Week notes #2

In last week’s syllabus design workshop we had people from four countries in our Zoom call. The topic of the hour was how to teach the successful deployment of digital era skills in government bureaucracies that aren’t familiar with these practices, and that can be actively hostile to approaches like agile or user research. We called this week ‘Change Management’.

We quickly agreed that the key to making any bureaucracy do anything new is to be a person (or a group of people) who are excellent at persuasion, negotiation and alliance building.

These are skills that are as old as humanity and that have nothing specifically digital about them at all. Furthermore these skills are already taught in MPA and MPP courses.

So the question arose ‘Should we be developing any teaching materials in this area at all, or should we be leaving well alone?’ It is certainly tempting to delete this topic entirely from our teaching - the syllabus would get shorter and we could leave the field entirely to others.

Eventually we concluded that there are two reasons we don’t believe it is fair to expect new digital era public servants to thrive if they are not alerted to a couple of quite specific issues that relate to overcoming persuasion barriers in contemporary governments.

First, in real governments there are often quite fundamental clashes between modern digital approaches to activities like project management, and the approaches to those same issues taken by traditional functions like finance and legal. These clashes have now been seen so many times in so many different contexts (and countries) that it is clear they don’t result from mere interpersonal friction, but instead represent real differences in belief about what counts as ‘good project management’ or ‘good risk management’. We feel it would be remiss of us to encourage the digital era education of public servants without warning them that some of the new skills they acquire are likely to be contested in their workplaces. It feels only fair to both give them the heads up, and give them some advice on taking more traditional functions with them on a reform journey.

Second, we felt it was worth talking explicitly about ways of making change because skilled persuaders and negotiators now have new tools at their disposal, thanks to digital technology. Rapid prototyping and user research exercises can produce assets that will persuade some decision-makers who were simply not going to be persuaded by more traditional civil service papers. It’s important that a highly persuasive public servant has such tools in their toolbag - tools that are not taught in traditional courses on these topics.

Next up

This week’s syllabus design topic will be ‘working in the open’, in which we’ll look at all the various approaches that now exist to doing government work in ways that are less ‘in the bunker’. If there are any innovative approaches to think you think we should be aware of, please let us know.

Starting to think web design

We’d really like our open access ‘teach-the-teacher’ syllabus materials to be both accessible and beautiful. This means that we’re starting to seriously ponder the web design aspects of this project.

We have two problems to overcome. The first is to answer the question ‘How are we going to get our hands on an excellent design for the key content pages?’. For example, it would be wonderful if we could manage a design as wonderful as that deployed by CORE Economics, but we know that such things don’t come easy. If anyone can point us to any specialists, or any amazing templated systems that we might look into for this purpose, that would be fantastic.

Second, we have to decide what Content Management System to host this new material on. True ‘Learning Management Systems’ appear to have lots of functionality we don’t need for giving grades and assigning homework, neither of which are required for our approach. However, trying to do the whole thing in Squarespace (which this website is in) whilst simple, doesn’t quite seem right.

In particular it’s design elements appear mainly chosen for small businesses and personal sites, not for potentially quite dense educational materials - just take a look at some of the beautifully integrated graphs and side-notes here if you want to see what the design challenge is.

So, what should we do? All suggestions welcome.