The focus of the project is to consider:

• how can administrations create long-term strategies that shape society while still being responsive to a changing environment?
• how do administrations identify changes in the environment and what kinds of structures and processes are necessary to respond?

The paper begins by asking what is agility, and puts forward Eric Beinhocker’s argument that agility depends on both hard and soft elements. The hard elements are the institutional or structural systems and there are three changes that can increase an organization’s adaptability/agility:

1. Reduce hierarchy
2. Increase autonomy
3. Encourage diversity

The changes to the soft elements, or cultural norms, are about opening up the organization to experimentation within the framework of a strong and consistent set of values that provide focus and coherence:

1. Create a culture of cooperation
2. Foster a high performance culture
3. Develop a culture of innovation

Taking a step back and looking at the six changes that are proposed, it seems to me that the overall culture that is being described here can be summarized as one of high trust.

Managers would need to give their staff the mandate, the tools and the support to pursue ambitious, innovative and experimental approaches to their policy and service challenges. This latitude would be offset, however, by a clearly understood shared vision or purpose.

Why does this matter? Again, it comes back to trust. As the authors note:

Private markets are offering consumers unprecedented levels of product choice and service responsiveness …[this] certainly creates an expectation that public services should be better attuned to citizen’s wants and needs. If governments cannot keep up, they risk diminishing levels of public trust in their capacity to deliver. Without public trust, the operating legitimacy of public agencies is undermined. (8)

Agile capabilities

The paper then looks at the five capabilities that are entailed by the notion of agile government. Three of these warrant further comment.

Outward-oriented culture

What we refer to in Wellington as the outside/in view. The shift to a more customer/citizen centric view in the public sector is both welcome and, from a communicator’s perspective, overdue. Unfortunately, I would argue that the authors do not go far enough, agencies do not only need to look outwards and scan the environment they need to actively engage with their various publics. Trust is built on two-way interactions.

Workforce adaptability

Yes, we need a versatile and adaptable workforce. Again, this is not just about demands on staff. Managers need to trust their staff to experiment (and to make the occasional mistake) but more importantly, we need to re-engineer our working environment to better match the social norms of the workforce. Digital natives bring a very different world view and skills to the public sector, and we need to respond to their expectations around connectedness and mobility.

Successful use of information

The value of government information can not be underestimated. The potential is not just limited to

the creation of more responsive relationships with citizens, who can now get more information to make their own decisions and use channels such as the Internet to access services. (12)

While this is undoubtedly true, what must also be considered is the (largely untapped) value of social and economic benefit that this information represents, should it be published in an accessible format for people to reuse and mashup.

Conclusion

The authors close the paper by posing five questions, inviting readers to submit their answers/responses to be fed into the next phase of the project.

The provocation questions are:

1. How can government reconcile agility with the inherently slower processes of deliberation and accountability under which the public sector operates?
2. What advantages might government have over other sectors when it comes to scanning, responding and shaping?
3. To what extent are public sector functions aligned, or not, to enable rapid adaptation to changing circumstances?
4. What are government’s most significant constraints against agility and how might these be addressed?
5. What does agile government look like in practice?

I would also put forward another question: how can government move to this platform of enhanced capability without further impact on baseline funding?

Finally, I can’t help thinking that, given the nature of the project, how a much better a blog would have been for enabling transparent feedback and higher quality engagement — a missed opportunity.

Photo: Kwong Yee Cheng.

So I have developed a couple of arguments that I wheel out — to wildly varying effect. The first I ran through recently, and it is one that appeals to those managers that like to deal in statistics. Painting them a picture of the numbers of people using social media generally helps them to visualize the enormity of the change and, with any luck, will help you to focus their attention on the need to adapt to these changes.

There are two others that I also fall back on. The first is inspired by Charles Darwin and the second by very large primates.

Darwinism

Today, New Zealanders – both here and offshore – can choose to receive all of their mass media content via the Internet. They can listen to Radio New Zealand streamed live to anywhere in the world, access newspapers via their websites or, even better, via RSS feeds to their desktops or personalised home pages, watch TV shows (including downloading torrents of programmes that are not scheduled to appear on NZ TV for months, if at all).

Not only is it possible to access all of this content via the Internet, but in almost every case, you can access it when you want to. In other words, you don’t have to listen to Mediawatch on Sunday morning, you can download the podcast and listen to it on the train home on Monday evening. You don’t need to wait for the DomPost to land on your driveway to read the latest breaking news and you certainly don’t have to wait for distributors to determine when you can watch the latest Batman film.

Now, faced with these realities, how long do you think it will be before everybody (or at least those people with access to broadband) just give up on the old model entirely? It is already extinct, it is just that the body still seems warm to the touch…

That is natural selection at work.

The 800lb Gorilla

Ask most comms people who they think is the largest media player in New Zealand and you will get a variety of answers. Fairfax. Independent News & Media. News Corporation. CanWest. Yet, apart from Murdoch’s News Corp, none of these companies is in the same financial league as Google: and Google is currently significantly more profitable than News Corp.

And it is not just the financial weight of Google (although you would be naive to ignore it), when you also consider that all of the content that the other media players produce can be served up through Google search – complete with their advertising, you begin to see how important understanding Google is. Understanding how it works, in terms of SEO and more importantly, in terms of reputation management.

Conclusion

These aren’t intended as knockout arguments, rather they are designed to start people thinking about the changes to the media landscape and how that will affect their business. As communications professionals, it is up to us to ensure that senior managers are briefed on what this will mean for our organisations and how we can take advantage of these changes or mitigate against some of the risks.

Whatever course of action we decide on, one thing is clear: complacency is not an option.

I thought John Keys’ decision to visit Waitangi dressed not in the expected suit, but in the very unexpected – a T-shirt (black, with a green tiki on it) – was a clever move. Doing away with the pin-stripe and tie for a day, and instead wearing clothes more typical of an “everyday Kiwi” was an interesting piece of positioning.

His unusual attire clearly drew the attention of the Dominion Post, making it a front page story, accompanied by a large photo, the following day. A timely example of the power of visual media in communications.

Guest post by Kate Dowling

Then last week Savaia got in touch to suggest a regular meeting for members interested in internal communications. So here it is: micronetworks.

The idea is relatively simple. The Network will provide the administrative infrastructure, all you have to do is register your interest in participating in one (or more) of the micronetworks. We will set up emailing lists for each of them, something like subject@psnetwork for example, and then people who have registered for that group will be able to communicate with colleagues who share an interest in that topic. I can also set up a web page that lists the members of each group (password protected) and their agencies – if that will help.

So, to get the ball rolling, here are a couple of suggestions for potential micronetworks:

1. Internal communications
2. Social media (web-based communications)
3. Social marketing
4. Crisis communication

If you have other suggestions, please add them in the comments. If you want to join a micronetwork, fire me an email. Once we reach a critical mass, I will set up the mail groups and the web page and let you know where you can find all this good stuff.

I think it would also be helpful to have someone volunteer to coordinate each of the micronetworks, so I will put my hand up for Social media. Anyone else keen to take on a micronetwork?

This blog is intended as a forum for members to discuss ideas, trends and strategies as they impact upon our professional lives. It is also a tool to trade tips & techniques, or to simply announce upcoming events that will be of interest to Network members.

The publishing software that runs this blog, Wordpress, supports a much richer functionality than the static HTML pages on the Network website. You can submit articles for publication, comment on others contributions and discuss these posts with your peers, all through the web browser. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed to keep track of exactly what is happening on the blog, and across the Network.

So, welcome and please, get stuck in and have your say…