Requirements for Change: Strong Leadership or a Disaster

"Every mayor wants to know what others are doing. It gives them the courage to do it in their own cities."

Clarence Wardell III, What Works Cities

While different team structures have pros and cons, one factor stood out as an indicator that a team would be successful: support from the top. Teams who have a city manager, mayor, CTO, or other person in a strong leadership position championing them are hands down more effective than teams who are trying to make it on their own. The trailing second place indicator? Disaster forcing work to begin.

Support from the top means not just that someone in a leadership position likes your team and gives you a budget, but also that they champion change, and empower the team to operate differently. This sometimes means that teams align with a mayor’s passion, as with some Bloomberg teams, or New York City’s Office of Economic Opportunity. In San Jose, the team aligns around a set of city priorities. But for teams everywhere, support from the top means the space to fail, the ability to walk into offices where you might not be wanted and try something new, and the political power to hack through the bureaucracy, redesign departments, jobs and processes, and make change.

Some mayors introduce change by bringing a business customer service mindset into office. In Orlando, the mayor views his job as being the city’s CEO, finding great talent and bringing it into government. In Mobile, a change in leadership catalyzed subsequent innovation—and it too, started with an industry approach. “When Mayor Stimson came to office, he brought a private sector cabinet in,” says Jeff Carter. “They used a model of leadership that understands the rigor of private industry in customer service, but adapts the flexibility needed to implement it in government.” By framing government within the model of private industry, mayors have recognized how they can set the priorities, practices, values, norms to drive user adoption and customer service as priorities within the way government does work.

Support from the top means not just that someone in a leadership position likes your team and gives you a budget, but also that they empower the team to operate differently.

Other mayors framed their approach around expanding staff’s capacity to come up with their own frameworks to dream big and reimagine how government could serve its communities. In Anchorage, Mayor Ethan Berkowitz tells staff to take him out past where he can see. Berkowitz knows trust around innovation comes from leadership: people need to know that if they take a risk and try something new they won’t lose their jobs. At the same time, he understands that innovative ideas stay ideas without hiring superb staff and trusting them to execute. Says his CTO Brendan Babb:

“[Mayor Berkowitz] has a lot of great ideas but he's also interested in people going past that in terms of ideas. When we've gone to visit departments where we kind of had a crazy cop, crazier cop, where we'd say like, ‘What if we had an Uber for snow plows between the city next to us and the school district? Could we share less equipment and be able to check it out? Or, can we do electric buses?’”

Across our interviews, we saw leadership taking up the challenge of hiring good people and trusting them to do the work. During her time as director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, Cecilia Muñoz brought in USDS to execute a new policy with her team.

“A bit later, my team came to me in a panic and said, ‘What USDS is proposing is not what president asked us to do, it’s going off rails.’ But I realized that USDS saw what was possible in totally different way—and they could make the end product much better. They were starting from what would the user need. We were starting from the solution requested.”

In places like Boston, Philadelphia, Syracuse, and Minneapolis, mayors encourage departments and innovators within them to both set priorities and to recommend best solutions within them. In San Jose, leadership makes that trust of internal capacity to achieve clear by hiring and promoting from within. When they city created the Office of Civic Innovation and Digital Strategy, the team promoted people from within. Thong notes:

“It’s unusual compared to other teams and gave us a fair amount of credibility in the organization based on who we were and relationships we already had. That saved us 18 months of time compared to other teams, where you might drop in someone who has an incredible pedigree but spends 12 months figuring out who are the allies and how to navigate the process.”

In some cases innovation and change result from a disaster, manmade or otherwise. The short story: Something broke. Generally badly. Almost always publicly. Sometimes in government, a fire can actually kindle a commitment to creating firebreaks. At the federal level, this is epitomized by the wave of private industry, largely-plucked-from-Silicon-Valley specialists who entered government in crisis response mode following public failure.¹

The healthcare.gov crisis spawned both an immediate and longer-term response. President Obama created the country’s first chief data scientist, pulled Silicon Valley talent to fill key roles like chief technology officer and chief information officer, created an Office of Science, Technology, and Policy, and introduced new ways for mid-career industry professionals to plant in government.²

The short story: Something broke. Generally badly. Almost always publicly.

Simultaneously, federal teams like the United States Digital Service and 18F created ways for skilled, trained industry professionals to circumvent traditional civil service hiring. Both were in the works, but the healthcare.gov crisis jolted their timelines forward. Each brought best practices of industry, including human-centered design, Agile procurement, constant beta, open source code, and user research.

As with other models discussed here, because the work is new and the teams and people doing it are often new, we don’t have data on the sustainability of either of these models. We don't yet know whether teams forged out of disaster are more likely to prosper than teams created by proactive leadership, or vice versa. Disaster is something we would wish on no one. Hiring or election of innovative leadership can be beyond our control. But there’s several lesson to be learned here, starting with the need to to reduce disaster as a mechanism to catalyze change. When it comes to government, guardian of access to our medical care, food stamps, marriage licenses, bridges and roads, taxes and social security, the risks are far too high not to lead proactively.

There are takeaways here for practitioners and leaders. Practitioners should seek to join an organization that has strong support from the top. Don’t start a team because the mayor wants to “get some innovation.” Look for leadership with a serious commitment to improving citizens lives, and where that commitment means taking risks and trying new approaches. If you yourself are a leader, know that it isn't enough to want the latest shiny thing simply for the sake of having it. If you have suffered through a disaster, know you won’t be alone in shaking your fist at those who didn’t take proactive steps, at the slowness of the steps to reverse or try to patch things, or how hard even the seemingly “easy” things are.