"I hate the government" - excerpt

I was travelling home to my small, rural community from the city recently, and ran into someone on the ferry that I’ve known for many years – this is where many impromptu connections tend to happen in this part of the world. We hadn’t seen each other in a long time, so we were catching up on what we’re up to these days. I shared with her that I was working on a book about innovation in the public sector. She immediately cut me off with “I hate the government!”

Now, before you react strongly in one way or another, here is a bit more context. In her catch up with me, she shared that over the past weekend she was one of the hosts of a community dialogue about the official community plan renewal process that is underway where I live. The hosting team managed to get more than 200 people out (in a community of only a few thousand) on a rainy Sunday to talk about planning. She has also done decades of work on local sustainability and community health initiatives. Her opinion is informed by many years of working in-, along-, and outside of government to create change. My inside voice was saying all kinds of (mostly ungenerous) things: do you not enjoy the benefits of the education that your children have received; that you have received? Are you not grateful for the medical care that the parent you were just visiting was able to freely access? Do you not appreciate having clean drinking water arrive to your house, and having your garbage taken away? Do you not rely on riding this ferry that we are currently on? You get the idea.

The public sector is not known for being innovative. It is an oft maligned entity that shapes our lives in so many ways yet is inaccessible and opaque to most, by design. Trust and participation are low in many democracies while fiscal, social, environmental and other pressures continue to grow. The people, processes, structures, and budgets of this massive and diverse sector are rapidly being outpaced and overrun by the urgency, breadth, and complexity of challenges that we are facing in this time. Transformation toward socio-economic and ecological wellbeing and flourishing for all - humans and the natural world – is necessary, and the public sector has a vital role and responsibility in these efforts.

There are many ways that we can and are getting this wrong. There is dramatic evidence of this in recent years as self-interested, profit-oriented, and power-hungry interests grow in influence in explicit and implicit ways in governments around the world. There are ambitious innovation agendas that reproduce dominant logics and may realise meaningful outcomes in one domain while causing harm in others. There are unimaginative, short-term, and cowardly political and bureaucratic decisions that inhibit change or take us in the wrong direction. Change and transformation gets bogged down, lost in mazes of processes that take up massive amounts of time and resources. And of course, there is also the very boring, mundane, day-to-day and ubiquitous delivery of public services that is lodged within well-travelled grooves even if those grooves aren’t taking us where we want and need to be going.

Many contemporary systems of governance (and society more generally) draw heavily from the values and ethos of control, colonialism, extraction, and oppression leading us deeper and deeper into systems that perpetuate exploitation and inequities for humans and relations within the natural world. Much public management, policy, administration, and planning theory and practice is shaped by the same values and ethos – sometimes more obviously so and sometimes buried deeply and harder to see. The influence of management approaches from the private sector have leaked into the public sector in both helpful and unhelpful ways, and the consequences of this are not often critically examined in practice. The more specific domain of public innovation tends to be embedded within these dominant logics as well, even while trying to do things differently. It is easy and perhaps even reasonable to be stuck in these grooves, feeling that incremental and marginal improvements are the best that we can do in the public sector given all the pressures that we are facing. I think that this is what my friend on the ferry was frustrated by after all of her years trying to work toward sustainability and wellbeing.

I believe that we can and must do better than this and know that in fact, many of us already are. However, the public servants that are getting outside of these dominant approaches, dislodging themselves from the grooves, are often invisible, marginalized, and alone and their stories remain untold. I have met and worked with public servants who are actively figuring out how to ambitiously and courageously transform the public sector from within. Rather than being constrained by dominant frames of public sector innovation and governance, they are breaking free from these and experimenting with adjacent possibilities rooted in other worldviews. Rather than re-creating yet another version of innovation based on improving what already-is, they are imagining and enacting a more transformative innovation focused on what must be-come and using their muscles to hold open those portals of possibility.

They are expert dancers in this fraught space of remaining credible, legible, and impactful within the dominant systems of governance in which they work, while still making elsewheres together. They practice solidarity, mutual aid, and collaborative leadership - often with limited formal authority - by using non-hierarchical, mycelial, and sometimes subversive forms of distributed power. They are leading with values and purpose and taking big personal and professional risks to stay true to those in everything that they do. They are focused on building authentic, trust-based, accountable relationships, often with people most affected by the challenges that they are grappling with. They are finding and making ways when there is no way, and keeping at these labours in very difficult conditions with a great deal of love.

In my book I share some of their/our stories, woven with lessons from the natural world, insights from diverse thinkers beyond traditional public sector fields, and examples from my own experiences as a public innovation practitioner, educator, and applied researcher. I’ve written the book as a cycle of seasons to indicate a non-linear and ongoing cadence that does not have an end point. This intentionally problematizes the more linear and short-term ‘solutioning’ bias that is common in both public administration and innovation fields. This seasonal structure is the first of many troublesome encounters that I hope you will have as I attempt to get us out of the grooves we have made for ourselves as public innovation scholars and practitioners. I also hope that this work serves to help us find and uplift each other as transformational characters.

We’ll push our hands deeply into the soils that feed our work, getting some dirt under our fingernails along the way. We’ll consider the seeds that we plant and the water and sunlight that nourishes us. We will explore composting and going fallow in our practice, knowing that these processes are essential for the next harvest season. We will listen for lessons from natural systems and cycles, anti-oppressive and decolonial thinkers, and deep practitioner experiences with transforming from within to see if we can coax something healthy and abundant to grow through our collective labours.

Cole, Lindsay (2026). Transforming the Public Sector from Within. University of Toronto Press.