Great essay. As a fed, I can testify that this is a huge problem for us. The problem is that the people who are the most risk averse are usually the ones promoted to management. Doesn’t matter how many employees have “go energy” if their manager has stop energy. I think there should be KPIs that are actually tied to an agency’s mission, and managers and employees should be rated on those KPIs. You wouldn’t believe how disconnected managers’ performance ratings often are from mission-related outcomes.
Absolutely right! I work in CA State IT, and the risk aversion as one climbs up the bureaucracy is staggering, and this results in the lower-level people -- people such as myself, who do ground-level project task execution -- constantly being questioned and forced to justify even the smallest changes to established processes. This means tedious and pointless meetings with middle management who need to be "brought up to speed" on the simplest execution-level tasks that should be left to the people doing them. We get bogged down in getting permission to follow our experience and instincts, which wears people down and turns them into bureaucratic drones.
This is the antithesis of any kind of Agile process, and why State IT here will never really work under that framework until there is an overhaul -- from the top -- of the mindset around IT project management and execution. This is a heavy lift, and needs to start with visionary and brave leadership or it will never happen.
I realize this lack of trust is the result of a lack of tolerance in the press and public for failure resulting from taking risks in government work, risks that are lauded in the private sector as brave and innovative, but reckless in the public sector. People get into public service for the mission, but also for the stability and security that the public sector offers. We need to balance the need to encourage innovation with the need to require accountability in a way that is respectful and not punitive. Otherwise people will retreat to their corners and keep applying the brakes.
First of all, it was illuminating to me to learn the difference between “capital projects” and “operations” in the context of the DOTs vs. transit. Transit has always had both - my agency did a lot building during the nineties and the aughts, but operations was always the main issue: how to make efficient bus schedules, how to deal with congestion and weather, how to keep riders happy, how to maintain power systems and catenaries, how to disperse revenue equitably and efficiently. The state and local DOTs, on the other hand, were just becoming familiar with “Operations.” There’s more than laying down roads and forgetting them. Now they have rapid response to accidents and amazing ways to tweak traffic lights using live networks.
Secondly, since my agency was tiny and flat (waves of austerity tended to cut any excessive levels of management) we already manifested many of the recommendations in “Coding America”. As an app developer, I found my own way between desired design and documentation methodologies and the way my little apps actually worked (the front of the sub.) The back of the sub was careful design of the underlying database so that it could scale up as technology made more and more things possible.
We also had a traditionally strong IT department that tended to do a lot of the work and problem-solving for the vendors who were developing our major systems, including a GPS tracking for buses, a new scheduling system, and a major accounting overhaul. As for the smaller business functions I was helping to streamline, I had access to pretty much anyone at any level of the agency to answer questions, which meant that I gained an understanding and respect for all those different levels of interest.
So a question that remains for me is: to what extent does the size or scale of a governmental unit determine its success at providing needed flexibility for the people who do the real work at the front of the submarine? Can we truly turn our massively complex bureaucracies in these directions? I’m standing by right here to find out.
Would love to talk to you more about this and what’s happening in local government. As someone (a trained civil engineer who works in transportation), who’s been hired to go and do with all the knowledge and connections and best intentions, the stop energy in local government and in our industry is killing everything right now. We’re currently at risk of losing the next generation of professionals because of a broken system that favors the loudest smallest and least informed voices. We have all the right skills and none of the right power and all feel helpless. I’m debating writing about it because I don’t know what else to do at this point.
You should definitely write about it. Bring attention to it. And organize! It looks like you're in the Bay Area. Are you part of Abundant SF? They get this and are trying to do something about it! And Abundance Network across California. LMK if you need an introduction.
Great esssay. I think there's a big omission of litigation culture in America though. It doesn't matter if you want to check fewer boxes or put fewer people on check boxing duty if the boxes need to be checked to avoid being sued. Maybe the department of transportation does everything you want- but then they end of getting sued for a bajillion dollars and need to undue all the work they just did that you wanted, because the legal system enables private citizens to sue the government if projects don't have their boxes checked,
Yes, that's absolutely true. But that also means we need to hold our elected leaders accountable to reducing the surface area for adversarial legal attack, our non-profit and advocacy world (and the funders who fund them) accountable for suing less often, and ourselves accountable for holding them accountable, through shaping the dialogue about what our communities need from their leaders!
It's always amazing to me how much we humans are able—in any industry but especially in government—to forget the WHY of what we're doing. We get so wrapped up in the HOW, perhaps because it's so visceral and right in front of our noses. Yet it's vital that we first and clearly define the "jobs to be done" as Clayton Christensen called it, and then somehow remind ourselves of those jobs again and again. If we can remember that, we have a fighting chance of applying stop energy and go energy in balanced ways.
You might see some more visitors to this post today as Matt Yglesias linked it in his Friday post (subscriber only). He said you were "obviously right" but also...
Yglesias quote:
"It’s important to acknowledge, at some level, that people actually do have reasons for not wanting to adopt ideas that would make the government more effective.
The main reason is that there’s a lot of substantive disagreement about what we would like the government to be effective at doing. Donald Trump, for example, has lots of ideas that I think are crazy or stupid or nonsensical or ridiculous. But he also has a handful of ideas that I think are just wrong and bad. Investing a large amount of resources in rounding up long-resident illegal immigrants seems to me like a big waste of time and money. I wouldn’t do that if I were president. But Trump, by all accounts, is really fired-up about every aspect of the immigration puzzle. He wants to cut legal immigration, and secure the border, and step up interior enforcement all simultaneously. In a country with a lot of “state capacity,” he would be able to accomplish that if he wins an election."
.... (Yglesias goes on for a bit)
"The point is that it’s literally not possible to increase capacity to do things, with the proviso that it has to be only good things. The proceduralism that tries to guarantee “only good things” is precisely the thing that makes it impossible to do anything. You need to be willing to take that risk. I’m sure Pahlka knows all this, and there is a lot of merit to her approach of trying to be agreeable about it. But I want to genuinely do the thing, which means being eyes-open about the risk."
Has anyone ever read the book: “Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town.”? There are some very interesting tidbits. The author states if everyone went 10 miles per hour there would be no need for traffic lights and people would get to their destination quicker. The only reason we have traffics lights is to keep up with traffic.
Fulfilling job positions many times become a case when there's a stressing demand on the Exec team to ship replies, when the questions haven't been formulated, let alone having a critcal framing of the questions themselves. To this day, I see positions being opened where not a single experiment has been done with Robotic Process Automation, perpetuating tasks that are simply inhumane.
“The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers.
The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.” Peter Drucker
This post highlights an important general point about how government works - but it is almost impossible to discuss this issue meaningfully in such general terms. Governmental functions are very idiosyncratic, and for each function, a particular type of detailed change is needed.
Change begins with understanding - what does the executive in charge of the bureaucracy actually want it to do? As you allude to with the Indian education administrator - a good amount of government is designed and intended to not make news except in the exact way desired. Efficiency? Better functioning? Fine, but that is not always the point of the operation.
Good government is good politics, but usually only at a superficial level. And if leadership doesn’t know the difference between what is substantive improvement and what is good PR, that makes life even more challenging.
While this post is meaningful - it provides little or no roadmap for actual change, which can only be done at the most microcosmic scale.
Yes, that's a good point. The roadmap is not entirely clear but I think we do know some of the elements. I talk about what the public should do about these issues generally at the end of a post about the FAFSA debacle several weeks ago:
And see my comments in response to Danielle E here in this thread about what she can do. Organizing is going to be needed. I'd love to hear what you think the roadmap looks like!
1. It would be really interesting to see agencies try to classify their staff positions as “go” people vs. “stop” people (vs. hybrid), and quantify how many they have of each. And even, as a demonstrative exercise, make colored org charts that show which parts of the org have which focus.
2. It seems like maybe some of the “stop” functions are a bit duplicative. If you imagine some office in a federal agency, they probably face some type of oversight or accountability from (at minimum): the House, the Senate, the GAO, the courts, the White House (incl. OMB), the DOJ, departmental inspectors general, and departmental lawyers. And all of that is before we get anywhere deep down the org chart. So perhaps one of the ways we can have more of a culture of “go” is to thoughtfully remove some compliance/oversight actors on the basis that there are already others who have a similar job. (Of course not all of these actors are identical.) Though it’s tough because I think the most ripe opportunities are at the within-agency level—as the other actors are structurally, and sometimes constitutionally, mandated—yet I suspect some of the within-agency compliance functions exist precisely out of fear of landing in the spotlight of the others.
Absolutely. I think there's currently a strong incentive to duplicate review for that very reason. If there were less fear of landing in the spotlight of external oversight bodies, agencies could rely on that review and move towards a better go energy ratio.
Great essay, thank you. Front-of-sub and back-of-sub are useful figures. Regarding "fewer brakers", you might enjoy Glyph Lefkowitz' reframing of "move fast and break things" to "make it safer, don't make it later": https://blog.glyph.im/2023/12/safer-not-later.html
Unaccountability Machine is great. You probably know about Ian Dunt's How Westminster Works and Why It Doesn't, but just in case: also excellent.
Possibly the most important point you make js that no one really talks about this! Just raising the issue is necessary. In general, this is not going to be of much interest to the grassroots, but I have seen meaningful initiatives when new administrations (local government) take over, and some, er, mature corporate leaders lead task forces to focus on vital but not salient process improvements. Still a great topic and really appreciate your newsletter.
Great essay. As a fed, I can testify that this is a huge problem for us. The problem is that the people who are the most risk averse are usually the ones promoted to management. Doesn’t matter how many employees have “go energy” if their manager has stop energy. I think there should be KPIs that are actually tied to an agency’s mission, and managers and employees should be rated on those KPIs. You wouldn’t believe how disconnected managers’ performance ratings often are from mission-related outcomes.
Another great role for OPM: helping agencies craft mission orientated kpis!
Absolutely right! I work in CA State IT, and the risk aversion as one climbs up the bureaucracy is staggering, and this results in the lower-level people -- people such as myself, who do ground-level project task execution -- constantly being questioned and forced to justify even the smallest changes to established processes. This means tedious and pointless meetings with middle management who need to be "brought up to speed" on the simplest execution-level tasks that should be left to the people doing them. We get bogged down in getting permission to follow our experience and instincts, which wears people down and turns them into bureaucratic drones.
This is the antithesis of any kind of Agile process, and why State IT here will never really work under that framework until there is an overhaul -- from the top -- of the mindset around IT project management and execution. This is a heavy lift, and needs to start with visionary and brave leadership or it will never happen.
I realize this lack of trust is the result of a lack of tolerance in the press and public for failure resulting from taking risks in government work, risks that are lauded in the private sector as brave and innovative, but reckless in the public sector. People get into public service for the mission, but also for the stability and security that the public sector offers. We need to balance the need to encourage innovation with the need to require accountability in a way that is respectful and not punitive. Otherwise people will retreat to their corners and keep applying the brakes.
IT retiree from a small transit agency here:
First of all, it was illuminating to me to learn the difference between “capital projects” and “operations” in the context of the DOTs vs. transit. Transit has always had both - my agency did a lot building during the nineties and the aughts, but operations was always the main issue: how to make efficient bus schedules, how to deal with congestion and weather, how to keep riders happy, how to maintain power systems and catenaries, how to disperse revenue equitably and efficiently. The state and local DOTs, on the other hand, were just becoming familiar with “Operations.” There’s more than laying down roads and forgetting them. Now they have rapid response to accidents and amazing ways to tweak traffic lights using live networks.
Secondly, since my agency was tiny and flat (waves of austerity tended to cut any excessive levels of management) we already manifested many of the recommendations in “Coding America”. As an app developer, I found my own way between desired design and documentation methodologies and the way my little apps actually worked (the front of the sub.) The back of the sub was careful design of the underlying database so that it could scale up as technology made more and more things possible.
We also had a traditionally strong IT department that tended to do a lot of the work and problem-solving for the vendors who were developing our major systems, including a GPS tracking for buses, a new scheduling system, and a major accounting overhaul. As for the smaller business functions I was helping to streamline, I had access to pretty much anyone at any level of the agency to answer questions, which meant that I gained an understanding and respect for all those different levels of interest.
So a question that remains for me is: to what extent does the size or scale of a governmental unit determine its success at providing needed flexibility for the people who do the real work at the front of the submarine? Can we truly turn our massively complex bureaucracies in these directions? I’m standing by right here to find out.
Would love to talk to you more about this and what’s happening in local government. As someone (a trained civil engineer who works in transportation), who’s been hired to go and do with all the knowledge and connections and best intentions, the stop energy in local government and in our industry is killing everything right now. We’re currently at risk of losing the next generation of professionals because of a broken system that favors the loudest smallest and least informed voices. We have all the right skills and none of the right power and all feel helpless. I’m debating writing about it because I don’t know what else to do at this point.
You should definitely write about it. Bring attention to it. And organize! It looks like you're in the Bay Area. Are you part of Abundant SF? They get this and are trying to do something about it! And Abundance Network across California. LMK if you need an introduction.
Great esssay. I think there's a big omission of litigation culture in America though. It doesn't matter if you want to check fewer boxes or put fewer people on check boxing duty if the boxes need to be checked to avoid being sued. Maybe the department of transportation does everything you want- but then they end of getting sued for a bajillion dollars and need to undue all the work they just did that you wanted, because the legal system enables private citizens to sue the government if projects don't have their boxes checked,
Yes, that's absolutely true. But that also means we need to hold our elected leaders accountable to reducing the surface area for adversarial legal attack, our non-profit and advocacy world (and the funders who fund them) accountable for suing less often, and ourselves accountable for holding them accountable, through shaping the dialogue about what our communities need from their leaders!
It's always amazing to me how much we humans are able—in any industry but especially in government—to forget the WHY of what we're doing. We get so wrapped up in the HOW, perhaps because it's so visceral and right in front of our noses. Yet it's vital that we first and clearly define the "jobs to be done" as Clayton Christensen called it, and then somehow remind ourselves of those jobs again and again. If we can remember that, we have a fighting chance of applying stop energy and go energy in balanced ways.
So true. And well said.
You might see some more visitors to this post today as Matt Yglesias linked it in his Friday post (subscriber only). He said you were "obviously right" but also...
Yglesias quote:
"It’s important to acknowledge, at some level, that people actually do have reasons for not wanting to adopt ideas that would make the government more effective.
The main reason is that there’s a lot of substantive disagreement about what we would like the government to be effective at doing. Donald Trump, for example, has lots of ideas that I think are crazy or stupid or nonsensical or ridiculous. But he also has a handful of ideas that I think are just wrong and bad. Investing a large amount of resources in rounding up long-resident illegal immigrants seems to me like a big waste of time and money. I wouldn’t do that if I were president. But Trump, by all accounts, is really fired-up about every aspect of the immigration puzzle. He wants to cut legal immigration, and secure the border, and step up interior enforcement all simultaneously. In a country with a lot of “state capacity,” he would be able to accomplish that if he wins an election."
.... (Yglesias goes on for a bit)
"The point is that it’s literally not possible to increase capacity to do things, with the proviso that it has to be only good things. The proceduralism that tries to guarantee “only good things” is precisely the thing that makes it impossible to do anything. You need to be willing to take that risk. I’m sure Pahlka knows all this, and there is a lot of merit to her approach of trying to be agreeable about it. But I want to genuinely do the thing, which means being eyes-open about the risk."
Thank you for the heads up on Matt's mention! Got a few more subscribers following that. :)
Has anyone ever read the book: “Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town.”? There are some very interesting tidbits. The author states if everyone went 10 miles per hour there would be no need for traffic lights and people would get to their destination quicker. The only reason we have traffics lights is to keep up with traffic.
Fulfilling job positions many times become a case when there's a stressing demand on the Exec team to ship replies, when the questions haven't been formulated, let alone having a critcal framing of the questions themselves. To this day, I see positions being opened where not a single experiment has been done with Robotic Process Automation, perpetuating tasks that are simply inhumane.
“The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers.
The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.” Peter Drucker
100%
With some automation, we can still hire people to work in those systems, but focus them on higher value work that values human to human interaction.
This post highlights an important general point about how government works - but it is almost impossible to discuss this issue meaningfully in such general terms. Governmental functions are very idiosyncratic, and for each function, a particular type of detailed change is needed.
Change begins with understanding - what does the executive in charge of the bureaucracy actually want it to do? As you allude to with the Indian education administrator - a good amount of government is designed and intended to not make news except in the exact way desired. Efficiency? Better functioning? Fine, but that is not always the point of the operation.
Good government is good politics, but usually only at a superficial level. And if leadership doesn’t know the difference between what is substantive improvement and what is good PR, that makes life even more challenging.
While this post is meaningful - it provides little or no roadmap for actual change, which can only be done at the most microcosmic scale.
Yes, that's a good point. The roadmap is not entirely clear but I think we do know some of the elements. I talk about what the public should do about these issues generally at the end of a post about the FAFSA debacle several weeks ago:
https://eatingpolicy.substack.com/p/upset-about-fafsa-heres-something
And see my comments in response to Danielle E here in this thread about what she can do. Organizing is going to be needed. I'd love to hear what you think the roadmap looks like!
Love this! Two ideas:
1. It would be really interesting to see agencies try to classify their staff positions as “go” people vs. “stop” people (vs. hybrid), and quantify how many they have of each. And even, as a demonstrative exercise, make colored org charts that show which parts of the org have which focus.
2. It seems like maybe some of the “stop” functions are a bit duplicative. If you imagine some office in a federal agency, they probably face some type of oversight or accountability from (at minimum): the House, the Senate, the GAO, the courts, the White House (incl. OMB), the DOJ, departmental inspectors general, and departmental lawyers. And all of that is before we get anywhere deep down the org chart. So perhaps one of the ways we can have more of a culture of “go” is to thoughtfully remove some compliance/oversight actors on the basis that there are already others who have a similar job. (Of course not all of these actors are identical.) Though it’s tough because I think the most ripe opportunities are at the within-agency level—as the other actors are structurally, and sometimes constitutionally, mandated—yet I suspect some of the within-agency compliance functions exist precisely out of fear of landing in the spotlight of the others.
Absolutely. I think there's currently a strong incentive to duplicate review for that very reason. If there were less fear of landing in the spotlight of external oversight bodies, agencies could rely on that review and move towards a better go energy ratio.
Great essay, thank you. Front-of-sub and back-of-sub are useful figures. Regarding "fewer brakers", you might enjoy Glyph Lefkowitz' reframing of "move fast and break things" to "make it safer, don't make it later": https://blog.glyph.im/2023/12/safer-not-later.html
Unaccountability Machine is great. You probably know about Ian Dunt's How Westminster Works and Why It Doesn't, but just in case: also excellent.
Just finally read the Glyph Lefkowitz post. So good. Thank you for sharing that!
Great reminder... I haven't read that and I will!
Possibly the most important point you make js that no one really talks about this! Just raising the issue is necessary. In general, this is not going to be of much interest to the grassroots, but I have seen meaningful initiatives when new administrations (local government) take over, and some, er, mature corporate leaders lead task forces to focus on vital but not salient process improvements. Still a great topic and really appreciate your newsletter.