Bureaunia Chronicles: Episode 20
Aithorix witnesses the moment a senior bureaucrat begins to see the system differently
At the end of the five days, I thought I would evaluate what we had learned, the usual thing to do before concluding a workshop. As expected, the fifteen participants commented on very positive things about what they had learned about digital technologies and how they would go back to their workplaces and start forming strategies with the support of our programme and form teams in their respective ministries.
The sixteenth participant, the seniormost, everyone’s “Sir”, was still quiet. I had the choice of not taking the risk of asking him what he thought of the workshop or completing my evaluation by taking his brutally negative feedback. Like a fool I was, I chose the latter.
It is funny how your life changes when you take a risk. He said, “Listen, young man, I’ve been in the civil service for over thirty years. I’m going to be a permanent secretary very soon, and I will retire in a few years. In the last thirty years, I’ve not attended a workshop that was more eye-opening and useful.”
My jaws dropped visibly, prompting him to explain: “You did quite a few useful exercises, but two of them were striking. One, you taught us how to draw pictures of service delivery processes. To me, service delivery meant a physical paper file containing a citizen’s request or a government decision coming to me. I read it, analyze it, and sign off on it with my comments. If I approve, I send it to the next person in the chain of command. If I don’t approve, I send it to the previous person. The quicker I sign off and send the file to the next person, forward or backward, the more efficient of an officer I am. That’s what we are taught in our civil service college from the very beginning. I’ve never seen the whole process in the command chain of a particular service from a bird’s eye view. That’s why I never realized that many of these steps in the chain are totally unnecessary and existed for historical reasons, sometimes as a tool of exploitation perhaps, from colonial times for many decades. Also, we never analyzed how much time each step actually takes versus how much it should take. It’s astonishing that none of us ever questioned any of this.”
He didn’t stop until he explained the second reason for his U-turn: “Second, you’ve taught us how to analyze failures.” I had given the participants some case studies on technology usage in the Bureaunia government to analyze. They had an equal number of successes and failures to analyze.
“Within the government, we don’t analyze failures. We push them under the rug. So, analysis of our own failures so that we can learn from them was eye-opening. Thank you.”
On that day, I learned two things. First, civil service was trained on age-old norms and procedures that had been used to rule and govern since colonial times. Empathy for citizens was an unfamiliar and often unnecessary concept. Questioning the status quo, looking through the citizens’ lens, or walking in their shoes was unthinkable.
Two, it is possible to play a catalytic role in humbly nudging a bureaucrat, even a senior policymaker, with the right tools. I did a simple calculation to know how many lives this particular gentleman could change with a simple stroke of his pen. It was in the millions.
That changed my life. And with that, the work that I catalyzed would save the poor and marginalized over thirty billion dollars and twenty billion workdays in the next decade.
I had no idea which of my tools that I had brought from my startup and consulting days in my career abroad would help me, but I decided to experiment with all of them. Over time I figured out the process of planning with everyone was far more important than the actual plans, because plans change because of context and leadership and other factors, but people remain with their biases and prejudices, preferences and inspirations, rigidities and commitments. And that is what one had to work with to move mountains forward.
Bureaunia is imaginary, but the queues are real for every developing nation. Next: Episode 21 — Seeing the Invisible
Anir Chowdhury
#BureauniaChronicles #DigitalTransformation #DigitalPublicInfrastructure #DigitalInclusion
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