Hello! Glad you found Un/Stated. I’m launching a new 5-part essay series called: “Administrative Truth: What Lies Beneath”. Sounds like a public service thriller, right? Maybe it is. (PS. Part 1 is online now!)
The Moment
From a citizen perspective we’ve all been there. You try and get a government service that you think you are eligible for, and you get stuck. For me, it was applying for Canadian citizenship. I tried twice, but gave up because I couldn’t get an answer from the authorities on what was wrong with my application. I finally got my citizenship the third time around, two years later after I first tried. I’m still forever grateful, but it was a lot of work. Scholars Pamela Herd & Donald Moynihan coined this work that citizens perform vis-a-vis the state “administrative burden” (2018).
Jurisdictions across Canada and around the world, such as Finland, Singapore and Ireland, recognize that this an important challenge to solve, especially in an age where trust in governments is declining. They’re digitizing service experiences, connecting data across systems, institutions or even jurisdictions, and making service delivery proactive rather than reactive. They work in a new, human-centred way that reasons from life events: real situations in people’s lives that unfold regardless of government structures, revealing what needs to change (OECD, 2026).
Each of those innovations is hard on its own. But together they create a complexity that is easy to get lost in, particularly in the age of AI, where technology can absorb all of our human attention.
When teams are in the middle of that complexity, there is a risk of old ways of thinking getting applied to new problems. This could lead to something that looks and feels a bit different, but that isn’t necessarily new or better for people. Albert Einstein observed a thing or two about that tendency.
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
So in this work, within a Canadian context, I found myself searching for a reframe: a new concept and a new question spacious enough to hold the complexity of what jurisdictions are aspiring toward, and generative enough to help us ask better questions throughout discovery, design, and delivery, so that we might arrive at something genuinely different — and perhaps … better?
This series offers one such concept: administrative truth.
What This Series Is About
Administrative truth is the specific set of facts that institutions (government in the context of this series) have formally recorded about a person, that they treat as current and authoritative, and that they act and operate on when making decisions about that person’s life. It is what the system believes to be true about you, for the purposes of governing what you are entitled to, denied, or required to do.
Administrative truth goes beyond the technical aspects of personal data, the information a person provides about themselves, or the attributes they hold.
Take Scott. He was laid off last month. His employer filed a Record of Employment. Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) holds three years of his tax history. Service Canada has his contribution record. His former address is in two provincial systems. His divorce, finalised a year ago, is in none of them.
Each of these institutions holds facts about Scott. Administrative truth is the specific facts each institution will act on when Scott asks for help — the record that will determine whether his income assistance application is assessed against a single-person household or a two-adult one, whether his Employment Insurance (EI) claim is processed against his actual contribution history, whether the right person receives a notification when something changes.
Right now, several of those operative facts are wrong, simply because Scott’s life moved on and the records did not. And until he performs his current reality back into each system separately, the systems will act on what they know to be true. And that can cost a lot. Something we’ll uncover further in the next installments of this series.
Discovery for Administrative Truth
This distinction between ground truth (someone’s life in general, or an event within it) and administrative truth matters more than it might first appear. When a designer does discovery for a (single) service, they typically focus on the individual person’s needs, their journey, their pain points first. They ask: “what does the user need?”.
What they less often examine is the administrative record that already exists about that person across systems, and across services, Ministries, programs and jurisdictions. It’s that complex space between what is happening in a person’s life (1), that frozen, fragmented, jurisdiction-specific versions of a person that institutions are already acting on (2), and the rules and policies in place that decide whether a person is eligible to receive a service (3) that I find fascinating to design with, especially considering the kock-on domino effects when thinking about service-level administrative truths, compared to data-level administrative truths, and its relationship to state power. Yes, it gets fun!
Understanding that full picture, and understanding how administrative truths can get operationally out of sync with life-events, or contradict each other, and how they interact across jurisdictions and the person’s lived reality, kind of like a train wreck orchestra, is what I am calling discovery for administrative truth. It has a central question:
What does the system* already believe about you?
System in this context means: the combination of rules, institutions, technologies, people, and power relations that together determine what happens to a person.
(and is that belief true?)
This question could fundamentally change what we design, and encourages us to move much deeper into the internal works of the government machine. It makes the space between ground truth, administrative truth and administrative decision the design material. It changes what questions we ask in discovery and what problems we are actually solving. It addresses the power a-symmetry between the entity asking the question, and people who use government services, effectively moving the research burden closer to government.
It gives designers, developers, product owners, and executive directors a shared language for the layer underneath the service experience. This layer determines whether connected services actually work for the people they are supposed to support. What would it look like if government responded more perfectly? How easy or hard is it to establish a new (service-level) administrative truth about someone?
The series develops the concept of administrative truth across five parts, and points toward the specific questions and frameworks that make it useful in practice for discovery, design and delivery teams that are navigating the complex terrain between understanding a person’s life event and delivering the connected services that should respond to it.
What the Series Covers
Part 1: Who Does the System Think You Are?
Part 1 introduces the concept of administrative truth through the fictional story of Scott, a construction worker navigating employment insurance and income assistance after a layoff. Part 1 shares the full vocabulary: data, authoritative data, administrative truth, administrative untruth, administrative decision and the distinction between a signal and a verified truth.
Part 2: A Fragmented Country
Part 2 looks at the Canadian context, which is very specific: overlapping jurisdictions, incompatible definitions, and a system where a person must prove the same facts of their life separately to every institution that needs to know about them. This part also touches on First Nations data sovereignty, providing a more unique angle to countries with a history of colonization.
Part 3: The Dark Side of the Truth
Part 3 examines what happens when administrative truth meets automated decision-making. When an administrative untruth is in the system and machines are talking to each other, who is accountable for what the system believes? And who bears the cost when it is wrong?
Part 4: What a Better System Could Know
Part 4 introduces design opportunities, such as the government receipt for a service-level administrative truth, a service orchestration layer, informed navigation within a jurisdiction, portable truths across jurisdictions. What does technically feasible, governmentally realistic change look like? What is the role of magical AI?
Part 5: Governing for Administrative Truth
Part 5 contains the argument for a national, pan-Canadian governance framework that treats administrative truth as a distinct object of national policy with five core principles: legibility, contestability, portability, proportionality, and accountability. It includes ideas for what needs to be built, and why it’s complex, and how it will take time. Where to from here?
Scotty
Throughout you’ll find Scott. Scott is a fictional character in a speculative fiction storyline to illustrate this public service “thriller”. He lost his job. But he’s got trouble getting the benefits he is entitled to. A real “whodunnit” … Scott, or the system? And whose truth has power? Scott is named after J.C. Scott, the author of “Seeing Like A State“, an author who greatly inspired my conceptual thinking. Though given the Canadian context, and Scott getting chopped up into gory bacon bits, my Canadian colleague aptly pointed out his name really should have been … Kevin :-D.
Who This Is For
I wrote this series primarily for designers and public servants doing discovery and service design work across sets of services in government contexts to explore a different research question. I wanted to provide a more human dimension, provide a more high-level systemic design viewpoint and take a socio-philosophical approach to a topic that is otherwise mostly approached in more technological (data, digital) or bureaucratic ways a the single-service level (“Why isn’t this service working?”).
The concept of administrative truth could potentially bridge conversations in more rich, human ways. As a result, the discovery phase for connecting public services across silos and boundaries may be approached differently, and artefacts may look different (ie. from a service design or ecosystem service map, to a chain signal map, see part 4). It could expand what we consider in-scope (ie. designing a government receipt). And it could give language to something we may have encountered or felt in our work, but we were not yet been able to name.
A recent interview I did to inform research underway on what it would take to build a pan-Canadian, shared digital infrastructure (for the Institute for Citizen-Centred Services), as well as Beth Simone Noveck’s provocative foreword for Gustavo Maia’s forthcoming book Zero-Click Government, had me further reflecting on how this concept and its ideas could also be relevant to executive leadership when deciding what gets done and in what order, and what considerations to have. The governance questions this series raises are central to whether a new digital infrastructure would serve people or simply automates existing failures at greater scale.
It may also be interesting for product owners, developers, data scientists and architects on product teams who are building towards a more shared and increasingly automated digital infrastructure of the Canadian state.
Why I Am Writing This
“Why would you care about something like address change when the world is on fire?”, asked a friend. I had to think about that for a bit, especially because it moves away a tad bit from what I’ve been writing about.
Administrative truth is the concept that holds some (not all, check out my series on relationality and systemic design) of my public service design work together, for me personally, for now. It gives a name to the gap that keeps appearing in discovery: between what a person’s life looks like, what different systems across boundaries believe to be true about their life, and a more collective government response.
It also makes it more clear that in whichever ground truth you live, government already has mostly already decided across multiple service touch points how it will respond and why, via set eligibility criteria, policies and laws. It’s far less optional than the question “what do you need?” makes it appear, and it’s the out-of-sync-ness across boundaries (programs, policies, jurisdictions, administrative records) and power imbalance that intrigue as a distinct design challenge. Designing better ways could save people some time and money maybe. Time and money we could be spending on other things, in more human and attentive ways, since the world indeed is on fire?
I also believe the pan-Canadian conversation about shared digital infrastructure needs more voices asking the tough, boring governance questions alongside the technical ones, especially in the age of AI. What are we digitizing exactly? What data moves between systems, how, with whose consent, governed by whom, with what accountability when something goes wrong? How do we govern that together across jurisdictional, cultural and legal boundaries? What is the role of AI in this? We can’t afford not asking these questions, especially in an age where trust in government is dramatically declining, national threats are increasing, and Canada falling to 47th place (from being 6th in 2003) in the UN E-Government Development Index.
Administrative truth is an original concept and appeared one night in February ’26, from a feeling that something was missing, given the same problems kept reappearing in my work. I discussed it with a few folks via a grey paper called “From Services to Signals”. It resonated, so I kept exploring.
As far as I know, no one has named or explored Administrative Truth quite this way, or connected it to life events, service design/discovery, data interoperability, and proactive service delivery in the way this work does. It names “operative institutional belief” as the governance object and design material (not the data or the tech), connects it to power and consequences via a governance framework with five core principles (legibility, contestability, portability, proportionality, accountability + an opt-out via human judgement) and is applicable in multi-jurisdictional contexts. It explicitly does not throw out the question “what do you need as the user of a service”. It just starts with a bigger question that may be a bit more fair and responsible towards the person using a service or experiencing a life-event in terms of research burden and power balance.
I fully acknowledge that this concept acts within the larger concept of the state, and only touches very lightly on default state behaviours (not trusting citizens, over trusting them), state surveillance, overreach, oppression and colonialism, limitations for people outside formal systems, or why public transformations in general mostly fail. That’s for another time, another series.
For now, I am inviting others to build on it, challenge it, debunk it, or point me in the right direction to take it further.
It’s kind of fun, type II fun. *
* * *
*The views expressed in this series are my own for the sake of learning and discussion. They do not represent the views of my employer or any government institution. Thank you to a few near-dear to me friend-colleagues who reviewed the content and encouraged me to publish it. You know who you are.
Complete Reference List
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Eubanks, V. (2018). Automating inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. St. Martin’s Press.
First Nations Information Governance Centre. (2014). Ownership, control, access and possession (OCAP™): The path to First Nations information governance. First Nations Information Governance Centre.
Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (G. Burchell, Trans.; M. Senellart, Ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. (Original work published 2004)
Herd, P., & Moynihan, D. P. (2018). Administrative burden: Policymaking by other means. Russell Sage Foundation.
Jacobs, L. (2024). The Canada Disability Benefit Act and women with disabilities: Pursuing disability equality and reducing administrative violence. Osgoode Hall Law Journal, 61(2), 547.
Lipsky, M. (1980). Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public services. Russell Sage Foundation.
Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press.
Spade, D. (2015). Normal life: Administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of law (2nd ed.). Duke University Press.
Srivastava, M. (2026). The minimum digital kernel of an unbundled state. Digital Statecraft. https://digitalstatecraft.substack.com/p/the-minimum-digital-kernel-of-an
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs