Summary
COVID-19 arrived slowly and then quickly for governments across the world. By the end of March 2020, lockdowns and states of emergencies had been declared. Join Gordon Ross as he reflects on his time spent with the British Columbia (BC) Government DDN (digital delivery network), working on the COVID-19 response over the first 12 months of the pandemic. Learn how the government mobilized talent, how decision-making and situational awareness was achieved, and whether the innovations prompted by COVID-19 led to lasting change or costly chaos.
Key Insights
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The BC COVID response was treated as a design problem, requiring rapid, cross-ministry coordination involving government, federal agencies, and authorities like the Vancouver airport.
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Using digital collaboration tools such as Miro replaced traditional in-person whiteboarding during pandemic lockdowns to map complex service journeys.
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A pivotal insight was that self-isolation on farms was unfeasible; the province took responsibility to quarantine workers in hotels to prevent outbreaks.
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By July 2020, BC had zero COVID cases on farms with temporary foreign workers, contrasting with outbreaks elsewhere in Canada.
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The Digital Response Unit (DRU), later the Digital Delivery Network (DDN), was an informal network that met multiple times per week to coordinate COVID efforts across government silos.
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The DDN embodied the features of networked organizations – flexibility, scalability, and survivability – enabling rapid adaptation to evolving pandemic challenges.
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Over 750 government staff, about 1% of BC public service, participated in the DDN at its peak, accelerating initiatives from traveler attestations to vaccine administration.
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The pandemic compressed years of government innovation into weeks, raising questions about sustaining these changes and realizing a lasting "COVID dividend."
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Gord highlights the importance of shortening network distances between government staff to increase collaboration, trust, and shared situational awareness.
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Sustaining emergency-era collaboration outside crises is difficult; dedicated programs like BC’s Digital Leadership Academy try to retain key lessons and practices.
Notable Quotes
"The assistant deputy minister described this to me as a design problem, even if his peers couldn’t articulate it that way."
"We mapped like this for three solid days playing the map forwards, eliminating steps, mitigating risks."
"Having workers leave the airport and then self-isolate on farms was simply not feasible."
"By summer, there had been zero cases of COVID on farms employing temporary foreign workers in BC."
"The DDN was a source of situational awareness and air traffic control within the flurry of daily COVID case counts and policy decisions."
"Flexibility is the network's ability to reconfigure itself and yet retain its goals; scalability means expanding or shrinking size with little disruption; survivability means withstanding attacks to nodes or codes."
"We shortened the network distance between any two randomly selected government staff involved in COVID response, making collaboration faster and more effective."
"A COVID dividend is the value we reap from reforms and innovations accelerated by the pandemic that deliver sustained improvements but are at risk when the pressure is removed."
"Sometimes these quick solutions were a bit quick and dirty, and long after quick, dirty still remains."
"How are you managing connections across projects and communities inside your government during non-emergency times so you’re ready when the next crisis hits?"
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