Making bureaucracy work for you in the public sector
In a workshop held on February 1, Marina Nitze, co-author of the new book Hack Your Bureaucracy, shared with attendees how to successfully navigate challenging bureaucracies to usher in innovation.
Nitze is a partner at Layer Aleph, a crisis engineering firm that specializes in restoring complex business systems to service. She is also a fellow at New America's New Practice Lab, where she works on improving America's foster care system through the Resource Family Working Group and Child Welfare Playbook. She was the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs under President Obama, after serving as a Senior Advisor on technology in the Obama White House and as the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the U.S. Department of Education. She serves on the advisory boards of Foster America, Smartsheet, and Think of Us. She created TaskTackler, the personal productivity app for Type-A personalities, and authored the book Business Efficiency for Dummies.
Nitze told a story about her first days on the job as the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. She lacked the resources she needed to achieve her goals and make actionable changes but remembered the story of a blogger who was able to successfully trade up from a red paper clip to a house through a series of transactions. With this in mind, she wondered how she could trade her “paperclips” for the resources she needed to achieve her goals, inspiring her first tactic to hack bureaucracy: finding your paperclip.
“It took me years to get my first hire, it took me years to get my first dollars of budget,” she said. “Think about what resources and skills you have that you might be able to trade with others. And you never know, you might make a kind of wacky trade to unlock what you really need.”
Next, Nitze talked about cultivating your karass—an informal group of people who are motivated to work together in service of a common goal. Relationships, knowledge, and power are not captured by traditional organization charts. By mapping how people relate to one another in reality, you can develop a better understanding of who knows what, who controls what resources, and who to include, in what order, in service of your goals and plans. She advised participants to get to know their colleagues on a deeper level, as they may have unexpected connections and experiences that may be useful in achieving organizational goals. However, Nitze said that this relationship-building will look different in a virtual office setting.
“It definitely takes a little bit more work in a remote environment. And that can be friendly private messaging in Zoom,” she said. “What I found working really well was making that extra dedicated space for just human time.”
Nitze also emphasized the importance of showing the hard numbers, giving credit to others, and “understanding the why” behind an idea. Asking why repeatedly and connecting practices back to specific reasons make it clear what needs to change and how to properly change it.
While it is tempting to be the pioneer of adopting a new technique, Nitze told participants that it is better to be second. The bigger and more established the bureaucracy, the less likely it desires to be the first one trying a new process. Being the first is often seen as risky and prone to errors or failure. Nitze advised attendees to look for similar precedents to make it seem like their organization is going second to deter any potential hesitations.
“If you are in state or local government, this can be an even more powerful tool,” she said. “State and local government, and to a lesser extent federal agencies, think everyone else is behaving the way that they are. They generally don’t have a mechanism to test that, and if you can spend that energy to research … you may be able to influence that to move a lot faster because now their risk framework has changed.”
Not only is it important to set internal goals, but by setting public commitments, organizations can generate momentum for an initiative. If your organization has the power to convene and celebrate other groups, Nitze advised asking them to make public commitments on a shared goal that can be unveiled together.
Meetings are often seen as a productive environment for colleagues to convene and make decisions. However, Nitze told participants that the majority of the work they should be doing should be done before the meeting. Nothing unscripted or unknown should happen because ample preparation and conversations are done before the meeting.
Nitze refers to her favorite tactic as “strangling the mainframe.” This means attacking an overwhelmingly large problem with smaller wins. The mainframe can refer to an agency, a team member, or anything that poses a challenge to achieving your goals. Through these small wins, you can get to the root of your larger problem without the bureaucracy even realizing it.
“This is really our strategy for building what is now VA.gov. We did not try to put every single benefit line at the VA online at once. We started with the GI Bill Comparison tool and then we folded on a little bit of the employment center articles, and then we folded in the healthcare application,” she said.
Her final advice included: using the bureaucracy against itself, not wasting a crisis, being wary of problem lists, and stabbing people in the chest. This means using the routine practices of your organization to your advantage, being prepared for the unexpected, focusing on creating solutions rather than dwelling on problems, and being open and honest with your colleagues if you disagree with them.
Watch the recording of the workshop here!
