This is part of the 2019 Control The Room speaker video series.

Control the Room 2019 was Austin’s 1st Annual Facilitator Summit with the goal of bringing together facilitators of all kinds to build rapport, learn, and grow together.

The conference opened with a talk by Priya Parker, author of “The Art of Gathering.” After that, we moved onto 15 quick-and-powerful presentations by facilitators of all kinds.

Within that group of amazing speakers, we were lucky enough to have Marni Wilhite and Ben Guhin join us. Marni and Ben cofounded the City of Austin’s Office of Design & Delivery. They gave a talk entitled “Stay Curious, Find Joy: Fostering a Culture of Creativity Among the Frustrating Forces of Bureaucracy.”

The idea of working in government may be at an all-time low — the shutdown, the partisanship, the do-whatever-it-takes-to-be-right forcefulness that seems impossible to penetrate. Despite these obstacles, Marni Wilhite & Ben Guhin have established methods for service design, technology strategy, and stakeholder facilitation at the City of Austin that are leading the conversation for how cities design and deliver services.

Watch Mari and Ben’s talk “Stay Curious, Find Joy”:

Read the Transcript:

Marni Wilhite:
Howdy all y’all. So as Doug pointed out, we’re here to talk about how we do facilitation and government. The things that we will be discussing today are three words specifically don’t often get combined, especially with that first one. So bureaucracy, how we use curiosity and joy. So as we’ve already been introduced, I’m Marni.

Ben Guhlin:
And I’m Ben.

Marni Wilhite:
We’ve cofounded the Office of Design and Delivery within the city of Austin. We actually have some of our previous flock members in the audience today, which is super cool. We started this to really change how we’re putting technology in place. I’m sure you’ve all tried to use a government service and found it to be incredibly outdated and frustrated. Really the test was can we do this fast? We were able to have tangible outcomes very quickly. The most recent thing we just released is forms for filing a complaint or a compliment to police officers. So when you think about something of that magnitude and sensitivity, there’s a lot of facilitation that goes into it. It turns out into a technology form, but there was a lot of work to get here.

Marni Wilhite:
So, a quick exercise to think about how we have to frame things in government. There was recently this article on Route 50 talking about a cashless future, so moving all of our interactions to digital or credit cards, which I myself have stood in a grocery line and rolled my eyes as someone took out a checkbook thinking about how much longer this is going to take, so I definitely feel that as well. There are a couple of things to keep in mind when we’re talking about a cashless future. 28,000 households in Austin are unbanked. They do not have a bank account or a credit card. If you look at this worldwide, it’s 2 billion people and 75% of those live in poverty.

Marni Wilhite:
If we’re talking about how we approach government in the future, we’re actually talking about the room where it happens. Who are you including in the room? Why don’t you take a minute and think about this. Because when I was in a room recently, we had the same recommendation come to us to go completely cashless. It was a room of 35 people. I was brought in at the last minute as a technologist to help consult on it, and I’m the only one that raised their hand when they made this statement and said that we should be going to a cashless future. I said, “What about our unbanked population?” Because if we’re not taking that into account, you are suddenly increasing inequities throughout the city.

Ben Guhlin:
Yeah, so I think there’s this question of what kinds of people should you be including in the room in order to get to the best policy outcomes for residents.

Marni Wilhite:
Anybody have any ideas?

Speaker 3:
[inaudible 00:03:04].

Marni Wilhite:
Yeah.

Ben Guhlin:
Sure. Like any specific invite that you would do in order to make sure that it’s going to get to all the audiences. Yeah?

Speaker 4:
I agree with design and solution, meeting with the team, understanding who do we seek to make this for, and make sure there’s a handful of those kinds of people in the room with you.

Ben Guhlin:
Yeah. Awesome. I’m glad you mentioned design because there’s been a lot of pride lately in the advancement of design as a field at the executive level. This is an article in Fast Company about Designers Finally Have a Seat at the Table. So we should all be very proud of ourselves for finally getting to the C suite and then we should think like designers and think about, “Wait, why is the meeting happening at a table in the first place?” How is this convening working out and who’s being included? Because the room is probably missing important perspectives.

Ben Guhlin:
I want to include an example that might make you uncomfortable. This was an early meeting of the current presidential administration. This is a number of technology executives from around the country meeting with the President-elect. I personally am very represented in this room. It’s pretty male and pretty pale. This room is probably totally cool with a cashless future. As we talk about what is the future of technology in the country on public policy, there’s so many levers in government that can be done overnight or within two years to dramatically change markets, and so we need to be really careful about how we can affect the attendance in the room. Then the rest of this talk really is changing the nature of the conversation so that it’s open and inviting for everyone involved.

Ben Guhlin:
The first part about that is curiosity, which is a word that you don’t really hear often with government. Most of the time in government it’s like this is how we’ve always done things. There’s this fear of changing the status quo, of possibly getting fired for challenging your manager, and that’s because curiosity requires courage. It requires being able to have that environment of psychological safety so that you can come up with these crazy ideas.

Ben Guhlin:
Across the city of Austin, a lot of these activities that we do are trying to create that culture of psychological safety where like, “Look, this is a meeting where people are smiling and laughing and leaning in and thinking about what’s the best way to move forward with an exercise. One important thing to note is that it’s about being positive about the great ideas and the possible futures, but it’s also about inviting the negative possibilities of questioning, “Why might this fail?”

Marni Wilhite:
Yeah. I think one of the things that’s interesting when you’re in bureaucracy is a lot of times the decisions on what projects are going forward are made at the executive level. It’s been decided and they’re getting pushed down to the actual worker bees, the people that are going to implement, and they have no say on whether it goes forward. So it’s really important when you have a team that is going to have to actually do implementation to give them the space to actually say why they think there are barriers or challenges to this actually being a success. Once you open that floor, it can become a conversation back and forth. They’re much more comfortable actually going forward because they’ve been able to present those challenges. They’ve been heard and it’s something we can talk about as we continue on the project.

Ben Guhlin:
Yeah, because those people usually are the ones with their arms crossed. So you say, “Okay, you look like you don’t think this is going to be successful. How might it fail?” and suddenly the conversation is what they actually want to talk about, which is why this was a terrible idea and it should never have been mandated and we need to talk about that. Sometimes one of the things too that we challenge our employees is if this is a bad idea, we should tell council that it’s a bad idea. There’s only 10 of them and a mayor and we know all of their names. I used to work at the federal government where it’s much harder to go in front of Congress and tell them that something’s a bad idea. If you guys aren’t familiar with the Austin City Council, they’re all actually really wonderful people. So there’s really curious things about how can we change the nature of government and the relationship between employees and the highest level.

Ben Guhlin:
In this process, we have this really simple definition of what it means to be agile. This is a process of trying things and learning based off of what you tried, just doing and learning. It’s a matter of if you have a good idea, just try it. If you’re not sure where to start, then do some more research and learn, but really have these quick learning loops.

Marni Wilhite:
Yeah, so also curiosity feeds on context. This is the inbox to the austintexas.gov team, and one of the statements here is this is probably the worst website to navigate. That, if you are a designer, is a gold mine of “Hey, it’s time for us to change.” But when you’re talking about government, they’re like, “Get in line. It takes everybody this long. You’re just lazy.” That’s one thing we have a really big clue on in government is when you hear the word lazy, they don’t actually understand how to nudge those people in the right direction. And also, curiosity can be cautious.

Ben Guhlin:
Yeah, so there’s [inaudible 00:08:08] actually got to this point a little bit, but sometimes it’s not the best idea to bring everyone into the room to talk about the problem. Maybe that’s not the best first interaction or facilitation. There’s examples of… We did work, like Marni mentioned, with our police oversight in Austin. My colleague at Brown did the world’s largest randomized controlled trial with police-worn body cameras in the district of Columbia, and he reached out to the ACLU, the police union, Black Lives Matter.

Ben Guhlin:
Everyone sort of had this sense of we’re never going to agree on this, but his big thing was we’re going to use science, we’re going to use a scientific method and do a randomized controlled trial, and met with these groups individually and said, “Hey, if we make a decision based on these results and this is how we do the trial, will you respect that decision?” And their answer was like, “Well, the other people won’t.” And it’s like, “Okay, that’s fine, but would you respect that decision?” And they’re like, “Well, sure, I would.”.

Ben Guhlin:
And he was able to in separate meetings to get everyone to agree on the same methodology and then be able to say, “Hey, it turns out you all agree that this is the right method,” and at the end of the study they actually found it in the District of Columbia police-worn body cameras did not actually change police behavior in a significant way, in the way that they defined significance in their early process. Everybody from the police to the community actually agreed with that result and there was greater trust involved with everyone afterward.

Ben Guhlin:
So that point of like sometimes you can have these meetings in separate rooms, and there’s similar stuff that we did the City of Austin around trying to define whether we need to include technical terms in permitting recommendations and so trying to introduce what the concept of impervious cover is to residents. One of the big things was let’s just design it and show here’s an example of how it could be shown on a website, and by showing that artifact, that was able to move the conversation along much more so than a facilitation where you put everyone in the room and get them to agree sort of conceptually.

Ben Guhlin:
Let’s talk about joy.

Marni Wilhite:
We try to embrace the absurd when we’re talking about creating psychological safety, especially in government. Offering an assertive environment really does help with that. It gives them the space to actually throw out crazy ideas. Like we said before, we created the Office of Design and Delivery. If you haven’t noticed the acronym is ODD, so we’re keeping Austin odd. Our mascot is a love chicken because a bunch of people have chickens and we love chickens. We like to have parties where we make cookies out of them. We borrowed this from the US Digital Services. They have a crab as a mascot, which is super fun and playful and makes people think that maybe government can be fun. This is their administrator, Matt Cutts dressed up as the crab, because again, sometimes you embrace the absurd.

Ben Guhlin:
Yeah. Our Twitter handle is civiqueso, which appreciates Austin’s civic tech community as well as our appreciation for queso. And then, in Rhode Island we’re launching a podcast with a mascot which is a narwhal, to respect Rhode Island’s history of whaling as well as the unicorns of the sea. Another event that happened in the District of Columbia was bringing policymakers and community members and academics all together around improving government forms. They called it Form-a-Palooza. At one point they had a hundred people in a room shouting, “Forms, forms, forms?”

Marni Wilhite:
Yeah. One of the things that we recently had written about was basically that Office of Design and Delivery said “Corporate workshops should not be awful,” so this is another way of bringing joy. We had a team, one of them is here, Ashley Harris, if you have questions about this work please ask her, because she can tell you more. They created these workshops that we call Funshops because work should be fun, and people walked out saying, “Wow, this is really changing my approach to my work.” We did not put that in.

Marni Wilhite:
Then we also have the design guide that Ashley also helped create. It’s the fun metaphor of talking about content strategy as the components of a breakfast taco. So again, just making it fun. And then always and continuously talking to our community and having parties and celebrating people’s lives and having dogs in meetings. It’s another important one that helps embrace the absurd.

Ben Guhlin:
The dog in that photo is just taking the meeting so seriously as part of the-

Marni Wilhite:
And then also, again, having massive celebrations and remembering to have fun with the community that we’re in.

Ben Guhlin:
Yeah, so this again gets at just doing and learning. A lot of this culture stuff we’ve been introducing just in the past three years in local government, and so it’s not perfect and we really do think about the design process in designing the culture around these meetings, around these conversations and projects as well.

Ben Guhlin:
I’m going to end with a presidential quote back when presidential quotes sounded presidential. This was said actually just 40 miles away from here at the LBJ Ranch and it gets at the spirit of what we were saying at the very beginning, that if we really want to control the room toward the outcomes we want we need to be really thoughtful about who is in the room, and if we want to solve this together then we need to actively include people who don’t look and think like ourselves.

Ben Guhlin:
Thanks.

Please join us for the Control the Room 2020, which will be held Feb. 5–7, 2020. You can find out more and buy tickets here.

The post Stay Curious, Find Joy appeared first on Voltage Control.

Marni will be speaking at our upcoming event — Control the Room: The 1st Annual Austin Facilitator Summit! Taking place at Austin’s Capital Factory on May 23, 2019, learn more and get your tickets here.

In 2000, Marni was hired by the University of Texas Electrical and Computer Engineering Department to do something new (although now wildly prolific): design and develop an interactive platform that allowed students to take tests and quizzes from the comfort of their homes. This experience led to the opportunity to join one of the leading international research teams as a design engineer for wearable computers at UT in 2001, at a time when the only other notable work in this area in the US was from MIT.

After years of working in the private sector helping build products for companies like Samsung as well as smalls startups in Austin’s backyard, the thought of working for the government was not something she had considered. While she was learning a lot about utilizing data, augmented intelligence, and business models, she wanted more. She was feeling burnt out from working in careers where she felt like she was not impacting the world in a positive way when a position came up in The City of Austin’s Design, Technology, and Innovation fellows program. She jumped at the chance to use her experience in technology for a greater good.

“For those of us who have felt burned out in private industry, it’s attractive to come in for a year and help improve government services, and then you can go back. Just take a pay cut for a year and come do really great work that’ll make you proud. You’ll learn a lot and be able to take that knowledge back to your private industry career.”

What started as a fellows program eventually lead to the creation of the Office of Design & Delivery in Austin, which Marni now leads as Head of Digital Transformation. It’s one of the most successful city-level program of its kind in the US. “Starting this kind of program in government is similar to starting one in large bureaucratic companies. You need buy-in and support from leadership, you need someone leading the initiative who has done this before. You need to take hiring practices very seriously. You need to ensure that you evaluate partner agencies with projects.”

Marni has observed, both in the public and private sectors, that when teams are hired to do a job but don’t get proper buy-in from leadership, what they end up leaving behind does not work long-term. The employees cannot take ownership of the program put in place, which leads to a breakdown in the system. “The design doesn’t actually work well for the things that you’re trying to do. There aren’t the competencies in-house for the technology that was chosen to manage it for the long term, so there’s not that operational and maintenance cost that needs to be understood, and the competency set that’s necessary to do it well.”

The Pilot program that turned into real change

When the Fellows program started in Austin it was tested to see if they would be able to hire people from private industry to come in and work for the government. The government has a reputation for being boring and slow, so how could they attract people from the private industry to come into government, and will it actually help with improving services?

They ran a pilot project around recycling using behavioral science and technology that had great results and were able to get buy-in. Because of this, they were able to establish the Office of Design and Delivery to start doing digital transformation and service design work across Austin.

Marni spoke about how you need the right balance of people working on a project for real results. “It can be really hard to break a career civil servant out of the patterns that have been doing for 20 years. If we’re talking about big transformational change, you need someone that’s done that kind of transformation before to help people get past those roadblocks. Otherwise, people have a negative outlook because they’ve been stuck doing the same thing and being told they can’t do it any differently for so long. They don’t feel empowered.”

Failure is an option

One of the biggest differences she has faced when it comes to government versus private sector work in that there is a real fear of failure.

“One of the biggest things that we see in government is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt…failures can be a headline in the news.”

“One of the biggest things that we see in government is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The fear of failure is really strong. We’re a public organization. We’re supposed to be transparent. Anybody can ask for public information and so failures can be a headline in the news. There’s a fear of trying something new because they’re afraid of the backlash if it fails.”

She states that you have to work with agencies on opening up and giving people the space to try something new. She encourages fast prototyping and testing because not every prototype will work; but the faster they get done, the quicker you learn.

“Before trying to push for new ideas, I always ask stakeholders to tell me why something might fail. Usually, when you give them room to be heard regarding where they are hesitant, they will open up because they feel like their concerns aren’t being disregarded.”

Marni feels getting the challenges out of the way first makes for a better project in the end. “I picked up a technique from reading about NASA and how they do pre-mortems. You have rockets that blow up, and then it’s a big deal because people die; So they pick a project and they do a pre-mortem at the beginning and say, ‘What will make this fail? What are the failures that could happen and how could they happen?’ It actually leads to a stronger project in the end. You get more buy-in because you’re accounting for those challenges. It empowers people to know that those things are going to be taken into account and we can test for them early.”

Innovation that does good

Since Marni started working with the City of Austin she has finally been able to do things she feels are really making an impact on the community. “We worked with the Office of Police Oversight to do a department transformation — how do we interact and engage with the community? Their goal was to have enough data to make informed decisions about what kind of policies need to be in place for police training. We created digital forms for people to submit complaints and thank yous.”

She continued: “Usually, thank yous can take months to get back to the police officer. But, because we’ve done this digital implementation, now it took less than a week for there to be social recognition of this police officer who made a woman who had been a victim of sexual assault feel empowered and safe again. Being able to put people forward and say they’re doing it well is a way that you can influence other people’s behavior. It’s an exciting outcome…”

“Being able to put people forward and say they’re doing it well is a way that you can influence other people’s behavior.”

One place she’s been inspired by is the Danish Design Center, which is led by Christian Bason. In terms of service design, design thinking and designing things that meet societies needs, Marni feels that the Scandinavians are way ahead of the United States. “They understand that cognitive capacity is diminished when you don’t have income that’s at a living wage. They understand that your life is better when those things are happening. They understand that companies can support that, but their end goal is to support humans being happy and getting what they need.”

Marni knows that it’s not going to happen overnight, but thinks this type of innovation can inspire her and other government employees to find solutions that meet the needs of the city and its residents. She stated that within the government there tends to be a lot of mistrust from the public and when government services aren’t designed in a way that supports people this lack of trust grows. “I’m keen on how we can test services that function really well and regaining trust to show people that it can be worth it to invest in a government.”

Can cities work together?

Marni feels you can learn a lot by visiting other cities and getting to know those involved in making change. “ I love mayors. Mayors are incredible optimists. They’re trying to support their communities.”

She works with groups such as the US Conference of Mayors to listen and learn from what is happening in other cities and how they are innovating ways to handle issues, make big changes and solve problems. She also uses her own personal travel time to visit and take calls with local city staff.

Four tips from Marni on innovation in government

1. Empower career civil servants to think differently. Most don’t consider themselves innovators, but they are!
2. Before diving into a project, allow everyone to voice their concerns on what could fail. Think through the failures beforehand to give everyone the sense they are being heard and considered. A better product will come out of it.
3. Get buy-in and support from leadership. You also need someone leading the initiative who has done this before. Take hiring practices very seriously. Also, evaluate partner agencies closely and create a formal document to be clear about expectations and what you’ll need for success.
4. Make sure you have one decision maker that is recognized by all if there is a lack of consensus. Too many decision makers can cause confusion, and prevent the team from making progress.

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post Government is Ripe For Innovation appeared first on Voltage Control.