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