Transcript
Transcript: Future-Generation Government
[00:00:01 The CSPS logo appears onscreen alongside text that reads "Webcast - Webdiffusion".]
[00:00:06 The screen fades to Myra Latendresse-Drapeau sitting in a chair.]
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau (Director General, Transferable Skills, CSPS): Good afternoon and welcome. My name is Myra Latendresse-Drapeau. I'm the Director General of Transferable Skills at the Canada School of Public Service. I'll be your session moderator for this event today on Future-Generation Government. Thank you very much for joining us.
So, before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge that we are joining you from the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe People. I offer my sincere gratitude to the generations of Algonquin people, past and present, who have been the stewards of this land. It's important that we also take a moment to reflect on the significance of this place, honour the ongoing presence and contributions of Indigenous peoples. I also recognize that participants may be joining us from across the country, each in different Indigenous territories, and I encourage you to take a moment to reflect on the land you are on, and on its history.
Okay, so today's session is designed for public servants who are thinking critically about how to strengthen long-term planning in government. While today, we often focus on short-term gains, we do it as people, we do it as citizens, but governments do it too. And that can make it harder to tackle big issues like climate change, like automation, like aging population. And for public service employees, long-term thinking means looking past today's pressure to make smarter decisions for the future, and it helps us build stronger policies, better outcomes for the next generation.
So, in today's session, we're going to be exploring why long-term thinking matters, how present bias – which is going to be a concept that we're going to be talking about quite a bit – how present bias affects decision-making in government. We'll also discuss how public servants can overcome short-term pressures, support more durable policy solutions that anticipate and that prepare us for the challenges ahead.
[00:02:28 Dr. Nicholas Chesterley is shown seated next to Myra Latendresse-Drapeau.]
So, it's my privilege to introduce Dr. Nicholas Chesterley, who brings a wealth of expertise to this important conversation. Dr. Chesterley is a PhD in behavioural economics from the University of Oxford. He's held leadership roles in government, including on the future of government, public service innovation and experimentation, the future of money – interesting – and innovation and growth in the economy. Nick is currently a Director General in Macroeconomic Policy Analysis at Finance Canada. He's also the author of this amazing book, Future-Generation Government, a thought-provoking book that explores why governments struggle with long-term problems, what they can do to overcome them.
So, today's conversation will take form of an armchair discussion. I'll be asking Nick a series of questions to explore how government can shift towards more future-ready thinking, and what that means for us, all of us as public servants. We'll open it up for your questions as we go, so feel free to submit them using the chat bubble icon at the top right of your screen. And for those who are here with us in the room, well, we'd love to hear from you, too. So when the time comes, I'll ask you to come up to the microphone, which is right there in the corner. Let us know your name, your department, and, of course, your question.
Okay. I think with all that said, we're ready to get started, so please join me in welcoming Dr. Nicholas Chesterley.
(Applause)
Okay. Nick, thank you so much for joining us. Let's get right into it.
So, we know this topic because we live it every day, and as public servants, we are always kind of pulled between the day-to-day urgencies, the day-to-day demands. We know that some longer-term thinking is necessary, but it's sometimes hard to focus on the bigger picture, the bigger, longer-term issues. So, we plan, but when it comes down to the longer-term challenges – things like we mentioned it in the intro, things like climate change or the impacts AI is going to have on us – it sometimes feels daunting. And we know it's important, but it's hard, and it's not just about time. So, I want us to kind of think about, okay, what are some of those factors?
And we're going to start here. You just published this book that we've mentioned, Future-Generation Government – Congratulations, by the way. It's a great read; I highly recommend it. It's backed with amazing research, there's a lot of examples that make it very real, very concrete, very relevant too. So to start us off, Nick, maybe you could just talk to us a little bit about what motivated you to focus on this area of work.
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley (Director General of Microeconomic Policy Analysis at Finance Canada): Sure, and hello, nice to be here, nice to see you all in person, and I can't see those of you online, but nice to have you here as well. This is a passion project, and frankly, it's a passion project that got a little out of control. So anyway, originally, I was just interested in this topic and thinking about it, and then it sort of snowballed from there. But I think a couple of threads I would pull in terms of the motivation, one of which, as in the overly generous intro I just got, so I did my PhD in Behavioural Economics.
I thought a lot at that time about how people plan for the future and how they can be present-biased. Because as individuals, we're often not good at saving for retirement, or dieting or doing all sorts of things that have a sort of short-term cost and long-term benefit. And so that was before I joined government; having joined government, I sort of was struck by the observation that governments often struggle with much the same things. There's obviously differences, governments are not the same as individuals, but I wondered, is there something to be learned from all this work on individual present bias to sort of inform government work and make governments better at solving these problems? So I think, high-level, that was the motivation. The other two things I would add in, one, I think I wrote most of this during the pandemic, and the pandemic was a very visceral experience of a long-term problem that I think governments everywhere could have done better preparing for, so a piece there as well, and having kids, I think, only emphasized that further.
The other, if I may tell a slightly off-topic story, but it's one I really enjoy, and it's the story that sort of stuck with me most coming out of writing the book. Roosevelt, President Roosevelt, did fireside chats. He did about 30 of them during the Great Depression, and then during World War II. They helped reassure the U.S. They were seen as instrumental for bringing the country together and sort of uniting everyone in confronting these major challenges they were facing. And he was asked at one point, why don't you do more of them? And his answer was, every time I do one of these, I have to take four or five days of uninterrupted time to prepare for them, I dedicated almost a week to just preparing for this one short radio address, I just don't have time to do more.
And I don't know what your lives are like as public servants, but there is no topic on which I spend four to five days of uninterrupted time. Not at all. I am not a major world leader in any sense. None of us have four to five days to dedicate to individual projects, I mean. And so, it's just such a different experience than 100 years ago or whenever, and I don't know that we've necessarily grappled with that as public servants, as individuals, on how we can sort of make sure we're carving out the time and space to solve long-term problems. So, that was a very long-winded answer.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: No, no, but it's amazing. It really does kind of set the stage. And I like your Roosevelt story because it kind of brings us a little bit closer to our current environment. You mentioned being a public servant yourself. We see from where we sit that there is quite often a real tension between the short-term political pressures that our elected officials are under, here and everywhere in the world, and the need to think about future generations. If we put aside all of the usual challenges that are related to workload and time, which we all face, what is it that makes it so hard for government, especially, to actually be able to adopt that longer-term perspective?
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: Yeah, and I think part of it, and this will not surprise any of you, is that it's a remarkably fast-moving world these days. A lot of things come up quickly, and this is a ridiculous example but public servants in the era of the printing press could have spent a century thinking about the right policy response to the printing press. AI is not quite the same. You have minutes to respond to AI some of the time. Things come up and things change and there's new technology every year. The pace at which you have to respond and adjust is simply incomparably different. So, I think pace is part of it and also just volume of information. I mean, the world creates an enormous volume of information, and all of its inter-related. And so, our ability to say, well we're going to solve this one problem right now is challenging when there are so many problems to be solved and so many evolutions of those problems going. And so, I think one piece of it is this fast-moving world we live in, and that's true for individuals and it's true for public servants of all levels.
And the second, I think is the sort of structural feature of democracy, is that we change leadership every few years, and that creates an incentive to not worry too much about the long term because leaders are going to change anyway, and it also just creates instability in leadership. You have a government, then a new government comes in and a new direction. And that's a solvable problem, but it takes time. It can derail projects. It leads to adjustments over time, and so it can make it harder to focus on the sort of enduring long-term problems we face.
And then, I think a third is that the public may well be short-term. Individuals are short-termist, and there is research that individuals will vote for short-term policy answers. There's this great study of disaster response, and a vast amount of public attention is focused on disasters that make good headlines, even though they are not necessarily as serious as disasters that don't make good headlines but have a stronger long-term effect. And so, there is a sort of focusing effect from the public in terms of on potentially more short-termist issues, and there's also the risk of a vicious cycle, and I think we may get into trust later. But if the public does not expect politicians or leaders of any kind to deliver on long-term promises, then they won't bother to push for it. And so, you get this trap where people aren't pushing for long-term solutions, and so long-term solutions aren't being delivered.
And to anchor it a little bit on a practical example, the introduction of pensions, which is in itself a sort of long-term policy, and you're taking money from current workers to give to future retirees. I mean, it's a long-term problem, introduced by Bismarck. Lots of things one could say about Bismarck, but they introduced pensions. Probably because at the time they introduced it, there was no chance of him losing power at any point. He was so comfortable in the polls that it almost didn't matter what he did. He had 80 or 90% support, like he was fine, but his concern was in 20 years, the socialists, which he did not like, might gain support. And so, he implemented this now to sort of undercut the socialists in 20 years. It was very much a long-term plan of his, and he could do it because he was so safe in his electoral chances that he figured, yes, he would lose some support now, but it wasn't going to change the results.
The parallel – and this is why I like this example – is that in the UK when they were discussing reducing pensions, it was the elected officials who were very in favour of doing it, and the senior public servants in the UK recommended against because they didn't trust future politicians not to raid the fund. And so, there was a trust issue within the public service, where public servants were the ones being short-termist, because they were saying, well, we don't believe this fund will persist and so we wouldn't even do it in the first place.
And I mean, it's a really unfortunate trap to be in, like no one is wrong in that circumstance. That is a risk. It didn't turn out to play out that way, but I mean, it is a tricky balance to navigate. And so, I think it's easy to blame individuals for this sort of thing – and there are short-termist individuals – but I think the big picture from my perspective is that, look, governments have had lots of successes solving long-term problems, they've also had some challenges. On average, they could do better than they do, and it is the structure of governments that pushes them to be short-termist, I think, in a lot of cases.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: So, that structure of government, that kind of sometimes pushes us to be a little bit more short-termist, also comes in tension with one of the fundamental roles of government, which is to ensure that future generations have access to a life that is at least as good as the ones we have now. Right? And a lot of what you introduce in your book and this whole idea of adopting a long-termist approach is linked to this idea of intergenerational justice. Even your example about pension, that is part of the idea behind pension plans, to have kind of this intergenerational justice. Why is it so important for government to integrate this preoccupation day-to-day, all the time in their decision making? And what is it that we, we as public servants, but also, we as citizens, can do to actually get government to integrate it into their decision-making?
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: That's two questions.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: It's two questions. I know, I know. You're going to give us two answers, I'm sure (laughs).
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: Yeah, I'll try. In terms of why it's important, nothing I'm going to say is going to surprise you. I think we face a long list of long-term problems, whether it's resource exhaustion, whether it's climate change or whether it's antibiotic resistance, whether it's crumbling infrastructure. I'm sure you can come up with a lot more. There are a lot of long-term problems, and I think the modern world is more capable than ever of influencing the future in good and bad ways. And so, I think we have more power to affect the future, as well, which also creates more of a responsibility to be thinking about this, in my view.
So, I think in part, it's about solving problems where we need action today to avert costs tomorrow, which are inherently challenging to solve. I also think a lot of problems require a sort of long-term enduring action to solve. I mean, problems that you solve by hitting a button once are really great problems, but I think a lot of the challenging problems we face as public servants require action today, and again tomorrow and again the following day. And there's no button you can push; it is just ongoing, incremental gains, and that requires sustained, focused attention over time, and I don't know that we're always good at that in public services. And so, I think that too is a real reason to do it.
And I said this earlier, I will say I think there are lots of successes from government. There is a Svalbard Seed Bank in the north that stores seeds for future generations. There's the Spaceguard program that detects asteroids before they hit the Earth, which unfortunately was motivated mostly by the movie Armageddon in the nineties, but regardless, there are lots of successes. There's lots in Canada too. I don't want to be too critical of governments, lots of successes as well, and lots of public servants do amazing work in this area, but I do think we face more and more long-term problems. It's not getting any easier to solve them, and so that's why I see it as sort of a particularly critical challenge for us. I can now talk about how I see us doing better.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: Yeah!
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: So, areas to do better. And so, I'll go through sort of four broad strategies I think can be helpful in terms of improvement. I'm not sure they all apply in all contexts, feel free to mix and match from the menu as you prefer, and come up with others as you wish, no problem. One broad one is that I think it's not always obvious what our impact on the future is, and there's clear behavioural research from individuals that salience really matters. If things are hidden or not visible, we forget about them. And so, one piece of it is how do we make our impacts in the future very visible, how to make them more salient.
And the example in particular I point to is that we have a gross domestic product, which not all of you may be as nerdy about economics as I am, but it's a measure of a flow. It is the measure of the annual income of a country every year. We don't really use a measure of gross domestic wealth, the stock of wealth in a country, the value of our bridges and roads, but also the education of our people, also the quality of our environment, of various other bits and pieces, the quality of our institution. And so, using more often a measure of gross domestic wealth or some variant of it, I think would be a good step in the right direction to making the impact on the future more visible.
And there is work done on inclusive wealth indexes and this kind of thing, that shows that a lot of countries in the past 20 years have seen increases in GDP, but not always in their national wealth. They've drawn down natural resource stocks or other things to boost their short-term GDP but not their long-term wealth. And so, I think one strategy I'd say is making that more salient. And then we can make the decision. Sometimes we want a short-term solution, there are short-term issues we need to solve. So, it isn't about one trumping the other, but it's about making sure we have the information to make the decision.
A second strategy, I think, is to make it easier. And to take a somewhat trite example, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, whenever he has a senior meeting, always leaves a chair empty. And the reason for that is when he does his roundtable, he gets the empty chair and he says, well, what would the customer think? It's to make sure they never forget the customer's perspective. And to some extent, I think the same is true of the future. It's very easy to forget about the future because they aren't here. None of them are born yet. By definition, they are not represented in policy conversations. And so, how do you bring the future to be more tangible in the policy conversations and in the decisions we're making?
And so I think there are a lot of strategies you can explore in that regard, things like red teams, foresight exercises, making teams more diverse and having more perspectives represented. But that fundamental insight of, how do you make it more tangible in policy decisions, I think, is an important step in the right direction. One country with quite a sophisticated model on this is Finland. It's often pointed to as sort of the richest foresight ecosystem in the world. They have a group in their prime minister's office, in individual departments. Their Parliament has a committee dedicated to the future. And then, they have partnerships with NGOs and universities and others, and sort of the ecosystem works together to think about the future.
What I find most interesting with this example, and there's a lot to learn from it, is that some of the research on it suggests that the biggest impact is not any of the products these groups produce, but rather the fact that most senior politicians in Finland served on the Committee for the Future in their Parliament when they were junior politicians. And so, it influences sort of how they think about things. And if I may be excused, to plug for the school, the School of Public Service, similarly, when you influence people as junior analysts, it can affect their senior analyst perspectives and everything, and solving long-term problems is a long-term process, and there's a long-term play to be done, if you will. And so, I think a piece there as well.
The third is commitments. And so, in the individual sense, you can think of promising a friend you're going to go on a diet, or my favorite example – this no longer works, but years ago, people used to freeze their credit cards in ice, because if you were tempted to go on a shopping spree, you had to thaw out the credit card. And if you microwave it, you burn out the chip. And so, all you can do is wait for the ice to melt, and the idea is it's sort of a commitment to a cooling-off period - although ironically, it's actually a warming-up period, but anyway. I love this example, to free up the credit card and use it to go shopping. Governments can do something very similar when it comes to commitments. They can make mandate commitments, which are not particularly binding, but have some level of commitment to them, you know there's an incentive to… yeah, exactly.
But they can make constitutional changes, on the other end of the spectrum, which is an extremely hard commitment to change but may or may not be suitable for the long-term. Constitutions are rigid, like it's hard to change them. And then, the example that doesn't have an individual sort of comparator is setting up independent institutions, where governments delegate authority to an independent group to sort of carry out their wishes for them, and those can often be set up in a long-term way. And you can think of central banks as an example of this, where they've been sort of delegated authority to think about long-term interest rates, or sovereign wealth funds.
The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund is enormously successful as a sovereign wealth fund, partly because Norway does great from its oil revenues, but also partly because it was intentionally set up as a steward for money that they had made from oil for future generations, and they now own a remarkable share of total world wealth, basically, through this fund, and there's bipartisan consensus on it most of the time in Norway, that this is something they want to preserve, and they've set themselves a cap of only withdrawing up to 3% of the fund every year to make sure that it keeps growing for their future generations.
And then the fourth one, which sits in direct tension with the third one, but I'm going to do it anyway, is experimentation-iteration. I think it is easy to think we know what the future will be like, and let me reassure you, we do not. There's clear research we're terrible at predicting the future. There's this great study of monkeys throwing at dart boards doing better than experts at predicting the future, in some cases. We're not good at this. And so, I think part of being future-ready is saying, look, we're not going to solve this today, we're going to take a position that allows us to be flexible and adapt and iterate, we're going to try things, many of them will fail, and that's fine and we'll learn from them and keep moving.
That's very hard in a government context. It's hard to fail in a government context. And so, we could spend a full hour today talking just about that, there's lots to be said about it, but I do think getting better at that iterative approach is a really important part of being future-ready. I mean, we seem to face constant waves of crises some days, and having the ability to pivot and adapt and iterate is really important because we're not going to predict them all. And so, trying to have the master plan that sets out everything we'll do in the next ten years, I think, is going to be very difficult.
And though in a very different context, I will say there's an interesting thread in China around this, which is very intentional about its experimental approach to things. They set up special zones where they can try new things and scale them up or scale them down. Their public servants are rewarded based on experimenting with new things, the municipalities are expected to try new approaches and scale up and scale down. As I say, not a democracy, very different context, but I think an interesting set of models for how we might try new things and see what works and what doesn't in that context.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: So, these are kind of four really interesting strategies, and I think we can all see how this relates to parts of our everyday work. So, really measure what matters. Make it easy, make it effective – this is kind of your second strategy. Commit and then iterate and experiment. And they all have different components, cultural components, organizational components, political components, et cetera, et cetera. At the end of the day, though – you've hinted to it – if we want some of those longer-term strategies to work, they require public buy-in. How do we get there, right? How does trust, like this idea of trust in public institution, how does that play out in making longer-term investments or longer-term planning?
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: It's a really good question, and it's one I didn't think about very much when I started thinking about this, and I ended up thinking about a lot by the time I got to-… I mean, I'm still thinking about it, but later in thinking about it.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: This is part two of the book.
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: There you go. Trust is really important, and as I sort of hinted at earlier, I think there is a real risk that if the public does not expect leaders, public servants, whoever to plan for the future, then they won't bother pushing for them to do so, and then there's no incentive for leaders to do so. And so, you can get trapped in this sort of vicious cycle where there's no public pressure to do so, and so people don't bother, and so the public lose faith even further.
And I think it's particularly hard on long-term problems because the standard recommendations for improving public trust – engage well, be transparent, reliable, quick service delivery – it's hard to say exactly what those look like when you're talking about services for a future generation. I mean, you can be transparent about your efforts for a future generation, but they're not tangible in the way that providing benefits and services to the current voting public is. And so, it's a tricky balance, and the future generation is inherently not involved in those conversations, and so they're not visible.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: It's your empty chair, right?
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: Exactly, it's your empty chair. And you can assign people to represent them. There's a commissioner for future generations in Wales, there's sustainability commissioners elsewhere, and that can be an interesting model and one to think about but I think there are no easy answers when it comes to public trust in this topic, because inherently, when you're talking about the future, you need to trust someone doing something in the future. I mean, that's the nature of things. This is not an immediate barter where you get something and I get something. You're relying on people to do what they say they're going to do in the future because that's what we're preparing for.
And so, this is all a very unsatisfying answer, I suppose. But anyway, there's my unsatisfying answer, which is that I think it's really important. I don't have an easy answer. But I do think what we see worldwide is declining public trust in governments, as I'm sure you all know. That seems really problematic to me, and it's problematic for many reasons, but one of which is that I think it makes it harder to solve long-term problems.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: So, you're not giving us unsatisfactory answers, you're actually giving us food for thought, and I'm sure a lot of us are starting to have multiple questions. So, before we move to the last question that I want to ask you, please start thinking about some questions that you may want to ask Nick. And for those online, submit your question through the chat bubble icon and we'll get to it.
So, okay Nick, as I said, you've given us food for thought, I mean, nothing that we can implement tomorrow morning as a ready made solution but a lot that we can start, I think, influencing in our own spheres of work and control. That's why I want to ask you kind of that last very, very simple question. What would be kind of, I don't know, the two main takeaways that you would like public servants to leave with around what we could do about supporting longer-term thinking?
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: That's a great question, not really a simple question, but a great question.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: And you can give us more if you want.
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: I'm struggling to get to two. So, the first one I would say is think about the future in your work, in your life. I mean, try to keep a hook or a trigger to think about that. And I do think in the public service, look, we work in a hierarchical organization. It is easy to be like, well, senior leadership needs to make this decision, and leadership's really important, I don't want to diminish that.
But I also think when it comes to this, and particularly when it comes to the overwhelming press of the short-term, I look at the lives of our senior leadership, and they are busy people. They are not carving out a lot of time to think about the long-term because they have very busy calendars. And so, I think there's a need for public servants of all levels to be thinking about this kind of thing, and it may well be at the junior levels where there is more time and space to carve out opportunities, to think about the future, to prompt reminders to come up with sort of tripwires that remind people to think about the future.
So, it's not going to be an everything. We're going to make decisions as a public service, as individuals, that are short-termist, that are long-termist, with a mix, but I think one is thinking about from time to time, how do you take a step back and think what is the big picture of the work I'm doing, or whatever you're thinking about, and the long-term, and can you build in some sort of structural trigger to remind you to do that, I think would be one very concrete takeaway. And of sort of the four strategies I talked about, that second one about tripwires and setting up reminders for a change, I think is a good one to think about for all of us.
The second super philosophical one is that I think a lot of our institutions are a little rickety. And I think it's interesting if you think about if we wanted to innovate in our institutions, what would that look like? And I don't have a particular innovation to recommend. And frankly, I think if we do, we're going to fail a whole bunch of times. That's sort of the nature of innovation. It's boring if you know you're not going to fail, that's not innovation, but trying new ways of engaging the public, of making decisions amongst ourselves, of talking to each other, all of those things I think are really worth doing, and that's true for getting better at thinking about the future, I think it's just true generally as well.
But I think thinking about institutional design is, I mean, very nerdy but surprisingly interesting, and I think even innovation in decision design is fundamental, and I know Michael Mackenzie spoke at the School I think last year or something, but he's talked a lot about minipublics as a way for decisions, sort of like mini or larger sized juries that make policy decisions. I have no idea if minipublics are good ideas but I think they're an interesting idea, and I think generally we should be open to interesting innovations in our institutions, and thinking about new ways of taking decisions and thinking about the future.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: And iterating around it and experimenting with that, right? Because that's the whole point.
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: Yeah.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: Okay. Thank you so much, Nick. Okay, I think we're going to have some questions in the room, but as people slowly move to the mic, we can go to online questions. There is one that I always find really interesting, which touches on kind of the nature of our Constitution, the fact that we have a federal system where we have jurisdictions overlap. What can you say about long-term thinking in this system that we have with multiple levels of government?
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: I'm an economist. If there are political scientists in the room, they may yell at me, but I'm going to say it anyway. So, there you go, but just the caveat that I'm not a political scientist. So, I think the federal systems are actually very good for long-term thinking with some caveats, which is that part of, as I say, long-term thinking, is this trying new things and scaling up, and I think what we see in the Canadian system is that the provinces have had a lot of successes and they've been scaled up nationally in many cases. Things like health care came from a provincial initiative, and so I think promising in that regard where a decentralized system allows more space for trying different approaches and scaling it up.
The caveat, I would say, is that we have to be willing to learn from each other, and I can think of countries, nearby countries perhaps, where it is not always obvious different states or different jurisdictions are willing to learn from each other, and that really limits the ability to scale up solutions. And so, I think I'm generally pro decentralization of power in this context. I think it's good for experimentation and for innovation.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: As long as you're willing to kind of learn and to have that discussion around that.
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: And I will say, I started with a disclaimer of political science partly because I think it is also totally fair to say, and there's research suggesting that having too many veto points in a system, that is too many groups who can block change, can make it very hard to plan for the future, just because so much effort and time is spent navigating these veto points that it can be tricky. So, there are trade-offs. I suspect there is no perfect system in that regard.
And this is totally unrelated to your question, but if I may, a tangent I'd like to go on is that I also think some people think about this and they think, well, democracies are just weak and we should think of a more dictatorship-centralized model. I think that is not true. You may disagree with me; I think that is not true. I think democracies are not great at this. I think they are actually much better than dictatorships, which statistically do worse on all sorts of long-term measures, like environmental protection, economic growth, other pieces.
And to be a little rhetorical about it – and because I love this line in my book, and I wrote it myself – you can have philosopher kings, but you can also vagabond princes, and one vagabond prince can really destroy a place. And so, when you're thinking long-term, checks and balances are really important, and yes, they can slow down progress, yes, they can be frustrating, but I'm pretty sure dictatorships are not the answer. Not that I'm an expert, but I'm pretty sure.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: I think we can all reflect on that. Okay, so there is somebody here in the room, if you want to state your name and where you're from, and just address your question to Nick.
Question: I don't think this is on. It's on now.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: Yeah.
Question: Hi, my name is Andrew Tripp. I work at the Canada Revenue Agency. Fascinating topic and discussion, thank you so much, and your point about different types of government being better or worse is kind of a good segue to this. So, you mentioned volume and pace of information, but I think a new challenge for us is misinformation, and particularly misinformation generated by bad actors, particularly democracies I see being weak defending themselves against that because of freedom of the press and freedom of speech and those sort of things, those concepts. So, how do we, as Canadians, deal with that when we know there are people who are actively attacking our way of life and our beautiful, wonderful democracy?
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: That's a great point and a great question. I do not have an answer for misinformation. (Laughs)
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: Yeah.
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: But I think you're totally right, and I think it increases the noise in the system even further, and I worry a little bit about AI in that context, and that I don't really know what it looks like to run a consultation when you can get a million different custom letters all written by AI that say they're not written by AI as input to your consultation, and that's not even silly misinformation; it's just noise. And so, I think we do need to get better at sorting out misinformation and sorting out noise, and maybe AI also has potential as a solution. But yeah, it's a really great point.
Question: Thank you.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: Let's go to somebody else in the room.
Question: Hello, I'm Jason Scott. I'm with Indigenous Services Canada. Really fascinating talk, and the second point that you mentioned about innovation, I'm wondering if you, from your research, might have had any, or uncovered any sort of actions or practices that might be tried and true, and perhaps maybe that's a solution to a long-term problem, would be to revert to something that has worked in the past.
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: It's a great question, and I do think innovation is a big part of solutions to all sorts of things. I can't think of a good example for this.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: Yeah, it's a tough one.
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: Yeah. So, the context has changed dramatically from past scenario. And two random examples, Tony Blair, Prime Minister in the UK in the nineties, used to say that when he started as Prime Minister, he solved one issue a day, by the time he left, he usually was expected to solve three issues a day. I think it was President Coolidge, more like in the early 1900s, who took naps every day. So, there's been a large spectrum of changes and of the demands on our senior leaders. And so, I think in some cases, it may be harder to learn from past models, the models may have changed.
That said, I do think there's a ton to be learned. Before we started, Myra, I used an example from the Roman Empire at one point, and I said some people like those examples, some people don't. You should do whatever you want with that example, but I would say I think that one of the challenges of institutional design is that it's hard to experiment on a macro scale, we have to learn from other models, like past models, current models elsewhere. There's a lot to be learned from other jurisdictions, other states, other places, other times. So, I'm struggling to have a good terse example for you, but I agree with you. I think a lot to be learned.
Question: Thank you.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: There's a question coming from people online kind of around innovation, and I think it's just something that we used to talk a lot about as an institution. We talk about it a little bit less, I think, because we've realized that one of the ways that we have to innovate is by incorporating some of those experimentation-innovation practices into our daily work, but how do we bring that about in trying to support our senior leadership, like immediate senior leadership, in our day-to-day work, to try and get them to think about the future, as you said. Right? Develop that discipline, develop that routine, to think about the future, and develop, again, that openness to some of this idea that we don't know what the future is going to look like. So, we need to try things out to figure out what what's going to stick, what's going to work.
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: Yeah, it's a good question and probably the subject of a whole talk another day. A couple of small thoughts on it, which is one, I think transparency is really important. I think no one likes being surprised in this kind of context. And so, having someone come up and be like, "Surprise! I tried something, it didn't work," is probably not going to go well. So, I think transparency, no surprise, is important, and I sometimes think about a former deputy of mine who, in the context of the public service in Parliament, was like, we're going to fail a lot but we just need to go to Parliament every year and tell them we're going to fail a lot, and then when they ask us about it, we'll be like, yeah, we told you so.
So, there's something there, I think, about being transparent upfront. I think there also is an element of, look, some decisions are essential, non-reversible, critical to the organization. We need to be real careful with those, we don't want to break important systems like the health and welfare of Canadians. As a public servant, we play a crucial role in the country and I think we need to be respectful of that. And so, I do think there is something of saying, look, there are some decisions that are easily reversible that, in my view, should be delegated down as low as possible and we should give space to make mistakes and try things and experiment. Other things, we're going to have to be careful and thoughtful, and engage and consult and take the time it takes.
And so we can't do it… or at least we won't do it for everything, in my view, but I think having upfront conversations with management about which decisions fall in which buckets, and where do they come from with and where do they not, recognizing that they're under a lot of pressure themselves often, I think there's no easy answer but talking about it as a public service is a good place to start.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: Talking about it but also giving our senior leaders the tools to talk about it themselves up the chain too, right? Which is also an important piece of it. Let's go to the gentleman here standing up bravely.
Question: Hi, my name is Mateusz Trybowski. I work at Global Affairs Canada. I was wondering if you could expand on the research that you touched upon briefly with regards to the future ministry committee, the parliamentary committee in Finland. I know that there is a number of countries in Latin America that are experimenting with those models. So, is there a trajectory in that direction? There was a UN summit on the futures last year. Does that have momentum or is that sort of paused with everything else that's going on in the world right now?
And then in relation to that, you really piqued my interest with the impact that you mentioned in relation to the Finnish experiment with regards to, I guess, junior ministers or parliamentary committee members applying kind of a future orientation to their work later in kind of their career trajectory. But I'm curious, I do performance management and I used to design democracy development projects. So, how do you qualify that? Because you want to kind of present evidence that this is maybe something that you would kind of look forward to achieving in ten years, after implementing such a strategy, but it's hard to measure. So, if you could provide any insights on that. Thank you.
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: Yeah, great questions. So, on trends, big picture, that is my sense as well, is that there's sort of increasing interest in this. The Finnish model is longstanding. There's been a bunch of other models introduced more recently, other countries are exploring it. I don't think it's a one way trend. There's several countries that introduced them and then also abolished them later, so you can go both ways. But big picture, I think you're right, you're seeing more and more, and I do think Finland probably gets a lot of calls about this – though I haven't asked them (laughs). So, yes, I think you're right.
I hesitated a little bit because the last six months have changed the emphasis on a lot of things. I have no data on the last six months in terms of this trend. So, who knows? But I mean, I hope it only encourages more emphasis on the future, but we'll see. In terms of the impact of the Finnish committee in measuring things, I mean, there is a specific study that looks at it – and the name of the author is escaping me, but whatever she did is an option, but I think also it is just tricky to measure probably because you're going to measure it 10 years from now, like it is a slow-burn impact. And under the pressure to, what are the results now, where we do see, we'll find out in ten years is a hard answer (laughs).
So, I think it's not a simple thing in that regard. So, I used to work in performance management, I have lots of things to say on performance management, but you can create short-term measures, you can poll participants and ask was it useful, do you feel it's changing? I'm sure you've thought of all of these things, but I think it is hard to get out of the sort of tyranny of short-term results, which both pushes us often towards more measurable results because that's more quickly, easily, short-term measurable, and it's also just things that can be demonstrated more quickly.
So, I believe in measurement, I think it's a really important process. I think we all should be upfront about the limits of measurement. There are many things we cannot measure well, and that does not make them less important; it just makes them harder to measure well. And when it comes to the long-term in particular, we cannot have today a measurement of the impact in 20 years. That will not exist and we simply have to be upfront about that, but that does not make your life any easier.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: But that's also where you've talked about this idea of a national balance sheet, right? So, I'm kind of bringing us slightly elsewhere, and we have other questions, but do you want… because it's so related to this, do you want to talk a little bit more about this idea of what that could be and how you measure that?
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: So, the core point is that you can measure the sort of… well, I'm going to put it in individual terms. In your personal lives, you probably keep track of your income to some extent. You know how much you earn in a year. I would all suspect, at least I hope you do, speaking as an economist, measure your personal net worth to some extent, or at least your personal budget. You have a sense of how much you own, how much you save for retirement.
The case is we probably want governments to measure those two things as well. We want them to measure how much they're earning in a year, how much the country is earning in a year, or spending in the year, but also sort of their net worth, if you will, as a country. Because sometimes, you can do things that increase how much you spend or earn in a year that will actually lower your net worth. You could sell stuff that's really important to you, and in the short-term, boost up your income. But in the long-term, you're then poorer because you don't have those things anymore, savings or something like that.
And so, I think that would be my sort of intuitive comparison to the government doing the same thing. That measurement of wealth is tricky. It's one thing to say, okay, we can measure the value of all the roads and bridges in the country. We can probably do that, though even that's not trivial, but it can be done. Next, we could try to measure natural capital, the value of all the wetlands and the ecosystem services they provide, and beehives and this kind of thing. Again, conceptually doable, getting trickier. There's a big effort in the U.S. to do this. I mean, we'll see, but I think conceptually doable. Uninspiringly called human capital, the value of the health of countries, or the health of the people in countries, rather, education, skills, talents, getting even harder to measure. Though again, I think you could do an approximation, probably. You're going to have to sort of wave your hands in the air a little bit for some of that, but you could come up with something.
And then, I would add a fourth bucket, something like institutional capital, the quality of the rule of law in your country. I mean, you can come up with a measurement of that, but non-trivial but very important to the success and welfare of a country. When you think of long-term wealth, the wealth of nations comes in many parts from the quality of institutions in that country. It's a key factor and there's lots of economics research about this, but hard to measure. I mean, it's one thing to say you know it when you see it, but actually measuring it is tricky, and counting it, national wealth, is tricky. I still think we should try. I think proxy measures are better than no measures, but it's hard, but I'm getting off-topic about it. Big picture, I think measuring wealth and measuring that stock does give us a sense of, how are our short-term actions affecting the sort of long-term, what we're passing on to future generations? So, there is a piece there, definitely.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: Your wrapping up of that question is actually linked to one of the questions that we're getting from folks online around how can public servants foster-… no, sorry, how can governments communicate the value of long-term investment – which is a bit what we're talking about – to citizens who… the question says who prefer immediate results. I don't think it's always a preference, I think sometimes it's just a default, but how can basically government help citizens care about this so they can help governments back? Right. Introduce this idea of a virtuous circle that helps support that national wealth that we're talking about.
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: I think the salience part in measuring wealth and our impact on future is a big part of that. We already talked about that so I'm not going to talk about it again, but there is most of my answer. See previous answer. I think too though, part of it is just being transparent with Canadians, or with citizens in whichever country it is. There's this great study of potholes in Boston which drive Bostonians crazy, and I suspect drive people everywhere crazy, and the Boston government sets up this…
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: Have you drove in Ottawa and Gatineau lately?
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: True enough! The Boston government sets up a website to help people who live there report where the potholes are and sort of frankly complain about potholes. It does not really help solve the potholes any faster, it just gives them an opportunity to see where it is and feel like they're weighing in. People's satisfaction with pothole quality goes up significantly. People like to feel engaged, they like to have the information. They like to feel like they can have an influence, even though I don't think it improved Boston's results in any way, and so having people feel like they've been well engaged, they've been well consulted, they engaged with them.
Because some citizens will have short-term interests, some will have long-term interests. Like a government, there's a mix there, and people will vary by day, by mood, by moment, and there are important short-term priorities. I mean, many people anywhere are focused on important short-term priorities because they are legitimately important, and governments should focus on those too. So, it isn't one or the other, it is doing both, but I think coming up with the best information we have about the impact in the future, and being clear and transparent and engaging about what we're trying to do is a good start now.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: Yeah, wonderful. Okay, this is something that you talk about in your book, and there is a question about that coming from online folks, which is this idea of can we have, or can we support more collaboration between the public sector, the private sector, academia to actually work together to foster that agenda, or to kind of increase attention on long-termism?
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: Yeah, it's a good question. I think it is trickier than I think I would have originally expected to get that right. The cultures are very different; they tend to focus on different things, and I'm speaking purely from my own personal experience. We all have different experiences and that's fine, but it is just that they are different worlds and so it is tricky to get that collaboration right, and I know the School of Public Service has done lots of thinking about this, and so you may have a better answer than I do, and I don't know why I didn't say that one first, anyway. So, I think it is an important part of the answer, and I think not just with academia, but also civil society, private sector, everywhere, we need to get better at that.
There are potentially models from Finland, from elsewhere, in terms of how they set up and engage across sectors, but also it is just tricky. I mean, it's a different organizational culture, and in the same way that having different private sector organizations talk to each other, I suspect is difficult. I think it is important not to underestimate that there are cultural differences to navigate and to be conscious of those when we do so. Anyway, you can now answer it better.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: (laughs) Well, I don't know if I would have a better answer. I think we have different configuration of those types of conversations based on the type of issues too, right? You don't engage with the same partners, and I think sometimes as government, we tend to see, this worked in that context, so let's apply the exact same model in that other context and bring similar actors to discuss in the same way, and that doesn't really work, right? So, I think you've really emphasized the idea of transparency, but I think there is also this idea of, we also have to be transparent about what we're trying to achieve, but we also have to say we don't really know how to do this, and so, we're going to try it in different ways and have that flexibility too. So, for me, it's about transparency, but also flexibility, but it's a different topic that we can go back to at some point. Yes, somebody in the room.
Question: Hi, I'm Melanie. I'm from Public Safety. I'm kind of intrigued by your thoughts on the role of the public in the future generation. I know we're talking like, what is the role of government and maybe what is the role of private and academia? But as you said, government is so greatly influenced by the wants and needs of the public. So, what is the messaging that we should be sharing as a government and encouraging the public so that they are more engaged in this concept of their own power in future-generation?
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: Well, especially – If I may add – especially when trade-offs are necessary, right? And we know that part of the reason why we tend to go for the short-term issue is because the benefits are clear. Trade-offs are usually… at least we know what they are, we kind of agree with them. So, just adding kind of a dimension to your great question. Thank you.
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: I don't think there's an easy answer. I feel like I say that for almost all the questions, but anyway, I'm going to keep going.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: You like hard things, that's fine (laughs).
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: It wouldn't be interesting otherwise. I do think part of the measuring impact on… having a clear sense of how will it impact the future is important. I also think making sure we have voices that represent the future is important, to make sure they're not lost, because I think, I hope, and I'm pretty sure that almost everyone cares about the future to some extent. Some people may have kids, others don't, but it doesn't matter. I think everyone does want to leave a nice world behind them. It's not that people are actively trying to, I'm going to use up all the resources so nothing's left, maybe some people are, but I think the vast majority of people everywhere, when confronted with, "Look, this will have an extremely deleterious effect on the future generations, are you sure you want to do it?" will at least take a moment to be like, well, maybe not, actually.
And so, I think being able to have that conversation, saying, look, we've looked at it, this will affect the future, are you sure you still want to do it, is a good place to start. They may still, and that's okay. And then, it's the role for government in terms of, well, what's best for the public? I mean, you've got to make hard decisions, but I think it is not… I mean, that's fine if they do still. That's the prerogative of individual voters. And I mean, that's the reality of not having future voters represented if their voices are quieter.
So, I think anything we can do to make the voices of the future a little louder and a little more audible is a good thing, and will make it easier, but we're never going to solve that. I mean, the fundamental precept of democracy is that the people who are currently voting get to pick what happens, and if they all want to do something short-termist, they will to a large extent, and you can navigate around that, but you can't get around to too much.
And to get totally diverted by a tangent, there is a tricky and I think somewhat subtle challenge in that you could try to take power away from individual voters on this. You could try to sort of bury future generation stuff in government and have it not be visible and reduce salience. But over time, I feel like that might actually lower public consensus on the importance of the future, and actually be counterproductive in the long-term.
I think in part of the book, I talk about defaults as an option, and so you can sort of create default policies where you don't need a new policy decision or authority or anything, just by default, it helps the future, and then it sort of stays below the waterline most the time. You can use it on things like automatic stabilizers in the context of economic crises, for those of you who pay attention to economic policy. That's an interesting idea. I like the idea, but I do think there is a trade-off, and that engaging the public and getting them to say, "Yes, we do care about the future" is important too.
And though I'm really not an expert on mini-publics, so I hesitate to come back to it a second time, there is interesting research on mini-publics, where you've brought this random group of Canadians together, or other citizens from wherever together to talk about a policy issue. If you prompt them to be thinking about the future and raise this, it will affect the decisions they take, it can affect the decision of this group of people. And so, there are ways. You'll never solve it, but I think there are ways to just encourage people not to forget about the future.
Question: Thank you.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: Thank you so much, Nick. I feel like we're getting at the end of our time. You left us on a great note, but is there kind of a last parting words that you would like to share with us?
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: Parting words? Go forth and future! No (laughs). I mean, like all interesting problems, it is a tricky problem. I think all of you probably encountered this in some way in your own lives and in your own work, but I think it's an interesting problem to think about it, and I do not claim to have solved it in any way. So, you're welcome to disagree with me, you're welcome to have more to add. But I would say, feel free to think your own thoughts about this. I'm not trying to pretend that I have all the answers, but I think it is an important thing to think about, because it is so easy in the world we live in for the future to be neglected because it is not here, it is not visible, and it's just that that is a fundamental tension we, I think, have to navigate. But go forth and think future.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: And adopt a future-oriented mindset. Thank you very much, Nick. Thank you so much for everybody who's joined us today, either from here in the Canada School of Public Service, or online from across the country. This has been a very insightful but also inspiring discussion. Nick, thank you very much.
If that topic is of interest to you, the Canada School of Public Service has just released a video on the future of public health and the role of the employer in it. We also have a series of courses on misinformation, disinformation, which are things that we've touched on today, but I would also highly recommend you read Future-Generation Government. Well, again, thank you so much, and you've given us a lot to think about.
Dr. Nicholas Chesterley: My pleasure. Thank you for spending an hour listening, I appreciate it.
Myra Latendresse-Drapeau: Thank you.
(Applause)
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