Probing the Bureaucratic Mind: About Canadian Federal Executives

by Ruth Hubbard, Gilles Paquet

Overview

The transformation of the environment and of the institutional order has created quite a challenge: maintaining some sort of adequacy between these evolving realities and the frames of reference in use by public sector executives. Complexity is often nothing more than a name for a new order calling for a new frame of reference, and the reluctance to abandon old conceptual frameworks is often responsible for fundamental learning disabilities.

Through a series of conversations with Canadian federal senior executives about more and more daunting problems – from coping with an evolving context, to engaging intelligently with a new modus operandi, to trying to nudge and tweak programs in order to correct toxic pathologies, to reframing perceptions and redesigning organizations to meet the new challenges – weaknesses of the capabilities of the Canadian federal executives to respond to current challenges were revealed, and suggestions made about ways to kick start a process of refurbishment of these capabilities. This means having to gain new knowledge about complex systems – something that calls for intellectual effort.

This volume draws mainly from extensive Chatham House style discussions on 24 different topics, with approximately 100 senior executives of the Canadian federal government, with a number of interviews conducted afterward with other senior Canadian federal executives on the same themes. APEX provided a safe space for these Chatham House discussions, an opportunity for engaged senior executives to discuss daunting wicked policy problems, challenging ideas and intriguing hypotheses, and to reveal how they and their colleagues think.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780776638522
Publisher:	Invenire Books
Publication date:	08/10/2022
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.33(d)

About the Author

Ruth Hubbard is a practitioner, advisor, explorer, and published writer about governance and management challenges, especially in the public and not-for-profit sectors. She served for more than a decade as a federal deputy minister, during the iImplementation of Canada’’s value-added tax (the GST). Later, she was Master of the Royal Canadian Mint and President of the Public Service Commission. She was a senior research fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Centre on Governance and Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. from 2002 to 2017.

Gilles Paquet (1936–2019), O.C., MRSC, was Professor Emeritus at the Telfer School of Management and a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre on Governance of the University of Ottawa. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Royal Society of Arts of London, and served as President of the Royal Society of Canada (2003–2005). He studied at Laval, Queen's (Canada) and at the University of California (Los Angeles) where he was Postdoctoral Fellow in Economics. He taught at Carleton Universityfor almost 20 years before joining the University of Ottawa in 1981. He received honorary doctorates from Queen's, Laval, and Thompson Rivers University, received the Public Service Citation Award of APEX, and was made Honorary Member of l'Association des économistes québécois. He was made Member of the Order of Canada in 1992.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Beyond the traditional cliches
The rise of network governance
The federal bureaucracy under siege
The process
The outcome: probing a mindset


Chapter 1 – Cat’s cradling: the capacity to cope
A syncretic view of each theme discussed
Contextual issues
Diversity
Security
Ethics
Disloyalty
Organizational culture and new government tools
Corporate culture
The Gomery world
Public-private partnerships
Partitioning anew the federal public service
A personal distillation of what we learned
The decline of open critical thinking
Lack of gumption
Paradoxes, neuroses and willful blindness
Conclusion
Annex: Basic documentation for each session


Chapter 2 – Cat’s eyes: the capacity to engage intelligently
A syncretic view of each theme discussed
Intelligent accountability
Intelligent regulation
Intelligent organizational design
Intelligent public service
A personal distillation of what we learned
A cautionary statement
Somebody is in charge and it is not me
Déformationprofessionnelle
Cognitive dissonance
The present of latent fear
Conclusion
Annex: Basic documentation for each session


Chapter 3 – Not in the catbird seat: the capacity to collibrate
A syncretic view of each theme discussed
Perverse incentives
Rewarding failure and deception
Punishing success
Positive discrimination
Failure to confront
Pathologies and challenges
Quantophrenia
Performance review
Speaking truth to power
What role for cities in public governance?
A personal distillation of what we learned
Moral vacancy
Crippling epistemologies
Risk aversion and fear of experimentation
Conclusion
Annex: Basic documentation for each session


Chapter 4 – The unwisdom of cats: the capacity to reframe
A syncretic view of each theme discussed
The political-bureaucratic interface
The federal public service as a nexus of moral contracts
From leadership to stewardship
Deputy Minister: then, now and in the future
A personal distillation of what we learned
Difficulty in thinking about systems
Experts can’t learn
A tiny bit of intellectual nonchalance
Conclusion


Annex: Basic documentation for each session
Conclusion
Four layers of capabilities
A syndrome... tentatively
Cosmology-less wayfinding
The way out and forward... a catwalk
Toward a new covenant through a new inquiring system
One starting point
In summary


References