Innovation dot gov & The Better Government Movement: Case Study

Below is the first of seven case studies that go into more depth into different organizations and featuring leaders who are leading with empathy and creating systemic change in the world.

In Obama’s first day in office, he did something no other president has ever done: he went all in on creating a transparent and open government in a memorandum. In it, he stated that:

“My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.” (The White House 2009)

He boldly stated that the government should be transparent, participatory, and collaborative, setting a new precedent. He directed the US Chief Technology Officer, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the Administrator of General Services to write recommendations for an Open Government Directive.

At the beginning of Obama’s second term as President, several programs were also created to further this mission: the Presidential Innovation Fellows program; 18F, a digital consultancy inside of the General Services Administration (GSA); and finally the United States Digital Services out of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Further, technological innovations happening in the world and the expectation of having modern services from citizens was forcing public servants to rethink what government could be in a modern, technological age.

As the presidency was coming to a close, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announced a research project through the White House’s 2015 Strategy for American Innovation to understand innovation across government with hundreds of volunteers and interviewees (National Economic Council 2015). In it, they stated:

“A growing number of Federal employees are using new approaches to solve problems, improve the core processes of government, and foster innovation. However, adoption of these approaches is still low relative to their potential. Many Federal employees do not know that these approaches exist or lack the support needed to use them effectively.” (National Economic Council 2015).

A team of volunteers across the government and I set out to explore how to build products and services to meet the needs of public servants and help achieve the goal of building a 21st-century government. What resulted was around 600 pages of research in around 15 different content areas: from launching prizes and challenges, to creating an innovation lab, to hiring a Chief Innovation Officer, working with startup companies, and partnering with various sectors to achieve the goals of government.

Two weeks before the 2016 election, I started a new project at the General Services Administration to translate this draft research into usable content that defines 21st century government and to spread these practices throughout government.

I knew that this was going to need a huge culture shift. I had been reading research that showed that culture change requires a movement not a mandate, and we knew that a big piece of the puzzle was missing when it came to spreading these practices further. For decades, the top-down approach to change hasn’t gotten organizations and companies very far.

Sarah Soule, a Professor of Organizational Behavior and Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the Stanford Graduate School of Business has been studying organizational theory, social movements, and political sociology. She and Bryan Walker of the design firm IDEO in San Francisco make the case for a more participatory, bottom-up culture. They say: “culture change…lives in the collective hearts and habits of people and their shared perception of ‘how things are done around here.’ Someone with authority can demand compliance, but they can’t dictate optimism, trust, conviction, or creativity.“ In short, change has to come from the inside with a movement of people leading it (Soule and Walker 2017).

As the new Administration started and the political appointees joined the White House, access to all of this research majorly stalled as they said that the Executive Office of the President “owns” this research. This was a major roadblock, but I was not deterred.

To figure out what’s next, I reached out to those who participated in the research who were still in government. To my amazement, nearly 150 people showed up to a workshop I held in March 2017. We laid out sheets of paper around the room with questions around the five W’s ( Who, What, When, Where, Why). We equipped attendees with sticky notes and Sharpies and set them loose on answering the questions around the room. Each new team built upon the last team’s notes and added new possibilities — it was truly a meeting of the minds. By the time we ended that meeting, we knew that a movement was bubbling up around us. We coined the phrase “better government” and created the Better Government Movement (the Movement).

Background

Co-Creating the Movement

Dan Nessler, UX Collective

I made a commitment to convene this group (and let it grow organically) every two weeks. During the meetings I would follow the Double Diamond design process: we’d review the content from last session to converge on the design, and then I’d open ourselves again to diverge — to see what’s possible. At first we discovered if we are doing the right things. Then, we were interested in doing things right.

In between sessions, small breakout teams would take all the data collected and synthesize the findings, and would put together prototypes and start experimenting with what we could do. As time progressed, the trends emerged and the prototypes took shape and we’d either publish our work or turn it into a workshop to build the community. The process was open, participatory, and peer-driven.

Through this participatory design process we landed on this design question:

How might we equip and motivate the existing federal government workforce to affect positive 21st century change within their organizations?

Theory of Change (Empathy + Action)

The Better Government Movement (the Movement) existed so that the government could have a better relationship between the public that it serves. We believed that in order to do that, the government must put the right leadership and vision in place, and place change agents throughout government in strategic places to build a movement of people from the inside to move the government forward. The Movement was the glue that bonded the leadership and change agents.

The Movement’s goals were to:

1. Increase use of 21st century methods and approaches
2. Increase institutional support of innovative practices
3. Incentivize and reward innovative thinking
4. Improve enterprise-level policies and structure

The Better Government Movement Workstreams

The above vision and goals outline where we were going and why it was important to build the Movement. Here are the pathways on which the Movement achieved its goals:

Research: Understanding our Users and Creating Insights

Research helped us understand the behaviors and needs of people innovating in government so we can design programs and services that help them best. We captured insights through interviews, data analysis, surveys, journey and experience mapping, prototyping and iteration.

Content: Creating a Shared Language

We completed user research on an innovation toolkit and paired that with the research completed during the Obama Administration to create a foundation for this work. The teams around this pillar would design a structure to incrementally build pieces of content (we call “sprints”). More than 100 volunteer public servants helped build, write, design, and launch Innovation.gov, a useful digital site that included a shared language for government innovation. Innovation.gov existed to: inform visitors of the kinds of innovation happening in government; educate them about how they could innovate; and connect with others across government silos.

The team translated the 600 pages of research into about 100 pages of content that was interactive and informative. It laid out six plays in a Playbook of how to “innovate” in government, a toolkit around topics like 21st century culture and workforce, improving service delivery, solving complex problems, and collaborating with innovators around the world.

Community: Safe Space to Empower and Lead

This is where the movement turns our insights and content into action. Through the community we were able to connect and build creative confidence in curious public servants so that they can affect positive change within their organizations and better serve the American public. What resulted is an inclusive space where public servants can grow their creative capacity and learn new tools to jumpstart innovation to solve government-wide problems. In this community we meet the members where they are — we practice what we preach and preach what we practice.

The Design Challenge

The Design Challenge was a three-month learning journey to pair proven modern methods with practical application over a period of time to yield both principles and practice. The hope with this Bootcamp is also to catalyze beacons of change to amplify and evangelize innovation in government

Between March and June 2018, 40 public servants from 34 agencies completed the Bootcamp’s first cohort which consisted of 15 weeks of training and applying eight different 21st century methods in a safe space to tackle three government-wide problems. Human-Centered Design, Lean Startup, and Agile were the core elements of this training program, with specific master classes on prototyping/Minimum Viable Product, change and transformation, storytelling, and pitching.

Impact

Through this Movement, innovators across government had a shared language, could link to one another and collaborate, embracing and promoting innovation even if their individual department, group, or agency was not ready for or supportive of the concept. By working across government, ideas and skills were able to germinate freely, absent of the localized constraints that inhibit lasting innovation progress in government. by the time the Movement was taken down in 2018, the Movement:

• Amassed a community of 5,000 members both inside and outside of government
• Wrote content for and launched Innovation.gov (in Beta)
• Convened more than 2,000 people from 112 agencies in nearly 100 co-creation workshops and two design-a-thons
• Built content, tools, and resources with nearly 200 active volunteers that built the Movement

To learn more about what happened to the Better Government Movement and Innovation.gov, visit this post here.

Key Lessons and Takeaways

1. Create a Shared Purpose

On top of the mission we co-created above, we were tackling the biggest barriers to innovation across government. We formed a grassroots movement that was made by the people, for the people. We would practice what we’re preaching, meaning that we would use the practices such as Human-Centered Design and storytelling to lead. We were focused on solving real government problems — to understand the right problem before jumping to solutions and solve the problems right, unlocking barriers to innovation along the way. Finally, we were inclusive, meaning that everyone could join no matter what level they were at, and we would provide a safe space for belonging and connection.

Questions to Ask:

• How are we co-creating our future?
• What are the values that our team believes in?
• What are the practices that we’ll use?
• What kinds of problems are we solving?
• How are we providing spaces for belonging and connection?

2. Define the Language

We started with helping to define the parameters of what we were creating and then extracted our purpose from there. There were many groupings of concepts but I’m only showing a few here as examples. We focused on studying who supported innovation:

• Champion: Champions are those who are the biggest cheerleaders and supporters with the authority to make decisions and hold the power to move the change forward.
• Gatekeeper: The kinds of people who were key decision makers or blockers to the work that we were doing. We needed to understand who these people were early on so that they didn’t slow down change efforts.

Then, the team started brainstorming our values, which we call “Plays”. We voted on the top Plays which made it to our Playbook. We kept it to six so that they were easily remembered:

1. Everyone has a role in building a better government
2. Keep your user at the center of your design
3. Embrace change and experiment
4. Collaborate with partners inside and outside of government
5. Let data inform your decision making and be a key part of your story
6. Innovation is not a one-size-fits-all approach

Providing a shared language allowed us to effectively communicate what we stood for in the Movement, and provided a pathway for us to achieve our goals. It laid the foundation for what we were to create next.

Questions to Ask:

• How do you define important language between the people in our movement?
• What is our organization’s purpose?
• What values or “Plays” guide our work?

3. Outline Audience and Roles

We created three categories of people who were in our audience for the Movement with approximate numbers of people who were in government in the categories:

1. Curious (60% of Government): Interested in learning more about innovation, wants to share ideas, but doesn’t know how, and doesn’t feel like his voice is heard on the job.
2. Dabbler (about 35% of Government): May have some formal training in innovative processes, but wants to learn and do more.
3. Professional Innovator (about 5% of Government): Typically has experience in both the private & public sector. Wants to share her wisdom and inspire others but her time is sensitive.

Questions to Ask:

• Who would we say are our key audiences we’re trying to reach?
• What traits would these groups have?
• How do we move the people up to the next rung on the ladder?

4. Understand Motivations

Each person is motivated to do the work that they do for various reasons, which can be labeled in two categories:

1. Intrinsic Motivation: They are doing this work because it gives them purpose, personal growth, they’re curious or passionate about the topic, or they find the work fun.
2. Extrinsic Motivation: People in this category are motivated by the outcome they will get by doing a task or work. This can take the form of promotions, pay raises/bonuses, benefits or other perks.

If you can pinpoint the reason why someone would be motivated to join or do the work, you can help to align the strategies you create around the internal needs they have.

Questions to Ask:

• What motivates us to do what we do — is it internal motivations or external ones?
• How about our team? Our organization or company?
• Which of these two categories of motivations does our leadership choose over the other? Does that align with what we need or want?

5. Pave a Pathway to Engagement

We took a book out of the 2012 Obama campaign playbook with a concept called the “Ladder of Engagement,” which would take people from passive observers to engaged leaders and fierce advocates. This was applied to digital engagement, but we modified it for community engagement. (Milroy 2019 and Schossow 2014).

What underlies all of this is trust — it’s a two-way street. People will get more engaged work if they trust that you’ll do good in the world and are representing and care deeply about your program/service before you hand the keys to the kingdom to them.

1. Level 1: Observing: In this phase, most people are just observing what is being said and done. They haven’t signed on to do anything, but they’re taking notice.
2. Level 2: Following: They understand the cause and what you stand for, and care about the outcome. They read regular communications coming from the Movement, but don’t move into action — yet. They might follow your website or social media pages.
3. Level 3: Endorsing: This type of person endorses the work that is being done, meaning that they feel connected to it, trust it, and want others to know about it. These people might forward the email to others, or passively watch or attend an event.
4. Level 4: Contributing: This is where deeper engagement comes from the community member. They’re contributing more time, financial or social capital to the work, and start to assume responsibility. You can trust them with multi-step assignments and they can do work on their own.
5. Level 5: Owning: This is where the person is fully engaged in the mission and success of the work. They make deeper commitments and consistently show up and deliver. These are the people who might be a good person to lead a program, workshop, or lead a board initiative.
6. Level 6: Leading: The top of the ladder, this space is reserved for the people who have fully earned your trust. Less people make this level, but you can hand almost anything to them and they can run with it and come back to you with quality work. They’re committed to the mission and their energy for the work is contagious. They might take on a governance or leadership role within the community.

Each of these six steps helps to show how someone can move through a community — and the right amount of trust you can build between the one leading the effort and the people who are passively observing and moving up the ladder.

It should be noted that not everyone will move up the ladder of engagement. A large number of people will be observers, and the more compelling your vision and work is, the more people who will jump on board to join your Movement.

Questions to Ask:

• Where would we see the people in our community in this ladder of engagement?
• Who are the people that we can trust with deeper assignments?
• Who are the ones who are ripe to lead the work?
• What strategies do we have to move people up the ladder?

Works Cited

Milroy, Jack. “Digital Organizing 101: What Is a Ladder of Engagement and Why Do I Need One?,” April 8, 2020).

Schossow, Clay. “Using The Ladder Of Engagement,” New Media Campaigns, March 3, 2014. https://www.newmediacampaigns.com/blog/using-the-ladder-of-engagement.

The White House, Executive Office of the President, National Economic Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Strategy for American Innovation, October 2015, 109–110.

The White House, “Transparency and Open Government,” Memorandum for the Head of the Executive Departments and Agencies. National Archives and Records Administration. January 2009.

Walker, Bryan and Sarah A. Soule. “Changing Company Culture Requires a Movement, Not a Mandate,” Harvard Business Review, November 16, 2017.

This has been one of seven case studies that go into more depth into different organizations and featuring leaders who are leading with empathy and creating systemic change in the world. They are referenced in the book Empathy for Change: How to Create a More Understanding World.