As the pace of public service retirements has picked up, so have reports of questionable decisions and “wheel reinventions” arising in large part from inadequate or non-existent knowledge transfer among public servants. This has been described as “organizational Alzheimers” that can result from failure to transfer knowledge about public governance and management from one generation of public servants to the next.
Public servants possess a great deal of tacit knowledge that doesn’t get articulated in written form for the public record. Donald Schon, among other scholars, argues that practitioners do not simply rely on theories and techniques developed in teaching and research institutions. Rather, they develop their own theories about how organizations work. He discusses the concept of “reflection on action” that involves a conscious effort by professionals to analyze their experience, to articulate the lessons learned, and thereby to inform future decision making.
More recently, Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap have formulated a related concept described in their book, Deep Smarts. Deep Smarts are “a potent form of expertise based on first-hand life experiences, providing insights from tacit knowledge, and shaped by beliefs and social forces. Deep smarts are as close as we get to wisdom.
The federal Public Service Commission’s Mark Hammer, in a paper on “The Getting and Keeping of Wisdom,” reminds us that it is necessary but not sufficient to transfer information and knowledge. It is essential to transfer wisdom, which includes such dimensions as “strategic thinking and reasoning, visioning and being able to take the long view, being able to effectively dialogue with others and engage them, and effective self-management.” Thus, governments need to foster and exploit the wisdom of public service practitioners, especially those in the senior ranks who may soon be leaving the public service.
While it is common to think of public servants as learning best by observing, working with, or being mentored by experienced high performers, more attention should be paid to transferring knowledge and wisdom through the written word. Inside the public service, this can take such forms as accounts and records of difficult policy and program decisions lodged in departmental files and libraries. But this approach neglects an important external dimension of knowledge and wisdom transfer, namely its transmission to public servants in other departments and other governments – and to the academic community.
Academic scholars and their students are likely to be best served by the efforts of what are described here as scholar-practitioners. These are current or former senior-level public servants who make knowledgeable and often wise contributions to the scholarly and professional literature in public administration. Their writings are found both in books and in articles published in refereed learned journals such as Canadian Public Administration, in practitioner-oriented public management journals such as Optimum, and in public management magazines such as Canadian Government Executive. Their publications are widely read in university classrooms and referenced in academic writings, not only for the information and knowledge they provide but also for the wise insights they contain about the real world of the public service. These writings are an important source of learning for the many university students who join the public service at some point in their career.
There are, however, two painful realities about scholar-practitioners. There are too few of them and they receive little encouragement from the senior levels of the public service. A review of Canada’s public administration literature over the past 50 years reveals a lamentably small number of public servants who, before or after they left the public service, made distinguished contributions to scholarly writings on public administration. The quality of their scholarship has been recognized in part by their receipt of such awards as the Donald V. Smiley Prize for the best book in Canadian government and politics and the J.E. Hodgetts award for the best article in English published in Canadian Public Administration. There are doubtless many other current or retired public servants with the capacity but without the opportunity or the encouragement to make similar contributions.
In connection with a 2009 article for Canadian Public Administration, I communicated with several of Canada’s leading scholar-practitioners. They noted that there is currently little support from the top ranks of the public service for scholarly writing by practitioners. Yet, among the most distinguished scholar-practitioners in the pre-2000 period were deputy ministers (e.g. Al Johnson, Gordon Robertson, Arthur Kroeger, Ian Clark) who have been celebrated for their excellence as public servants. Other award-winning scholar-practitioners are David Good, Ralph Heintzman, Ruth Hubbard, Bert Laframboise, Brian Marson and Mitchell Sharp.
According to one of these scholar-practitioners, “publishing analytical papers communicating and advancing understanding of [his] work to other practitioners across Canada as well as to potential or future public servants (that is, students) was part of the job.” Moreover, it helped to keep current his “own understanding of the ‘scholarly literature’.” Another scholar-practitioner, the late Bert Laframboise, regretted that senior managers were unable or unwilling “to commit themselves to transmitting the knowledge they have gained through experience” and he wondered, in his usual direct and memorable fashion, “if line management skills may be generally incompatible with perceptive observations and articulate writing.”
There are other significant barriers standing in the way of a flood of scholarly writings from public servants. The constitutional conventions of political neutrality and public service anonymity enjoin public servants who are still in government to be careful in making public comments about government policies, plans and personalities. Yet Laframboise noted that “much more could be done by senior officials to add to the store of practical knowledge, within the bounds of discretion and good sense.”
The most frequent explanation for the dearth of scholarly writings by public servants is simply the lack of time for reflecting and writing. In the words of one scholar-practitioner, “the pace of activity is relentless and after one issue is resolved for the moment it is on to the next issue, with little or no time for serious reflection and in depth learning.” This argument is somewhat less persuasive for retired public servants.
Another barrier is the protracted and often tedious nature of the assessment process associated with publishing in peer-reviewed learned journals and the consequent temptation to publish elsewhere, if at all. Academics can help to overcome or at least ameliorate these barriers by collaborating with public servants in research projects and co-authoring books and articles with them. Another scholar-practitioner noted that “[t]he practitioner can contribute his/her ?rst-hand experience and theoretical re?ections, while the academic partner can contribute theoretical perspectives, research data, scholarly apparatus, and drafting time.”
Some initiatives have already been taken, with varying degrees of success, to disseminate more effectively the wisdom of the practitioners. These include several, usually very successful, ventures in co-authored academic-public servant publications; joint research and publication projects facilitated by IPAC’s research committee; an extensive publication program, including individual and collaborative research, at the then Canadian Centre for Management Development; and university-public service exchange programs.
Some initiatives that could be taken include a more vigorous pursuit of the approaches just mentioned; the creation of publication outlets, perhaps online, that are better suited to the time and talents of public servants; invitation-only research conferences and symposia involving academics and public servants; and encouraging and engaging retired public servants to write or collaborate in such projects as “learning histories” of periods in an organization’s life that produce “reflectionable knowledge.” Academics, along with professional public administration organizations, could also assist in the transfer of practitioners’ wisdom by assisting them to write autobiographies and by researching and writing biographies or biographical notes and monographs on Canada’s best and brightest public servants.
Another means by which public servants can, and do, share their wisdom with academics, while doing little or no writing of their own, is through the ideas and insights exchanged when academics take on consulting work in such forms as preparing research studies for government on various management matters and serving on advisory bodies.
A much less frequent source of learning for the public administration community is the writings of political executives. References to the institution and profession of public service in the biographies and autobiographies of political leaders are usually scattered and episodic.
However, public servants who have become political executives are in a unique position to reflect on public administration and particularly on the interface between politics and public service. Notable here are Mitchell Sharp’s Which Reminds Me: A Memoire and Allan Blakeney’s An Honourable Calling: Political Memoires. Notable also is the experience of former Premier Blakeney and Professor Sandford Borins, who co-taught public management and co-authored Political Management in Canada.
Public officials who effectively commit to writing their reflections on public service leave a more lasting legacy to the public administration community than their equally talented, but unpublished, colleagues.
Ken Kernaghan is Professor Emeritus with the department of political science at Brock University and the author of, and contributor to, several books, including Digital State at the Leading Edge (kkernaghan@brocku.ca).
