Public sector innovation doesn't need technology—it needs culture change

I recently wrote an article for Federal Computer Week (FCW) about the growing need to rethink how our government organizations are operating. Conversations with customers and partners in the public sector have shown me how digital technologies are changing the ways everyday people interact with their governments—and what they expect from their governmental organizations. So I wanted to explain how an open approach to building organizational culture might help agencies and departments confront their own digital transformation challenges.

FCW published an abbreviated version of the article, which I think captures the gist of my argument very well. But I thought some folks might be interested in reading the full, unedited piece, so I'm republishing it below.

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The pace of technological change has never been faster. Call this condition whatever you'd like—"digital disruption," the "Fourth Industrial Revolution," or any of the other trendy monikers coined in recent years. The truth is that the speed of innovation today makes planning for the long term incredibly difficult.

It's true not only in the private sector but in the public sector as well. Like everyone, government organizations are struggling to chart paths forward in the face of a faster-moving and increasingly ambiguous future. According to a 2018 report from the Congressional Research Service, federal government IT budgets are growing, but so are the costs of maintaining older systems. That leaves precious little budget available for new and innovative initiatives. When course-changing disruption becomes a persistent possibility, organizations are left asking: Why spend millions of dollars on long-term R&D initiatives for results that may be irrelevant or obsolete before they're even finalized?

Part of the problem may be that technology alone won't address the issues we're facing. The only way governmental organizations—or any organizations, for that matter—will continue to thrive amid continual, innovative disruptions will be to fundamentally rethink how they operate.

First and foremost, that means questioning the principles that drive those organizations, which are still optimized for industrial-era economies. These organizations tend to favor hierarchical structures as a means of driving large-scale efficiencies. For them, planning is a rather simple and straightforward matter of identifying a strategic position in a market or a capability they need to develop, formulating plans to achieve those things, dictating the steps required to get there, and ensuring everyone in the organization complies with those decisions.

Doing more of this—just somehow "better" and "faster"—isn't the way forward. The hierarchies and bureaucracies so commonly in use today were best suited for their context, and while they were an elegant and effective solution for their time, today the context has shifted. Traditional planning techniques only work in situations where variables are clear and the future (at least somewhat) is predictable. That's just not the case in most industries today, where work demands creativity, adaptability, and agility in an environment overflowing with ambiguity.

Instead, we should be organizing for innovation. Now, let me state up front: This doesn't necessarily mean overhauling every aspect of our organizations—gutting them and starting again (as if that degree of change were so easy!). More often, it means starting in a small defined way, perhaps on a project-level basis, questioning received wisdom and tradition.

What's most important is infusing our organizations with some new guiding principles, ones that might seem alien at first. The organizations best able to weather disruption are open organizations, those that embrace principles like transparency, collaboration, meritocracy, and sharing as foundational values. These organizations are able to act with greater agility, to derive knowledge from passionate global communities, to benefit from more engaged employees and stakeholders, and to innovate more frequently because they're built on values more conducive to adapting to the future rather than controlling it.

In short, they've focused not on refining outdated methods of planning for futures that never come to pass, but on building organizational cultures that help them remain constantly change-ready.

Of course, the cultures of our government organizations won't change until their leaders change. They'll need to recognize that culture is an output of the behaviors they champion and model, not an input they can simply decide to drive across an organizational chart. So they'll need to change how they act. They'll need to get comfortable creating places where constructive conflict is the norm, where people question even the most long-standing traditions, where bottom-up decisions carry real weight, and where failure that produces useful knowledge is a cause for praise, not punishment.

Most significantly, however, leaders will need to come to grips with letting go. They'll need to leave behind their impressions of the leader as an all-knowing coordinator who architects a brilliant plan and masterminds its execution. Instead, they'll need to function as catalysts for constant change, agitators who bring the right people together at the right moments to solve the right problems. In other words, they'll need to be open to changing themselves before they work on changing their organizations.

Nevertheless, becoming more open certainly isn't easy, even if it is necessary. But don't get me wrong: By suggesting that organizations adopt open principles and methods, I'm not saying they need to begin sharing everything they have with anyone who's interested. Red Hat, the company where I'm president and CEO, is an enterprise software company with an open source development model. We share the source code for our software products because that's the best way to tap the wisdom of a diverse and distributed developer community. It also helps us understand the magnitude of oncoming innovations and enhance security. But not every organization (certainly not every government agency) is in a position to operate that way. 

What I'm talking about is taking an open approach to organizational design and leadership—to letting open principles guide how an organization does what it does, even if only internally. Efforts to open up our organizations don’t need to be focused on the product we ship (whether that be software or something else entirely) but on changing how we deliver those products with greater speed, responsiveness to constantly changing environments, and care and attentiveness to the people who benefit from what we do.

An open approach to leadership and innovation can apply to all types of organizations, including governmental ones. Public-sector organizations share many of the challenges and pressures that private sector ones do—including maintaining the kind of agile, responsive, and digitally-enabled organizations people have come to expect in their rapidly changing everyday lives. But they already benefit from a mandate for transparency and an abundance of civic-minded, community-focused enthusiasm, so they, too, could open themselves to a more inclusive future. They also collaborate frequently with external partners, like contractors. At the moment, those collaborative relationships aren't as agile as they could be, because the current system incentivizes large, complex, and highly specialized tenders. If government leaders were to open themselves up, they might cause interesting ripple effects that would impact contractors and their teams.

This is already happening at a grassroots level, where passionate advocates for a more open way of working are driving changes across their departments. For example, the City of San Rafael, located in Marin County, California, recently undertook some major culture-renovation initiatives aimed at helping the city government "learn how to make government work better by sharing what we make, learn, and improve," as the city's director of digital service and open government said in a recent presentation I watched. The city has relaunched its intranet—something available only to internal employees—as a public-facing utility anyone (employee or not) can access and review. This has not only increased transparency and accountability but also aided recruitment (a pressing issue for government agencies at all levels today), as prospective employees can take an unobstructed look at how the San Rafael team operates. These are just a few ways that governments could (as the U.S. Digital Service puts it, and as we like to say at Red Hat) "default to open."

Incremental advancements toward openness go a long way to fostering an environment where people aren't afraid to voice their opinions and instead feel empowered to be creative and suggest new ideas, which is an environment primed for innovation. "Going open" isn't an all-or-nothing gambit, and it never works by fiat or decree. It's about identifying the areas where open attitudes and behaviors can make the most significant impacts in particular agencies and empowering decision-makers to implement open policies where they see fit.

Operating openly is an option available to any organization. But in a world where opening up seems to be the only way to avoid disruption, it's a choice that's becoming harder not to make.