A more social civil service is needed for a true open governance

Sadly I missed the Civil Service Live event in June when Will Perrin presented his thoughts around how the civil service should start to wise up about social media.  Reading his presentation, I liked the way they nicely summed up the fact that over the last 30 years it’s been business as usual for the civil service but how the disruption of social media has led to the beginning of the end.

The big change and focus they seemed to identify was one of knowledge – which is kind of obvious, but maybe has to be clearly stated to Civil Servant audience.  However, if I was putting together this presentation it  wouldn’t be the need for a  change of how knowledge is dealt with (i.e. shared internally / crowdsourced externally), but rather a more far-reaching “character-based culture change”.  In short, Civil Servants need to become truly social.

As changing the Civil Service into a more social beast is going to take more than simply getting people to share their ideas via delicious.  “Being social” requires the embedding of a whole host of other skills and characteristics, which may seem quite alien to the more greying civil servants.  Social skills like:
- Being open
- Listening
- Sharing
- Being conversational
- Being nice

I’m not saying civil servants aren’t these things.  I know a lot of civil servants, and they’re all humans (obviously) and (mostly) extremely nice people.  However I think there’s a wider socially-orientated organisational culture shift – especially at the top of the civil service – that is needed, off the back of which practical things like knowledge sharing and participative policy-making will flow much more easily (and naturally).