84 Hack Your Bureaucracy
We're joined by[Marina Nitze(https://twitter.com/MarinaNitze) to talk about their book Hack Your Bureaucracy(https://www.hackyourbureaucracy.com/). We'll discuss tactics you can use to get things done in all sorts of organizational environments.<br><br>### Resources and Shoutouts:<br>- Recoding America (book)(https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61796680-recoding-america)<br>- Power to the Public (book)(https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55421550-power-to-the-public)
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Transcript
Hello. I'm Ryan Cook, and this is Civic Tech Chat, a show that looks at the way technology, politics, and policy impacts the world around us. The tools we use, the way services are delivered, and how we talk about and set policy all shape our society. We'll gather around and have a chat about these things together and more. Before we get started, I do wanna let you all know that we've started a Discord for the podcast. There will be a link with an invite down in the episode description. Do feel free to go check that out. It's a small community right now, but hoping to grow it. It's a great way to reach out to me and let me know things that you might want us to cover or to just hang out and talk about civic tech. Anyway, let's go ahead and start the show. This is an episode from the archives. So there may be things that are mentioned like events, links, email addresses, and the like that might be inaccurate or may have simply passed because this happened a while ago. So let's go ahead and sit back and enjoy this episode about discovery sprints. Marina, thank you so much for joining us here on Civic Tech Chat. Could you start us off by introducing yourself and telling us a bit about what you do?
Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. My name is Marina Nitsa. I do two things these days. I do crisis incident response, with a small partnership I have at a firm called Lair Olaf, And then I do a lot of foster care reform work, through New America's New Practice Lab. And my claim to fame as it were is that I used to be the chief technology officer of the Department of Veterans Affairs, back in the time when the US Digital Service was first being birthed.
And, Marina, what would you say is your personal why? That thing that drives you to get out of bed each morning and do all those things.
It's definitely a Lily Tomlin quote, which is, I always wondered why somebody didn't do something about that. And then I realized I'm somebody. I think about that quote literally every day.
Oh, that is a really good quote. I'll have to make sure that that one's in the the episode notes there. And, also, are there any, actually, speaking of episode notes, this is totally not a question where I'm just trying to milk for content for those. But, are there any videos, books, podcasts, or other media that you'd recommend to the folks out there listening?
Yeah. So if you're looking to get into bureaucracy hacking, would definitely recommend my friend Jen Paulka's new book Recoding America, which has a lot of really, detailed bureaucracy hacking stories versus our book that has a lot of tactics but doesn't get you into the kind of nitty gritty of the stories. And, also, Tara McGinnis's Power to the Public is another really excellent resource.
Cool. And then I think we can go ahead and, begin our hop into the topic, which is about also a book, but but your book called, Hack Your Bureaucracy. Can you talk a bit about, like, why did you seek to write a book like that?
Yeah. So, Nick and I, started writing the book about ten years ago. It was originally inspired by a whiteboard that our colleagues, Kumar Garg and Tom Kalil, had in their White House office, and it listed a number of ways that you could get things done in the White House environment. And if you were stuck, you could go look at their whiteboard, look at the tactics, and it could help kinda jog your thoughts about what strategy you might pick up next. Then after I left the White House, I was going on to be the CTO of the VA, and I started making an even longer list of tactics that I saw other people using, things I mistakenly did that worked, things I mistakenly did that I should not do again, advice I was giving to my team. And that was really a Google Doc of many, many tactics. And then once I left government, Nick and I started talking about, hey. Wouldn't it be nice if we put this in a book, so that we could give it to other people? And Nick teaches at Harvard. So in particular, he had that kind of mindset, in hand. And for me, truly, honestly, I check the appendix of my own book regularly when I'm feeling stuck on a work problem. And I'm like, what tactic can I can I use? Nick and I are not purporting to have invented these tactics, but we hope that we've collected them in one easy reference.
Oh, okay. So it sounds a bit like a like a labor of documentation. You know? The things that you learned along the way that maybe you still need to reference occasionally, but then also maybe others then don't have to have the the harder lesson that you maybe had to get there.
Yeah. Absolutely. And something we hope people will take away from the book. We often encounter people that are new to large bureaucracies, especially in the public sector, right, that we're in. And they usually have a tendency to think, you know, this is impossible to fix or worse, the only way to fix this is to blow it up or to go around it or to go under it. And that never works. We've never seen that work. We actually did a ton of research in the course of writing this book to look for bureaucracies that people had successfully dismantled, and there are none. So instead, we really want people to have a message of hope. This book is all tactics and stories that worked in a lot of the hardest environments, in the world, in the White House, in the Department of Defense, in the VA, at Harvard, etcetera. And we hope that those stories will be inspiring, to people that are stuck. Even if you're stuck in a bureaucracy, that might be your homeowners association, frankly.
Nice. I I, I hear you kinda digging into, like, one of the takeaways there that you're hoping folks maybe take from it. Are are there any others that you're hoping folks might take as they're kinda making their journey through those pages?
Well, we have 56 tactics in the book. And so what I would say is all of them are not gonna work in all environments. And sometimes you really are gonna have a bureaucracy hacking challenge that, you really are stuck on. But something that's been really rewarding as we promoted the book and gone out and talked to thousands of bureaucracy hackers in the field is they've often remarked, oh, you know, I didn't think of trying that, or I didn't think of trying this in this environment. And so we really also hope it gives you a toolkit. So if you are feeling stuck, it might, jog loose another way that you might still go forward.
And something we talked about, as we've gone along here is that, the idea of this being maybe the product of lessons that you've learned that maybe you're you're saving others from having to learn. Of all the ones you've maybe thought of or explored with your experience writing the book, what would you say was, like, the hardest earned lesson that wound up in it?
That would definitely be, you can't make the bureaucracy care. Like, don't try to make the bureaucracy care. I think this is a tendency we all have as humans, especially humans drawn to public service. And I and I was at the VA, I would regularly get in, fights that never ever resulted in anything productive, or I'd be like, you're killing veterans. You're denying veterans' health care. If you don't approve this, you know, tool or way forward, if you don't make a decision, veterans are being harmed. And the thing I had to really come to grips with is that there's no place on the approval form that asks, you know, how many people will be negatively impacted if I don't make this decision? How many people will be negatively impacted if I don't make it in a timely manner? And so what's really important is is you can't make those emotional arguments in replacement of the arguments that the bureaucracy is actually looking for. A quick story here I have for my foster care work during the pandemic. I was helping a small team in a state. They helped older foster youth, which is, like, teenagers 18 to age 21 who are technically living on their own but still need support. Right? And now we're in a pandemic. It's very scary. They were highly at risk, you know, of potentially being homeless, maybe not not having food. And this team, it was so good and so dedicated, kept the list of these kids on the office wall to keep track of them, which is great until you're in a pandemic and you can't go into the office. So all they needed to do was move the list to a shared spreadsheet, which does not seem like a very big technical problem. But they had tried and tried and tried for months begging IT, making the argument, you know, these kids could be homeless. They could be in they could be harmed. They need resources. We need to help them get the spreadsheet. And IT kept responding with, that's not on the form. What's on the form is, you know, explain the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your shared spreadsheet. And they were talking past each other. And I was able to show up luckily and and help kinda translate only because I had made that mistake so many times myself of trying to make the emotional argument to get the IT approval or the business approval or the budget approval. One, what you really need to do is fill out the approval form exactly and as thoroughly as as it needs filling out, right, to go through the actual approval process. So I'd say that was definitely the hardest one to learn over time.
Oh, that is a that is an interesting anecdote because it it sounds a bit like e like, the impact can't overcome requirements if they're there. And if you don't satisfy the requirements, the the organization isn't gonna, like, change its rules
for a situation. Am I kinda like receiving that? Absolutely. So bureaucracies are not people. They are made up of people. But the bureaucratic process itself, like, you can't persuade it with emotional argument. You have to give it, you know, what it what it's asking for, which is usually a particular kind of paperwork.
If there was one technique someone pulled from a read of this book, what would be the the best or, like, most important one for them to pick as what they've learned?
This is a hard one, but I'd I'd have to say it would, to me, be, look between the silos. So we're all familiar with the concept of silos in an organization. And the larger and more storied your organization is, the more siloed it probably is. And people have a tendency when they wanna solve a problem to, like, try to go attack a silo, like, show up and be like, hi. I'm here to change your team, your department, your process step. And the thing is silos really don't like change. They're looking for you. It's almost like they have sentries posted at the door. They're watching, and they're trying to keep people out. But the space between the silos, when you have a step handoff or something goes across departments or across agencies, not only is there nobody there defending it, often nobody even knows what happens in that space. And so you can really be so much more effective, and no matter what your role is, even if you're literally on the outside of an organization, if you can follow a real process, claim, application, person, whatever your situation is, follow it from start to finish across all the silos, and you'll very quickly start seeing opportunities between the silos where you might be able to make changes in service of your larger goal. And once you start making those changes between the silos, now you start getting your, hands and your fingers in inside the silos. And I'll tell a fun story here. A lot of my work in foster care is around helping states streamline their foster parent licensing process. And that doesn't that sounds kinda boring until you learn that there are kids, babies, toddlers that live in offices, like sleeping on the floor, waiting to go live with their godmother or someone else that loves them and is and wants them until that person can get through this paperwork process. So getting it down is is quite important to these kids, and it can take hundreds of days sometimes. And so I was helping a particular state look for ways to shorten their process, and I'm following a real FOST grant application from start to finish. And I, eventually get to a step where a woman is requesting the applicant's driving record from the DMV. And she complains to me the whole time she is doing this. She pulls out a carbon copy form where she has to, like, press really hard through the four layers of colored paper. She has to find a stamp. She has to find an envelope, and she's just like, what is wrong with DMV? Why do they live in the nineteenth century? This step takes forever, and it's the worst part of my job. I did what this woman was not empowered to do, which is I then went to the DMV, and I said, hey. Could you show me how you fulfill driving record requests? And the woman there pulls up an electronic system. And on the left, she's like, I get the incoming request here. I click here. I click here. Boom. The I fulfill them in about an hour. And I was like, well, wait a minute. Where does the carbon copy form fit in? And she says, oh my god. You were at child welfare. Those people live in the nineteenth century. Why do they keep sending me this carbon copy form in the mail when they could email me like every other civilized person in this state? And I was like, I have someone for you to meet. So I introduced these two incredibly well intentioned, hardworking civil servants who immediately changed their process. Child welfare immediately switched over to the email request. This woman now hated her job, let's say, like, 50% less, and we shaved thirty two days off the application process from one afternoon of insight like that. And bureaucracies are just absolutely chock full of examples like that. I probably find one every day in my job, and most of it is just you have to start going to look for it. So I would really encourage anybody, whatever process you are frustrated with, whatever problem you're trying to solve, start with just following the process, claim, application person from start to finish and see what opportunities you find there.
That's a that's a remarkable story. I I think it's incredible how you can have those situations where, like, a division just thinks it's one of the requirements, and then the other thinks it's, no. It's like your requirement. And and I imagine, like, maybe at some point, there's, like, some sort of modernization issue that happens. Maybe it leaves somebody behind, and then, like, there's just no sync backup. And it sounds like that's maybe, like, pretty common in those places where there's kinda, like, communication cleavages or, like, hand off points between organizational units. Am I kinda hearing that correctly?
Yeah. Absolutely. We call those water cooler rules, like, something you keep doing over time, but it was never written down. It was never actually policy. It was never a rule. And we've actually got this really interesting question as we've gone on book tour from people asking how they can avoid becoming a bureaucracy, and I have kind of a two part answer to that. The first part is you can't. Everything is a bureaucracy. But you can be a well functioning bureaucracy as opposed to a dysfunctional bureaucracy. And, really, a key to being a well functioning bureaucracy is understanding your own bureaucratic processes. Like, so many of the examples I just gave you, nobody owns the end to end process. Nobody has ever owned it. Nobody has ever understood it. They have all looked at their particular step because that's how it was designed. And so if you can be the person that looks at a problem holistically end to end, that can really open doors and opportunities. And if you're starting a new team or a new initiative, keeping a active eye on that, maybe even literally assigning process owners as your processes get bigger, I think can be a real game changer.
A phrase you use in one of the book sections and I think we folks will kinda in civic text spaces will maybe have heard it in some places is cultivate the cuirass. What does that phrase mean to you?
So a cuirass is a concept from Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. And in the book, a karass is a number of people that God has hidden around the planet to accomplish a goal together. We use the term in a more secular way in the book. And the idea is instead of approaching your organization as though there are people hidden around that are there to thwart you, that are there to stop you, to slow roll you, to keep you from getting resources, behave like there are people hidden around to help you. And they may be hidden in mysterious unexpected places, and it's your job to find them. And my favorite story here from the VA, very early on in my time, despite being the chief technology officer, I had no budget and no headcount when I started. And I had a real vision for, like, hey. What if VA had, like, one website where everybody could apply for, manage, and access all their benefits? Or maybe what if there were plain language instructions? Like, I had a lot of things I wanted to do, but it's hard to do very much when you have no dollars and no people. And so I was, I'd given my first opportunity to get a real budget, like a few million dollars. And in order to do that, I had to move about a thousand written articles off of a website onto a new website before the old website contract was up because then we could save the money, not renew the old website, and I could get some of the cost savings. But I'm by myself. Right? And it's a it's over a thousand pages of HTML content, and I didn't think I could do it in time. I was complaining about this to Simon, the security guard on the Twelfth Floor when it occurred to me that Simon had some time on his hands and a computer. And so I said, oh, Simon, would you maybe you could help. Like, would you like to learn HTML and help me? And he said, yeah. I'll come, you know, at my lunch break, and you can show me kinda what's up. And he came at lunch with the security guards from the other 11 floors. And they all brought their computers, and they all learned HTML, and they all helped me. And I ended up beating the deadline, getting my first multimillion dollar budget, and all the security guards left for IT jobs. So we had a brief, maybe, security HR challenge at the VA. But that really taught me the value of, like, who would have expected, like, the way to get, you know, multimillion dollar IT budget was to befriend the security guards. Not me, but now I know that, like, the first people I befriend anywhere are the security guards or the executive secretary pool or simply just people in other areas. It might be HR, procurement, legal, tech if you're not in tech, you know, scientists if you're in a in a more science based organization, making friends, and just real human connections. There's no, you know, sneaky motivation here. Go to lunch, get a coffee, ask how their kids are on, you know, on Monday. Ask what their weekend was like, And build those that rapport because you never know who the person that can help you unlock the door that's kinda between you and what you're trying to get done.
I absolutely love that story because it's like the ultimate kinda, like, win win win. Like, you got the the budget you're able to get to getting stuff done. You were able to build a connection with this community of folks. Those folks have an opportunity to, like, find maybe something that turns out they're interested enough to pursue professionally in a place like practice it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It just seems like it was kind of a great thing for everybody involved at the end of it.
I hope so. I learned a lot, and I've tried to apply that a lot since. So
In your book, you also talk about the importance of taking advantage of that time that you're new or a newbie. How would you suggest someone might try to, like, wield and exercise that time well?
That is almost a magical window, and I don't have it very often in my career now. But when I do, I try to really recognize and treasure that time, because you can ask all the, quote, unquote, stupid questions you want when you're new, and you can really deeply understand something that the people around you are it's not safe anymore. It's not psychologically safe for them to ask basic questions. Right? Imagine, you know, the the CEO or the secretary of an agency having been there, even for a year, frankly, is is kind of a long time in public sector time and asking, like, well, wait a minute. How do pension claims work again? Like, they can't. There's no there's no psychological safety there. But you can ask those questions. And and even if you are in a role, you may find yourself on a new team or a new project that will reopen a window during which you can be a newbie. But so often people are shy about asking those questions, and it's hard. Right? Like, I'm not great at this because you have, you know, pride and you don't want people to think that you're stupid, especially if people are just meeting you for the first time. But more often than not, other people around you will be extremely grateful that somebody finally asked, you know, how is how does this work? A corollary to that, though, that we recommend is you don't wanna use the word just and be on day two and be like, why don't you guys just do x or y? Because very often, everybody has tried x or y many, many times before you, and there are actually quite good reasons why they were not successful. And so if you show up and you see we call it beware the obvious answer. And you see an obvious answer, you know, keep it in the back of your mind. Maybe quietly run it by a trusted person who's who's been around for a little while, but don't, show up as, like, the the person with the the great new idea because it's very likely it is not your it is not your idea at all. It's been done, and there's there's reasons why it hasn't worked.
Another section that stood out to me was the one titled stab people in the chest, in part because of the the wording of it. But, like, what what should folks take away from from a read of that?
Yeah. So the concept behind stabbing people in the chest is that you aren't stabbing them in the back. And there's a real tendency, when we are disagreeing with colleagues to wanna show up in, like, say, a decision meeting. And I'm gonna make my pitch, and you're gonna make your pitch, and my pitch is gonna be better than yours, and I'm gonna win the debate. I think I was talking about this in an earlier, chat I was doing today. I feel like we learned something wrong from debate class when we were younger that, like, arguments are won and figured out by showing up, making up persuasive speech, and then walking off. And so the problem is when you have an open argument and you are, you know, pulling out points that maybe you haven't brought up with your colleague before or you're trying to win and you're trying to get them, that might work to win you an argument, but it will forever ruin your trust with that person. And odds are you're gonna have to do a lot of things with that person, many of which may not actually be controversial at all, but now your working relationship is strained. And so what I recommend instead and this doesn't feel good. It is hard, but it is necessary, is to stab people in the chest. And by that, I mean, let's say I'm about to go to a decision meeting with you, and I know I'm gonna disagree with you. I'm gonna offer to sit down one on one privately, the two of us. I'm gonna go over the slides. I'm gonna say, look. Here on slide 11, I'm gonna disagree with you. I'm gonna point this out about why I think your thing is wrong. On slide 17, I'm gonna say this. I'm gonna disagree. And the point isn't to change the other person's mind. The point is to build trust that you aren't gonna stab them in the back. So they're gonna show up. They're gonna be prepared. They're gonna know what you're gonna say, and you gotta stick to that. You can't surprise them. And then when you do that enough times as you disagree enough, you develop a very functional sort of working relationship and a high level of trust that means you can accomplish a lot of other things together. And this is one another one. I definitely learned it the hard way. I've definitely stabbed some people in the back. I'm sorry to those people if they're listening right now, and I try really hard to stab people in the chest now.
It it sounds like that the act of doing that well builds a relationship where you can disagree productively. Is is that is that kind of the end goal of of what you're trying to do? Absolutely.
Yep. And not create a work environment where everybody's sneaking around one another's backs trying to get one over on one another. Like, you're gonna disagree and you're not gonna win every argument, but you wanna develop a reputation for having played fair and being transparent.
So so so not like Game of Thrones is is what I'm hearing.
No. Not like Game of Thrones. Also, hopefully, less I know it's a stabbing analogy, but, hopefully, still less violent than Game of Thrones.
You also make, quite a pitch for the effectiveness of the the one pager, which, may maybe folks out there have have have heard that phrase before. What is that, and how should folks go about making use of it?
This is really something I credit to Nick. Nick was originally my boss when I worked at the White House. And every time I would have an idea or a project, his response would be, well, where's the one pager? And I would go, like, grumble and go off and try to write a one pager. But it's actually a really fabulous tactic. And the basic idea is that can whatever your idea or your pitch or your proposal is, can you fit it onto one page, your crisp talking points, your, you know, examples, whatever resources that you need? And having it handy means that when that magical window opens up that you never know is happening, where maybe you could get funding or you could get a meeting with somebody or there's interest, or especially in public sector, there's gonna be a new assistant secretary of of x y z, and they're they're starting tomorrow. Can you get something in their briefing book? You have something that's ready to go that's crisp and digestible. It's not, you know, a research paper, that can help people get buy in. And Nick has a particular trick that is great, which is just sharing that one pager with others, asking them for their feedback can really be a strong way to get buy in. If someone else even if it's a typo fix, then they're like, ah, I contributed to Marina's one pager. They feel a sense of ownership. They feel a sense of, like, hey. I'm kind of on this team too. And so it's not just about persuading the person reading it. It can also be a way to to build your caress in a new way.
So in that situation, they're they're part of the the we, no longer, like, a persuaded party. Like, they're part of the action is, like, what I'm what I'm hearing from you there. Yes. Absolutely.
Bureaucracy hacking is a team sport.
So as you think about, you know, the experience of of having written this book, what was your process like trying to put something like this together? I I imagine it's, pretty complex to to write a book.
Yeah. So, I mean, we followed the the fairly normal process of writing a book proposal, which was, like, 110 pages, hiring an amazing agent, Bridget, you know, shopping it out, getting bids. But then in terms of actually writing the book, originally, the book was a we had the same approximate list of tactics, but the book was 12 chapters, like a traditional book. And that was extremely difficult because I had we had to think about, you know, how do you take these 56 tactics and mush them strategically into 12 chapters that made sense. And then our editor, Dan, one day was like, what if you wrote a 56 chapter book? And that felt like it made it a thousand times easier. So that's my advice to anybody reading this. Similarly, you know, like, maybe writing a blog instead of a book, in the sense of for each tactic, we got to write as much as we felt was useful. Not every tactic has stories. Almost all of them do in the book, but couple of them don't because they didn't really need one. And so that made it feel much easier. And then we could go tactic by tactic, write the chapters. And then if anything, the hardest part was grouping them logically and figuring out what the right order was because it would get confusing if you got like, at some point, I have to introduce that I was the CTO of the PA, and Nick was deputy CTO of the country somewhere. Right? You don't wanna introduce that on chapter 32. So that was a little bit of organizing. But, overall, I don't know. I would I would do it again. Some people say that writing a book was a miserable experience. I don't think that was our experience. It helped. We had content. We had lots of friends that that contributed lots of really great stories. So
I didn't know that there was something about 12 chapters. Did did you have a sense for, like, what that what that's about?
I suspect this is another, like, water cooler rule sort of situation where the templates, everything you see says 12 chapters. If you think about c, like, the average chapter length and then you divide, like, the number of words that we were and pages that we were contracted to write, the math ends up being 12 chapters. And so if you look also, we spend a lot of time literally at Barnes and Noble looking through all the nonfiction business books, and most of them have 12 I made a little spreadsheet. I was like, how many chapters do they have? And and for coauthored books, we also spent a lot of time paying attention. Like, do they go back and forth on first person, or do they use first person plural or or whatever that may be. So I don't know where 12 comes from, but I'm really glad that we did not write a 12 chapter book.
Yeah. It it sounds like the the larger number of chapters did did a lot of service for, what you're trying to do. Because it sounds like you also were kind of managing being mindful about like, yeah. This is a book that conveys information, but it in a way, it still kinda has a story arc as to, like, how it goes about that.
Jack Canfield, the success principles, was very much my model. That book, you can open to any page, and you can get, like, a a motivational quote or a story or something. And I really wanted our book to not be one that you felt like I just sit down and read cover to cover, but one that you could almost literally, if you were feeling stuck, open to a random page and get a little bit of inspiration. And I am somebody I am very, very type a. I love lists, but I also love randomness. So I always have lists, but I apply, like, the random number generator to them. So, like, I might have a list of things to do, and whichever one from it I do next is always picked from random.org.
And if you were to imagine I think you you mentioned, like, oh, like, I would do this again. So if you were to imagine doing this sort of thing again, what's something you would wanna try to do differently on a new attempt?
Yeah. I'm pretty I mean, we spent years on the book. So some things I I think we kind of worked out in the process of writing the book, like ending up on 56 chapters instead of 12. I'm super glad that we did that. But I think you can never prepare enough to sell a book, especially given the delta between when a book your final draft is due, which in our case was December 1, and then it came out September 13 of the following year. Right? So it's almost a ten month space between you finished the book, but now you have to sell start selling the book. And things like, there were plenty of of stories or anecdotes that didn't quite make it in the book for various reasons, and maybe they just didn't fit organizationally that that we were like, ah, that could be a blog post. And I would say, at the moment, most of them are still on our list of things. It could be a blog post as opposed to, like, finished blog. So maybe we could have taken some of the discipline that we applied to writing the book. I mean, we were on time. We weren't late. I was pretty proud of that and could've, like, kept that momentum going, getting, like, a bunch of blogs and articles kind of teed up ahead of time. So maybe that's something I would've done differently. So far, I'm not missing a tactic, though. I was really nervous that we publish it, and I'd be like, shit. I have a fifty seventh tactic, and I forgot it. And so far, we have not I'm not saying it's a perfect book by any means, but, like, so far, I have not had the feeling of, like, oh my god. I left this really important thing out. So that feels good.
I I guess you could have gone, like, the, you know, like, the the Dungeons and Dragons book strategy and have, like, you know, the additional tactics compendium Yeah. Partner book.
I mean, never know. People definitely write in and tell me all the tactics that I forgot, and we can have a follow-up book. But
Well and I imagine there's folks kinda out there listening to this that, you know, they maybe they've been nodding along, starting to feel a bit inspired, and they're like, alright. Like, I wanna maybe start trying to put some of this into practice into my day. What advice would you give them as they maybe take their first sips of coffee tomorrow morning and wanna get started?
Yeah. I think it's really about starting where you are and starting with something. I think it's very easy to get paralyzed by a multiyear or a ten year plan or trying to solve an entire problem all at once and trying to find, like, the perfect plan, and I'm gonna get all the requirements, and I'm gonna think about every edge case. And so often, the secret is really starting somewhere, anywhere with something. And this something might not even work, but the benefit might be of what happens when you get feedback to it when you iterate on it. And so, don't let enemy perfect be the enemy of the good. Start with whatever your problem space may be. Is there one small step you can take toward solving it or even understanding more about the problem, which might mean going out and talking to real users? It might mean building up your and finding people in other areas of the organization or organizations outside of yours, right, where you can just get to know them and understand their perspective of of what's going on. Are there data measurements you can collect for the first time that don't exist, especially if, like, you're dealing with something tech related? So many websites, like, don't even have Google Analytics on it, and I don't mean to overstate. But simply knowing, you know, what search terms people are using and where they're getting stuck or where they're dropping off can be an enormous lever for change, once you surface data like that that nobody saw before. Like that, oh my god. Everybody's starting this form and 85% of people aren't finishing it. Something's up. Maybe you can figure out what field they're dropping off at, and then that could be the key to solving, you know, a huge backlog or a huge disparity in access or something like that.
Marina, thank you so much for joining us here on Civic Tech Chat today. I have no doubt folks are gonna get some really good nuggets out of this conversation to take into their day to day.
I appreciate you having me so much. I hope that this was, useful to you and your audience.
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