In October of last year, the Policy Innovation & Leadership (PIL) group of the Ontario public service hosted a conference on “polivery,” a term meant to capture the increasingly integrated nature of policy development and program and service delivery. Set against a backdrop of “wicked” problems that often confront multiple ministries, the event drew over 450 attendees from across the government and marked a first step in Ontario’s efforts to modernize its policy practices. Giles Gherson, Deputy Minister of Policy and Delivery, spoke with associate editor Chris Thatcher about the term and its application in the OPS.
Let’s start with the term “polivery” itself: how are you defining it?
One of the things that has been preoccupying us for the last little while has been ramping up our policy thinking in the longer term – looking around the corner and asking, what’s the likely policy agenda in say 2015, based on what we know now. How well prepared are we? So, tuning up that policy muscle, if you will, recalibrating after a period where I think a lot of governments and policy people have been perhaps more focused on the shorter term.
The second aspect is program delivery. Back in 2003 when it was elected, this government put an emphasis on delivery similar to the earlier Tony Blair process in the UK. It set up results tables chaired by the premier on health care and education, which continue to this day, to assess the progress being made on key initiatives. Now, that is being stepped up several notches and the scope is being widened; we are looking at the top priorities of government and reporting on those internally to make sure that we know where we are in meeting measurable goals. That’s a bit of a change. Polivery is about bringing those two things – policy and delivery – together. I think there is a sense that, over time, the folks who develop policy and people who deliver programs have become a little bit separate. Yet obviously good policy development, assiduous implementation and great outcomes really rely on the strengths of both coming together seamlessly.
How would you characterize the gap between the two at the moment?
Perhaps it is more of a mindset gap. Policy development can be more conceptual while delivering programs is operational. The people who deliver programs and services are on the frontlines – they have real time knowledge of how programs are meeting public expectations – as opposed to the policy community, which can sometimes be a bit removed from the trenches. This is about bringing those two together so that one is well informed by the other to get a greater cross-pollination of thinking.
Has this gap been visible for some time or has greater public demand for more services made the gap more evident?
Probably the latter. Clearly governments want their programs and services to meet the highest quality standards. To be sure you are doing that, you need to be able to measure your performance. So, you need to establish clear target outcomes and benchmarks along the way, and you need to be able to evaluate how you are doing in relation to those milestones. That’s a more rigorous approach than we’ve traditionally had. We live in a consumer age and expectations of citizens have probably never been higher. And governments are becoming increasingly attuned to that.
During your conference, polivery was presented as a means to addressing ‘wicked’ problems: could you expand on that? How so?
I think mainly through cross-pollination of ideas and expertise. One purpose of the conference was to bring very different groups together to look at big policy problems from different angles. As we confront these large, complex problems, we need a multifaceted, multidisciplinary approach. And you only get that by bringing together groups from different functional groups across a variety of ministries. The architecture of any government inevitably is somewhat artificial in that few problems actually conform to the precise definition of a given ministry. So you really do need to have more cross-government approaches to policy development.
Given the nature of these problems, and the fact that solutions do not readily fit sound bites, do you need new ways of communicating them to citizens?
Yes, I think it really comes down to how you frame problems. Large problems are never going to have simple solutions, so it helps if the discourse of government is one in which you break these problems down into smaller pieces and communicate them in that way. I think that it adds to public confidence if you can show you are making progress on a complex problem by successfully dealing with its constituent parts. A good example might be a big, complicated issue such as climate change: we’ve broken it down into a number of different, more readily digestible elements including major investments in transit expansion, coal plant closures, and the Green Energy Act featuring an innovative feed-in-tariff, to name just three.
Given that the debate around many of these wicked or complex problems tends to become polarized, can polivery be used to change that conversation?
I think to some degree it can. In the area of policy development, it comes down to looking ahead and anticipating policy challenges before they are right at your door. Governments, when they do decide on issues they want to move forward on, often want to act pretty quickly. So it helps if the public service has done that advance thinking and policy development work, and that it is as sophisticated as you can make it. Being prepared well in advance is absolutely vital since it can also give the government enough time to frame the policy problem and solution correctly.
Delivery is the other side of the coin. It can build public confidence in government by demonstrating that it is actually doing what it said it would do. It’s all about results and outcomes. And the public becomes accustomed to hearing about real outcomes. Results are an important part of the language of government now. And for that to happen you have to have a fairly sophisticated process of setting target outcomes, milestones along the way, and the ability to evaluate your progress, taking corrective action as necessary. That’s a pretty intricate piece of machinery, if you will, but it is becoming increasingly commonplace for large programs such as education, health and climate change policy.
How do some of the staples of public sector management – measurement, performance management, accountability – fit within that polivery framework?
I think ultimately it is a culture. Polivery was an effort to bring a lot of these together. We did an evaluation after the conference and the response was very positive. People were excited by the idea of thinking across ministries, thinking about policy planning in a more rigorous way, thinking about a more systematic approach to results and ensuring that commitments that are made are actually delivered. From a communications point of view, it’s very authentic when you can say, “this is what we’ve done – here’s the evidence.”
Has evidence-based decision making taken longer to become a norm than might have been expected?
It is one of those things that has been around for quite a while and has taken root in some places earlier than others. Now we’re talking about a more widespread application as a normal p
