Identifying Digital Government Blockers

Modern approaches to digital delivery - typified by agile and user centered product management approaches - often run headfirst into the management practices and policies of government organizations that were designed to operate under a very different set of assumptions. The old management consulting adage is that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. While this is true, we believe there are two bigger fish out there and that incentives eat culture and structures eat everything else. At Think Digital we call this our “Pac-Man model” of organizational change (see: https://thinkdigital.ca/pacman-model-for-rethinking-gov/).

In this session, we will use the Pac-Man model as a starting point to unpack what some of the real-world challenges public servants face in applying modern digital ways of working in a government context. Think Digital CEO & Founder Ryan Androsoff, along with Associates Winter Fedyk and Dorothy Eng, will kick-off this workshop with an overview presentation to set the context.

This will be followed by an interactive working session facilitated by members of the Think Digital team where you will engage with other participants through a structured process to map the seen and unseen blockers at the various levels of this model. The goal will be to produce a consolidated overview of common challenges to digital ways of working in government and identifying specific approaches that can help to alleviate these at the structural, incentive, and cultural levels of an organization. We will consolidate and publicly publish the outcomes of this workshop afterwards to help further the discussion on these issues.

Who Should Attend: Anyone interested in better understanding challenges related to implementing modern digital era ways of working in government (i.e. agile, user centered design, etc.). This will be particularly relevant for public servants with experience leading digital projects and teams, those working at policy centers in central agencies, or those in enabling function roles (i.e. procurement, legal, communications, HR, etc.).