I don’t have a full name yet for my current non-fiction Work In Progress, but I’m hoping it will be my first book out of the gate once I’m retired. I just have to wrestle 5 Nobel prize-winning economists to the ground, pin them, and steal their moves. Piece of cake, right?

Unfinished business from 2007-2008

Back in 2007, I was working at ESDC in the policy and integration unit of their strategic policy branch. My ADM at the time was considered a policy bigwig in government with one of the largest policy branches anywhere. And he was genuinely brilliant. He had commitments for the year for four files, including medium-term planning (MTP) and an Integrated Policy Framework (IPF), the latter of which was mine.

I never landed the IPF. I think I did 92 versions in deck form, not including about 40 or 50 in which we didn’t iterate on levels. Of those 92, I would say there were about 15-16 major versions, and the rest were incremental minor changes. At the time, I wasn’t quite sure why they didn’t land. I was too close to it.

Now that I’m about to retire, I’ve dusted off the IPF, and I’m building a new one. To my specifications and no one else’s.

The limitations of the original IPF

When I was trying to build it with my team of good analysts, there was no roadmap to follow or foundation to build upon. The department had never tried to create a fully “integrated” version before; they had draft versions of three frameworks in vertical silos, but that was it. If you drew a pretty picture, you could put a title like IPF and then three little boxes side by side. That’s how far you could go.

The goal, though, was not a pretty picture. The real goal was to create an integrated, policy-based theory of change, transform it into a functional framework to aid in setting priorities, and then support discussions in which “varying inputs” would produce logic chains and policy reasoning through to “recommended outcomes and priorities”. Even as I describe it now, I am using a mechanical description of what is almost always an organic process in government.

I kept pitching the machine; they kept asking about the outcome. I spun my wheels for 18 months and burned out. It was the biggest challenge of my professional life up to that point, and I gave it my all for 18 months. When I left that unit, I was crispy. I “ran” to planning and performance to rebuild my ego, my confidence, and my sense of worth as an employee. About six weeks after I left, the ADM killed it. He decided medium-term planning was enough without a full framework. They rebranded another product, declared victory and moved on.

I always felt it was not only a personal failure, but a giant lost opportunity.

Enter the multi-headed dragon

Over the last 20 years, that personal “failure” (which everyone else said wasn’t a failure) has haunted my dreams. Unfinished business to me. And when I started working on a plan to write another book when I retire, I sheepishly mused to myself, “Wow, it’s too bad that I don’t have the IPF to build on.”

Oh dear. Yep, that’s where my head went all right. I actually need THREE tools that don’t exist to write another book. One IPF; one policy coherence framework; and a revised approach to performance measurement that takes existing PM approaches in the Canadian government, reduces them to one lane, and then adds other lanes of alternative PM to the mix. Three tools to drive a later analysis that would be in book-length form.

The PM stuff I can create a short-form tool…sort of like wanting a high-end chisel with multi-grain options and settling for a flat-head screwdriver and just beasting it. The Policy Coherence Framework outline is in really good shape, and I’ll have to decide whether to write it as a longer policy piece first, or as a short version first and a longer version second.

Yet I can’t short-change the IPF. I need to have a fully realized framework if I want to write the more important book afterwards. Any weaknesses in the underlying IPF tool will invalidate the entire other premise. I have to nail the IPF first.

There are about 20 policy challenges that I could flag up front. Political realities. Different bases of analysis between human development (agency and the individual), social capital (the capacity and role of society networks through trust and reciprocity), and learning (processes, supports, and institutions). The fact that no one is paying me to do this, I have no deadline, and I might just be screaming into the void or staring into the abyss, waiting for it to stare back.

Yet that all pales in comparison to the scope of my ego commitment.

I have to wrestle 5 Nobel prize-winning economists to the ground, steal their thoughts, and build an initial framework. Then layer on the subsequent work of dozens of award-winning, internationally renowned policy thought leaders, map all of it, and understand it. (And yes, I know there is technically no formal Nobel prize for economics; it has a different name, Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, but meh.)

Once it’s built, I get to turn it into some sort of working frame, applied to labour markets in Canada. Why? So I can write the other book.

I have to create a framework that nobody else in the world has successfully landed and merge it into a coherent operational framework. What could possibly go wrong with this plan?

I swear, I keep hearing a modified line from Top Gun in 1986 (Stinger, played by James Tolkan, to Maverick, played by Tom Cruise) — “Son, your ego is writing checks your brain can’t cash”.

And yet…it seems to be working, even though those 5 winners didn’t always agree.

I’m standing my little integrated framework on the shoulders of giants. George Stigler’s (1982) work on capture theory and the role of power in the three domains. Amartya Sen (1998) is the anchor for my consideration of Human Development in general, the importance of opportunity, and the focus on agency. I had the pleasure of hearing him speak in the year he won, when he delivered the eulogy at the UN for his friend Mahbub ul Haq. Douglass North (1993, with Robert Fogel) added the role of institutions, clearly anchored in an economic vein.

In 2000, James Heckman (and Daniel McFadden) won for econometric methods (snooze), but I’m sneaking in through the side door and stealing his work on building links between human development and learning and expanding the entire life-course anchor. And then, finally, Elinor Ostrom in 2009 cemented the social capital domain, with crosswalks to institutions and important lenses such as ecology. There’s a sixth candidate, Gary Becker (1992), who argues for human capital reductionism, and I mostly jettison his work, throwing him out of the ring.

Remember that I said at the beginning that I get to write this while being only accountable to myself? That is a dangerous pit of obsession. I couldn’t be satisfied with just the three domains and what the world thinks the framework should look like there. No, that’s not enough of a workload. What do I really need? Twelve lenses to challenge those three main pillars. The Nobel-winners didn’t go wide enough, apparently, so I’ve kept theirs and added some of mine, to create a home-brew:

• Economics, institutions, and life course as separate lenses;
• Human rights (both a political and civil lens as well as an economic, social and cultural rights lens)
• GBA and Persons with Disabilities for important target groups;
• Culture, ecology/environment, technology, and power to undercut some of the legitimacy, and,
• Indigenous reconciliation to try to break the entire framework with sovereignty challenges.

Are they all clean and properly cited? Nope. It’s a work-in-progress.

What am I doing today? Trying to figure out which elements become automatic cross-cutting issues across all 15 lenses/domains.

• What the “floor” is in every domain…of five levels of possible definition ranging from basic subsistence to full agency;
• The impact of project-funding vs. sustained funding on the stability of systems and participants, and the role of systems in self-perpetuation or even harm;
• Metrics options that range from traditional PM to movement along a spectrum to community-based alternatives;
• The role of politics and agency in design, definitions, status, blame, etc; or
• Where the “individual challenge” is most severe.

You know, typical light summer reading for a Sunday afternoon. The yoozh.

It’s funny, though

For whatever reason, I don’t think I’m going to tap out. Don’t get me wrong; it is enormous work. I won’t win a Nobel prize for butchering the works of giants.

But I have time, the near-unlimited ability to focus on it for a sustained period, and no approvals required except my own.

Will anyone read it when I’m done? I hope so.

But non-fiction is for me, first and foremost. I’m looking forward to the writing and the build. It’s just a wee bit daunting. Sigh. Deep breath. In, out, in, out.

Anyone else trying to scale new mountains today?