Helping people by designing great systems

The science is crystal clear for virtually every social or business pursuit:  diverse teams and organizations perform better, produce higher-quality products and services, and perform better financially.  However, it’s one thing to push out a policy espousing diversity, equity, and inclusion, and another to build a team or workplace to maximize the business benefits of DEI.  Building – or rebuilding – and cultivating teams that embrace DEI as a performance tool is a process with some important steps.  Every team should actively work to dismantle the myth of diversity as a zero-sum game, and learn how to transition from “feels strange” to “feels normal.”  

“Stakeholder engagement” is almost a profane term in many government circles.  Why?  Because opening up oneself or an organization to feedback is always scary, especially with a very safe expectation that the feedback will be negative.  But the development of quick and easy feedback opportunities greatly improves relationships between government entities and their stakeholders over time. 

High-performing government teams create and regularly use efficient and effective methods of soliciting and using feedback from customers, users, or constituents

Together, we can work to create – – and close – – feedback loops; we can enable your team to receive feedback from its stakeholders, to let them know that they’ve been heard, and incentivize those stakeholders to continue providing that feedback. 

Governments are collections of human beings working together to provide essential services to their citizens; by definition, they’re imperfect.  If that’s true, why is government failure prohibited, concealed, and severely punished for exhibiting innate traits?  This isn’t about moral or ethical failure, like acts of greed, thievery, or corruption; but about occasionally inaccurate estimates or calculations; good ideas poorly executed; great strategies that for one reason or another don’t result in the expected outcomes.  The fear of severe reactions to inevitable failures is what keeps most governments on the late freight; it makes us the last to adopt innovations in business operations, promising practices, or new technologies that have propelled the rest of society forward for decades prior.  How might we breed bravery into government, enough to take it nearer to the front of the line for the next new idea?  How might we cultivate a culture in government that recognizes failure not only as an eventuality but as a tool?  How might we train and incentivize government leaders to acknowledge failure in ways that disarm most critics, and to create “air cover” for their subordinates for embracing risk as they search for better ways to deliver services?

Public sector teams can and should become great IT customers by taking control of their own product strategy.  While IT and business team MUST work in close coordination, the IT shop in most public organizations is so siloed from the “business” (the staff performing the mission work of the organization) that there is a seemingly intractable gap in understanding between the business and IT shops of the following:

• How to determine the steps in each business process that can – and should – be automated
• The ideal outcomes, and the minimum number of process steps needed to reach those outcomes
• The products and services that already exist in the IT marketplace to assist the business in meeting its goals.

Depending on the size and relative scope of the business processes a government team manages, it can more effectively control its destiny by practicing the basics of product management.  No one knows the business and what it is like for those doing that business every day.  

• Business teams can – – and must – – learn to:
• Articulate their IT needs and as a routine part of their performance monitoring practice;
• Routinely research the IT marketplace for innovations that incrementally improve processes;
• Avoid the need for massive business transformations, and instead, regularly search for small IT retool opportunities that make a huge difference over time. Stop trying to boil the ocean!