Building Collective Capacity for Change
Happy Wednesday, everyone.
I’ve spent a fair bit of time writing about some of the issues we face. Whether that is how extraction and innovation are in opposition to each other, how blame avoidance hinders policymaking, or our policy paradox that prevents us from acting on the policies that we know will help.
I’ve also spent some time over the past few weeks exploring what we can do about this. I’ve written about the importance of bringing energy to the edges and the role of actors outside of government to drive change. I’ve then explored some practical steps through my “Change in Practice” series, such as on the role of impact narratives and the importance of collective sensemaking.
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Today, though, I want to revisit first principles. My thinking has been actively evolving as I have been reading and writing, so I believe there is value in re-examining the imperative for change, considering how innovation influences my thinking, and how we can move the needle on the outcomes we want to achieve.
Moving the needle is ultimately what matters. We can analyze the problems endlessly, as the policy community writ-large has for so long. But that achieves nothing. It is itself a form of rent-seeking, as Matthew Mendelsohn so crisply put it to me in a conversation recently. But if we actually want different outcomes, then that requires action, not just analysis.
In short, I believe we need to explore ways to build collective capacity for change. While a clear top-down vision can play a crucial role in overcoming status quo bias and challenging entrenched interests, it is not sufficient on its own. Much as innovation itself is complex and non-linear, so too is making change happen and moving the needle to get the kinds of innovative outcomes we want to see. There is a need for collective, bottom-up action.
If you are interested in collaborating to build collective capacity and support for changing how we approach innovation in Canada, please get in touch via this survey. I’d love to discuss this further with interested individuals and begin to figure out the next steps.
Onto the long version.
Photo by hayleigh b on Unsplash
What Is Our End Goal?
My starting point is actually what our end goal is from an innovation perspective, in particular, and policy, in general.
To use a horribly cliché Stephen Covey phrase, we need to “Begin with the End in Mind.” For me, that end is a Canada and a world that is prosperous and inclusive, where everybody is able not only to have their needs met, but also to thrive as human beings.
Key to this is also recognizing the world’s interconnectedness and our shared challenges. That we are not isolated, atomized individuals, but are inherently connected in multiple ways, from the shared infrastructure we depend on, through the shared air we breathe, and most fundamentally, our shared humanity. Furthermore, it must be built on a recognition of the importance of community, at multiple scales from the local through to the global.
Policymaking Focused On Means, Not Ends
Too often, however, policymaking focuses on the means rather than the ends. As Grace Blakeley described it in a lecture I attended yesterday, it is as if we witnessed the “End of History” in the 1990s, and there are no big battles to be waged or big choices to be made. That we face merely technocratic questions, to tweak one policy or another. Luke Savage also put this well back in February:
In the centrist imagination, governance is largely a matter of applying highly specialized technical expertise. It’s an enterprise of management whose processes are at once subtle and obscure; a domain of discrete puzzles whose solutions are both intricate and abstruse. When it comes to fundamental questions of economics or politics, the ship of state is to be steered only by way of minor course corrections or it will inevitably capsize.
Innovation As An End
Innovation and related concepts such as productivity fall into this trap. There is an underlying assumption that more innovation is good. That increasing BERD is an end in itself. That closing our productivity gap with the US is the end we are aiming for.Geoff Mulgan has described this dominant framing as “‘more-ism’: the view that more science and more technology are goods in themselves.”
This view was common in the mid-20th century. But it became ever more problematic over the last half-century thanks to everything from DDT and Thalidomide to nuclear proliferation and cloning, Internet impacts on children to climate change, biased AI, and a hundred other issues. The smarter scientists have long recognised that the idea of simply ‘following the science’ is rarely a good guide to action. More-ism came to be seen as a naïve anachronism that ignored the complex and uneven impacts of technology on gender, class, age and place and the most basic political question - who benefits?
Much as Mulgan argues that UK science and policy elites have never accepted this questioning of “more-ism,” so too in Canada, we have not questioned this approach nor focused anywhere near enough attention on the outcomes of innovation.
We need to question more:
How far do our current dominant models of innovation and productivity, and the assumptions that underpin them, reflect the actual kind of Canada we want to see?
The US Comparison Trap
We often also default to comparing our innovation underperformance to the US. Yet, how often do we take a critical look at the kind of economy that is being built and how it is being built?
We often overlook many aspects that underpin innovation and economic “success” in the US. Kevin Milligan pointed out one aspect of this just yesterday.
Jim Stanford, in a couple of great Policy Options pieces that I wrote about last month, also skewers the use and misuse of GDP per capita as a measure of our success and a comparator to the US, given how much it masks. As he argued, “The goal of economic policy is not to maximize an abstract statistic. It should be to enhance the well-being of people.”
We can also go beyond statistics and deficits to explore the underlying power structures of innovation and who benefits. We can observe how state power is being misused to advance the interests of select private actors. That can be egregiously in the open, such as the State Department pressuring African companies to adopt Musk’s Starlink, or it can be more in the background, such as the decades-long close relationship between the US government and Boeing - one that ultimately resulted in hundreds of lives being lost in the 737 Max disasters. We can also see it in how innovation is developed on the back of neo-colonial practices and labour, as Madhumita Murgia wrote about in Code Dependent, and which I explored a few weeks ago.
The Need for a Normative Approach
We need to shift from a focus on innovation as an end in itself towards one that recognizes it as a means to achieve the value-driven outcomes we want to see.
Innovation and productivity matter. They are essential for growing the economic pie, for improving living standards overall, and for solving the challenges we face. We need innovation, both technological and social.
However, innovation is not something to be pursued in ways that compromise our values, such as the colonial use of low-paid labour from the Global South to train AI models, or pursued in ways that compromise the end goals, such as through accelerating climate change and polluting the atmosphere here and now to bring on more data centres online.
Making Change Happen
If that is my underlying analysis, then how do we get to a situation where this normative, values-driven approach becomes the standard and is reflected in our actions, not just our words? That is the key question.
I don’t have easy answers here, much as I wish I did. But I come to two main pillars of action: the need for a top-down vision and the need for bottom-up action.
Top-Down Vision
I have written at length before on the need for a top-down vision. I have also written about how the politics of blame avoidance reduce the incentives for taking such bold steps. Several factors reduce the incentives for bold leadership and innovative approaches.
Yet, ultimately, we need leaders with a bold and genuinely transformative vision. Change is tough, if not impossible, without it.
Kathryn May wrote about this in Policy Options when exploring whether “mission government” could be brought to Canada.
Longtime bureaucrats say they’ve seen other versions of this before – tiger teams, super ministers, special cabinet committees – and that mission government is just the latest trendy management brand to fix age-old problems. One noted the government already has many of the tools it needs to fix things. What it takes is political will and strong, focused leadership. Without that, the system reverts to the status quo – and resists change.
That status quo bias in the public service requires bold political leadership to overcome. As Michael Howlett has written about in the book Canadian Public Policy, the default approach of incremental policy change is built on the same set of actors being involved in the policy process over a long time, and how in talking to themselves they come to develop a common “way of looking at and dealing with a problem.” Overcoming that requires strong political vision and leadership.
This is something our moment calls for in multiple ways. As Emmett Macfarlane has argued this week, “we should be encouraging a renewed spirit of leadership in areas of federal jurisdiction, especially as it relates to the national economy” and that “We need to start demanding of the feds that they grow a spine, assert their authority, and show some long-term vision.”
Showing a spine is key. If we want to align our means with the outcomes we desire, then leadership requires challenging existing power centres within Canada and globally, such as tackling the extraction inherent in corporate Canada right now.
We need to push for that. How to do that effectively, I’m less clear. Writing to MPs, writing to the Prime Minister, and engaging with federal policymakers all seem valid routes, though whether they can shift leaders in ways they are not already incentivized to go, I don’t know. Perhaps more people with spines need actually to run for office. However, those opportunities only arise every few years and are subject to the vagaries of electoral geography and big ‘P’ Politics.
Bottom-Up Action
But politics is not just about electoral politics. It is inherent in everything we do. That is something that is often lost. Much as top-down leadership is necessary, it still centres the agency of government leaders who have so often failed to deliver and whose incentives work against some of what we are arguing for.
Relying solely on top-down leadership is akin to relying on a linear model of innovation, where invention leads to development, which in turn leads to commercialization, resulting in positive outcomes for the economy and society. But that model doesn’t reflect reality. As Richard Owen and co-authors argued 12 years ago:
innovation is not a simple, linear model with clear lines of sight from invention to impact, and where accountability for such impacts can be traced. It is an undulating path, sometimes with dead ends, involving many, often loosely-connected actors. It is a complex, collective, and dynamic phenomenon.
Similarly, reorienting our policies to focus on the ends, rather than the means, is a complex, collective, and dynamic process. We live in complex and polycentric systems. Innovation in Canada extends beyond the federal jurisdiction. It is a global phenomenon, shaped by worldwide trends. It is a provincial issue, shaped by provincial action, or lack thereof, in areas such as education policy, economic development, or welfare policy. It is a hyperlocal issue, shaped by the opportunities and barriers of individual people and their capacity to engage in innovation. It is so many other things beside.
Agency exists at multiple levels throughout these complex systems. And the prospect for inspired leadership exists far beyond the Prime Minister’s Office.
Collective Capacity for Change
So again, how do we make change happen at this level? A few weeks back, I wrote about embracing context and complexity, bringing ideas to the table, and facilitating coordination and collaboration. The pieces I have written since then dealt primarily with the first two. But I increasingly think that it is the latter that underpins all.
We need to begin with a collective endeavour. We need to build the connective tissue that enables people who believe in better outcomes to collaborate and support one another. Because challenging the status quo is hard, and it can be isolating.
Rachel Coldicutt in the UK is working to create a “Society for Hopeful Technologists.” As she wrote in the original blog that fleshed out the idea, such as society would:
Be a place for fostering and sharing big ideas
Be an advocacy body that responds to government policy proposals and offers pragmatic opinions about hyperbolic policy proposals that won’t survive contact with reality
Be a useful point of contact for regulators and policymakers
Be an inclusive place to gather, learn, and improve skills
Be a place of professional resistance and organization when malpractice and bad actors appear on the horizon
I think we need something similar here. We need a place of professional resistance nd a place for sharing big ideas.
If that resonates with you, please get in touch. I want to start thinking more about how to build the collective capacity for change and, well, that needs to be a collective endeavour.
If you’d like to discuss it further and get involved, then drop me your email in the survey here, and I’ll be in touch!
And if this does resonate with you, then please do share it further.
