Tag: Transformation
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Leadership at the Summit: Ministers and Deputies as Catalysts of Cultural Accountability
At the Peak of the Pyramid Ministers and Deputy Ministers stand at the summit of Canada’s public service and political governance structure. While the operational machinery of government depends on Directors General and Assistant Deputy Ministers, the tone, pace, and cultural priorities of the system are ultimately set at the very top. In the Westminster…
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Decisions in the Middle: How DGs Move Beyond Advice to Action
Directors General (DGs) hold the pivotal middle ground of the federal public service. You are close enough to operations to know the realities, yet senior enough to influence strategy. In many transformations, the success or failure of implementation comes down to how DGs interpret their role: are you merely an advisor, or are you a…
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Everyone Nods But Nothing Moves: The Hidden Drag on Government Transformation
Transformation in government is never about technology alone, nor about bold political vision in isolation. At the highest levels of leadership—where Ministers and Deputy Ministers carry responsibility for both vision and execution—the challenge is subtler and more insidious. It’s the silent drag on change that arises when everyone around the table nods in agreement but…
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Transformation lessons from the Double Lift
At sheepdog trials, which I’ve written about before, there is a challenge called the Double Lift. The trials test shepherd and sheepdog to run a herd of sheep through a course and into a pen. The Double Lift is the challenge for champions that requires two groups of ten sheep be acquired from different parts…
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Be a transformation shepherd
My wife’s love of animals occasionally takes us to a sheepdog trial. This is a competition for shepherds and their border collies entailing the herding and moving of sheep through a course, splitting the large group, then penning the smaller of the two new groups. It always strikes me as eerily similar to transformation and…
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AI Will Probably be a Productivity Bust
Before we get to the bold productivity prediction, know where I’m coming from… I am of two minds on Artificial Intelligence: the large language models of Chat GPT and so forth. Like some of those eminent in the field, I think AIs may represent a mortal threat to humanity. Even if the computers do not…
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Productivity: the no. 1 digital transformation shortfall
I have nothing against digital transformation imperatives or the millions of dollars and hours put toward it over the past decade. It was and remains an essential foundation of 21st-century value production. Picking up on a recent post, I will say that if anything the job is not done. Productivity Recognition: Digital Transformation’s final frontier…
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Involuntary buy-in: the truth about change
I know it’s received wisdom, even catechism that everyone in any organization can and should be bought in to change. I know this is essential to address resistance, often sounding like, “If they only knew better… we can help get them there by informing, educating…” I know within organizations we’re, “Not dealing with 5-year-olds,”…
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Unlocking Change: Embrace Forward & Backward Lookers
A recent experience crystalized for me an essential, binary nature of organizations: some people look forward, some backward. There ought to and will always be both in any given organization. That there might be all one kind or the other is unlikely. More probable is overrepresentation or, at the least, an unbalanced influence or control…
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Failing Productivity? What About All That Digital Transformation?
The Canadian character lends itself to millennialist productivity flagellation (e.g., recent Globe & Mail-only: Canada’s declining productivity streak adds to inflation problem, The productivity problem in Canada’s economy is really a marketing and sales problem, Canada has a productivity problem. The solution is training, not factories, one expert says, Canada’s productivity lag could be helped…
