governance – The PolyBlog

Articles I Like: It’s 2022. What Does Life Look Like?

July 13 2020

The New York Times has a great article from David Leonhart where he tries to predict what life in 2022, a scant 18 months from now, will look like in America. He assumes no vaccine arrives this year, and that we continue to see waves of outbreaks and lockdowns.

From a business perspective, he talks about which business models will likely prove less than resilient in weathering the storm. Some likely casualties are those who were already vulnerable businesses…newspapers losing advertisers, traditional department stores (Eatons, Zellers, K-Mart, WoolCo, Target have all bit the dust in Canada long ago) losing out to Walmart and Amazon, and malls closing when they lose their department store anchors.

While universities in Canada are unlikely to fail, the same budget pressures are hitting them as they are in the U.S. — enrolment stability, cancelled summer programs, residence and food service fees gone, parking revenue gone, and provincial and federal budgets are taking huge beatings. I follow Alex Usher on Twitter, and he has been actively watching which universities are planning for full virtual classes in September and which ones were hoping for some sort of mid-semester return.

I was a bit surprised Leonhart uses such pedantic examples and doesn’t spend more time on the hardest-hit sectors like health in general, agriculture and food processing, aviation and tourism, and restaurants. He notes in the intro that they may disappear, but there are entire sectors that present far more disruption to human life than the loss of paper newspapers, loss of department stores and malls, or disruption in higher education options.

In the area of habits, Leonhart identifies the importance for white-collar workers that working from home, working remotely in general, has been successful, and I couldn’t agree more. Education from home is less successful, but I love the quote from Microsoft:

As Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, said this spring, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.”

Where I work in government, we have accelerated our IT plans by 2-3 years for some major projects. Things that would normally have started in 2022 or 2023 and likely would have taken 1-2 years? They’re already 50% implemented or more. Doubling bandwidth, new platforms for collaboration, massive increase in mobile infrastructure for workers with huge increases in laptop deployments. We’re one department, in one government, in one country, and we literally have bought thousands of new laptops to get people connected from home. How are manufacturers keeping up with IT demand? The short answer in some cases is that they are not keeping up. If you were looking for video cameras in the first few weeks of WFH, they were scarcer than bread yeast. Months later, stocks are returning but only because everyone already has a webcam somewhere in their digital ecosystem. Many are just using their phones. I stopped by one of the computer stores last week, and some of their shelves are looking pretty empty, particularly for larger monitors. Not enough to declare a shortage, although again, that’s partly as they’ve restocked.

I’m less enamored of Leonhart’s predictions for the US political realm, not with a fall election hanging in the balance. Trying to do similar predictions for Canada without a set election date is probably equally useless. The Liberals are in a minority situation, and will likely to continue to be, as long as the NDP keeps getting what they want on various files. But they can only go to that well so many times before the Liberals can’t afford it, and the alliance / coalition / politician’s agreement falls apart. Just as with Leonhart’s opening question — how long does this last? — the political outcomes will be shaped by the health outcomes. Where I find Leonhart’s rationale lacking when he argues for sweeping roles for government in the U.S. if Biden wins is in the reality he talked about for higher education. Government budgets are taking a sh**-kicking and while they can literally print money, at some point, the bill comes due. Spending at current levels is not even remotely sustainable. And if you want to spend your way out of a recession / depression, eventually you also have to make serious cuts to government either during or afterwards.

Nevertheless, I hope there are more prediction articles I like these. If we crowd-source a couple of thousand of them, we might even approximate a forecast or come up with a to do list for contingency planners.

New featured images – Governance

April 18 2020

As part of an update to my website, I am revamping all my featured images (New featured images – Astronomy). Having already tackled a small one (astronomy) and a large one (website and computers), I am turning my attention to a different challenge — governance. I actually have multiple categories that fall into a “governance” theme, although in many ways, “government” might be a better term for some.

I have an actual category specifically called governance, and I tend to write about a variety of things related to running a government. Elections, public administration, audits. I have more of a technical bent to my topics, and if I was completely candid, it seems like public administration would be the more likely heading. Except from time to time I go above that and intersect with policy and politics. The running of a government at a level above. Not often, but occasionally, and usually related to how the two realms — politics and public administration — intersect. At one point, I wanted a new “image” to represent all that, and given the ethereal nature of the concepts, I made up a combined image representing different parts of a governance package — politics, legislation, judicial, and the people. It’s not a huge category for me, only 30 posts out of about 1400 deal with governance issues, but it may grow once I retire.

I also used to work at CIDA dealing with international development issues. I don’t write about it very often, only 27 posts in total, and 17 of those are about one specific book where I wrote about each chapter as I went. I do like to follow what’s happening in broad trends, though, since I spent 10 years of my career dealing with the files, yet even when I do write, I tend to have a “public administration” slant to my writing, rather than development in general. I didn’t have a great idea for my international development “image”, but managed to find one that was about food security, including both growing your own food and production of meals afterwards. It’s a bit cheesy, but it’ll do.

A third area I write about regularly is the “civil service” itself. And to be honest, I haven’t had a good image to reflect that area. It’s not a lot of posts, still only about 27, but I’ve tended to bop between one of two images. First, I’ve used the general governance image shown above, but that doesn’t really reflect what we do. I have also often used the bottom right-hand corner of that governance, the one of “people” to reflect the civil service (the fourth pillar of the governance stream). Which is fine. Except that I have also used that one a LOT for something else — my posts about HR in the government. In particular, when I’m writing items for my HR guide, I’ve tended to use that image as the theme. However, to be honest, I don’t really like it for my HR guide. I need a new one for that, so I can use it here now. And, as noted, there’s symmetry with the larger combined governance image.

Which leaves me with two very specific areas to deal with. One is a “one-off” conference that I helped organize way back in 2002. The reports and docs are on my site (13 pages), and I use the logo we had for the conference. You can find it at PS Transitions FP.

The other is my HR guide. I have struggled with this guide for a long time, in varying forms. Mostly I have used my large tree frog image to reflect my branding for it.

But a few years ago, before I ran into some publishing snags with the Conflict of Interest people, I went ahead and had the full cover page designed for the guide.