Stuck in Transition
As global forces collide with aging demographics and stalled public systems, New Brunswick’s greatest challenge isn’t the economy – it’s our inability to see who we are, or what want to become.
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Happy day after our February long weekend everyone! I hope you enjoyed it by going to see Canadian film ‘Nirvanna The Band, The Show, The Movie’ with a friend, cheering on Canadian athletes at the Olympics, and baking a really awesome focaccia. Okay, that’s what I did. It was a much-needed brain break and so today I’m diving into my archives and pulling out an abridged version of the opening essay from ‘Who Gets to Lead When We Don’t Know Where We are Going or What We are to Become?’ an e-book I co-authored with Dr. John D. McLaughlin in 2014. Cheers ~ Lisa
You can be forgiven if you have an uneasy feeling that New Brunswick is being passed over. But passed over by what, and how is it happening?
The answers to these questions remain vexingly just out of our reach.
While the headlines might imply our greatest challenges lie with the economy and shifting political interests, our problem lies much deeper, and the solutions are complicated.
We are entering unknown territory, brought here by two powerful forces: rapid and profound global change banging up against the demographic and fiscal reality of New Brunswick.
The theories developed by traditional business and public administration schools over the past 50 years will be of little use in dealing with what lies ahead. To survive, and hopefully thrive, in this new reality, we need strategies that develop organically, can shift to accommodate society’s changing needs and which, in the end, can provide us with long-term economic stability.
Checking our ID
We begin by asking ourselves if New Brunswickers had a clear view of who and what we were. The blunt answer is...sort of.
There is an obvious pride of place, very specifically defined by our deep attachment to New Brunswick’s physical and social geography. However, the province has long been riven with internal divisions.
The question is no longer where you live; rather, it is how.
Our inability to understand our shared culture has compounded the failure of our public institutions – government, media and universities – to explore and analyze New Brunswick’s contemporary culture in any great depth, or develop policies that reflect its reality.
New Brunswick is used to being disappointed. Do we have any success stories upon which to build a strong society?
To find them, New Brunswickers must let go of their tribal-like connections to individual communities and their resentments of powerful outsiders in favour of embracing a singular sense of who we are.
What is our common purpose? How do we balance shared risk with shared value in the face of changing social, demographic, technological and economic forces? We simply don’t know.
Here in New Brunswick, issues such as French immersion, homelessness, and industrial development are simply the latest in a decades-long list of failed conversations between our public and corporate institutions and us. They fail because municipal and provincial governments, and corporate players, assumed their view of development and change is citizens’ view too.
This assumption is an absolutist viewpoint destined to fail in a pluralistic society, particularly when we are forced to confront difficult issues. It’s what we call a wicked problem – an issue that is difficult to define, dominated by multiple viewpoints and linked to other wicked problems.
Glory Days
Here in New Brunswick, as in the rest of North America, the 1960s and early 1970s are remembered as a period of great optimism and change, with the province’s stories dominated by grand gestures and charismatic figures such as premiers Louis Robichaud and Richard Hatfield. Then along came Frank McKenna, New Brunswick’s most famous political export.
He was premier for 10 years, overseeing the development of e-government at Service New Brunswick, the building of New Brunswick’s call centre sector and successive balanced budgets. Looking back, it feels like McKenna was the end of an era, the golden age of New Brunswick political personalities.
In fact, viewed through the larger lens of economic and social change, McKenna marks the beginning of New Brunswick’s great transition. But transition into what?
Twenty-nine years have passed since McKenna left the premier’s office, and we still don’t know what we are going to become in this era of deep change.
We are stuck, following well-trod policy and corporate paths that continually loop us back to where we started. The end result is a succession of failed conversations around the issues New Brunswickers care most about – K-12 schools, post-secondary education, health care, water quality, forestry management, urban development, rural living, seniors care and resource development.
To begin to tackle New Brunswick’s wicked problems, we need to consider what we know and don’t know about the rhythm of contemporary New Brunswick life, including:
our culture, which represents our shared values;
our institutions, which should embody our shared purpose;
our infrastructure, which supports the exchange of ideas, people, goods and services; and,
our economy, which produces individual and community wealth.
These four elements flow and blend together in our societal sea, and most of the time we are content to float atop its surface. But you can’t do that when the waves hit. They bear down on us and wash over us when we are caught unprepared.
Here’s the interesting science of a wave: its power is not found in the water; it’s in the energy that flows through it.
The energy to push a society forward comes from the imagination and knowledge that flows through its citizens.
If we in New Brunswick, and indeed the rest of Canada, are to chart a new course, our traditional business and political leadership must cede its natural inclination to control the agenda, in exchange for gaining access to the collaborative power of the Commons.
The power we once ascribed to our public and private institutions is migrating to the crowd, and we must follow – or risk being lost in its wake.
Download the full ebook here: Who Gets to Lead When We Don’t Know Where We are Going or What We are to Become?
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