The how we need now: a capacity agenda for 2025

The title of this post comes from a paper with the same name published by Jennifer Pahlka and Andrew Greenway for the Niskanen Center. John Grant pointed it to me.

The paper is divided in sections:

1. It looks at both structural and cultural drivers of incapacity.
2. It provides some prescriptions: it offers four priority areas for building state capacity.

I will use this map as basis for some of the things highlighted in the paper. This basic map just visualize the main components of the relationship between citizen, government and companies.

My purpose with these maps are just to visualize some of the concepts described in the paper. I do not cover the whole paper, just the main topics that are interesting to map. I recommend the reading of the paper as it explains in a very good manner some of the problems the US administration has without forgetting the complexity of the territory.

1. Structural and cultural drivers of incapacity

Factors that hold back the government, there are 3 main topics covered:

• The pacing problem,
• The bureaucratic anxiety cycle
• The legislative anxiety cycle

The pacing problem

This problem of speed or pace is described with this diagram

In Wardley Mapping we look into capital flows or flow of information to understand volumes and velocity of execution. In this case I identify 2 loops, one considered by the paper as slow and other considered fast.

The bureaucratic and legislative anxiety cycle

These to cycles or loops are represented in this way:

In Wardley Maps you can point to focal points. In this case, I have pointed to the activities where these cycles are impacting with negative consequences. The map is horrible as it contains many details.

Note that “One throat to choke” was added.

I did not add anything about, but they provide tensions in that are important:

• “The tyranny of tiny decisions” = Whenever a process is created in any large organization, there are always a series of suggestions for additional qualifiers and considerations that are individually proportionate and sensible responses to a possible risk.
• “Adversarial legalism” = It is hard to move fast when you must generate mountains of paperwork and move at the speed of the courts.

2. Prescriptions

The dysfunctions described previously will not disappear when you name them, they must be attacked with a new set of tools, principles, incentives, and work routines.

The paper proposes changes in the executive and legislative branches. Four main prescriptions.

1. Hire the right people and fire the wrong ones
2. Reduce procedural bloat
3. Invest in digital infrastructure, and
4. Close the feedback loop between policy and implementation.

1.- Hire the right people and fire the wrong ones

• Reform the civil service
  • Close the gap of the gap between the principles and the practices described in the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. Principles are fine, but practices (or execution) is poor.
  • Adopt new practices for hiring hiring and retaining top-talent.
  • Avoid bad practices on poor performers.
• Rebalance the forces that promote change (go-energy agents) and prevent change (stop-energy agents)
  • More than just getting out of agencies’ way to increase the velocity of the vehicle of government.
  • Office of Personnel Management (OPM) play a more active role in balancing the ratio of stop energy agents and go energy agents.

2.- Reduce procedural bloat

• Take on policy, procedure, and regulatory accretion
  • Have “right-sizing” procedures to be fit for purpose, so it reduces the stop-energy agents.
  • The paper proposes a set of principles for de-proceduralization.
  • Right-size procedures that impact every agency.
  • Reduce policy accretion
• Reduce the surface area for legal attack
  • Understand the nature of many of these lawsuits.
  • Reforming civil service rules to limit the opportunities for litigation to substantive and meaningful wrongdoing.
• Resist trade-off denial
  • Setting priorities and operating to those priorities (avoid to try to achieve too many goals at once).
  • Clearer priorities start with policymakers understanding that they must subtract as much as they add.
  • Undoing is often boring, detailed work (though today AI can help).
  • Undoing is also hard because what’s being undone may have champions who will actively resist, sometimes because they benefit from what you’re undoing.

3.- Invest in digital infrastructure

• Transition to product model funding
  • Move from custom build software to commodity software.
  • Move from project (RFP, hire, define, build, deliver, maintain) to product (continuous construction of capabilities and adaption to user needs).
  • Software is never done: acquire software practices.
• Invest in centralized and decentralized teams.
• Invest in platforms.
• Right-size AI guardrails

4.- Close the feedback loop between policy and implementation

• Closing the loop means that we must apply test-and-learn approaches.
• This means conducting multiple small-scale experiments at the boundaries of policy and delivery.
• Align funding to support feedback loops.
• Fund internal competence first.
• Align oversight to new models.
• focus on enablement over mandates and constraints.
• Invest in congressional capacity.
• Incentivize legislators to close the loop.
• Make new operating models the norm.

Takeaways

As usual any constructive feedback is welcome.