Delivery Policy

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In Dungeons and Dragons, there is a type of player or dungeon master described as a “rules lawyer”, who argues over the application of minor rules, corrects players needlessly, and impedes the game from moving forward over technicalities. Its chaotic good counterpart, the “pro-bono” or “public defender” lawyer, advises players how to use the rules to achieve their objectives, avoid missed opportunities, and allow creative interpretations and exceptions to enable something fun. “I know what I’m doing, and I do what I like”, says Dungeon Master Aabria Iyengar in Burrow’s End, a live DnD performance hosted on Dropout Media. As in, I know the rules well enough to play with them in ways that orchestrate compelling worlds, gameplay, character development, and performance, to make magic out of law.

My favourite kind of fantasy world-building imagines an underlying logic or explanation for magic that disrupts its common metaphors as inherited privilege or supernatural gift. In Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence, magic is (learnable, breakable, interpretable) law; its practitioners “blacksuits” or “craftswomen/men” granted their title after articling, with rules and power encoded on their skin as ruins, slowly eating them away to bone. It is a world in which gods are real, prayer is a financial investment, souls are currency, combat is a metaphysical contract negotiation or argumentation over the borders of authority.

Gladstone describes the books as “legal thrillers about faith, or religious thrillers about law and finance. Plus there are hive-mind police forces, poet gargoyles, brainwashing golems, nightmare telegraphs, surprisingly pleasant demons, worldshattering magic, environmental devastation, and that deepest and darkest evil: student loans.” All the governance problems of our world — transportation, freedom of the press and religion, misinformation, crime, financial regulation, industrial development, pollution, poverty, trade — with the power that underlines and undermines them made visible on the bodies of its practitioners and the world they shape and fight for. One character, speaking both metaphorically and literally says, “The world is a complicated place, and it changes, that’s all. People interpret the universe and their interpretation alters it.” 

In real government, the rules are both more firm and less clear than magic. Some are law, with encoded mechanisms for oversight, formal complaints, and lawsuits (e.g., The Privacy Act or The Official Languages Act) and their associated Regulation (intended to carry out the intent of Acts of Parliament). Some are policies, which dictate who is responsible and the outcomes they are responsible for. Some are guidance: advice and interpretation to help achieve those outcomes. They are meant to define, direct, constrain, enforce, incentivize, responsibilize, productize, communicate, document, and measure, targeted at the tens or hundreds of thousands of people doing somewhat similar public sector jobs, to make every government website recognizably trustworthy, ensure public data is handled consistently, or that every national park operates predictably for visitors.

In her book Recoding America, former US Deputy Chief Technology Officer Jennifer Pahlka writes, “The magic of law is now inextricably tied to the bits and bytes of computer code.” “Software and our government have something very important in common: they are made by and for people. In the end, we get to decide how they work.” Tara Abernathy, one of Gladstone’s fictional craftswomen and in-house legal counsel for local government and gods, says “engineers: they spend so much time solving physical problems and obeying physical rules, they forget that nonphysical phenomena obey rules every bit as strict.”

Under laws and policies, government teams are assigned responsibility for interpretation and implementation. If the timing is auspicious, intentions aligned across different decision-making bodies and powers needed to enact something into reality, the policies come with funding that helps enable the outcome it was intended to conjure. A policy comes to life through human beings attempting to invoke, enact, soften, or avoid it, through interpretation and application, the policy equivalent of case law. As a public servant, not knowing the rules is not an excuse; ensuring you are sufficiently aware enough to comply when needed is carved like ruins into our job descriptions and oaths on hire. Our organizational operating models are bent around delegated responsibility for compliance, concatenations of oversight mechanisms tangling the machinery. 

In digital government and other leading-edge fields, we often prioritize external hires, to bring in modern expertise and fill known skills shortages in the public service. The centralized team model of digital government asks: can you staff a team of mixed career public servants and external hires, build something using private sector best practice in agile, iterative development, and design, that still meets the legislative, regulatory, and policy requirements to enable broad adoption and interface with existing government technology and programs? Can you communicate this compliance to a government client base that does not have the same flexibilities you do or speak the same subject-matter language? Can you communicate it to members of the public, end users, who rarely distinguish between services offered by different levels of government, much less departments or special teams, and who simply want accessible information and straightforward transactions?

In an interview in The Logic, Honey Dacanay, a founding executive in the Ontario Digital Service described two past projects, an online student loan calculator and improved search function in a Ministry of Health prescription database, and the work of digital government as a whole, as a performance of “boring magic”. “Essentially, if it works, nobody cares,” she says. To the public, many of the changes we agonize over are invisible, a smoothing of irritating friction or confusion, not a transformation. 

In my day job, I run a Delivery Policy team for a digital government service. When I was first hired, I asked my recruiter if they’d perhaps gotten my title backwards. Was it “Delivery Policy” or “Policy Delivery”? Which word modified which noun? The answer came back clearly: mirroring “strategic policy” or “program policy”, delivery policy enables delivery, as in the delivery of a product, program, or service, a concrete thing manifested into the world. My team isn’t compliance or oversight, we are enablement, embedded on technical teams so that we can advise early and often. We’re there to short-circuit the delivery tendency to build and ship and ask permission later by putting policy on the same level as design and development in an interdisciplinary product team. We are pro-bono policy advisors, not rules lawyers.

The work is mostly thankless in the way that most public service work is thankless. If we do our jobs well, nothing bad happens. No laws are broken, no one needs to unpick code or rewrite product roadmaps or stall a release or make a public apology or respond to a complaint. Our job is to know how government works — culturally, structurally, procedurally, legally, linguistically — so that other professional specialties do not have to. It is boring, invisible magic, even to our fellow bureaucrats.

It is my job to know how public sector organizations operate and to work within them effectively and yet, I often cannot easily figure out how to get a medical specialist’s office to process a referral, my pharmacist to stop filling the wrong dosage, order tests that would actually illuminate the dysfunction of Long COVID, or access tax breaks intended to offset financial burden of illness. Bureaucrat friends describe the challenges of applying to EI Parental benefits from inside the machine, of getting proxy authority to interface with government on behalf of aging parents. I think of this irony often, how challenging it is to interpret and navigate any complex systems on your own behalf, especially when the outcome is personal and intimate, the risk of failure intolerable, when your illness comes with its own capacity limits.

Generally, we don’t fund the equivalent of social workers or patient navigators for the health care system. Your family doctor is meant to play this function, but often won’t engage with the private practice paramedical professionals on your care team, and rarely have the time to do more than send referrals and write prescriptions. Complex patients, whose conditions might come with conflicting guidance, who metabolize or respond to medications exceptionally, experience lengthy diagnosis delays and missteps in treatment. There is no equivalent of my day job function to support them and the system relies on medical practitioners to be rules lawyers in order to reduce risk and cost; an efficiency instead of an efficacy argument intended to serve the population as a whole.

Unlike government, much of the rules and the powers at play are not readily or publicly available. They’re hidden in hospital and clinics procedures, in clinical guidance and insurance company requirements, and communicated through practitioners, not posted online. Once, to correct an error a cardiologist made in ordering a test, I had to call six people in three different hospitals (my own, central booking, and the one the test was scheduled at) to find someone who was authorized to communicate with her office and correct the error, knowing her own admin staff routinely send patient calls to voicemail and triage them later.

The Canadian Medical Association reported in January that an estimated 6.5 million Canadians don’t have a family doctor, one-third of those who do find it difficult to book an appointment, and burnout in the profession is leading clinicians to reduce their hours or retire early, with administrative load ranked high among causes for both exhaustion and lack of time to spend on patients. It is not a functioning system, for anyone.

Earlier in the pandemic, there was more media coverage of the systemic issues in our healthcare system, the real limits of emergency rooms, the lack of oversight in long-term care facilities, the supply chain issues that impact prescription renewals and testing. Today, the mood feels more resigned. We ask patients to wait patiently, we ask doctors to make do. Our public health approach to the pandemic is the equivalent of magical thinking not boring enabling magic, a dice roll for each patient, not the creative application of the rules for the benefit of unique, complex individuals.

The Impairing Curse is a long-form, serialized experiment in personal essay, science journalism, policy analysis, and poetry. To start at the beginning and read it in order, go to the first essay or read about the aesthetics and labour of illness, and the failures of public health. To support this project, share it online or subscribe.