Hello, this is Peter Levesque. Welcome to episode twenty of the Knowledge Exchange Podcast. This podcast series is a product supported by the Canadian Council on Learning – Canada's leading organization committed to improving learning across Canada and in all walks of life. I want to thank the great staff at CCL for their efforts with this project to advance our understanding of effective knowledge exchange to improve the learning of Canadians. You can download this episode from my website at www.knowledgemobilization.net, from iTunes directly, just search for KM podcast. Alternatively go to knowledgeexchange.podomatic.com.
Paul McDowall is at the centre of the conversation about Knowledge Management in the Government of Canada. While he is understated, he has been a central figure in creating a more sharing and collaborative environment for those trying to work across silos and institutional barriers. Now at the Canada School of the Public Service, he shares his views about the need to re-engineer leadership, of the need for longer-term vision, of co-creating the workplaces that serve the citizens of Canada. He believes that the principal purpose of the Government of Canada is to serve Canadians. I was impressed by the results obtained from using communities of practice. I was also somewhat disheartened by the fact that change may not happen until the issues are urgent and pressing. I appreciated Paul's wisdom and openness and I hope you do also. Peter: I'm in the West Tower of L'Esplanade Laurier in Ottawa with Paul McDowall. Paul why don't you introduce yourself and tell people a little bit about who you are and what you do? Paul: Thanks Peter. I'm the Knowledge Management Advisor in the Canada School of Public Service. The school is responsible for building capacity in leadership levels and at functional technical levels across government. So it has a prime responsibility for training, learning, and building broader capacity, especially on leadership issues in the Federal Government.
I also happen to be the chairperson for the Interdepartmental Knowledge Management Forum and have been the chairperson for quite sometime there and that has given us a very interesting perspective on the experience of government departments - almost every government department in Ottawa or in the Federal Government – having tried to do KM (knowledge management, knowledge mobilization, knowledge exchange) over the last ten or twelve years. We've had lots of dramatic failures, lots of weak successes and learned an awful lot of powerful lessons. Peter: That's really important. We were just talking before the interview that in fact, the Government of Canada is perhaps the largest employer in the country.
Paul: Yes.
Peter: It's an enormously, complex, varied type of institution. There are all sorts of agencies and departments within it. And so I'm going to ask kind of a difficult question but knowledge exchange from…at the Canadian Council on Learning is described as bringing people and evidence together to influence behavior. Within this complexity, when you hear the word evidence, what do you think about?
Paul: There are different types of evidence I would suggest and we mentioned…we were talking before the session about practice evidence and I believe that's a very powerful form of evidence that tends to not be validated by a certain segment of the Federal Government, particularly leadership or academics, or scientific levels. They focus more on research and research produces powerful evidence absolutely. But there is a practice evidence that I think, cannot be discounted and that's I think where we need to go. And from a Michael Polanyi concept, the explicit knowledge and the tacit knowledge – and the tacit knowledge is one that really needs to be explored much further I believe.
Peter: Okay so how…you've talked about ten or twelve years worth of work in thinking about this and you've talked about failures as well as some successes. How do you bring together tacit and explicit knowledge?
Paul: Well the organization need to consider what it needs to do and what it needs to be in order to accomplish that. There's a huge role for leadership and visioning and understanding how to manage the total resources within the organization. In this context we're talking about the tacit knowledge of the individuals, the innovative capacity of the individuals in the organization, the relationships with stakeholders, with partners, with lobby groups, with citizens, with other countries, other experiences. For organizations I believe that it's essential to vision a workplace which is highly productive – taking full advantage of the individual and their capacity to achieve much more than they actually think they can and to create the space and the protocols and the mechanisms for that to happen. Peter: Okay, can you give an example? You talked about leadership and leadership is one of the themes of these interviews and it's come up in different contexts and there's some similarities. Within this context, when you talk about leadership, what is good leadership? Can you give an example?
Paul: I can give you an example, yes. I think of when Alan Nymark was the Deputy Head of Environment Canada – this is about four or five years ago – the Department was going through a number of difficult changes as most departments were, through post program review and Alan Nymark understood implicitly, the potential that was there in the organization in the form of its people and he said, “We are a knowledge-based organization and we need to manage ourselves as one.” And so they launched a process that resulted in a charter and an agenda.
The charter was the “Knowledge in Service of Canadians” and he created the vision and he allowed the organization to co-create that vision. It was a vision of an organization that was achieving the outcomes and the results that it needed to achieve for its primary audience and the primary audience is the Canadian citizens. He was the leader of the process to create that vision and to engage individuals across the organization at all levels in determining what that vision was and then he strongly supported it.
Peter: Okay.
Co-creation is a word that I've heard in other contexts as well. What does that look like? We understand…you know most people understand leadership from that military model right? There's a leader in front and let's go…and when I hear the word co-creation that seems much more complicated. Paul: And it's a little more risky and one needs to be open and transparent a lot more. In the case of Environment Canada when Allan was there they invited anyone across Canada in Environment Canada to come to a 2-day open space session – this was at the worker level to identify what they felt the needs were at the working level in order to be successful.
Allan had lead his leadership table in the same sort of exercise and then they went to the middle managers and middle managers tend to be more…present more of a barrier than an enabler for a strategic change in organizations. And they went to the middle managers and they said, “Do not vet or do not veto what you see on this piece of paper but add to it what you need to be successful and so they co-created a vision.
Peter: Interesting.
Paul: And they built what they considered, and they used the term revolution in the organization, and it was a huge culture change…huge.
Peter: How do you support culture change? One of the concepts that I put forward is that you need a combination of incentives and infrastructures…that incentives for behavior and once you…once people are behaving in a certain way, you need an infrastructure to support that. What changes happened at Environment Canada?
Paul: Well I wish I could tell you that 5 years on, it was an exemplary practice...through the whole thing. One of our difficulties in the Federal Government is it is a systemic barrier and that's the rotation of Deputy Ministers. After 2 years the Deputy Minister moves along. So the new Deputy comes in, wants to create a new strategy so the former strategy is no longer valid, no longer even discussed. So it creates a culture of cynicism around change. The change will only last as long as the Deputy is there and then it will start all over again.
So the talk about culture – it's a very difficult issue for the Federal Government and I would suspect that the private sector struggles with something similar. But culture change…I think there's a misconception about culture change that we can create three…we can launch three initiatives to go and change culture – we're going to change culture – that's our primary priority this year and you can't change culture but you can influence culture, long-term I believe. I think you have to start with the behavior – you start with individual's behavior creating the incentives as you suggest and there can be a carrot and stick involved and that's fine too because you do need accountability. We need accountability in this domain but change individual behavior and after time and that will change the attitudes of those individuals and of their circle of colleagues. And if you change attitudes and behavior then, like a virus, it'll spread through the organization and if you continue to change behavior for the better to improve their work environment, their contribution, their job satisfaction, etc…etc., then the culture will have a potential to change but it needs to be sustained long-term change. So that's the… Peter: That's the challenge – it's the short-term versus the long term stressor? Paul: Exactly.
Peter: Okay.
The Canadian Council on Learning is trying to create a culture that supports lifelong learning. When you hear the term lifelong learning what do you think about?
Paul: I think that there's a…certainly a number of people in the Federal Government who think of lifelong learning as ongoing access to training and I don't believe that's what lifelong learning is - so I'll start with the negative and work to the positive. Peter: Okay.
Paul: It's not taking courses every year and being allocated a certain amount of money or a certain number of training days per year – that's not lifelong learning. We learn as we work and you quoted that thing before…that phrase before… Peter: The HIV Aids…that “as we learn, we live”. Paul: As we learn, we live and you learn as you are working. For a knowledge worker, everyday is a learning experience because you're doing something new, something different, you're creating, you're innovating, you're engaging, you're consulting, you're developing your own skills or abilities or experience – so that's a learning process and lifelong learning then is about how you turn that back in to the organization and keep the cycle fresh. Peter: Okay, so how do you support that?
Paul: As an organization?
Peter: As an organization.
Paul: I think there is a visioning aspect to it and you need to share that vision and develop the vision as Alan Nymark did at Environment Canada – or was trying to do at Environment Canada. You need to focus the effort towards certain priority areas. Clearly organizations cannot be focused on 101 priorities. They need to apply their resources and they are limited and organizations struggle with the lack of funding from time to time but you need to focus those priorities in certain areas and allow the individuals working in with those areas and in those areas, to have the accountability and the authority to achieve outcomes rather than to follow certain processes. So I believe that there needs to be an openness to the way we accomplish things so that we can find…so that we can accomplish something far beyond what we could envisage from the front…from the beginning.
Peter: We talked a little bit before we started here about technology and the role of technology in assisting practice and assisting learning processes and assisting the sharing of information and knowledge. What role does technology play in all of this?
Paul: Well it certainly has a huge role to play I think. We often find that we cannot use effectively the tools on our current desktop and whether they are “bloatware” or not, they are certainly… Peter: Bloatware? Paul: Bloatware - you use 5% of the functionality of tools and there's always a new version of the application coming out every year or two and you're still only using 5%. So 95% of the application is not being used, whether it's a word processing, email or whatever. The technology can create a collaborative space for organizations and for individuals. It also creates a single, narrow channel of communication and that can be a barrier as well.
So one needs to be extremely careful about which technology you choose and why you choose it and what you're hoping to accomplish through it. Email of course is in every organization and yet it's not really a great collaborative tool despite the fact that you can email people around the world within seconds. Because it creates this bi-lateral discussion rather than open discussion and so the technology can foster the kind of culture that you want to achieve and allow the results to become part of the legacy of the organization – part of the corporate memory as a part of the process but we tend to think of technology as a tool and it shouldn't be a tool, it should be the way we're trying to accomplish.
