 For those of you who haven't been to New America before, we're a community both physically here in DC, but also virtually across the country of problem solvers who are dedicated to renewing the idea of America in the digital age. And it's really only fitting that we're hosting this book conversation because it's part of how we think about solving problems is with a new set of tools that goes beyond the white paper or an analysis, a budgetary analysis. I can't say enough about these two authors and about this book. So I'm gonna hold mine up and wave it around. I'm gonna ask for mine to be signed at the end of this event. The message that's here is profoundly useful whether you are leading in government or you are leading in a completely different context from the private sector to frankly, if you were doing something to better your community, there is something for everyone in this book. If you weren't sure about hacking of bureaucracy and you just wanted the best collection of great motivational quotes, this is a frame, this is each chapter, I was like, that's a good one too, I'm gonna save that one. In writing a book myself, I realized that there's generally a crowd of people who do things and a crowd of people who write books and it's very rare that you find true doers who write truly great books and you have two here. This is like, they're so good, it's so good to read, it's totally accessible. It tackles things in a way that leaves you a short list behind if you don't know what to do. So I can't say enough about how grateful I am to be here with these two, to listen in and that this is really in the ethos of what we do. So if you're trying to hack your own bureaucracy and you get stuck, come back to the new practice lab in New York. Marina Nitsa, Nixina, this team needs no further introduction and in the category of getting stuck and needing help, the work that the team at Tech Talent is doing in drawing in the types of leaders and with the skills that Marina has described is remarkable. So let's jump into conversation, I'm gonna put down the mic, thank you everyone. Let's get started. Thank you. I'm gonna go ahead and kick us off. My name is Angelica, most people know me as Angie. I lead the federal partnerships portfolio with Tech Talent Project and in my role I do matchmaking. I help bring in technical executives into the federal space and then support them once they're in. This is your onboarding book. This is the book that you have to get. It has all the tips for you to be able to be successful and effective when you're in government and especially in a new role. So I'm happy to be here and have this conversation with Nick and Marina because whether they know it or not, when I was in a different role in the state of California, I followed a lot of the practices that they actually wrote about in this novel. And in the middle of bureaucracy hacking in the state of California, I think there was one instance, I forgot what I was working on and I got an email from Marina and she, I don't know if you remember this, but you gave me props and I was like, I didn't even know she knew me. Oh my goodness, no. But I think the reason why I'm mentioning that right now is because it really spoke to me and some of the lessons that you capture here is exactly the type of culture and cultivating the carass, as you point in your book, that I wanna build into events like this. I wanna be able to bring people together, executives and non-executives that are working on challenging and complicated problems so that you know that you're not alone in solving that complicated and challenging problem and that there's others that have been in your shoes that will be more than happy to support you. So thank you for being here and for telling the stories. I was hoping maybe we could kick off the conversation by talking a little bit more about what is the favorite story that you can think of, first of all, tell us about the book and then what is a story that you can think of that really exemplifies how policy and product are really interconnected. I think that's something that a lot of executives in general don't really, especially in government, aren't able to understand. So I'm hoping that we can impact that a little bit more. Okay, we're still perfecting our shebang together. So the book, I joined the federal government in 2012 as part of the first class of Presidential Innovation Fellows and I did so as a libertarian who believed that government should be blown up. It did not work. It was all broken. There was no saving it and then Nick tricked me to come into the government as a fellow and I was completely wrong, right? I saw people around me that were making change at a scale that was unimaginable to me in my previous life as a business process re-engineer for like small to mid-sized companies and I joined Nick's team at the White House, began auditing the VA's use of technology as part of processing disability claims and then a year to the day of joining the government as a fellow became the CTO of the VA where I stayed for five years and did some things like help found the US Digital Service but the book really came out of a number of lessons that I saw people that just kept working and also a number of mistakes that I made and learned that don't do that, do this instead and this is what worked and I want people to be more effective. I want them to be more effective in their PTAs, in their businesses, in the government, in HOAs although I think my new position on HOAs is I want you to be effective at joining your HOA to end it because they all suck. But generally speaking the rest of the bureaucracies you shouldn't blow up and we really just wanted to make accessible stories of people who despite some maybe impressive job titles that I've had I really never had any amount of hard power of any kind. I joined the VA with zero people, zero dollar budget, zero resources and it's about what you can do from wherever you are to get stuff done. So I spent four years in the presidency, in the executive office of the president and just about every day outside people would come to us and say the president ought to say this, the president ought to do this, the president should write an executive order that does this, right? Like that was just par for the course and our office, the office of science and technology policy had a lot of external engagement and we cultivated a lot of outside actors but it meant that you got a lot of those requests all the time and to your question about policy to me it was pretty clear that the way to get the president to write an executive order was to create the conditions on the ground where the president would be excited to write that executive order and it would codify some really good stuff or in a crisis and you're directing some changes, right? And so I guess I have a more of a entrepreneurial or bottoms up approach to change rather than this idea of well, the change has got to start from the top. It's just kind of a, maybe it's because I, the other thing that was interesting to me is I really enjoyed being in the office of science and technology policy but it was not the highest ranking policy council inside the presidency. You're not supposed to laugh so much. But so we knew that to get stuff done it had to be the National Economic Council, the National Security Council, even OMB had tremendous statutory power and so our low rankingness inside the presidency was actually a superpower and so we had to learn how to make things other people's idea, how to partner inside and outside, how to use external commitments, presidential commitments as tools and we wrote down a number of these sayings on a whiteboard which we actually kept for eight years. I only served four years in that particular office but after eight years they broke some rules and took that whiteboard out of the old executive office building and a lot of those sayings were ones that we really internalized and there were things like the hacks versus wonks so really understanding the different guilds in the White House was helpful to understand like the policy wonks which we were part of, we oftentimes did not have appreciation for the comms function and if you really got to understand the comms people which we affectionately called hacks there's a story of me insulting David Gergen to his face in front of 100 people calling him a hack but we meant affectionately and really understanding where they were coming from in terms of framing solutions for the American people and how important storytelling is especially in the presidency so anyway these series of tactics and sayings many of them learned the hard way, many of them learned watching people come in and try and make change and fail and so we incorporated a number of them in the book. Avoid policies that and how they you know a rant I could go on easily for forever from my VA time and now definitely my foster care time is that people write policies with great intention and if you don't think through and ideally test through how it will be implemented it can easily fall apart or cause great harm. I will do a couple of rants in case somebody watching can fix one of these problems currently in foster care it is against the law in Maryland for a foster child to sleep in a bunk bed. The person who wrote that law meant well they wanted foster children to have their quote unquote own bed and own rooms and perhaps a puppy but what this means is there are kids sleeping on the office floor or in group homes with available grandparents right now who cannot get past the state law about bunk beds so I'm working on fixing that but I think that we see a lot of policies that pass that have great intention but we think we saw that during the pandemic I mean Tara and I worked a ton on unemployment and we saw Congress for example passing PUA that was with a great intention to really help people in a crisis and implementation got really mangled as people missed up the details or didn't appreciate that in most states there's like one or two people who can change the rules of the entire unemployment mainframe and they also have like 17 other jobs and so when you change the logic every other Thursday you actually made it pretty untenable for them or if you gave them more of like a mad lib like hey Congress you can change like the dollar amount and this other thing but the code logic has to be the same it could have been a much, much different outcome. Yeah I'm a fan of this idea of human centered policy making and there's a story actually we didn't put in the book of the macro implementation so this is kind of how Medicare pays doctors for quality rather than just volume and Congress had passed legislation and CMS the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services has to pass a series of rules and implement this program and Mina Shung who's the current USDS administrator she was at CMS at the time and the story of how she works with doctors many of which were planning to quit I mean they did interviews and they understood that if implemented poorly and if implemented exactly as how Congress had written it it would have been a disaster and so how can they as they're writing the rules also test what the implementation is going to be like so that the rules are written better and that the rules are actually written more flexibly so that implementation can continue to evolve with doctor needs because it was mostly a payment program for doctors. One of my favorite stories during the pandemic response was really trying to figure out how do you communicate the well-intended policy with the well-intended politician that their policy is great but there are people in the room that need to focus on the how like we need to figure out the how do you get it done and so it's a balance between really making sure that you have the solid policy intent and then bringing the people together to execute on that vision. Oftentimes that's also more successful when you have air cover and that's the other theme that I was hoping to unpack in our conversation here. I know I had a ton of air cover in my prior role in the state of California and it helped me a lot because I was able to execute on other things and build a great team and great culture by being able to have a backing and the coaching of a mentor who provided air cover when I needed it. What can you speak to the stories that you've written in terms of being able to bring air cover into some of the implementations that you have shared? I think it's important so as Nick mentioned you we've watched a lot of people that were extremely amazing professionals in other lives come into some of the big bureaucraties like the VA, et cetera and also in flame out and I think a reason was sometimes that they misunderstood what air cover provides so maybe I'll just touch on that first which is air cover is not exceptions to the rule air cover does not mean you don't have to follow like law or things air cover is the support of your senior leaders and maybe a nudge or maybe a little bit of a budget boost but it's not, it doesn't mean that you get to sidestep the whole process and pretty regularly at the VA when I would have a new hire they would come in and they'd be like great why don't we just ask for a memo that says that we don't have to follow any of the rules and then we can just deploy all the code and fix all the problems it's like well that doesn't exist in most bureaucraties it does not exist but I was very lucky to have some pretty amazing air cover starting with Nick when I joined the government and some of air cover too is just that mentorship of explaining what rules are, what constraints are fixed and what constraints are like you're gonna actually go to prison for this and then what rules are like paperwork reduction act jail that like people talk about a lot but I don't think exists and also if it does exist I kinda wanna hang out there so yeah. Yeah I think that sometimes I have needed air cover and not done a good enough job educating senior leaders how they can help me and so we have a chapter on make it easy for the other person and that includes making it easy for the senior leader the secretary or the administrator or so and there are times in my career when I have been that senior leader and tried to provide air cover and I realized there's a question of trust and context and convenience so do I trust this person in many cases I have recruited that person into government in a fellows program or some other stuff but do I trust them on what they were doing and that they have the judgment the EQ, the technical judgment, the bureaucratic judgment, the mission judgment all these kinds of judgments add together so do I trust that but there's also an element of is this the right strategy to provide them a lot of air cover and then are they making it easy are they actually providing the talking points or the materials to arm me who's running around trying to I mean at one point I was with Jen Palka running the presidential innovation fellow program and we had 40, we had expanded too fast in round two and so we had 40 odd fellows and Jen and I mostly I was not doing a good job of managing them and we didn't have a program office yet set up in the general services administration so it was a little chaotic and we're trying to provide air cover and help and I could just see the limits of air cover as well as the opportunities when you really did it right there is a great story which we did not put in the book of convincing White House Council that it was okay to put presidential innovation fellows in the IRS and that we were not gonna get in the news and not cause any trouble and sure enough they helped build the first modern API so taxpayers could check their claim status they helped get the 990 data open and available to the world it did a bunch of important things behind the scenes and I kept my word to White House Councils. Clearly. I think to build on that and you both mentioned in several chapters of your book curating the crass can you talk a little bit more about what that means? Okay Nick I'll take it this time so the crass if you have not read Cats Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut in the book is the idea that the universe has conspired to put different people on earth to achieve a goal together and our late colleague Jake Brewer who was tragically killed in a bike accident when we were in, I already left for the VA but you were still on OSTP had kept this postage note on his computer that said cultivate the crass so it has become sort of a mantra for many of us in his honor but it really means that like that your crass is almost certainly not your org chart there are hidden people around and I think when people are in bureaucracies they're often complaining to me and this has been like a constant Q and A as we've been on this book tour of like well all those people are conspiring to stop me they're afraid I'm gonna take their job they're afraid computers are gonna automate them away like they're intentionally slow rolling me or getting in my way or whatever and I think a much healthier perspective to take is that like the universe has hidden helpers for you around your bureaucracy and you just have to find them they may have been people who tried your idea 10 years ago, 20 years ago, whatever it may be and may have some insights into what didn't work that time and what might be different this time or they may just have a different perspective or skill set to lend one of my favorite crass building moments was I had an opportunity to get my first budget at the VA I had zero dollars and I was supposed to redefine the art of the possible for how America honors and serves its veterans so no big deal and I was trying to get money and one way to do it was if I could help shut down this 27 million dollar behemoth IT contract which is a website full of content I could get some of the cost savings redirected to my budget and so I had to move a thousand pages of content from one page to another and I didn't have any staff to do it but I did notice that the security guards seemed to have a little bit of time on their hands so offered if anybody wanted to come to a lunch and learn I would teach them HTML and they could help me with my project and then like boy are the security guards in a building also the best best friends that you should have possibly only next to exec sec and so they all like learned HTML they helped me meet my budget and I got a few million dollars of budget because they helped me meet my timeline and then they all left being security guards to become IT professionals so everybody's better off again but you just never know where your grasp will be Yeah and I think to build on that I know Nick you talk about the stone soup approach Yeah I'm a big fan of stone soup so we titled the chapter act as if and so it's this parable I think it's a European folk story about a traveler who comes to a village and asks for a meal and the villagers say no and so the enterprising traveler gets a big cauldron somehow I don't know like where he or she gets this cauldron but basically starts heating up some water and kind of a curious villager comes by and the traveler explains making stone soup delicious stone soup and it's so hearty and good and just paints this picture I said oh you know but I'm missing a carrot like would you mind just giving me one of your carrots you have five could I just have one of them and convinces this first villager to give a carrot and then of course another villager comes by and the traveler describes this amazing soup and manages to get an onion and it goes on and on and on until the end it's a really delicious soup that the traveler shares with the entire village so a lot of people see this as a parable about sharing and community which it may be but I've always thought of that story as a story about entrepreneurship inside of organizations and that what you're really trying to do is get that first villager to give you that first carrot because that's social proof and in large organizations it's hard for a global no right the secretary the president of the United States the general counsel sure there are legal things but if you're starting up a project initiative whatever you're trying to do it just may be that that particular leader can't give you resources time attention what you want is just a little bit of social proof because that helps get additional social proof and that was a tactic that we used in the start of the US digital core so the US digital core for those of you aren't familiar with it is a early career tech project where we recruit early career technical feds for two years housed in GSA but then placed in agencies it's a really exciting over a thousand folks apply and about 40 fellows in the first cohort and that was one of those things where we could have essentially asked for permission to start but it was much easier if we went around and just ask for feedback on this and then agencies will say hey you know if you're gonna bring in some early career engineers or designers or data scientists or cyber depending on the agency you know I'm in that sounds interesting and so we got some early carrots and built that social proof. So for folks that are online you can start sending in your questions for folks in the room I see some of you already started submitting your questions through the QR code on their table so I'm gonna take an opportunity to ask this question because it actually builds on what you just mentioned. How do the topics and techniques in the book overlap with or clash with the more traditional approach to change management? Well the change management that I have seen often focuses on trying to change people like inherently and they'll be like slide presentations or culture changes or spaghetti towers like with marshmallows or you make the tallest one or the wisest one or whatever and the only thing I've seen work is really changing the environment in which people are working. Like it's easy to think most people are either active supporters or active like dissenters but I think most people are actually more in the middle and they maybe don't wanna step too far out of the line of their position description or their performance reviews or the thing that will get them a step grade promotion and if you can change that then you can change the behaviors. I also think it's dangerous sometimes when people come in especially around technology and they're like oh we're gonna move everything to the cloud which is maybe good and there may be good arguments for reliability and dollar savings, et cetera but if that person over the current server has been there for 30 years and is a GS 15 step 10 and they have built up that expertise and they are proud of their career and their contributions and you come in and be like I don't know maybe you could take like a certification course this weekend and you're gonna turn them into a newbie in their role and they're suddenly not gonna be able to navigate or do basic things. That's really threatening in a way that I think people do not appreciate. I have mixed feelings about the innovation word and I used to teach a class called Tech and Innovation in Government at the Kennedy School. Our former boss Todd Park who is the second CTO in the Obama administration would talk about the difference between shiny hood ornaments and actually fixing the engine. And it's hard to fix the engine because nobody wants you to touch the engine because in any one of these agencies they'll be like if we don't send out the checks this week we can cause a national recession which is true like at CMS and Social Security and et cetera. And so the trick is how do you do things that are not vanity hood ornament but are adjacent to the engine but actually may be meaningful to the agency, right? And so sometimes you can call that innovation but sometimes you can call that other things as well. And so I just, I'm a big believer in user-centered design I'm a big believer in a lot of innovative or new techniques that we can bring to the federal government but I think sometimes these words are kind of loaded and sometimes we'll create a backlash among many of the employees. Our friend Eerie Meyer, who many of you know has a quotation that I love which is innovation in government is answering the phone. And I think more people should focus on like are we doing our basic service delivery and then we'll talk about some fancy AI machine learning robot or whatever but. Yeah, that resonates. I think we have another question here. Do you have tips to deal with the frozen middle? I don't know what the frozen middle is. I don't know what the frozen middle is from anonymous, so. I think it's a derogatory term for the middle of the bureaucracy where there's this, I don't know if this is right or not but there's this, I hear this a lot in DOD where I do a lot of work more recently where they're like, oh well the generals and admirals get it and the young lieutenants and captains but it's the frozen middle, it's the kernels who are causing the problem, right? And so that's at least what that term means. Yeah, well I think it's still goes back to like changing the incentives in the framework. When I was trying to get cloud computing approved at the VA one of the challenges was that the inspector general would not let us use the cloud because you could not put the cloud in an evidence bag and it took two years of like working with them, educating them, showing them the alternatives, they could do it before they issued what is for me the my career highlight of my entire life which was a memo saying that they preferred logical access over physical access to the cloud but other burdens I was trying to get there, I'm trying to fill out the paperwork and the very experienced VA IT people would not let me submit paperwork or I did not answer every question and some of the questions like, Marina did you promise that you jiggled the doorknob of the door of the cloud and the cloud does not have a door? I left it blank, it came back to me. I tried to explain like metaphorically how I jiggled the doorknob, it was rejected to me. I tried to put not applicable, it was rejected to me. I tried to convince the ISO that like veterans were dying if they did not approve the form, the form was sent back to me and what ultimately worked was changing the form itself and now eight years later like the VA is a truly cloud first agency where it's actually much harder to have a physical server under your desk and the easy thing and so if you change that paperwork, the process, the incentives, the performance review, the step grade promotion I think that's how you change the frozen middle and maybe they're not frozen so much as like people responding to incentives and you need to change the risk and incentive framework for them, not expect them to just stick their neck out and potentially get fired or end up in an IG report. And make them champions when they unblock and help even if they were initial skeptics. I think that's, I like the grilled cheese. Yeah, we had our car accident the VA was we called it the grilled cheese club. We definitely violated fire code because we had George Foreman grills in the office and we would make grilled cheeses while we demoed just kind of what we were up to and we invited anybody around the agency if you were a security guard all the way up to assistant secretaries just to come and learn what we were up to have a glass of wine in the middle of the day and have some grilled cheese and it really, really helped because as one person or even as a team of maybe 20 people at the time we couldn't be everywhere and so when we were just kind of sharing and keeping people updated I think that's another way that it helped them give us air cover in ways they didn't expect because they were just informed. I am someone who is not always created like proactively communicating about my projects because I'm like, I'm head down, I'm busy, I'm working why would I like write up what I'm up to and what the latest is, but it really, really helped so that someone isn't, if there is a problem later on I don't now have to explain, well there was this project and this is what it's for and this is what it's about and this is what happened, it's that project I've been talking to you about for nine months we just hit this very specific roadblock and you helped me. Yeah, you were bringing them along. I tend to be pretty bad at that. But it's a learned skill of, especially in large organizations is over communicating via whether it's a listserv, whether it's email, whether it's updates, snippets, whatever it is, spreadsheets of just making sure you're writing it down and you're communicating not in a way that you're bragging about your thing but that you are informing the wide set of colleagues and I'm also a fan of if it's appropriate to be using a public comm strategy because if you were talking about your project you can find other people in the agency who learn about it via public comms and outside stakeholders, former employees, the field class I used to teach at the Kennedy School one of the requirements for clients and the VA was a client, City of Boston was a client was that they had to be okay with the students blogging with me supervising and them supervising about the project that they were working on and so throughout the semester the students would blog about the things they found when they went out and did a design sprint when they were doing all of these things and it taught them that they could attract supporters inside the clients as well as supporters and people who wanted to help and so that kind of asymmetric information flow if you can use a public comm strategy, not every tactic and project can but I've found it's actually a really interesting way of even speaking to your own organization. I know I use that tactic when I led the alpha team in the state of California so there was a project that I led where I brought together a multidisciplinary team to reimagine what the front door of the state of California, SEA.gov would look like and I gotta say that was probably the one thing that made my sponsors the most nervous was that we were going to blog on a weekly basis what we were doing and what we were learning and it actually ended up being one of the more successful pieces of alpha was being able to capture on a regular basis the progress of the work that we were doing who we were engaging, the technical aspects really explaining why we were doing something versus not doing something and I think it did help build community around those that were following the story so I recommend that. It's completely countered. It's completely countered to the way we do comms so we're used to, we do the big announcement, the big press release and then a couple years later when the thing actually works or we've delivered or we have results then the big press release so this idea of like, wait a second we're gonna have this steady ongoing engagement and be more transparent about our process it's just not a normal muscle but I think it's really powerful and we can do this outside of technology. Yeah, it really does bring people along in a different way. Nick, given your work with students how have you thought these tools and perspectives to your students and early career folks? So I love encouraging the students to get out of the office as we talk about it but get out of the classroom I guess would be more appropriate for when I teach it and so in this field class where we're working with the city of Boston or VA or any one of these clients what happens is the students for the first couple weeks are developing the perfect interview guide. So we're talking about user centered design, human centered design and so they're thinking about okay we're gonna go do this great interview and they write up this long interview guide and then they get out in the field and they're talking to Boston city residents they're talking to city officials they're talking to actual users out in the field and of course they learn so much and the interview guide wasn't right but it's better to learn that in week one or week two rather than going into week seven of a 12 week class. So I'm always trying to kick them out of the classroom as quickly as possible. In the book we tell the story of Berkeley Brown she was an undergraduate cause I let a few undergraduates in and we embedded her in the gang unit in the city of Boston. So the police that go around and deal with gangs and so that was quite the culture shock for her and then to come back to Harvard Square and just kind of it helped make things more real it helped her understand the mission and so you can talk abstractly about tech policy as it's related to various databases that these detectives would use but you start to understand what safety means to people and also what it means to pull over someone and have a negative interaction where it's ultimately supremely unfair and going to kind of poison their perspective on the police and so you realize these set of questions around how to use a database have real meaning and to start there is pretty powerful. Yeah, talk about perspective, right? Many senior leaders do not fully understand the capabilities of modern technology which today's enables policy execution. How can this challenge be an opportunity? You have to find ways for them to learn safely. So a senior executive is not going to raise their hand in a room of 100 people and say what exactly is an API or like what is the cloud or why is that better? And they may not even ask you privately so you need to find ways to make it safe for them to learn and our colleague Erie also has a story in the book that I love which was the government was trying to put forth an API policy and we were pretty sure that most agency CIOs did not know what APIs were and we're also pretty sure that they weren't gonna ask and so Erie held an event at the White House in the fancy room called APIs for Executives and I at the VA saw this invite being passed around like the senior leadership of people being like oh this is for us, this is a special event for us that the White House were going to go and then in that environment they were like yeah I know everybody knows what APIs are but just in case we're just gonna do a little refresher and it was a safe place for people to learn among their peers in a special environment and it wasn't patronizing in any way and I think that I think about that a lot how to make things safe to learn because it's not putting them in a spot I think too many people get kind of a kick out of that of kind of gotchewing and I think we really need to stop doing that entirely. No one knows everything, everybody was right so like there's no way that anybody should be expected to know everything and it's the more senior you go the more you're expected to know somehow which is interesting when you think about it just tying that API story to policy it was we wanted the Department of Education to develop a read write API for the FAFSA form and so what we do well in government is what I call retail digital so we build websites and we wanna get people to fill out this free application for financial aid especially from underprivileged environments because they're under matching to four year institutions and yet we don't think about well hey could we use KIP schools or a nonprofit that deals with the Hmong community in Minnesota or all these different intermediaries and groups kind of like veteran service organizations that might be able to help students and their families fill this out so we don't do wholesale digital government very well and we were having trouble trying to communicate this as a policy idea to the Department of Education and we realized we had to back up a step and actually find a safe environment to teach about APIs and APIs that actually you could write systems to so you could have trusted intermediaries that would write to these systems. Is that really a way to tie it back? So speaking of creating a safe space to learn what about a safe space to fail? Where have you seen this? Yeah, I think this topic has come up a lot this week where people are like but what if I do my pilot thing and then it fails and then my thing is over I was like well I think it's actually an incredible trust-billing situation if you set up a pilot with exit criteria and you say oh I tried that for a week for $5,000 whatever it may be and it didn't work and look I still have my job I am not the world has not ended this guy has not come down because I think government and our book is not just for government but it's a government audience is not really designed to support people failing publicly and saying that they did it. I also, we have a tactic in the book about using a thesaurus so maybe don't call it a failure, you know call it an iteration or a brief test or a pilot or some other word that is like safe in your space to try something. One of the tactics too is around defining your success criteria and your exit criteria so A defining them because most people don't do that and B perhaps defining them differently. So if I am doing a pilot I'm gonna commit to other people who are skeptical or worried I'm gonna come after their budget and their resources or worried that my thing is gonna disrupt their world that hey if I don't hit this benchmark by this date I'm gonna stop and so that creates a sense of safety and then also though if I hit this success metric I'm gonna move forward I'm going to get money or budget or comms or whatever it may be and then I have some space in the middle where I'm gonna iterate before I'm gonna necessarily move forward. I presume OnePager's coming handy for something like that. I'm a big fan of OnePager's. I would tell it to Marina way too much. I still, I got an email from Tom Coley who asked me for OnePager yesterday. I sent him a 45 pager and he did not want me to do that. There's a lot of talk in the White House. There's a lot of talk in agencies and you know talk is cheap I would say great you know can you send me a OnePager and the reason OnePager's are super helpful is you can pass them around. You can also use them to build consensus and feedback. So instead of sending a OnePager about a particular thing that you wanna do it could be a policy, it could be a project initiative budget request whatever but to ask for feedback rather than permission, right? It gets back to the carrot and the social proof and so and it wasn't a OnePager but in the context of the 21st century VA this vision document that Marina did she got feedback on it and so that when she finalized it and it got to Secretary Shinseki she had the implicit consent and support of a lot of the senior leadership. So I'm a big fan, it's also a good way to test folks right as people come in and say hey you know I want your help, I want your support on XYZ it's like okay great can you send me a OnePager because if it doesn't have the problem, the solution, a really good anecdote or fact or statistic that backs that all up and told in a way that busy executives can understand then how am I supposed to be able to socialize it across a large organization? And there's other ways to do this too like public URLs and short videos but like a OnePager is pretty classic, I'm sorry. No, and it lets you be ready to take advantage of like a change in leadership or a crisis. I mean so many people think of bureaucracies as totally static and that is just not true. They're changing things every single day and people move around a lot whether departments or roles and even if it's a deputy secretary becoming a secretary they now want to go on their 90 day listening tour they now want wins or new priorities and if you have something that's like ready to go then you have a much much better chance if maybe it wasn't the right time last year or the year before but maybe now is the time to move. Yeah, I know that came in super handy. The Tech-Telling project put together in partnership with so many others, the memos for Technostation as part of the start of this administration and I hear that it was very helpful to the people that were just starting in their new roles. Okay, question. What would you advise are the limits of hacking with technology? Are there certain types or categories of problems that don't lend themselves to being hacked? I think every problem is worth looking at and seeing if there are ways to fix it. Obviously we don't use hack in our book in the sense of like hacking, like breaking in and stealing people's information, like don't do that, that would be a limit probably. Breaking the law would probably be a limit. You might be able to change the law, that's harder but I think though with hacking with technology too many people view technology as the solution. I think you should think of technology as a Trojan horse to get your solutions across the finish line. Technology is never by itself the solution. It needs to be a way to change processes for the better against KPIs that usually don't exist too. Yeah. Yeah, we mean hacking in the positive sense of like a tip or a tactic or a way to get something done. The best hacks in our mind not only advance your particular project but also make systemic change. How about that? So we have a few minutes left before we end the live stream. What would you like to leave the audience with in terms of your book and your stories and the hope that you have, that these stories will bring to people's lives that will be reading your hacks. I am often treated like some sort of wizard or something when I solve problems and I just want people to know that I have no secret wizard skills. We wrote the book to say like anybody wherever you are you can follow a claim from start to finish. You can follow a case or a person from start to finish and identify where the broken handoffs are and find solutions. You can advocate for people who don't have a voice wherever you are. Like you have a lot more power than you may think and bureaucracies can and do change. And I mean, they can change for the worst but they can also change for the better. You know, the VA won a Sammy for customer experience on Tuesday. Thank you, Sammy team. Yay, Sammy team. And vets.gov one, one, two years ago and like, wow, was that on my vision board in 2012? I was just hoping to get like, you know one little form into the cloud. And so I think hopefully we have a message of hope that wherever you are, however broken your bureaucracy is and I think like VA White House we have some pretty dark ones. They can really change for the better if you just kind of start one step at a time and understand what problems you're really trying to solve. I guess the thing I would say is too often we start to see constraints as fixed and all of these organizations are a set of humans and humans creating rules and processes and so forth. And like, these are all fixable. These are all changeable. They're all modernizable, whatever kind of verb you want to use. You know, human beings created this organization and so we can change this organization. And so the trick is not all the time, not everything all the time at once you kind of have to pick your spots and sometimes it does take a crass or it does sometimes take a crisis or something like that. But these constraints are more variable than you might think. And so I spend a lot of time with early career and students and I'm encouraging them to be ambitious and to ask why and question whether it's a fixed or a variable constraint. Thank you. Well, if you haven't bought your book yet, please do, there's a lot of tips and hacks that you could use to hack your bureaucracy. I appreciate you for... Thank you guys so much for coming in. Good luck, you can do it. Thank you on the live stream.