What the Work Really Looks Like

"Going through that process of rebuilding my credit and rebuilding my life after bankruptcy, that’s one of the other reasons that I [entered public service]. I want to prevent people from falling to the same structural challenges that I did, and to help those already there get out of it. There are ways out. It’s personal for me."

Tishaura Jones, Treasurer, St. Louis

We started interviewing problem-solvers working in government in the summer of 2017. By spring of 2018 many of the people we interviewed had left their jobs. Some had left government altogether. Why? Just as interacting with government can be hard, working within government to improve those interactions is also hard. People management is hard, the silos are hard, the bureaucracy is hard. It’s hard to get in through civil service, it’s hard to stay because of burnout, and it’s hard to stay in the field because finding the next step is more akin to “choose your own adventure” than following a predetermined career path. Upward management jobs are scarce, and lateral moves are common. Yes, this is everyone’s work. But systemic challenges prevent everyone from staying.

There is no playbook on how to redesign government, or to scale or sustain the work. Practitioners typically cite 2010 as the earliest domestic example of an innovation team embedding in government, when Boston formed New Urban Mechanics. Many people who have joined since became the first of whatever their title is, taking roles that never before existed. To figure out how to do their jobs, they use practices taken from the private sector, common sense approaches, or intuit what they know about simply making stuff better. They face a number of structural challenges, including shifting skills sets, a slow pace of change, challenging people dynamics, lack of career pipeline, and burnout.

The pace can be a huge source of frustration for problem-solvers who live in a world where everything keeps getting faster but work in a job where time itself can seem to stand still. Marni Wilhite, head of product at the City of Austin, says:

"The biggest challenge is that measuring impact is such a long term game. Over the course of a six-month project we came out with these great prototypes, but knowing whether long term we’re going to have an impact remains to be seen.”

The dire needs of constituents served by government compounds frustration with the slow pace. Practitioners come to do these jobs because they are deeply committed to change, and their work is critical to improving real lives of the people government serves. It’s painful to know you have the intellectual, technical, and resource capacity to improve a parent’s ability to feed their children, but you can’t press ‘go’ until you get two heads of agencies that don’t work together in a room, and the negotiation to do so takes five months. Or you have to get a policy changed before you can change a piece of code. Or you have to reject a qualified contractor’s bid on an RFP because they used the wrong font in their proposal. The list goes on.

At the same time, slow work and small work has huge potential for impact. When Durham’s innovation team wanted to improve outcomes for residents returning from prison, they took a small bite off a huge problem: focusing on people who need drivers licenses to get, or get to, a job. They thought a few dozen people would respond when they created an amnesty day where people could text to see if they qualified for license reinstatement. Two-thousand people texted, and the team helped 700 of them. It took months of research to figure out how to make a small change in a huge problem, but the results improved hundred of people’s lives, and gave the team inspiration and ideas for how to expand the service.

The dire needs of constituents served by government compounds frustration with the slow pace of change.

In Memphis, the innovation team also approached the mayoral priority of neighborhood economic vitality in smaller chunks. It would incubate a single idea, test and tweak it, scale, and then transition the project to agencies who had been partners in the entire process. This process birthed MEMFix, the idea that Memphis could revitalize a street with small, low-cost neighborhood changes like planters, bike lanes, re-striping streets, changing storefronts, and cleaning vacant lots. The team paired it with MEMShop, a retail incubator that would pop up shops into vacant storefronts in areas with the infrastructure upgrades, helping them ramp up with some subsidized rent, technical support, and promotions. Today, many of the corridors MEMfix touched have seen lasting change. Justin Entzminger, director of the iTeam, said:

“It’s a really great success story for how the model can work. You do a deep dive, you understand what needs to happen and how change can take place. Then you do well-planned, well-executed interventions and resource not through beyond the testing phase when you can say, okay, we believe in this. This works. This is how it was executed, and then determine how to sustain it in whatever way makes sense for that specific program.”

Brendan Babb, the chief innovation officer of Anchorage, Alaska, encapsulated the sentiment of many:

“I've made something to help people find bus routes. That might make their day five seconds easier but it's like 10,000 people whose days are five seconds easier because of that. That is really addictive.”

There are hundreds of thousands of civil servants working across state, federal, and local government. Many have been there for decades, working their way up the ladder, slowly but surely. Many problem-solvers in government come through what often seems like a back door: an appointed leadership position, a civil-service-exempt digital services position, a temporary fellowship. They often arrive with a blessing not bestowed on many who have been in line for promotion, recognition, or idea adoption far longer.

This creates on-the-ground friction that must be addressed to get work done. We heard this story from one city in many forms: “Public Works played with us, but they didn't want to. They were doing it because the mayor told them, ‘You will be interacting with [us].’ I think they were like, ‘Who are these, for lack of a better term, kids coming in and telling us how to do our job?’”

Practitioners spoke constantly to the importance of not being superheroes descending on work that needs doing. In Orlando, the team requested to be moved out of the mayor’s office and into the IT shop in order sit with the rest of the city, as well as to move away from the “needs of the week” focus of the mayor’s office and toward the longer term projects the IT shop takes on.

“I found that staff were saying ‘yes’ in meetings because Matt-from-the-mayor’s-office was there. It was really difficult to know if the staff was buying in because the mayor’s office was asking or because they actually bought in,” Matt Broffman, director of innovation for the City of Orlando, recounted.

We heard many stories of how teams worked to win over the civil servants they encountered. In order to build a relationship with the code enforcement team, the Mobile i-team joined themselves at the hip to the code inspectors. “Whatever they did, we did. If they washed their cars on Friday, we did that. If they took their garbage out, we did that,” Jeff Carter told us.

"Who are these, for lack of a better term, kids coming in and telling us how to do our job?"

The Syracuse i-team followed a similar playbook with public works crew while reducing the number of water main breaks in the city. “One of the things we've seen with working with departments is that we need an element of street cred,” Adria Finch says. “We don't want to be afraid to get dirty. We want to get out there. Some of my coworkers went and picked up garbage. I went out and filled potholes.”

Without such care, these dynamics can breed resentment, roadblocks, and friction between newly-arrived problem-solvers and longer-term civil servants. We’ve seen this firsthand as government technologists working at the city, state, and federal levels. Recommendations to put metrics in place, reduce wait times, or simplify processes for citizens can often be met with puzzled looks. Puzzlement that shifts into resentment can turn into roadblocks to getting work done, and can ultimately force problem solvers out of government service. Stuart Drown, deputy secretary for innovation and accountability in California, said:

“My job in terms of innovation is finding new ideas, proven new ideas, which can work in public sector. There are a few things that are obvious, few things that scale up. But mapping the processes and seeing what works and what doesn’t with core teams is critical. You have to send signals that say ‘we want you to participate in making your life better. You’re important.’ There’s more than enough work for everyone.”

Civil service has traditionally been a job people approach with the mindset of securing a stable job, having a career, and securing a pension. People entering government to problem-solve and disrupt often come in dreaming of big impact. National storytelling about saving state foster care systems, getting veterans healthcare, and building food stamp access are powerful ways to attract people who haven’t been part of government. But it also can do potential practitioners a disservice when the work does not look like the stories.

In a model like Teach for America, the call to serve grounds itself in clarity that the work will be slow, hard, and impact one child at a time. When encouraging people to problem-solve in government, the call to serve is the opposite: It focuses on the federal level, on radical change, and on success. It’s a powerful narrative, and one that draws in people who have never before considered government as a career. As engineer Brian Lefler noted:

“I’d read about [government] software failures, but you assume what you see in the news is an exception not the norm. Seeing healthcare.gov fail convinced me that there was a serious problem.”

Many people we interviewed joined because of huge crises like healthcare.gov and resulting calls to serve. But most people’s experiences do not involve swooping in to rescue the signature piece of legislation for an administration while simultaneously saving the day by giving Americans healthcare. Nor are they ushering thousands of refugees into the country or saving the lives of scores of veterans.

At city, county, and state levels––the wellspring of much of this work––impact is smaller scale, often slower, and focuses on mundane elements of people’s workaday lives. Innovators at the city level are thinking about potholes, garbage, and homelessness. They’re increasing the appeal of parks and they’re getting streets paved more efficiently. They’re helping connect citizens with homes, jobs, and food. These are the essential elements of people’s lives, and it is tiring, sometimes tedious work. Compared to the big stories the field prizes, it’s not surprising that most people’s work may feel small.

"Seeing healthcare.gov fail convinced me that there was a serious problem."

This gap between what we sell and what we do when joining government both undervalues the importance of the “small” wins and sets people up with skewed expectations, both of which threaten the ability to stay in the work. In a model like Teach for America, expectations coming in help define the kinds of working environments and challenges people may encounter, from lack of support to lack of supplies.

People who love this work and want to stay are many, and the numbers are growing. But the ways for them to stay and grow are not matching pace. There is no career path for “problem-solving in government incorporating modern processes or better technology.”

The fellowship model and/or temporary funding are common introductions for professionals going from private industry into government. Particularly on the federal level, people hop from temporary gig to temporary gig. They don’t move up the ladder. They renew contracts or go to another two year assignment in another agency. Lack of common vocabulary cripples people’s ability to find ways in or sustainable jobs. Civil service and hiring rules often prevent renewals. This leaves people, often with unfinished work, floundering to figure out how to stay, where to go next, or how to scale.

The combination of lack of career path and the emotional weight of the work create critical risks for a sustainable talent pipeline. Because those who commit to this work tend to have high emotional intelligence (EQ), they are often also sensitive to the problems they are trying to solve—often some of the hardest in society. Like teachers, social workers, and public interest lawyers, public interest technologists often work long hours in high-pressure situations. All take the work home with them, literally and emotionally. It can be emotionally and mentally exhausting, rickashaying from banal to burning-up, everything-is-on-fire crisis mode. And yet for those who choose to stay, the cost is worth it. As Marina Martin said of her work at Veterans Affairs:

“I had an idea it would be hard. I don't think I knew quite how hard it would be. But anytime, even in the very darkest moments, I would just remember that the people I was trying to help, in many cases literally gave their lives for me. So the least I could do was be super, super stressed out for four and a half years.”