The Internet will make our current notions of government unrecognizable as we move from leadership and management to collaboration and stewardship

1. ICTs Will Make Governments
Unrecognizable by Today's
Standards
Christopher Wilson
Senior Research Fellow
Centre on Governance
University of Ottawa

2. How is technology changing the landscape
of governance & governments?
• Connecting more people
• Increasing transparency
• Creating more knowledge but also
democratizing knowledge
• Creating more opportunities for self-organization
& collaboration
• Facilitating greater access to more resources
• Creating more value
• Creating more communities
• Increasing the self sufficiency of citizenry

3. What happens to leadership
if followers won’t follow?

4. The Leadership Bargain
• Leaders are created by followers
• Followers will follow iff the leader is
perceived as ethical and effective
– Might, right or charisma no longer justifies leadership
– People want to follow but only if they believe the
integrity and competence of a leader will help them
get what they need
– However, the distinction between leaders & followers
is continuously being eroded -- generating at times
disloyalty and even active resistance
– No followers >> no leader

5. Questions
If people can self organize using the
internet to produce collective goods and
services -- think MOOCs in education -what will be the new role of government?

6. Questions
If we can finally give up on the notion that
perfect privacy is neither technically
feasible nor socially desirable, then how
can we protect ourselves against the
harms that may befall us from individuals,
organizations and governments who try to
use technology while remaining
anonymous?

7. Questions
If we democratize knowledge and enable
everyone with very sophisticated
technology, how can we protect ourselves
from those very few disturbed individuals
who just want to do others harm simply
because they can?

8. Questions
In a fully transparent multistakeholder
world, can we finally move on to an
accountability framework that's about
learning instead of the current one of
blaming and shaming?

9. Questions
Can we finally recognize that democracy
is a mechanism for the shared ownership
of all citizens and not some modern
version of entitled aristocracy?

10. Questions
Since we are all connected, can we
reorganize our public sector around
scalable learning rather than avoiding
waste (which it does very badly at any
rate)?

11. Deeper Questions
Maybe the question to ask is, what is the
most ideal form of social coordination that
we can imagine, use the technology to
help create it and then call that
government.

12. Where to go from here?
Any one of these notions would be totally
transformative for a modern government, but
technology is pushing all of them onto public
consciousness at once.
Since we can't count on leaders who are not in
control of all the necessary levers of resources,
knowledge or power and who are also wedded
to the status quo, what processes might be put
in place to facilitate the needed transitions? If
you can’t rely on leaders, then what?

13. The notion of leadership
was for a different era.
It’s time to retire it.

14. Leadership is a mechanism of
social coordination
…and increases the groups’
capacity for specialization
and coordinated activity
One that can transform
random groupings into
ordered social structures

15. But Leadership has Fallen
into Disrepute
Parliament is a Sham
Contempt for the
The entire “leadership- Macleans
class” is “fundament-whole institution
The Senate is the
Washington is
ally self-dealing”
[of the Senate]
– could have
backwater of
“a dogNew York Times run GE” – - Macleans the
GE
Suicidal
- GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt of his US government
The $50B leadership
- Newsweek
US CEOs have done more to
US
Nearly
predecessor Jackis a “fraud”pillar of – doneYorkerto
HSBC CEOs have New more
industry “Welch every execs apologize for
In over 40 years, the
hurt
American society hasthe economy than
Only 9% oflaundering money for Al
Canadians
-industry has "Trust
Barbara Kellerman,
leadership 2013 global itself to be – even more than
The
revealed anyone else
have confidence findsthe trust
that
Qaeda and drug cartels
made no meaningfulsurvey, the President or Congress
Barometer" or Harvard as
corrupt, incompetent,
– – Fox News
measurableFederal government canclimb,The Star
improvement Time to
in institutions continues
or both” -problems
both
address
in human condition.their
only 18% of respondents trusted
- Nanos
- The End of Leadership and
business leaders, Research
government leaders scored only
13%.
- The Economist

16. What is Leadership?
• What it should be
– “bringing people together to make something different
happen.” - Harland Cleveland
– A way for followers to coordinate their individual activities to
produce value-adding, collective outputs through structures of
hierarchies, clans, markets, & networks
• What it’s become
– a romanticized myth, a cult of personalities who are seen to be
intrinsically special, different from followers & capable of saving us
from ourselves.
– the accepted avenue for obtaining additional perks and benefits,
but susceptible to people later exposed as weak, liars, foolish,
inept, corrupt, vain, lazy, demagogues, selfish and just plain
crooks
– A $50 billion industry that in 40 years has produced no evidence
that it has produced any ‘better’ leaders, mitigated the effects of
‘bad’ leaders or contributed to the betterment of human society
– an excuse for not adapting to environments where no one is or
can be ‘in charge’

17. Warning!
Leadership can be harmful to your organization
Rob Ford –
Aboriginal Affairs
US Congressman
CEO of
Ottawa’s Mayor
Intergovernmental
drunken stupor,
Minister John
Anthony Weiner
“America’s
O'Brien charged
Affairs minister
cocaine user, DUI,
involved in Duncan resigns
Most Innovative
with bribery
resigns over
associates w/ Sarkozy under
sexting scandal over ethics
Company”,
criminals, investigation for illicit campaign funding
violations
Enron
irregularities.
Award winning
threatens campaign financing
PennState coach
colleagues, the
convicted serial
uncivil man
FIFA President,
Three ex-Nortel
child molester,
João Havelange &
executives Wachovia CEO
school president
other top officials
charged Thompson linked
receive millions in Lance Armstrongforced to resign
Former Italian PM,
to $378B in
Jimmy Cayne,
bribes Berlusconi,
addresses Global
Silvio
money laundering
Chairman & CEO
Leadership Forum
sentenced to 1 year
prior to bank’s
of Bear Stearns,
in jail
collapseSenators Mike
in 2008
“worst CEO of
Richard Fuld, CEO Duffy, Mac Harb,
all time - Gilles
Laval Mayor CNBC
of Lehman
Patrick Brazeau,
I found Mr. Mulroney’s
Vaillancourt
Brothers, leads
& Pamela Wallinex-SNC-Lavalin
evidence to be not
charged with
his company to
investigated for CEO Pierre
worthy of any credence
gangsterism
$639B bankruptcy
financial Duhaime arrested
– Judge Oliphant
for fraud
improprieties

18. Collaboration Diminshes Leadership
• But even ethical leaders are in disrepute because they are
increasingly ineffective due to issues of complexity and the
distribution of knowledge, resources and power…
• The Result: Fewer Canadians have confidence that our
leaders can address the concerns that matter to them
most
– eg. Issues like health care, jobs, education, environment & climate
change, first nations, aging population, social programs, living
standards & balanced budgets
• Why? Because these ‘wicked’ problems take more people,
more perspectives, more and different resources, and
multiple sources of power & authority to resolve. Citizens
don’t believe governments can work with others - Policy
Options

19. Followers Create Leaders
(but increasingly followers won't follow)
Leaders without Followers
- The Economist
Idle No More
protests beyond
control of chiefs
“public servants [should]
make their own judgments
about the public interest.”
– Ralph Heintzman
“we are the 99% and
we are leaderless”
Globe & Mail
Occupy Movement
Federalism upside
down: Who speaks
for Canada now?
iPolitics
Federal scientists rally against the
A “weak” and “secretive” “Death of Evidence” 10 July 2012
public service starves
Parliament of the information Protests against gov't
it needs to hold the
corruption planned for
government to account.
more than 80 Brazilian
account
- Parliamentary Budget
cities – CTV
Officer
“A tsunami of
exposed corruption
cases in Spain” –
New York Times
The US Budget failed
because Boehner "did
not have sufficient
support from [his]
members to pass."
- Huffington Post

20. Leadership is a mechanism of social
coordination but it is not the only one.
… there is no a priori reason to use
only leadership – only habit.

21. A Leadership Alternative
• Stewardship
– Instead of the ‘causal leader’, the steward
acts as a ‘catalyst’ among owners helping
them to shape change through a combination
of process design and relational governance
– The steward “depends for his power on
making other people powerful”.
– Stewardship is a collective attribute that is
neither personality based nor even people
based

22. Stewards are Created by Owners
• Building co-ownership & developing
mechanisms to share it are key tasks
• Stewardship is primarily process design
– assembling principles, rules, norms,
behaviours, mechanisms and protocols into
an ‘automatic pilot’ capable of generating
wayfinding, meaningful self-organization,
social learning, resilience, & innovativeness.
• Stewardship is ‘learning while doing’

23. Stewardship Process
• This coordinating process of stewardship has six separate
but interconnected tasks:
– gathering together all the relevant actors and information;
– creating an effective space for frame reconciliation to ensure
collaboration, leaning and innovation;
– doing together but avoiding the rush to decisions and action:;
– generating trust with a mix of incentives & moral contracts likely to
fuel both the continuous inquiry needed to facilitate learning, as
well as the need for contingent cooperation;
– assuming failure, the constructing of feedback, fail-safe and safefail mechanisms to ensure both effectiveness & resilience; and
– creating relationships that foster trust but also develop negative
capability - the conditions that ensure the collaboration will be
robust enough to survive.

24. Hints of Things to Come
• Goldcorp Challenge1
– Goldcorp recognized it’s own experts didn’t know
enough & with a $500K challenge opened themselves
up to the world’s geologists & different approaches to
finding gold, taking their net worth from $100 million to
$9 billion
• Governance of Tech Startups
– A bringing together multiple perspectives -owners,
angel investors, customers, engineers, suppliers – with
no perspective taking precedence. Both innovation and
accountability are enhanced
Tapscott & Williams, Wikinomics
1

25. Hints of Things to Come
• Brazil’s HIV-AIDS strategy2
– With one of the worst infection rates in the world in 1990, WHO
said focus on prevention. The sick can’t be saved.
– No one in charge, but guided by communitarian principle that no
one would be written off
– Shared leadership, a government asking questions about how
things really worked & committed to sharing successes
– Brazil’s infection rate now 33% better than the USA
• Canadian Partnership Against Cancer Corporation3
– A knowledge mobilization partnership of federal & provincial govts
and VSOs
– Policy authority & financial resources to implement a national
cancer prevention strategy
– Government participation but arm’s-length relationship from them
Westley, Zimmerman & Quinn-Patton, Getting to Maybe
3
Rocan, The Voluntary Sector In Public Health
2

26. Institutionalizing an Inquiring System
Observational
Does the situation
need changing?
Info Gathering
Heuristics
Learning
Affordances
How do we learn
Doing
Learning While
together & evaluate
Checklists
Trust
Doing
our progress?
Feedback
Judgement
Relationships
Connoisseurship
How can we
work together?
Relationship
Design
What is the
problem?
Investigative

27. Going Forward
“You never change things by fighting the
existing reality. To change something,
create a new model that makes the old
model obsolete.”
- Buckminster Fuller
“We cannot win the future with a
government built for the past.”
– US President Obama,
11 March 2011

28. Thank you
Christopher Wilson
Senior Research Fellow
Centre on Governance,
University of Ottawa
Tel: 613-355-6505
Email: wilson@telfer.uottawa.ca