Better Government Problem and Mindsets

The Problem

Four Questions to Understand the Problem

1. What is the solvable problem? Explain why the product is needed.
2. Who has the problem or who is the customer? This should explain who needs the solution and who will decide the problem has been solved.
3. What barriers and constraints exist to solving this problem?
4. What form should the final solution take? What is the scope (in time, money, resources, technologies) that can be used to solve the problem?

Problem We’re Trying to Solve

It’s really difficult to innovate in the Federal government. To make matters worse, the government also isn’t good at sharing and managing knowledge. There are specific people within the government that want to bring innovation to their agency, but lack the tools and proven practices that “work” in the government.

Barriers and Constraints to Innovation

• Government red tape

  • Lack of budget and resources (“doing more with less”)
  • Burdensome and sometimes outdated requirements while complying with the law
  • Requirements from “higher up” authorities frequently block new approaches
  • Resistance to innovation on the Hill (Question: What is our evidence of Hill resistance to innovation - is it Hill resistance to government innovation specifically or innovation generally?)
  • Siloes within organizations

• Lack of understanding of or access to the user/customer

  • Clear guidance on compensation of users
  • Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA)

• Lack of definitive resources (government wide or at their agency)

  • Different agencies different authorities (DoE)
  • What is the proper policy? What is definitive?
  • No standards provided across agencies
  • Competitive & conflicting guidance; bureaucrats dodging bullets from compatriots

• Lack of innovation incentives

  • Staff are measured with performance metrics that require meeting numbers and if they take time to learn HCD then they won't make their numbers. That affects their performance, and therefore money in bonuses.
  • My staff and my agency are measured by the numbers they meet and make sure they get things done & if they spend time learning, it will affect my numbers which ultimately affect bonuses. Solution: need to get metrics in innovation in supervisors and create performance standards around that

• Misunderstanding/mistrust of innovative approaches

  • Fear of doing something new--many don’t want it to survive
  • Teammates reluctant to experiment with new tools
  • Lack of agile personnel (Question: what is meant by agile personnel?)
  • Staff says they don't have enough time
  • Innovation is digital (it is NOT)

• Political climate

  • Don’t want to make any changes with the new Administration/leadership changeover
  • Innovation seen as partisan work
  • How do you connect with hostile citizens?

• No support early in process and in scaling

  • Lack of leadership support
  • Hard to scale innovative approaches
  • Leaders need to be persuaded that the benefits (and enhanced employee morale) of HCD/innovation outweigh any significant time commitment.
  • For folks who have the ability to experiment, once you do and want to scale to a larger audience, one of the larger barriers is the lack of resources to carry that across; that could be human resources or something else; a lot of us seem to not have capacity to take on more work or a methodology to scale, because lack of resources & with that comes often lack of necessary of air cover in leadership at the higher levels to push forth; some folks aren't willing to help you push it further out because it may require investment or heavy lifting and bias against innovation
  • Time constraints, expectations (ex: announceables)
  • A major barrier is time. Doing a full-fledged HCD or innovation project can take time. Leaders need to be persuaded that the benefits (and enhanced employee morale) of HCD/innovation outweigh any significant time commitment.

• No holistic look at the ecosystem and pathways

  • Not looking at issues holistically
  • Reacting to a problem rather than on outcomes

• Infrastructure doesn’t support innovative approaches

  • Infrastructure is a major barrier. We bring in designers who need Macs and Mac-based applications. There is institutional skepticism of the need for these supplies, so we jump through major hoops to get them procured.
  • Partner agencies may not have access to our technology stack (or vice versa) so it makes it hard to collaborate and share files
  • The need to infuse new technology with security and privacy
  • Union rules say that some tools are not required (specifically talking about online and PC-based tools and platforms, but also sure this applies to innovative concepts like Human-Centered Design (HCD) and others.)

Customer (User)

Customer Jobs

• To innovate within the legal and policy bounds of their agency while complying with the law
• To explore how to fit innovative approaches into my office or agency’s setting
• To tell effective stories about how innovative goals are accomplished
• To do work that is new for my agency and sometimes for myself
• To manage an innovative team, program, or center
• To work in areas where my agency is not used to innovating
• To convince leadership at my agency to adopt innovative approaches
• To do work most efficiently and effectively (limited time and resources)
• To broaden my skillset without having to know everything that there is to be learned.
• To not always be able to write freely about my work

Needs/Wants

• Authoritative guidance (including references to specific helpful policies) for how to deal with burdensome and outdated

• Examples of process documents other people are using to implement innovative approaches so that I have real models to help me start conversations and adapt for my own work.

• Want case studies of other agencies’ work--successes as well as lessons learned--so I can learn from their experiences, see what’s possible, persuade my stakeholders that there’s precedent for this work, and know who to try to connect with for further details.

• Practical explanations of best practices and operational information so that I can with confidence support or carry out ventures that may be unfamiliar - by borrowing from validated examples.

• Need examples of quantitative metrics other people have used to demonstrate the value of their work

• Know who else is doing this work well so that I can more easily make direct contact with them.

• Support for navigating bureaucracy, change management, and more so that the whole organization can align in one direction.

• See related materials and groups that could be useful for innovative work so I can do my work most effectively, avoid reinventing the wheel, and expand my skillset.

• Work with other people at my agency and elsewhere who already care about the areas I’m dealing with, so I need strategies for how best to work with them.

• Make connections with a lot of other people to both learn new things and share what I’ve learned.

• Meet in-person or have phone conversations that aren’t put in writing that isn’t attributed to me.

Mindsets

Mindset: a set of assumptions, methods, or notations held by one or more people or groups of people that is so established that it creates a powerful incentive within these people or groups to continue to adopt or accept prior behaviors, choices, or tools.

What’s the change that needs to occur?

Culture

From	To	Notes
Fixed: abilities are mostly innate and interpret failure as the lack of necessary basic abilities	Growth : abilities can be acquired provided you invest effort or study	Carol Dweck
Internal stakeholder design	Human-Centered Design
Information and governing silos	Open, collaborative innovation
Large, Monolithic contracts	Smaller, modular contracts
Apathetic leadership	Supportive, engaged leadership
Doing it alone	Partnering with stakeholders
"It will get done, eventually" mindset	Sense of urgency (burning platform)
Driven by politics/other priorities	Measuring goals and ROI on agency level (Data-Driven)
Meetings upon meetings	Action (small things and show progress)

Individual

From	To	Notes
Fixed: abilities are mostly innate and interpret failure as the lack of necessary basic abilities	Growth: abilities can be acquired provided you invest effort or study	Carol Dweck
Waiting for someone else to make the move	Doing/Doers
Risk averse	Risk taking
Solution-focused	Problem-focused
Assuming what's good for the user	Empathy and Understanding
Closed-minded	Curiosity and questioning
Content with status quo	Bias towards action
Closed off to feedback	Open to feedback and reflective
Complacency	Passion for your work
Scared and beaten down	Confident
Ego-centric	Lessen ego
Doing things like they always have been	Continuous improvement
Trust in what has worked in the past	Embrace change
Doing it alone	Partnering with stakeholders
Giving up early	Perseverance, persistence and resiliency
No critical thinking	Ability to distill ideas and identify insights (critical thinking) networked thinking
In it for the long haul and shooting for big wins	Bias towards small wins
Poor communication	Clear communications
Acting without feeling	Trusting intuition/conscience
Believe in past experience	Embrace ambiguity

Team?

From	To	Notes
	Agile
	Cooperative
	Creative
	Focused
	Radical candor
Negative outlook on the future	Positive outlook

Designing the Community of Practice

Form should this take?

• Online and in-person
• Pilot or demo with proof of concept
• Guidebook or playbook (with onboarding); innovation comes from people, not things.
• Adopted and adapted from private sector into public sector

Types of convening

• Virtual meetings
• Action-oriented, focused (solve specific problems) meetings
• Listserv, platform, space for cross-functional communication (e.g. Slack)
• Training
• Experimentation of methods

Who to convene with (external):

• Academia
• Large/small/start up businesses
• State & local government orgs
• Interdisciplinary convergence of experts

Who to convene with (internal):

• Leadership
• Across siloes and agencies
• Communities