Bear With Me

January 2015

I signed up for Roxanne Snider's writing class to help me break the bad habits of 20 years of writing as a bureaucrat. 

The classes work around "prompts" - short writing assignments. I've done two so far; the third one's brewing.

There are six of us in the workshop, all women, but other than that we have almost nothing in common.

We read our assignments in turn, Roxanne gives her feedback and then we all comment.

The first prompt was to write about something that happened to me as a child using language and perceptions appropriate to my age at the time:

I’m outside. I’ve had my breakfast. I’m cold in the shade behind the house. I look up at the clear blue sky. A gold bracelet floats in the air. 

This scares me. I look again at the gold ring. I should know what it is but don’t know what it is. 

I'm bothered that I don’t know what it is. 

I try to think. I have seen one before. But it wasn’t a bracelet. It was another thing.

I hear two voices. 

In the next yard are the brother and sister who live in that house. They lift dripping pink sticks to their lips and blow.

Soap bubbles.

The second prompt was to use description to create a sense of place. I found this tough. What follows is very different from what I read in class.

The Cavallo Point Lodge hotel is a repurposed military base nestled at the foot of the Golden Gate bridge. Red roofed clapboard houses circle a parade ground surrendered to moles and wild grasses.

On our last day, we sit on the porch of what might have been the mess hall and is now the charming pub. We have blankets over our knees and sunglasses on our faces. 

Sparkling in the sun on a narrow table in front of us are fifteen dollar cocktails and six dollar bowls of fancy spiced popcorn. 

For free all around us is the sunny afternoon.  The bay’s ever present sea salt haze makes the air glow. The bridge towers are a stark silhouette in the distance.  

We are the only people outside. There are no conversations but our own, no sounds of traffic from the bridge. The air is perfectly still, the temperature balanced between chilly and just fine. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Closure

Pushing through the dead leaves: early blossoms at the Allan Gardens

The team I've been coaching gave their presentation this past week to a generous and friendly panel of senior public servants.

I attended the event so I could watch and maybe feel that pride I'd heard a coach from past years describe. Instead I felt they all should have spoken up a little louder. But they did fine.

I witnessed the moment when the five of them returned to their table, sat, and realized it was over. The months of struggle were behind them. They went back to having nothing immediately in common, relieved of the burden of figuring out how to work together. They said we should get together for a drink at some point.

I said sure, sign me up. I gathered my coat and left. I may not see any of them again, ever.

As For Me

There were reports in the media toward the end of last year that the Ford government would pay public servants to voluntarily leave their jobs. I thought that the offer was not for me. I'm four years away from retirement. The hit on my pension would be too hard.

Just to prove that was so, I got in touch with the pension board to get the low down on the numbers. Turns out the deal lets me pay into my pension for another eighteen months, so it still takes a bit of a hit, but not so much that the offer didn't all of a sudden become a lot more attractive.

So I signed up. I got my approval letter this past week. My last day as an employee of the province is December 31, 2019.

Thanks for reading!

Happy Easter!

Karen

New shirt for his birthday:
Ken at 89.

Sympathetic Characters

The snow drop again: my favourite thing growing in my garden.

It's a risky thing when you're a public servant to pick up a call from a number you don't recognize.

I did it twice on Tuesday.

The first caller I knew a little bit about. He had written the ministry in February, got a reply in the form of a letter from me that he felt just did not deal with his problem so he wanted to talk with me about it.

I could tell he was a little startled by the fact I answered my phone. But he got over that. 

After he had explained his problem - six or seven times - I felt I understood him well enough to say back to him what I'd heard him say. He seemed satisfied with that, but he had to explain the problem to me another six or seven times. He finally agreed to let me get on with my day. I promised I'd get back to him.

I conferred with the guy who reports to me, who had overheard a lot of the conversation. We thought the man on the phone might have a point, so we're going to do some digging around and see if we can help him ease his mind.

The thing for this guy was, even though he had solved his original problem, he felt he had not been treated fairly and that was what he could not let go.

The second time the phone rang, I picked up thinking it might be the first guy again.

It wasn't.

A woman introduced herself as an "angry Ontarian" and then scorched my eardrum for five minutes about the smart meters - six of them - lined up outside the building she lives in. She told me she had read information on the Internet that confirms smart meters cause cancer, plus a few other claims. 

I decided not to struggle. I asked her what she wanted. She said her utility company wanted a thousand dollars per meter to replace them. There was no way on God's green earth she was going to pay that. 

So I said, "you're looking for a person who can order the removal of your smart meter for free?" 

"Yes," she said.

"I'm not that person, and I don't know who that person is, so I'm sorry I can't help you."

It took another five minutes to get her off the line. She disclosed that she's a retired teacher, and that her name was Linda but she wasn't going to tell me her last name because this isn't a police state yet. She yelled over and over that she wanted the meters taken away. 

A few minutes after I finally got her off the phone, the other guy who reports to me in my shop dropped by to say he'd just had a very aggressive call. 

"Linda?" I asked. "Did she tell you about the Nuremberg trials too?"

She had. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

89 years old on April 3 -
Ken Clarke
celebrates his birthday.

Influencers

Crabby dinosaur: Tyrrell Museum Drumheller August 2018

For the past several months, I've been coaching a five-member team of public servants who want to make the leap to senior management. They are members of the imaginatively named Leadership Development Program. I've written about them before.

There are 14 teams in the program. Each must undergo a ritual humiliation called the "Action Learning Plan" or ALP.

The ALP proposes that five strangers can, through the alchemy of the leadership program, cook up without guidance a great idea for government to implement. Once they have their idea, the teams have to put it into a presentation. Then the teams have to make their presentations to a panel of senior officials.

This is where the humiliation comes in.

A couple of weeks ago, several of the other coaches in the program and I acted as pretend panels so the teams could give their presentations a trial run. 

I sat through seven. One was quite well done. Five were varying degrees of OK, but still needed a lot of work. One was truly terrible.

All of the presentations made me appreciate even more than I normally do how tough the policy job is. You have to take a complex problem, boil it down to a simply stated issue and then describe an elegant solution in ten slides or less.

My team at the ministry makes this look easy. The Leadership Development Program teams I watched made it look pretty darn hard.

The truly terrible presentation, I came to find out, was about an app called "My Benefits" that helps people on multiple public assistance programs coordinate their benefits. It also reduces, by a lot, the administrative costs to government of these programs.

The problem is people aren't using the app. The terrible presentation was a pitch for a strategy to increase its use.

That seems straightforward, so what went wrong?

Most of the teams failed to one degree or another with the first step of making a policy proposal - that simple statement of the issue. The truly terrible presentation never made the statement. I had to confer with the other people on the panel to understand what it had been about.

Before the light dawned for me on the presentation's point, only one thing had made an impression. 

A slide about two thirds of the way in mentioned "influencers", people who have lots of followers on social media. It's a real life marketing tactic to use influencers - like the Kardashians or whatshername Ratajkowski - to generate interest in products and events. 

The slide illustrated the concept of influencers with a picture that first looked vaguely familiar and then gave me a start when I realized where I'd seen it before. The team had used an image from the Fyre festival showing wet mattresses piled in front of temporary shelter tents.

When I gave them my feedback, I suggested, among other things, that the team illustrate their point some way other than with the image of a world famous failure.

When the presentations were all over, one of the other coaches wondered aloud how this painful process developed leadership skills. None of the people in her team, she said, had taken on a leadership role. Neither, I said, had anyone in mine.

Had I been a member of the team with the terrible presentation, I might have led them to the idea that the policy problem was not that too few people were using the "My Benefits" app. The problem was that government had come up with a solution for its administration costs that was no kind of a solution for the people who rely on social programs. 

And, if I ever get to be a member of the team that designs the ALP, I might lead them to the idea that government's current solution to develop leadership skills isn't much of one.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen