Quote of the week

“The views gathered will help us develop a concrete blueprint for action…”

— 20th Report of the Clerk of the Privy Council

Editor’s Corner

In the Twentieth Annual Report to the Prime Minister on the Public Service of Canada, Clerk of the Privy Council Wayne Wouters told us that he and deputy heads had been working on a vision for the future of the public service of Canada, one with a “capable, confident and high-performing workforce that works collaboratively with citizens and stakeholders.”

He also indicated that he wanted to spread the dialogue out to federal public servants across the country in order to test the vision.

At the APEX Symposium, he announced the details. He said he was launching an initiative called Blueprint 2020, to start the conversation with public servants about what the federal government should do and look like seven years in the future.

This Friday, just before Public Service Week, he will formally launch the initiative with a webinar. A firm believer in the power of technology – at APEX, he riffed on the importance of crowdsourcing – he has promised that social media tools will be used to get comments and feedback.

Deputy heads and functional communities will launch consultative initiatives framed around four areas of inquiry. One will focus on the vision itself. Another will ask people to explore how it applies to their individual work environments and what they can do to make a difference.

A third will ask how the public service can make the vision a reality; in other words, what changes need to happen? The last area will focus on how to manage the risks associated with change.

Those who have been around for some time may think back to the La Releve initiative launched in 1997 by then-Clerk Jocelyne Bourgon which included – among other things – broad consultations within government on what the needs of the future public service would be. A task force was set up to coordinate the consultations and activities.

It will be interesting to see how the Blueprint 2020 process works and what it comes up with.