In Part 1 of this episode, Josh Hjartarson reflects on his early career in the Ontario Public Service (OPS) as a newly minted PhD, highlighting how it deepened his understanding of the interplay between theory, policy, and practical solutions. Influenced by state support during his childhood, he recognizes the significance of government intervention. His diverse career spans public sector roles, academia, lobbying, and consulting, teaching him that societal issues are complex and require collaboration across government, private, and nonprofit sectors.
In this episode of "The Path of Public Service," Josh Hjartarson, Deloitte’s Global Leader for Human and Social Services, reflects on his early career in the Ontario Public Service, emphasizing the connection between theory, policy, and practical solutions. His diverse experiences in public service, academia, and consulting reveal the complexity of societal issues and the need for collaboration across sectors. Drawing from his own childhood experience with state support, he highlights the critical role of government intervention in creating opportunities. Hjartarson campaigns for collaboration among government, private, and nonprofit sectors. Advocating for accountable leadership, Hjartarson stresses the importance of integrated support systems for housing, mental health, and addiction services. He views social safety nets as investments and underscores the value of lived experiences in program design, championing the rewarding potential of public service.
In Part 1 of this episode, Josh Hjartarson reflects on his early career in the Ontario Public Service (OPS) as a newly minted PhD, highlighting how it deepened his understanding of the interplay between theory, policy, and practical solutions. Influenced by state support during his childhood, he recognizes the significance of government intervention. His diverse career spans public sector roles, academia, lobbying, and consulting, teaching him that societal issues are complex and require collaboration across government, private, and nonprofit sectors. He introduces "collective action problems," noting that self-interest can hinder cooperation. Despite challenges, Josh champions idealism in public service and stresses the need for accountable leadership to address social complexities.
00:00:01 Katie Jensen (Host)
Applaud is proud to showcase the dedication of those who make decisions for the greater good and strive to leave the world a better place for all Canadians. All personal views expressed by guests and our hosts are their own. Applaud will continue to recognize those in public service, offer a kaleidoscope of perspectives and operate in good faith to build trust with Applaud members and all public citizens.
00:00:31 Josh Hjartarson
I’ll always point to my formative years in the OPS as a newly minted PhD, as a real education in the intersection between theory, policy and solutioning.
00:00:51 Katie Jensen (Host)
I'm Katie Jensen and this is The Path of Public Service from Applaud, celebrating people who have spent their lives working in Ontario's public sector. Today we're talking to Josh Hjartarson, Deloitte’s Global leader for Human and Social Services.
00:01:06 Josh Hjartarson
I have the best job in the world. I get to travel all over the world, interfacing with governments that are experiencing really similar sets of problems. Like, how do we make our safety nets more human-centered, more family-centred? How do we help people who are experiencing multiple disadvantage combination of addiction, mental health problems, poverty, homelessness. And I would say that I really bring the sum total of everything I've learned to those problems. That includes the theoretical, it includes the practical as well.
00:01:42 Katie Jensen (Host)
In this episode, we explore how Josh’s early years influenced his career choices.
00:01:48 Josh Hjartarson
My childhood very early on was shaped in part by the benevolence of the state.
00:01:54 Katie Jensen (Host)
And the professional foundation he built while working for the Ontario Public Service.
00:01:59 Josh Hjartarson
I can say that having spent time in government, in policy making, I became a much more practical academic, and became obsessed with the application of theoretical knowledge to real world problems.
00:02:17 Katie Jensen (Host)
With experience in the private, public, and academic sectors, Josh recounts the positions he's held.
00:02:24 Josh Hjartarson
I've had five careers, all cumulative, all playing on the knowledge that I attained in my previous steps.
00:02:33 Katie Jensen (Host)
And of course, there were lessons to learn along the way.
00:02:36 Josh Hjartarson
I think the one thing that I'll take away from my academic and from my early public policy career, no problem is simple.
00:02:46 Katie Jensen (Host)
The perspective he brings to working on improving the social safety net in Canada and around the world.
00:02:52 Josh Hjartarson
As I'm talking today, I'm talking as private citizen Josh and none of the views on today's podcast are reflective of Deloitte views, and I don't claim to be speaking on behalf of the organization. I'm only speaking on behalf of myself today.
00:03:06 Katie Jensen (Host)
We start by talking about Josh's childhood and the impact these early experiences had on his choice of career.
00:03:14 Josh Hjartarson
I grew up in a very small town in Alberta called Warburg, Alberta. Tiny little town, less than 500 people. I grew up with a single mom and my brother.
00:03:26 Josh Hjartarson
I would say it was a very rich childhood, very spartan as well. My mom was living off of teacher salary, and she became a teacher because the government helped her along her journey. And government workers, social workers, employment service workers encouraged her to finish high school, encouraged her to go university. And then even supported her job search and helping her get to her job interviews and all that sort of good stuff. So my childhood very early on was shaped in part by the benevolence of the state and really effective programs designed to get young people like her on the right track and supporting her family. I moved around in smaller communities where my mother continued to be a teacher.
00:04:15 Josh Hjartarson
And then decided that I wanted to do something in political science, and so I went to a small little religious university, because I wasn't quite ready for the big city yet, called Camrose Lutheran College. And eventually made it onto the University of Alberta and then did a PhD in political science.
00:04:34 Katie Jensen (Host)
I asked Josh if he was aware of the support that his family was receiving at the time.
00:04:38 Josh Hjartarson
I knew that mine wasn't a typical family. We were a sometimes four-person family, but three-person family and, particularly in growing up in rural Alberta which was pretty conservative and religious, that we weren't the typical family unit.
00:04:54 Josh Hjartarson
And I knew that the government was involved in our lives at various stages through the payment of income, benefits, etcetera. So that I was cognizant of that. You're a kid, so whatever you're going through feels like normal. I don't think we felt sorry for ourselves. I don't think we felt particularly hard done by.
00:05:13 Josh Hjartarson
And very early on, my interests weren't typical, right? I was into music at a very early age. For rural Alberta, I was pretty punk rock as an early teenager, all that sort of good stuff. And I was super cognizant of the role of government in people's lives. My mom was a civil servant, after all. She was a teacher, and I was very interested in that.
00:05:35 Josh Hjartarson
So I wouldn't say I could tell you at that age what effective family intervention social support programs could look like, but I certainly knew that the state was involved in our lives.
00:05:47 Katie Jensen (Host)
He grew up kind of close to Edmonton, so I asked if he ever traveled there to see punk shows.
00:05:53 Josh Hjartarson
All the time. When I was like 16, 17. A good friend of mine who is also a local punk rocker, we were always going into the Edmonton clubs at the time, Edmonton actually had it pretty good, sort of, I wouldn't say punk rock but, certainly alternative scene, and we were fairly embedded in that in an early age.
00:06:16 Josh Hjartarson
Fortunately, I stayed clear of drinking heavily and getting into the drug scene, which is a bit of a godsend because it was easy to fall into. It was an hour and a half by car. We would usually borrow someone’s car and make the trip then, and have the time of our lives and then sort of roll in bed around four or five in the morning and sleep the Saturday or Sunday away. I love the music scene, I credit my brother for that - he was a Led Zeppelin fan at the age of 9 or something like that, and saved all his money from doing odd jobs to buy a record player. And the first albums he bought were The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. And he would blast the music in the household, and I sort of learned by osmosis. I didn't really have a choice.
00:06:58 Josh Hjartarson
I still do it. Like my friends, they're often in awe, but I go to a show every two weeks, so I'm usually at a club in Toronto listening to an up-and-coming punk band. I really like the shoegazescene, anything post-punk. And I've done a lot of discovery. And I take my friends with me, sometimes willingly, sometimes unwillingly. And that's certainly part of my sort of personal interests, as I see as many shows as I can.
00:07:24 Katie Jensen (Host)
Josh told me that he first entered the public sector after he finished his PhD.
00:07:29 Josh Hjartarson
I decided to find immediate employment, so I went to the Ontario Public Service in the Ministry of Finance. That's where I learned how to write legislation. Understanding the interface between stakeholder consultations and government policy and how that translates into legal frameworks was so valuable for me. And then transition to the Government of Ontario, Cabinet Office, intergovernmental for a while and then decided to go back into academia.
00:08:00 Katie Jensen (Host)
Returning to academia a second time changed the way that he thought about his research.
00:08:05 Josh Hjartarson
I can say that having spent time in government in policy making, I became a much more practical academic and became obsessed with the application of theoretical knowledge to real world problems. And my teaching began to reflect that. My classrooms really borrowed a page out of MBA-type instruction where it was all case study focused, where you really need to hone in on the problem definition and then focus on generating advice run that's very practical in the resolution of this problems.
00:08:43 Josh Hjartarson
I'll always point to my formative years in the OPS as a newly minted PhD as a real education in the intersection between theory, policy and solutioning.
00:08:55 Josh Hjartarson
So I was in the public sector, I was in academia, then more or less essentially became a lobbyist, and then got into consulting. So I've had five careers, all cumulative, all playing on the knowledge that I had attained in my previous steps. I always say though, if you would have told me, so I've been consulting 7 years, if you would have told me eight years ago that I'd be a partner in a consulting firm, I wouldn't have known what you’d meant.
00:09:27 Katie Jensen (Host)
What's the trick to integrating public, private and academic lenses so that all three can work efficiently and effectively together?
00:09:34 Josh Hjartarson
I wouldn't say there's a universal recipe. Depending on what the challenge is that you're facing. I certainly think that where there are collective action problems, for example reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere as a collective action problem, “why should I, when my neighbor is,” that type of thing, and so certainly government has a role there as it seeks to regulate and introduce rules around carbon emissions. Then the private sector has a role in driving some of the innovation that needs to happen. And nonprofits, academic institutions, need to be able to do the research to indicate what's working, what isn't.
00:10:14 Josh Hjartarson
Solving our wicked problems at a system-level requires multiple actors with multiple disciplines and multiple sense of incentives. Sometimes it's up to the government to create the incentives, and then it's up to other actors in the broader ecosystem to respond to those incentives. Every problem is complex. I couldn't sit here and give you a discrete set of solutions to every problem in the world.
00:10:38 Josh Hjartarson
But what I can say is that we need to create the conditions where collaboration, and, I think a critical factor as well, trust that people trust the intentions of the other actors in the system, trust that the rules will be evenly applied. Trust is really the currency of collaboration.
00:10:58 Katie Jensen (Host)
I had never heard the term collective action problem before, so I asked Josh to tell me more.
00:11:03 Josh Hjartarson
So I remember my first year of my PhD and I was pretty confident in myself, thought I was pretty smart. And then I show up to my first day of my PhD course, and we were given this book by Mancur Olsen [Jr.] which is called The Logic of Collective Action[: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups]. It's one of those books that changes your thinking. It changes how you view the world. And you don't have to buy into every aspect of it, but there's certainly an argument about human nature and the nature of cooperation. So I showed up and I opened this book, and 90% of this book is actually math equations and algebra.
00:11:40 Josh Hjartarson
I'm in with political science course and I almost had a visceral, angry reaction to it.
00:11:47 Josh Hjartarson
But because we were compelled to read the book and actually write something on it, I had to get inside it. And then I attended the seminars and listened to my classmates as they talked through the book. And I realized that, “Holy moly, this actually is very enlightening.”
00:12:07 Josh Hjartarson
Logical approach to action problems argues that people aren't biased to collaboration, they're biased towards self-interest. And that's a very jarring insight for a social scientist like myself. So, for example, think about like the roads in our streets.
00:12:22 Josh Hjartarson
If it was voluntary to pay the government to build those roads, how many people would do it. There's a reason why taxes are not voluntary. That's actually one of the grand scale collective action problems that, left to its own devices, people would choose to free ride and allow their neighbors to pay their taxes.
00:12:42 Josh Hjartarson
And there's a crucial insight. And so it was a controversial one to me at the time was basically, for example, belonging to a group.
00:12:51 Josh Hjartarson
Local businesses in a town will belong to a Chamber of Commerce. And the logic of collective action suggests that the only reason they belong to their Chamber of Commerce is because they get discounts on insurance.
00:13:03 Josh Hjartarson
Or they get the opportunity to network and promote their products that they're selling. So it's a very reductionist view of human nature, but it actually does a lot of heavy lifting. There's, like, “Why does a Chamber of Commerce have to offer discounts on insurance?”
00:13:21 Josh Hjartarson
“Why does the automobile association have to offer free tow trucks for membership?” It's because it's these, what they're called, “select incentives,” that compel people to actually participate. I found it very jarring because I'm a social scientist. I believe in the social.
00:13:41 Josh Hjartarson
The knee jerk instinct that we all belong out of sense of belonging is actually a partial truth, and they use it to describe interest groups. That there will always be an imbalance between interest groups that can hoard the benefits of their lobbying, and those that are dispersed across the community.
00:14:01 Josh Hjartarson
You'll always get more effective action from interest groups that are closeknit and can hoard the benefits versus, for example, build your local park society. You'll have a few active volunteers, but you won't necessarily get every member of the community that benefits from the building of that park. And that's a classic example of the collective action problem.
00:14:21 Josh Hjartarson
Now the thinking has evolved because the book was written in the 1950s and 60s. And in fact, the need to belong, some people really enjoy contributing to their, you know, local park, and they'll participate in the annual clean ups and stuff like that. But this notion of self-interest in terms of belonging actually explains, not every human behavior, of course, but it does explain why certain organizations are mandatory and you have to belong. You don't have a choice.
00:14:51 Josh Hjartarson
Because a lot of people would choose to free ride.
00:14:53 Josh Hjartarson
Then you could go to the counter book. which is an author named Barrington Moore who wrote a book called The Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship. He explains the outcomes of different forms of government on the ability of certain actors in the society to collaborate.
00:15:13 Josh Hjartarson
And that's a great thing about social science is that you read these things and you never buy into the whole argument, but you actually weigh and then you form this view of human nature that draws on different ideas.
00:15:26 Katie Jensen (Host)
Is there a place for idealism in the public service?
00:15:29 Josh Hjartarson
Oh 100%. It's easy to lose the idealism.
00:15:35 Josh Hjartarson
But some of my favorite leaders in the public service who mentored me, who are still in my life today, who I would describe as big eye idealists who are looking to, for example, make child welfare and child welfare programs much more child and family centric, working preventatively to keep families together and addressing the root cause problems,
00:15:57 Josh Hjartarson
as opposed to yanking children from those contests. Because we know the outcomes for children who are taken into care. They're not great. So, working preemptively and proactively.
00:16:08 Josh Hjartarson
There are lots of visionaries who are leading the charge in this space, and idealists, I would say, and they understood the value of government and the public good that government could generate. I think it's actually those individuals combined with some policy entrepreneurship, who have taken the social safety net from a very anachronistic, pedantic, paternalistic, 1950s version to a model today where it is more empathetic, it is more sympathetic. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Certainly suffers from a lack of investment, but I think our models are more forgiving than they once were.
00:16:47 Katie Jensen (Host)
Josh is so good at bringing together the economic lens and the social aspect of public policy. I really wanted to know if there was an aspect of his early life for his education or even his career that cultivated this.
00:17:00 Josh Hjartarson
I very much the lead with the human side of what we do. So, my mom was a single mom, right? So she was a teen mom. Actually, she had my brother when she was 16, and I soon followed. And she was on her own. And there was a sink or swim type of situation in the sense that we could have gone many ways.
00:17:20 Josh Hjartarson
But, she recalls having a very human centered set of social workers that set us on a path. On a counterfactual basis, if she doesn't get that support early, am I here, am I the global leader of Human Services, Social Services for Deloitte? Maybe, maybe not. But certainly the odds are stacked against me if we don't get those interventions early on in our families lives.
00:17:40 Josh Hjartarson
So I always lead with the human element and that's the way my team functions as well. We're very mission driven. Of course, though one of the great things about where I work is the interdisciplinary nature of the people that we can bring to bear. I can access accountants, I can access economists, I can bring in human centered design professionals. I can bring in public policy professionals and mobilize them against a sticky problem that is, “how do we better support families?”
00:18:08 Josh Hjartarson
So I think the one thing that I'll take away from my academic and from my early public policy career [is], “No problem is simple.”
00:18:20 Josh Hjartarson
And if someone is selling you a simple solution, then I think you should give pause for thoughts. If someone recognizes the complexity and the human dimensions of of the problems that we're dealing with, and can say with honesty that they don't have an easy answer for you, then I always advise people that person's being more honest. It's probably likely going to get you to a better resolution.
00:18:43 Katie Jensen (Host)
This has been Part One of our conversation with Josh Hjartarson. In Part Two, we hear more about how his previous experiences impact the work he's doing today.
00:18:52 Josh Hjartarson
I learned so much, and I'm forever grateful for the great leaders that I had in those early formative careers, because I use that knowledge to this day.
00:19:05 Katie Jensen (Host)
The people he worked with.
00:19:06 Josh Hjartarson
I was so impressed by the number of mission-driven individuals that had the public interest to heart. I was also super impressed by the quality of the intellect, like so many smart people.
00:19:25 Katie Jensen (Host)
And he lets us in on a key piece of advice he's applied throughout his career.
00:19:30 Josh Hjartarson
Make sure your accountability is roughly equivalent to your authority.
00:19:41 Katie Jensen (Host)
Thanks for listening. Applaud is proud to showcase the dedication of those who make decisions for the greater good and strive to leave the world a better place for all Canadians.
00:19:52 Katie Jensen (Host)
All personal views expressed by guests and our hosts are their own. Applaud will continue to recognize those in public service, offer a kaleidoscope of perspectives, and operate in good faith to build trust with Applaud members and all public citizens. You can share feedback on this episode by visiting applaudpublicservice.ca