On being CDO of California
Yesterday I left my role as the Chief Data Officer of California. Below I share some thoughts.
Reflections on change making in the public sector
If you are doing similar work, you are a change maker. But there’s a problem. By design, the government doesn’t change much. And individual incentives to change within that system are weak. We celebrate funding, not delivery. We announce new stuff, not reflect on old stuff.
Relationships are the currency of internal government change.
I came into this role with this belief and it holds. Relationships help broker the space to introduce change. Your reputation, trustworthiness, likeability, network, and even the ability to connect with others as individuals are ingredients that feed your relationships.
Funding and executive mandates can help with change and in many cases are necessary. But I’ve found that funding and mandates can fail quite spectacularly without the right relationships in place or if the effort is led by someone who is not liked or respected.
So if you want to help modernize the government, build your network and plan for a lot of coffees, lunches, and zoom meetings. Cultivate skills to rapidly accelerate relationships using strategic disclosure and intimacy.
Prepare for but don’t dwell on relationship mistakes.
You will mess up a relationship or two. Take time to reflect on each mess up and identify what you need to work on. But also don’t be afraid to cut your losses and focus elsewhere. You won’t win everyone over all the time — it is a reality of this work. Instead, focus where the relationships are ripe.
Consultative coalition building is a skill to cultivate.
I’ve also seen people who were liked and respected fail because they didn’t use a consultative approach to coalition building. This goes beyond having good relationships. It is a set of skills around facilitation, meeting narrative and structure, and communication. It requires active stakeholder engagement and management. As soon as your work depends on others and their willingness to change, you are in the business of coalition building. In the public sector, the merits of an idea are not sufficient to move forward.
Executive support for change is not always necessary and is never sufficient.
Time and again, I see change agents obsess about support from electeds, appointees, and those in the highest positions of power. Yes, these roles are critical. But they are too busy with too many things to help you really deliver on change. You need a multi-level strategy that includes a respectful and empathetic approach to the career civil servants and the institutions they shepherd. Plus, a great deal of change work can happen in the spaces where the civil service is excited and supportive and executives are supportive but not focused.
If you hope to affect change, get ready to work on yourself.
My parent friends note that kids are a great way to identify and process your stuff. Same goes for government change work. Your own stuff will show up over and over again when you try to change behavior, structures, and incentives in old institutions. So make sure you practice self-care, set boundaries, and have a wealth of therapeutic mechanisms to process stress.
Reflections on the “civic tech” movement
In the beginning of my career I came to believe that the best way to affect change at scale in the public realm was to work on cross-cutting issues like data and technology. My career thesis was that if I improve these areas, I can improve all domains. My interest overlapped with what later became the civic tech movement. However, I plan to revisit this thesis.
(Side note: I use this term as a shorthand. I don’t like the term civic tech. It’s a label that underrepresents the work and makes it easy to write us off. As a data person, it can be actively harmful as it can result in being lumped in with IT.)
Money follows policy domains, not cross cutting work like data.
I knew this when I crafted my career thesis. I just didn’t appreciate how important it was. The challenge for data teams as well as digital teams is that they are a shared service. In the public sector, shared services, and especially new shared services, are structurally underfunded. They have no natural constituency groups, including interest and advocacy groups, to push for their funding and support. The vast majority of public funding supports domains such as climate, human services, education, research etc not “good government” work.
Moreover, shared services in the public sector tend to be founded in compliance and legal requirements and are rarely focused on change. This includes IT, security, HR, and facilities management.
I think this poses a quandary to the field. I’ll be thinking about this more.
Have we become data and digital janitors?
I’ve spoken on this topic before (including in this talk “Put down your digital hammer”). The central tenet of the civic tech movement is that we can build or fix our way to better government. Perhaps this is true in some cases. But I’m worried that we continue to make marginal improvements to the implementation of existing and sometimes bad policy. Should we instead focus on advocating for better policies to then implement? Or even beyond that, policies that require little administrative overhead and implementation? Again, I don’t know but I’ll be thinking about this more.
In the meantime, my greatest gratitude to my friends and colleagues. Your quiet commitment to making this one institution just a bit better warms my heart. I send you warm wishes on your journey.
