The past two weeks, I’ve attended two one-day (well, one evening and an all-day) conferences that couldn’t have been further apart in the reaction they drew from me. The first was Interesting South on 12 May and then on Monday this week, Web Directions South Government. Both conferences were run extremely professionally by great teams. The content at both was largely really well selected by the organisers and well presented by the speakers.
But the audience and the “buzz” at each was worlds different.
The good news first. Let’s talk about Interesting South.
Based on the London Interesting, Interesting South was an eclectic gathering of speakers presenting brief talks – just five or 10 minutes – on a staggering range of topics – hopefulness, living one’s life to the fullest, genetic counselling, diving with humpback whales, marriage and others including my all too brief foray into participatory culture and just how low the hurdle is to get involved.
The feel of the evening, very much set by the first speaker, Mark Bagshaw was one of hope for a better future, a more accepting Australia and a call to action to live our lives to the fullest in spite of any hurdles placed in our way. The message couldn’t have been more compelling than it was coming from Mark, a quadriplegic who despite the significant issues he faces day to day in just getting on with life has reached the highest levels in business and seemingly lets little stand in his way.
The 320-plus of us in the Belvoir Street Theatre were engaged completely in the evening. We laughed, we cried, we empathised and I’m pretty sure we all walked out of the theatre determined to make something more of ourselves.
In deep contrast to Interesting South, the audience at Web Directions South Government struck me as less than engaged.
As someone who has spent many years working as a public servant in policy and delivery areas, has consulted in the same environment and who knows intimately the bureaucratic and tool inadequacy hurdles these people face in just getting their jobs done well each day, I had hoped that this audience might be different. I had hoped that they would be along to get revved up. To see just how good public sector web-based service delivery could be. And to go back to their organisations feeling vitalised and with plans to start something.
There was a strong theme across talks on the day of collaboration and Government 2.0, of the socialisation of the web and of the power to drive productivity and real knowledge sharing. Early in the day, Jason Ryan from the NZ State Services Commission gave a clarion call to the Australian public sector to stop their inward gaze and to look across the floor and outside the wall to its public – those who it is there to serve. He urged them to use the tools of social computing, appropriately managed, to engage with each other and with their constituencies, warning that if they did not, it would happen anyway, but that what would happen would be well beyond their control.
In New Zealand, as in the UK (as these nations are good proximate analogues for Australia, sharing cultural and governmental similarities) significant efforts are being made to innovate with web service delivery. The use of social tools within and across departmental walls is a part of those efforts. Yet here in Australia, despite the highly publicised and heavily used good news story that GovDex ought to be (but isn’t) and the small scale innovation taking place in parts of some organisations, there is no shining light of innovative web use by government in Australia.
Indeed, the invocations of Gilmore’s Law on the day were manifold. More than one speaker warned the audience that failure to take action to engage their employees, their management, their stakeholders and their public would inevitably result in significant failures in their agencies. I just don’t think this audience were convinced.
Not only were they not convinced, they were by and large, the wrong audience. There was no senior management present. No people there who were capable of returning to their organisations with big plans and the capability to get buy-in from senior management. The audience was, once again, the doers. Those people who are engaged day to day in the activity of delivering government services and yet are disempowered by bureaucracy and command-and-control management.
Yes, those people should have been there to hear about what they could be doing, but their management should have been there as well. Instead, I’ll hazard that a very significant number of them will be at CeBIT in Sydney this week, engaging in some self-congratulatory networking and attending the eGovernment Forum where I guarantee that the leaps forward that need to take place will not be discussed.
I may be wrong. I really do hope that members of the Web Directions South Government audience went back to work feeling excited about the possibilities and keen to get their management on board. I’d love to hear from some of the attendees (and not just the usual suspects) about their feelings on the day. Were they excited? Engaged? Amped up to drive some change? Committed to doing it?
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I had a couple of technically good pics of the WDG conference which I decided not to upload because the people in them looked so miserable and disinterested. It was depressing. Not sure why people would make the effort to go to such a conference when they look like they can’t wait for a career change or perhaps retirement.
@NathanaelB at least it wasn’t just me getting this impression about WDSGov. I was talking with Jason Ryan during a break, and he was significantly underwhelmed by the level of audience engagement.
I wasn’t at WDG but I’m not surprised. Over the last three or four years there seems to be a growing disconnect between senior SES who make the decisions on the people at ground zero who have to implement them.
Lots of things flow down the chain of command. I can’t remember the last time I saw something flow up the chain that didn’t result in great pain for someone.
There’s a big problem in the system. Some say it’s always been there. However, if I’ve only been in the service for 7 years and I can comfortably say ‘This is much worse than it used to be’, there’s a real problem.
I don’t think these people want a career change. I think they feel they need if they’re ever going to effect real change with their day to day work.
It’s a shame WDG was a bit of a washout. The list of speakers for the day seemed compelling.
@Shane with a couple of minor exceptions, the WDSGov speakers were all very good. Like I said, the group wasn’t engaged and the people needing convincing weren’t there.
The APS has an issue with engagement and rewarding work overall. I think this audience was simply a snapshot.
Nice wrap-up, Steve. Your participation in Interesting South was appreciated — but that is just it. Our whole aim is to bring together an active and participatory audience with activist and challenging speakers. That context changes everything.
So Steve, you said the audience weren’t convinced, but the tone of your post appears to blame the audience for this. If there is ‘convincing’ to do, that is the responsibility of the speaker, not the listener
I couldn’t make it, so don’t know what the speakers were like, but I can’t see how it can possibly be the audiences’ fault that the message didn’t connect.
Donna, I think it was less of an issue of them being convinced by the speakers – you and I both know several of them and know how good they are – and more a case of simply not being engaged at all and really not interested in attending the conference for the purpose of learning something new and potentially world-shifting for them.
Jason was particularly interesting at breakfast, Jose in the morning keynote equally so as was Matthew’s talk and Robert’s closing plenary. There was a theme through each of these talks of the power of collaboration. Jason’s and Matthew’s talks in particular were calls to action.
Jason’s role in the NZ public sector as a senior communicator is important in driving this type of change and has significant parallels with his Australian counterparts should they exist. He attempted to organise meetings with Australian equivalents to him on his visit and found, according to my conversation with him, significant apathy and a lack of people prepared to identify as comms managers. He also commented to me on the disconnected feel of the audience in spite of the good speakers. He was significantly surprised at the lack of progress in collaboration and social computing use in the public sector here – both within and across organisations and out to the public.
The audience really didn’t ask the meaty questions I felt they should be if they were interested in the subject matter. Many of them seemed to be attending simply for a day away from their desks.
Nathanael’s observations seem to support my own.
@trib the frustating thing about the public service is the power distance – its high, there is a strong hierarchy that leaves most of the doers – lets say EL2 and below feeling disimpowered – you have people in Branch/Div and FAS that seemlingly only exist to implement CYA practices. and heaven forbid that the doers EL1 and below actually get to talk to anybody higher then El2. The chain of command is very closely guarded. I do wonder if the use of twitter could be used to flatten the hierarchy some… but getting people to use it would be nothing short of a miracle.
@plasmaegg Ben, the use of something as immediate as Twitter, despite the value it’s proving to have by those using it at enterprise level, would be the veritable “nuclear option” Mark Pesce is so fond of invoking. They wouldn’t know what hit them.
@plasmaegg Along similar lines, perhaps people on the inside blogging about these issues and hopefully people higher up reading those blogs and feeling the frustration of those many levels under them might inspire some to see the light. How can one “suggest” a blog to someone they never talk to? I rarely talk to the manager two levels above me, let alone seven.
I didn’t attend WDSGov. But the problem of people just there to slack off from the 9-5 is a common problem.
As is people not willing for change or to attend a conference outside their usual mode of operation. Hence why there was little senior management. The WD conference series has a previous rep aimed at the doers not the desks. The attraction of CeBIT as a showcase of easy sell and no thinking would have won as an easy budget sell for management.
The problem comes down to WD pitched at the normal network contacts of doers and that’s what they got. I would say John and Max needed to engage more Govt Management. Now that is hard, they are not blog readers, or infact readers of any online interactions. Best you can get is a them reading a mailing list. The traditional print media is their focus, they will respond to flyer drops and magazine adverts. Crazy I know.
Sadly most of these doers are not the core of motivated change agents. In fact the percentage of change agents in a WD conference audience is usually very high. However I think this time it was a low percentage, and hence there was no crowd infection, no buzz, no yeah I’m inspired!
I unfortunately attended a few sessions that weren’t particularly that *inspiring*, and wished I had been at Matthew’s session. It was tough enough getting mgt to send my team to the conference, so there was no way I was able to attend the separate breakfast. Again a disappointment as by the sounds of things it was fantastic. Wish it had been part of the whole day.
I have nearly 10 years working in the APS specifically in web. I deal with management who say things like ‘but our users are mainly internal’. In other words they don’t matter. They say things like ‘It has to go live tomorrow’ even though we have done no usability testing and the site is clearly a botch job. I answer to boys in pinstripes who haven’t nearly got the understanding of the importance of the web as a communications tool and insist on their ‘designs’ being implemented. They work in isolation and exclude the lower ranks from implementing any change. I shove the pixels around a bit to massage their egos. I button my lip as I am already ostracised for asking questions and suggesting change.
I have heard stats such as 1 in 5 in the APS are depressed. I wonder how many were at the conference. The Peter Principal is in full force in my workplace, people not qualified to be making decisions yet are holding the power to do so and blocking the thinkers from speaking up.
Now this is my personal experience and isn’t a reflection of the audience. Just my 2 cents. The last decent manager I had in the APS was in 2003. Obviously I am seeking to move on.
@zuzu @trib people – as much as I love to rag on the APS the culture in the couple of departments I have worked in has very closely followed the expectations of the minister of the day – what they want and what we can get away with. Obvioulsy the APS could have a much greater role in engaging with the citizenry and should to my mind adopt a much more outward looking approach using social media tools to develop policy and maintain datasets(my personal plans for world domination). But from my experience most of the management is so shit scared that they are going to sign off on something that is going to generate blow back for the current minister that the road most travelled is the one most travelled. I can only hope that some of the more enlightened people hang around long enough to more through the ranks and adopt some of the tools we use in our personal lives, within the firewall for the greater good.
If it wasn’t the road most travelled then it wouldn’t be called “the road most travelled”; such a concept wouldn’t exist – if only people chose the right path, the path of innovation, the responsible path, the path that leads to better productivity, better quality, better morale … but no, gotta stick with the status quo!
I would add a couple of points to this interesting conversation.
Public speaking is the original social medium. There isn’t much point standing up in front of people if you are just going to read PowerPoint slides. You have to work to engage the people you are talking with.
Following on from the above, if you are going to present, work out your ROI – particularly if the investment is being made by the taxpayer. Have some metrics to define success and strive to meet them.
I came away from my trip thinking that there was a lot of good stuff being done, but absolutely flummoxed as to why no-one was communicating it. Why not share the lessons, the victories as well as the failures and build capability across the system?
@Jason, I think your final point is particularly cogent. Why isn’t the public sector, always seemingly wide open to criticisms of stagnancy and lack of innovation (and I’m as guilty of such criticism as anyone), screaming from the rooftops about it successes everywhere, and particularly in collaboration and social media?
I asked this question at another event where GovDex was shown and the very pat answer given was that they were “building capability”.
This reticence and the lack of publicity is in no small part a contributor to the feelings I came away with on the day. If the public sector in Australia was more willing to open up to itself and the public about its successes, show itself as innovative and capable, and engage its people who are often as much in the dark about what’s going on as the rest of us, perhaps the criticisms and the feelings expressed in the comments here would be rather more rare.
Absolutely. Another effect would be increased engagement, ergo less turnover & higher quality applicants which would lead to greater innovation etc. Virtuous circle.
A couple of bits I want to comment on here …
I fundamentally disagree that “there seems to be a growing disconnect between senior SES who make the decisions on the people at ground zero who have to implement them. Lots of things flow down the chain of command…” Specifically I don’t think that there is enough direction flowing downwards (or enough information flowing upwards for that matter). However it is the lack of direction and governance flowing downwards that is really disempowering. There is not much point having staff with great technical skills unless you can tell them what the problem is that you want a solution for. What happens is that technical people solve whatever (given the lack of direction) they perceive the problem to be. Guess what? It was the wrong problem! So then our customers and users think we are out of touch with the business, and don’t talk to us. Without business direction we cannot prioritise, we cannot calculate ROI, we can’t know when we have succeeded. Give me more direction, not less!
Also each and every one of us needs to be prepared for the government to spend money on this if we want to bring it up to a “best practice” level. I work for a small company. It is clear to us that it is worth bringing all of our employees (spread from Singapore to NZ) together a few times a year to have fun, to talk, to share knowledge and to learn more about each other. We have essentially been spending our own money to do this and we know that the cost of the air fares and accommodation and lost delivery time are money well spent. Let’s just imagine the headlines if Centrelink or DFAT or DEWR decided to do this (book our a few major hotels on the Gold Coast to bring everyone together for a few days).
@Patrick, it would appear on the issue of distance between SES and EL and lower staff, you’re not talking to the people I am. The comments above are from public sector workers in the EL bands who are living this day to day.
In my experience in the public sector, both as a consultant and as employee, the rarity with which anyone doing on the ground work and the SES come into meaningful contact is increasing markedly. I’ll admit there are exceptions, but they would appear to be exactly that, rather than the rule.
As Jason Ryan said in his excellent breakfast session, there needs to be fundamental change in the way the public sector communicates within departments, between departments and to the public. The existing, outdated structures where “ownership” and “protection” of knowledge and information militate for this, preventing people communicating effectively and seeking workarounds in order to be effective in their roles.
The disconnect also blocks understanding between the SES and lower staff. SES are so busy managing upwards to their political masters internally and in the Parliament that they have little time to be in touch. Lower down staff see this (rightly or wrongly) as disinterest. The mutual lack of understanding prevents the public sector from communicating to itself well and from functioning effectively.
These people don’t need to be brought together in a single locality to collaborate properly, they need to experience a fundamental shift in their understanding of each other, they need to be furnished with decent tools and they need to alter the way and by what channel they communicate.
You need to be talking to some of the people I do in order to see how they are feeling about all these things.
Stephen, it was the later part of the quote I was disagreeing with, and it sounds like you are agreeing with me in general on this specific point. The original quote indicated that there is (if anything) too much downwards communication. I believe (and you seem to agree) that perhaps there is too little, or at least it isn’t of sufficient quality or about the right things.
I think you missed the point of my second comment. It wasn’t that we need to be in one place to be able to communicate. It was that if a government make a bold, innovative, “best practice” step it will be criticised. So if we want government to do this then there will be costs, mistakes, u-turns, all the things that come from innovation. I am just cautioning people to be ready to support government when it is costly, makes mistakes, back-tracks on things. Otherwise you are asking for government to be a long way away from the leading edge.
Oh, and by the way, the “you’re not talking to the people I am” and “You need to be talking to some of the people I do in order to see how they are feeling about all these things” I’ll take with a grain of salt. As a consultant I work at this interface every day. SES and EL1/EL2 staff, in a range of government organisations are my workplace. There is even a some overlap with the organisations that you have done some work for. Admittedly I only have only a scant few decades of doing this…
@Patrick, I’ll run with the mea culpa. Happy to see that (with a more careful reading and clarification) that we do largely agree on a number of the issues. I have been thinking that this post feels a bit too negative and am preparing a more positive piece on communication that I’m sure we’ll see eye-to-eye on.
Yes, like many businesses, the public sector has enormous communication issues between the management and doer layers. I think that’s a huge issue that needs dramatic revolution. But revolution is hard (and there are hard decisions to be made).
@Patrick The real issues for me being an EL1 in the APS are the lack of facetime I get with SES – talking branch head and above. Its feels like we are kept at arms length but for the most part its because the SES are just too busy managing up to effectively manage down. Whatever flow down there is comes through a couple layers of middle management – interpreted and filtered before it get anywhere near us. Similary for information going back up – unless I make the effort to actually walk upstairs into my branch heads office (assuming she’s there) I would get nil face time with her and face time with div head and above is non-existent as is the possibility of face time. Its nobody’s fault – those levels of APS operate in such different circles, we may as well be on different planets. The promise of social tools etc is that maybe just maybe we can establish linkages with people outside our section/branch, @ heaven forbid higher levels then us. (Twitter for instance has allowed me to communicate with people around the globe that I would never have been able to talk to outside of professional conference or contracts) This is a necessary cultural change from my perspective for the APS and social media comm’s has a role to play in this. Similarly it would seem that social media tools has a role to play with increasing the engagement between depts and the public.
none of this is to say that we aren’t all trying – and that there aren’t good people at all levels – but the comms/information/idea sharing between levels/internal/external is happening in channels that are not open to discussion.
I agree with this in general but do not necessarily think that SES are even aware that engaging with the public is could be done much better – especially with the younger generations – using social media tools etc, mainly because (and I generalise here) most of them are illiterate with respect to these tools. And since I believe we were at a conference talking about engaging with the public/each other from a social media perspective it seems like we are going to be pushing stuff uphill expecting SES etc to take a lead in this type of activity. They simply don’t get it. The people who are aware at only now working there way up. Its going to be a long slow process.
As for doing something innovative its seems like the general public pays such little attention to what our departments do that its should be fairly easy to be innovative in this space, since its going to be hard work to get people to notice in the first place
naive? maybe but thats my perspective and perhaps part of the problem and solution all at the same time.
Specifically I don’t think that there is enough direction flowing downwards (or enough information flowing upwards for that matter). However it is the lack of direction and governance flowing downwards that is really disempowering.
I just wanted to respond to the above point of Patrick’s, given that he was responding to my comment that lots of things flow down the chain of command but not much is allowed to flow back up.
Patrick is right in that a big problem is direction (or lack thereof), but this is quite closely linked to the unidirectional flow down the chain and not the incompatible ideas that I think Patrick is saying they are (happy to be corrected if I’m wrong here…)
In the four departments I have worked in, one of the core transferable experiences has been a scatter gun approach from the pointy end. A high volume of requests/demands forces it way down the pipe with the hope that at least some of the outcomes will stick in a positive manner. There is little engagement with how the flow will be implemented, only that it will and must be.
It gets depressing to think of the amount of time I have wasted over the years implementing something that was requested from deep within the SES, only to have the outcome ignored or, worse, completely forgotten about.
I don’t see that the two concepts of one way flow and lack of direction need be exclusive ones.
I really should stop leaving blog comments late at night. I fear I make less sense this way.
As one of the presenters at WD Gov 08 I’d love to hear more from audience participants about what they thought of the conference.
The presentation I made is one I’ve delivered on 3 different occasions and each time I received a lot of positive feedback both during and after the preso. But this time I found many people in the audience to be far less responsive, which threw me a bit.
One of the general comments I’ve heard about the conference is that the content wasn’t specific enough to government. I can understand that and have taken it on board for other events. But I would like to say that there were a lot of presos where the content could easily be directly applied to any industry. Mine’s a good example of that. I would hope that delegates were able to distil info well enough that they could apply it to their own work.
I do agree that it is the responsibility of the presenter to develop and present engaging content and you can’t please all the people all the time. But as a conference attendee I also think it’s up to me to take what I can from a session. There have been times when I’ve attended a session the sounded interesting but turned out that it just wasn’t my thing. That’s hardly the presenters fault.
Lisa, I strongly agree with you that attendees as much as presenters have a role to play in making content relevant to them at conferences. It helps if a presenter is skilled, but no presentation at a conference would have got on the agenda if the organisers didn’t consider it relevant.
I thought yours was particularly relevant. The issues of usability generally and accessibility specifically are at the heart of providing access to information and services online. Especially so for government.
My issue with the whole day was not at all with the conference or content, but with the apparently disengaged audience. It really bugged me.
I just feel relieved that I’m not the only one that noticed it… I was a bit neurotic when I came off stage!
I travelled down from Sydney to attend WDG after winning the ticket at Canberra BarCamp. Initially I was uncertain that I was the right person to have won the much coveted door prize but opted to come anyway. As I’m not from a government background nor am presently working in the APS I felt overwhelmed at first.
Thankfully I knew a few of the other attendees otherwise I’d have had a very difficult day. I felt as if a lot of the other attendees weren’t overly approachable. Perhaps this was because there wasn’t the underlying ‘buzz’ that should be present at a conference which allows delegates to talk to each other about something cool they just saw in a presentation. Instead during talks I saw people more occupied with their laptops, phones, staring into the distance, and rolling their eyes at colleagues at some of the ideas being presented to them. I know I spent a lot of the day on my phone social networking in a lot of the talks about the content.
Stephen you nailed the atmosphere of the day perfectly. In a few ways it a was relief to read your summary. I had worried that it was just me who felt disconnected from the rest of the group. I found only some of the talks being over relevant to my background and interests, I didn’t have a group of co-workers to mingle and gossip with during breaks and between sessions. I did float between groups containing people I knew but by and large felt quite separate.
I did meet and catch up with quite a few interesting people; some of whom I have kept in touch with since returning to Sydney. However the most engaging conversations I had during my time at WDG were with other delegates were on topics not related to the content. Having attended a number of conferences focussing on different themes and areas of expertise I’ve never felt the way I did at WDG before.