 I'm going to play you a clip here. Now is the time to show that to me. Now is the time. I think we've heard the speakers all allude to this. There is a window that has opened up for us at the intersection of what's happening with technology and with the level of disruption that has happened with COVID, where we have an opportunity to unfreeze society. We've talked about this in a second. And work on making change forward, making a radical change. The same type of radical change that we have all experienced in our personal and professional lives these past two years, where our kids are working from whom I have a 10-year-old and a 13-year-old who have been transitioned immediately to digital education and now back in school and working somewhat in a hybrid fashion. My wife, who's a professor, is now working at home. There's four of us working in the house at times. We've had to be flexible as a society. And it has opened up, if those of you are familiar with Lewin's model of change, that there's these aspects. The starting condition is you have to unfreeze. You have to unfreeze the organization. You have to unfreeze the people in the organization to be open to a different way of trying to get work done, of trying to accomplish what we need to accomplish. And only then can you begin to establish change. People have to be open to it. The conditions have to be right for change to happen. And that is the thesis, I think, of why we're all here together is this window in time has opened up to unfreeze the state of school and allow us to address it. The collective us, right? We'll talk more about this. This is not an individual initiative. This is not a small group initiative for Prime Minister and Ministers Western backers. This is all of us collectively, because that is what it's going to take to effect change at the scale, right? It's not speeches from the stage. It's gonna take all of us working through making the change happen, envisioning that future, and then refreezing into that new normal that we're trying to get to. I wanna just cover three objections that I think all of you have heard, some of you may have felt. And the first one is, I am not a techie. And I will tell you, I am not a techie. My degree is not in computer science, my degree is in accounting and economics, but one of the previous commentators noted this, you don't have to be a technical leader to lead change that is technology enabled. What you have to do is you have to understand the technology and what's possible with the technology at a deep enough level and intersect that with your own experience of what is it we're trying to accomplish as public servants and as ministries to find those creative solutions and then work with the technical staff to make those things happen. This is also true at the level of your staffs and the public that you serve, right? Every single one of you has a staff that as soon as they walk out the door, sometimes before they walk out the door, on their devices, checking social media, communicating, interacting, everybody is now a technologist. I'll give you a story. It is very hard to find good wanton soup in Austin, Texas where there's one place. And the lady who runs it with her husband used to write your order on a piece of paper in Mandarin, clip it to a rope and pull it backwards, send it into the kitchen and the guys would take the paper down and fulfill the order and send it forward. When they reopened after the pandemic for takeout service, I called her and I said, she said, we want to order. She said, you know, you should use the website. It's much faster. I said, you have a website? Not only did they have a website, they had an online ordering system where I could get in, pay, get my receipt number, get my estimated time of delivery. This is a business that went from the 1800s mode of delivery to the modern mode of delivery over the course of an afternoon it turns out a consultant came in. We're all techies now. My staff is not ready. Maybe I am not ready. But in reality, we're all ready. My mom was an elementary school teacher and a principal and she retired. During her whole career, there was never a single computer in a classroom. She didn't really use computers. Over the last five years, she and all her friends have gotten cell phones, usually the kids giving it to them and trying to encourage them to use it. And now that cohort is online constantly. They have WhatsApp groups, more than one WhatsApp group, they have Facebooks, they're Instagram. These are people in their 70s. And so yes, it's true that there are sections of the audience that are hard to reach that maybe aren't as digitally savvy, but they have kids, they have grandkids, they have neighbors, they have people to help them into the journey. So we cannot hide behind the excuse that the people are the problem, right? These same people are ordering KFC on their phone. They're there. Our job is to find a way to get them there collectively for the services we're trying to develop. And the last fallacy is that the digital revolution means no more human interaction. That's not what it means. What it means is that for the people who are able to access these services digitally, the process allows them to do that without having to get in their car and fight traffic coming into Port of Spain to make that transaction happen. But it also means that for those citizens who need help, who need someone to sit with them and walk them through the process, who need felt filling out a form that those types of services are available. They could be scheduled online, they could be scheduled in an app. But if you think of your role as a public servant, I know certainly my role when I was in the ministry, there was aspects of tedium and handling forms that is not the reason you want to come to work in the morning. If we pivot towards a public sector where the main part of your job is not administrative, where the main part of your job is actually working to help the citizens get done what it is they need to get done, that makes for a more attractive public service career. The challenge is to figure out, we can't just digitize the existing process. The challenge is to figure out, how do we reinvent that process in such a way that we can achieve the efficiencies that are possible with the technology while at the same time we're making the service level delivery higher? Both are possible. I think that is one of the theses here is that both are possible. You can make the process more efficient and you can improve service delivery. And it requires a little bit of imagination. It requires the savvy use of the technology that we're bringing to bear and it requires the collective effort of all of us trying to figure out what does that digital future look like and realizing that it's not a dystopian future where we interact with machines only. The public sector is a quintessential service economy initiative. We interact with people. Sometimes those interactions may be digital. A lot of times those interactions will need to be interpersonal. The challenge is figuring out when is each appropriate and using the same platforms to differentiate when a digital piece of delivery happens and when a in-person piece of delivery happens and have those be seamless in the back end. Now is the time where the technologies have become available to allow us to do that. Several of the speakers and the panelists have talked about this. Why? Why re-imagine and why now? I think all of you I dare say in your role as an individual must have had experiences of being a customer of government that was frustrating, that was slow or that was inefficient. So this is not a hypothetical. The processes that we have inherited and we have run with, some of them date back more than a hundred years and there have been many reasons why they have not been changed but now we are in a window where it's possible for them to change, where it's possible for us collectively to make them change. What will happen as a result is they're more efficient. We save the resources, we're in a very constrained economic environment but at the same time, if you look at the introduction of these technologies across the spectrum, client satisfaction, public satisfaction increases when they're done well. So you're trying to envision a future where the public of Trinidad is happier, where the resources consumed in delivering those services have been reduced and you will realize that one of the by-products of that is that it becomes more attractive to be in the public service. You are joining a forward-thinking organization with a high level of customer satisfaction. Some of you would have heard of NPS, not Net Promoter scores, which is the way to monitor the depth to which people are satisfied with your services. You can have a future where you've reimagined these processes to be both more efficient and drive higher levels of satisfaction and have this knock-on effect, but the role in the public service, as particularly at the junior levels, becomes more attractive because you're not just handling forms and handling paperwork. And that idea of being a talent magnet is something that's not just technical. We've talked already a little bit about the importance of some technical education and more technical depth, and that is, of course, true, but we also need avenues to be able to attract the deep talent into the public sector and keep them there. And part of that is by being joining a forward-looking organization. I really like this quote. Many of you would have seen it before. Now is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning. This is Churchill in 42. Remember the warden end until three or four years later? And he was preparing a citizenry that was already beleaguered and tired for what was to come, which is that there was much, much more to do. I think it's analogous to where we are now. Yeah. As I came in and I've met with several of the PSs, it's been really impressive to see the spectrum of activities that are already underway. We are not on the starting line. Many digital initiatives have been implemented and underway already. Digital word certificates, the TT travel pass, the hospitals that are using the health information services, the digital access centers that have been rolled out to multiple communities, the land registry, the company's registry. There is a really solid groundwork of initiatives that have happened over the past few years to move us, to begin to move us into this direction. The challenge is that in almost every case, those have been done within a division, within a ministry. Somebody said earlier talking about silos. That is a good foundation. You have to start somewhere, right? You can start within your silo. This next level requires us to move across. Truly transformational change cannot happen in our department or in our ministry. It has to happen across. As a citizen, if I go into an office and I'm told you need your new word certificate and I have to then leave, go over, request my word certificate, make another appointment, come back. The same government I am dealing with is sending me in multiple places. The technology promises that you don't have to do that. The integration of services has to be part of what we're making front and center or north star as we go through this. Collaboration. Many of you would have had experiences working in other ministries prior to the ones that you're now leading. So you already have some of that experience, some of that visibility. And of course, many of you have been customers of ministries that you haven't worked in. The challenge before us all is to take those experiences, lead your staffs, integrate the thinking across. I was saying to some of the meeting organizers last night, you know, the most important thing that all of you can bring to this effort is relentless, relentless optimism. Because one thing I can guarantee you is all manner of hurdles will crawl out of the bushes. Public sector regulations hurdles. I already signed a contract two years ago to this hurdles. The Data Privacy Act doesn't let me do XYZ. Not just one hurdle. You have to anticipate multiple hurdles. Your role as a leader is going to be centered on your ability to stay relentlessly optimistic and lead your people through a transition that is bound to be bumpy. It's bound to be bumpy. We know that at the start, especially when we start working across organizational boundaries. But you know what? We don't have the luxury of saying no. Now is the time where we have this window before us. If not now, when? If not you, who? It's not going to be smooth sailing. But your job as leaders is to take the helm, chart that course through the rough seas and deliver your organizations. And the good news is you're not doing it alone. The collective leadership of the public services here, the senior ministers and the prime minister here are saying that they are in this together. We are in this together to work through this next more challenging phase of cross-governmental collaboration. And now is the time that we have to do it. You would have seen in my title slide and it was not a typo. If anybody did CXE or Cape biology, kingdom phylum, class order, family, genus species, a genus is a group marked by common characteristics. Within a genus, there are multiple species. Sometimes species that you wouldn't even recognize as being related to one another. I think this is an analogy for what the public sector looks like. You all have many more shared characteristics than you might realize. Even if the day-to-day function of your ministry requires you to operate in a way that might seem unrecognizable to the ministry down the street. You all are the, there's a gene pooled through the public sector. And I have a couple of poll questions. Pop quiz. I think all of you know that all animals share some level of shared DNA. The first one here is between humans and cows. You wanna pull up the results sheet. I think some folks maybe already started voting. And that is actually the right answer, 80%. Pretty different species, 80% share DNA. Next one, a little bit more of a stretch. What percentage is shared between humans and bananas? People say apples and oranges, this is a more exaggerated stretch between humans and bananas if you wanna pull up the results. It's between 50 and 60%. More than half of our genetic code is shared with a banana. So when the pushback comes, and we know the pushback will come, which is you don't understand, PS, this department is really just different. It cannot be moved because 16 reasons why. Your job as the leader with relentless optimism is to push them through that. It's to say, no, no, no. It cannot be, it cannot be that we have to just sit here and do the same process that we've been doing for the last 100 years. Let me help you push past that. Let me help you envision what a different way of doing it could look like. Let's bring in the digital resource team and lay out a path to how to get from here to there. But we cannot throw a collective pity party that says, oh, hard, can't do it, don't do it. Regulation says this, union says that. Interesting observation. If you look at on the broad sweep of history, social change and what has galvanized social change, you begin to see a really interesting pattern. The earliest examples were all individuals leading systematic change and all the way through the mid part of the century that was true, right? This is what we call the, and it's interesting to know they call it the great man theory of history, not the great woman theory of history and it's because that's who typically has led. But if you look more recently, the starting with the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and certainly this accelerated demands for change over the past 10 years, you'll be harder pressed to find individuals leading the charge, although anecdotally, the individuals who are leading the charge have tended to be women, Greta Thunberg and Mark Malala Yusuf Asi. But in large part, the big social change pushes have been from groups coming together to work on issues. And the high level summary we've put on that is the move from genius, which is an individual, the great man or woman of history to genus, the group of people with a shared interest working together. That's the moment we live in. Some of that is because of communication and the ability to draw interest groups together and the way that technology has evolved. That pattern is true here today for us, right? We're not waiting for one individual to drop from the sky and lead the charge on this. The collective genus is already in this room. You are the ones who understand what needs to be delivered to the public. You are the ones who understand the history and the context of your organizations. You are the ones who have to collaborate across the groups to find the 60% common DNA, the 80% common DNA, the 95% common DNA and refuse to take no for an answer. The relentless optimism of saying no because not doing anything is not an option. It's not an option. Collaborating with your peers. Asking for help when it's needed. Pushing beyond the boundaries of what you thought was possible. That's the expectation of every one of us in this room. It's the only way we will get there. When I was at Boston Consulting Group, got caught off on the end here, but Jeannie Daniel Duck, amazing woman, met with her this summer again in Florida, was the head of the change management practice. And she wrote a book called The Change Monster. And she said, you know, I could write this book and I could go on and on, have chapters and have slides. But what I will do is I will anchor the book on a picture. And this is Jeannie's picture of the change group. I love it. I've been using it for 20-something years. And there's a few different elements here. If you, time flows left to right. The starting is stagnation. And what Jeannie says is that although it says stagnation, it could also be hyperactivity. There's a state of the world that exists. And there's inertia behind it. People just wanna keep doing their thing. And we are in a moment now where that window has opened to change. One of the challenges is to recognize that us collectively in this room, we're down the path. We've crossed the bridge into change. We have collectively committed to it. That's why we're here today. Remember that that is not true for your organizations. You all have been thinking about this for months, years. There are some people in your organization that have just been wishing it away. This too shall pass. Job number one is to recognize a whole bunch of people are off on the island still. You can't blame them, not just human nature, they're there. They're keeping their head down, trying to do their thing. Your first job is to motivate them to come on the journey with you. And remember, you've been thinking about it for months and years. They will be forced to deal with it for the first time. So your role in this change management process is absolutely critical because you have to inspire them to come on the journey. You all have signed up for the journey. You all have risen through the ranks at a level of leadership based on talent and intellect and passion. You have to reach into your organizations and rally them to the cause. You have to, you cannot do it alone. Even with your fellow PSS support, you can't do it alone. The entire organization has to rally to the cause. And you have to recognize that they might just be starting the journey. Communicate, communicate, communicate. One of my favorite quotes from Jeannie was, she would say, in the absence of information, people will connect with the dots pathologically. The fair response kicks in and all they can think of is, ooh, all the ways in which this could be bad for me. And while it's true that some jobs will go away, but when I was in the ministry, we had a tea lady. I don't know that such a position exists anymore in the public service. We had two drivers. Some positions go away, right? The world didn't switch from horse and buggy because we ran out of horses. Technology compels us to move forward. And there will be dislocation when that happens. At the same time as there's new avenues of opportunity and more interesting job prospects opening up. So your job is to get the organizations across the bridge, down the path. And just as importantly, anticipate the crisis. Just because we all get a full head of steam and leave here today and go back to our ministries, doesn't mean that we won't face challenges. But your job is to be relentlessly optimistic and to not settle. Your job is to push, push, push. I was saying to somebody at breakfast, there's an interesting analogy many of you would have heard that when they shortly before Apple launched the iPhone, Steve Jobs walked into a meeting. The engineers was just so excited to show him just the amount of things that this iPhone could do and how it was going to be a game changer. Jobs looked at the phone, looked at the presentation and everybody's excited. He takes his car keys out of his pocket and he scrapes the screen. Big scratch across the screen. He says, nope, this cannot work because people put these things in their pocket and their handbag and their glove compartment and in a month the whole screen is obliterated. Come back to me when you could fix this screen. And they were just, they were depressed. What an unreasonable thing to say. We have developed this amazing technology, touch screen, improved antennas, battery life, interesting software. And this man is blowing it up because he finds the screen too easy to scratch. Just put a screen protector on it and move on. They had to search high and low. They finally figured out that Corning was making a glass for industrial use case application which came to be called Gorilla Glass. And that had the characteristics. It was haptic, you could use it for touch screen. Still not solved because Gorilla Glass does not want to be cut into a curve and Jobs will let me cannot make the screen square. The screen has to be rounded on the edge. So more engineering. How to make Minister Varkas knows the story. How to make this thing that we find in material, it still doesn't work because how you have to round the edge because Jobs will refuse to put a square edge. They figured out that. Still not solved because it turns out that that was a specialized application for Glass and you couldn't just churn out 50 million panels at our Glass for the first set of iPhones. So now they have to go figure out how to make 50, 100, 200 million. Maybe six months later, order of magnitude. A few months later, Jobs is on stage introducing the iPhone. Apple becomes the first trillion dollar company. A ridiculous sounding challenge that Jobs issued to them late in the game. Push that company across the chasm to the most valuable company ever. Problem after problem after problem, relentless optimism. So I wanna give you all our thought here which is to think of yourself as PSs in addition to your title as permanent secretary as problem solver. Not one, not two, not three. Many problems will come to your desk and your job is to be relentlessly optimistic and help them solve the problems. To reach out to your fellow PSs, to reach out to the ministers for support and find a way to push through and get to a solution because leaving the old process in place is not an option. It cannot be an option. So you now have a secondary job title of problem solver in chief. Let them, let just encourage yourself to think creatively but get in the weeds with them and help them find creative solutions. That is your job as leaders. So help them find the answers. So we talked a little bit about COVID and how we're done for society. I'll skip forward because we talked about that. One of the pieces of good news is the investments in the technical tools are being made. You know, one of the things I said early on to Karina and the team is I hope we don't start making investments in silos. Everybody has a database. Everybody has an identity system. Everybody has a payment gate we are trying to do because of course it's not scalable. Of course it's frustrating to the individual if you end up with 15 logins to the government and the investments to make the technical platforms in place are being made so that it's both more secure, more scalable, simpler for the user, better for communication across the platforms. I'm looking at a time. I'm gonna skip through here quickly. I do wanna quickly touch on the next few slides. There's seven technologies that each of you needs to be aware of that I'm gonna touch on very briefly. I'm happy to circle back if any of you have questions and set up separate sessions with your ministries and with your leaders to talk about these but I'll go through them fairly quickly. What these seven high level technologies are just to give you a flavor for what's possible. Because what we're talking about is the art of the possible. All of you are familiar with the cloud, right? So instead of putting physical servers and you have to keep wiring more and more servers together, you put things on the cloud. The idea is it's all virtualized. And if you are dealing with a sudden influx of traffic because everybody is trying to stream Dimash Grah live, you can spin up more servers in real time, serve the demand as it comes in and then spin them back down. Which means you're not trying to maintain this huge infrastructure for the two days a year where there's high demand. The amazing piece of it breaks the economics of how you do computing with the ability to scale up and down. Because you can provide the services, you can ramp up, you can ramp back down. APIs is a little bit technical, application programming interfaces. There's a set of software that allows systems to speak to other systems. And so even in a world where you're starting with legacy systems in different places, the API protocols begin to allow systems to speak to each other. So the agricultural lands database can begin to speak to the registrar generals, land registry and start to exchange information even prior to being on a fully integrated database on the back end. So APIs provide a gateway to bridge from the past to the present. It allows different distinct disparate systems to sync and integrate data across even if the end state is to try to put those things into a single database. So it's a great bridging tool to get from the legacy systems to the future. This is going to be a big deal. Increasingly people are worried about privacy and data protection and the concept of sovereign identity is it's a software mechanism to allow you as a user to exercise control over your personal data. A great example of this is if I go to a bar in the US, they ask me to prove I'm over 21 and what I do typically is I show them my ID card. Now remember, what I'm trying to do is prove that I am over 21, that's it. Right, I'm born before such and such date. But what I give them instead is my address, my height, you know, a copy of my picture, my exact date of birth, you know, an insane overexposure, but that's because that's how we've always done it. You show your ID. The concept of sovereign identity is that I could give you permission to say, here, go query this record and ask the record, is this person over 21 and their confirmation is yes, that's it. They don't need to know where I live, they don't need to know where data I was born, all they were trying to get to was, am I 21? Are you authorized to enter the country? Are you, did you authorize social development or request a digital birth certificate to complete a transaction? The individualization, the individual control over the scope of the data that you can put in the hands of the citizen, the sovereign identity technologies allow that to be true. And that removes a lot of angst and concern from the users of the technology about what are they doing with all this data? Who's going to see it? How are they going to see it? Well, it's a platform that begins to address a lot of those concerns. Many of you will be familiar with the Internet of Things, which is basically the idea that data can be collected and pushed to small devices. So you might have smart bulbs, you might get your fridge sending you on a lube, certainly a lot of cars now have a lot of chips in them. But really interesting implications. They are speaking to the PS and public utilities. I'm from Salt, we never have water. WASA's distribution system could leverage the Internet of Things because now you can monitor, you don't need the old school skater system with wires and sensors. You slap a solar powered sensor on a distribution pipe every thousand feet and you monitor the flow and it's sending it wirelessly back to the server. And if all of a sudden 10,000 gallons of water are being used a minute, what do you know that there's a leak? You don't have to wait for somebody to call it for a big hole to open in the road to fall away to know, oh, there was a leak. When you think about all these port containers, I'm staying upstairs there looking out at the port and the thousands of containers on that port and can you find your container and has it been cleared or not? Some of these edge technologies are allowing you to monitor those assets in real time and know exactly where they are. The power of immutable ledgers. And I will warn you to stop saying blockchain. People think they know what blockchain is and it's Bitcoin and Ethereum. That's a side use case on incentives to get people to use blockchains. The promise of blockchain distributed ledger, immutable ledgers is a simple one. I think all of you probably know the Estonia use case. Estonia is way down the path on using blockchains for their records. The premise of it is simple. Anytime somebody adds to a sub-tractable record, there's an immutable record of what was changed, when and by whom. And the reason Estonia implemented it is they had just insane amounts of corruption in their land registry. So people would be farming a piece of land for 100 years and all of a sudden the guy next door turns up with a deed to their land because somebody got paid off and the registrar's office shows that there was a transaction but you don't have the ability to audit it. The beauty of immutable ledgers and the reason they're so critical to public sectors where you're reliant on records is they give you an immutable record over time where the data cannot be manipulated without you leaving your calling card of who did what, when and why. And if it turns out that was not an authorized transaction, you can reset the system to the last stable state. So this idea of immutable ledgers is central to how records get managed. Ultra-hybrid bandwidth 5G, right? We cannot cable our way into the future. You have to be able to push data to citizens when and where they are, to users when and where they are and leverage the bandwidth, right? So you can imagine the most popular use cases is self-driving cars, right? Insane amount of data into and out of the vehicles but simple things like health delivery, right? You're trying to send a CT file across the network for radiologists to look at and that thing is measured in gigabits. The ultra-high bandwidth potential of 5G to serve, especially rural populations is something that you have to really be mindful of and then finally AI and machine learning. You know, particularly when it comes to seeing patterns, fraudulent patterns, service delivery patterns, the ability to code that in. Many of you probably use Waze to drive around. Waze is the great use case of AI, right? They're constantly churning that data and trying to figure out what's the state of play on the roads and how can I adjust my route around it. The ability to use data to provide better services to identify areas where things are not working the way they're supposed to and then flagging it to the attention of the leaders in your division to figure out, ooh, what do I do with that pattern? So they're not spending their time collecting the data, they're spending their time acting on the data and I want to just leave you with five. Everybody likes a list of five, so I did a list of five and this presentation is available out of you all to download. You have to do it with the people you have. Several speakers have talked about this. There's no option. You can't hire your way to the future. So figuring out how to train your folks, who to train and what to train them on is gonna be really important. Do not digitize what you have. Don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. Re-imagine the process from the perspective of the user, from the perspective of the staff member, from the perspective of the ministry, from the perspective of government. Collaborate across, because most times you will find us what's needed is to collaborate across. Build the future process from the bottom up and then go figure out, with that relentless optimism, how to get from here to there. Put the users at the center. I cannot emphasize this enough. The citizen's experience of government is in your hands. Figure out how to integrate that and make it a seamless, pleasant, satisfying experience. But at the same time, keep your outcomes in mind. We're trying to get done the business of government. We're trying to deliver services. We're trying to drive development, the development agenda, so you have to balance it, right? Keep the users at the center, but keep the outcomes in mind and then finally collaborate, collaborate, collaborate. The only way we will get through this is for all of you collectively to work together to find solutions to these challenges. I will quote the Calypsoanians, you know. Now is the time to do the things you see. Now is the time to help in every way and now is the time to show that you care. Give, give off your intellect. Give, give off your leadership. Give, give off your passion. Give because now is the time. Thank you.