Advice – Excited Pixels

The Unwritten Rules for Engaging Government

Governments have formal processes, rules, and institutions. But anyone who has spent much time working in or around government also knows that there are plenty of unwritten conventions about how things actually get done, including how organizations effectively engage with ministers and their offices.

For people outside of government, political offices, or professional advocacy, many of those conventions can be surprisingly opaque. Not knowing them can also mean inadvertently undermining your own advocacy efforts.

FutureBridge, which provides training on engaging with and working alongside government, has published a particularly useful series of posts that helps demystify some of this. They cover the unwritten rules of meeting with ministers, understanding the role(s) of exempt political staff in ministerial offices, how governments and political staff actually approach policy development, and some of the fundamentals of effective advocacy.

As I read through them, I found myself repeatedly nodding along. At the same time, a few things that I’ve done (or watched others do) over the years clicked into place. Some of the advice articulates practices that people who spend a lot of time around government may follow almost instinctively, without necessarily stopping to explain why they work.

It’s possible to agree or disagree with individual pieces of advice in the series. Some of those differences will come down to personal experience or preference, differences between sectors, or other factors. Taken as a whole, though, there is a lot here that organizations engaging with governments would benefit from reading, internalizing, and turning into consistent practices.

Most valuable to me is how clearly the series illustrates what organizations should be doing before, during, and after an engagement with government. Effective advocacy is not simply about getting the meeting or making the argument once you are in the room. It requires preparation, follow-through, and organizational capacity. The posts help make visible the time and resources that are more likely to give an organization’s advocacy a meaningful chance of success.

For people working in government or operating as professional advocacy / lobbying bodies, much of this may seem obvious. For everyone else, and particularly those who only occasionally interact with ministers’ offices, it offers useful institutional literacy. It can help organizations think more carefully about how they advocate for a preferred course of action and, just as importantly, recognize when an advocacy strategy may be poorly positioned to succeed from the outset.

I have the privilege of working at a place where remote work has been a fact of life for some of our employees and fellows, whereas the bulk of us have worked out of a beautiful workspace. Obviously, the pandemic has forced everyone out of the office and into their homes and, with that, has come a forced realization that its important to get a lot better at handling remote work situations.

For the past few months I’ve been trying to collect and read resources to ensure that remote-based work, works. To date the most helpful resources have definitely been the huge set of resources that Doist has published, and their ‘book’ on leading distributed work forces in particular, as well as some of the publications by Steph Yiu based on her own remote work experiences at Atomattic. I’m also slowly working through some of the work that’s come out of Basecamp, and I’m keen to dig into Remote: Office Not Required over the fall.

Some of the most valuable stuff I’ve picked up has been around re-thinking which communications systems make sense, and which don’t, and how to develop or maintain a team culture with new and old colleagues. And some of these things are really basic: when someone joins an organization, as an example, rather than just saying ‘hi’ or ‘welcome!’ over chat, all members of a team can instead state who they are, their position, some of their areas of responsibility, and one or two personal things. By providing more information the new team members start to get a feeling for what the rest of their team does and, through the personal attributes, a sense of who they are working with.

Given that many of us are likely to be working from our homes for the foreseeable future—and some of us permanently, even after the pandemic—it seems important for employers, managers, and employees alike to think through what they want to change, and how, so that we can not just enjoy the fact that we’re still employed but, also, that we’re working in ways that provide dignity and respect, and which are designed to best help us succeed in our jobs. We’re all 5-6+ months into the pandemic and we should be very seriously asking what kind of world we want to inhabit both throughout the rest of the pandemic, as well as afterwards, and we can’t keep saying that things are ‘unprecedented’ to excuse not trying to make our work environments better suited to the current and future realities we’re within.