Being Curious as a Public Servant (FON1-V54)

Transcript: Being Curious as a Public Servant

[00:00:00 Animated CSPS logo appears. Text on screen: Webcast.]

[00:00:06 Neeta Thawani appears full screen. Text on screen: Neeta Thawani, Canada School of Public Service.]

Neeta Thawani: Good afternoon, and welcome. My name is Neeta Thawani, a faculty member here at the Canada School of Public Service. I will be your session moderator today for this presentation, Being a Curious Public Servant. Thank you for joining us.

Before we begin, I'd like to recognize that I'm speaking to you from the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people. I'm very grateful to be here. I invite all of us to take a moment to reflect on the Indigenous territories we occupy, and to consider how we can deepen our connections with Indigenous people and communities. I also recognize that participants may be joining us from all across Canada, each on different Indigenous territories. I encourage you to take a moment to reflect on the land that you're on, as well as the history.

Today, we're here to talk about curiosity. Curiosity is an important driver of creative thinking, stronger teams, and achieving meaningful results, both individually and collectively. For public servants, specifically, curiosity means always seeking better ways to serve the public, which leads to greater government effectiveness and innovation.

In today's session, we'll explore why curiosity matters, and how it impacts us as public servants. We'll talk about how it shapes our ability to provide expert advice, embrace new ideas, and continually learn so that we can all improve program and service delivery for Canadians.

It's my privilege to introduce Dr. William Hatcher to all of you. Dr. Hatcher brings a wealth of expertise to this really important conversation.

[00:02:05 Split screen: Neeta Thawani and Dr. William Hatcher.]

Neeta Thawani: Dr. Hatcher is a Professor of Political Science and Public Administration and serves as a chair of the Department of Social Sciences at Augusta University. He also serves as the co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Public Affairs Education. Dr. Hatcher holds a BSC in Political Science, a Master's in Public Administration, both from Georgia College and State University. He followed this by a PhD in Public Policy and Administration from Mississippi State University.

In addition to all his academic achievements, Dr. Hatcher has practical experience as a public planner and as a chair of the Board of Adjustment in Richmond. Dr. Hatcher is also an author. He's the author of the insightful book, The Curious Public Administrator. This book explores the transformative role of curiosity in public administration. The book provides valuable insights on how curiosity drives learning, sparks innovation, and improves public service delivery. Themes that align closely with today's discussion and conversation.

Before I pass it on to William, I'd like to remind everyone that Dr. Hatcher will take your questions after this presentation. Please click on the little chat bubble icon located in the top right-hand corner of your screen to send in your questions throughout the presentation. So, without further ado, let us all warmly welcome Dr. Hatcher. William, over to you.

[00:03:52 Dr. William Hatcher appears full screen. Text on screen: Dr. William Hatcher, Professor and Department Chair, Augusta University.]

Dr. William Hatcher: Thank you so much, and thank you all for joining, and thank you to the Canadian School of Public Service for having me talk on this very important topic. Of course, I'm biased because it's the research and findings that came out of a book project that I worked on for about five years, so I've spent a good bit of time on this. But really, I'm glad to be here to help spread the word about how we make decisions, and how we make decisions in a way that seeks to understand how the world works by using curiosity. And how curiosity is something that in many ways we think we're doing, but it is a skill that we can learn to do better.

[00:04:41 Split screen: Dr. William Hatcher and slide showing Dr. Hatcher's credentials titled “The Curious Public Administrator: A New Administrative Doctrine.]

Dr. William Hatcher: I'm from, as you probably can tell a little bit from my accent, I'm from down south in the United States. I'm at Augusta University – as the great introduction told everybody – that's in the state of Georgia, in the United States.

A lot of the research that's reported in this book was conducted in the United States, but I hope we can have questions. Then, at the end, there's some material in the presentation that will cover and go over some of the findings in their relationship to the Canadian context. But throughout the presentation, I'll use public administrators, public servants, public managers interchangeably. In many ways, the way we study and the way we practice, as you all know, it falls under a broad umbrella that we are servants for the public good, so throughout the presentation, I'll use those terms interchangeably.

[00:05:48 Split screen: Dr. William Hatcher and slide showing headlines from articles: The Business Case for Curiosity, by Francesca Gino; The Power of Curiosity in the Workplace, by Chelsea Spencer Smith; How to boost curiosity in your company – and why, by Dylan Walsh.]

Dr. William Hatcher: When it comes to curiosity, what do we mean? Curiosity is about how we make decisions. In many ways, though, public administration, what we do as public servants for our communities is about making decisions. Our field of public administration, and scholarship, and practice, it's about making those decisions in a way that's based in evidence.

If you approach public administration and public service with that foundational motivation that we seek answers to how the world works, that's curiosity. Really, for our organizations, we can improve our decision-making processes by recognizing the value of curiosity and trying to spread it throughout our academic programs in public administration, the research we do on public administration practice, and as managers and public servants in the field.

The business sector already does this. Well, we do a good job in the public sector, too. My background's in the public sector, and we're talking about public administration, and we're public servants, so of course, we're biased. But we can learn something from the business side, from private sectors and private organizations.

For years, there's been a lot of research recognizing the importance of curiosity in the private sector. I've got some clips here, screenshots up from some articles across the board, from Harvard Business Review to MIT, looking at articles that have made the case in the private sector for why curiosity, as a value, as a practice, is important.

[00:07:38 Split screen: Dr. William Hatcher and slide with headline: Curiosity and What Equality Really Means, by Atul Gawande.]

Dr. William Hatcher: But why did I come to this argument and started a book project and doing presentations like this to make the case for curiosity. In 2018, I read this article in The New Yorker, and it really hit home because in the article, Atul Gawande talked about how he had a patient who had been convicted of a horrible crime. The ethical dilemmas that doctors often face in those situations where they may be hesitant to treat an individual who has done horrible things, but because of their profession, because of the service they're doing, they have a responsibility to be curious and treat that individual in a way that is based on evidence that is rooted in providing the best medical care possible.

As public administrators, we often face situations where we are having to do decisions, or put in place policies that really, we have to look at the bottom line, at the foundation. Are we trying to make these decisions based on evidence and take away our preconceived notions of maybe how the world works or what we should do and try to find evidence to support what we're doing.

[00:09:10 Split screen: Dr. William Hatcher and slide titled “A new doctrine: the curious public administrator”. Text on slide:

• Curiosity is a crucial aspect of seeking and acquiring knowledge; it is about realizing that one is ignorant of how the world works and seeking information to dispel that ignorance (Inan, 2013).
• Curiosity is a “motive” that drives individuals to learn more about their worlds (Opdal, 2001).
• Philips, Evans, and Muirhead (2015) have argued that curiosity about an individual's place in the world positively affects her wellbeing, making for a healthier, better adjusted individual.
• Phillips (2015) has further deduced from the scholarly literature three reasons to “talk about curiosity” (pp. 14-15): it produces positive effects, helps us improve lives, and has intrinsic value.]

Dr. William Hatcher: Out of that, like everything in research and practice, we have to have clear definitions of what we're talking about. This presentation, it builds on getting in more detail. More detail about curiosity in the public sector and what we mean by it. It is a process of seeking and acquiring knowledge about how the world works. We're interested in the way things are.

Oftentimes, as public administrators, we do a lot. We do a little of a lot. Especially in rural and small communities, the local city manager, city administrator, chief administrative official for our local governments. One moment, they may be involved in public safety. The next moment, they may be involved in economic development. So, you have to have a drive to be interested in understanding how a lot of things work. That motivation drives you to look and answer questions, not be comfortable sometimes with the way things are.

Research has shown, especially in psychology, and also, as I started, we've already discussed a few slides before, that research has really shown, from psychology and the private sector, that being curious, for the most part, is just not good for you as a private sector manager or a public servant, it's also good for you as an individual. Individuals who are curious tend to be happier and better adjusted.

[00:10:40 Split screen: Dr. William Hatcher and slide titled “Defining curiosity...”. Text on slide:

• The intellectual motivation to objectively learn how the world works (Hatcher, 2019a; Hatcher, 2019b; Inan, 2013).]

Dr. William Hatcher: But again, we have to have a clear definition, so we get what we're talking about. Curiosity is one of those terms and concepts that when you hear it used, you know what it means. But as you know, in research, we have to clearly define it. When we talk about new ways of doing things in practice, we have to have a clear definition.

That clear definition that we've used in our research, and it's in the book project, is curiosity is the intellectual motivation to objectively learn how the world works. The intellectual motivation to objectively learn how the world works. We're being motivated to figure out how the world works in as objective a manner as possible.

Now, objectivity and subjectivity are things that are often debated, in the sciences. But with curiosity, what we're getting at, and what the book looks at, is that we're really trying to be as objective as possible by recognizing our own biases and looking at the evidence when we're faced with decisions.

[00:11:45 Split screen: Dr. William Hatcher and slide titled “The dimensions of curiosity”.

Text on slide: Kashdan and colleagues (2018) reviewed psychology's literature and identified the “five dimensions of curiosity.”

• Deprivation sensitivity or realizing “a gap in knowledge.”
• Joyous exploration or enjoying learning how the world works.
• Social curiosity or seeking to learn from others through interactions.

Stress tolerance or being open to deal with the frustration that may come from new things. Thrill-seeking or seeking to take risks. (p. 58-60).]

Dr. William Hatcher: Out of that definition of curiosity comes more research and literature that has been done in the private sector on exactly what does that mean in practice. Researchers have identified five key dimensions. As we'll talk about in a few slides, we apply these dimensions to the public sector workplace in our research to determine whether public managers, public servants, are expressing curiosity in how they describe their work in the public workplace. But the dimensions are a realization that you have a gap in knowledge and that you actually enjoy knowing that you don't know everything about how the world works and trying to figure out answers to what you don't know.

Now, that's harder than it seems for many of us to step back and recognize, I don't know as much as I think I know, and I need to fill those gaps in knowledge. Curious individuals don't see that as a problem. A lot of us, especially PhDs that teach things, have issues identifying, realizing we don't know a lot about how the world works. From that, whether you're an introvert or extrovert, you have to have a certain level or degree of social curiosity to work with others to try to find answers.

In public administration, I'm an introvert myself, so sometimes it's hard, because we do so much in teams. In research and teaching, we do so much in teams. But that's part of seeking this social connection to advance knowledge about how the world works. Again, you have to have a certain tolerance to not knowing everything and to trying to figure out how the world works and to realizing at times that you may not know how the world works and you may only know just a little bit about the questions that you're answering on a particular topic.

The last one is in the literature, but it's not directly related to us looking at how workers in the private sector and then the public sector behave in a curious manner. But the first four really deal with positive aspects of curiosity. But the last one deals with thrill-seeking and maybe a more negative feature of curiosity that people that are overly curious may make rash decisions. The old saying that “curiosity killed the cat”, that's where that comes from.

[00:14:28 Split screen: Dr. William Hatcher and slide titled “A theoretical framework for the curious public administrator”.

Text on slide: Curious public administrators demonstrate the following work-related features.

• First, they are knowledge seekers.
• Second, they practice empathy in the workplace.
• Third, the seeking of knowledge and practice empathy helps curious administrators care about their colleagues and the people that they serve.
• Lastly, seeking knowledge, practicing empathy, and caring leads curious administrators to be better learners than managers who lack curiosity, which in turn leads to learning and adaptive public organizations.]

Dr. William Hatcher: We took those four dimensions, not the last one on Thrill Seeking, but the four, and used it to construct a theoretical framework for curiosity in the public sector or the curious public administrator in the book.

That theoretical framework is based, again, that public administrators are knowledge seekers. They practice empathy in the workplace. They're curious about their colleagues and the communities that they serve. To make solid decisions, we have to seek evidence and be curious about the individuals we're serving.

Oftentimes, the best public administrators, that's the first question they ask, How will this affect the communities that we're serving? They fit this in to – managers that practice empathy, seeking knowledge, and being curious about the communities they serve, that will bubble up at a macro level to fit organizations that are adaptive and able to change, and organizations that practice curiosity to make better decisions.

[00:14:28 Split screen: Dr. William Hatcher and slide titled “A theoretical framework for the curious public administrator”. Text on slide:

• Hypothesis 1: Curious public administrators are more likely to view the objective search for knowledge as a crucial part of their jobs, compared to other parts of their work.
• Hypothesis 2: Curious public administrators are more likely to express the importance of practicing empathy as a part of their jobs, compared to other parts of their work.
• Hypothesis 3: Curious public administrators are more likely to express the importance of demonstrating caring behaviours as part of their jobs, compared to other parts of their work.
• Hypothesis 4: Curious public administrators are more likely to express the importance of learning, not just searching for knowledge, as part of their jobs, compared to other parts of their work.]

Dr. William Hatcher: This idea of those dimensions of curiosity, those four, those four dimensions help us develop that theoretical framework, and from that theoretical framework – I'm sorry, it's a little torturous. It's right after lunch for some of us. Some of us may be in other time zones, but we do have some hypotheses in the book and thinking about how we make decisions and collect data and research. That theoretical framework can be used to develop a few hypotheses that's in the book that allow us to figure out how the world works when it comes to public administrators, public servants who are being curious.

Public administrators that are curious are likely to view their job as searching for knowledge. That's an important part of the job. They express empathy for the individuals they serve. They express caring behaviours for the individuals they serve. They stress the importance of learning when they describe their work, and learning about the task they have to do, the nature of their job, and the individuals that they serve.

From those hypotheses, those four hypotheses, we can use that in relying on that four dimensions of curiosity in the workplace that has been administered as survey instruments in the private sector.

[00:17:08 Split screen: Dr. William Hatcher and slide titled “Data and Methods – City Managers”. Text on slide:

• Survey of city managers and administrators working in cities with 10,000 or more residents.
• The survey was administered via Qualtrics through emails in multiple waves between June 28, 2022, and July 28, 2022.
• The analysis in this book was based on 184 city managers and administrators throughout the nation.
• Administered demographic questions, city characteristic questions, and the M-Workplace Curiosity's 16 statements (Kashdan et al. 2018); Joyous Exploration (statements 1-4), Deprivation Sensitivity (statements 5-8), Stress Tolerance (statements 9-12), and Openness to People's Ideas (statements 13-16).]

Dr. William Hatcher: We could take that and construct a study for looking at actually how public administrators, public servants approach curiosity in the workplace. What we did, one part of the book, we collected data from city managers in the United States. In cities, the United States, being a federal system like Canada, but we really love local governments in the United States. We have around 90,000 local governments, thousands of cities, thousands of counties. We love local government. There's a lot of benefits to that.

At the local level in the United States, the way our cities, like many cities in Canada are organized, is that we have a manager council system where the city manager does a lot of the day-to-day governing of the city. Oftentimes, ideally, of course, we're biased in public administration and teaching master public administration graduates. We want them to be professionals hired with MPAs.

A lot of cities have city administrators, so what we did, looking at how public administrators behave from a curious standpoint at the local level in the United States, we surveyed chief city administrative officers in cities of 10,000 or more. Many studies just look at cities, or metro areas, with 50,000 or more. That's one way that this research contributes to our understanding of public administration, that we're looking at many small to rural communities, small to medium cities.

The chief administrative officer, we like a lot of variety, a lot of diversity in the United States when it comes to structure, even within individual states. Some, as I mentioned, are city managers, some are city administrators. Some people we surveyed, especially in a really small towns, 10,000 to 15,000. I say that when I come from a town where I grew up, they only had 500 people. So, these are somewhat large compared to where I'm from. But in those smaller communities, you may have city clerks who are the chief administrative officers.

So, we talked with around 180 city managers, and we administered – part of the survey was administering those – what's called the M-Workplace Curiosity's 16 statements instrument. That's basically taking those dimensions that we talked about earlier, being joyous about learning how the world works, realizing that you are deprived of knowledge, you don't actually know everything, and being able to deal with the stress of not knowing everything and not being able to agree all the answers to how the world works, and being open to talk to others and changing your way and your points of view of how the world works, to collect evidence, to make decisions rooted in evidence.

Now, from that workplace instrument that I just referenced, it's never been, until this book, applied to the public sector. It's been used in organizational psychology to get an idea of how private managers and private employees fall on those dimensions of curiosity, but it's never been applied to the public sector. That's one of the first things we did in this book.

[00:20:32 Split screen: Dr. William Hatcher and slide showing a table, as described.]

Dr. William Hatcher: So, look at this slide, I'm sorry, it's a little difficult to read. Just as a note, you should have received a copy of these slides in the reminder email about today's event, so you can look at this in greater detail or go back. My email is on there, and please email me if you have any questions or just want to talk more about these slides as well, the broader presentation.

But the way you minister the survey, the instrument, is we gave the city administrators a list of statements, and we asked them to give their opinion on how they agree, if it's right or wrong, ranging from very slightly to extremely likely. For example, I can spend hours on a single problem because I feel a need to find an answer. They would give their opinion of slightly, or not at all, to extremely likely. The idea on these is that extremely likely, when you have more folks giving that opinion, they're more curious and they're practicing more curiosity.

Well, what we found was, and you can see how the questions, statements 1 through 4, [are] about being joyous about learning how the world works. Statements 5 through 8 [are] about recognizing that you don't know everything about how the world works. 9 through 12, those statements get at being able to tolerate the stress of seeking how the world works and not knowing everything. Then the last ones, 13 through 16, get at, Are we open to understanding how the world works and working with others and adjusting our opinion based on what we find from others in evidence?

What we found is that, for the most part on these statements, the answers were very much in the direction of worker, employees, city administrators, city managers, public servants, being more curious. In particular, we found a lot of support for that openness to people's ideas. I don't have a slide for this, but when you take these ideas and the way public servants answered these statements and gave their opinions on it and compare it to the way private sector managers have answered these things, both groups tend to practice curiosity in their work, or say they do, on the surveys, but the public sector was stronger in their support. The public sector workers, when it comes to curiosity and how they answered these statements.

[00:23:14 Split screen: Dr. William Hatcher and slide titled “Data and Methods – NASPAA Faculty”. Text on slide:

The survey was administered by using an email database of NASPAA faculty. The database contained 2,645 faculty who received the survey. The survey was administered via Qualtrics through emails in multiple waves between June 28, 2022, and July 28, 2022.

Of the 2,645 faculty contacted by email, 329 started the survey, which is a response rate of 12.4%.

The survey contains 49 questions that collect data in the following areas:

• the characteristics of the faculty and their programs
• the demographics of the faculty
• their definitions of curiosity as a concept
• and their viewpoints of curiosity in the workplace and the field of public administration.

The survey includes the same 16-question instrument administered to city managers in Chapter 4.

In Chapter 4, this instrument is used in assessing the curiosity levels of the local public managers in the study.]

Dr. William Hatcher: What does that mean and how do we teach curiosity? We were really looking at, well, they practice curiosity. And if you have follow-up questions, there's more questions in the survey and data we collected getting at that. In the book, we talk about a number of case studies in the United States context, in the federal government, in some of our state governments, and nonprofit case studies, looking at how public administrators practice curiosity. They practice it, and we have information about how they're practicing it in that they're more open, especially compared to the private sector managers, and interacting with others, and changing their opinions based on that. The next step in the book, and I think where hopefully some of the discussion goes, is that we sought to figure out how we can teach curiosity in our classrooms, but also in the workplace.

If curiosity is a good thing, public managers tend to practice it, but there's always room for improvement, how can we teach it in our classes on public administration, which then we'll translate, because we're training public servants in those classes, to public administration and practice and how they teach it in the workplace.

We surveyed faculty among NASPAA programs. NASPAA is our international accrediting body in Public Administration. That body issues accreditation. It's a tough process. We just went through our reaccreditation here, so we're good for seven years. But it's a tough process to be accredited, and the accreditation goes to Master of Public Administration programs.

These are faculty members throughout the world. Of course, most are in the United States context because it's an organization that started in the United States. But there's a good number of NASPAA programs in Canada and throughout the world. These faculty working in these programs really are the ones that are the front lines of teaching current public servants going back to get a graduate degree, or future public servants, getting that credential of a Master of Public Administration or an MPA degree.

So, we talked with around 329 faculty members. We asked them questions about, How do you define curiosity? How do you teach it? We asked them questions along the lines of the same thing we did to the public servants, the city managers, city administrators. We asked them to give us their opinion on the in-workplace curiosity instrument, and we found some interesting things that I briefly want to talk about because even though we're not surveying city managers, in this case, about how they teach curiosity in the workplace, like I said, this is the first line of instructors that are teaching current and future administrators in the classroom, and those future current administrators will take that to the public sector workplace.

[00:26:27 Split screen: Dr. William Hatcher and slide showing a table, as described.]

Dr. William Hatcher: What did we find? Well, you can look at this. If my skills with PowerPoint were a little bit better, I may have tried to figure out how to superimpose this where you have this table with the table of results from the city managers, but that's a really busy slide. But you can see with this that, like the city managers, NASPAA faculty, when you administer the workplace survey of curiosity instrument, they are very curious also. They're even more curious on a number of measures, especially working with others.

What does that mean? Again, this tells us that based on how they're reporting, viewing certain acts of curiosity, those dimensions of curiosity in the workplace, they have strong likely attachment that certain things that are statements that get them to express that they're open to learning from others. They enjoy learning how the world works. They seek to solve problems. They're really open and say that that describes them well.

[00:27:40 Split screen: Dr. William Hatcher and slide titled “Defining Curiosity – Faculty Comments”. Text on slide:

When asked how they define the concept, the surveyed faculty discussed curiosity as asking “why,” seeking to solve puzzles, desiring to understand how the world works, and other ways of building knowledge and learning.

The top five words were desire, know, interest, something, and learn.]

Dr. William Hatcher: Well, a lot of what we learn in public administration comes from just taking survey data and quantitative data, data dealing with numbers, and then also taking qualitative data where we sit either by administering a survey through Qualtrics, or actually talking face-to-face, or on the phone with public managers, public servants, about how the world works. In this case, we saw in the survey to ask them to define curiosity. Their definitions of curiosity, some of the top words, desire to know, interest, something to learn, really fits in that definition that was rooted in the literature that we talked [about] at the beginning of the presentation. In that, they're really seeking in how the faculty defined curiosity is about having a desire to understand how the world works and the why for why it works that way.

[00:28:45 Split screen: Dr. William Hatcher and slide titled “Teaching Curiosity – Faculty Comments”. Text on slide:

• Case studies are good for curiosity. One case study was on parking fees, whether they should be changed, and how the different parking lots should be structured to negatively impact the least number of residents. Curious students actually looked at other parking fees and lots in other cities in order to answer the questions in the case and to develop their fees. Other students just answered the questions and used no other sources, just what was in their brain at the time they did their assignments.
• I have a neighbourhood inventory that cause students to explore their neighbourhoods.
• I look for ways to push students to engage in critical thinking – which I view as akin to engaging curiosity. Critical thinking encourages students to “think outside the box” and apply the information they are receiving in new, different, and sometimes unfamiliar ways. The curious student is oftentimes the one who best excels in engaging in critical thinking.
• One of the most useful ways to inculcate curiosity, is to note how much of public administration is counter-intuitive. For example, the concept of politics is multi-dimensional. Public administration conceptually is a political practice with those in and above middle management being political actors as well as managers and administrators. And they should be professional politicians, that is, profess critical political values around our city charters, constitutions, and laws. By confronting the conceptual complexity of public administration, curiosity is inevitably piqued as students when wonder why such distinctions are often not noted or handled well.
• Developing a problem statement of observed problems in their workplace including the history of how it came to be. Then write a theory based change plan to address the problem, including projecting probable consequences.]

Dr. William Hatcher: Then how do they approach? This slide, I'm sorry, is really busy. Once again, these slides are available by email. For some reason, if you have any questions or want to follow up on what's on it, just let me know. But really what a lot of this data is getting at, the way they described it, and just to give you information about how the faculty described teaching curiosity. A lot of them, most of them were really supported in that curiosity is something that you can teach.

A smaller group of the instructors, the faculty members that we surveyed, focused on that curiosity is not really something you can easily teach. It's more of a trait than a skill. But in the research and the scholarly literature decades ago, that's how often people approach leadership. But we learned over decades that you're not necessarily just born a good leader, or socialized to be a good leader, or grow up to be a good leader, you can also learn to be a good leader in certain situations. It's an aspect or characteristic that is a skill and not a trait. Most of the faculty felt that way about curiosity, too.

They talked about some ways they have taught it in their classes. A lot of them talked about how they teach it in most of all their classes, but classes dealing on research and how you collect data and answer questions with data. Those kinds of classes are the ones where they tend to teach it more. They tend to teach it by using case studies, examples. A lot of the stuff we can do in the workplace revolve around, well if we're trying to get our teams to think in a more curious way, use examples of how leaders, or how managers approach certain problems in communities, that that will encourage curiosity. That's how they describe the teaching of it. Trying to get their students out in communities, out and participating with the people they're serving to collect evidence and be curious about the lives people live.

[00:31:00 Split screen: Dr. William Hatcher and slide titled “Curiosity and the MPA Curriculum – Faculty Comments”. Text on slide:

• Introduction to PA (public administration), looking at how modern PA is a product of the reform movement yet informed by practitioners such as Alexander Hamilton. Strategic administration is another critical course for curiosity as complex organizations, a characteristic of most public agencies, are counter intuitive. This demands multi-dimensional administration to create and protect efficient task performance, nurture future constitutional administrators and forge the politics into a productive and mutual interaction with the specific publics, such as the media, and the general public.
• Public Administration Ethics and Organization Theory )because students are prone to think in very conventional terms about core issues in both courses).
• Intro to pa (public administration), methods classes (including statistics – how to answer questions), all of them – one PA failure is the failure to anticipate unintended consequences (e.g. of policy decisions) – students need to be encouraged to understand how their decisions will affect those impacted, which implies/requires curiosity.
• Every course can have a focus on being curious about the unknown, and discussing the anxiety of asking for help, and creating a sufficiently trusting work environment where it is safe to say, “I don't know.]

Dr. William Hatcher: I already mentioned this, but some of the questions asked, Well, where do you teach curiosity across the curriculum? I'll briefly go through this because this just so we can get to the more relevant material toward the end. But this is, like I said, most of the faculty members talked about they teach it in broad, the introduction of public administration course, but also research methods course.

Many MPA programs have courses on leadership and ethics. It's one of the classes I teach, and we talk a lot about curiosity in that and encourage curiosity. It's a lot of places throughout the curriculum that it can be taught.

[00:31:47 Split screen: Dr. William Hatcher and slide titled “Curiosity in the public workplace: Typology of public administrators”. Text on slide:

• Overall, strong support for curiosity in the workplace among the surveyed local government managers
• Two coherent themes in the factor loadings
• Curious Public Administrators
• Go-it-Alone Public Administrators
• Group 1 fits within the theory of public administrative curiosity exposed in this book. It is the largest group among the respondents. They scored high on the joy of curiosity, deprivation sensitivity, stress tolerance, and openness to the ideas of others.
• Group 2 appears to be administrators who are against many of the sentiments of curiosity, especially the need to work with others, approaching questions often alone.]

Dr. William Hatcher: The recap, what we found in the book and going forward, and I'm really looking forward to some good questions and discussions from this because I think that's really the next step. Curiosity in the workplace we developed, we saw from the survey data that most of the administrators, most city managers demonstrated very high levels of curiosity. But when we did some more in-depth data analysis that I'm not showing here and trying to organize their answers into groups, we found a strong portion, as I mentioned, really supportive working with others, curious public administrators.

But then we found this, too, with faculty, there was a really small group, but they had really strong opinions about going it alone, not working with others. Being curious about how the world works, but not taking that final step to have that social curiosity of working with others. Some of these folks may be really strong introverts, like myself, but the idea in what we found a very small group was you had a lot of people who said they were curious, but then weren't open as much as others to working with groups.

And that's really interesting because those dimensions, as we talked about earlier, and that are a part of the workplace, build on one another. You have to realize that you don't know everything, that you enjoy trying to figure out how the world works. You have a stress tolerance of that process, but then you have to work with others to do that. But still, overall, in the end, most of the public managers demonstrated high levels of curiosity.

[00:33:34 Split screen: Dr. William Hatcher and slide titled “Takeaways - Curiosity among public administrators”. Text on slide:

• Public administrators appear to be more curious than private sector managers.
• Regression modeling showed no statistical relationships affecting how the surveyed public managers approach curiosity in the workplace.
• Gender, race, education, and other factors did not predict if managers were more curious in the public workplace.
• Curious finding – smaller cities in terms of population had city managers who expressed more curiosity than their counterparts in larger cities.]

Dr. William Hatcher: An interesting takeover, we had some analysis. We like to look at differences among context, gender, race, education. We looked at those socioeconomic factors of the city and the public managers we surveyed had no effect on curiosity. But one interesting finding out of the research is that smaller cities, the city managers, city administrators from smaller cities, tended to express higher levels of curiosity. Theoretical thinking that we didn't explore more detail in the research was that those individuals were coming from a smaller community where they may wear a lot of hats, where it's not as specialized as in a larger city, where they have a much larger staff. Oftentimes, it may just be them. It just may be them making those decisions that causes them to demonstrate more curiosity.

We didn't find a lot of differences among the city managers and groups, except for more rural communities, smaller communities. For the most part, everybody demonstrated high levels of curiosity, most of the surveyed folks. But rural communities and rural city managers demonstrated higher levels.

[00:34:59 Split screen: Dr. William Hatcher and slide titled “Takeaways - Curiosity among public administration faculty – How can we teach and learn curiosity?”. Text on slide:

• Faculty demonstrated high levels of curiosity, with a small but notable group expressing the viewpoint that curiosity is difficult, if not impossible, to teach.
• “...curiosity is a great personal trait, but it may not be a skill.”
• Faculty mostly held the viewpoint that curiosity could be taught in the public administration classroom, particularly in courses focusing on leadership and policy analysis.]

Dr. William Hatcher: What are some of the takeaways? How can we teach it? Like I talked about, there was a small but notable group that said it's a personal trait that can't be taught. But we had that same discussion for decades in public administration, history, and other social sciences, and in practice in these social sciences, that leadership is something that we can teach. Many MPA programs and many public administration programs today have courses specifically on leadership. And faculty, and within our local governments and our communities, when we're actually in practice of public administration, really can focus on leadership and analysis as places – public planning. There's places where curiosity really matters a lot and can be really taught.

You've got to think about – I gave the example of public planning – for a community, the planning process in many ways is a process about being curious. You're developing goals for where you want to be in the next 5, 10, 15 years as a community, and you're developing those goals based on evidence. Then you're going out and developing strategies, and you're building evidence to develop those strategies. Of course, you have preconceived notions about what the city, the community should be, but you're collecting a lot of data from public hearings and public participations to be curious, to collect that information, to make those planning decisions.

[00:36:32 Split screen: Dr. William Hatcher and slide titled “Takeaways - Curiosity in public service in Canada”. Text on slide:

Curiosity can help public administrators address governance issues by:

• Seeking to objectively explain how the world works and answer questions about how to solve problems.
• Being comfortable with not understanding an issue
• Being motivated to seek to fill that knowledge gap
• Understanding the complexity of the world helps public administrators be more empathic and caring

Curiosity is important in all communities, especially rural and small communities:

• We found that public administrators expressed curiosity in the public workplace
• We found that city managers/administrators in the US were even more likely to express support for curiosity when they worked for small cities in terms of population.]

Dr. William Hatcher: Some takeaways, and we can branch off from here with questions. Some takeaways, you have those five dimensions, but especially the four that we looked at with the survey data, being comfortable with not understanding how the world works, seeking to answer it, being comfortable with not understanding an issue, motivated to understand it, and realizing at the end of the day that understanding that what we do in our work is complex. There's a lot of trying to practice empathy and caring.

Then, an interesting finding, because I know, like the United States, a lot of Canada is rural, and a lot of United States, a lot of these managers were from communities of 10,000 to 25,000 people. Those communities were more likely to have administrators practice even more curiosity. And that practicing a curiosity really matters a lot in those small communities, when you're more likely to be a journalist, somebody that has to wear multiple hats, and somebody really at the end of the day that doesn't have a staff that is responsible for a particular area that can advise you on the decision you make.

I feel it in many ways in my role as chair of social sciences, because we have everything in my department, from social work to criminal justice, to political science, to public administration. My area is public administration, public policy. Sometimes I know just enough to be dangerous with social work. I have to be really curious and be a journalist in that to figure out what decisions we should make for that program because it falls under my department.

[00:38:16 Split screen: Dr. William Hatcher and slide. Text on slide: Questions? And THANK YOU!

Dr. William Hatcher: All right. That is the end of the formal presentation. Thank you all again. Thank you all for attending. Thanks again to our folks that organized this. I look forward to questions.

[00:38:31 Split screen: Neeta Thawani and Dr. William Hatcher.]

Neeta Thawani: Okay. Thank you so much, William. Thank you for that amazing presentation. So many important things you said. I just want to highlight two things that really helped me. I really appreciate that your evidence is all related to the public sector. It's so relevant for us. As well, I appreciate the reminder that it can be learned. We can think about it both in terms of universities, but also our leadership programs is something for us to think about. So, thank you for those really important takeaways.

So, I'm going to remind everyone that you can share your questions. We have some time for questions.

[00:39:13 Neeta Thawani appears full screen.]

Neeta Thawani: You can submit your questions by clicking on the little chat bubble icon located in the top right-hand corner of your screen. So, if you have any questions, please send them our way, and then we're going to share them with Dr. Hatcher.

All right, I'm going to put something out that I'm curious about.

[00:39:39 Split screen: Neeta Thawani and Dr. William Hatcher.]

Neeta Thawani: Do you have any specific examples that you can share with us where curiosity has directly improved a program or service?

[00:39:52 Dr. William Hatcher appears full screen.]

Dr. William Hatcher: Yes. Oftentimes, the broad examples that I would point to, especially at the local level, if you're thinking of local governments, is like I mentioned, that planning process. That planning process is a way where, for it to really work, to do comprehensive planning, to do planning, develop a division for your community, where you want to go, you're really practicing a lot of curiosity in that. To do it well, you have to be curious.

You have to make time. That's one of the hurdles and one of the drawbacks. Often, what we were thinking about in terms of critiques of curiosity in public administration is that we're just trying to get by with the work we have on our plate today. When do we make time for it? But it's injected. Planning is injected in a lot of what we do. Being curious and trying to think in an evidence-based way is, too. Planning is a broad way. At the state and local level, too, it's related to planning, it's a part of planning, but thinking in terms of economic development, how we seek to improve our economies for communities and states and subnational governments, thinking in terms of that is a way that requires a lot of curiosity.

A more specific example, that's in line from the United States context, that started off as a failure, and a big failure, without getting political, but we struggle with health care in the United States. We pay a lot, and we don't get the best results, especially among the industrial democratic nations. One of our biggest reforms was the Affordable Care Act during President Obama's administration, so-called Obamacare. One of the big failures of that was the public website that was created for people to buy health insurance if they didn't have health insurance covered by their employer or a public program that already existed. That website was one of the worst public sector mistakes and errors and screw-ups in the last couple of decades in the United States. It is something that seems very straightforward, but it's very complex in trying to put in all the information for people purchasing their health insurance through it, and it fell on the first minute it went live. There's a whole [lot of] reasons why. There's a logic to it in the way we make decisions that we contract out much in the United States at the federal level that there was so many different contractors, it was hard to get them on board.

The team that came in to fix the website really had to practice a lot of curiosity in what the problem was. Just not start with the knee-jerk reaction that we often have in the public sector is that public sector is solving problems that are a lot more difficult than the private sector, so of course we're going to struggle at first.

They had that approach, but then they also really practiced a lot of curiosity to figure out how to make the website function as well as possible. Within a short amount of time for all the hurdles they had to clear, the website was up and running. Today in the United States, even though it's still talked about much in our political campaigns, Obamacare enjoys 60 to 70% public approval. But a lot of that early frustration with it was due to a website.

[00:43:34 Split screen: Neeta Thawani and Dr. William Hatcher.]

Neeta Thawani: Thank you so much, William. I love this really practical example because you're talking of something as big as Obamacare, but the practical example is that the website needs to be accessed for people to get access to Obamacare. So, thank you for that.

We have some questions coming in. How can we create a culture of curiosity within the public service?

[00:44:07 Dr. William Hatcher appears full screen.]

Dr. William Hatcher: Yes. I think that's what really, when it comes to research and scholarship, one of the goals of the book, and I've written a couple papers over the years making the case for it, is that at the foundation, public administration is about making decisions. So, how do we make those decisions? We make them in a curious manner, and there's these positive outcomes that possibly will happen from that. When it comes to research, the argument that I've been making is that's how we should approach the way we study public administration. And see, like we did in the book, if public administrators are curious and how it can be improved.

Then you transition that into, Well, how do we teach it? Most folks in public service are getting advanced training in it. How do we teach curiosity? What are some ways for that? Then the next step, and the next step in the research, developing all from this foundation is, What are some nuts and bolts, day-to-day practices that managers can do to promote this culture of curiosity?

Like a lot of things, it goes back to the hiring process itself. The way we describe our positions and the way we hire folks is that many of the positions we have in the public sector are very technical positions that have a specific need, but even within that, there's room for the professions, oftentimes, or better professions, whether it's engineering, planning, healthcare practitioners are better when they're more curious, so there's room for encouraging curiosity and a culture of curiosity through the hiring process. There's room for encouraging curiosity and how we make decisions as teams. In the public sector, it's one of the ways we often remind our students that public administration and public management is a lot more difficult than private management and being a boss in the private sector because we're really not bosses. There's really not one boss in the public sector. We're accountable to many different organizations, many different levels. But at the end, we're accountable to people, to our communities.

So, really getting that across to people is that you can't manage in the public sector in a top-down way. Being curious, trying to interact with others, understanding how the world works, helps you do the day-to-day management things you have to do. It helps you convince people that the way that decision that you've got to make or the decision that you think that you should make in those roles for your team is a decision we should make.

Research on the United States presidency constantly shows that the power of the President is the power to persuade. That a lot of times our executives – whether you are president or prime minister, all the way down to a mayor, city administrator, city manager – these positions, especially chief executives of a nation, have dramatic significant formal power. But a lot of their power is embedded in informal abilities to persuade people. Curiosity can help you do that.

Then just another example of how we approach day-to-day decision-making and thinking long-term, and that long-term thinking is really where we can try to be more curious, is getting the people that will be affected by the decisions we're going to make involved in the process. If you're putting together a plan for a community, ensure that you're up front doing public participation, public involvement, to get an idea for what the community thinks instead of doing what is often done, especially in our cities and counties in the United States, where we'll write a plan and then take it and tell citizens that this is the best plan ever. Of course, it never gets used. So, public participation up front on decisions is key in practicing curiosity, too, and injecting a culture of it through our teams, but also through our communities.

[00:48:27 Split screen: Neeta Thawani and Dr. William Hatcher.]

Neeta Thawani: Okay, thank you for that. We still have a few questions that are coming in, so I'm going to share another one. How come public administrators are more curious than private managers?

[00:48:52 Dr. William Hatcher appears full screen.]

Dr. William Hatcher: Okay, that's a good question. We didn't get the empirical evidence for that in our survey, so I have to be cautious when I answer. But just knowing the difference between private sector management and public sector management that we know in the literature, and it's that our jobs are harder. Our jobs are harder in the public sector. It's harder for us to determine if we're successful for one thing. In the private sector, a private company makes its decisions at the end of the day, rooted in this mechanism of the profit margin. That is something – right or wrong – that's a really clear mechanism to follow that if you're making a good decision. If you're making a decision that is going to advance your company.

In the public sector, we don't have that, rightly so. We're doing things that the private sector can't do in the public sector, providing health care, providing public safety at the local level, providing a national defence. Those public goods that we're doing can't be easily sold and driven by the profit margin. In many ways, to operate in that environment and operate in an environment where you have many people you have to answer to, the public, your technical boss in administration, your boss's boss, or the political accountability, you really have to be more curious to do that. You have to really be open to interacting with others and trying to figure out things. Then maybe in the private sector, where it's a little bit more streamlined, and of course, just with my bias toward the public sector, it's a little bit easier.

[00:50:34 Split screen: Neeta Thawani and Dr. William Hatcher.]

Neeta Thawani: Okay. Thank you for that. We have another question here. Oftentimes, we see that there's quite a few overlaps between some of these words, we especially use the leadership.

[00:50:50 Neeta Thawani appears full screen.]

Neeta Thawani: Words like, when you think of curiosity, you think of some more creativity, innovation, you think of continuous learning, you think of taking initiative.

[00:50:59 Split screen: Neeta Thawani and Dr. William Hatcher.]

Neeta Thawani: So, I'm just curious. Do you consider these the same thing? How do we get our head around all these different words when we're thinking about what you shared today, in terms of curiosity?

[00:51:17 Dr. William Hatcher appears full screen.]

Dr. William Hatcher: That's a good question, too. It's some of the thinking behind the book. It's one of the things over the years that's always been frustrating to me is that we have a lot of buzzwords. Oftentimes, we take those buzzwords from the private sector, not at risk of being too critical of the private sector again. But we take those buzzwords. It's not used as much anymore, but like synergy, this idea that we work together, collaborative. We take these very abstract buzzwords from the private sector and try to apply them as reasons for what we do as public servants.

So, coming from that frustration, if you've got all these buzzwords, I used another buzzword and created a research project to apply it, but it's with the idea of, Well, let's get down and look at what is a clear value concept from these buzzwords that we can define, that's been studied, that we can understand and can be useful for us to argue in the public sector for improving how decisions are made. That's why there's a clear definition of curiosity. There's the clear application of the workplace instrument that comes out of scholarship that's been done on the private sector to really get at this idea of taking curiosity from a buzzword that we all know what it means, but we really don't all know if we're saying the same thing when we say it, to having a clear definition, a clear description of what it means to practice in organizations and clear ideas of how we can get there.

[00:52:59 Split screen: Neeta Thawani and Dr. William Hatcher.]

Neeta Thawani: Thank you for that. I absolutely appreciate you sharing that. It is great to have that evidence to support what we are sharing, especially when we are talking about leadership. Really linking that word curiosity to having that definition as well as the evidence is really, really helpful.

I think we have time for one more question. How do you keep being curious when processes are heavy and change takes a lot of time?

[00:53:31 Dr. William Hatcher appears full screen. Text on screen: Dr. William Hatcher, Professor and Department Chair, Augusta University.]

Dr. William Hatcher: Yes. Yes, it's hard. That's something I've actually learned in my job now that I'm primarily an administrator. I still teach, and of course, I still do research, but I don't do as much teaching, which I miss, and I'd rather teach some days, but that I've learned just how the bureaucracy can really make you negative. Oftentimes, we have to think, especially in academic bureaucracies, every form has to have seven signatures. You're trying to be curious, you're trying to get things done, trying to figure out how the world works. That stuff can make you frustrated.

I think a good thing in public administration throughout the democratic world is really learning more of this over the last few decades is we need to have a logic for why we do things. If there's a justification for it, let's keep doing it. If a form needs seven signatures or seven different approval levels, what's the logic behind it? If it's a logic that fits within us being more effective, more efficient, and practicing equity in our decisions, then let's keep it. I mean, that's something that we'll just – That's another reason why we have to keep that decision that may slow us down compared to the private sector. But there's a logic behind it as administration and organizations and democracies, why we need to keep it.

Thinking in terms of that, that a lot of times the logic behind things that may frustrate you day to day, that may slow down decisions, is rooted in those competing things that we have to do, those competing goals we have of being efficient, effective, and fair, or practicing social equity in our jobs, is often that leads to decisions that take longer.

But then again, curiosity can really prepare you for that because to be curious, you have to have a certain level of tolerance to stress. That stress of things taking longer and having to get multiple people involved, that really helps you. Curiosity really helps you with that.

In my job, just thinking back, and like many of you that work in the public sector as administrators, there's often not one thing that you can just make a decision completely by yourself. And that's an adjustment, and curiosity helps with that.

[00:55:59 Split screen: Neeta Thawani and Dr. William Hatcher.]

Neeta Thawani: Okay, thank you so much. Yes, and that link with all the changes we're going through, that stress tolerance is really, really important.

Thank you so much, Dr. Hatcher. On behalf of the Canada School of Public Service, thank you. That was a really thoughtful presentation. I also want to thank everyone here who has joined us across the country.

[00:56:23 Neeta Thawani appears full screen. Text on screen: Neeta Thawani, Canada School of Public Service.]

Neeta Thawani: I hope you found this discussion as inspiring and informative as I did today. I just want to say a big, big thank you again to Dr. Hatcher for being here and sharing all this information, all this knowledge, all this practical advice with us.

I also encourage you all to visit our website, stay updated, and register for upcoming learning opportunities. Once again, thank you all, and have a wonderful day.

Dr. William Hatcher: Thank you all. Thanks so much.

[00:57:02 Animated CSPS logo appears.]

[00:57:08 Canada wordmark appears.]