The lost art of saying “not now”

Why our bias towards new ideas clogs up our public service with busy work

My fellow designers might consider me a heretic, but I firmly believe that ideas are cheap. And if not cheap, then they are plentiful. Our cup runneth over, in fact.

I often think of the cult of Silicon Valley and how it impacted our understanding of innovation, improvement and modernisation, instigating a culture in which a new product is the universal answer to any question. But I’m told by my friends who understand psychology a lot better than I do that our inherent and ill-informed interest in the supposedly new is quite hard-wired and difficult to avoid for us.

When we face a barrier, an issue, an irk, we look for a new idea to fix the bad thing. And certainly, the Steve Jobs’es and Ted-talkers of this world have (and continue to) made bank on the idea that “thinking outside the box” is the solution to all our problems. I read this as rooted in the implicit belief that expertise and experience are bad – that they are legacies of failure that hold us back, shuttering our eyes from the brilliant solution that’s just around the corner, if only we find a “fresh” approach. I’ve once heard this brilliantly described as our “innovation fetish” by a speaker at Webstock, whose name shamefully escapes me but I believe it was here.

Coming to think of it… The brutal tech-bro takeover of the US-American public sector (which I’m only watching through tiny cracks in between my clasped fingers like a teenager at a horror movie) might well be building on a long legacy of dismissing the maintainers, the calm stewards of complex systems, and a deep-seeded distrust of patient expertise, isn’t it?

But let’s stay on our isles. As I’ve expressed before in my dissatisfaction with “blue skies” design approaches as universal paths to improvement, I don’t believe that we just need to find that one brilliant new idea to fix what we find broken in our public system.

Ideas have a way of proliferating, like a kraken reaching out its many tentacles across an organisation.

Photo by Dustin Humes

I most vividly remember this from my brief time as manager of a small team. With great regularity, a team member would be approached by someone to have a coffee, sit in on a meeting, or attend a workshop to discuss an idea. Any idea, something that needed fixing or something new that the organisation might try. And they wanted our advice. This team felt pretty snowed-under at any one point, there never seemed enough hours in the day, but hey, collaboration is key, right? Sure thing, let’s lend a hand.

There’s a German idiom: you offer a finger, and they take the whole hand. And that is what would happen all the time: A little coffee or a quick meeting for some advice would turn into a working group, into a project, and an informal advisory function. And before we knew it, our work board was plastered with the wildest project titles that we were all entangled with. When you asked team members why we were involved with this or the other, they couldn’t really say why we were spending time on this piece of work, other than it was a good idea (and it usually was), and it seemed valuable to have a seat at the table.

Each of these projects amounts to a story of escalation, where one interesting idea leads to a business case, which leads to a project, which leads to regular meetings, and catch-ups, and minutes, and workshops, and, and, and…

And this is how ideas, and ultimately work, proliferate to a point where at the end of a year you ask yourself why the heck you where SO busy all the time, while you can’t really tell your family at Christmas lunch what you’ve actually done.

So when I hear Brian Roche speak about “we have too many meetings”, then I have two competing thoughts in my head. Cynically, I think that no team I ever worked in would have said: “Yes, we have the Goldilocks number of meetings. Not too many, not too few.” But I also think of this real dynamic that I experienced:

That work always creates more work, and that “good ideas” just keep coming up, all the time, incessantly. And we find it really difficult to say “no”, or at least say “not now”. Because they are – in fact – good ideas.

Years earlier I had experienced a fascinating move made by the management of a larger private organisation: one day we were all informed that management was placing a “freeze” on all ongoing work that is not directly operational. Every project that did not keep the wheels turning at the core services was stopped and would be reviewed with a fine-tooth comb and “thawed out” once leaders were convinced that it was “contributing to our annual goals”.

If you’ve read a few of my missives you know that I’m not a great supporter of the ol’ top-down smack-down – but I do remember this as an overwhelming success! For a few days we all did some administrative spring-cleaning, watched our calendars be cleared of half the regular workshops and meetings, and slowly a few of the bigger projects re-surfaced. MANY did not though, and we were better off for it. They had been frilly side-projects, someone’s hobby horse that they had gotten senior leader support for somehow. And when they were gone, we simply felt less frantic. For a few months, that was. Then the new ideas tentacles had reached us again.

In many ways, this is easier in a private sector setting because the ultimate goals of the business, what “value” means, is pretty clear: it’s coin, cash, green. One reason why the public sector spends to much time in wording visions and strategies may be because what is bare bones necessity and what is nice-to-have isn’t always so clear, so we feel a need to define the stakes that should tell us what is important over and over again. It’s far less easy to say: let’s just focus on the basics (if I had a dollar for every time I heard a leader say that…), because the basics are much more subject to interpretation.

This is exacerbated by the fact that there are SO MANY ideas that public servants come up with that could have a positive effects on New Zealanders - if they were realised. And that is genuinely the main motivation that I have always seen in 95% of people I met working here. At the end of the day though, most of those well-intentioned and rationally-good ideas hit a wall at some points, somehow. And yes, one could call that waste. But it’s not the kind of waste you can just easily identify and put a stop to by giving a stern address to public servants, because it’s systemic and it develops unintentionally.

I’m not saying that much of what the public sector does is pointless and could be done away with. Any roundhouse-kick statements in this direction do more harm than good, because I do think that a LOT of public effort is actually spend in some kind of operational capacity proportionally. But us thought-workers in head offices who may be entangled in the arms of ideas-krakens – we might have a few ideas on our miro boards that could be placed in a freezer and left there for a while. Not no, but not now.

In an environment where so much can feel like it is on fire and needs someone who cares about finding a bucket of water, the hardest thing is to let some things smoulder so that we can focus our energy, resources and initiative to fighting the biggest flames.

It’s all pretty easily said and much harder done, because it comes down to the judgement of what is on fire and what is just smoke.

A bit like Brian Roche’s curious vacuum cleaner bag metaphor (which gave me a snort) – there may be something there, but it all depends on those who make the judgement call as to what work should go into the freezer, and what needs to be protected and lifted up. This is seriously tricky stuff, because the last thing we need is to send the message to public servants that they shouldn’t take initiative. And we shouldn’t forget that

some ideas, particularly near the coalface, are not silicon-valley-shiny-innovation, but born out of pure necessity and survival under dwindling resources and the continued threat of further cuts and public distrust.

Ultimately, it’s our hierarchical decision-making and their underlying mechanisms that deserve our attention - and our scrutiny - in the next year. I think we can make progress when we acknowledge how much of what we believe are rational, strategic decisions are influenced by our monkey brain that is always drawn to the new and shiny thing.

Good ideas are not solutions.