involved in policy / program work;
· a new group which is developing its work-plan, and has not been doing work on its key files for very long;

Audience 2:
· individuals or groups who have been working on a given issue for a while, and have a pretty clear sense of what they're working on and why

(a) Part One

Audience 1
For this set of audience types, it would make sense to use a generic case study to walk through the eyeball diagram (eg. Bioleaching). This helps people to see how they can express/ articulate/ understand/ conceptualize their work using the language and terminology of the PF.

Audience 2
For this set of audience types, it would make sense to use an applied case study drawn directly from the work of the team. The goal would be to guide people through an activity wherein they can map their work onto the policy framework and explain what they are doing using the language / phrases of the PF.
This will also be an opportunity for the group to do a mapping (not a critical assessment, just a mapping):

· the roles they are currently playing, and in what ways;
· which stakeholders are being engaged
· which levers of influence are being deployed in the file


(b) Part Two

The purpose of Part Two would be to support participants to apply a Policy Framework lens to the Case Study in order to generate key questions that the bioleaching team might be well advised to consider / have considered before, during or after their work.
These questions would function as a checklist of some kind that would be be directed to helping the team consider:
· ways to work in a more collaborative, integrated and evidence-based fashion
· ways to be a better champion of SD - a leader in S/P - a world class ctr of knowledge

For example, using the bioleaching case study, Audience 1 participants could examine:

· the degree to which stakeholders were involved at each stage of the project, and how this facet could have been improved;
· which of the 3 roles above NRCan was playing in this project and how well we did;
· which of the levers NRCan was using at each stage of the project, and whether we could have done better;

Audience 2 participants would ask themselves this question for their current work on the file in question in order to identify strengths and opportunities to improve their performance.

Ideally, the checklist items would be linked to a "best practice" way of working from the PF (stakeholder engagement, collaboration, etc.) that would in turn be linked to a series of recommended skills/capacities/tools that employees can access/develop competencies in.

A group that recognized that it needed to improve its collaborative efforts, for example, might then want to follow up on the PF workshop with a workshop from the KM/CT action team, or a professional development training on collaboration. Similarly, a group that was excellent at integrating science into policy might offer a workshop / lunch&learn to other NRCan groups.

Thoughts?

The Policy Framework - Is it a "non-negotiable"?

Obviously, there are two possible answers to this question. Yes. No. But both sides of the argument are valid.

I think as employees will determine how they want to put into practice what has been developed (framework, KM stuff, etc.).

But it IS important to say that we want people to start using the policy framework in their daily work. Not to say that the document can't be interpreted by employees based on their individual jobs. So the question is does it really need to be applied to everything we do?

While you might argue that it's not really a choice of whether to implement or not, but rather a choice of how to relate the framework to their daily work - I'm sure you could find people who do not want to and don't have to relate their framework to their daily work.

The point I'm trying to make is that the framework is very important. And eventually I do think that everyone (or most people) will use it in some way. But people will embrace it if we let them come to that conclusion on their own and see the real value in it! How will that happen? Through facilitated conversations, not talking head type presentations. While I know that the meaty content is important, people will only understand it if it's not preached to them.