Probing the Bureaucratic Mind

About Canadian Federal Executives

By Ruth Hubbard & Gilles Paquet
Categories: Business, Economics & Industry, Business, Political Science, Public & Social Policy
Publisher: Les Presses de l'Université d'Ottawa/University of Ottawa Press
Ebook (PDF) : 9780776638539, 152 pages, August 2022
Ebook (EPUB) : 9780776638546, 152 pages, June 2022

Table of contents

Introduction
Beyond the traditional cliches
The rise of network governance
The federal bureaucracy under siege
The process
The outcome: probing a mindset
Chapter 1 – Cat’s cradling: the capacity to cope
A syncretic view of each theme discussed
Contextual issues
Diversity
Security
Ethics
Disloyalty
Organizational culture and new government tools
Corporate culture
The Gomery world
Public-private partnerships
Partitioning anew the federal public service
A personal distillation of what we learned
The decline of open critical thinking
Lack of gumption
Paradoxes, neuroses and willful blindness
Conclusion
Annex: Basic documentation for each session
Chapter 2 – Cat's eyes: the capacity to engage intelligently
A syncretic view of each theme discussed
Intelligent accountability
Intelligent regulation
Intelligent organizational design
Intelligent public service
A personal distillation of what we learned
A cautionary statement
Somebody is in charge and it is not me
Déformationprofessionnelle
Cognitive dissonance
The present of latent fear
Conclusion
Annex: Basic documentation for each session
Chapter 3 – Not in the catbird seat: the capacity to collibrate
A syncretic view of each theme discussed
Perverse incentives
Rewarding failure and deception
Punishing success
Positive discrimination
Failure to confront
Pathologies and challenges
Quantophrenia
Performance review
Speaking truth to power
What role for cities in public governance?
A personal distillation of what we learned
Moral vacancy
Crippling epistemologies
Risk aversion and fear of experimentation
Conclusion
Annex: Basic documentation for each session
Chapter 4 – The unwisdom of cats: the capacity to reframe
A syncretic view of each theme discussed
The political-bureaucratic interface
The federal public service as a nexus of moral contracts
From leadership to stewardship
Deputy Minister: then, now and in the future
A personal distillation of what we learned
Difficulty in thinking about systems
Experts can’t learn
A tiny bit of intellectual nonchalance
Conclusion
Annex: Basic documentation for each session
Conclusion
Four layers of capabilities
A syndrome... tentatively
Cosmology-less wayfinding
The way out and forward... a catwalk
Toward a new covenant through a new inquiring system
One starting point
In summary
References

Description

This book explores the thinking of Canadian federal public service senior executives through conversations. The transformation of the environment and of the institutional order has created quite a challenge: maintaining some sort of adequacy between these evolving realities and the frames of reference in use by public sector executives. Complexity is often nothing more than a name for a new order calling for a new frame of reference, and the reluctance to abandon old conceptual frameworks is often responsible for fundamental learning disabilities.
Through a series of conversations with Canadian federal senior executives about more and more daunting problems - from coping with an evolving context, to engaging intelligently with a new modus operandi, to trying to nudge and tweak programs in order to correct toxic pathologies, to reframing perceptions and redesigning organizations to meet the new challenges—weaknesses of the capabilities of the Canadian federal executives to respond to current challenges were revealed, and suggestions made about ways to kick start a process of refurbishment of these capabilities.