foresightXchange
Shaping the Future Civil Servant of 2030 Astana, Kazakhstan 22-‐23 May 2015
1. Introduction Foresight is rapidly emerging as an essential addition to traditional planning practices. Globally, governments are looking for planning and policy tools to better navigate an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. Traditional planning methods deal with predictable, gradually unfolding, unambiguous change but are less suitable for capturing the complexity, interaction and interdependency of, for example, climate change, urbanization, technological developments, natural resource scarcity and global economic, financial and political instability, etc. Government institutions, which may previously have been considered robust, look increasingly rigid, vulnerable and powerless in the face of unintended consequences and unexpected combinations of domestic and external trends and developments. Their capacity to anticipate and adapt to change is compromised by an over-‐reliance on concentrated (expert) knowledge, a belief in predictable and familiar futures constructed around past patterns, and an organizational structure that encourages reductionist analysis and fragmented solutions to complex, interdependent problems. As a consequence, government agencies are often ignorant of subtle but significant shifts in their environments, blind to the longer-‐term effects of their strategic decisions, slow to detect the increasing irrelevance of certain policies, and inattentive to promising opportunities until they have passed by. Anticipatory and adaptive governments, on the other hand, have the ability to pick up on and respond to change and are therefore better equipped to protect hard won development gains, achieve sustained economic growth, political and social stability and environmental sustainability, and are able to share the benefits of development with their citizens. The question remains, though, how public services can contribute to more anticipatory and adaptive governance. What particular capacities will be required to strategize and plan, as well as develop, implement and evaluate policy in a volatile and unpredictable environment? How to encourage cross-‐sectoral and cross-‐society collaboration in order to address complex challenges and promote inclusive and people-‐centered development? How to strengthen the resilience of public institutions, making them more adaptable, not only to sudden natural and man-‐made shocks, but also to opportunities? 2. Strategic Foresight for Public Administration Strategic foresight enables public planners to use new ways of thinking about, talking about, and implementing strategic plans that are compatible with the unfolding future. Strategic foresight is the umbrella term for those innovative strategic planning, policy formulation and solution design methods that don’t predict or forecast the future, but work with alternative futures. Foresight can help devise policies that capitalize on the transformational possibilities of the preferred future, moving from foresight and insight to strategy and action. By collaborating on foresight with other stakeholders, such as communities, businesses and academia, government agencies can become more attune to the distributed knowledge inside the wider environment, leverages imaginative use of technology and ‘sense signals’ of emerging change, leading to much
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greater awareness of probable futures. Long term visioning remains crucial, to set widely shared, realistic and inspirational visions, while at the same time the significance of short-‐term resiliency, improvisation and flexibility to achieve that vision is amplified. Strategic foresight is based upon a range of skills such as situational awareness to possible, probable and preferable futures, a pro-‐active and ceaseless scanning of the wider environment, an ability to sort, sift through and combine open, real-‐time data and the creation of tight feedback loops. It entails the exploration of possible scenarios and pathways and the systematic rehearsal of potential responses; and the strengthening of the system’s structural capacity to deal with this plethora of possible changes and either cope with the disruptions or turn risks – which are inherent to change – into transformative moments. 3. Strategic Foresight applied to Public Service Excellence Strategic foresight, therefore, is an indispensable part of the capacity of modern public services to strategize and develop resilient policies in an uncertain and complex reality. It is also a highly efficient tool to think and talk about (and act upon) the future of public service excellence and to reconsider some fundamental assumptions. After all, the fundamental uncertainty of the emerging future equally affects the parameters of public service reform, adaptation and innovation. ‘Times change, and we change with them’, or so we should. Ideally, public administrations would plan and erect their organizational strategies, such as reforms and innovations, around the relevant future changes in the society they serve. In reality, however, most notions of public service excellence, and the derived adjustments, reforms or innovations plans are neither relevant nor rooted in local societal change, let alone future challenges and opportunities. Most touted public service excellence models, conveniently called ‘good practice’ and therefore considered globally applicable, are western models (and to a very large extent Anglo-‐American ones). Other public administration models, with might be more reflective of local legacy, context and practice, such as the Islamic and Confucian public administration ones, are either ignored or put aside as intrinsically inadequate to provide solutions to the future challenges of developing, modern, post-‐modern or ‘post-‐normal’ societies. In this context, these public administration models are -‐ at best -‐ responsive to specific changes in Western societies. Much of the substance of public service reform is generic, internally oriented and thereby to a certain degree disconnected from outer reality. Internal organizational rules, mechanisms and structures, such as professionalism, integrity, performance evaluation, business processes etc., although important, are by themselves not sufficient to create public service excellence. The measure for success is not compliance with the organization’s rules and procedures. The benchmark for public service performance is primarily external to the organisation, i.e. the impact of economic and social policies, the relevance, accessibility and timeliness of basic services, citizens’ satisfaction, smooth collaboration between political and administrative leadership, etc.
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It is entirely possible, and actually quite the norm, that public service delivery fulfills all the internal prerequisites of a bureaucracy, in terms of accountability, integrity, professionalism, due process, etc., while citizens nevertheless suffer a time-‐consuming and tedious process that still delivers a less-‐than-‐relevant ‘service’. When the same experience is replicated in an e-‐Government application (meeting all bureaucratic requirements, but still tedious and unsatisfactory for citizens), to give a very concrete example of public service ‘innovation’ in response to a massively disruptive change in society, it is obvious that this public service provider is more concerned with accommodating an uncomfortable reality than adapting to a changing environment. In terms of proper organizational development and change management, therefore, public sector reform, adaptation and innovation should always take their cue from these external indicators, which happen to emerge and evolve in a volatile and unpredictable environment. Although often professed and rhetorically emphasized, this is not always the case. It is not uncommon, that, somewhere along the chain of translating environmental change in corresponding organizational adjustments, innovations or reforms, internal organizational logic and ‘politics’ take over, the change process gets sidetracked and the results, although overall satisfactory for the organization, fail to fully address the challenges and opportunities that gave rise to the change process in the first place. The systematic application of strategic foresight provides a mechanism to avoid the pitfalls described above. • First, it enables local public administration systems to identify local trends and developments, design different scenarios of local political, economic, social, cultural and technological changes and discuss local alternative futures in which they have to do what they are supposed to do. Strategic foresight will enable them to gain locally relevant insights about future change and strategize and plan locally relevant organizational adjustments, innovations and reforms accordingly. • Second, strategic foresight provides insights, in the shape of scenarios, in which reform and innovation policies can be tested on their relevance and resilience in alternative futures, instead of one pre-‐defined futures. New opportunities and challenges can be identified and explored. Implementation strategies can be prototyped and subsequently scaled up or discarded. As a result, public administration will be better prepared for shocks and changes in the system in which they have to implement their reforms and more flexible in their implementation approach. • Third, strategic foresight allows a public service organization to deal with organizational logic and ‘politics’ from the beginning of the strategic process (instead of during the implementation phase) and create a shared understanding of the possible and probable futures in which the reforms and innovations have to be implemented and agreement on the relevancy and resilience of the chosen strategies.
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4. Foresight Applied to the Future of Work in the Public Service in Central Asia 4.1 Introduction The Regional Hub for Civil Service in Astana, Kazakhstan, and UNDP’s Global Centre for Public Service Excellence (GCPSE) joined forces to organize a strategic foresight event (‘foresightXchange’) on one of the key components of public service excellence in the future: the civil servant. The event, titled Strategic Foresight: Shaping the Future Civil Servant of 2030, aimed to explore different scenarios on the interplay between local demographics, technological innovation and public service delivery, and how these three factors – the first two being among the most disruptive forces of the 21st century -‐ would determine work in the public service in Central Asia in 2030. It would discuss and test existing and new profiles of public servants who will populate the public service of these particular futures, thereby linking up with the theme of the Human Development Report of 2015, The Future of Work. The foresightXchange was organized straight after the Astana Economic Forum, on Friday 22 May and Saturday 23 May, thereby capitalizing on the presence of senior officials from Central Asia and beyond. The event took place at the Academy of Public Administration (APA) under the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan and welcomed over 40 high-‐level representatives from mostly Central Asian public service organisations and public administration educational institutes. The event was opened by Alikhan Baimenov, Chairman of the Steering Committee of the Regional Hub of Civil Service in Astana, Max Everest-‐Phillips, Director of the UNDP Global Centre for Public Service Excellence in Singapore, and Bolatbek Abdrasilov, Rector, Academy of Public Administration under the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan. 4.1.1 Report Following is a consolidated report on the proceeding of the foresightXchange Strategic Foresight: Shaping the Future Civil Servant of 2030. The report is divided in three parts. The first part will provide the context and describe some of the trends and developments in demographics, technological innovation and the resulting public service demand. The second part will be devoted to the activities that tried to make sense of the kind of futures these trends might create and its impact upon work in the public sector. Group discussions resulted in significantly different future scenarios. The third part, lastly, will take a closer look at what the participants, both as civil servants and as citizens, considered the likely profile of the civil servant in 2030. 4.1.2 Methodology A quick word on methodology. The aim of the foresightXchange was two-‐fold: to introduce foresight as a valuable addition to the traditional strategic planning toolkit of public administrations (and related organisations) and to apply foresight to a key issue in public management development. As such, this foresightXchange provides a ‘taster’, not a whole ‘banquet’, which is reflected in the chosen method: basic scenario thinking as a way to reimaging the future.
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In basic scenario thinking, scenario planning is stripped of its customary, often painstakingly prepared, detailed outline of all the trends that might have an impact upon the particular future under investigation and the subsequent, equally detailed and multilayered, elaboration of full-‐fledged scenarios and matrixes. Instead, with the basic principle of scenario thinking intact (to generate a group of plausible representations of the future), and within the limits of time and available knowledge and experience, the foresightXchange focused on reimagining the broad outlines of the interaction of two particular issues and its possible impact on public service demand, public administration and civil servants. The method was tweaked along the way to allow for clarification, elaboration and learning. The actual application of scenario thinking resulted in the production of significantly different scenarios, which stimulated a lively discussion and further probing in the historical legacy of the current civil service (e.g. the emphasis on rigorous planning in the Soviet area), the current state of affairs, future requirements and above all in the future of work in the public service.
4.3 Framing the issue: Technology, Demographics and Public Service Demand in the Future IT and networked technologies belong to the most disruptive forces facing governments in the 21st century. Networked technologies are oblivious of political borders and social boundaries. They are the antithesis of centralized and consolidated organisation, management and control. Increasingly, they are the vehicle for social innovation and change, fluidly linking networks of individuals, groups and communities around pressing societal issues. The flotsam of an incredible amount of data is increasingly put to new use. Not surprisingly, therefore, these technologies are profoundly reshaping the interactions between citizens globally, regionally and nationally; citizens and governments; and within governments. Given the amount of change and disruption the technological revolution has already caused to people’s daily lives, to long-‐standing business models in the private sector, to basic services such as education and health, and to the machinery of government, it is sometimes difficult to imagine that this revolution is only in its infancy. The IT hardware is on the eve of a paradigm shift that will lead to a mindboggling multiplication of computing power, transcending Moore’s Law. Infrastructure is proliferating in all directions, increasing speed and access exponentially and creating an ever-‐denser web of connections. The latest innovations are adopted and mainstreamed at neck-‐breaking speed. New devices are equipping new generations with powerful tools for incessant collaboration, creation and innovation. The interchange of generations born and raised in the technological revolution with the relentless pace of technological development will provide particular challenges for governments trying to catch up. The new generations will increasingly expand the use of technology for their day-‐to-‐day purposes and will expect others, including governments, to do the same. If that does not happen, these generations will disengage or, as is already happening, pick up their device and start crowd-‐sourcing and co-‐designing their own solution, circumventing the public service provider altogether. At the same time, ‘older’ generations and poorer segments of society will, on the whole, inevitably fall behind, potentially creating a hybrid public service demand, ranging from pen-‐and-‐paper solutions and personal interface to virtual ‘one-‐click’ design and impersonal interactions.
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It is very hard to predict, with any certainty or precision, how these demographic trends and technological developments and their interaction will pan out in the near future, how they will shape and be shaped by the type and manner of public service delivery and therefore, how citizens and governments will relate to each other. It is certainly not useful for future Central Asian public management organisations to base their responses upon crude global generalizations. The high level of volatility, unpredictability and complexity of these issues will require strategic foresight, both as a tool to make sense of alternative possible futures as well as a method to prototype and test possible responses. This approach will not only shed light on what kind of public management systems will be required in Central Asia in 2030, but also, arguably even more important, by what kind of people, drawn from which educational pool, with which skills and competencies, etc. these organisations will be staffed. In other words: how will the civil servant of the future In Central Asia look like? 4.4 Making Sense of the Issue: Building Scenarios After a presentation of the key components of strategic foresight and the disruptive trends of demographics and technological innovation, the participants split in three groups to discuss how the demographic and technological trends might interact and develop further, what their impact upon public service demand might be and what that would mean for the public service in 2030. 15 Years was considered an ambitious but realistic time period, in the sense that it was sufficiently mid-‐term for important change to take place during most participants’ active career, thereby providing an additional stimulus for richer engagement. Participants were expected to rely on their own knowledge and experience, supported where necessary with quick online searches on their smartphone. It was up to the individual group to decide whether to discuss a particular country, the Central Asian region or an imaginary Central Asian country. Scenario 1 The first scenario presents what was in effect the base-‐line scenario for the demographic and technological environment the Kazakh public administration will confront in 2030. Steady population growth reflects past patterns and stand at 20 million in 2030 (natural growth). Migration towards the urban centers will continue apace and urban growth, with the possible exception of Astana, will be constant but incremental, resulting in a roughly equal urban and rural population. No dramatic shifts in the balance between the ‘young’ and ‘old’ are expected. The political, social and economic relationship between the urban centers and the rural areas will not change significantly. Political and economic power rests in the urban centers, while the rural areas will remain predominantly agrarian. No meaningful shifts in the function of the rural areas is envisaged either. As such, the substance, organisation and delivery of basic public services to rural and urban areas will remain fundamentally the same. Technological innovation, however, will cause increased automation (including robotics) of administrative tasks (broadly defined) and stimulate a more individualized, citizen-‐centered and customer-‐oriented approach. On the one hand, this will lead to a modest reduction in size of the civil service, while the remaining civil servants need to be up to date with citizens’ use of technology, concentrate less on administrative purposes and develop ‘soft’ skills for interaction
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with citizens. The level of technological innovation, including applications and devices, reflects to a large degree the current situation. Human interaction will remain the default interface between citizens and the civil service. The group emphasized the importance of social contact in basic service delivery for both citizens (especially those with less proficiency and access to technology) and public officials. The basic public service delivery infrastructure will not radically change, with physical counters and booths for different services in ‘traditional’ locations. Scenario 2 The second scenario, on the other hand, is anything but ‘business as usual’. This scenario is conceived for public administrations in Central Asia in general. Population will grow at a faster rate. Urban centers continue to expand rapidly (as is currently the case), resulting in a situation where more people will be living in cities than in rural areas. Although not specified, it is implied that this could lead to a different political, social and economic relationship between urban and rural areas, with a possible knock-‐on effect on the substance, organisation and delivery of public services. Scenario 2 emphasizes the impact of technological innovation on the public service in 2030. It postulates a technologically savvy citizenry, in full control of smart, mobile and cloud technologies, a quickening uptake of new applications and devices and a government which is able to respond and initiate in kind. Technology will saturate the interaction and interface between public officials and citizens well beyond the current state of affairs. This will come at a price. Technology will automate many tasks traditionally carried out by ‘human’ civil servants and thereby dramatically reduce the size of the civil service in the near future. Many civil servants will be made redundant. What remains is a core group consisting of public policy makers and frontline policy entrepreneurs, bolstered by several layers of technological applications and devices that will do the actual delivery of the majority of public services. The frontline policy entrepreneurs will be tasked to bridge the gap between citizens and policy makers. Although severely reduced in size, the remaining civil servants would be much better paid than the current ones. The combination of digital public service delivery and ‘roving’ policy entrepreneurs should optimize the public service experience for citizens, who will be front and center in the design, organisation and delivery of public services. This scenario is very clear in subordinating the interests of public organisations and needs of individual civil servants to the evolving demands of the citizens, and juxtaposed the situation in 2030 explicitly with the current situation in Central Asia, where remnants of the heavily top-‐down Soviet public administration still exert a strong influence. The public service delivery ‘environment’ will change drastically. It will become much less time and place bound, possibly anticipating a different relationship between urban and rural areas, and, crucially, less depended on human interaction. The main interface between citizens and public officials will be technological, through (online) one-‐stop service shops and other digital access points. A few physical contact points that will provide human interaction continue to
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exist, mainly to cater to those groups in society with less adeptness and/or access to technological innovation. Scenario 3 The group working on the 3rd scenario took a totally different approach. Instead of making the demographic and technological trends, or their impact on public administration, public service demand or the work of civil servants, the main focus, scenario 3 squarely put ‘values’ in the center. This scenario describes how values such as ‘humanism’, ‘respect’, ‘social progress’ will drive the public sector, and motivate the individual civil servant, in 2030, buttressed and buoyed by technological innovation, no matter the demographic developments. In this value-‐driven scenario, impersonal forces, no matter how disruptive, cannot and should not distract attention from the centrality of people: citizens as people, civil servants as people, organisations and institutions as collections of people, etcetera. In 2030, these people will not be carried away by both the opportunities and challenges of technology, but remain committed to humanistic values, human needs and, crucially, human interaction. Technology, and in its wake, automation and the ‘digital’ civil servant, cannot replace the unique contribution social interaction makes to the public service experience and a better understanding of each other needs, and therefore more relevant public policies and services. Advanced IT technology, as well as new and existing industrial and agrarian technologies, will be put at the service of the citizens, translate into new opportunities for work, education and leisure, create better health, housing and agricultural services, etcetera. A sustainable and efficient state apparatus, able to effectively select and retain professionals, provides services to the public. The public service environment, although enhanced by technological innovation, will emphasize respectful face-‐to-‐face interaction between civil servants and citizens. Although not worked out in full detail, the radically different perspective of Scenario 3 provides a valuable and timely reminder that the emerging future is not solely determined by abstract forces or intentional interventions: values, consciously or unconsciously, play a crucial part in shaping and building the future. 4.4 the Civil Servant of the Future 4.4.1 Insight The three scenarios were significantly different in perspectives, emphasis and outcomes. The mere fact that a relatively homogeneous group could imagine and describe such a variety of possible constellations of demographics and technological innovation, and their impact on public service demand and the future of work in the public sector, presented in itself a perfect illustration of the benefits of strategic foresight. The debate on the insights gained, moreover, was rich and deeply satisfying. A key insight was that the inheritance of Soviet style public administration still looms large. The rigorous (and often rigid) planning methods of that time, aimed at the annihilation of uncertainty and risks, and based on iron causality and absolute predictability, sit uneasily with strategic foresight, with its acknowledgement and embrace of uncertainty and complexity,
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adaptive approach and agile responses. The top-‐down approach of the command economy, which profoundly penetrated public service design and delivery, is, in many ways, the polar opposite of a citizen-‐centered/customer-‐oriented approach. It would therefore be unrealistic to ignore this legacy when discussing scenarios for the future of work in the public service in Central Asia in 2030. A related insight, vividly expressed during the discussions, was that, perhaps contrary to initial expectations, strategic foresight does have something useful to offer to experienced planners from a post-‐Soviet public administration. The use of alternative futures to navigate uncertainty and complexity, the (equally valid) plurality of perspectives, opinions and experience, and the discussions about new insights, opportunities and challenges; the immense value of these, and more, key components of strategic foresight for planning became obvious to the participants in a very short time, while undergoing only a ‘taster’. Another key insight was the tremendous and wide ranging impact technological innovation would have on the composition, size and position of public administrations in Central Asia by 2030. Economists have only just begun to explore the divergent ramifications of technological innovation on growth and employment, mostly in the private sector. The repercussions of the technological revolution on public sector employment is, as yet, still under-‐researched and maybe under-‐discussed. This foresightXchange explored some of the possible implications. A third insight was the enabling effect technology has had, and will have, on citizens. As the discussions in Astana showed, this effect is complex, context sensitive, multi-‐dimensional and even multi-‐interpretable, defying lazy statements about ‘empowerment’ etc. What was obvious, though, was that technological innovation was creating shifts in the relationship and interaction between citizens and state institutions, including the civil service. For the moment, this shift seems to encourage a greater citizen-‐orientation then before. So where does all this leave the civil servant? How will her work look like in 2030? What skills and competencies will he need to do a good job? As a representative of her generation, what attitudes and knowledge will she bring to the public service? The foresightXchange used the rough scenarios, as well as the discussions, to try to imagine how work in in the public service might look like in 2030, and what kind of skills and competencies will be required? The following profile emerged. In 2030 the average civil servant in Central Asia will no longer be involved in administrative or procedural tasks. Her job will be either policy making, frontline service delivery or policy entrepreneurship. All civil servants will have honed their strategic skills, being able to see the link between a policy or a service and the intended result, anticipate and make sense of changes that will have an impact on those results and require adapting existing policies and services, and ‘read’ developments in the broader environment and access and analyze new sources of information (including big and open data). They will be empowered to take the initiative and show leadership in their field. In 2030, civil servants will be as competent in the use of technology as their fellow citizens. Moreover, they are capable to work with and integrate new technologies in their daily work, as well as prototype new applications. They are fully versed in using mobile and smart technologies
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to communicate with citizens. They know how to use tools to analyze and incorporate big and open data in strategic planning, policy making and service design. They feel at ease with new digital devices and tools. They are capable of delivering basic services without human interaction but with human empathy. However, they will not be required to be IT experts or software programmers. In 2030, civil servants are endowed with empathy. In fact, empathy is one of the most important characteristics of civil servants in 2030. They are able to communicate in a respectful and emphatic manner with citizens, willing to collaborate with citizens, ngo’s and the private sector, and service-‐oriented and consultative. The civil servant in 2030 co-‐designs solution and services with stakeholders, aided by technology, and will be less motivated by internal compliance than external results. In 2030, civil servants are honest and setting the standards for trust and integrity. Corruption will be rooted out, through a combination of the civil servant efforts, citizen pressure and new technologies. -‐ ∞ -‐
June 2015, UNDP Global Centre for Service Excellence, Singapore Special thanks to the Astana Civil Service Hub’s Secretariat and Research Team as well as the Academy of Public Administration under the President of Kazakhstan for facilitation & organization of the foresightXchange session in Astana.
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