Probing the Bureaucratic Mind: About Canadian Federal Executives

Product Description


This book explores the thinking of Canadian federal public service senior executives through conversations. The transformation of the environment and of the institutional order has created quite a challenge: maintaining some sort of adequacy between these evolving realities and the frames of reference in use by public sector executives. Complexity is often nothing more than a name for a new order calling for a new frame of reference, and the reluctance to abandon old conceptual frameworks is often responsible for fundamental learning disabilities. Through a series of conversations with Canadian federal senior executives about more and more daunting problems - from coping with an evolving context, to engaging intelligently with a new modus operandi, to trying to nudge and tweak programs in order to correct toxic pathologies, to reframing perceptions and redesigning organizations to meet the new challenges - weaknesses of the capabilities of the Canadian federal executives to respond to current challenges were revealed, and suggestions made about ways to kick start a process of refurbishment of these capabilities. This means having to gain new knowledge about complex systems - something that calls for intellectual effort. This volume draws mainly from extensive Chatham House style discussions on 24 different topics, with approximately 100 senior executives of the Canadian federal government, although a number of interviews were conducted afterward with other senior Canadian federal executives on the same themes. APEX provided a safe space for these Chatham House discussions and an opportunity for engaged senior executives to discuss daunting wicked policy problems, challenging ideas and intriguing hypotheses, and to reveal how they and their colleagues think. Gilles Paquet is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre on Governance of the University of Ottawa, and Editor of optimumonline


About the Author


Ruth Hubbard is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre on Governance of the University of Ottawa. She served for more than a decade as a federal deputy minister in the Government of Canada. Gilles Paquet is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre on Governance of the University of Ottawa.  Gilles Paquet is Professor Emeritus at the Telfer School of Management, a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre on Governance of the University of Ottawa, and Editor in Chief of optimumonline ca, an electronic journal on public governance and management that reaches some 10,000 subscribers.