Driving Change in Federal Agencies

This week a new team sweeps into Washington, and I have been reflecting on two years as a public servant at the U.S. DOT Research and Technology .

In 2023 I drew this flowchart to help me with my own decision-making, and I hope it's useful for others in similar roles. I also highly recommend The Geek Way by Andrew McAfee and Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka .

In my experience, calls to remake federal agencies in the image of startups often overlook required activities, distributed authorities, or the consensus-driven nature of many federal agencies or departments.

In startups, failure isn’t merely an option — it’s often accepted as the most likely outcome. Startups are unburdened by legacy costs, processes and ideas. Key decisions are made by a few individuals operating in an environment with a large appetite for risk. As a result, these organizations are able to quickly pour resources into new ideas that show promise and abandon old ones that don't.

Large organizations often function in the exact opposite manner since legacy activities can be legally-required, failures can be costly and processes often focus on avoiding them.

What does Driving Change mean?

Incoming teams or innovators tasked with Driving Change in large organizations have two key needs: they must locate knowledge and authority, and they must build support for ideas. If they fail to do either of these they can risk poor execution or rejection of the ideas they’re attempting to advance.

Organizational impact mostly involves trying to influence other people, each of whom have different tools at their disposal and respond to different incentives. Thus driving change is a complex decision-making process that often involves blind outreach into an unfamiliar organization — a process that can be fraught with risk.

In this flowchart, questions are written with decision criteria in yellow. Actions are in green, and disengagement actions in red. While these ten questions in this chart are more or less in order, you should assume that at any given time you might need to come back to one of the earlier questions due to changing conditions or priorities. The first two questions focus on goal definition, while the remaining eight focus on how to work effectively with others in the organization.?

Define Goals and Objectives

1. “Can I translate the big goals I want to achieve into well-formed objectives?"

Attracting employees to drive change in a large organization in the first place requires that they are allowed to define many of their own goals. It thus becomes the job of the leadership team to help ensure that goals can be translated into actionable, achievable objectives within the organization.

If you’re an incoming team member struggling to make the connection between your goals and something more actionable, your management team should be able to help you find the specific things your organization could do (or do differently) to achieve these goals.

Institutional knowledge helps a lot here, too. Veteran employees remember times before the current status quo and have observed different approaches that have succeeded or failed in the past and why. This information can help an incoming team learn the swimlane in which it can operate.

2. “Am I personally capable of achieving these objectives, and am I authorized and empowered to implement them?”

Decision making authority is often widely distributed in large organizations and impactful work almost always demands collaboration. In the rare cases where the answer is “yes” to ALL of these conditions, then the next step is obvious: execute!

In a large organization it’s rarely possible for a single individual to implement an innovative idea start-to-finish. Innovative ideas don’t just need technical expertise: they require new staff, resources, processes, behaviors, precautions, and priorities. Control over these functions is typically distributed across different departments, verticals, labs or teams. Innovation teams must seek out people who care about their objectives and have some degree of authority over their implementation — and then they need to figure out how to work with these people. As with the previous question, executive sponsorship and veteran employee advice can help point to the right places in the organization to get things done.

Work with Your Network

3. "Does this person need or want to accomplish this objective?"

Complex processes can involve hundreds or thousands of people. Many of these people can influence the outcome of an innovative project, but they don’t wear a sign on their forehead that tells colleagues how much they care about a particular issue or how much influence they have over it. Incoming teams often spend substantial amounts of time getting to know an organization.

In practice, employees have a broad spectrum of responsibilities and priorities. I've simplified them as axes “Authority” and “Motivation” in the diagram below. In some cases innovators find people who want to achieve the same objectives, but have little control over them. In other cases they meet people who have been given authority over critical processes or resources, but might not share their objectives.

You'll meet plenty of people along the way who are irrelevant to a particular goal. They may be great colleagues in other regards, but with respect to a particular issue they neither have much interest nor much authority. Generally it’s best to disengage on the topic, at least temporarily, to avoid wasting each other’s time. However, as objectives and opinions evolve over time, it still may be valuable to periodically check in with each other.

Working With Authority

4. "Do they want help?"

Let’s start with the people that need to accomplish an objective, or have practical ownership of a key element of it. In the best case scenario, authority figures welcome help! In these cases often all that is required is a conversation about dividing up work. (NB — these may not be “authority figures” in the traditional sense, but individuals that hold formal authorities over a specific function, e.g. budget, product, legal.)

However, in many cases authority figures tasked with a substantial responsibility have no interest in an outsider’s assistance. This can happen for a variety of reasons (e.g. simple mistrust, inability to allocate mindshare to a new idea, or fear of losing control).

5. “Are they missing something big?"

In cases where an authority figure doesn’t welcome help, engaging with them may be a waste of time. Is this specific person so critical to a particular objective that they cannot be ignored? How big are the consequences of proceeding without this person? Is the improvement your involvement brings worth the disruption of inserting yourself into a process where you’re not welcomed?

6. "Can you help them understand?"

If an authority figure is missing something big, or the consequences to their lack of action/involvement are grave, then it becomes the role of an innovator to educate the authority figure (and vice-versa!) Often both parties are lacking key context, and the process of education should quickly become mutual. Remember that people learn in different ways, and you might need to make multiple attempts and try different approaches during this educational effort.

It’s quite plausible that this person sees the same problems you do, but wants to retain control of them and hasn’t had the time to address them yet. Individuals like these may be persuaded to let you help if they believe you will be a responsible steward. Sometimes all that’s necessary is tacit acknowledgement of the importance of your objective and permission to move forward. This is a great outcome, and can help create a foundation of trust for bigger collaborations in the future.

Working With Motivation

7. "Is this person empowered to help me?"

Let’s now consider the case of people that demonstrate interest in a particular objective of yours. If they haven’t done much about it, perhaps it’s because they don’t feel empowered to do work on the objective. You might be able to help them!

8. "Can I empower them?"

If someone shares your objectives but can’t help you, maybe you can help empower them! One key way that innovators can do this is to elevate good work that helps motivate the objective. This could be as simple as talking about this person’s project in a high-level meeting or in front of a large audience.

If you can’t find a way to empower this person, at a minimum you’ve found another cheerleader for the same objective. The two of you can use your combined networks and creative energy to find ways to move towards the objective in the future, e.g. “Who else can we get to help us?"

9. "Do they know how to help me?"

If they’re empowered to help you and they share your objective, they might not know that you need help — ask for it! Educate them — let them know what help looks like. As always, let the education be a mutual process.

10. "Can they do it by themselves or with their own resources?”

Once they know how to help you, they may need resources to be able to help. If you share resources (space, data, software, people, budget) you’re more likely to get someone else’s help in return. And, as always, get specific about objectives and execute!