[On-screen text: How can Government work more effectively in place?
Insights from Mark Cabaj, international community change expert
President - Here to There Consulting (Canada)
Associate – Tamarak Institute]
[On-screen text: How can government work more effectively with local community partners in place?]
Mark Cabaj: What are the various roles that could be played by government?
They typically refer to things like convening with local partners; investing in initiatives or investing in coordinating dollars; advocating for policy change; adjusting internal processes and regulations.
So I think any civil servant could sit down and write all the possible roles that government could play in the context of place.
What we really have to go at is to realize that some what role we play win depends.
So sometimes we need to lead; sometimes we have to actually build and drive a change process; sometimes we have to back up a little bit and support and amplify local efforts; and sometimes we don't even need to be involved but we want to celebrate so we stamp and brand something and say isn't that terrific.
So if government says—rather than come and saying here's my job and my role—came and saying here are my capabilities let me try and deploy them in a helpful way, depending on where this change initiative goes that's powerful.
[On-screen text: What mindsets will enable government to work effectively with communities?]
Mark Cabaj: Well I mean that's right, mindsets are a big part of it.
We could actually say here's our tools, but what are the mindsets required to use those tools?
Well the one we just left was more of a contingency mindset—so what needs to be done?
Don't think of it as a formula, think about as ‘I'm going to be in a situation and I'll be called on—we'll all be called on—to do different things and if no one else can do that I might be able to do it.’
So a contingency mindset is one of them.
Another mindset is dealing with ambiguity.
As a human species we’re terrible at it.
We love the delusion of certainty and the pretense of control, but when you're tackling a complex issue you really don't have that.
You have to live with some degree of ambiguity and uncertainty, and in fact there's moments in time where you have to do it for quite a long time.
And we really don't like that, we really get paid to pretend we know what we're doing.
So that is another stance that we have to sort of embrace and can we tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty?
The third one is the possibility of doing something that doesn't work out.
So we talked earlier about intelligent failure as a way of doing it but dealing with it.
Some stuff will not work out—can you handle that?
Because if you can't we're only going to do stuff that for sure will work out.
So it's not a safe to fail intervention it's failsafe, which means it's probably low leverage.
So there's a lot of work on this in the area of adaptive leadership.
And people like Ronald Heifetz and others have talked about this, but I think 21st century public administration has to embrace the idea of adaptive leadership and management.
You jump into a complex situation and then you are driven by that situation and it's really a story of act, react, adapt and being situational in how you do that so big much.
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