Bureaunia Chronicles: Episode 19
Aithorix’s first week inside government begins with skepticism and resistance
My role was first to convince the politicians and civil service that it was possible, then to design the interventions in various ministries, and finally to roll them out and demonstrate that common people benefited.
Piece of cake, right? I’d done that before, albeit in a different context. I had spent a previous career before coming back to my home country Bureaunia just a few months ago running technology startups abroad supporting multinational corporations, some of whom had employees in the hundreds of thousands across the globe. So, I thought, in my boundless arrogance (which I later realized to be nothing other than infinite naivete), that it would be appropriate to treat the government of Bureaunia, with just over 1 million civil servants (excluding the teachers), as a slightly larger client needing the same types of strategies.
With the mindset to develop a top-down strategy, I walked into the Prime Minister’s Office. My first week on the job was very interesting, scary, and life-changing, all at the same time.
I was running a week-long workshop with sixteen participants, each from a different ministry. They were all senior bureaucrats, many soon-to-be permanent secretaries. The focus of the workshop was to explore how digital technologies would help them do their jobs better in serving their clientele, farmers, students, patients, drivers, workers, the poor and the marginalized, among many others, better, faster and cheaper. That’s exactly how I had approached my foreign clients. The techniques I had borrowed from the top management gurus to extract information and expectations and analyze that to build a strategy had always worked to produce superior results and beat my rivals who were far bigger than my small startups. So, why not here?
After the initial introductions on the morning of the first day, I asked my sixteen participants about their expectations. Fifteen of them said good things: “We want to use technology to improve agriculture, health care, education, law and order, blah, blah, blah!” Exactly what I was hoping to hear. The territories were different; I had not worked in agriculture or healthcare before. But that had never deterred me from extracting, analyzing, and building strategy because it was a co-creation process which I knew well. What I didn’t know so well was bitter resistance and how to deal with it.
The sixteenth person was very quiet and didn’t answer my question about his expectations from the workshop. He was the senior-most bureaucrat present in the room. Everyone called him “Sir”, as was and still is the custom in civil service to address your senior in rank or age with “Sir”. So, I asked him again, “Would you say something about your expectations?”
He literally barked at me: “Listen, young man, this is all bogus. Digital technology in an impoverished country like Bureaunia does not make any sense. We have not ensured food security, clothing and shelter for our poor, employment for the massive number of unemployed. And, you are talking about digital technologies. Such utter nonsense, and such waste of time! Your office, the Prime Minister’s Office, has asked me to come, and so, I could not say ‘no’.”
He went on to caution me that while I would continue with my utopian lecture on digitization, I should not bother him during the workshop because he would concentrate on reading newspapers. Oh, by the way, the newspapers were online, so he would at least engage in ‘online’ activities. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.
I was quite scared by this gentleman, about twenty years older than me, and a “Sir” to everyone else in the room. But I remembered somebody wise saying, “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” Like a fool, I rushed in for the next five days.
Bureaunia is imaginary, but the queues are real for every developing nation. Next: Episode 19 — The Sixteenth Participant
Anir Chowdhury
#BureauniaChronicles #DigitalTransformation #DigitalPublicInfrastructure #DigitalInclusion
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