There is no shortcut

A bit of commentary to go with the paper I just published with the Niskanen Center on the topic of Culture Eats Policy (one of the concepts in my new book). The paper describes two examples (there are many more! Send me yours!) of policies that make perfect sense on paper but get twisted and even flipped upside down as they descend through the hierarchy. Over time, the processes and procedures that evolve to administer the policy result in a perverse outcome, frequently the opposite of the policy’s intent. If the reason for this is the culture of government (and I believe it is), then we need to recognize the limits of policy change and work harder on changing the culture of government. If elected and appointed leaders want to know how to get the bureaucracy to get different outcomes, they need to be willing to look at different levers than simply writing new law or policy. They need to look at how they behave, and how they see the bureaucracy. That’s a very hard conversation to have. 

Case in point. A friend recommended my book to a local elected leader in his area. “You really have to read this,” she told him. Now that the government tech field has a solid base of excellent books for practitioners (see below for list), I wanted to write a book for the people who create the environment in which our practitioners work. They are the ones who can accelerate change. So I really want them to read it.

In this case, though, no dice. “Tell me what it says to do and I’ll do that,” this elected told my friend. “I just don’t have time to read the book.” 

I have not exactly been great about reading all that I should have over the last, say, 20 years. (It is not a coincidence that I chose 20, the age of my kid. Parents: I see you.) Throwing stones would be a bad idea from my glass house. And it would be very self-serving of me to insist that my book was the only way for people to engage in the topics I address. Of course it isn’t. But the “just give me the answer” mentality is part of the problem.

It’s an honor to be asked what the answer is, and for people to be willing to listen. And it’s shitty to complain about the privilege. But if “the answer” fit in a half hour meeting, or a memo, or even a report, the problems would have been taken care of long ago. If the answer were a bill you could write and get passed, someone would have tried it. Certainly, if it were a hearing, we’d be in great shape! In some sense, silver bullet thinking is the problem. 

I do have some concrete suggestions for how elected and appointed leaders can get better outcomes out of the administrative state.

• They can change how they do oversight in a multitude of ways, with less emphasis on fidelity to plans established long ago and long checklists of requirements, and more on asking what the team is learning along the way, how they are adapting to account for what they’ve learned, and how they are showing real value to their actual users.
• They could ask about the barriers public servants face and how they might help remove or mitigate those barriers. (Top of everyone’s list will be hiring, and I’m not going to stop saying that until we actually make some progress on this, so prepare to get sick of me.)
• They could try using prototypes of services in design as well as the live services their constituents have to use.
• They could work to reduce the policy complexity that burdens these programs and services with so much needless detail that it takes decades to learn all the rules.
• They could invite implementers of all sorts (tech, design, ops, even legal!) to the table when they are crafting law and policy in order to increase the chances that the policy will be implementable as written. 

In my experience, these are not things that most leaders want to hear from me. They want to know what bill they should author or amend, and I rarely have an answer. My suggestions all have to do with changing behavior – changing their behavior in order to encourage change in others. 

But even more than behavior change, what leaders need to do is expressed well by Joi Ito in a paper he wrote called Resisting Reduction: 

“Better interventions are less about solving or optimizing and more about developing a sensibility appropriate to the environment and the time.”

That’s right. I want our leaders to develop “a sensibility appropriate to the environment and the time.” (Related is Dave Guarino’s frequent refrain to cultivate situational awareness.) If you’re wondering how well that goes over in a meeting on the Hill…yeah, so am I. I haven’t had the guts to try it yet. I suspect I will be thanked politely and shown the door. 

(I wrote a paper in this same series, called Death Star Thinking and Government Reform, which was the first time I retold Weaver's ESB story, Chapter Four of Recoding America being the second time, and the Niskanen paper being the third! Credit still goes to Weaver, who wrote it up here ages ago.)

But this need for “sensibility” should resonate with anyone who’s come to the realization that if the problem is a system that is too rigidly rules-bound, the solution is unlikely to be more rules. And there is a difference between understanding that as an abstract concept in your head and having lived it long enough that you feel it deeply in your gut. Between seeing a system of rules and seeing a network of people. Norbert Wiener said 60 years ago that

When human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human beings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood.

It is because public servants are flesh and blood that they behave the way they do. And they act within interconnected, complex, self-adaptive systems, making it difficult to know the real-world impact of new rules and regulations. Human behavior, mostly well-intentioned, perverts the intent of law and policy. I’ve worked to better understand (never well, just better over time) the behavior of the public servants in our administrative state, but what I realize now is that if I want to change the environment in which they work, so that our culture eats less of our policy, I will need to better understand the behaviors and incentives of our elected and appointed leaders, in order to help them develop new sensitivities. Any suggestions are welcome. (You can hit me up here.)

PS: As promised, the Suggestions for Further Reading section of Recoding America, in part:

Belotti, Marianne. Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones). San Francisco: No Starch Press, 2021.

Carnahan, Robin, Randy Hart, and Waldo Jaquith. “State Software Budgeting Handbook, De-risking Custom Technology Projects: A Handbook for State Grantee Budgeting and Oversight.” 18F, Technology Transformation Service, General Services Administration, August 2019. https://derisking-guide.18f.gov/state-field-guide/.

Digital Services Playbook, The. US Digital Service. https://playbook.cio

Greenway, Andrew, Ben Terrett, Mike Bracken, and Tom Loosemore. Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery. London: London Publishing Partnership, 2018.

Harrell, Cyd. A Civic Technologist’s Practice Guide. San Francisco: Five Seven Five Books, 2020.

Hopson, Mark, Randy Hart, Waldo Jaquith, Igor Korenfeld, Vicki Mc- Fadden, Rebecca Refoy, and Alicia Rouault. “De-risking Government Technology: Federal Agency Field Guide.” General Services Admin- istration and 18F, September 2020. https://derisking-guide.18f.gov/federal-field-guide/.

Hunt, Bill. “Digital Policy Guide: A Digital Servant’s Guide to U.S. Federal Information Technology Law and Practice.” https://digitalpolicy.us/.

Kalil, Tom. “Policy Entrepreneurship at the White House: Getting Things Done in Large Organizations.” Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization 11, no. 3/4 (2017): 4–21. https://doi.org/10.1162/inov_a_00253.

McGuinness, Tara, and Hana Schank. Power to the Public: The Promise of Public Interest Technology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.

Meyer, Erie. “How to Usability Test a Government Service.” Medium, December 6, 2020. https://eriemeyer.medium.com/how-to-usability-test-a-government-service-e43d03834383.

Nitze, Marina, and Nick Sinai. Hack Your Bureaucracy: Get Things Done No Matter What Your Role on Any Team. New York: Hachette Go, 2022.

Pahlka, Jennifer. “Delivery-Driven Policy.” Code for America, November 5, 2019. https://codeforamerica.org/news/delivery-driven-policy/. “Qualitative Research Practice Guide.” Code for America, Spring 2020 https://info.codeforamerica.org/qualitative-research

Signals. Periodical from Public Digital, available at https://public.digital/ signals.

“Software Acquisition and Practices (SWAP) Study.” Report of the Defense Innovation Board, US Department of Defense, May 3, 2019. https:// innovation.defense.gov/software/..gov/.