Good Engagement? Bad Engagement? Time to Check Your Cholesterol!

My post on engagement from a few weeks ago, The Myth of Social Media Engagement in the Public Service, generated a healthy debate on the nature and inherent value of engagement in the public sector. Some interpreted my post as saying that I held little or no value in engagement for the public sector. ThisRead… Read more »

Happy, Happy, Happy Citizens. Possible?

I have always been interested in happiness. Even before Pharrell Williams made it fashionable to sing about and dance to, I was interested in what made people happy. When I was given the opportunity to do some research for a Masters degree in Public Leadership (Virginia State Univ 2013) citizen satisfaction with local government becameRead… Read more »

7 Steps to Productivity

In my last blog, I talked about how to increase everyone’s productivity by tweaking your meetings. What about making your personal time more productive? Technology helps you multitask and do more, right? Wrong. Mutitasking creates lower quality results making you less productive. Here are seven productivity tips that I have combined from inc.com, a listRead… Read more »

“Selling” public service to Millenial consumers: Are we in a new sort of competition with the private sector?

A fascinating paper by Winograd and Hais, and published by the Brookings Institution this morning, discusses some striking differences in what appeals to Millenials, compared to earlier birth cohorts, and it got me thinking. http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2014/05/millenials-upend-wall-street-corporate-america-winograd-hais The authors’ focus is principally on the corporate side of things, and consumer behaviour, discussing what they believe is aRead… Read more »

Building a Government Data Culture

“‘Are people innately altruistic?’ is the wrong kind of question to ask. People are people, and they respond to incentives.” – Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner (SuperFreakonomics) One of the most important things an open data directive can accomplish – whether it takes the form an informal policy, an executive order or an open dataRead… Read more »

Lean Scope Project Management: Project Management for Highly-Innovative Projects

I will present my Lean Scope Project Management methodology on Wednesday to the Project Management Institute’s Government Community of Practice. On Thursday, I will release a YouTube video explaining Lean Scope Project Management. I look forward to the comments of project management practitioners and human-centered design practitioners. The origin story of Lean Scope Project ManagementRead… Read more »

Risk, Failure, and Honesty

This post originally appeared on cpsrenewal.ca. Last year Nick and I went down a long rabbit hole on the idea of the faceless bureaucrat (see: Embracing Authenticity Means Embracing Complexity). There’s a maxim that bureaucrats are rightly anonymous, in that it facilitates professional, non-partisan advice, but I’ve been wondering if the foundations on which thatRead… Read more »

The Bricks and Mortar of Digital Transformation

Successful digital transformation in organizations is built on a foundation of strategic goals and objectives.The building blocks are leadership, governance, digital competencies, education and training, and change management. An organization’s culture is the mortar that connects and binds everything together. All organizations will be transformed by social and digital technologies – it’s a question ofRead… Read more »

Leading Edge: How to out pace your competition

Transitions happen in every organization. Consequently, the results include co-workers and leadership leaving to join new offices on a regular basis. Some call it staff turn-overs or others view it as “staying power” if you decide to not move on. Sometimes when people leave to take on new opportunities, it is because they out paceRead… Read more »