Enabling an Ecosystem of Civil Servants in the Age of Platforms — with Robyn Scott

Podcast Notes

In this episode, we’re talking to Robyn Scott, co-founder and CEO of Apolitical, a global learning network for public servants. The Apolitical Academy, Apolitical’s non-profit arm, helps young and traditionally excluded people run for political office.

Previously, Robyn co-founded OneLeap, an executive education company, and two southern African non-profits teaching coding and entrepreneurial skills to vulnerable youth, women, and prisoners. She has written a critically acclaimed memoir about growing up in Botswana. She has also worked for the Financial Times.

The team at Apolitical works passionately towards “fixing” the Democracy Flywheel on three levels: making politics a credible and trustworthy path, making the narrative around governments and civil servants one of talent and pride rather than “necessary evil”, and reviving interest among citizens in a democracy based on free-flowing and accurate information, where democracy is not “traded in” in return of quick fixes.

In our conversation, we talk about how Apolitical is working to facilitate peer learning among civil servants, creating a go-to marketplace for new ideas and innovations. Beyond that, we also explore emerging aggregation possibilities in the space of government platforms such as the potential to aggregate private sector suppliers to let the best emerge across the space.

We also talk about current tensions between the imagined “global village”, a trend of fragmentation and localism, and the fact that we won’t find all solutions in any of these extremes.

A very thought-worthy conversation about a sector that arguably has to yet reap all the benefits in a platforms and ecosystems world.

To find out more about Robyn’s work:

• Website: https://apolitical.co/
• LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/robynscott
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/RobynScott

Other references and mentions:

• The Apolitical Academy https://www.apolitical.academy/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/apoliticalco
• McKinsey Center for Government (MCG), Government productivity: Unlocking the $3.5 trillion opportunity: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/the-opportunity-in-government-productivity#
• Alison Gopnik, The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us about the Relationship Between Parents and Children, 2016: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gardener-Carpenter-Development-Relationship-Children/dp/0374229708

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music

Recorded on 15 December 2020.

Key Insights

1. One of the key motivations for Apolitical is to unlock the colossal amount of value “locked up” in governments, partly due to the insufficient sharing of lessons learned between them. By enabling peer-to-peer learning, civil servants can go beyond word of mouth and start adopting solutions that have worked elsewhere. More than providing great opportunities for saving public resources, being part of a platform like Apolitical also helps increase motivation and a sense of pride among often (portrayed as) “faceless” civil servants locked up in a bureaucratic machine.

•  Listen to an excerpt by Robyn on how they unlock value through peer learning at min 6:26.

2. Governments are facing “existential competition”, with the last few years showing us that liberal democracy is more vulnerable than we might have thought. Therefore, they need to invent ways to regain the trust of citizens, not the least by involving them more directly in policy-making processes. Apolitical is working to make the relationship between governments and citizen-med innovations more porous, leveraging on new technologies and creating new supply aggregation possibilities in areas like public procurement. Robyn also urges us to think of governments as systems part of the Democracy Flywheel, where it’s enough for one part to be broken, for the network effects to slow down and erode over time. That’s why they have developed the non-profit arm — Apolitical Academy — to forge a new path for politicians across the political spectrum.

•  Listen to Robyn on the “existential competition” governments face at min 25:40.
•  Listen to an excerpt explaining the Democracy Flywheel at min 36:36

3. The counterforces between globalization — the dream of a “global village” — and regional fragmentation are difficult to balance. While we’re seeing a correction to an idea of globalization that was probably too generic, Robyn believes that we might need a correction in the other direction, not to fall entirely on the localism side of the spectrum, since some issues really require more united responses.

•  Listen to Robyn’s thoughts on the Global Village and fragmentation at min 45:11.

? Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of large scale organizing by leveraging on technology, network effects, and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.