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At Work with The Ready
AUA: Is Real Change Possible Inside Federal Bureaucracy?
00:07:15
Rodney and Sam explore what organizational innovation actually looks like when your mission is regulating and administering—not disrupting and growing.
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Transcript10 lines
- [00:03]
A
Hey everyone. Welcome back to OrkwithReady. I'm Sam Sperlin and I'm joined as always by Rodney Evans.
- [00:10]
B
Hi Sam. Hi everyone.
- [00:12]
A
Every other week we're tackling one tough, thought provoking listener question and sharing a few ideas that might help. So let's dive in. Rodney, what you got for us this week?
- [00:22]
B
I am an internal consultant within a giant federal agency. Much of the context of your podcast is corporate focused. There are times when the incentives you describe don't match feds. Many of my internal clients are tasked with the mission of maintaining and regulating rather than innovation of underlying concepts. Can you do an episode about federal agencies tasked with regulating or administering and what dynamics you see come up there that are different from corporate sector? I especially found the episode on dual transformation not resonant. Noted. We could innovate processes, but usually not the fundamental goals of the agencies.
- [01:02]
A
Yeah, I'm not surprised that the dual transformation topic didn't quite slap. It is a different context for sure. What I think about with this question is any client we have worked with, and we have worked with federal agencies where there's a lot of regulation. And I think the kind of step zero of any sort of work, like the work we talk about in federal agencies or any highly regulated space, is to really, really understand the landscape, really understand what the regulations allow for and do not allow for. In a lot of the places that I've done this work, the regulations are vaguely understood by most, very understood by a very few, and generally just used as a bit of a cudgel to keep people away from the edges for probably good reason, you know, don't want to be breaking the laws and, and whatnot. However, I think if you care about doing organizational work the way we talk about it on this podcast, and you're in an environment like this, you have to become the deepest expert on the actual regulatory environment in which you are operating so that you can have a lot of confidence and trust in the white space that exists below or around those, those lines that you can actually do something with. That's for me is always, always step zero. Because once we can define the true boundaries, then we can actually do interesting things. And I think there's a lot of great work to be done, even if you're holding purpose constant, which is essentially what this, this question is saying, like we're not changing the purpose of a, of a federal agency, so does that mean there's nothing else worth doing? Like, absolutely not. That's not the case. There's 11 other fields of the operating system canvas in the ready parlance that probably has some, some, some work that we can do.
- [02:55]
B
I just want to say like having done work with federal agencies, first of all, I actually find that there are a lot of people working in agencies that have a more innovative mindset than people in large antiquated bureaucratic companies. In some cases I think there's less ego because I think that there are a lot of mission driven people and very like service oriented people in federal agencies. You know, we have a lot of smart clients in federal agencies that could just like make a shitload more money in the private sector. And they choose to do this because it's important to them and they feel like it's their civic duty. I say this because I have personally had the experience of introducing more radical ideas in federal agencies than my corporate clients would let me say on a stage. So first I would like, I would parse out the regulatory landscape that Sam just very eloquently discussed with the posture of innovation. Because I actually don't think that's not. That Venn diagram is not a circle. Like you can be very innovative in mindset and still work in a, in a company or in an organization that is highly regulated and highly administrative in nature. Which leads me to what you can actually innovate. That's, that's what's going to be different is like you're probably not innovating product or creating a new growth engine like your company. B But a lot of the best work that I have seen, the innovation is around execution and it is around the removal of broken process or the reimagining of workflows or the inclusion of automation or whatever. And actually that too service design.
- [04:44]
A
A lot of federal agencies are interfacing with the public. Like there's a lot of innovation to be done about how that goes.
- [04:51]
B
Totally right. User centered design. And generally speaking, because federal agencies aren't trying to hit a quarterly number, there's a lot more patience for that stuff. So I've seen better work of that stripe unfold in an agency context because people have patience for something to happen and it doesn't have to immediately translate into a lagging metric on a spreadsheet in order to be worth doing. And so I say this because I would like, I understand what you're saying and I would sort of like flip the script a little bit to be like, use the mindset of innovation that is almost inevitably there to tackle the inverse problem, which is removing friction rather than growth and use the fact that you work in a place that doesn't completely function on a three month cycle to your benefit, because that's actually like a pretty rare condition and it makes doing this kind of work a lot more fun.
- [05:54]
A
All right, that is it for this mini. If you've got a question of your own, hit us up@podcastheready.com we will see
- [06:03]
B
you back next week for a full episode of At Work with the Ready. Thank you for being a listener.