Conclusion

When you are buried in your work, heads down trying to schedule a meeting with someone who doesn’t want to meet with you, following up on an email for the gazillionth time, or explaining yet again why metrics/research/agile is important, it can sometimes be hard to feel that you are anything more than a tiny drop in a very large, very bureaucratic ocean. But overwhelmingly what we learned from this research is the degree to which people working in government attempting to solve problems, change process, and rethink everything, are all encountering the same challenges, chewing over the same ideas, and tinkering with similar approaches. In conducting these interviews we met kindred spirits across the country who believe deeply in what they’re doing, despite the myriad challenges.

As we’ve said in here multiple times and in multiple ways: This work is hard. Beginnings are hard. No one has it all figured out. But when change does happen—whether that means watching Scrum spread throughout the department or launching a housing lottery app—it feels magical, which is why we keep coming back for more.

These are the early days of the field. Many of the essential structures that exist in other fields are missing. Career paths are muddled or missing. Professional development is spotty. Jobs tend to be clustered around fellowships or senior to middle management, excluding spots for entry level workers or executives. Practitioners don’t have obvious ways to meet and swap lessons learned. We don’t even really have a name.

Yes, all of these elements are lacking. But we hope that this report sparks the creation of more connective tissue across the field. Specifically:

• A way to share resources and solutions. Practitioners need shared resources similar to the kinds of shared resources teachers have created: work plans, source code, sample job descriptions, off-the-shelf product recommendations, and other such tactical and functional information beyond a press release or a white paper noting that someone launched a new thing
• A better understanding of why people are leaving and how to make the work sustainable. This impacts every group interested in problem-solving in government, from funders who want to make informed and (where possible) quantitative/qualitative data-driven decisions about how to invest in sustainable success to leadership who wants to hire and retain talent, to people doing the work, who lack places to see they are not alone in the struggle to find a career path, and who need clearer signals on how to stay when they want to do so.
• Help shaping career trajectories, including entry points and ways to move up. The many places tackling the challenges of pipeline through workaround, temporary solutions has created a career pipeline based on short-term bandages for a long-term broken system. People can often get in at higher pay scales, but without a sustainable way to stay. We need larger conversations around hiring, beyond one-offs developed in individual locations, and in partnerships with civil service professionals and their organizations.
• Professional development, more convenings. We heard that practitioners would like more opportunities to meet each other and share stories and solutions, but also observed that the field has limited opportunities for professional development. This means that not only is it hard for long time civil servants to learn user-centered, modern practices without the intervention of a designated innovation team, but that practitioners don’t have the opportunity to learn and grow in their own areas of expertise.
• A better way to talk about the work. We spent two and a half pages discussing why it's so hard to talk to anyone about what we call this thing that is problem-solving in government. Practitioners, funders, government leadership, and the constituents we serve all need better language to describe what is this thing we do. The field has yet to settle on ideal terminology, and if we can’t talk about it we can’t scale it.

Our interviews made clear there is a lot of room, and need, for improvement. Despite a year working on this project, and many years doing the work, even as we started writing this report we found ourselves making discoveries by happenstance. Though we used multiple different outlets at many different points in time to recruit interviewees, in some cases we found people simply by passing them in the hallway at conferences, or stumbling across interesting posts on Twitter. We still find out about convenings and conferences through colleagues-of-colleagues, people tagging us in LinkedIn posts, or emails asking, “Are you the right person to talk to about X?”

And yet for all of its challenges, the success stories are beautiful. When government works the way it should, we are all better off. We hope that this report has provided others with a sense of community and a way forward. As with everything else in this field, we know it is a small, slow step. But we see it as a meaningful, important one nonetheless.