Getting the Work Done [Code for America Summit 2018 Breakout Session]
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As anyone who has spent time working in or around civic technology knows, there are certain debates that come up time and again. Are we most effective fighting fires or should we work toward changing the culture around design and technology in government? Should we function as consultants, or as specialized innovation teams, or can we make change from the inside as a one-man-band? And ultimately, what is the best way to get stuff done? As Public Interest Technology fellows at New America, we've interviewed more than 70 people in and around government over the last ten months, many working on innovation or digital-service teams, and we’ve got answers. In this session we’ll share what the most effective teams in this space are doing, what works and what doesn’t, and more broadly how the field is thinking and feeling about the hard work we do.
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Getting the Work Done [Code for America Summit 2018 Breakout Session]
- 1. @hanaschank | @saratexas Code for America Summit Getting the Work Done May 31, 2018
- 2. SO MANY QUESTIONS - Did I even do anything useful? - What are other people doing in other places? - Is there some definitive playbook for really making change in government? - And also, um, I need a job. But what do I do next? What am I even qualified to do? - This work was really exhausting and maybe I need a nap but the world is crazy right now and I want to do more and also can’t stop won’t stop. Leaving USDS … what now?
- 4. The Original Plan: Interview people in the field. Not quite sure who. Find great success stories. Distill lessons learned. Maybe make a playbook or something? Help people somehow? Write some pieces for national publications because this work spreads through exposure. Like a good virus!
- 5. ● Aneesh Chopra: former CTO US, former CTO Virginia ● Lamar Gardere: former CIO New Orleans ● Garren Givens: former PIF Exec. Director, former 18F Deputy Director ● Vivian Graubard: founding member USDS ● Nigel Jacob: co-Director Boston New Urban Mechanics ● Deepa Kunapuli: Director of Marketing & Comms, Wellstone; former Comms Director USDS ● Brian Lefler: founding member USDS ● Marina Martin: former CTO VA, former Director VA Digital Service ● Ashley Meyers: Product Manager, San Francisco Digital Services ● Jen Palkha: Founder, Code for America ● Ariel Kennan: Director, Design and Product, NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity ● Dana Chisnell: former USDS, Center for Civic Design ● Mollie Ruskin: former USDS ● Emily Tavoulareas: former USDS ● Anne Marie Slaughter: President and CEO, New America ● Ben Scott: Senior Adviser, New America ● Cecilia Muñoz: Vice President of Policy and Technology and Director of the National Network ● Alan Davidson: Public Interest Technology Fellow, New America ● Brooke Hunter and Georgia Bullen: Chief of Staff and Director of Strategic Initiatives, Director of Technology Projects, Open Technology Institute at New America ● Sonia Sarkar: Public Interest Technology Fellow, New America ● Lauren Greenawalt: Public Interest Technology Fellow, New America ● Andrew Lovett-Barron: Public Interest Technology Fellow, New America ● Denice Ross: Public Interest Technology Fellow, New America ● Kristina Peters: Public Interest Technology Fellow, New America How should we find the work? Initial Interviews
- 6. And we did some synthesis.
- 7. How should we find the work? More Interviews ○ Expanded sherpas ■ Bloomberg i-team director ■ CFA ■ What Works Cities / HKS ■ NYU Gov Lab ○ Big city practitioners ■ San Francisco ■ Austin ■ NYC ■ Boston ○ Smaller city practitioners ■ Gainesville ■ Memphis ■ Mobile ■ Syracuse ○ State-wide initiatives ■ MA Digital Service ■ CA Digital Service ■ CACW Digital Service ■ Puerto Rico ○ Dug deep in three areas ■ Opioid ■ Procurement ■ Foster Care ○ Conversations with practitioners across the country at convenings: ○ CFA Brigade Unconference ○ Union of Concerned Citizens
- 9. How should we find the work? Even More Interviews ○ Follow-ups ■ For specific general publication articles ■ For specific practitioner articles ■ For specific conferences ■ On PIT projects ○ City Leadership (Mayors, City Managers, “Non Tech” City Officials) ■ Austin Design Summit ■ SXSW Mayors Convening ■ CA Design + Innovation Summit ○ Smaller city + non-lead practitioners ■ Designers ■ HR staff ■ Procurement staff ■ Other programs (FUSE, etc) ○ SME ■ Building teams ■ Procurement reformers ■ Common problems across cities ○ Communications + Outreach ■ Editors and Publishers ■ NA leadership ■ Brand specialists + Designers
- 10. Wait a minute, we’re asking the wrong questions.
- 11. We wanted tactics on how to get the work done from people who had everything figured out.
- 12. We wanted tactics on how to get the work done from people who had everything figured out. Turns out no one has it all figured out.
- 13. • Is this even a field? What do we call ourselves and this work? We’re fragmented: Why should I go to Summit? What’s an iTeam? People are hopeful that what they’re doing is working, but many are interested in tweaking the model. They want to take something they did in one place and try it somewhere else. (i.e. always be iterating) People are still working out a lot of the basics.People are still getting down the basics
- 14. So we rethought the kinds of questions we were asking. Here are the big four.
- 15. #1 What do you call this work? How do you find this work?
- 16. How do you find this work?
- 17. How do you find this work?
- 18. How do you find this work?
- 21. “It’s the way things have always been done” is no longer an acceptable answer for “Why do we do it this way?”
- 22. When in doubt, follow the money trail.
- 23. © Harvard
- 24. #2 What kind of team structure works best? What kinds of team structures are people experimenting with?
- 25. 1. A team that works to change the culture across government, or works across agencies on a specific issue (Gainesville, Asheville, New Orleans, Bloomberg iTeams) 2. An innovation team that works across agencies or acts as consultants. (USDS, 18F, Boston, Austin) 3. Embed within an agency (eg: CA Child Welfare Digital Service) 4. Open up the doors to the entire city for small-hit help 5. Hire one really smart fancy person and let them figure it out. 6. Accidentally hire one person who really gets it and let them do their best. We found a few different models.
- 26. 1. A team that works to change the culture across government, or works across agencies on a specific issue (Gainesville, Asheville, New Orleans, Bloomberg iTeams) 2. An innovation team that works across agencies or acts as consultants. (USDS, 18F, Boston, Austin) 3. Embed within an agency (eg: CA Child Welfare Digital Service) 4. Open up the doors to the entire city for small-hit help 5. Hire one really smart fancy person and let them figure it out. 6. Accidentally hire one person who really gets it and let them do their best. A great way to drive everyone crazy and lead people to rage quit! We found a few different models.
- 27. “I want one of these.” Citizen-Centered Gainesville Department of Doing Working to change the culture in government: Gainesville
- 28. Bloomberg i-team model Durham, Anchorage, Mobile, Memphis, Syracuse - Grant funds for a small team - Aligned with a single mayoral initiative, such as reducing blight, improving economic outcomes for people returning from jail, reducing the murder rate. - Teams work to “unpeel the onion” across entire city government (reorganize a dept, redesign forms, change how repair trucks are stacked, rewrite call center scripts) - Externally imposed innovation. You’re not invited in, which can create tension. But support from the mayor helps.
- 29. - Boston New Urban Mechanics: incubator for new ideas. - Have grown to assist multiple departments with specific problems, especially DOT. - Austin: started with fellowship model, work with multiple city agencies on specific initiatives. - Constant hunt for work, but ultimately are invited in. May not always have strong leadership support. Consulting model 18F, Boston, Austin
- 30. - Launched in October to offer service design support to the entire city government - “What’s something lightweight we can do every week, rather than running workshops?” - Created office hours for anyone in any city agency. - Way to open doors to the entire city. - I went to the launch and was like, “This will never work!” Office Hours Service Design Studio, NYC
- 31. - 89 office hours - Scheduled out through July - 187 people have come in - 29 unique city agencies - Also, people from other cities have scheduled calls - Still new so don’t yet have success metrics, but are tracking repeat visitors, projects, and how questions evolve Actually, they’ve been overwhelmed. “We had no idea what we were getting into!” - Mari Nakano, NYC Service Design Studio
- 32. - Procurement questions, RFP help, fair housing policy, animal bites, what’s next? - The people who come in generally have some understanding of service design but need guidance. - They’re invited in. It’s a catalyst for others to make change. - But, the people who come don’t always have support from their agency’s leadership. Who comes through the door?
- 33. But here’s the dirty little secret.
- 34. The team structure isn’t what really matters.
- 35. The most successful teams have one single thing in common: support from the top.
- 36. The Mayor, City Manager, CTO or CIO feels that things must change, and gives people permission to operate differently. What that looks like...
- 37. #3 Tell us about a successful project. How do we define success?
- 38. Sometimes you get to change the law. A team in Mobile working to reduce blight ended up changing a property law from 1901. Sometimes it is really BIG and BOLD and DRAMATIC.
- 39. Sometimes it is three lines in an FAQ Change!
- 40. Other things that are successes ● Getting multiple city agencies to use the same Google Sheets doc. (Syracuse) ● Getting people from two agencies who don’t like each other into the same room at the same time. (Everyone) ● Adding one sentence to an envelope. (UK, Anchorage) ● Getting someone who isn’t really into this whole thing you’re trying to do to return your calls. (Also everyone) When we people told us those stories with big splashy endings, we saw that those successes were built on a million smaller steps. It is important that we recognize those smaller successes too.
- 41. And yet. There’s an important question to ask that we far too often ignore.
- 42. #4 What does success look like? When should we quit?
- 43. First: This work is HARD. “It’s like...the hard parts are hard. And so are the parts that should be easy. You know?” - Priya Sarkar, New Orleans
- 44. Second, there’s a lotta fellowships leapfrogging from temporary thing to temporary thing.
- 45. Third, there’s a lotta feels.
- 46. Fourth, there’s a lotta pressure.
- 47. Fifth, there’s a lotta Judge-y McJudge-rson.
- 48. So much that we need to slides for judging you.
- 49. We (the collective we) are still figuring out what we need to do the work, and also to leave the work.
- 50. So we did what good “technologists” do. We asked people about their problems. We prototyped some first step steps forward to address them. We shipped some beta products. We’re now testing, tweaking, talking to people, and iterating.
- 51. The Commons CfA New America Track Industry publications What we started doing.
- 52. wearecommons.us
- 53. New-America/Code for America “Birds of a Feather” workshops at the Summit! ● Group Therapy: This is What Success Looks Like ● So You’re Working on: Design Literacy ● Group Therapy: Haters Gonna Hate, or, Overcoming Human Obstacles ● So You’re Working On: Recruiting and Hiring Outside the Usual Suspects ● So You’re Working On: Innovating in a Smaller Locale ● So You’re Working On: Turning IT into Civic Leaders ● Group Therapy: For CIO Leadership
- 54. Surfacing the stories to general audiences: industry publications - Series in Fast Company (“The Government Fix”) - Reported stories (Fast Company, Slate) - Op-eds - Weekly Column in GovLoop ( “In Something We Trust,” highlighting stories of small successes and people doing the hard work) - More coming!
- 55. We are the first people to say “these are small interventions.” But if nothing else became clear over this last year, what was clear was that people want this work to work. They want it to stick. They want to keep doing it. So what are the right questions to be asking? There’s not one answer for what is “right.” But we need to ask/make space for questions.
- 56. Just because you don’t have all the answers isn’t a reason to not do the work. Or to leave it when it’s not working--for YOU.
- 57. <insert> Some final exciting concluding slide, TBD, because the work is never done. </insert>
- 58. Thank you! Hana Schank & Sara Hudson @hanaschank | @saratexas
Notas do Editor
- Stand up if you work in government please stand up. Stand up if you work in some government adjacent thing. If you feel like you have a pretty good handle on what you’re doing please stand up. I’m Hana Schank, here with Sara Hudson. We are both Public Interest Technology fellows at New America. We’ve spent the past year(ish) interviewing people all across the country working to improve government services at the state and local level. We are going to talk today about what we’ve learned from those interviews about Getting the Work Done, but first I want to explain how we ended up researching this topic.
- Both coming out of USDS and USDS-adjacent. I was finishing up a year at USDS, with DHS, trying to figure out what to do next. USDS had been an incredible experience, but it left me with lots of questions.
- So I knew that whatever I did next I wanted to spend time finding answers to these questions so that down the road I could be more effective. So I did what you do when you need a job, which is I asked the people I knew what they were doing next, and I was lucky enough to land at New America, with funding to research all of these questions.
- So we did a bunch of interviews.
- Then we did more interviews
- And more interviews.
- And then that great thing that happens with research happened, which is that you realize you’ve totally been asking all of the wrong questions.
- So we backed up a bit and started thinking more broadly about what we had learned from our interviews. What are the big questions that people are solving for.
- And we rethought the kinds of questions we were asking.
- SARA: When we started, the one question we asked everyone was, “What do you call yourself? What do we call the work?” In many ways, this made sense. We are words people. We were interested in connections between a type of people. But we didn’t know what that type of people was called, or called itself. We just knew what it looked like when we saw it. Think about looking for a scorpion in Spain. You may not know the local word for it, but you know it immediately for what it is. We are words people, so are many of you. The difference? We weren’t looking for the work right now to do it. We were studying it. When we talked to you, the doers, we realized the first question you all needed answered was, “How do I find this work? How do I recognize it for what it is (nameless though it may be)?”
- So. Thus prompted, we started asking “How do you find this work?” Hint: flames in the sky are a good signal. We saw two big ways government donned the “We are going to innovate” hoodie. The first was the worst: reactive. There was a crisis. Something broke. All of a sudden...
- We care about technologists.
- Also, user design.
- The other most common things we saw? The exact opposite end of the spectrum to reactive scramble: proactive leadership. As many or more times than we saw people adopt “civic tech” or whatever you’d like to call it, we saw proactive leadership as the signpost pointing the way to the work.
- The place we most commonly saw this was at the local/city level, and with mayors. Leadership from the top has its advantages and disadvantages. For finding the work, one of the advantages is that it makes it a lot easier to spot when the mayor herself has said, “Yes, please and thank you” in a public way. For one thing, they put out press releases, so you can sometimes follow the media trail.
- Meanwhile, for practitioners, it seemed like it often boiled down to attitude: having a mayor or sherpa who said, “ ‘It’s the way things have always been done’ is no longer the acceptable answer for ‘Why do we do it this way?’”
- Another trend we found? Whether talking about reactive crises or proactive leadership, when in doubt where the work is, follow the money trail.
- Both after a crisis and with proactive leaders, funding is one of the most common ways government get the carrot they need to try something different. Programs like Bloomberg’s What Works Cities teams, Innovation or “iTeams,” FUSE Corps, Benchmark Cities, Smart Cities, Built for Zero, Alliance for Innovation, and many other national programs of all sizes have created funding and support opportunities for government to try to iterate, innovate, and improve. In turn, the places they work and the people they connect became great resources for finding innovation across America. Exploring this first question of “where do you find the work” led us down a second common path: “what should teams look like once a government latches onto the the desire to do the work?”
- [HANA]
- The last two are most effective for driving people crazy. There have also been a few high profile instances of cities hiring super fancy people and just assuming they can figure it all out, without providing them the support they need. That has not worked out well. We talked to a few people who ended up in government because they genuinely wanted to work in government, who also knew best practices, and they seemed pretty beaten down.
- HANA Gainesville city manager, Anthony Lyons, he told us about how the mayor became interested in innovation. He had heard another mayor talking about a thing called a Blue Ribbon Report and he came back to Gainesville and said, "I want one of these." So Gainesville brought in IDEO to help them rethink the design of their entire city government, and decided they wanted absolutely everything to be *citizen-centered*.
- HANA Teams work across city agencies, unpeeling the onion
- HANA Teams work across city agencies, unpeeling the onion
- HANA (should be around 20 min in here)
- HANA
- So great, there are different models with pros and cons. But here’s the dirty little secret, and what we learned through our interviews.
- As we asked people to tell us about their successful projects, we heard a really big range and came to understand that success can look a lot of different ways.
- HANA Prior to coming to New America I was with the United States Digital Service, working with Customs and Border Protection on their Trusted Traveler programs, the most common of which is Global Entry, which if you travel internationally you’ve probably heard of. -huge backlog - some people were waiting up to a year to get into the program - all kinds of bad press about it. So when they came to us for help we were like AWESOME we want to fix the backlog workflow analysis change the policy so that people dont have to come in to a Global Entry center to do their biometrics we want you to appoint a product manager for your Global Entry program who can be monitoring the wait time metrics and WE WANT TO FIX ALL THE THINGS. And CBP was like, actually, we just want you to help make the application form look a little nicer and not be 500 pages and not take 3 years to fill out. So we said, “OK< we’ll do that, but first we want to do some research just to understand the context around the programs.”. There were multiple programs, not just Global Entry but also Pre Check and Nexus. GE - travel internationally. Pre Check - just for getting through TSA checkpoints. But this was the biggest point of confusion - which program can I travel on internationally? So we watched people type in “can I use Pre Check to travel internationally” into google, and the first thing that came up was the TSA Pre Check FAQ which said, “YES, you can use it to travel on international flights.” and made no mention of GE. went to TSA and said, hey, you have this really confusing thing on your site, can you change it. And like two months and 15 meetings later, they updated the FAQ. Here is what success looks like...
- [OVER TO SARA AFTER THIS SLIDE]
- SARA: Like many research projects--or really, all of them--the work went directions we didn’t expect, sometimes wildly different directions. Some, we caught at the beginning. For example, procurement is a THING. It’s at the roots of why people can’t get the work done and that was clear after synthesis round *1.* Other themes, were both more subtle and took time to see. One that we didn’t expect?
- When should we quit? People are leaving. A lot, actually. That includes multiple people we interviewed over the last year, who have left. Why? A lot of reasons. Why? And why aren’t we asking the question? Couple big reasons.
- For starters, it’s hard. The work is hard, people are hard, management issues are hard, siloes are hard, the work is hard. We are running a workshop here specifically called “group therapy”--because the field so clearly needed it. I was startled, but not surprised, when I looked at the schedule and saw we weren’t the only ones who created a breakout workshop with that title. This work is HARD. And as Priya Sarkar said, It’s like the hard parts are hard. And so are the parts that should be easy...
- Starting with the most basic: there’s not a “career path” for “problem-solving in government, often incorporating modern processes.” The fellowship model and/or temporary funding are common introductions for folks going from private industry into government. Particularly on the federal level, we see people hopping between temporary gigs, never really going up, but going around as they figure out angles into staying in and around government. Case in point: the two of us.
- SO many feels. And they come in a lot of forms, and several common frameworks. One is the open and acknowledged problem that sometimes when private sector folks come into government, they bungle the landing. There come in wearing capes and halos and Lycra jumpsuits, assuming they are saviors, and also that the work hasn’t been done because someone smart enough, technical enough, SME enough, whatever, hasn’t tried. This creates all the kinds of feels that you would expect from people on the ground, who have done the work, will continue doing the work, and don’t appreciate kids in self-made, probably 3D-designed jumpsuits. Ditto, from people also are coming from private industry or outside government who are diametrically opposed to the superhero narrative, who want to duck their heads and uplift hard-working civil servants and otherwise work hard and do the work because it’s interesting and it matters and believe exactly zero people should be kissing their feet just for showing up at 9am to City Hall instead of Silicon Valley. Second, we are a high-EQ lot on the whole. That makes us sensitive both to the problems we are trying to solve--often some of the hardest in society--and also to team dynamics. The first part is another piece of “the work is hard” theme. Like teachers, social workers, public interest lawyers, we often work long hours in high-pressure situations, and we take the work home with us. It can be emotionally and mentally exhausting. At the same time, we often work on small teams, in even smaller emails, we grow close, we become like family, and like family, sometimes we want to adopt out a sibling to another family, preferably in Australia, or take the initiative ourselves and run away from home. People are hard. And that’s not just the ones we meet outside our teams.
- And it’s often self-imposed. We are, in general, a bunch of high EQ people, we who stick it out. And that means we feel the pressure acutely. That often can translate into the other side of both the savior condition and the ‘I want to serve’ compass: “I can’t leave” complex. No one is coming. It is up to us.
- What we round was the first two ingredients sometimes combine like a fifth grade volcano experiment into an eruption of Judge-y McJudge-rson. All of the feels and pressures can create problems when it comes to making personal decisions about next steps. As we saw time and again, when you come into a team or on a team, and the team is part of a club, and the club has a secret handshake and a clubhouse and an official piece of clothing--the hoodie--it also often comes with a cafeteria. Not a real one, this is government, there’s no money for that. But it does come with what can sometimes look like the dynamics of a middle school cafeteria. Which means you also can get the things that come along with middle school cafeterias: judgement on your personal choices. And sometimes, like middle school, that loathing or judgement comes from your own self.
- That judgement can sometimes look like this: if I leave, I am joining the dark side. Or, coming from others, the messaging of “If you leave, you are joining the dark side.“ There are amazing, and an amazing lot of people, who agonize about leaving when they want to stay but can’t. “It is up to us” as an open mantra also often translates to “and if you quit, you are giving up, going to the dark side, less than.” This is NOT HELPFUL. People have to be able to make personal choices based on what is or is not working for them. Right now, as a field, we often have a much stronger sense of self when it comes to, “No one should be kissing my feet because I’m here,” than we do “Nor judging me if, when, or why I choose to leave.”
- So what does this all mean? We (the collective we) are still figuring out what we need to do the work, and also to leave the work. And that’s okay. But what did become clear was we needed to start iterating small solutions to address some of these questions, challenges, and opportunities in our field, just as our field is doing when it tries to solve problems for our communities. Part of that includes conversations like these, that connects people and creates spaces to talk about things like about why we quit that it’s okay.
- So with that insight in hand,
- At our core, we are writers and connectors, so we started with what we know. We decided to design three starts of solutions, based on sharing and connecting through stories and learnings, for each of three core audiences we identified: practitioners, city leadership, and community members.
- First, we created a monthly newsletter for practitioners, The Commons. Each month, the newsletter focuses on a new topic that has come up across practitioners. The first issue was “Connecting the Field,” the next (which comes out next week!), is The Hiring Issue. It will include featured stories from local places tackling challenges, and also offer pieces by practitioners, interviews with sherpas, and practical information for getting the work done.
- Second, we partnered with Code for America to deliver a series of opportunities right to your doorstep, at this very Summit. We heard over and over that people feel silo-ed, isolated, and that CfA Summit was a place to connect. We also knew there were specific topics that didn’t get as much surfacing that people really wanted to talk about. So together with CfA, we created “Birds of a Feather” workshops, which run this afternoon and tomorrow afternoon, and are led by practitioners, for practitioners. They include topics like doing the work in small cities, based on feedback we heard that staff there are often part of conversations where some of the solution-sharing doesn’t apply in the same way, or connecting CIOs, who have specific but also wide-ranging job descriptions. And of course, responding to the overwhelming research response we heard about needing a place to connect, and also share, and find people and not feel so alone, we have several “group therapy” sessions.
- Second, we committed to surfacing local stories in national publications as a way to shine a light on this work. Time and time again, we found that local leadership was leading the way for national change in how government works, and doesn’t. For practitioners, we’ve gotten overwhelming feedback that seeing these kinds of stories helps people feel validated, and start to be able to connect, solve, see that it is a real field. At the same time, for city leadership, it’s a way to get inspiration, connect with other cities. And for residents, it’s a way to see not the government of pulpits or politicians, but of everyday hard work to improve services--and also to start to understand why it is so hard.
- All of that said, the field is young and we’re all still figuring this out together. If someone pretends to have all the answers, BE VERY SUSPICIOUS. And that includes us. We know there isn’t one way to do this work. Part of what we wanted to do today was to show that there are a lot of different configurations, a lot of different ways of measuring success, and still a lot of unknowns in the field. And we also want to say, we are the first to recognize that these are small interventions.
- Keep at it. Keep on doing you. Conversations like these are a place to pause and assess. And then keep driving forward, wherever that may take us.
- This is still a work in progress. We want to keep the work going by opening the floor to ask questions here.