Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

Government Will Not Act Until You Speak Up

I work in government in the public service, and I see government from within the offices and hallways of the bureaucracy. I operate in the public service which means I do not see what happens in the political wing of democratic government, but I see what happens in the administrative middle-ground between the political decision-makers and the front lines where agencies actually do the work. A colleague recounted to me last week about her discussion with someone from one of the Province’s emergency response teams, who asked very straightforwardly, “What is the Government doing this year to make the team better?” That is an honest and sensible question.

There is a concept that I’m sure many who went to business school learned about: kaizen, or continuous improvement. The idea behind this is to make small improvements on a continual basis so that, over time, you end up with significant improvement over where you started but without having taken any momentous leaps at any point. It’s the idea you may have come across in personal improvement about being 1% better each day, or learning 1 new word each day or doing 1 new thing each day. It’s something that every high-performing organization really ought to have instilled in its culture.

As I’ve written before, government is not about excellence. Government does not, in all honesty, need to be excellent because there is no competition. Furthermore, the culture is risk averse to the extreme, finding it better not to do something than to do the wrong thing.

The end result is that a government as a political entity, and the unelected, for-the-most-part obedient bureaucracy working for it, will only do what it has to out of practical necessity or out of political urgency. You may have noticed that the latter often trumps the former.

My colleague in the instance mentioned answered the team leader in a very diplomatic manner, but would have liked to say, “Don’t you know by now that government won’t do anything unless it has explicitly committed itself to doing it?” In other words, there is no concept of continuous improvement in government. Well, that’s not entirely true – I think there may be the occasional speech or motivational memo (isn’t that in itself an oxymoron?) that talks about the pursuit of excellence in the organization – but in my opinion and based upon what I’ve heard over the years from my colleagues, the concepts of excellence and continuous improvement are foreign to the public service (and almost assuredly equally foreign to many elected officials).

If there is something that you feel your government – be it municipal, regional, provincial/state-level, or federal – ought to be doing, you need to write to your representatives and even call their offices. In a democratic government, elected officials run the government and its bureaucracy and require your votes to be re-elected. They want to know what you are concerned about because they will focus their attentions on what you are concerned about, and not on what you don’t give a damn about. It’s logical, really. If they represent you, and as far as they can tell, you don’t care about Issue A, they won’t lift a finger about it. They will not spend a dime on it, they will not devote any government resources to it. But, if enough constituents write or call about Issue B, it may garner enough political weight that the machinery of government starts to move and do something about it.

You may well receive a form letter response, but keep at it. Don’t take an answer about how the issue is “important” or that it’s a “priority” at face value, either. I once heard a colleague remark how she had heard from a Communications rep say, only half-jokingly, that saying something is “a priority” means very little because the government has so many things labeled as “priorities” that in reality none of them are actually priorities. Press for a commitment. You likely won’t get it, but at least you have to try – that is your right as a citizen.

If there is something you really and truly think that your government should or should not be doing, you need to put in some effort. You need to say something, say it strongly, say it often. Your voice counts, particularly when the vast majority of the populace remains silent.

There are some, or even many, politicians who want to do the right thing and do good things, but they need to hear from you. There are many public servants who want to do the right thing and do good things, but we can only do what our political leadership enables us to do. All of us, as individual citizens, are ultimately responsible for getting our voices and concerns heard.

If you want your government – at any level, in any jurisdiction – to be doing something, you have to speak up and say something to your elected officials.

How Do the Taliban Train Young Boys to Be Suicide Bombers?

Two of the most important things we in the privileged world can do to make the world a safer place is to make it a better world for all. Not just ourselves, not just our neighbours, but for all.

1. Economic development because it brings hope and options.
2. Literacy and freedom of information because it enables people to truly think for themselves.

Many of us have probably asked the question how a person becomes a suicide bomber. What is it that “makes” someone do such a thing?

This little video from Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy presented at a TED conference sheds a little light on those questions:

New Restaurant in Markham: Mong Kok Chinese Restaurant

I tried a new Cantonese restaurant in Markham yesterday called Mong Kok (like the neighborhood in Hong Kong). It’s located in the plaza on the southwest corner of Kennedy & Highway 7 (at 8360 Kennedy Road), and when I went it was only its third day in operation. When I say new, I mean very literally new!

Since it was only a party of 2 at the table, we tried their $24 combo for 2:

• soup (lai tong)
• bbq platter
• 2 main dishes (song)
• dessert

The bbq platter came first, and was barbecue pork (cha siu) and soya chicken. It tasted pretty good, particularly the chicken, but the bbq pork was a little tough. The platter was alright. Unfortunately, the first thing on the table really should have been the soup, which we had to ask two different servers for before it arrived.

The soup was quite tasty, with an obvious pork bone flavor and what might have been fuzzy melon. It’s hard to say, because they served the soup in individual portions (which is different from most other Cantonese restaurants that serve in large communal serving bowl) and had only given us the soup liquid. We wondered whether there was MSG in there, but since my dining partner is usually quite sensitive to it but experienced no issues, the soup is probably MSG free. That speaks well of the restaurant.

The two main dishes we selected were stir fried pork neck/jowl with vegetables and stir fried chicken slices with bitter melon in black bean sauce. They stir-fried well, with obvious wok hei, and decently tasty but they really could have used some more flavor. The meat could have been marinated longer or at least more flavoring added during cooking. The portion sizes were good: we had enough left over to take back home and use for lunch today.

Dessert should have been something like red bean dessert (hong dao sah) but they were out by the time we got there, so we had honeydew melon for dessert.

All in all, the food was decent. The environment is nice, like what a decent, large Cantonese restaurant should be. Service for the most part was good.

I say for the most part because there was one young gentleman who was very rude to his colleagues. Seriously rude and was grating on his colleagues. He never interacted with us – he looked to be a busboy – but since we understood what he was saying to his colleagues and obviously heard the tone, I was left with the impression that he’s a nasty little bugger with a serious attitude problem. The service staff who interacted with us were good with but one exception. We paid by credit card and they brought the wireless card machine to our table to process the payment – but the gentleman never said thank you after we paid he walked away to process the next table’s card payment.

Mong Kok is a decent Cantonese restaurant. There are those that are better, and there are many more that are worse. I wouldn’t specifically recommend this restaurant, but I feel no need to warn anyone away from it, either.

Logistics Makes for Successful Emergency Response Team Deployment

My academic instruction and my own continued readings reinforce the premise that logistics will make or break an emergency response effort. My experience and what I hear from other deployed teams strengthens my belief in the absolute importance of logistical considerations. The debrief session from one of our emergency response teams’ deployment for the G8 Summit drilled home the point repeatedly.

The team’s deployment went smoothly. In fact, they were testing out their recently modularized equipment and the setup and teardown went so smoothly that both were completed ahead of schedule. The 3-day around-the-clock deployment went without a hitch. Although the team was not placed under heavy stress on this deployment, since nothing much happened up in Huntsville during the G8 Summit, it was nonetheless a good test of the team’s logistical capabilities to deploy and operate smoothly.

Lessons from the deployment include the following:

• Ensuring a continuous and uninterrupted fuel supply for the power generators takes more attention and effort than you might think
• Ensuring sufficient generator capacity is crucial – you have to calculate it out before your deployment and build in a sufficient safety margin in case your generator is outputting below spec or you end up using more equipment simultaneously than planned
• Hand hygiene is an often-overlooked but critical consideration – gastrointestinal issues can easily crop up around temporary camps unless you make sure everyone keeps their hands clean, and putting up hand sanitizer pump stations all over the place is a great thing to do
• Potable water is always critical, and all the more so during a hot summer deployment
• Equipment needs to be sufficiently “weatherized” – the team experienced 50-60kph wind gusts during the deployment and were glad their new tents were anchored well and adequately weatherized, which in the past was not always the case
• Feed your people good quality food – it’s important for morale, and it’s necessary in order to keep your people running at peak performance for an extended period of time
• Ensure sufficient lighting – when you have equipment and power cables going everywhere through your camp, shadows cast by your tents and equipment are health & safety hazards
• Ensure proper security fencing & guards around the camp to enforce perimeter security

The biggest lessons were actually the hand safety, generator capacity and lighting.

At other camps set up by other organizations, there were some gastrointestinal issues that may have been due to hand hygiene. At a high-profile international event many years ago, site security was at risk due to food poisoning due to poor food safety. People have to eat, and you know from your own experiences as a tourist that if you eat something that isn’t clean or that has been sitting out for too long that you aren’t going to be in any condition to do a serious job for at least a half day. Your people can be taken out of commission by something as simple as hand hygiene or food safety. This specific team’s deployment, however, went totally smoothly and part of that was due to the attention paid to hand hygiene.

Generator capacity is an area where more is better than not enough. The team learned that its one generator was sufficient for this deployment but did not give them a sufficient safety margin in terms of power availability. They will be procuring a second generator and bringing it along to future deployments. Note, however, that this increases load on your logistics team to keep a continuous, uninterrupted supply of fuel coming in.

Finally, lighting was a revelation to the team. It had brought along its standard lighting setup which in the past had always been “sufficient.” However, for this deployment they borrowed additional lighting equipment from an urban search & rescue team and, apparently, it was like night and day. Having more and better lighting kept the camp safer and would have enabled the team to operate at the same tempo & intensity in the middle of the night as during the middle of the day.

Think about any of the times you have had emergency deployments or had to activate emergency response plans. I’m willing to bet that logistics will have played a role in many cases, either clearly enabling a successful outcome or clearly causing many needless troubles or challenges.

When you are putting together emergency response plans or business continuity plans, give serious thought to your logistics. Think through the practical elements of what it takes to get the job done and what it takes to keep your people safe and at their best.

Logistics can, very literally, make or break you.

Little Big Soldier: A Jackie Chan Movie that Actually Made Me Feel Something

Jackie Chan’s movies – at least anything I’ve seen since Police Story 1 – are usually entertaining but ultimately forgettable fluff. I saw Little Big Soldier this week, and while it isn’t a cinematic masterpiece by any stretch, I think that it’s very well done as cinematic art. It is entertaining, and almost uniquely among Jackie Chan movies, actually got my emotions moving.

This is ultimately an enemies-become-friends movie, which has been done a number of times, of course. This one, however, is set in the China’s Warring States Period (475BC – 221BC) and the differences between the two main characters are not ultimately political or military. Yes, Jackie Chan’s character is an older, common footsoldier from the State of Liang, and Lee-Hom Wang’s chatacter is a young general from the State of Wei. The principal difference between them is one of life goal’s and outlook. Jackie Chan’s character is a farmer at heart – he longs to live in peace and tend his own farm. Lee-Hom’s character is an ambitious aristocrat with defeating the other nations and subsuming China under his personal rule. One is a commoner, through and through, who longs simply to live in peace. The other is a military man, who sees military conquest as the road to peace.

The story is not complicated, and of course has its own holes and shortcomings. The characters are not particularly deep, particularly all those other than the two principal characters. The fight scenes are nice, but nothing like the acrobatic & choreographic wonders that Jackie Chan used to do when he was young. What, then, redeems this film?

I found it entertaining and engaging because I liked the main characters and the dynamic between them. They are both good, honorable men who – through the film’s various trials and challenges, forge a strong bond together. They never become buddies, but they highly respect one another.

And… the ending. I found the ending of the film very touching, though it is not in any way a happy ending. One man’s world and dreams are shattered, and the other man is changed to the core forever.

I did not expect the ending, and I felt that it was very well done. One of the themes throughout the movie is about the very human cost of war, and seeing the demise of one of the main characters to whom I had grown attached personalized it.

Indeed, I found myself thinking this morning how very little our history books capture this very basic and immediate fact of history and warfare. “The Romans conquered France.” “Qin conquered and unified China.” These are statements of fact that entirely omit the human experience of those times. Films, however, are a medium that can be artfully used to truly move an audience to understand the human side of history. Anyone who has seen Schindler’s List, The Pianist, or Life is Beautiful has experienced this. Little Big Soldier cannot objectively be held to the same level as Schindler’s List, but to me the film brought home its message just as strongly – although having done so with humor throughout most of the movie.

I greatly enjoyed this movie, and I certainly would like to see more movies from Jackie Chan done with this level of heart and thought.