This is Everyone’s Work

“This isn’t our work. This is everyone’s work and it can be your work. You don’t have to be a Steve Jobs figure in a black turtleneck to do innovation in government, you just have to have the guts to apply a different playbook.”

Jen Pahlka, Executive Director, Code for America

Practitioners told us that in order for this work to grow and be sustainable, we must broaden the way we think about the people who are capable, qualified, and empowered to do it. The origin myth for much of the work in the field centers around the rescue of healthcare.gov. The truth is that people have been attempting to innovate, reorganize, and redefine government work for generations. But because the healthcare.gov rescue is the canonical national example of saving government from technical failures, much of the thinking around innovation focuses on bringing external technologists into government instead of identifying homegrown or already present talent.

We heard from multiple practitioners that this line of thinking can be exclusionary, and lead to negative results. Leaders in the public interest technology movement told us that they originally thought there wasn’t a place for them in the field because they didn’t have engineering backgrounds, or didn’t know how to code a simple website. Ariel Kennan told us, “I am designer first and foremost. I followed a lot of what the chief innovation officers and chief digital officers were doing. I always thought, those roles are really cool, but I didn't think they were ever for me.”

Garren Givens, the first executive director of the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program (PIF) and founding member of 18F, observed that at the federal level a lot of the language used to describe the work sets up an us-versus-them narrative, with people who are screwing up and the people who are there to save them:

“The first thing that I wanted to blow up was this whole narrative around dropping fellows in behind enemy lines. I didn't feel at any point like my life was in danger at Department of Education. That narrative immediately establishes this idea of good guys and bad guys and who's smart and who's not, who's here to fix it and who's not. If you ask a room full of people who's a good driver, the entire room is going to raise their hand."

Givens notes that many people in government joined, at one point in time, to serve the public, and that he preferred to give people the benefit of the doubt. This devaluing or undervaluing of government employees––and the value of doing the opposite––was something we heard across our interviews.

Several teams told us about efforts to empower and train others within government in order to grow the innovation workforce. In Syracuse, the innovation team asked code enforcement staff to participate in task forces and offer opinions on solutions that the innovation team developed to tackle buildings-related challenges around the city. While others within government expressed doubt that anyone would want to participate in the task force, two-thirds of the code enforcement staff ultimately signed up for the task force.

People have been attempting to innovate, reorganize, and redefine government work for generations.

“The laborers and people who are the boots on the ground, this is their career. They've been doing this job for years, but nobody has ever asked them their opinion about how to make something better,” says Adria Finch, the director of innovation for the city’s iTeam. For Syracuse, soliciting opinions and feedback from on-the-ground workers is in essence a part of expanding their innovation workforce.

The director of the innovation team in Mobile, Jeff Carter, observed something similar, but found that simply asking the frontline employees their opinion wasn’t always productive:

“The people who know the most about the problem are the frontline employees that do the work every day. The trouble is that frontline employees don't have the language to explain the problem in a way that crosses that barrier. They express things like, ‘This sucks’ or ‘This is broken’ or ‘This doesn’t work.’ They don't know how to say, ‘This doesn't work because we don't have an organizational structure that allows me to complete it’ or ‘This doesn't work because we don't have the tools that we need.’ So they can only say, ‘This sucks,’ but those guys really are the ones with the right information.”

The Mobile team found success empowering the middle-management layer. The team is focused on reducing blight. They worked with frontline employees in the code enforcement department (the code inspectors) to help reshape their roles so they were more effective in reporting code violations across the city. As the code inspectors became more productive, it reflected well on middle management, who were able to report positive numbers and successes to the senior staff within the agency. The result was that code enforcement managers felt incentivized to keep moving the department ahead.

In San Jose, the innovation team organized a Scrum boot camp for city employees. The team had been using agile themselves, and wanted to find a way to offer the approach to others in the city. Ten non-technical staff from the city took the bootcamp––all employees who had never heard of agile before (“They’re not reading the blogs saying that if you’re not doing agile then you suck,” Michelle Thong, the service innovation lead for the City of San Jose told us)––and immediately began implementing the approach in their own teams. San Jose now has nearly two dozen teams using Scrum. Thong says:

“On the civic tech side, people wring their hands a lot on how you get government staff to adopt new methods when the terminology is weird, or how do we get them to change how they think. This shows that people are totally willing to take on new terminology when it solves a really important pain point for them, which is prioritizing their work and being able to say no, or at least say hold on.”

It’s also worth noting that the San Jose team’s founding members were also all existing city employees. So in essence they recruited their own innovation workforce from people who already worked in San Jose government. This proved highly beneficial to the team when it came to understanding the inner workings of the city (in that they already understood them) and also in building relationships and gaining trust. Because the team already knew the players, and weren’t viewed as external, fancy hires, they were able to move quickly when they first formed.

Practitioners also agreed on the need to find people who can be passionate about this work, whatever their backgrounds. Some discussed ways to appeal to people with computer science degrees, or those working in Silicon Valley, and attempts to instill the value of public service in those arenas. One engineer noted the lack of a tradition of public service in the tech sector, and described how surprised he was at the degree to which he found himself passionate about his public sector work in a way he’d never experienced in the private sector, despite the fact that he’d come from a high profile company. “I suspect that if I’m a lawyer, this is not a shocker. But it is news for tech developers who work in big tech.”

This is the tack that USDS has largely taken, in an effort to woo highly qualified engineers and others away from big paychecks and stock options. But most local governments we spoke with don’t have the budget or the resources to entice workers from Silicon Valley, so in many cases shied away from hiring technical talent and instead looked to hire “do-ers” or “hustlers”––people with a passion for public service, who will try multiple angles to get the work done, and who in some cases can be trained in the fundamentals of service design and human centered design. While many of these teams noted that they would like to bring on more technical talent, many of them have functioned for years without it. They’ve found ways to use free tools like Instagram or Google Sheets, or they’ve trained select city employees on human centered design methods. In some cases, as with the Memphis innovation team, they partner with technical talent from local universities.

"The first thing I wanted to blow up was this narrative around dropping behind enemy lines. I didn't feel at any point like my life was in danger at Department of Education."

Additionally, some teams have had success recruiting from the veteran community. Travis Moore, founder of TechCongress, reports: “The veteran community is a hugely untapped resource. There is expertise and a desire to serve that is, and people coming out of service need jobs.”

Finally, we heard the need across the country for greater diversity in government innovation workers, with a particular interest in bringing more minorities into the work, and a broader range of ages. Anecdotally (i.e. go to an innovation conference and look around), innovation workers tend to be young (20s and 30s) and white. Although women are underrepresented in technology, they make up a sizeable chunk of the civic innovation workforce. We made an effort in the course of our research to interview a diverse range of people, but we also found that many teams have equal or greater numbers of women. On New York City’s Design and Product Team, for example, six of the 10 staff members are women. More broadly, within the leadership team for the Economic Opportunity office, six of 10 directors are women. USDS staff is 50 percent female, the leadership is over 60 percent female; Code for America’s staff consists of 65 percent women/non-binary, with 76 percent women/non-binary on the leadership team. And our own Public Interest Technology team at New America is run by a staff of five women.¹

Teams who looked beyond bringing on engineers as innovation workers also tended to be more socioeconomically and geographically varied. Many teams looked to hire locals for several reasons. The Mobile team, for example, found success in hiring a diverse range of Mobile natives who not only cared deeply about their town, but also were more affordable than employees from the tech sector. Austin, Orlando, Syracuse, and Anchorage, too, have hired local talent. Two teams who wanted to bring on experts from the tech sector noted off the record that they were struggling to staff up. Even though they were able to offer competitive salaries (for government) they found it hard to entice their top candidates to relocate to places outside of the large urban areas where most technologists live.

Although women are underrepresented in technology, they make up a sizeable chunk of the civic innovation workforce.

But the teams who focused on finding and nurturing local talent had more success, pointing us to a critical and overlooked understanding that the best opportunities for growth lie not in luring technologists away from Silicon Valley, but in convincing people who are passionate about their communities that they can find a path to change through government.

Ron Bronson, formerly a UX strategist and service designer for the City of Bloomington, Indiana, made an early career of working in obscure local governments:

“I go to places no one else wants to go, like Wyoming or Kentucky. Someone has to come to these places and help folks understand things and make things easier and better and work better for ordinary everyday citizens. Because the folks in these places deserve that. It’s like a mission. It’s not religious, but it feels like missionary work in a sense.”

But for the most part, people don’t want to move to small locales they’re not connected with, no matter how enticing the work. Which means growing the field and growing diversity within the field will require empowering the people who are already working in government. “There's a network of people who really, really care about this and they don't all look alike,” Jen Pahlka observes. “These aren't the people that go in Wired magazine. Bureaucrats in the most obscure state government department are part of this movement and we should celebrate that diversity and recognize it, because that's where all this happens.”