Hacking The Bureaucracy

Seminar with former U.S. Deputy CTO, HKS Adjunct Lecturer Nick Sinai

Nick Sinai is an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Sinai joined Harvard in 2014 from the White House, where he was U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. His research, writing, and teaching is focused on technology and innovation in government. As part of the digital HKS Seminar Series, Sinai spoke at the Kennedy School to discuss the following questions

· how do you get big things done in a high profile, risk-averse environment;

· how can you start and grow initiatives inside the bureaucracy; and

· what are the secrets to being an effective public-sector entrepreneur?

THE GREEN BUTTON INITIATIVE

The Green Button Initiative was originally an idea in the National Broadband Plan, that Sinai helped co-author. It began as an FCC policy idea that then became Obama administration policy. “The idea was to make energy consumption data available to customers of all types, and their authorized third parties, in machine-readable and human readable formats,” Sinai said.

U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra and Sinai discussed the idea with multiple electric and utility CIOs, who agreed to partake lead the initiative, with the White House championing their progress. Since utilities were investing a lot in smart grid, and needed to show progress on the customer engagement side, there was a mutual fit. The initial challenge for Sinai’s team was to see how much utilities could accomplish in 90 days, after which the CTO’s office celebrated progress. This three month forcing function for utility commitments to action ended up becoming a very useful mechanism.

GREEN BUTTON LESSONS

Sinai gave a lot of thought about what some valuable lessons his team learned from the Green Button Initiative and came up with quite a few. The first one was the idea of starting small. “It hooked into a lot of different policy documents, into funding, into presidential policy, and into DOE policy,” Sinai explained.

The second lesson was the power of private sector standards. “The national stance is that we defer to the private sector wherever possible to create and use standards,” Sinai said. “In this case, we championed a private sector standard to catalyze data portability back to consumers.”

The final lesson was the power of celebration. “This lesson had multiple parts. We were celebrating electric utilities and getting them excited about getting White House attention and kudos for doing something on a voluntary basis.” In Sinai’s experience, utilities don’t usually do anything on a voluntary basis; they’re used to regulators telling them that they must do something, which can be adversarial. Sinai continued, “It’s also the power of celebration that got more and more of the administration to pay attention and how it got built into things like the climate action plan, and it started to gain momentum.”

In the end, the Green Button Initiative ended up being a new way to hack the bureaucracy. “We never actually got permission for it…We just kind of did it,” Sinai explained. “It got increasingly higher visibility and was seen as a win in energy and data policy.” Sinai and his team were able to use these sort of hacks in a variety of ways for different initiatives.

PRESIDENTIAL INNOVATION FELLOW

The PIF program is modeled in part after Code for America. The idea was to bring in talented technologists and entrepreneurs for a six-month “tour of duty.” It started from scratch with eighteen fellows that eventually turned into a bill that was signed by President Obama moments before he handed over power at the end of his administration. PIFs improved designs on prosthetics, mapped data for disaster response, unlocked government data, and launched a number of websites and other digital services to help millions of Americans.

LESSONS FROM PIF

Sinai remarked that it was so essential to create allies when setting up initiatives like the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, as well as sharing credit for the work. “It’s easy to say we should start a fellows program…It’s a lot harder to do it, and do it well,” Sinai said.

The program, led by U.S. CTO Todd Park and Senior Advisor John Farmer, with Sinai helping behind the scene, originally had the cohort lasting six months. The team soon realized it was hard for fellows to make progress within a bureaucracy within this short amount of time. It was also a lot to ask of the families of the recruited fellows. “People flow is a powerful strategy,” Sinai said. He Sinai found that it wasn’t just about what people accomplished while they were in the program, but also what they continued to do afterward.

“A sizeable majority of the fellows became attracted to the scale and the scope of the mission problems. A number of them were so frustrated by not being able to accomplish enough in the given amount of time that they founded 18F which is a digital services agency within the United States Government to work on projects. A number of them were able to scrub in a lot of emergencies and have now gone on to have a measurable impact within their careers.”

Sinai noted that one of the great things about PIF was that it was bipartisan. “If you don’t care who takes credit, and share in everyone’s ideas your plan will go a lot father. It may not be 100% of what you thought, but it’s going to have a much better chance of surviving,” Sinai said.

ConnectEd AND ITS LESSONS

ConnectEd was President Obama’s education technology initiative to increase broadband and digital learning in schools. The initiative began, in part, over a coffee date Sinai and his White House colleague Kumar Garg had with two staffers from the FCC. The White House subsequently saw a presentation from a non-profit, Education Superhighway, that was focused on the issue of how bad broadband was in schools.

The FCC staffers were interested in improving broadband to schools, but noted a potential impediment: a powerful senator that had considerable influence over the FCC.

Sinai and Garg asked them to consider imagining removing this “constraint” and encouraged them to start thinking big, including E-rate reform. And this had the potential to be larger than the FCC. “The FCC was rightly focused on what they could do,” Sinai explained. “The federal government has limited jurisdiction over education, but the Presidency can serve as a bully pulpit. So we had to figure out how to turn something from a big picture vision…into something that the presidency can articulate in a way that then various people with different authorities and resources can plug into so it can become a national initiative.”

“Getting the superintendents to step up to a model policy…We told them these were the kinds of things, like digital learning, that we want you to commit to. We were going to celebrate those commitments, and we were going to form those sets of policies with them so that the policies weren’t just foisted upon them.”

In the end, Sinai explained that to hack the bureaucracy, a few key tactics are key. Be sure to build a strong team of creative thinkers around you that puts the work ahead of their own personal goals. Show, don’t tell; it’s one thing to tell people innovation is important but it’s much more valuable to show its usefulness in a concise way. Last, make sure to think big, and imagine what can be done without constraints.