Digital Leadership in the Entrepreneurial State

today is the launch of our entrepreneurial State 2.0 Festival which is really the reason that we set up the institute in other words we can't get better policy around climate around Health around the digital divide with gems great book recoding America everyone buy it when it's actually out May 10th uh can do unless we rethink the Civil Service and for me the reason I set up the Institute five years ago so we have two anniversaries it's the fifth anniversary of uh The Institute the 10th anniversary of the book was that to actually have an entrepreneurial State we need new we need a new curriculum I think check it out I said we need a new man a new woman a new human a new brain so we can't keep teaching Global bureaucrats and the Civil Service that at best what they can do is fix market failures what does it look like to really co-create and co-shape a new economy what does it mean for the new theory behind that in terms of public purpose public value market shaping outcomes orientation um and what does it mean from actually learn learning in a humble way from the practice on the ground right when we actually try to do really great things around digital around public banking around outcomes oriented budgeting as academics we should be a bit humble and then change our way of thinking given that doing things are actually often much harder than just talking about it so that kind of uh what's it called the trio there of new policy new thinking new training new curriculum is what IPP is about so we're celebrating this year our fifth anniversary but also the 10th anniversary of my book The entrepreneurial state which is the reason why I set up the institute in the first place and our wonderful comps team have set up a great uh program that ends in June end of June with different events this is the first one inaugurating uh the series and just to say the different Events first of all I hope you all have one of those little um brochures there the uh what are they called these things conflicts Flyers um but we really look at these four different areas which ipp's new framing around Market shaping tries to look at the first is kind of what is the new directionality of an economy what does it mean to talk about the direction of growth not just the rate what does that mean for the outcomes orientation of the policy tools second the organizational capabilities and tonight I think we'll be talking a lot about those kind of digital capabilities how do you govern digital platforms not as a techie thing right but to actually deliver on really difficult challenges we look a lot at assessment issues so how do you actually then evaluate these policies are we going to stick with you know Net Present Value and cost benefit analysis how can we actually assess in a dynamic way Dynamic policies that are outcomes oriented and also how do we actually share both the risks and the rewards so in IPP we call this Roar r-o-a-r roots and directionality organizational capabilities assessment evaluation and risks and rewards and the whole series which you can see there the pamphlet kind of unpicks that at different levels of areas around Health around digital around climate so I'm going to shut up now and hand over to David who we are so happy has joined us recently as a deputy director here at IPP it's been wonderful David to have you for the last six months it's come from Harvard we managed to steal him away and he's moderating tonight's panel so he'll make a proper introduction to who's here thank you perfect thank you so much um welcome everybody um I don't want to say too too much because I want to get into meet but actually one thing is is I'm able to introduce the panel but I actually think it's nice for the panel to know a little bit about the audience so maybe just a quick survey raise your hand if you're a student here or at UCL more generally right on or a student in London you can say student in London that works uh raise your hand if you're um a public servant like you work in government there's like a few of you here Excellence or have or have previous or uh previous or want to as that's good um and if your faculty raise your hand with your faculty and raise your hand if you're kind of just general citizen interested in this work like everybody should raise their hands I was like I was like you are all citizens I want to remind you of that you have more than one hat perfect thank you um so I think the the main thing I just want to say to open up this panel which I'm so excited about is um I have the huge privilege of teaching a course on digital government with Mike Bracken here at the school and I think one of the things that I actually kind of find frustrating is I actually hate the term digital government because when I say the words digital government people think I'm talking about the future they're like oh yeah you're going to talk about something that's going to impact us tomorrow like so what's the new fancy thing whereas anybody I've ever taught particularly now in executive Ed programs but even my students when they come to our classroom they want to they're they're questions and their interrogation of what we're talking about and what we're teaching about is very much about the present we live in a digital era our government is already digital it is trying to figure out how to deliver better in that era how to transform itself how to make it but that's not a future problem it is a present State problem and it's a problem if we don't get right I have enormous amount of concerns that people will lose confidence in the state and that will lead to a place where you know other types of actors will step in to try to fulfill those services and goods which I think could be deeply harming to us I think this for me is like a an issue that is deeply deeply and personally important I think important to all of us but it's also not one about like let's just worry about what's going to happen tomorrow this is a current and present challenge so to kind of interrogate this issue I'm really excited about our panel um we have a mixture of people with a little bit of experience in this just just a little bit of experience in this domain um as well as some people have been thinking very deeply about this so immediately coming up first is Mike Bracken um he's faculty here at the iapp as well um but also many men know um one of the original director of the government digital service uh kind of one of the groundbreaking organizations that really kind of first thought deeply and then engaged in a huge amount of action in helping governments think about how to become digital and be effective in digital era here in the UK I'm already introduced and I think known to everybody Mariana masicato uh really kind of a champion of thinking about like how do we rethink State capacity for uh challenging kind of the new problems that we all collectively face and then do her right uh Jennifer balka another person an incredible record um uh uh what to say about Jen like what has she not done um but a founded code for America which I always thought was like the most amazing thing code for America did was get us to stop talking about smart cities instead talking about like who are citizens and how can we serve them better like really completely change the conversation in the United States about what government should be thinking and what they should be doing then went and worked at the White House and then it went back to Copa America and it's been a thought leader ever since has a book forthcoming as Mariana mentioned uh which we'll ask her about and then at the very end Nikola who is a PhD student with us looking at like what I think is one of the most important issues which is really think about how what does digital identity look like so how how are we going to provision people services in a digital era if with GPS we know where you are but we still don't know who you are and how are we going to tackle that issue in a way that tackles issues of trust and safety and inclusion so with that said I think I'd like to first start with Jen because she's just spent the last couple years writing all of her thoughts into a book and just be like um if we live in a digital era Jen like what are what it what are the things from your both um your pro your work in proxy working protein what are like the big gaps right now like what has you up at night what has you worried about where State capacity is right now in a digital era foreign thank you well let me just start by saying you know if if we did a good job at code for America of Shifting The Narrative it was in large part due to you thank you uh and if we did uh anything to shift the course of the U.S uh State capacity and digital it was because of this guy and he did he has some experience he did a website once right only one just the one uh so it's just really exciting to be here and I've just been such a huge fan of IAP and Marianas for so long and never been to IEP before so thank you so much for having me um what keeps me up at night uh to get straight to the point is um in the U I mean this is sort of an example but the example itself literally keeps me up at night in the U.S we passed the inflation reduction act you can also say we passed the in uh infrastructure Act and the chips act and these are three really important pieces of legislation that are huge and I think our mental model of how change happens is that you pass legislation and we're done yay uh in fact I grew up on something called uh Schoolhouse Rock Americans here will know what I'm talking about the little Bill Smiles and everyone everyone celebrates because we Pat the bill became law I'm a law um you know I think it's never been true that once it passed everything was done and we could be happy I think it is less true now in a digital era and my the thing that keeps me up at night is that the we are not actually implementing the climate provisions of the IRA and the skills and approaches that are needed to do that are the ones that GDs pioneered that code for America works on that U.S digital service that all of the the there are serve a lot of this is service design and um and and process redesign and not digitization taking what we have today and putting it online but really digital transformation which is for example this is just one tiny little part of it if we're going to draw down the funds that come with IRA that allow people for instance to get a lot of money to solarize and Electrify their homes which we must do in order to avoid a climate collapse um 30 000 different jurisdictions the United States have to Str have to permit that solarization electrification at some you know multiple of what they can currently do that we don't even know but it's not 10 or 15 percent better it's like 10 times faster than we can today and no digitization of a current process is going to get us to 10 or 10 20 times better we actually have to do what people who practice transformation do um and I think there's multiple problems here one is that our mental model of change is wrong we don't focus on implementation we don't see the possibilities in transformation we look at the problem from the from the top down and from if you're sitting in the White House those problems of Permitting in local jurisdictions aren't even visible so I mean I'm taking that as a very very narrow slice of a much larger problem but I think it pulls back to something that Mariana said would I'll extrapolate from something she said what are the capacities and competencies that government needs today and how are we building them we're not even asking the right questions and at least in the U.S you know the consequences of not asking and answering those questions and getting to work are existential threats um you can talk about our chips Act 2 which is you know National Security and the ability to maintain you know getting computers and phones in the event of additional disruption but um you know there's a lot more to it but I I think I'll just start with that you know um the you said an introduction that you're concerned that we people will lose confidence in the state that's the other existential threat people all already losing confidence in the state we already have uh an unstable political order at least where I live I won't speak to your situation um in part because people are so frustrated with their experiences with government we know that when people have negative experience debitive experiences with means tested benefits they vote at lower rates our problem in the U.S is I will try not to get political but is our biggest problem is people not voting it's not people voting for their I mean certainly it's people voting for the wrong party but it is a much bigger problem that people are not voting and um I think that is tied very much to your your original question so but does the do does the average person or the person in power think that the skills that we talk about here are the way to solve that I think the answer is no and it should be yes it's like a great a Great American context maybe um Mike it might be nice to might be nice to hear a little bit of like you have a lived experience here in the UK and then also been working with governments around the world like maybe kind of talk to us a little bit about how you see kind of Jen's dilemmas and problems really into the rest of the world and what you're seeing is kind of the gap um yes thanks David and thank you for the kind words and the invitation tonight um uh we I spend most of my time with governments around the world and um essentially I'm an optimist so uh I think there's a few things that have come true in the last 10 years and you've seen some of these as well and the first thing to say is that you know the UK is in a certain position and Jen's not written a fantastic book based on on the US but there's a big world out there and um just because you're ahead doesn't mean you're winning as a wise man said to me once what's very very interesting is were the Confluence of political will digital skills and some form of mission awesome or crisis is in place the digital capacity of governments is through the roof the ability of states to react to crises to create new Services is tremendous and actually what digital government does and I don't like the term either but what this new era does is it allows countries who are perceived to be not at the head of the global race to move very very quickly and um I think there's a there's always a corollary to that scale is important the UK is probably at the top end of a nation state that can move in one go with 60 70 million people as Ted lasso said how many countries are in this country but you know you that's probably that's probably um but again you know once you're into once you've got sort of the state machinery and so on it is more complicated and understand that but I think for it's not just smaller Nations like Estonia Singapore otherwise it's like mid-sized Nations now in terms of population size are doing some radically interesting work and we've seen with you know coronavirus response and favorite story is you know the response of Togo pretty much weigh down all the genie coefficients in terms of how you would measure that country's performance in many areas its response to covid was outstanding um now they've had a few goals at that but the point is with SARS and MERS but the point is is that just you know digital capacity if deployed with the right political cover and at the center of government it's not a periphery of governments can affect radical change I'm optimistic for that radical change I think a couple of other Trends I see politics lags government substantially so we are when I came into the UK government as an anecdote I came in for those in up in the country we just had a change of government and the the first Coalition in second in my lifetime we had on many and the the party that had been in place labor party had been in place for 13 years so the new incumbent of politicians had essentially grown up with Facebook and Gmail who walked into government and went what on Earth is this right and what we're now seeing I think is we're going to have a next generation of politicians who understand that with frankly a vanishingly small number of people with the right digital skills Folks at the right issue they can affect change much much more quickly than dealing with often dealing with sort of conventional policy based approaches now that's not all good that's by some not all good we just found that out with Cambridge analytica in this country and the whole political advertising thing but I think you're going to see politicians with a more if not single issue like brexit but I'm more focused on dealing with one or two policy issues use digital teams to focus on them radically quickly so I'm quite optimistic about that although there's got to be some oversight of those politicians and I think the third the third thing and I'd say and final thing I'd say the reason it gives me optimism is is in this room but also you know we live in a digital generation the the framing of Technology skills has been an enormous problem because in the last 10 years technology has seen as disruptors uh people who want to break things and yet the people I see around governments are actually the most Progressive reform-oriented public-minded and public spirited people you might want to see that that we've got to I think think of technology and digital change differently and allow those people to get on with the very necessary work of Reform of government not see them as disruptors whether to change change is inevitable it's coming one way or or the other and I think to deny that change is as a public service system is to to not do your job and a public service leader I think to enable that change and focus it on necessary outcomes is is the game in town but overall I'm positive I guess our two countries probably bring my optimism bias down a little bit but there we are now um I would love to give you a chance to kind of just react to Jen but also as but also but I think also you're thinking a lot about you're doing your research but you're kind of in the educational field you're helping train next Generation public servants as you think about this capacity I think you've made how are you seeing us teeing that up like what what makes you nervous or optimistic about that nervous so I come here as a researcher um in by training an educator by vocation hopefully and then also as an activist by choice and I think some of the things that really come through for me is I see kind of my role in the classroom thinking about how can we make this a space where we think about equity and Justice and serious issues around the implementation of digital transformation and so not looking at Justice as something in the words of Mark Jones from the national Innovation service I used to work with Justice is not just going to roll off a hill Justice is an implementation problem and I'm interested in looking at that across digital transformation and so thinking about what does Equity look like not only with respect to maybe outputs and outcomes but along processes and I think that in terms of in the classroom I'm really excited to talk with students hear their voices hear their thoughts but also engage them around critically thinking about these themes and that's kind of what I tried to do in my seminar groups and when meeting with students and I loved it but I think that what goes on in the classroom doesn't stop there what goes on in the classroom is an invitation to continue exploring critically what these themes mean in relation to the work that they will do going forward yeah it's so cool can you just say something about that because looking at data and digital platforms not as this Tech thing but everything you look at I think people should hear what you're doing so I'm really interested in looking at how does global governance influence digital transformation in the public sector and specifically I look at that primarily through Global institutions like the world blank the UN um uh the WTO the IMF and I'm interested in understanding how is it influencing orienting um digital transformation in governments through digital identity projects and what are the implications of that and so I tried to explore the potential implications of that in terms of how does this influence how digital governments are emerging and I look at that in Uganda and Kenya specifically and then the second part is I tried to look at that through the Lancet they had this this proposition where they talked about digital transformation as a determinant of health and so I'm really interested in understanding what are the implications in how digital transformation is being oriented in the public sector for structural harm and how can we use maybe Health determinants as one way of trying to measure and track that and gain insight into that and so that's what I'm trying to do with my PhD yeah and I'm I need to do a lot of interviews so I'd love to connect with all of you but yeah you're like uh a lot of thoughts I know that you can you get read Jen's book so I'd love to maybe just just give you an open feel just talk a little bit about react to Jen and the others but particularly kind of like what Jen's been thinking and what she's been trying to think about and a nice yeah so I think I mean you have to use that okay um so first of all can I just say something to introduce like I still remember this amazing walk we did in Hampstead Heath where we were also talking about our personal problems which don't worry I will not reveal but you said something which I've never forgotten which is that those working in government as good as they might be we were just talking about upstairs let's not dismissed the talent actually that notwithstanding all these kind of disincentives actually go into government but you said what struck you when you were working with the treasury with different parts of government was this kind of lack of sometimes understanding or appreciation for the Machinery the you know the how the how to do and that's not a coincidence what we do in The Institute is to say instead of embellishing the word designed thinking which somehow is used out there as like a good thing you can also do stupid design thinking we've designed our way into these failures it's not a coincidence you have civil servants coming into government that might not necessarily have also been trained in the Machinery in the treasury of money right like where does money come from um and health of where actually all the stuff you talk about in your book Health structures and health um care how it's structured what do we need to actually deliver an outcomes oriented Health System why is that and and The Institute we talk about the fact that we we framed it with this reactive mode so by Design you're out of breath by Design you're in reactive mode why because you're just always at best fixing market failures so that means you just need to know how to do bandages you need to know how to fill the Gap you need to know even worse how to ask a others what they need right which by definition means you're probably going to get screwed along the way versus really building a dynamic ecosystem that's outcomes oriented and ask what are the tools the capabilities the capacity you need to deliver on that and what's amazing about recoding America which everyone must read I think it's coming out May 10th is 13th oh God what did I think was May 10th okay it's three days before my birthday so now I know my my birthday present is a proper not the proof's version thank you okay um is that you tell stories of your experience but underlying those stories is a really hard critique of why the system is failing and I think the mix between the stories that you have both collected through your work working with Administration but also encoding for America and your critique of the system which is failing the question is what's then the feedback between the two right because the storytelling we can all talk about failures but then the degree to which it's been and we were talking upstairs about this isn't about conspiracy but this is about a structured systemic failure more than just a nice story there a failure there and then maybe scale up the good thing scale down the bad thing revealing what these systemic failures are I think you do an amazing job in actually highlighting your point which is what it would it look like if we actually cared about the machinery but not Machinery is Tech fix right right which is again why I think you all then resigned from GDs where it was just seen as you've done gov dot UK you can go now at gov dot UK which you guys did require many different things the first is like citizens are not just clients or customers they're users with human rights so the interface that people have when they are accessing their passport their driver's license not only has to be user friendly but literally citizen person centered I think you guys had an arrow pointing outside of the window to the people right um but really combating that kind of I would say clienteleization of people right required requires a really different Framing and I think the the questions that you raise here and what does it mean to have a system which is actually focused on kind of people and planet and delivering on a Machinery which is as you say not neutral now I mean what I love about your PhD is that you know data is not this neutral thing that we just need to then throw at Health right how we actually frame the health problems health for all which we talk about on our who Council then should be informing the way we think about the implementation of the technology and that interface with people just I just want to say that this is like an amazingly easy read you will read this I don't know how many hours would it take and she has done her voice her actual voice is on the audio that's amazing it took her a week so not only read it but listen to her wonderful voice um it I just think it caused it it forces one to link the stories on the ground the questions of what are the systemic failures and the need then to create a different system which really scales what you often talk about which is the fact that notwithstanding all of this you have these amazingly great people progressives in government but that really require a different system through which to actually work together and sorry what I was trying to say is what you told me was that when you guys did gov.uk the idea would have been that it actually changed how government worked how all the different departments work together instead the silos the incumbency effects that each department had and how it currently was working with data and their digital platform was very strong and that there was a resistance to actually allow gov dot UK having all of government approach to deliver for people in a different way yeah although it did it did do that over a lot of that so let me I want to pick up on this because I feel like in the one way to look at a lot of the way kind of digital has been tackled in government the last 10 years is kind of like if we just give people new skills uh Magic will happen like if we just if we just if we get more designers in the room we get kind of modern developers in the room like things will just happen and I feel kind of like uh there's a lot of public servants who I feel feel pretty broken because they brought new skills to the and it was helpful but they still run into structural change I kind of almost think it was like hey you're doing something new on a train but the train tracks are still going that way and you're you're trying to go this way but the train tracks are still that way and it doesn't matter how many skills you have the train can only go this way and this is only so far you can go so what does what does leadership mean then like what is the leadership what leadership is required and What needs to change to make things work better okay that's that's a that's a big meaty question um so um first of all I'd just like to say that I think I don't want to downplay the getting the people with the skills in the room and it's actually really hard I mean a lot of what we deal with in the US is just Civil Service rules and the hiring stuff and I mean I remember my first time in when I was working in the white house we're just trying to get a web designer hired into the VA and we would go find all the great web designers we knew and ask them to apply for this job and what would come out the other end is SQL admin administrators like is like oh wow the Machinery of government is something we don't understand at all and it's not has anything to do with tech it's a whole bunch of rules and processes that need to be refactored there's actually we went and looked at it later there's nothing wrong with the law it's just the way it's been interpreted and so that's hard and it does matter a lot and I don't I just don't want to skip over that even though I completely agree with what you said um and I think it base case for change is there a lot more people in and um like a lot more people in even though that that's super hard um I completely agree however though that you get in yeah you I like your metaphor of like you're trying to go this way and it's going that way I mean I guess the the metaphor that I use in my book is that we talk about agile develop like software development versus waterfall software development which is a fine thing to talk about but it is not constrained by any means to software development it you are in a waterfall and what you need to be in is a measure built with build measure learn cycle and yeah it's like fundamental disconnect fundamental like you know record scratch um that may that makes it hard uh you know to skip to the end there's three particular places I talk about that I think could change that would help create an environment in which people could use that build measure learn cycle um hiring oversight and funding you know if if those could be changed to be in a more you know um uh agile circular model it would help a lot will it actually solve the problem in the same way we thought like oh bringing people in will solve the problem Agile development will solve the problem like all these things you do and then they don't solve the problem you can get a little discouraged but you know I end the book on the story of um a woman career civil servant in um uh is for us it's the centers for Medicare and Medicaid services it's a huge huge part of our federal government that runs Medicare and Medicaid and um very very complex and enormous bureaucracy this is like this woman's name is yudira Sanchez she is my hero of Heroes it was her first job ever she's been there 23 years she is there for the failure of healthcare.gov which I'm sorry to be speaking in a very U.S context again but it was sort of our big like moment of of come to Jesus on on our our lack of capacity and digital through that experience she was sort of thrown into and agile she had to operate actually there was no choice like we had to get this thing back up she takes those skills and she um um she ends up building these teams that work very very well to get outcomes for people um and certainly she brings agile user-centered iterative software development in but what she really does is challenge the orders that she gets from above so the waterfall that she is in is a much bigger waterfall than software development and I think in a classic waterfall you do not look back up and say yeah but this is funky we gotta Circle back right the policy I've been handed is actually not going to get us the outcomes on the ground um and she starts questioning that and taking the initiative and the she doesn't ask permission she just does it to say well actually I think we're going to do it a little bit that way uh in one example you know they're they're supposed to be dealing with doctors there's nine different definitions of a group Medical Practice like Group Medical Practice as opposed to individuals she says we've got to boil that down to two I mean they should support it out to one they get it to two that that is something and she's this line it's actually not her line it has to make sense to a person she starts doing things like that and you know I kind of end her story with um her being succeeds wildly in the next policy that's handed down after the ACA which is what uh spurred healthcare.gov um they get this thing called macra they do it incredibly well they have such a success that the doctors are writing on these forms this can't be right it's too easy like this this makes sense to me I can use this interface I I believe in Medicare again so this great success and then she gets handed down minor minor regulation that's asking her team to get data for about um Pharmaceuticals about prescription drugs out to the community and the regulation says that they need to do these data extracts that go out quarterly and she's like well it's a terrible idea I mean it's going to take nine months to get the data out it's not real time uh an application programming interface it's just basically giving those same people who access to the data in real time through you know a much better interface it's going to cost less it's going to be much better it's going to be much faster more sustainable and the people who want that data are actually going to be able to use that data in a way they wouldn't have been able to and I just think it's very rare to find a public servant who says oh I'm reading what Congress told me to do and I'm ignoring it I'm not ignoring it I shouldn't say ignoring it I am doing what I know they wanted through other means and that's an empowerment of public servants that is really rare and a I think we should stop uh I'll point this at the elected officials in my country there is so much handwringing and so much time spent like calling public servants up for for Tech failures like healthcare.gov or more recently in my own experience we had you know real crisis of delivery in covid um and so everyone gets mad and we focus so much on what goes wrong if we spend an equal amount of time looking at people like Yadira Sanchez and saying what she's doing is the right thing to do even though it is not technically compliant with the letter of the law she is she's honoring our intent in you know the intent of the law instead of the like let's hold her up and encourage other public servants to be like her I think we would have far far better outcomes beyond that why doesn't she have a seat at the table when that legislation is being written why aren't we asking implementers to help us write policy that is implementable so I hope that gets to what you're talking about I mean she is fundamentally breaking the waterfall through sheer force of will and she is the kind of person who gives me just enormous hope that this whole system can change I love this story anybody else like what are the traits of leadership that you're looking for to help build State capacity any examples or thoughts I'd love to hear from anyone else in the panel well um I think that I I think Jen's in the book hits on an important point which is you know Paul's leadership is is demonstrable leadership there's many forms of leadership you need all of them in the public realm but the sort of you know the the classic uh idea of a senior leader in this country would be the you know the core job is to speak truth to power so you think on the one hand this Minister on the other hand that Minister that's a difficult job I was rubbish at it you know it's not it's not easy and we need that but it's not the only job and sometimes it's also not the most important job the the there are different forms of Asia but I think the two forms that I I don't see enough of is the um the leadership that not just delivers but shows the monster how to do demonstrable change Jen's book is is is uh the subtitle is includes how we can do better and I think part of the job of leaders now 10 15 year roughly by and large government started to address digital government as a mechanism of change about 2010 when these things became you know more popular so we're over a decade into this now I think for leaders who are doing this now it's not just the delivery and all delivery is all context is important country state level National you know delivery what it is is actually to demonstrate show the homework how we did this open up communicate in the open leave assets available for others to follow doesn't mean they have to use all of them I don't think that the leadership that just achieves sometimes quite narrow policy goals or policy Livery is enough um and I think the the other form of leadership and this is really hard this is really hard and I say this to you know we work with private companies and third-party sectors and global funders the hardest thing to do is be as good at consuming as you are at producing government like many big Industries is a producer economy we make stuff we like making stuff we make driving licenses and passports and all these other things and then when we've done we go oh other people could use that we'll we'll Chuck it over the wall and it's like well hang on why didn't we start looking at what other people had before we started making stuff and actually putting the hard yards in to consume and visibly consume other people's stuff whether that be knowledge or whether it be software or whether it be processes and ways of working that's hard but in a in a in a world where many governments are digitizing and the US and the work Jen has done uh you know he's groundbreaking with code for America and then with usds is what's the effort gone in to opening that up for other governments to use like where are the fast followers and there's not enough leadership doing that focusing on the international aspect of that and I think those are the two forms of leadership I think 10 years ago that would be a nice to have frankly you we had to fix the website right I think where we are now is it's like that's part of the job yeah so I don't really obsess about the word leadership but more like again coming back to the design what actually attracts people who have choices to come into government and it's really interesting to look at what happened in the U.S when they actually had a recovery program after the financial crisis 800 billion was what they spent back in 2009 and they decided to Green it initially then the Tea Party kind of you know screwed things up but anyway that was like the plant 800 billion were going to Green our economy in Europe we're like austerity that's the way and because they had this ambition you had a Nobel prize-winning physicist Steve Chu who was attracted to even work not only in government but to head up the doe the department of energy would a Nobel prize-winning physicist have agreed to direct the department of energy if the idea was oh can you come in and de-risk Elon Musk or help us devise carbon taxes it was about creating a direction what I would call shaping the economy co-creating an economy not just fixing it and de-risking it so that issue of design was the remit of government matters um the missions this whole mission oriented approach that we kind of go on and on about in IPP that's exciting eating right I mean if the mission is like zeroing the digital divide so that in the next lockdown when all these kids are at home and you know locked in their homes they still have equal access to their human right to education which we failed on globally inequality Rose for all sorts of reasons including that that's exciting that's going to attract really interesting people who are the Geeks in the Tech Community who are driven to a purpose-oriented government so this whole idea of what does it mean to create a purpose problem solving government that works with other actors in business and Civil Society to solve really crazy problems that require the welcoming of uncertainty and not fearing it not Outsourcing things to the Consulting companies which Rosie Collington another wonderful PhD student and I just wrote a book about um those are the questions we have to ask so why is it like what are the structures preventing kind of the expertise and Leadership to want to work in government notwithstanding the fact so we have some so many amazing people in government and I just think there there needs to be a lot more thinking about it otherwise we just end up with some answers like oh you need to pay civil servants a million dollars which is what they do in Singapore and that's why they have such America credit government yeah that's part of the issue we do need to pay our civil servants better but creating a problem-oriented purpose-oriented mission-oriented type of government that's trying to solve really difficult goals with others it's never about top-down government that would be a first place to start if we want to want to attract leaders um I think for for me what comes to mind is when thinking about digital leaders and the entrepreneurial state I think that you know there's a lot that can be done around creating more efficiencies and promoting public value but I think another aim that is tied to that is diminishing oppressive systems that exist currently and so when we think about the state I think that part of what came up in your class the class that I tied for is kind of looking at what are some of the historical harms that are becoming embedded into digital systems because of uncritical approaches and what are some of the emergent harms that are appearing around that and what really animated my thinking around that is the work of Joy bulimwini who uh she's a data scientist from MIT media lab and she looked at how bias algorithmic bias harms and discrimination became encoded into algorithmic systems and so I'm like okay if we can look at it at the level of Technology what does it mean to look at that at the level of digital transformation processes in the state and and so I think that leadership is we really not seeing equity and Justice is that we're just going to pull more people into the room but fundamentally changing the relationship between the state and its citizens particularly communicating communic communities that have been substantially harmed historically it means that you know trust is not a privilege to afforded to all it means that you might need to take more affirmative steps in order to try and Garner that and I think that part of what leadership can bring to that is I think prioritizing these issues is fundamentally important and fundamentally tied to promoting public value not not as something that maybe it's an add-on maybe it doesn't happen yeah so I want to open up the Florida questions and just while I'm giving you a moment or two to think and then to raise your hand I think that just to reflect on some of the things that I've heard kind of just from what I've seen like one challenge I really worry about is not necessarily in the United States but in many countries observe the kind of path the leadership in the public sector is really driven by your policy acumen and your desire to kind of whisper in the ear of the minister not in your ability to run a 50 000 person organization and to think about like what does it take to make that organization operationally effective and and so that that that kind of the highlighting of one skill that's set so dramatically of another I think sometimes explains why we end up in this trap where we don't actually end up having State capacity because the people who are there really just want to kind of like come up with the perfect answer to a policy problem not solve the thorny ongoing never-ending problems of running a 50 000 person organization other is like just to speak to yours is I get really inspired by the leaders who because because many leaders then don't have operational experience they're scared of their users yeah you know like like sorry I don't want to Jen almost lost her drink there um you know they're like they'll hide in their office and they'll want to look at dashboards about how people are engaging with government how they're interfacing and in the digital ERA this is even bigger problem because at least in an analog world they actually came like you were forced to meet users like they came into the office and they like filled out a form and then they sat in front of you maybe behind a pexy glass window but they were there and you could see who they were and what they were unhappy about but then they do if they're interfacing with over a website you could go your whole career now and never meet a citizen user like that is a conceivable outcome for you so so now like the state capacity in my mind has shifted because a thing that was a byproduct of the animal world now becomes a capacity we have to bit like intentionally build which is why this kind of the the user design the service design works so important because it doesn't happen by chance anymore we have to go actively engage and so we can have leaders who are kind of locked in their offices scared of their users they have to get out there not only do builds good services but to think about issues of justice and equity and access like that doesn't happen without those things um can I can I tell a quick story on that I know you want to get to questions okay yeah let's go quick quick and then raise your hand so we can start to figure you out but yes I'm sorry I like telling stories um because I think it's I think it speaks to somewhat and I was talking about and and certainly so um I start and end almost end with this story about criminal records in the U.S so we decriminalized marijuana uh I'm gonna forget the stat I think we uh charge uh black and brown people at five times higher rate then it's very realistic yeah so when when you charge certain uh racial and ethnic groups with this though marijuana use is this essentially the same across these ethnic groups but we have charged people of color at three or five I can't remember times the higher higher rate and in and incarcerated them for that when you decide to um decriminalize that you have the opportunity to take those felony Rec felony convictions off their record that is the way that you could if make some small amount of Justice um there's a long sort of technocratic story though about how in California which is one of the first states to do this we passed the law and then we sat back and waited for people to file very long complicated petitions and then file another thing and then wait and get through a year-long process that involved 15 different steps and going to the court which no one did so in theory we had made it possible for tens of thousands of people it was in the state of California alone is quite a high number to take a criminal felony conviction off of their record and be able to get housing be able to drive their kids to the carpool be able to get a job in reality we did zip um in a year into it in San Francisco 23 people had applied none of them gotten through it so you're missing and I mean there's there's a whole body of work about how digital can can discriminate this was a huge opportunity for um for it to to sort of to sort of reverse that um and the the reason that it changed was essentially that we were we had a team at code for America that was already look watching people do this process speaking of getting out of the out of the uh you know in front of people we did this for 7 000 people watched them try to get through it before we realized this is never going to work um inside government there was a woman named Christine uh uh Christine Barry DeSoto who had had been a public defender so she also knew it was never going to work and she started automatic expungement by simply taking that whole process and trying to do it for them which also just doesn't scale we had a woman named Jasmine Latimer a black woman daughter of a cop who was running the process for us and I think one of the reasons we were able to crack this nut is we had a woman on the inside and a woman for on the outside who already knew this was not gonna work and together they could sort of put out the case that I'm sorry I'm not sure why all this paperwork is necessary it's a record in a database that you could change like so you know automatic expungement went from we're trying to like fill out seven thousand applications on behalf of people using very old technology to Let's use an algorithm to figure out who's eligible and change the records in the database and be done with it but it would not have hap I mean it's it's such a it's such a story of Technology it is not a story of Technology it's a story of two people getting that this wasn't going to work because they had that lived experience and then they had the operational and Technical expertise to do it but it didn't start with the tech it started with understanding that oh and can I say one more thing about that I was very quick just back to my other point those people need to be writing expungement law and policy yeah sorry that's I just need to say that you have to write policy that is implementable because we've had many uh decriminalization law and policy written since then that is literally unimplementable questions so thank you very much this was fascinating um I'm Johanna nula I'm representing the internet Commission uh I want to agree with Mariana I I love that you touched the point of Education uh and coming from The Institute of Education I must say that education is under seas and education is under digital seas and we are at a point where um uh you know the idea of reflexivity in education that promotes Democratic citizenship is essentially dead um so from a digital policy point of view we see now that um Regulators mandate um mechanisms for redress Pathways for address for Citizens and consumers online and that goes to your point like how do I communicate with the provider with the government or the service and we are at a critical moment I would say we have an opportunity right now to design those systems that will allow voice how do we do it and how do we not miss the opportunity okay can I get one other question yes sir so you talk to her about low trusting governments at the beginning and I need to recruit better civil servants so how do you let people to try new things and be Innovative in their approaching government while still having accountability which is incredibly important for public Trust you're one of these can I interest a panel member no it's pretty sorry [Laughter] okay I don't know which one actually let's let's put Mike on the spot for how do you get people to to try new things when the rails are pointed in this way and we're saying they want them to do something new I mean I get the sense as a public servant here is like I'd like to do something new yeah and constrained like how much should they put themselves on the line how much capacity like how much space do they really have and what have you seen work and not work yeah I mean I'm hesitating because it is a pretty hard question and not that there aren't things that have worked but um I can't give a question that takes the risk out of it for public servants and I'm sorry about that um but it does involve it does involve um I mean I think you know to talk about Yadira Sanchez um I'm like it's just like part of me that's worried that publishing her story is gonna get her fired of course I asked her of course I asked her we ended up having many long conversations about this um I don't think she will uh get fired in the end but um you know but she's also pretty far along on this journey I think you're asking about earlier on like you know how do you even create the space in in the first place um you know the joke is um uh that in America is just you know crisis right like you can do things in a crisis that you can't do in normal times um one uh common observation I think coming out of kovid is how quickly we have reverted to processes that are burdensome and unnecessary that somehow magically disappeared during a crisis um and you know so part of the trick is just using those crises and then trying to keep it from reverting um but yeah we Mike teased me about this quite a bit that we weren't going to get anywhere until healthcare.gov happened but you I think you can also sometimes I don't want to say create a crisis but um it's not it's not create it's make visible so one of the stories I tell in the book is uh about um we had a we had an application for Health Care um uh for veterans that like just literally didn't work you can read about why like it just if you were inside the building and you had a particular combination of Internet outdated Internet Explorer and outdated Adobe Acrobat and settings were such that it would open automatically on your laptop it opened fine so if you were a veteran and you called you're like this thing doesn't work for me they'd like works fine no problem and in fact when the user researchers discovered that it didn't work well they went to get it approved and even the bureaucrats like showing them like we can't reopen this we have a requirements list and all the requirements were fulfilled there's no physical like there's no bureaucratic way to reopen something that is says it's done and what they did was went out and captured audio and screen share like you know uh screencast of a particularly Dynamic and articulate veteran trying to do this and they in uh women that in the book who some of you know Marina Nitza found a way to get that played that that audio and and video played in front of the deputy secretary of the VA and in that moment everything changed because it went from being I'm sorry I'm looking at this paper and all the requirements have been fulfilled to We are failing veterans and I can see it and I can feel it and it's not just about the functionality it's about the emotion like they felt a lot of emotion in that moment Shame about what they were doing and it had not been a crisis and they made it into a crisis and then we're gonna not gonna let you off the hook on the education but so one of the things that we work on with different governments is what would it look like to explicitly admit that this is hard they have to welcome the granularity it's not this linear thing input output but you're probably going to screw up along the way the trial and error and error and error but investing in your ability to learn from the error you shouldn't just celebrate the errors but learn from it learning by doing that requires a safe space the sandbox right so gov Labs like in in Chile they have the Laboratories that sounds good because it's in Spanish so what would it look like if there was you know that part of government would be as normal as having a treasury right a safe place to kind of mess up and do learning by doing that depends on I keep coming back to this design issue the remit of government there's no reason to welcome experimentation to say you need to be learning by doing if you're not seen as the knowledge kind of organization right um and you mentioned or I can't remember it's upstairs or here but in covid because we actually saw it as sort of a war because millions of people were dying we reinvented re-elevated up things like the defense production procurement act so outcomes oriented procurement but it's not this like thing that you just pull off the shelf you need to even with that experiment with it so one of the things we're doing here in The Institute is working on outcomes oriented procurement with different levels of government including Camden literally the council where we're sitting today and that can be designed in different ways like what does it mean to have outcomes oriented what is the social value versus public value what is it mean to not just have the outcome but to make sure that along the way the way that you're working with other actors is a symbiotic partnership and not a kind of a parasitic one with large monopolies what you guys did with GDs which was to expand the ecosystem what are the new metrics we need to expand or to measure Dynamic ecosystem as a result of government policy you need to admit that that's hard but have a way to you know experiment and the reason that Rosie and I had one of the subtitles of our book on Consulting how Consulting has infantilized government is that when you stop doing and welcoming that experimentation process you stop learning by doing and you literally stop growing you become infantilized but by Design really thank you um so I'll just share a little bit about my experience um uh I was working on a project with a big city government and they were looking at trying to make changes because the system was not serving vulnerable people and quite it was quite harmful and violent and so some of the really interesting things that happened is they started building a movement outside of the outside of the institution where there were activists networks there were civil society groups there were a lot of people coming together to talk about what was happening talk about the fact people were dying and getting harmed and trying to create pressure on the outside that could kind of I guess shift the the maybe the real I don't know if it shifts the risk but it creates enough institutional pressure on the outside that it made the government more willing to act where it had been reluctant to do too much before and so I think that this kind of speaks to the paper that came from here around this idea of the role of movements around missions and the importance of movements in helping to kind of bring different types of actors together create different types of external pressure and and I think that this is really kind of why it's really important to engage Community to engage actors outside to think of movements in solidarity as something that can really kind of shift some of maybe the institutional inertia so I don't know if this is helpful in your case but I saw it work in this particular scenario do you understand no pressure um I'm gonna go next question maybe just one quick thing with that is I do think that my students almost always many of them come from government and have this frustration my experience has been I tell them I want you to remember that frustration because when the moment you're a leader you may not have total freedom to do anything but you always have some you have some freedom to to create space for those who work below you to have more freedom and behave differently so what are you so now you are living this frustration you are angry when you now become the manager are you going to create space for the people underneath you to have more freedom than you feel you have right now to do something different like that it can't change everything but can you create a little bit of space um perfect let's go to there was a question in the back let's go there and then thank you um yeah okay um yeah so um I'd just like to ask the panel um so in order for bureaucracies to operate in the way that you're talking about a lot of people have to change their behaviors and expectations including people with lots of powers sometimes up to and including government ministers so what are the from your experience and your experience with governments around the world what are the most I mean effective strategies methods arguments that you've marshaled for people to change the ways in which they operate to align with this model that we've been talking about for a decade now foreign policy here at UCL um and I wanted to ask a bit about you know you talked about learning and growing and experimenting and learning from that and I guess so I'm just finishing up a book on mission-driven bureaucrats and I I think there are you know I think they're incredible inspiring bureaucrats everywhere governments all over the world and it seems to me that almost all of them have a story about that interface with citizens and that being part of their learning and growth and inspirational process and I'm worried in the direction you were pointing Dave that you know as we digitalize the interface between citizens and bureaucrats we run the risk of depersonalizing those interactions we run the risk of making it even harder for them to see the communities which are already so marginalized so often by government and I guess I wonder how we can capture all of the wonderful advantages of digitalization uh while while not separating the citizen in the state and facilitating let's say delivery with rather than simply delivery to those citizens thank you uh if you insist um uh so the question at the back I think was how what arguments work to make people change um none of them none of them by and large because if they were going to do that they would have done so um I think that I mean there's a sort of central problem with the framing of the question it's a very good question so um when I arrived in government basically a sort of an entire machine was like right you're here well now go and write some papers and give us some arguments about why you who are nothing should we should all change I was like well thanks for the kind offer but we're not going to do that because you're not really interested in that that's just it's actually just a sort of intellectual debate that we can have over there but the if we were going to change they need actual change to take them with them so in a very positive way I was like look I'm not you know be funny you're not all the Enemy by any means but I'm not engaging in an intellectual debate there are many things about this was a long time ago but many things that was like evidently broken like our benefit system and so on so let's not have an argument about that theory of change let's just actually change it that's why when I first went to the minister for 40 days he said what's the strategy of change I said the strategy delivery that we're just going to deliver at a pace and at to a higher level which demonstrates the the ways of working to deliver that are more attractive than many of the ways of working in place now that sounds incredibly simple but actually it was a sort of strategy of Last Resort because you in most governments where there is a sort of uh a a very strong resistance to change you either have you know the only real way to do it we have top down political pressure which we had by the way which is fantastic or you have a crisis like covert that's so obvious that things need to change to deliver that now those situations don't come about that often so I think that you know I think I think making the arguments the best made sort of after the event actually the best man we said well we tried this thing it's it's it had some positive things maybe some negative things let's learn from that and move on but I think having the you know having an argument in my experience in life was having an argument's the wrong word but having a debate with people about the benefits of using a browser I am not joking in 2012 whilst everyone's carrying around one of these I'm saying well what's the benefits of that I'm like well the answer look in your pocket but you know to some degree the argument is pointless it's actually what people are often saying is have an argument because they don't believe there actually is an ability to change I think that's many big institutions not just governments have got to that point is that they're sort of Frozen they just don't know what to move first and the only way you win that is not I think with a debate but it's it's when you make the change be very open about what you've done and actually that's hard leadership then it's gonna also fail a bit and go well that didn't work we'll try something else so it needs good it needs it needs a conversation but not necessarily an argument about the theory of change I think sure show s um I think I understood your question to be about not losing connection to people when you're increasingly interacting through digital means yeah I mean I I think that people miss that a core practice and principle of digital transformation is listening to people and in actively going out there and finding the people who have not been heard and listening to them and in fact I think the again if you think of this as digitalization of current things I agree we have a big problem if you think of it as digital transformation and you practice that well there is I think an increased opportunity to hear from people I this is really funny because this is not my project and I don't know anything about it but I just listened to a talk that um James Stewart who's one of Mike's colleagues gave um about a project that I've been following for years but not at a deep level uh the Universal Credit and what he said they did and you can correct me um it just struck a nerve with me um they what he said was they decided not to finalize the policy until they'd spent a lot of time with a very multi-disciplinary team an included technologist included user researchers it included Frontline workers it included policy makers and what they did was basically have people sort of start to interact with this thing and then the key technology was the phone that that they would call they would they would get to a certain point and call and the point is that they were calling the people these are people who had edge cases who had complicated Lives who had a lot going on that when they got to a certain point and they had to deal with the complexity you know the the interface was not working for them very often it doesn't right the person they were calling was policy maker who had to listen to them and explain why this wasn't working for them and only after several rounds of this did they start to finalize the policy not the technology not the interface not the user interface design the policy I have not seen that in the U.S and it really spoke to me but I do think that when we do this right we are doing much more listening not less and a in a briefly you know another lesson from the book is like um on healthcare.gov which everyone talks about I don't talk about it that extensively in the book but like we actually made a mistake it was sort of an opposite lesson in a certain way there we tried to include every single edge case from day one it's very hard to build technology that does that what we could have done is have a very simple easy online transaction with people who didn't have any edge cases weren't problematic like not sure we really need to listen that much to those people is the people on the edges who had immigration status issues who had you know uh uh uh joint custody of a kid you know all these things that like make your life really complicated that we needed to free up the in-person assistive centers and the call centers for those people so that we could get them processed and we could just do that and frankly at the beginning a manual way but when it would have an opportunity to listen to them I don't really think we needed to listen to those other folks they were fine they were getting health care that was great they didn't have it before very good thing but the simpler their lives the less we need to listen in my view so when we create structures that allow us to listen to those who are least listened to whose lives are most complicated we do learn um I took all day but I I think actually that thought about your question I I learned this the hard way I made so many mistakes haven't got time for this so I learned this the hard way but so I don't mean to be sort of wise to your absolutely event the concern about digital generally digital governments abstracting people from government is that turned out to be the biggest false false issue what abstracts people from government are accountants solicitors um all of those people who are intermediaries and what allows them to occupy that space are terrible Services usually sometimes very bad policy but almost all terrible services and this is pretty true for most governments and this is the problem politics has a feedback loop like every five years there's one big feedback loop we all participate in and someone gets voted out tonight there will be people there will be ideas floated in the press for tomorrow and immediate feedback there's surveys all the time politics is a constant art of feedback loops to find the other possible government removes feedback loops and the problem of the Machinery of government the real the real heart of the pro the policy dilemma is that the people making policy are abstracted from the policies and the services they're using and so if you're writing benefits policy and you don't receive a benefit by definition you don't know what you're talking about and that's not critical of the person it's just like you've got to get those feedbacks of things and what Jen's talking about is is getting those feedback slipping I think most not all policy but a lot of policy should like the British Civil Service Prides itself on writing two two-page memos that should be the limit of a policy paper a policy paper should say the policy intent what we're trying to the universal policy Universal Credit policy should have said we're trying to unify four major benefits into one system and that had cross-party agreement instead it was 16 binders or whatever of absolute nonsense science fiction in the future it'll be this in the future it'll be that so the the policy to start out thin as intent and then the feedback loops showing up Jen's absolutely right that's there are so many things not to follow Silicon Valley on like there are some people in this audience that know about those but one of the things they got right is that harnessing of those feedback loops to constantly to to to create and then constantly iterate on Services that's why so many of them are so good annoyingly and governments could do a lot more of that um I'll be quick I think that um in terms of kind of this idea of the voice and things like this I think it's important to think about diversity and inclusion are important but also who's in the room and who's making these decisions matter which is what's coming across and so I think some of the ways that I've seen people productively think about this is I've been really inspired by Reiner's work around public sector Innovation and so thinking about the importance of diversity and heterogeneity around complex systems in order to create more Dynamic feedback loops that can take into account lived experiences better I think that's one I think also the work of joy bulimwini and so thinking about how can the public sector think about intersectionality analyzes and methodologies around how they try to learn about problems and gain insights and and being really intentional about that I think that's another thing that can really work well in policy and thinking about what does that mean in practice and I think that in terms of Adrian Brown rounds work around emergent strategy and so I think she thinks about complexity thinking with regard to social justice and so thinking about how can we think about social justice around complexity thinking and and what does that mean for policy so what does that mean for who shows up how we think about power how power gets reorganized I think that's also a really a really great thing to look towards and think about what does that mean in terms of policy and then I think um the the Israeli personals there was another person but I forgot um but but what I'm saying is basically there's a lot of really or David cenge so David Dr David singer from Sierra Lee uh Sierra Leone yes um he as the minister of education and chief Innovation officer for the country and he has this really interesting approach where he's promoting radical inclusion policy and so thinking about what does inclusion look like across all government processes and as something that we try to intentionally seek out and that we don't think think about just serving the middle like the hill in the Stream cases because in doing that we'll catch a lot of people in between and so I think these are some really really productive ways in which people are thinking about voice thinking about power around diversity and inclusion and really changing not only um you know how how well are we able to hear people but who are the people actually in the room making the decisions how do we think about changing that and transforming that and so these people really inspire me I share this with you yeah I spent the day yesterday and I was gonna say Barcelona Barcelona and Italian you say Barcelona Barcelona anyway with the mayor at the collau and her team on their housing Mission housing for all and we were you know talking about the high approach blah blah blah but what they kind of brought to the table and what we've been writing about also with um some of our un colleagues is what would it look like to combine kind of an outcomes Mission oriented purpose-oriented problem-oriented government with a strong framing of Human Rights right because the human rights declaration is out there just like the sdgs are out there we're hardly really implementing them and what would the human rights approach to a housing for all policy look like and we had like 20 different bits that should be on the dashboard so it's not simple but it's what can actually hold the system accountable and along the way citizens know their human rights they become part of that you know just like we say DARPA is interesting because they don't know just how to turn the top on but also turn it off right agile flexible DARPA but who tells DARPA when to turn the top off for social problems that we have like around housing how to actually use a human rights approach to allow citizens the power to hold the system even when it is Mission oriented which might sound good but actually if it's not you know taking part of that feedback loop through citizen participation it's just another pet project but that some minister or some you know government decided on without but you need a principles and human rights do provide us that but it's often discussed in a completely different room from those talking about Innovation Tech and data um for me that just to bring it back for like in our course like one of the reasons I'm excited to be here is that we have a master's of public administration program so it's not policy as an important place to play but Administration I feel as this thing has been underplayed in the last 20 years like people don't people think Administration is a solved problem and we just have to get the policy right and Jen's entire point is that this is not the case and so in our class we talk about Learners versus planners and for me like the Learners are the people who are the Ops people who are trying to get things done and the planners are the people out there who are kind of writing the blueprint of what you're supposed to do and they kind of throw it over the transom and say go figure it out and then the Learners like none of this works and a huge part of our government has to do with the fact that like there's this line between the Learners and the planners they're seen as different casts and it's the planners who get promoted all too often and so how do we create how do we create a world where it's the it's not it's there's diversity planners are needed but so are the Learners and how do we create space for them to reinvest money uh yeah I wish the national government I feel like I feel like this also varies like at the local level you get a lot more reaction a lot more realization that you have to always be adopting you have to always be learning but as you get further away from your citizens and you get as more national government there you end up with a huge amount of overhead planning process very separated from the users you know kind of this oh this is the way it's going to be build it out 1600 pages how do we bring the kind of what's happening the local level into this into the national level and rethink the structure yeah being a little in like insight into how the book was written I was actually writing this chapter about something I learned researching the book uh about a law that was passed in the early 90s that tried to get the White House to take digital seriously in in the 90s and uh um the White House didn't want everything to do with it they they pushed back and said um this is this belongs where we buy pencils and and cars in the Gen I don't mean to denigrate the general Services Administration they do amazing work on digital now but they are known as America's buyer they're the procurement shop um please stop uh you know Senator Cohen and representative Klinger who are trying to pass this plot please stop trying to get us to have a federal CIO and a federal CI CTO please stop getting you know trying to get us to to take digital in at the highest levels of government and I think they simply mistook the digital Revolution for this sort of um new form of implementation that was just like the old one um but I was writing this and this had occurred to me like oh my God that's why I had so much trouble standing at usds is that John koskin at the time in the early 90s was the deputy director for management at OMB Office of Management budget in the White House said to Senator Cohen um that is uh we don't want that it is operational in nature and inconsistent with the policy role of this institution and I had just learned this and Mike came to visit and I told him and he said oh yeah the intellectuals and the Mechanicals there that's from the British Civil Service they're the intellectuals digital is the Mechanicals they just missed it they just missed the whole thing um and and I I just deeply felt that divide and how destructive that divide is but they they really did not see that it was about as as Tom Lismore would say like meeting the expectations of changing expectations and needs of people they just thought it was some detail and so they sort of rejected it online thank you so my my questions about the role of the citizen in terms of digital leadership in the entrepreneurial state so I'm thinking about co-creation and participation and nice Point around voice and activism but also Mike's Point about the government needing to be a consumer as well as a producer of services and thinking about the examples from the Ukraine where we saw Digital Services spun up really quickly in response to a crisis by citizens and for citizens so I guess so my question to the panel is what do you see the role of the citizen being in terms of digital leadership in this new entrepreneurial state so one is can digital governance serve as a solution to manage the breakdown of the social contract and just one more because they have plenty of them or our existing and emerging digital Technologies contributing to the digital divide or democratizing these spaces anyone want to dive in I we actually are almost at time here so even for these two questions we only have one or two minutes left but you can jump in if you want to add something you want to um the answer to digital social contracts is no it can't do that I don't think um it's a longer debate but uh I I can construct a new social contract but in terms of the breakdown of the social contracts it can help but no digital digitization of an existing government Machinery is going to really resolve that it's essentially a political uh issue I think anyone want to think about citizens or um it's not really an answer or just a reflection the labor share of global income is at one of the lowest levels it's ever been the capital shares at one of the highest levels why is that there's and I won't go into the answer to that because that'll take us hours but there's a lot of what we would call kind of extraction intermediary and like there's the whole possibility which is definitely not happening that something like blockchain right which everyone described as taking out the intermediation actually is creating even more intermediation so this idea that technology would create a more you know uh kind of less filtered space between different types of actors what we actually have and we have a whole uh Grant about this called algorithmic rents the degree to which the algorithms themselves are currently constructed to facilitate uh certain types of extraction that instead of it being the feudal landlords is today how we actually govern our digital platforms that just requires Reviving Concepts from old political economy that have to do with like rent and even being able to distinguish rents versus profits value creation for Value extraction requires not technology but actually knowing how to do the accounting in a very different way which is a big question do you want to talk what's the role of citizens at all um I guess I would I that's a hard question I I guess I would briefly say like change I mean as we were talking about earlier like we have mental models of what we expect government to do how we expect it to act what we hold it accountable to and I think those need to change fundamentally we need to hold accountable to execution and implementation not just policy but there's there's a lot there's there's certainly um a lot more to that that we probably don't have time to get into Barcelona right I mean what they did was through the data Commons and bringing in hackers into the city government the idea was that actually you know you wouldn't you would well first of all citizens are creating data but they're not necessarily benefiting from the new knowledge that is being created from that data creation so what we need also in terms of the capacity is that capacity to bring what other tried to do hackers into the city government to give back right to improve social transport public housing the decisions that are being made but with that feedback of citizens but that requires a very different type of also knowledge but then and I think it requires a degree of um simplification that we are not holding government accountable to now I just keep coming back to that line from the CMS team where they said it has to make sense to a person and we're not asking our government to run programs or execute policy in ways that make sense and that's just the hackers can't there's no hacker that can really understand like healthcare policy and I mean there's some that do but they're professionals like if you're not a professional it doesn't make sense to you why are we not holding our government accountable to doing things that we can understand I think the the I'm going to wrap this up just because I want to really make sure we end on time and like honor the release people and also maybe have people come and talk to our speakers directly but I think for me like the thing about digital is that it's actually worth remembering that uh in a previous era all your interactions with government were intermediated they were intermediated by a public servant often who knew the system and could actually help you navigate that system and a lot of what we're doing is actually just coming like no we're gonna we're actually just gonna like we're gonna interface you directly with the machine and then the expectation is that was going to be easier or better when actually you pulled out the person who could help you navigate and so in some ways digital is actually just exposing us to the complexity of the machine and now people are like oh my gosh the machine is very complex like how do citizens interface with that and we thought that in doing this we could wipe out all those layers of people who are gonna do the interfacing on on the behalf of citizens and then it was going to be cheaper and I think the two things that I would love people to take away from this panel is one is in some ways like the the competencies and capacities need a digital era are no different than what we need in a previous era um we just actually have to do more of them and better and it's not going to be cheaper it's going to in some ways it's going to require um all the things we previously did and then more on top of that and so I think often people think this is going to be a kind of Cheaper easier project the state will be smaller I'm not so convinced of that there's a real complexity here that can't just be like negotiated away with a website um we have to simplify but also find ways to engage and pull people Along on that Journey so that's the first thing and then the second is is these if we don't get this right I have this kind of like broken windows theory of government which is you know if you like if you can't deliver someone like a food benefit or a passport in a reasonable amount of time they're not going to trust you to like manage a pipeline or a sewage system or an air traffic control system and so I think we sometimes people think that these small things that government does doesn't matter but actually I think that's where the interface of trust that's where it matters most and so this huge it's essential that we get these competencies right because if we don't I'm really worried about what our future holds for us I'm hoping everybody can say thank you to our panelists for carving out time and experience thank you [Applause]

Channel: UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

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Id: 1GIo4tJiyfM

Length: 89min 23sec (5363 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 25 2023