Is it your job to create or reduce friction?

One of the big distinctions I've noted between working in the public and private sector is in the level of friction when attempting to get things done.

I define friction as the amount of red tape, process, procedure and protocols that slows down the achievement of a defined goal.

The more red tape, the more friction, and generally the longer it takes to get things done.

Some roles in organisations are defined around friction - such as a procurement team, lawyers and accountants. All exist to create or reduce the level of friction in achieving a specific goal.

Other roles can influence the level of friction around a given decision or topic - from senior management through to communication and IT teams.

Now friction isn't necessarily bad. By slowing down decisions, friction can mean more viewpoints are considered and fatal errors do not occur. In fact many of the checks and balances in government are there to prevent decisions being taken too quickly or unilaterally.

However reducing friction also has benefits. The faster an outcome can be achieved, the more likely it will be relevant. Fast decisions also mean fast learning decisions - 'failing fast' - and iterative improvement towards a desired state.

Balancing the level of friction required for good decisions and outcomes is the real challenge. How much or little friction is good?

This obviously depends on the outcome desired, the level of scrutiny required around a decision and who is affected as a result.

However, generally, the aim should be to have as little friction as possible within the overall constraints of the goal.

So what about your role in the public sector, is it to create or reduce friction - and do you create or reduce friction for others?

If your focus is on increasing friction, consider whether this actually advantages your organisation and its goals. Sometimes people simply create friction out of fear, rather than in the best interests of an organisation's goals.

If your focus is on reducing friction, consider whether some friction needs to be preserved for good decision-making. Also think about how your colleagues may feel as it gets faster and easier to achieve certain outcomes - many will welcome this, but a few will be concerned about a loss of control, fear greater failure or scrutiny.

When you work with others think about whether you are creating or reducing friction - and whether you're taking the appropriate stance for a situation.

Friction isn't necessarily bad, but the least friction possible is almost always good.

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Why not include ordinary citizens on the MP remuneration review panel?

Australia's Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, has now announced the review panel for MP remuneration expenses, and in my view it's close to becoming another missed opportunity to improve government engagement, accountability and transparency with the community.

The panel will consist of five 'eminent' individuals. Two will be former politicians (one Labor and one Liberal), one a business person and two will be former senior public servants (David Tune, former Secretary of the Department of Finance, and John Conde, Head of the Remuneration Tribunal).

In other words, the usual suspects - members of the major political parties (who are most under the shadow of the expenses issues), a friendly CEO or senior business advisor (who knows what side his - and it will be a him - bread is buttered on) and two public sector insiders who have worked closely with current and former politicians.

On the five person panel, there's apparently no room for ordinary citizens, the involvement of a citizen's panel or anyone unconnected to politicians who is actually concerned or enraged by the way MPs are using their entitlements or is concerned about the falling legitimacy and credibility of our political system.

Of course such participants would likely be more 'unruly'. They'd not be members of the cozy Canberra club which decides what is good for citizens (often based on mistaken, shallow or lobbyist influenced impressions of public sentiment). They'd not understand the rules of the game, the way in which things MUST be done in order to satisfy the egos and perceptions of those on the top of the political pile.

Participants from outside the Canberra insider club may not even share the group think of what is appropriate for politicians to spend, and could even disagree with the 'eminent' appointees on what is appropriate expenditure by politicians.

Of course the Prime Minister's hand-picked 'eminent' panel will be thorough and comprehensive in its review. It will consult citizens - allowing people to provide their views. And then it will weigh those views and provide its recommendations, based on their own filters, future career ambitions, relationships and experiences of being within the 'club'.

The upside of this insider approach is that the review will be less harsh on politicians, that the 'eminent' insiders understand the needs of politics and provide limited restrictions on politician entitlements, allowing politicians more freedom to rely on the public purse rather than personal or party finances.

The risk for politicians is that the public don't feel the review recommendations go far enough, that traditional media and social media continue to pursue senior politicians for their expenditure, that citizens don't feel they have been appropriately included in the process. The outcome of this would be further erosion of trust in both Australia's political system and in our public sector.

This risk could be partially or wholly mitigated through including ordinary citizens as part of the eminent panel, or creating a citizen's panel to oversee and support or reject the eminent panel's review.

Citizens could be selected through nomination or random selection from the electoral role - our court jury model is one approach that could be used. This group should, of course, be paid for their time and not expected to donate it for free - Iceland's Constitutional process, where they paid citizens their travel expenses and the salary of an MP for the days they worked is a good model to emulate to reflect the value of citizen involvement and the cost of their lost time.

In this approach, citizens would decide whether the review went far enough, not political insiders who may stand to gain from lighter recommendations.

There's a risk for politicians in taking this approach. They may end up with tighter restrictions on entitlements. It could be uncomfortable for parties struggling to raise the funds they need to operate, or costly for politicians' own finances.

However it would be far more likely to meet public expectations, to help rebuild credibility in political parties and allow politicians more certainty that something they spend won't haunt them in years to come. It could even provide a huge boost to the Coalition's re-election chances by demonstrating how the current government was genuine about listening to citizens and governing for all Australians.

There's still time for the Prime Minister to shape the form of the remuneration review, to take a bold step to respect citizens and embed greater accountability and transparency in the review process.

It's not a missed opportunity yet, but if it becomes one, the consequences could further damage Australia's democratic credibility and institutions.

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Governments are still very backwards in most of their online engagement - and it's not due to a shortage of tools

I've been reading about a new entrant in the government online consultation market - Balancing Act, a simulation tool for involving the public in government budget consultations.

It joins a range of other tools for this type of 'trade-off' consulting online - including Budget Allocator from Bang The Table and, my favourite, Budget Simulator from Delib (which I used to run in Australia).

These are only a few of the advanced online consultation tools available for government - of which there are many kinds, from surveys and geospatial mapping through to forums and blogs.

Many vendors have years of experience, having run thousands of consultations with hundreds of clients internationally (particularly Delib and Bang The Table).

However most governments are still very backwards and inconsistent in their online engagement - with many consultations still just having an email 'black box' for submissions, or employing expensive market research firms to do work that can be done by specialist public sector online consulting companies for a fraction of the cost.

I've seen agencies charged tens of thousands for basic SurveyMonkey surveys, or mistakenly use forums to capture a few dozen comments for quantitative consultations that would receive far more and higher quality responses and outcomes using specialist budget or survey tools.

I've had agencies so 'no thanks, we'll build rather than buy' when presented with tools that have been used by hundreds of agencies over many years, and have had millions invested in their development and refinement to make them work well - and seen the outcomes where they invested tens or hundreds of thousands (far more than the cost of buying in the capability) and ended up with a consultation system that didn't do what they needed it to do.

Even today most local councils and governments, when they engage online, buy or build a capability just for a specific consultation, then 'throw it away' afterwards - only to reinvest the next time they need to consult.

And that's in an environment where agencies know that they'll be consulting stakeholders or the community tens of times throughout a year.

So why do government agencies not take a pragmatic and sensible approach to consultation, invest in sound capability and use it repeatedly across all appropriate engagements, providing a consistent and managed experience at a very low amortised cost?

After years of running consultations and leading Delib Australia, I've come to the following conclusion.

I believe that fundamentally agencies and councils don't think of consultation as a critical step in policy and service design.

Instead consultation is usually either a 'sop' to their Minister, or to affected groups in the community, to provide necessary cover for whatever decisions they choose to make.

In my experience, while policy specialists and senior public servants are always interested in reviewing the synopsis of what consultation respondents say, they often suffer from the 'expert issue', where they already know the right solution, and simply don't believe that the public would have anything useful to add.

This bias is often reinforced during consultations. Due to the ways in which agencies consult it's common for many responses to be brief and poorly considered, or reflect ideas an agency has already investigated and rejected, or tried.

When experts, interest groups, companies and lobbyists respond to consultations, their responses are given a little more attention - partly because they are written formally in language that public servants respond to, and partially because they may be groups that can derail a government's goals.

However even these responses are often largely disregarded as the bias or slant of a particular group seeking advantage. Or they may be =taken as gospel - a mandated approach that already has the support of the group purported to be represented (even where this may not be evidentially the case).

Of course there are exceptions to the cases above and I've been fortunate enough to work with a number of agencies, councils and individuals who truly value and respect community input and understand how it can effectively inform and improve policy and service outcomes.

However until governments think more like start-ups, recognising the immense value that consultations have in uncovering policy issues and new ideas as a critical part of a design process, I expect we'll continue to see the poor use of online consultation tools even though many of the tools available today are superbly well-developed and tested.

Agencies and councils don't need to wait for or design better tools - they need to improve their thinking, or consultation will continue to be a weakness and a risk for them and their political masters.

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The Australian Government's entitlements issue is an opportunity for a Gov 2.0 solution

Practically everyone in Australia has followed the entitlements issue triggered by media reports of House of Representatives Speaker, and Liberal politician, Bronwyn Bishop's helicopter trip from Melbourne to Geelong over the last three weeks.

While at times other politicians were reluctant to criticise Bishop's expenses, on the basis that most politicians spend quite a bit of money in meeting the requirements of their positions, the public and media was almost universally negative towards the rolling revelations of expenses that seemed either not in the public interest, or more expansive than necessary in her role.

Now that Bishop has resigned her position as Speaker, with a decade of her expenditures being reviewed by the Department of Finance, and the Prime Minister has announced a new review of parliamentary expenditures and entitlements, including those of senior public servants, it's a good time to look at how digital technology could help Parliament and politicians to regain and build public trust as well as explain how and why politicians spend money in carrying out their duties.

There's a real opportunity to make it easier for politicians to submit expenses, improve the speed at which they're made public, and provide a mechanism for explaining the value of their legitimate expenditures, while making it much harder for inappropriate use of entitlements.

It's hard to believe, in today's world of electronic banking, myTax, myGov and online accounting platforms like Xero, that parliamentarians still have to, by and large, manually collect their receipts and invoices and physically complete paper forms to claim and verify their legitimate expenditures.

The technology to digitally photograph and submit expenses directly into an online system is widely available, as is the capability to digitally verify that all expenditures are accurate and appropriate.

It is also easy to then make these expenditures visible to whoever needs to see them, and to conduct various forms of analysis and reporting (both automated and manual) to identify and query exceptions (such as extremely high cost taxi fares) and, of course, to repay any out-of-pocket work expenses that a politician may have incurred.

While off-the-shelf tools are not really designed for the type of visibility expected of politicians, it wouldn't be too hard to develop a digital system for capturing, querying, reporting and paying these expenses, with the ability for the public and the media to view, in near-real time, all expenses incurred by parliamentarians in their day-to-day roles.

It wouldn't be much harder to allow expenses to be analysed and compared, as the media is already doing in articles like this, to understand the relative spending by MPs and, over time, by Ministers in the same or similar portfolios. This would provide for better comparisons and consideration over time.

What would be truly visionary would be to build in mechanisms for the public to flag certain expenditures and request an explanation, allowing politicians (and their teams) to explain what they are doing and why - improving the democratic compact between politicians and their constituents. This could be based on a minimum threshold of 'please explain' requests and require all requesters to be registered in the system to minimise the risk of nuisance enquiries.

On top of this, the system could provide information on entire itineraries and politicians and their teams could include information on the outcomes of their expenditures. For example an overseas study trip that resulted in a report to parliament and a change in legislation could have these outcomes and outputs linked to the expenditure, helping to verify how valuable it was.

Some might see the above type of approach invasive, taking the view that, once elected, a politician should simply be trusted to do the right thing.

While I can sympathise with this perspective, the reality is that it hasn't been shown to be effective in the real world. Some elected politicians have been shown to misuse or misunderstand their entitlements, and the damage this does to the integrity of the parliament is extreme.

Trust in politicians is low - not just because of questions over their expenditures, but also because of broken promises, failed programs and continual infighting.

Redeeming the reputation of parliament can't be achieved simply by expecting the public to let bygones be bygones and start trusting politicians again, it must be won through positive examples and actions - as Malcolm Turnbull demonstrated in his tram and train trip from Melbourne to Geelong.

Creating a digital parliamentary expenditures system with full near-real time transparency would be a strong visible sign that politicians are committed to serving Australia, not to their own enrichment.

It would also help dispel misunderstandings about how and why politicians spend money and improve the understanding of how expensive it can be to be a politician - particularly one with a large electorate or significant travel requirements.

Of course there's still the need to review the entitlements system itself - or at least adopt the recommendations from the last review of entitlements, however with some shrewd application of Gov 2.0 thinking and digital tools, Australians could be confident in how their politicians behave, not simply confident in the rules that they are expected to follow.

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The evolving role of social medial within government and the community

I had a great chat on Monday with one of the best online comms people in federal government, which touched on how the role of social media has evolved within agencies and how this matched the overall evolution and maturing of social use by the community in general.

I've thought through this and roughly mapped out the phases I've seen for social over the years - note this is a rough draft and others will have very different views of the progression.

Birth - 'I'm here look at me'
At its birth most people and organisations weren't quite sure what social media was for, with many starting out using social to talk about themselves and what they were doing.

Organisations often began engaging with 'look I'm here' messages - staking their claim to coolness through merely having a presence on a social channel, many without a firm strategy detailing why they were on social or how they'd use these platforms to engage with citizens, customers, stakeholders and staff.

This phase was typified by posts detailing that people were getting up, going to bed, having lunch or, from organisations, that their CEO was at such-and-such a place with such-and-such a celebrity.

Childhood - 'I'm learning about...'
As social grew in reach and users in sophistication, people began talking about topics of common interest, sharing news and information in topically based groups. The arrival of hashtags on Twitter to differentiate conversations is an example of one of the key stages on this journey as social media became less about being present and more about sharing meaningful data with relevant people and organisations.

Critical in this stage was the evolution beyond self-interest into sharing, with the reputation of social media users starting to reflect their willingness to share information rather than how they shared their own lives and activities.

Teenager - 'What's up?'
As social took hold in the mainstream, we saw a great deal of confusion - with new and advanced users beginning to collide in terms of the maturity of their use.

One particular trend was for tighter peer groups to form, with more experienced users 'circling the wagons' around their information sharing conversations as new people streamed in screaming 'look at me'.

This phase saw the creation of many expert groups who either excluded or husbanded in new users into their cliche in managed ways.

We also saw the type of information shared on shift to become more personal, with disasters fostering the use of social media for social outcomes - saving lives, directing resources, helping people cope with adverse circumstances as empathy took hold.

Organisations began using social media not just for impersonal information broadcasts but for personalised customer service and for engaging and supporting people in crisis scenarios.

More resources began being directed to social, with organisations encouraged to develop their own voices and live their values, rather than simply share information.

Young adulthood - 'Experimentation'
We're now entering the young adulthood of social media, with a majority of the population both using social and many doing so in innovative and useful ways.

The tools have been around long enough that people are beginning to explore what is possible in more systemic and mature ways.

Organisations now using social in diverse ways - still for information sharing, customer service and crisis management - but also for detecting the 'pulse' of the community, for engaging in the development of products and policies, and for building relationships with non-humans, from NASA spacecraft to coffee machines, in a social aspect to the internet of things.

We're seeing stories told via social channels and new forms of art evolving to encapsulate the global conversation that's now occurring between over a billion people day and night.


What do we have to look forward to?

Hopefully we'll see a long mature adulthood for social media, where individuals and organisations integrate social media fully within their lives, using social channels as we already use telephones as a natural part of the communication fabric of our lives, relationships and interactions.

For organisations and individuals still new to social media, it's worth trying to move quickly through your 'birth' and 'childhood', into the phases where social has the most impact and value.

While you may not be prepared, as yet, to experiment with innovative ways of using social, at least integrate it into your customer service and community engagement frameworks, even moreso than your outbound communications.

Try to develop a single voice for your social presence as an organisation - not an impersonal institution, emotionless and uncaring, nor necessary a 'human' voice representing a single person perspective, but a 'humanised' voice that represents your vision and goals with the passion and energy your staff bring to meeting them.

Social is now the main channel by which many people communicate with each other and with organisations, how they find out and share information and where they give and receive support. As an organisation you need to be prepared to be engaged and engaging, to be valuable in order to receive value from social channels. To grow up quickly and make mature use of social media.

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