Probing the Bureaucratic Mind (About Canadian Federal Executives)

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, with a number of interviews conducted afterward with other senior Canadian federal executives on the same themes. APEX provided a safe space for these Chatham House discussions, 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.