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Innovation isn’t just a buzzword, it is hacking the establishment. Few things are as rooted as gov’t, making hacking that much harder. Innovation in gov’t looks like failing (small) a whole lot in between successes. Unfortunately you aren’t allowed to fail in gov’t. @GavinNewsom
2/ If the Office of Digital Innovation is to have a chance at being successful then it has to hack the gov’t ecosystem. The legislative process, budget, oversight, but mostly the culture of bureaucracy that rewards the status quo. @pahlkadot
I had the privilege of leading one of California’s early digital service initiatives. We failed a lot. I failed a lot. But with many supportive partners we made major strides in procurement, open source, educating, agile, workspace, cloud native, and so many more. @CA_CWDS
4/ Innovation takes an entire ecosystem willing to support each other and take intelligent risk together. @civicactions @CGI_USA @AccenturePubSvc @OnCoreLLC @CasebookPBC @LopezACYF @18F @codeforamerica @CAGovOps But it can all fall apart unless you use blameless postmortems.
5/ our bureaucracy and politics thrive on blame. We see it modeled all around us. It takes #OneTeam to move big rocks and California has mountains to move if it is going provide the digital services that our citizens desperately need. Models like @nxtgovca and @agilegovleaders
6/ I learned about hacking procurement from @vdavez @18F and had amazing people inside of CA gov’t who were willing to step out of their comfort zone. Thanks Marvel Voss @CADeptTech Robyn Sasaki, Amy Cooper @ca_osi among many others - we built California’s first agile vendor pool
7/ We provided live video streams of our work in-progress meetings to our customers all over the State of California and the general public. Every taxpayer could see our product backlog in a publicly accessible webpage. Thank you @BillMaile
8/ I was privileged to write @CHHSAgency response in support of the Federal Gov’t Open Source Policy. @CA_CWDS was one of the first CA orgs to have an Open Source repo on @github and has 25+ active projects. Thank you @HenryPoole Marc Jones, John Boule and Mike Wilkening
We were an early adopter of cloud native within gov’t and were one of the first on @awscloud which allowed us plenty of opportunities to fail small, learn, and push on. Thank you @markspitzer Ben Hafer, Chris Cruz, Rich Bach, and Pema Geyleg among others.
10/ I had the support of some amazing people. @hondanhon @HouseholdGaines @HenryPoole John Boule, Amy Tong, @PhoebeVarinia @pahlkadot @citizenplanner among so many others. I tried to be the best leader I could be and I failed often. But as a team we accomplished amazing things!
11/ I failed at remote work. I blamed this failure on the ecosystem. There is some truth in that, but I didn’t push hard enough for this change. Not everyone need to be present in real time. Had I been successful on this topic CA would have access to many more skilled engineers.
13/ Failure - if you haven’t done it or it isn’t allowed then it can paralyze you with fear. Fear of failure makes rational people make seemingly “irrational” decisions. But they aren’t - it’s part of the conditioning of an org that doesn’t support people when they fail.
If @GavinNewsom ‘s Office of Digital Innovation is to be successful - and we need it to be - then it has to embrace failure and risk. It needs a leader with real emotional intelligence that can create space for our civil servants to learn and grow and create a new culture.
15/ Most gov’t fails at weighing the consequences of inaction/status quo against the possible consequences of failure. I hear gov’t managers say “this current thing was here before me, so it’s not my fault. But if I try to improve it I fail it will hurt my career.”
16/ Don’t ever let yourself or people around you say “it’s not personal.” We work in public service because it is personal. It takes people, process, and technology to deliver digital services, but we only do it FOR the people. Make it personal and keep trying to do better.
17/ I learned that being a leader is more about building people up so that they can do great things than it is about anything else. Heck, I’m still learning and will be until my last days on this earth. The best co-workers are the ones that challenge you to be better & teach you
18/ In my 20+ year govtech career I’ve learned that not enough leaders & policymakers use the frontdoor to their own services. People create a narrative about why things don’t work that often isn’t based on real experiences & data. This narrative gets repeated as tribal knowledge
19/ @jtag joined our program as the first research and design lead in CA state gov’t. She has lots of lessons to share from both success and failures. But we built a research culture. Build policy on user experience and then test it. You’ll get it wrong, but you can adjust course
20/ IF you don’t try to do everything all at once. I wish I had fought harder to start smaller at @CA_CWDS Don’t underestimate the power of early wins and proving directional accuracy. Unlikely to hit a target 7 years in the future, but you can if the target is measured in months
/21 @lukefretwell wrote in December a vision and framework for California that I fully support. It’s a great primer on the topic and a must read: govfresh.com/2018/12/govern…
/22 @lukefretwell says “Terms that should be incorporated and repeated often:
Empathetic
Inclusive
Collaborative
Camaraderie
Community
Open”
Yes, but just using this language is only a start. You have to practice these behaviors every day. You have to show people how by doing.
Empathetic
Inclusive
Collaborative
Camaraderie
Community
Open”
Yes, but just using this language is only a start. You have to practice these behaviors every day. You have to show people how by doing.
/23 Someone rightly said that gov’t is perfectly designed to achieve its current results. If you know we can do better then look at the design. The Office of Digital Innovation looks like a good first step, but it shouldn’t have to fight against a framework designed for the past
/24 I believe that *everyone* that has worked on a big IT project for CA knows that our current model for “ensuring” success is reductive. Complex projects need to be iterative and have measurable outcomes. Stop asking for a 7 year plan that becomes an immutable truth.
