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This week I was on the lookout for compelling narratives out there in the zeitgeist and found two worth discussing, both focusing on automobile safety (or the lack thereof).

The anchor story on the front page of last Monday’s (Feb. 1, 2010) New York Times was headlined “Toyota’s Slow Awakening to a Deadly Problem.” The writer, Bill Vlasic, instead of using the standard inverted pyramid approach that involves summarizing the entire story in the first sentence, took a narrative approach designed to grab the reader’s attention. He started with the story of a Lexus that sped out of control near San Diego last August 28, quoted the 911 call from the car (”we’re in trouble … there’s no brakes … hold on and pray”), and told us the tragic outcome: the car colliding with an SUV, bursting into flames, and all four occupants dead. This narrative then introduced a more measured account of driver complaints of unintended acceleration of Toyotas and the history of government investigations of the problem.

I think the Toyota safety story will play out over the next few months, and possibly years, as a fascinating case of conflicting narratives. Toyota’s narrative will be the standard crisis management narrative: we’re aware there is a problem and we’re fixing it as fast as we can, in short, we’re in control. The US Government’s narrative is a retrospective one. We knew there was a problem long ago, we brought it to the attention of the company and, because they appear to have been dilatory, we will not only put pressure on them to solve the problem now, but hold them accountable - through civil litigation - for past errors. The third narrative is that of the victims, or relatives of deceased victims of unintentionally accelerating Toyotas, who will be launching huge law suits. The government and victims’ narratives have the potential to be with us for a long time, no matter how much Toyota tries to change the story.

The second narrative was from the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, a major teaching hospital in Toronto specializing in, among other things, emergency medicine. It appears as both a subway poster and 30 second commercial (the latter can be found on the banner at sunnybrook.ca). The narrative starts with a car crash, a flight to the hospital by helicopter, a team of 36 specialists having 36 minutes to “perform the impossible,” the victim in bed on a ventilator and then learning to walk with an artificial leg. The narrative ends by identifying Sunnybrook, its website, its slogan (innovation when it matters most), and its pitch for support.

In narrative terms, a lot was going on in those 30 seconds. It’s a clear instance of the heroic genre, in which a desperate situation is saved. In the classic case, the hero is an individual, but in this case it’s a team, an identification that presages the institutional identity that will be revealed at the end of the story. There are also some subtle messages about the nature of the hospital. In the second frame, the victim is airlifted, rather than brought by ambulance, implying that this is a major regional hospital, not just a local one. In the last frame, the victim is learning to walk with a prosthetic leg, implying that the hospital provides, not only acute care, but comprehensive care and rehabilitation.

The narrator is the omniscient voice behind the scenes. Where does the story fit on the scale running from historically accurate to purely invented? We don’t know if this is a true story and the victim in the story an actual patient or an actor. Or perhaps Sunnybrook’s communications department would tell us the story represents what happens there all the time. An alternative would have been to present the story as a first person narrative, explicitly labeled as a testimonial by a former patient. Would first person testimonial have been a better choice than reenactment (of some kind) with an omniscient narrator?

Finally, it was a good idea to get the audience’s attention by presenting a gripping life-and-death story first and only in the last five seconds revealing the sponsor and purpose of the story.

So here we have two examples of narrative around us, indeed so much a part of our consciousness that we likely take them for granted. But when we start to analyze the narratives we begin to understand why and how they were used, how they were shaped by their creator, and the role they play in communicating a message.

I’ve been looking at the Government of Canada portal and Prime Minister Harper’s website as well as the White House portal. The differences between the US and Canadian sites are dramatic.

In a word, the essence of the Canadian sites is political messaging, and the message is all about Stephen Harper. Both the Canada portal and the PM’s site have three columns, and the eye is drawn to the top of the middle column - the widest column - which contains news stories almost always featuring the photogenic (or not) Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister’s site has the news of the day dominating the central column, priorities and utilities in the left column and video and audio in the right column. Today, there are 7 - count ‘em 7 - photos of the Prime Minister on the site (including the banner and all three columns).

The left column of the Canada site includes links to services, other aspects of governance (Supreme Court, Parliament), and utilities, while the right column links to priorities (currently the Economic Action Plan, Haiti, the Olympics, and armed forces recruitment). Links to popular services are below the story of the day in the middle column.

The Canadian sites do not occupy the full screen width-wise, but have well-defined left and right borders and leave considerable space in the margins beyond the borders. The implicit message is of focus and concentration.

Now let’s shift over to whitehouse.gov. President Obama is at the top, with links to four rotating videos, today including the State of the Union address and the announcement of the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund. The weekly video address - the online successor of the Saturday radio address - is one of the four during weekends and early in the week.

The site also has three columns, but they play out very differently than those on the Canadian sites. The right column contains priorities (Haiti, economic recovery, and the flu) and the middle column legislative proposals, with Health Care now at the top. The bottom of the page contains five columns of links, including issues, the briefing room, and background about the President and the White House. The extensive links at the bottom drive the site to cover the entire screen width-wise. As a consequence, the three columns in the middle of the page have considerable space and don’t seem cluttered, even though they are full of content.

The most distinctive feature of the White House site is the blog, which occupies the left column. It deals with a variety of policy and management issues Videos are presented, and posts authored by, a variety of administration officials including department secretaries, agency heads, and White House and agency staff. The main White House blog expands to nine sub-blogs including the middle class task force, the office of citizen engagement, open government, and partnerships.

While the White House site itself does not host consultations, the posts on the blog take you outside it to numerous consultations hosted on social networking sites (the response to the State of the Union address on Facebook) or departmental websites (a consultation on high speed rail on the Department of Transportation site). The open government blog leads to the Administration’s path-breaking initiative (data.gov) to make government datasets available - gratis - for citizen users, including software developers.

In effect, whitehouse.gov has become the administration’s high profile consultation portal. In contrast, the federal government’s consultation portal (consultingcanadians.gc.ca) is somewhere out there in Government of Canada cyberspace, but lacks a high-profile link to the Canada portal.

Think of the rubric “Obama Administration.” Putting the emphasis on Obama calls up the image of the embattled President, winning some battles with Congress (Bernanke’s confirmation), losing others (the deficit reduction panel), and with others still in the balance (health care legislation). Putting the emphasis on Administration evokes an image of the departments launching a host of initiatives: a vision of widespread creativity in governance. On the White House site, the embattled President rests atop the creative Administration, with the latter launching many new initiatives and consulting widely about them. It’s a portal of many voices, and it is the diversity (and occasional cacophony) of voices that makes it a far more exciting place than its Canadian counterpart.

For the skeptics who claim that innovation in government is an oxymoron, the notion that a tax collection agency could be innovative seems even more oxymoronic. Yet my intuition tells me that the Canada Revenue Agency indeed has bragging rights to such a claim.

Historically, it has been a rapid adopter of information technology, using it to enhance service by providing for payment online or over the telephone and to enhance compliance through aggressive data mining. Its status as a special operating agency, discussed in David Brown’s article in the most recent issue of Canadian Public Administration, has likely facilitated its innovativeness.

More recently, the Harper Government has likely become a driver of innovation, because of its use of tax credits - rather than spending programs - to implement social and economic policy. This philosophy of government tends to leave the program departments sitting on their hands but puts the onus on CRA. Some recent examples that come to mind are tax credits for child care, child fitness, disabilities, public transit use, and now home renovations.

For each such initiative, CRA has to come up with a precise definition of what is creditable, communicate the ensuing rules to the public, and ensure compliance. The latter would involve requiring taxpayers, or their income tax preparers, to keep receipts and occasionally auditing. The home renovation tax credit will be an interesting case. It has been widely advertised and tremendously popular. As the end of the eligibility period and this year’s tax filing date approach, the question that comes to mind is what sort of auditing CRA will do to ensure that taxpayers have been following the rules. Given the populist nature of this program - with a maximum permissible claim of $ 9000 in expenditures - the standard practice of auditing the few biggest users won’t work. The possibility of the program being extended in the upcoming budget underlines the importance of effective administration.

While the next federal budget is likely to involve expenditure cuts or constraints, I would be very surprised if the Harper Government didn’t extend its philosophy of populist tax credits in some other area, again calling upon CRA for implementation.

As a public management blogger and a taxpayer who has taken advantage of several of these programs (universal child care, child fitness, home renovation), what I see is the tip of the iceberg. Below the waterline is what CRA is doing to implement these initiatives. I think there is an interesting story here of innovative policy implementation for a public management researcher to explore.

I see a final exam as an opportunity to challenge students to demonstrate what they have learned by applying the course material to situations they have not encountered in the course. But because the examinations are never returned, the learning loop is not completed. To rectify this, today’s post will be about the final exam in Management C35 (Narratives on Management and Organization) given last month.

The first question highlighted the work of young adults: learning to perform their chosen trade effectively, finding and learning from a mentor, and defining the boundary between professional obligations and personal life. Students had little difficulty choosing characters in the course (for example, Erin Gruwell in Freedom Writers, Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men, and Kevin Calhoun in City Hall) and explaining how each dealt with each of the challenges. The most ambiguous of the challenges is finding a mentor. In some cases, such as City Hall, it turns out that the mentor has values his protégé, upon reflection, will reject. Therefore, if you are going to put all your eggs in one basket, choose that one mentor wisely. Another alternative, demonstrated by Erin Gruwell, is looking for a variety of partial mentors, each fulfilling a specific need.

The second question asked students to imagine any three of the characters in Twelve Angry Men being put through the Milgram Obedience Experiment and to predict how they would respond. Such a question has no definitive answers, only good explanations. I don’t know if Milgram or anyone subsequently replicating the experiment ever gathered data on the demographic and psychological characteristics of the subjects and used that data to explain their choices. It would seem to me that three crucial factors predicting the subject’s response would be deference to authority, willingness to inflict obvious pain on another human being for no good reason except that someone in a position of authority says so, and any personal experience that might provide a lens through which to see the experiment.

Applying those criteria, there are some jurors whose behaviour could readily be predicted. The architect (juror number 8) showed himself unwilling to inflict pain or defer to unreasonable authority and would not have administered the shocks. The European watchmaker (juror number 11), likely seeing the “scientist” in the experiment through the lens of his own escape from European authoritarianism and embrace of American democracy, would also refuse to administer electric shocks. The angry father (juror number 3) was certainly willing to inflict pain and would likely see the “learner” as his own recalcitrant son, and therefore would willingly shock the learner into unconsciousness.

The third question asked the students, in several cases, to distinguish between the narrator’s and creator’s point of view. In some, for example as a first-person memoir such as Graham Burnett’s A Trail by Jury, narrator and creator are identical. In others, such as Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day, and Errol Morris’s documentary The Fog of War, they are not. Both these narratives employ a misleading narrator, but it is from the creator’s point of view that the narrator is misleading.

Ishiguro uses irony to show us that the butler Stevens has wasted his life serving a misguided master and putting absurdly loyal service above a level of personal happiness to which any human should be entitled. Morris presents the forcefully articulate narrative of Robert McNamara, but Morris’s own questioning, choice of visuals to accompany McNamara’s voice, and ability to catch occasional disconnects between McNamara’s words and emotions, creates a point of view starkly different from McNamara’s.

The last question in the exam used John Kennedy’s June 1963 speech at The American University about world peace. I had read excerpts, but never the entire speech. It still remains a powerful and, for its time, radical denunciation of the nuclear arms race and search for an alternative. I asked students to interpret Kennedy’s rhetoric in light of the mid and late adult stages of Erik Erikson’s developmental model. I see the speech as strongly generative because Kennedy was searching for an alternative to the dead-end of nuclear warfare and doing so out of a concern for the lives of future generations, regardless of their nationality. He, of course, did not live to see late adulthood but - perhaps because of his seriously compromised health - was acutely aware of his own mortality. The line “and we are all mortal” strikes me as unusual on the lips of a world leader. And recognition of one’s own mortality relatively early in life would spur a concern for one’s legacy.

My students did well on the exam. I hope they learned from it. I know that I learned from reading their answers and thinking about it myself.

A little over a year ago, I wrote a paper entitled Digital State 2.0 reviewing the major developments in the use of IT in Canadian politics and government between 2006 and 2009. It is being published in a festschrift - due for release any day now - in honour of the retirement of the eminent public administration scholar G. Bruce Doern.

I’ve been asked to contribute a paper to another edited book about IT in politics and government, so I will be looking at developments during the last year to update the previous paper under the new rubric of Digital State 2.5. Here is my plan for the new paper.

In the area of IT in politics, the main driver of change is general elections. In Digital State 2.0, I referred to the federal election of 2008, Ontario election of 2007, and - because it represented such a transformative change - the US election of 2008. There haven’t been elections in any of these jurisdictions, so there is little to update. I will, however, have a look at the mid-mandate sniping going on among the major parties in the federal and Ontario governments, in particular online attempts by the Liberals to demonize Stephen Harper and online attempts by the Conservatives to trivialize Michael Ignatieff.

Economic recovery has been a key government priority, which will lead to an examination of the online presence for the federal government’s Economic Action Plan (www.actionplan.gc.ca). Its natural comparator will be the US government’s website for the Economic Recovery Act (www.recovery.gov). It appears that the US site is both more detailed in the information made available and less partisan in how it presents it.

The management of large IT projects is always a major concern, and in the last year we have had one that has gone seriously off the rails, namely Ontario’s eHealth initiative. Claims of project mismanagement have led to the resignations of the Project Manager, Chairman of eHealth Ontario, Deputy Minister and Minister of Health. Forensic analysis of troubled IT projects is a complicated matter, and it’s not clear to me that the official analysis has been completed, but I’ll try to say something about the causes and state of play.

The many facets of social networking referred to as Web 2.0 continue to be evolving in the public sphere as well. While outside the geographic purview of my article, I couldn’t help but laugh at a recent article in the New York Times by Scott Sayare about how the gaffes of French politicians, including even M. le President, are being caught digitally and circulated on YouTube.

More substantial is the US Government’s initiative to make public sector data widely available to applications developers on www.data.gov. The background here is that Washington DC did this and received considerable public recognition, including winning a prestigious Innovations in American Government Award in 2009. Vivek Kundra, Washington, DC’s chief technology officer has jumped up two levels of government by moving around the block to become the US Government’s CIO. Thus the US Government is virtually overnight scaling up a local initiative, and the results will be fascinating to see.

Looking back at what I’ve just written, the title of the book that started this line of research comes to mind: Digital State at the Leading Edge. In the book, we were referring to the Government of Canada. No longer. I think that honour now goes to the US. Stay tuned for more in coming weeks and months.

I’ll be taking the next two weeks off posting, and I’ll be back in early January. Happy holidays and best wishes for the new year to all.