Bureaucratic Mysteries: Design tools for government

Building the actual product or technology is rarely the coda on the work that is social entrepreneurship and government software. More frequently, we see much of the labor existing in collaboration with our government and civil society partners: in building consensus, forming coalitions, cutting through roadblocks, and mapping the bureaucracy.

In my time at the US Digital Service, IDEO, and more recently New America, there are a set of tools I often apply to working through this complexity and communicating that complexity with my team. And a significant part of this technique I believe comes from some mental muscles I developed in college studying classical literature. In Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the characters create a densely interconnected – but logical– community of influence. Zeus sits as king: impertinent, meddling, and cruel. Hera is at his side, manipulative, jealous, but loyal. Athena is the goddess of wisdom and all things military: untouchable, disciplined, and wise. Hercules is the human face of divinity: brash, contradictory, and flawed.

Each of the gods in the Pantheon represented a place in Greek cultural thought. They are metaphors through which people described the world, and rationalized what they observed in it. In doing our work as government technologists, we daily encounter the same mythologies. Bureaucracy ebbs and flows in its daily patterns, but when the dam bursts or the crops die, we scramble for explanations as to why.

The goal of these tools is to untangle the web of stakeholders that make up any given technology project, and to identify from the chaos the actors who appear most frequently in the story, who wield the most power, and who seem to hold sway over the narrative. If we can see that clearly, maybe we can push towards a better ending.

Read the complete description of challenges and tools on former PIT Fellow Andrew Lovett-Barron’s site.