IPAC: Get Networked
by Paul Crookall
Carol Layton became president of the Institute of Public Administration of Canada in August. IPAC is an outstanding non-profit organization that blends theory, research, and practice. For the past 60 years it has led the field. Layton is a remarkable public servant, who has earned the respect of her colleagues (who elected her to the post), and of ministers and clerks (who have appointed her to deputy minister positions in public infrastructure renewal, results delivery, and citizenship). We spoke with Layton about her volunteer role in IPAC, its mission and work.
Mission and future directions
To me, IPAC is a great organization. It brings public administration theory and research to the people who are practicing it every day. We focus on best practices and areas where we can learn from each other. We have a network of colleagues across the country – in all levels of government and with the schools of public administration – that brings IPAC members opportunities to engage with practitioners, researchers and academics. We are dedicated to excellence in public administration.
We now have over 2,600 members. We have an annual national conference at the end of August. There are 17 regional groups that are the backbone of IPAC. They support our membership and plan events that are relevant to their local members. And our national office, working with IPAC’s research committee, conducts leading-edge research and presents seminars on hot topics such as:
§ Leadership Lessons of Deputy Ministers
§ Responding to Gomery: The Future of the Public Service
§ New Frontiers in Public Sector Performance Reporting (joint national/regional workshops)
§ Leadership Lessons of Secretaries of Cabinet
§ Public Service in a Borderless World: Risk and Renewal
§ The Art and Science of Surveying Public Service Employees
§ International Brainstorm: The Regulation State of Tomorrow
Recent seminars held by the regional groups include:
§ Facilitative Leadership: Changing the Way Leaders Think (Fredericton)
§ Large Cities Under Stress: Challenges and Opportunities (Toronto)
§ La gestion de la diversité dans l'administration publique (Québec)
§ Spirituality and the Public Sector Workplace (Halifax)
§ Pandemic and Emergency: Maintaining Public Service During an Emergency (Nfld & Labrador)
§ Regional Government Policy: A Time for Change (Edmonton)
§ Challenges in the Alberta Workforce: Recruiting and Retaining Staff (Calgary)
We publish a quarterly management magazine and an internationally respected academic journal – The Canadian Public Administration Journal.
One objective for the next year, and beyond, is to increase the number of members from all levels of government and the broader public sector. We want to increase our networking, introducing academics and researchers to practitioners, federal, provincial and municipal staff to each other, and new recruits to seasoned professionals.
The 3Ps of international work
IPAC has a strong international consulting practice. To date, we have worked in over 21 countries that have sought to learn from Canada's expertise in building policy capacity, improving governance, implementing business planning or results-based management, as well as human resource planning and performance management. Basically, it is connecting the three Ps of priorities, process and people.
We have learned that a cookie-cutter duplication of the Canadian experience is not helpful. You have to think about the application. Many of the countries we have worked with are under much shorter timelines to build systems and infrastructure or implement processes that we took decades to develop and refine through evolutionary change. This is akin to countries leapfrogging into cellular telephone technology while skipping over the landline telephone stage. For example, they may be moving from poor accountability structures, with few or ineffective controls, or over–spending, to accountability and performance measurement. We proceeded more slowly, through several iterations including business planning, zero-based budgeting, and results-based management. They are more interested in learning from our successes than from our failures.
We learned from our experience in Kenya, for example, the benefits of logic modelling and follow-up coaching. They were here to learn about results-based management, performance planning and progress reporting. We had a delegation from Ethiopia here around the same time also looking at the Ontario system. Our task is to help demonstrate how our models can be adapted to their situation and people. These delegations are unabashed about asking questions and probing – in a way that can reveal weaknesses in our models that we can improve. They bring fresh, new eyes to our work.
Applying those lessons at home, in our work as managers – we strive to apply that Socratic rigour to ourselves and the programs we are implementing here. It requires us to take the time to articulate and explain our work, and provides good documentation for broader distribution.
At the IPAC national office, we are keen to know the skills and interests or our members. We want to work closer with our 17 regional groups to involve them in international opportunities. Participating in these international assignments is hard work, preparing for and following up on assignments. For our work with Lithuania, we had over 30 Ontario public servants involved at some point over a five-year period. Client countries are looking for senior, experienced managers, but we want to broaden the exposure of these projects to include new professionals.
IPAC also provides consulting and research for governments in Canada. A good research example is Al Johnson’s book, sponsored by IPAC, Dream No Little Dreams – a biography of the Tommy Douglas government in Saskatchewan (1944-1961). This book provides great detail on how a government translated its goals into policies and programs. It provides a good account, for example, of the interaction between central agencies and operating departments – an area that is of interest to public administrators, but is not well documented.
Another example is the Deputy Ministers/CAOs Survey that IPAC undertakes every two years. The survey will go out later this fall to all DMs in the federal, provincial and territorial governments and to selected CAOs in municipalities across the country. These senior public servants will be asked to identify pressing areas of concerns as leaders in their organizations. The results will reveal areas of convergence and also the differences among our jurisdictions.
These are just a few examples to illustrate the value of IPAC to a public servant in terms of understanding both the history of public administration in Canada and staying abreast of leading edge thinking in public administration and policy.
Readers wanting to learn more about IPAC can visit www.ipac.ca.
