Living outside of DC, I mostly read this as if foreign text. I understand enough to appreciate what you have done, and are proposing. I wonder- how many are there out there that do what you do? Does every state have one? What is a day in the life of your kind like? Does your kind have conventions? Can you condense your message to one or two memorable bumper stickers, or to a one minute pitch that a politician could understand and be willing to act upon? Does your kind have a lobbyist?
We need more change makers, much more!! Stagnation leads to things like corruption (including collusion) and might eventually lead to major changes that are NOT for the better good of “We the People”.
The bumper sticker I would choose to illustrate why change makers , especially why “system” change makers exist and are so critical to society is the saying:
Q; How many are there out there that do what you do? Does every state have one?
A: I'd like to count myself in that group and believe it's a movement that is growing. Every state has thousands of people who have witnessed the results of the scenario Jen describes first hand. It's unclear how many have the interest/will/incentives to try to change it.
Q: What is a day in the life of your kind like?
A: It's hard. It involves producing content that is too complex/nuanced for most to understand it as intended...trying to make that content simple without losing the message
Q: Can you condense your message to a pitch a politician could understand and be willing to act on
A: I've been working on this for a decade. I try to do this in graphical video form. I think I've honed most of my stuff to the point where a politician can understand it, but not to the point they are willing to act upon it. Here's a link to one example - https://si-delivery.com/clips/b2b948e1-dfca-4ae2-bb59-b11889602fba
Kevin, this is masterful illustative work and right on target in laying out the way this all works, its complexity and its range of participants and drivers. I value and want to replicate your graphical video approach. I see huge value in being able to build together from visions like this, so that someone else could leverage your images and ideas to expand in some new direction or dial into a specific focus, without needing to rebuild or explain the foundation you laid. It would be wonderful to see a common platform and library emerge where this was readily possible - I see where elements of that can happen now clipping and probably getting AI tools to model off what we can feed it. But Ideally we would land with something more coherrent and connected than say a set of iterative and related YouTube videos. And of course we doing a version of it here building on Jen's 3 Horizon's image and ideas.
As to your agility measurement point, I like your framing. We here at NJDEP have a portfolio of 200 active IT projects (research, planning or building) and a backlog of 150 project demand signals in "idea" status. Our completion time for the 180 completed projects since tracking started in 2022 from the time logged as "idea" to ultimate project completion is not great (15 months on average), although that includes waiting time to be prioritized and refined with clarity - not from start of build. This info is not highly accurate/reliable, but prior to 2022 we lacked the tracking to even know with any confidence what our full portfolio even was - so... progress. I suspect others are still working with our old spreadsheet method and may or may not have much of a formal intake process or clear business unit liaisons which were critical to our progress so far.
Perhaps Jen Palkha could rally some reasources to produce a government portfolio management playbook and open source toolset?
I think along with visioning like you have produced to understand the systems at play, governments will need pretty clear ongoing project demand visibility to complete the stories in support of more holisitc, more connected, more transformative choices toward H2+. Having the visibility and clarity still leaves the change makers up against the need to enroll owners like those described here, in legislatures and governor's offices. Even agency heads are stuck in some limiting dynamics that can interfere with their ability to champion the bigger picture often needed to make H2+ leaps.
Thanks Knute! If you're up for really digging in, you might like the strategy Minnesota published last July - you'll notice a similarity in the videos, which I helped them build. This was released in a RFI asking for feedback. The summary of that feedback from most of the 130 respondents was: "Minnesota has created a strategy that could be the ignition to a new way of transforming state organizations and solving these problems". Progress has hit some setbacks (if you follow Minnesota DHS in the news, it may provide some hint as to why).
Thanks Kevin, really great work on the graphics and videos. Telling these complex stories effectively is absolutely key. I agree that Minnesota is onto a great approach that could unlock deeper change than ever before (setbacks notwithstanding). I was brought back to my challenges telling such stories with the tools of the time in 2012. Prezi was new-ish and I was amazed to find some work I did on it was still live. I'm eager to get back to this kind of storytelling with the latest thinking and tech...
Very cool Knute. I think I would need a guide to take in the full story told through this Prezi, but was definitely able to catch the gist. The picture with the Current/Future towers and the "how" bridge reminded me of more videos! (feel free to tell me it's time to stop replying with new videos:)
To your call to action seeking people thinking and writing about horizon 3 - Minnesota DHS published a vision for horizon 3 and how to get there. It is focused on removing the structural constraints you mention here. How do we start dialogue between folks pondering these ideas and people on the ground who are working to make them a reality? Are there other strategies out there for horizon 3 that are being discussed/evaluated/tested?
Very nice work from the argument, the lovely Horizon model that steers innovation work in companies, and the calls to action - “Tell me your vision.” Very excited about the next pieces from your new organization. It's choppy waters out there for all of us! Thank you for the humility to publish this and reflect on your own good work. The window has changed, and your past work has built a well-informed perspective with real Wisdom.
“The number of carve-outs Congress has granted to the Paperwork Reduction Act in recent years is its own story.” - Privacy Act’s Matching Program restrictions are the same, there have been like a dozen amendments to create purpose-specific carve-outs.
Very much resonated with point about the well-intentioned, but worrying tendency for the bureaucracy to adopt H2- language, which can result in a bandaid fix (particularly the point about agile contracting). Your reflections help me to be cognizant of this when doing procurement, hiring, etc!
Hi Jenn, great post. I am a CA state worker currently in an MPPA program, and one of the ideas you're describing here is a concept I learned in my organizational change class this semester. I am not sure if you're aware of the research done in the academic organization literature on this topic (I certainly wasn't before my program), but some of it touches very directly on these ideas.
TL;DR, Meyer and Rowan argue that organizations don't adopt formal structures, procedures, and metrics to improve efficiency (although they often pretend this is why), but because they reflect widely accepted institutional “myths” (widely accepted institutionalized practices) that provide legitimacy. To manage the tension between ceremonial conformity and practical work, organizations often decouple official rules and structures from day-to-day operations, allowing them to appear rational and legitimate while still getting work done.
When you describe agencies that learn to speak the language without actually changing the underlying structure, that's basically federal agencies trying to demonstrate legitimacy via ceremonial compliance. Oftentimes accountability measures and expectations from policymakers and even the public are filtered through these lenses, such that the government agencies have to make sure they comply in the "expected" way while still trying to limp along and get the work done. All the while hamstrung by the policy cruft-filled environments and systems they exist in (as I know you are well aware of!).
Really appreciate you for banging the drum on this continually. I read your book and liked it so much that I convinced the chair of my department to do an independent study last summer centered around it.
Really glad this struck a chord! Here’s a few additional resources depending on what you’re interested in.
1. DiMaggio and Powell (1983), “The Iron Cage Revisited.”
This is a major paper on a concept called “institutional isomorphism.” It looks at how Meyer and Rowan's "myths" arise, and explains how organizations across different sectors and environments are merging over time. They propose 3 mechanisms: coercive pressures from politics and legitimacy demands, mimetic pressures to copy others under uncertainty, and normative pressures from professionalization (narrow range of degrees/schools in a given sector + professional associations, etc.). It helps explain why “agile” and similar reform language spread so quickly from the private sector to the public sector.
2. Bromley and Powell (2012), “From Smoke and Mirrors to Walking the Talk.”
This is a direct follow up to Meyer and Rowan’s paper. The authors update the decoupling idea by breaking it into two parts. 1) Policy-practice decoupling, where the policy/law is passed but then nothing changes, often because of institutional resistance or environmental factors, or because the new policy itself was just written poorly or under-resourced. And 2) Means-Ends decoupling, where the relevant institution adopts the new rules/laws/policies and try to implement, but the means of adoption are things like measuring the wrong thing, or collecting data without using it, or there’s no feedback loops to improve the first iteration. Basically, as you wrote in Recoding America, because the steering wheel isn’t connected to the car.
3. Kettl (2021), “Weberian Bureaucracy and Contemporary Governance.”
Don Kettl adds onto the steering-wheel-detached-from-car idea in a way that pulls in bureaucracy, policymaker and public expectations, and networked implementation structures that often involve a lot of 3rd parties. His argument is that policymakers, media, and the public still imagine government as a neat Weberian hierarchy (Weberian = from Max Weber, German scholar who wrote the book on Bureaucracy in 1922), while actual implementation now runs through messy networks of contractors, grantees, nonprofits, and local actors (and, although he doesn’t focus on it, technology!). This mismatch makes accountability blurry, which further makes change hard because if it something doesn't work, it's often difficult to pin the blame on any one link in the chain. It also helps explain why reforms that sound straightforward often fail in practice.
4. Ahmed (2006), “The Nonperformativity of Antiracism.”
Ahmed’s piece is about university antiracism work, but the broader point applies not just to any kind of change that a powerful entity wants to resist. Oftentimes just talking in the right language is seen as doing then change and gets the organization kudos and increased legitimacy, even if nothing changes. And in a pernicious way, as you said, it even acts as a smokescreen because it looks like the org is doing the right thing because they are saying the right thing.
Hi Jen -- great article! Your H2+/H2- distinction really resonated with me since I read this piece two weeks ago. The pattern you describe — reforms that relieve pressure rather than build toward the new system — maps directly to something I encountered at a large federal agency: a comprehensive H3 vision, developed carefully and presented with an iterative H2+ roadmap, was halted because the leaders felt the vision was too much change.
In my experience, coalition design is the prerequisite: at the Census Bureau, the Acting Director asked to be briefed on the leadership coalition's ideas as they were developing them, not after the vision was complete. That changed the relationship between the leadership and the work entirely. The leaders who co-created the vision were ready to carry it forward in a way that made the iterative work possible. Your invitation to share H3 operating model visions prompted me to work through this more carefully. Do you think getting the coalition design right first could make an H2+ iteration agenda more viable?
There's an easier read pdf version of this which is of a speech the author gave where she talked about this, which I cannot find a link for online. If you message me I can email it to you.
Thank you for the link to the paper. What I was referring to more than a cross-level, cross-functional coalition is the need for the top-level leaders to operate as a true team -- a partnership with both shared understanding of the complex system that is the agency or enterprise they work in and the shared accountability for delivering the outcomes -- the public value -- that it exists to provide. Having an executive team is the exception in the federal government because the "system" components, such as the Executive Core Qualifications, the Executive Candidate Development programs, the performance management system, the short tenures of political appointees. etc. all reward individual performance. What made the Census engagement unique was that the Acting Director formed the executive team and directed them to work together to create and implement a vision. Ten years later, that initial work is still yielding lasting results. But rarely do discussions about government reform or operating model changes address what needs to change in the behaviors at the executive level. In the federal government, it's very easy for one person in an executive governance role to slow or stop change by saying "No." What is needed is an executive team that works together to jointly decide -- and implement -- the "yes".
Wow, great essay Jennifer. The pressure valve dynamic really got me. H2- work succeeds at exactly the wrong thing. The dysfunction never builds enough pressure to force the real fix. That's how systems stay broken while looking fine. And of course, everyone just moves on to the next problem.
The people who actually keep these systems running already know which fixes are buying time and which ones are real. They're just never in the room when the reform conversation happens. Any framework that doesn't start with them is going to get absorbed the same way the last ten did.
The missing piece here is procurement. Whatever the new model looks like, it's going to get built through the same contracts and vendors that produced the broken one. You can change the language and the org charts and still end up in the same place if the money flows the same way, because there's no good way to increase "competition" through smaller, modular, tactical work.
There are a bevy of ways to solve the various problems we face -- especially at sub-federal levels -- but the morass of complexity makes it hard to actually help.
I agree that the people currently keeping these systems running usually know what the problems are.
But that doesn't mean they understand the solutions.
To fix the problems in many cases, you will need both the people running the systems as well as outside people. That understand what a well functioning organization looks like
This is a really interesting argument. I like the idea that “H2-“ work is making the status quo hang on for longer, whereas “H2+” work is actually moving toward a better solution.
I wonder though… I feel like all the proposals at the end are themselves H2-! There’s this fundamental problem of organizations with no real pressure on them to perform, because they are so far from democracy, and then they don’t perform.
I feel like H2+ would be something that is changing the model. Like a Palantir for general government agencies. Or like three of them. Required to be interchangeable. Enforce performance by terminating the underperforming 10% of contracts every year and giving their work to their competitors. I don’t know, I’m just trying to think of something that would feel like a real, fundamental, structural difference from how government services are provided today.
I am a self-proclaimed change-maker - I call myself a 'system change maker" (I can be contacted at systemchangemaker@gmail.com). I am not currently employed but my professional experience is a lengthy career in corporate law (as a paralegal) always with a healthy interest in politics (I was once a Political Science major, Pre-Law in my 20s). I love your article because it is obvious your work is at the level I am at - you are not "personal" with politics but you can bridge the personal between politics, business, and many other sectors.
I am a fan of the three horizon model. In my past life working in enterprise digital strategy, we often spoke with our clients about this model in terms of their legacy technological platforms, the process needed to evolve them, and the final future state. In my current work in civic innovation and strategy, however, on this subject of government and modern systems, we took a little bit of a different approach in our recent paper: https://resources.imaginedeliver.com/independentstateimaginedeliver
Living outside of DC, I mostly read this as if foreign text. I understand enough to appreciate what you have done, and are proposing. I wonder- how many are there out there that do what you do? Does every state have one? What is a day in the life of your kind like? Does your kind have conventions? Can you condense your message to one or two memorable bumper stickers, or to a one minute pitch that a politician could understand and be willing to act upon? Does your kind have a lobbyist?
I wish there were one of us in every state, and maybe there is and I don't know them. We should have conventions!
I definitely need to get better at the one minute pitch but to be fair it depends a little on the politician and what they're interested in.
I'll think about bumper stickers!
We need more change makers, much more!! Stagnation leads to things like corruption (including collusion) and might eventually lead to major changes that are NOT for the better good of “We the People”.
The bumper sticker I would choose to illustrate why change makers , especially why “system” change makers exist and are so critical to society is the saying:
“Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace” : )
My reflections on these questions:
Q; How many are there out there that do what you do? Does every state have one?
A: I'd like to count myself in that group and believe it's a movement that is growing. Every state has thousands of people who have witnessed the results of the scenario Jen describes first hand. It's unclear how many have the interest/will/incentives to try to change it.
Q: What is a day in the life of your kind like?
A: It's hard. It involves producing content that is too complex/nuanced for most to understand it as intended...trying to make that content simple without losing the message
Q: Can you condense your message to a pitch a politician could understand and be willing to act on
A: I've been working on this for a decade. I try to do this in graphical video form. I think I've honed most of my stuff to the point where a politician can understand it, but not to the point they are willing to act upon it. Here's a link to one example - https://si-delivery.com/clips/b2b948e1-dfca-4ae2-bb59-b11889602fba
Kevin, this is masterful illustative work and right on target in laying out the way this all works, its complexity and its range of participants and drivers. I value and want to replicate your graphical video approach. I see huge value in being able to build together from visions like this, so that someone else could leverage your images and ideas to expand in some new direction or dial into a specific focus, without needing to rebuild or explain the foundation you laid. It would be wonderful to see a common platform and library emerge where this was readily possible - I see where elements of that can happen now clipping and probably getting AI tools to model off what we can feed it. But Ideally we would land with something more coherrent and connected than say a set of iterative and related YouTube videos. And of course we doing a version of it here building on Jen's 3 Horizon's image and ideas.
As to your agility measurement point, I like your framing. We here at NJDEP have a portfolio of 200 active IT projects (research, planning or building) and a backlog of 150 project demand signals in "idea" status. Our completion time for the 180 completed projects since tracking started in 2022 from the time logged as "idea" to ultimate project completion is not great (15 months on average), although that includes waiting time to be prioritized and refined with clarity - not from start of build. This info is not highly accurate/reliable, but prior to 2022 we lacked the tracking to even know with any confidence what our full portfolio even was - so... progress. I suspect others are still working with our old spreadsheet method and may or may not have much of a formal intake process or clear business unit liaisons which were critical to our progress so far.
Perhaps Jen Palkha could rally some reasources to produce a government portfolio management playbook and open source toolset?
I think along with visioning like you have produced to understand the systems at play, governments will need pretty clear ongoing project demand visibility to complete the stories in support of more holisitc, more connected, more transformative choices toward H2+. Having the visibility and clarity still leaves the change makers up against the need to enroll owners like those described here, in legislatures and governor's offices. Even agency heads are stuck in some limiting dynamics that can interfere with their ability to champion the bigger picture often needed to make H2+ leaps.
Thanks Knute! If you're up for really digging in, you might like the strategy Minnesota published last July - you'll notice a similarity in the videos, which I helped them build. This was released in a RFI asking for feedback. The summary of that feedback from most of the 130 respondents was: "Minnesota has created a strategy that could be the ignition to a new way of transforming state organizations and solving these problems". Progress has hit some setbacks (if you follow Minnesota DHS in the news, it may provide some hint as to why).
Here's a Mural board that has links to everything: https://app.mural.co/t/minnesotamesmodernizationcan3670/m/minnesotamesmodernizationcan3670/1754081683082/fccc2005d83a2d11a12bea54bf6c2caa55b5fdbc?sender=uc99ad10c761de24074363019
Here's a summary doc:
https://mn.gov/dhs/assets/mn-mes-modernization-strategy-summary_tcm1053-700627.pdf
Here's the accompanying video series:
https://vimeo.com/showcase/11751697
Thanks Kevin, really great work on the graphics and videos. Telling these complex stories effectively is absolutely key. I agree that Minnesota is onto a great approach that could unlock deeper change than ever before (setbacks notwithstanding). I was brought back to my challenges telling such stories with the tools of the time in 2012. Prezi was new-ish and I was amazed to find some work I did on it was still live. I'm eager to get back to this kind of storytelling with the latest thinking and tech...
https://prezi.com/view/IsEAdyvf1deeDZch6pMn/?referral_token=4VcJrplnB3FN
Very cool Knute. I think I would need a guide to take in the full story told through this Prezi, but was definitely able to catch the gist. The picture with the Current/Future towers and the "how" bridge reminded me of more videos! (feel free to tell me it's time to stop replying with new videos:)
https://si-delivery.com/clips/0911b2cb-e031-429e-b3be-32c2d63b63e3
To your call to action seeking people thinking and writing about horizon 3 - Minnesota DHS published a vision for horizon 3 and how to get there. It is focused on removing the structural constraints you mention here. How do we start dialogue between folks pondering these ideas and people on the ground who are working to make them a reality? Are there other strategies out there for horizon 3 that are being discussed/evaluated/tested?
Very nice work from the argument, the lovely Horizon model that steers innovation work in companies, and the calls to action - “Tell me your vision.” Very excited about the next pieces from your new organization. It's choppy waters out there for all of us! Thank you for the humility to publish this and reflect on your own good work. The window has changed, and your past work has built a well-informed perspective with real Wisdom.
Great article so much to think on here.
We need real reform. But that's going to require changes both from the legislative branches and the executive.
And it's a long term process, not something that can be done in months
“The number of carve-outs Congress has granted to the Paperwork Reduction Act in recent years is its own story.” - Privacy Act’s Matching Program restrictions are the same, there have been like a dozen amendments to create purpose-specific carve-outs.
Very much resonated with point about the well-intentioned, but worrying tendency for the bureaucracy to adopt H2- language, which can result in a bandaid fix (particularly the point about agile contracting). Your reflections help me to be cognizant of this when doing procurement, hiring, etc!
Hi Jenn, great post. I am a CA state worker currently in an MPPA program, and one of the ideas you're describing here is a concept I learned in my organizational change class this semester. I am not sure if you're aware of the research done in the academic organization literature on this topic (I certainly wasn't before my program), but some of it touches very directly on these ideas.
The most salient connect is a paper from 1977 published by Meyer and Rowan: http://www.iot.ntnu.no/innovation/norsi-pims-courses/harrison/Meyer%20&%20Rowan%20(1977).PDF
TL;DR, Meyer and Rowan argue that organizations don't adopt formal structures, procedures, and metrics to improve efficiency (although they often pretend this is why), but because they reflect widely accepted institutional “myths” (widely accepted institutionalized practices) that provide legitimacy. To manage the tension between ceremonial conformity and practical work, organizations often decouple official rules and structures from day-to-day operations, allowing them to appear rational and legitimate while still getting work done.
When you describe agencies that learn to speak the language without actually changing the underlying structure, that's basically federal agencies trying to demonstrate legitimacy via ceremonial compliance. Oftentimes accountability measures and expectations from policymakers and even the public are filtered through these lenses, such that the government agencies have to make sure they comply in the "expected" way while still trying to limp along and get the work done. All the while hamstrung by the policy cruft-filled environments and systems they exist in (as I know you are well aware of!).
Really appreciate you for banging the drum on this continually. I read your book and liked it so much that I convinced the chair of my department to do an independent study last summer centered around it.
wow, this is fascinating! I'm going to read this paper. Please send me anything else you have on it.
Really glad this struck a chord! Here’s a few additional resources depending on what you’re interested in.
1. DiMaggio and Powell (1983), “The Iron Cage Revisited.”
This is a major paper on a concept called “institutional isomorphism.” It looks at how Meyer and Rowan's "myths" arise, and explains how organizations across different sectors and environments are merging over time. They propose 3 mechanisms: coercive pressures from politics and legitimacy demands, mimetic pressures to copy others under uncertainty, and normative pressures from professionalization (narrow range of degrees/schools in a given sector + professional associations, etc.). It helps explain why “agile” and similar reform language spread so quickly from the private sector to the public sector.
2. Bromley and Powell (2012), “From Smoke and Mirrors to Walking the Talk.”
This is a direct follow up to Meyer and Rowan’s paper. The authors update the decoupling idea by breaking it into two parts. 1) Policy-practice decoupling, where the policy/law is passed but then nothing changes, often because of institutional resistance or environmental factors, or because the new policy itself was just written poorly or under-resourced. And 2) Means-Ends decoupling, where the relevant institution adopts the new rules/laws/policies and try to implement, but the means of adoption are things like measuring the wrong thing, or collecting data without using it, or there’s no feedback loops to improve the first iteration. Basically, as you wrote in Recoding America, because the steering wheel isn’t connected to the car.
3. Kettl (2021), “Weberian Bureaucracy and Contemporary Governance.”
Don Kettl adds onto the steering-wheel-detached-from-car idea in a way that pulls in bureaucracy, policymaker and public expectations, and networked implementation structures that often involve a lot of 3rd parties. His argument is that policymakers, media, and the public still imagine government as a neat Weberian hierarchy (Weberian = from Max Weber, German scholar who wrote the book on Bureaucracy in 1922), while actual implementation now runs through messy networks of contractors, grantees, nonprofits, and local actors (and, although he doesn’t focus on it, technology!). This mismatch makes accountability blurry, which further makes change hard because if it something doesn't work, it's often difficult to pin the blame on any one link in the chain. It also helps explain why reforms that sound straightforward often fail in practice.
4. Ahmed (2006), “The Nonperformativity of Antiracism.”
Ahmed’s piece is about university antiracism work, but the broader point applies not just to any kind of change that a powerful entity wants to resist. Oftentimes just talking in the right language is seen as doing then change and gets the organization kudos and increased legitimacy, even if nothing changes. And in a pernicious way, as you said, it even acts as a smokescreen because it looks like the org is doing the right thing because they are saying the right thing.
Great article so much to think on here.
We need real reform. But that's going to require changes both from the legislative branches and the executive.
And it's a long term process, not something that can be done in months
This post inspired me to create this - https://si-delivery.com/interactive/three-horizons
Hi Jen -- great article! Your H2+/H2- distinction really resonated with me since I read this piece two weeks ago. The pattern you describe — reforms that relieve pressure rather than build toward the new system — maps directly to something I encountered at a large federal agency: a comprehensive H3 vision, developed carefully and presented with an iterative H2+ roadmap, was halted because the leaders felt the vision was too much change.
In my experience, coalition design is the prerequisite: at the Census Bureau, the Acting Director asked to be briefed on the leadership coalition's ideas as they were developing them, not after the vision was complete. That changed the relationship between the leadership and the work entirely. The leaders who co-created the vision were ready to carry it forward in a way that made the iterative work possible. Your invitation to share H3 operating model visions prompted me to work through this more carefully. Do you think getting the coalition design right first could make an H2+ iteration agenda more viable?
This is a known tactic in organizational change research. Check this paper out for more info: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/107898/Kellogg_Operating%20Room_AJS.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
There's an easier read pdf version of this which is of a speech the author gave where she talked about this, which I cannot find a link for online. If you message me I can email it to you.
Thank you for the link to the paper. What I was referring to more than a cross-level, cross-functional coalition is the need for the top-level leaders to operate as a true team -- a partnership with both shared understanding of the complex system that is the agency or enterprise they work in and the shared accountability for delivering the outcomes -- the public value -- that it exists to provide. Having an executive team is the exception in the federal government because the "system" components, such as the Executive Core Qualifications, the Executive Candidate Development programs, the performance management system, the short tenures of political appointees. etc. all reward individual performance. What made the Census engagement unique was that the Acting Director formed the executive team and directed them to work together to create and implement a vision. Ten years later, that initial work is still yielding lasting results. But rarely do discussions about government reform or operating model changes address what needs to change in the behaviors at the executive level. In the federal government, it's very easy for one person in an executive governance role to slow or stop change by saying "No." What is needed is an executive team that works together to jointly decide -- and implement -- the "yes".
Wow, great essay Jennifer. The pressure valve dynamic really got me. H2- work succeeds at exactly the wrong thing. The dysfunction never builds enough pressure to force the real fix. That's how systems stay broken while looking fine. And of course, everyone just moves on to the next problem.
The people who actually keep these systems running already know which fixes are buying time and which ones are real. They're just never in the room when the reform conversation happens. Any framework that doesn't start with them is going to get absorbed the same way the last ten did.
The missing piece here is procurement. Whatever the new model looks like, it's going to get built through the same contracts and vendors that produced the broken one. You can change the language and the org charts and still end up in the same place if the money flows the same way, because there's no good way to increase "competition" through smaller, modular, tactical work.
There are a bevy of ways to solve the various problems we face -- especially at sub-federal levels -- but the morass of complexity makes it hard to actually help.
I agree that the people currently keeping these systems running usually know what the problems are.
But that doesn't mean they understand the solutions.
To fix the problems in many cases, you will need both the people running the systems as well as outside people. That understand what a well functioning organization looks like
This is a really interesting argument. I like the idea that “H2-“ work is making the status quo hang on for longer, whereas “H2+” work is actually moving toward a better solution.
I wonder though… I feel like all the proposals at the end are themselves H2-! There’s this fundamental problem of organizations with no real pressure on them to perform, because they are so far from democracy, and then they don’t perform.
I feel like H2+ would be something that is changing the model. Like a Palantir for general government agencies. Or like three of them. Required to be interchangeable. Enforce performance by terminating the underperforming 10% of contracts every year and giving their work to their competitors. I don’t know, I’m just trying to think of something that would feel like a real, fundamental, structural difference from how government services are provided today.
So wise .. Our job is not to keep addressing problems, but to eliminate them. Organizations get too focused on sustaining themselves....
I am a self-proclaimed change-maker - I call myself a 'system change maker" (I can be contacted at systemchangemaker@gmail.com). I am not currently employed but my professional experience is a lengthy career in corporate law (as a paralegal) always with a healthy interest in politics (I was once a Political Science major, Pre-Law in my 20s). I love your article because it is obvious your work is at the level I am at - you are not "personal" with politics but you can bridge the personal between politics, business, and many other sectors.
I am a fan of the three horizon model. In my past life working in enterprise digital strategy, we often spoke with our clients about this model in terms of their legacy technological platforms, the process needed to evolve them, and the final future state. In my current work in civic innovation and strategy, however, on this subject of government and modern systems, we took a little bit of a different approach in our recent paper: https://resources.imaginedeliver.com/independentstateimaginedeliver