There's a culture of big in the government, which means that any time we do anything, it has to be big. As a result of that, there's a great fear in the bureaucracy. The more we can tone things down to much smaller chunks and allow for some failure in the smaller chunks, the more the fear goes away.
There's fear and distrust in the public service. There's not a lot of change. It's a risk-averse culture. There's some work to be done to build the trust. The way that has to be done is to have some consistent leadership, with very clear outcomes, and then going with very small implementations that aren't prescriptive and that allow the downstream teams to make the call.
There's so much oversight now. That's another part of the distrust: there's so much oversight. There's oversight on oversight. There's oversight in my stovepipe, and there's oversight from three other stovepipes over there. All that is constraint. All that is overhead. Knowledge in the organization is at the bottom of the stovepipe right across, and don't forget that I'm at the bottom of the stovepipe, in stovepipe number five over here. I'm knowledgeable in five, and I speak the “five” dialect. It's a little different dialect than maybe the legal dialect or the procurement dialect. I'm in the IT, and I talk about IT stuff, and people don't understand me. When those teams come together, we get communication. When they don't come together, I have somebody who's perceiving the world from his perspective, and he perceives the solution of the problem that way. It goes up through the hierarchy, and as it goes up it's filtered, and it gets skewed. By the time it gets to you, it can sometimes be bizarre. Then what happens is they say to you, “Well, now you have to make a decision.” Am I resonating a bit with you?