Building a New Practice of Public Problem-Solving

Idea

To scale the work of public problem-solving and ensure that good policy ideas actually reach the people they’re meant to serve, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Tara McGuinness identified four key elements of effective policymaking, arguing that these should guide future work. This work represented a departure from the previous century of policymaking, which focused on the origin of the idea (i.e., the policy creation) rather than the constituents it was meant to serve.

Incubation

In their seminal piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Slaughter and McGuinness argued that policymaking should be people-centered, experimental, data-enabled, and designed to scale. New America implemented these elements in ShiftLabs, a project aimed at helping local governments across the country reckon with dramatic shifts brought to their workforces by automation and artificial intelligence.

Impact

Rhode Island’s embattled foster care system has seen marked improvement in recent years—a shift catalyzed not by large-scale systems modernization, but, as PIT fellow Marina Nitze observed, by hands-on, community-oriented policymaking. Nitze worked with a team from the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) to develop an essentially people-centered initiative: a weekend event intended to shepherd as many pending foster families as possible through outstanding requirements. Ultimately, 174 families completed in one weekend a process that would normally take months, and the event also yielded more intangible benefits: The sense of community engendered could inspire greater commitment from new foster families—and wouldn’t have been possible without DCYF’s adoption of scalable, constituent-oriented solutions.