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Revolutionising Bureaucracy: Tactics for Lasting Change with Marina Nitze
51 Plays10 months ago
Marina Nitze is an author and a crisis engineer. She co-authored Hack Your Bureaucracy with Nick Sinai, it contains over 50 tactics, each with real-world examples, for making lasting change in bureaucracies from PTAs all the way up to the White House and Fortune 500 companies.
Marina is currently focused on improving America’s child welfare system, helping organisations solve mission-critical IT challenges. Before this she was the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and helped establish the United States Digital Service. She also served as a Senior Advisor on technology in the White House under the Obama Administration.
We talked about:
- What it means to have a high-functioning bureaucracy
- What hacking your (low-functioning) bureaucracy means
- Where to start to get results
- The mistakes that keen people make
- Why Marina is obsessed with stabbing people in the chest
And much, much more.
Find out more about Marina here:
And buy her brilliant book here:
Hack Your Bureaucracy: Get Things Done No Matter What Your Role on any Team https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hack-Your-Bureaucracy-Things-Matter/dp/0306827751
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'The Visible Leader' Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
In the course of writing the book, Nick and I tried to find an organization that was not in bureaucracy. So we talked with a lot of small organizations and we actually couldn't find one. We were at a small grocery store and even that had different risk and incentive frameworks, had different rules written and unwritten. Being aware of your own bureaucracy is really the key to being an effective bureaucracy.
00:00:23
Speaker
Welcome to The Visible Leader, the podcast that challenges conventional leadership and inspires you to create a workplace culture that empowers your team.
Guest Introduction: Marina Nitzer's Experiences
00:00:34
Speaker
Join me as I talk to thought leaders and changemakers about practical ways to apply new learning and rethink the status quo. Get ready to become a visible leader in your organization.
00:00:53
Speaker
My guest this week has been in cabinet meetings with President Obama, and I was a little bit starstruck when she was telling me about it, kind of starstruck by proxy, I suppose. I was really choked with her stories of changing veterans' lives, thousands of them. How did she do this?
00:01:17
Speaker
She was responsible for ditching bureaucracy in different government departments. And this has led to her writing a book and making the lessons she learned super practical. They can be applied across different organizations, large and small. And the main thing, anybody at any level can actually start doing these.
00:01:44
Speaker
And hopefully if they do, they'll be able to stop the, but we've always done it like that statement occurring, which is driving me crazy. Listen out for how she likes to stab people in the chest, which is quite an interesting concept. And I think you're going to get a load of value from listening to my conversation with Marina Nitzer.
Impact on Veterans' Lives and Bureaucracy Simplification
00:02:12
Speaker
I discovered Marina after hearing her talk about her new book that she co-authored with Nick Sinai called Hack Your Bureauprosy, more on that later. Marina is doing some important stuff right now. She's currently focused on improving America's child welfare system. She's helping organizations solve mission critical IT challenges. And before this,
00:02:37
Speaker
She was the chief technology officer of the US Department of Veteran Affairs, and she helped found the United States Digital Service and served as a senior advisor on technology in the White House under the Obama administration. So as you can imagine, I'm super thrilled to have her on my podcast. Marina Nitsa, welcome. Thanks so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. Yeah, it's great. So we are going to.
00:03:08
Speaker
get into what you've written about and how that relates to my listeners. I think a good place to start, your book is called Hack Your Bureaucracy. That might mean many different things to different people. So my first question to you is, what do you mean by bureaucracy and what do you mean by hacking of that bureaucracy?
00:03:31
Speaker
Yeah, so I think a lot of people think of bureaucracy as a bad word. We were actually, a few people gently told us that our book title was basically all swear words. Hack your bureaucracy, although we stuck with it. And so we use the term bureaucracy in a totally neutral way. A bureaucracy is an organization of any size,
00:03:51
Speaker
We are all in bureaucracies all day long that is controlled by rules, some unwritten, some written. And really, it's about are you a high-functioning bureaucracy, or are you a low-functioning bureaucracy? And I think when people think of bureaucracy as a bad term, they're associating that with a low-functioning bureaucracy.
00:04:10
Speaker
And we're talking about HAC, we're talking about changing your bureaucracy into being a more functional organization. We are fundamentally, and we can talk more about this as we go, against one time avoiding of the rules or going around the rules or pretending the rules don't exist. We see people try that again and again and again. We've seen it happen in some of the world's largest bureaucracies where people thought, aha, this rule sucks, I'm going to not
00:04:37
Speaker
expect that it applies to me. And bureaucracies are really good when you do that, of stopping anybody from doing that again, and not only that, but adding 10 more rules or barriers to the next one that's coming along. And so we really want to share with people stories that effectively change bureaucracies so that you can, whether it's your local parent-teacher association at a school, a large government bureaucracy, or as a consultant working with bureaucracies, you can find ways to effectively change them and get them to do what you want them to do.
00:05:07
Speaker
I love that distinction. I'm really glad you clarified that. High functioning, but not removing because it's, it's necessary. So your book was a real eyeopener to me about how massively complicated government organizations could be the time you spent in them. Can you kick us off for people that haven't actually read your book? I wish I can highly recommend.
00:05:33
Speaker
Can you kick us off with an example of the results you managed to get? Give us a little learn of case study of where you've hacked, effectively hacked to bureaucracy.
Transforming Bureaucracies: Success Stories and Strategies
00:05:44
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So there's this saying called the Sinatra test.
00:05:49
Speaker
where Frank Sinatra wrote the song, My Way. And he sings, if I made it here in New York City, I can make it anywhere. And so we really try to share a lot of stories of, hey, if this worked in some of the world's largest bureaucracies, it will probably work in your bureaucracy as well. And so by way of context, when I was the chief technology officer of the US Department of Veterans Affairs, that is an enormous federal agency in the United States. It has about 400,000 full-time employees
00:06:15
Speaker
Just the IT budget is, I believe, $6 billion a year right now. And there's about 20 million veterans in America.
00:06:22
Speaker
And the story I'd love to tell is around enrolling them in the VA healthcare system, which is the largest integrated healthcare system in the world. So again, 20 million veterans in America. And we had yet another crisis where we were on the front page of the newspaper, where the inspector general who was sort of the outside third-party auditor for the United States government found a warehouse with 800,000 pending paper applications from veterans who are trying to enroll in healthcare and had not yet been processed.
00:06:52
Speaker
And horrifically, they estimated that 100,000 of those veterans had already died waiting to enroll. So truly horrific. The bureaucracy was going to solve this problem the way that it always had, because that tends to be what bureaucracies do. And so in this situation, they were like, OK, we're going to use mandatory overtime. We're going to have more people work more hours. We are going to type faster. We are going to continue the same process as it was, but just apply more hours to it.
00:07:22
Speaker
And I thought as the technologist that maybe if we had an online form that could help reduce the 800,000 paper applications in the warehouse. And I was told, oh, no, no, we already have an online application. Only eight veterans have ever used it, eight out of 20 million. So that must only the veterans don't use the internet, Marina.
00:07:43
Speaker
And I was just unwilling to accept that premise. Yet the agency believed it had data, right? It had an online form. Nobody used it. And so we used the bureaucracy hack, which is talk to real people, and went out and, with their permission, recorded actual veterans trying to apply for VA health care online. And it turns out they couldn't do it because it didn't work. And the details of why it didn't work almost don't matter, but nobody had ever. Yeah, yeah.
00:08:12
Speaker
that the process did not work. And so we then developed literally the world's simplest online form. It was a form. There was no login. There was no complication. It was just a web form. Tried that, went back out and had veterans try that. They said, oh my God, I'd use this over anything the VA had to offer, which was quite an endorsement.
00:08:30
Speaker
Because of that feedback from real users, as department executives saw real veterans trying and failing repeatedly to get through this online front door, they said, okay, Marina, you can try your pilot given this moment in time where there was a crisis. It seemed low risk relative to the alternatives. And we launched that form and since then, 2 million veterans have used it. They can use the internet. Oh my God. Right? It's amazing.
00:08:57
Speaker
that it was going out and talking to real people, sharing that experience, measuring success in a different way, right? Like you have to measure success as not, do I have a form on the internet, but are veterans using it to enroll in healthcare successfully? And then taking advantage of a crisis moment to deploy something that maybe in a not crisis would have been delayed by other bureaucratic channels.
00:09:25
Speaker
Great. I love that. I love the measure. That's such a neat work. We're going to come back to that, how you measure this success. And it just seems so obvious, doesn't it? Nothing in our book is rocket science. It has 56 different bureaucracy hacking tactics. And I wouldn't say we invented any of them, but we captured them of stories of people using them successfully in a variety of different bureaucracies. Sort of as a story of hope, frankly.
00:09:54
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I suppose that's why I said it. It seems straightforward in the sense of hopeful in that it can be applied. But only straightforward once you'd uncovered it, Marina. It was like the day before you uncovered it, it wasn't straightforward. That's fair.
00:10:12
Speaker
So I'm thinking that super complicated government organizations are having their bureaucracy, their silos, all of the technology that isn't necessarily being used. I'm thinking a lot of the people that might be listening to this have much smaller organizations. They'll probably recognize silos and them and us type of culture, but it
00:10:35
Speaker
thinking about how this scales down. Are there differences when you look at those different sizes of organizations when you think about bureaucracy hacking?
00:10:46
Speaker
Yeah, there definitely can be.
Recognizing Dysfunctional Bureaucracies
00:10:48
Speaker
In the course of writing the book, Nick and I tried to find an organization that was not in bureaucracy. So we talked with a lot of small organizations. And we actually couldn't find one. That even took us, we were at a small grocery store. And even that, when you talk to them, had different risk and incentive frameworks, had different rules written and unwritten.
00:11:08
Speaker
What I like to talk to people about in small organizations, whether you stay a small organization or whether you have aspirations to grow, is that being aware of your own bureaucracy is really the key to being an effective bureaucracy. So how are decisions made? How is budget allocated? Even if, you know, perhaps it's not particularly bureaucratic when you're a team of one, but you're going to be interacting with other bureaucracies. How are you measuring? How are you allocating resources? How are you deciding what to do and what not to do?
00:11:37
Speaker
The more aware you are of those processes, the more effective your bureaucracy can be. And I think that that applies, again, no matter what your size. It just may be that certain tactics will apply more perhaps as you're interacting with other bureaucracies and less about your internal bureaucracy. Yeah, yeah, the awareness. I mean, that kicks in for so many different things, isn't it? If you're aware of something, then you can actually do something about it.
00:12:07
Speaker
And it kicks in at all levels. So when bureaucracy is low functioning, what was the... Yeah, I would say low as versus high functioning. Yeah. So an ineffective bureaucracy.
00:12:27
Speaker
How does that show up sometimes? I'm just wondering if it gets masked and looks like something else completely different. How would you know that your bureaucracy is a low functioning one? Yeah, I think employee burnout is a very good indicator because people get so frustrated that they can't make changes or they believe that change is impossible in the bureaucracy that they're in.
00:12:53
Speaker
I also think, you know, my day job right now is I'm a crisis engineer so I go into organizations of all sizes when they're in a crisis and help them resolve the crisis quickly and emerge ideally more resilient than they were going in recurrent crises are absolutely a sign of a dysfunctional bureaucracy, whether that's.
00:13:14
Speaker
employee retention, whether it's outages, whether it's failure to meet timelines, or could be a much, much worse crisis, whatever crisis is relative to what your objectives are. Basically, are you achieving your objectives or are you wildly off and people believe that it's impossible to achieve them? And I would say that's a very strong sign of a dysfunctional bureaucracy.
00:13:36
Speaker
Yeah. Now I can just hear them. I can hear them saying, this is how it's always been. People have tried to change it. It's too difficult. Yeah. I can hear them. Can I hear them, Marina? They need you. So we've, we understand what the symptoms are. Do they get masked? Are there, is there a sense of that other things are pointed at before bureaucracy or instead of bureaucracy?
00:14:04
Speaker
Some signs that I would definitely look for are some combination and you can have both simultaneously are people throwing up their hands saying that this is just impossible. There's no way to change this and perhaps sticking around, but just in a way that they feel like they've given up and they're sort of more robotic. The flip of that, which again can happen simultaneous to that is people doing Herculean efforts. And I especially see this depending on
00:14:30
Speaker
if you're in a service industry, if you're in the public sector, it might be people working extreme over time. A very common thing we find in my crisis engineering jobs is somebody who works all weekend, every weekend, or who people are like, oh yeah, John, he leaves church every Sunday because of this outage or problem that we're having. That is a bad sign, but I don't think people necessarily draw that
00:14:53
Speaker
connect that dot, that Herculean efforts by your staff are actually not, it's amazing that those people do it, but that's not sustainable for an organization. And that's a sign of some broken. Yeah. Internal funding. Don't like hand out the awards for that. Fix why it's happening. Absolutely. That's the award. It should be fixing whatever is taking John out of church. Yeah. Yeah. Given the award to the people that are able to
00:15:21
Speaker
do their role in their time, the hours. So when you think about this, we've looked at symptoms, we can understand it. What type of person in an organization might you want to invite to do something about this? Or is it always bring someone in from the outside? I assume not. I assume this is internally fixable.
00:15:49
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think you need, even as a consultant, I don't think you need anybody from that necessarily. I think it is absolutely possible for there to be internal bureaucracy hackers. And I've seen them successfully be at all levels of an organization. In fact, I would say sometimes it's a little bit rare for it to be the literal leader of an organization versus
00:16:06
Speaker
people that are further inside the organization. So I don't think that the tagline for our book is, get things done no matter what your role in any team. And I really do believe that. I've seen some amazing bureaucracy hacking from people that you might not expect because they are
00:16:21
Speaker
you know, on the quote unquote bottom of the ladder, but they're the ones that are therefore closest to users closest to that end process and most able to see what the problems are and what the solutions could be. So I think it definitely could be anyone that said, depending on what the problem is sometimes bringing in an outsider.
00:16:39
Speaker
consultant, I imagine, or many people in your audience, you bring fresh perspective. You can bring pattern matching, which is to say, once you've been in an organization for a long time, it can be difficult to imagine or see how something is wrong. Whereas you bring in an outside perspective, they may pattern match very quickly. And not only pattern match on the problem, but may pattern match on the solution.
00:16:59
Speaker
Aha, this is kind of your kind of shaped like this in your problem. I have successfully seen this solution work, so it can get you to a solution a bit faster. And frankly, it's literally a bureaucracy hack itself that sometimes when you're on the inside, you know the answer fully. But your bureaucracy responds to outside consultant requests.
00:17:20
Speaker
So you may want to hire that outside consultant to get them to say the thing that you've been saying for 10 years, but that's going to be the lever that gets your bureaucracy to listen. I have definitely been on both sides of that particular hack.
00:17:32
Speaker
Yeah, I can see that one. Absolutely. So they could be any level and nice that that external person might be able to bring something, but also might just be able to give that other voice of support to somebody inside. So I think I always really want to get fairly swiftly to
00:17:53
Speaker
The what to do so like the practical stuff or we recognize it we know what kind of person might be a good person to do what would be a good starting point if you can see the symptoms happening and you're at some whatever level in the organization where should you start.
00:18:11
Speaker
Yeah, so I have two suggestions of a place to start. You can do them in parallel. The first one is that you want to cultivate your caress. So a caress is a concept from Kurt Vonnegut's book, Cat's Cradle. And the idea is that there are people hidden around the planet that are there to accomplish a goal together if they can only find one another.
00:18:28
Speaker
Nick and I love this framing in a bureaucracy because you never know where other people on other teams, if you're an outside consultant, someone on the inside, vice versa, can be to help you accomplish your goals. When you build that class, you all collectively build a much stronger and more accurate view of how your organization works.
00:18:48
Speaker
than you can independently. And your carafe, I mean, my best carafe members when I was chief technology officer of the Department of Veterans Affairs were the executive secretary team, some folks in legal, some folks in procurement and the security guards. And I have many stories to tell about like all the ways that our sort of unexpected team got so much more done together than we ever could have separately. And a carafe you can start out by,
00:19:14
Speaker
grabbing a coffee or a virtual lunch or even just chatting a little bit before or after a meeting with people that are outside your team, outside your organization. It's about building real human relationships so that over time you can be like, oh man, I need
00:19:30
Speaker
a purchase card. I need a contract. I am stumped by this mystery that I can't solve. You never know who else in your Carras will help you answer or get that resource.
End-to-End Process Improvement
00:19:40
Speaker
And the more diverse your Carras is, the more effective it can be. So first of all, just mostly like reach out to people outside your team, organization, department, et cetera, and build real genuine relationships with them. That'd be my first tip. My second one, which again, you can do in parallel, is whatever the process is that you suspect is causing
00:20:00
Speaker
like a root problem. So whether it's sales, it's responding to a service request, it's processing a claim, you want to follow that process from start to finish. And I mean literally follow.
00:20:15
Speaker
you show up on the other side of the vaccine. If it gets in the physical mail, you follow that through the physical mail. And when you do that, you're gonna find this treasure trove of opportunities to answer the mysteries of like, what is actually going on here? Why isn't it functioning? Why are people making the decisions that they're making or not making the decisions that you want them to make? And it's very rare, surprisingly rare to me,
00:20:44
Speaker
own the process end-to-end ever. You'll have your step. Someone will have another step. You might even bring in outside consultants to help on a step. But if you don't understand how the process will start to finish, you're going to miss the next amount of opportunity to improve your bureaucracy and really high functioning. And that starts with understanding how the process actually works.
00:21:03
Speaker
And if you are the person that does that, you can be a superstar in a bureaucracy of literally any size. I do this play constantly. I get paid a lot of money as a consultant to do it, but I will really tell anybody that they also can do it in their organization. It reminds me of two stories from the book, like the security guard story, which I feel like talking about
00:21:25
Speaker
connecting with people and realizing that they can help. What's the story about the security guards? Yeah, so this may sound strange to listeners, but when I joined the Department of Veterans Affairs as the chief technology officer, I did not have an available budget. And part of that is because in the way the United States government works, your budget is decided years in advance.
00:21:47
Speaker
So when I came into my role, there was no free dollars because they had already been allocated for two or three years ahead of me. So I had effectively a $0 budget, which is pretty difficult to get anything done with. And I had this really amazing opportunity to get a few million dollars, which from $0 is a lot of money. I mean, a few million dollars is objectively a lot of money. But in the $6 billion, it was what we called budget dust.
00:22:15
Speaker
But to get this few millions of dollars, I had to move about 1,000 written articles off of an existing website and move it onto a new website so that we could get cost savings from not having to renew this other website. That doesn't sound like a particularly hard job, except
00:22:33
Speaker
I was by myself. I didn't have anybody else to help me move 1,000 articles, and I had weeks to do it. So there just simply were not enough hours in the day for me to do it myself. And I was complaining about this to the security guard who worked outside my office when it occurred to me that he had a laptop and a little bit of time on his hands. And so I was like, oh, maybe you would like to help me if I taught you a little bit of code. Would you be at all interested in helping me move these articles over?
00:23:00
Speaker
And he was like, yeah, I'll come at lunch. You can teach me. And he came at lunch and he came with the security guards from every other floor. And we had a class. We all learned very, very basic HTML, which is some slight coding that they were able to pick up at lunch. They were all awesome and motivated. And we crushed the deadline. Not only did I make it, I beat it and was able to get those few million dollars that I then used to build
00:23:25
Speaker
the pilot of what is now like the VA's entire digital transformation. And if unfortunately for the VA, I think all those security guards quit for IT jobs. So there was a slight security challenge I may have created, but I think all for the better.
00:23:44
Speaker
I love that story. I just think it's so sweet. It just changes people's lives. I just imagine them being really fired up with helping you. Yeah. I think no one would have imagined the way I was going to get my first budget was through the security staff.
00:23:59
Speaker
But boy, was that a lesson for me that like, you absolutely don't know who, you know, you shouldn't assign value to people based on where they are in your hierarchy or what their job title may be. And so I've tried very hard to have a really expansive crash wherever I ended up. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like it only, it just be, work hard, be nice to people. It's always just, just being like that, but it's great to see example of how it can actually work really nicely for everybody.
00:24:29
Speaker
I imagine that sometimes people will read your book and think it's really easy. Well, maybe they won't. I don't know. Maybe they'll think it's easy and go, oh my God, I really want to do this in my organization. And they get really fired up and they throw themselves at it. And in their keenness, it kind of backfires. So what do people sometimes do that
00:24:58
Speaker
is super keen, but it's not gonna work. Yeah, I've seen this a lot. I've also definitely been guilty of this myself. And I would say a lot of it is we call the tactic beware of the obvious answer. So what is very common is someone is keen to make a difference and they have a cursory understanding of what is wrong, or maybe they have an understanding of what's wrong from their perspective, but not necessarily from the perspective of others. And they immediately go after solving
00:25:28
Speaker
that obvious answer. And a way to catch yourself if you're doing this is if you are about to say a sentence that sounds like, why don't you just... I literally have a keyboard shortcut on my computer that if I try to type the word just, it deletes it, will not let me write it because it's a sign that I'm about to say something that I probably should think about.
00:25:50
Speaker
And it happens all the time, it's extremely easy to fall into this. And so what we really encourage is if you have such an idea, oh my God, it's obvious, why don't they just, da, da, da, keep that to yourself, but look into it, do some research, build your carass, talk more about the problem, follow that process from end to end, and understand the root cause. You know, there's that five why's from the Toyota production management,
00:26:16
Speaker
methodology where you keep asking why until you get to the root policy, the root law, the root decision maker, whatever the root may be. Really following that may uncover for you that there is a really good reason why they haven't just done that.
00:26:32
Speaker
and or 300 people before you may have tried that exact thing and nothing will turn them off from helping you more than you showing up with a bright idea announcing that it is the solution when they very well have already seen a bunch of people try and fail or maybe have tried it and failed themselves.
00:26:52
Speaker
And that's really rich information. So if somebody has tried that before, it's possible that in a new circumstances and new time and new whatever, that it will work today in a way that it hadn't worked before. But you'll only kind of know that by doing your archaeological historical dig through what people have tried, what the actual root problems are, and then how you might go about solving it.
00:27:14
Speaker
So I think that's really the key I recommend. And especially if you're new to an organization, you want to be gung-ho. You want to jump in and solve the problem, but you may not solve the problem and alienate yourself very badly if you jump in and that, you know, why don't you just sort of way. I think when I was reading about your examples and the impact you must have had
00:27:37
Speaker
on many people's lives. I mean, it really is kind of heartwarming to the veterans, the impact that's had. And I think, wow, everyone must have been really keen when you started doing that work and really wanted you to get that sorted.
00:27:54
Speaker
Maybe not. How will you receive, Marina? When I started at the VA, I had spent the six months prior auditing the agency from the White House, which I would not recommend as a popularity tactic because when I came to the VA, nobody wanted to talk to me. Nobody wanted me in their meetings.
00:28:17
Speaker
And so I was not received very well. I was also fairly young and people would make jokes a lot about like how the VA had started recruiting from high school, which I was not in high school. And so I would not say I was received super well. And I had to spend a long time years, literally years, building political capital, building relationships where I could. And, you know, I think that sense of not having the resources that I needed
00:28:44
Speaker
helped me learn lessons like building a really diverse class because the security guards would talk to me and I had, you know, I didn't pitch that security guard that day cold. He and I had talked every day for two or three years at that point.
00:28:59
Speaker
when I was going to enlist his help. So a lot of it was just, who will talk to me? And over time, I was able to earn what I would call political capital by showing that I was a valuable, I was a team player, I had something to bring to the table. And that ultimately, over the five years that I was there, I was much more well-received when I was leaving than when I had come in. You had a decent amount of time, didn't you? You said you thought
00:29:29
Speaker
Pretty usual, is it like that now or do you think it's changed?
00:29:34
Speaker
I am very grateful that I had that experience at the VA. And when I left VA after five years, I then spent five years, this is my fifth year doing work in child welfare in foster care. And at that kind of scale, by no means do I think all bureaucracy hacks take years to get traction. But when you're trying to do enormous systems change, I'm very, very lucky that I have now had two experiences where the first two, even three years, it may seem like nothing is happening.
00:30:02
Speaker
When I was at the VA, it took two and a half years to make my first hire. It took two and a half years to get my first budget and a lot of attempts along the way. It wasn't that I waited two and a half years to try to hire someone or to try to get a dollar, trying and failing in many ways, finding ways to earn political capital so that I could kind of barter as it were for the headcount or the dollars that I needed by sharing other resources that I did have.
00:30:29
Speaker
Depending on the scale of the bureaucracy act that you're after, it may be totally accurate and acceptable that it can take years to start seeing change. I don't want to scare anybody off from that, but I'm glad that I've had that experience twice because it means that whatever my next chapter is, I will have a greater sense of faith that if I keep working at it,
00:30:55
Speaker
It may take years, but then you can look back. I mean, there is nothing more incredible, I think, than my last day at the VA. When I had started at the VA, again, nobody would really talk to me. I didn't have any resources. I made this vision booklet. I posted it on the Hack Your bureaucracy website if anybody wants to see it. That's really neither here nor there, but it had like 48 ideas of things we could get done at the VA.
00:31:19
Speaker
Imagine what if veterans had a single digital experience, what if when they separated from the military, they got all the benefits that they earned easily in one place rather than having to navigate a very challenging bureaucracy. I put out this vision document and when I left five years later on my last day, my team reminded me to look back at that book and we had accomplished almost every one of them, which five years prior,
00:31:47
Speaker
even accomplishing one of the 48, frankly, seemed extremely difficult. And so that was a pretty amazing moment of looking back, because by that five years in, you have a whole new list of 48 things that you're working on. At no point are you like, oh, I'm done. That's a good point. Yeah, that's a really good point, because I think you can really feel like
00:32:08
Speaker
not not making the progress or always having something but like because in some ways before you said that I felt like you'd got to that point and you were ticking them off as you went and you had this sense of you know I've arrived I've done all the things but no there's another whole set of things
00:32:26
Speaker
Yeah, it never ends. And that can be hard. It can definitely lead to burnout, I think, especially for the go-getters of bureaucracy hacking. But I think that's why it's actually quite important to write down what your goals are and to check in with yourself over time. Because it's natural to have your first 48 goals replaced with the new 48 goals. But you still need that moment to say, like, oh, wow, it was possible to make some pretty monumental change. And that can give a lot of hope for whatever your next big challenge is.
00:32:54
Speaker
Now I think that applies to all sorts of places actually. I'm going to take that because I think sometimes I work with teams and I see this progress and then after a year or so, there'll be another set of things and it can feel a little bit like, wow, did any of this stuff really happen? But actually, yes, reflecting back so much has shifted and changed and giving them the capacity to deal with more things that bring more challenge. So it's a good one. Yeah.
00:33:23
Speaker
I like this phrase that you had, which was around stabbing someone in the chair.
00:33:31
Speaker
I feel like we need to dig into that. When was the last time you stabbed someone in the chest, Marina? Yeah, fairly recently.
Building Trust Through Transparent Disagreement
00:33:38
Speaker
So this is a tactic that I use a decent amount. It's one of the hardest ones, I think. It's a hard one for me still to do now. And the premise of stabbing someone in the chest is that you are not stabbing someone in the back. So you are going to go to any variety of situations where you're going to have a decision point where you're disagreeing with somebody else. And I think all of us have this
00:33:59
Speaker
innate and wrong tendency to believe that, OK, I'm going to disagree, or I'm up against you to get budget, or to get a decision. I want the decision to be yes, and you want the decision to be no on whatever topic. I'm going to wait until we get to the decision meeting, and I'm going to spring this amazing persuasive speech or secret numbers at you, or I'm going to have the more persuasive slide deck, and I'm going to quote unquote win.
00:34:26
Speaker
And that very well may work, but now I have ruined my relationship with you because I have stabbed you in the back. I have made you look bad in front of our potential mutual boss or our colleagues. Now you don't trust me. And now the next thing we very well may completely agree on the next hundred things, but we have harmed our working relationship by coming at the disagreements in an adversarial way.
00:34:49
Speaker
So stabbing someone in the chest instead means that rather than stabbing them in the back in the decision meetings, bringing information on them. Before I'm going to publicly disagree with you, I'm going to walk you through in complete, honest, transparent detail all the ways that I'm going to disagree with you. I'm going to sit with you, at least offer to. Not everybody will take you up on it.
00:35:08
Speaker
I'm going to sit down and say, here's my slide deck. I'm going to say this and this. And when you show that slide, I'm going to disagree. And I'm going to say this other thing. That is so uncomfortable. Again, this is a hard tactic to do. But it builds this absolutely incredible sense of trust and a working relationship with other people when they know that you are not going to stab them in the back. The goal is not to change their mind. Almost certainly, you're still going to disagree. Maybe you'll change a nuanced detail here or there.
00:35:36
Speaker
outside of that disagreement, you're going to have a really high functioning working relationship. And I am close friends today with people who I stabbed in the chest who Marina prior to learning this tactic would have totally destroyed that relationship in the pursuit of quote unquote winning. Yes. So good for trust building, which is so important for the type of thing that you're trying to achieve here, aren't you? Nice.
00:36:02
Speaker
I think this is similar to looking at the list of things you've achieved and feeling like actually progress has been made.
00:36:12
Speaker
thing I notice is sometimes you walk away from a situation where you've seen change and it doesn't stick. It happens in the moment, it happens while you're driving the change, but then you walk away from it and something doesn't stick, something changes and sometimes it's appropriate that it doesn't stick. But have you got an example of when that's happened for you?
00:36:35
Speaker
Oh, yes, absolutely. So when I came to the VA to be a Chief Technology Officer, I had one project that I wanted to do, which was I wanted to automate the processing of disability claims, which at the time was taking, I think, four and a half years to process one manually. And I had a very
00:36:54
Speaker
It wasn't a hypothetical vision. I had a working pilot at an entire hospital that was automatically processing them. So I had spent years on this. And what I did wrong, because this was one of my earlier projects versus one of my later ones, is that it was Marina's pet project the whole time.
00:37:13
Speaker
I did it off on the side. I did follow the rules. I have had IT approvals. I did everything according to the rules, but it was always Marina's pet project. I didn't follow the advice that Nick and I give, which is to use the bureaucracy against itself, which is to say, if I would go back, I would have found ways. How do I make it other people's project? How do I get other people excited about it? How do I get them to champion it? How is it in strategic plans? How do I understand more about who the
00:37:40
Speaker
naysayers are and find different ways to include them. I would have done that entirely differently if I had it over to do today. And to this day, there is still no claims automation at the VA, which makes me sad when I read about it in media. But I recognize
00:37:58
Speaker
very clearly why it did not stick, but why some of my other projects like the digital transformation of VA.gov did stick because so many other people saw that as there. So when I left, really your key marker here is like, when I left, does it continue on? Are there champions? Are there people that are advocating for it? Are there people whose jobs it is? And that's what I did wrong, but did right on VA.gov.
00:38:23
Speaker
Yeah, really good lessons there. And I'm learning from you, Marina. It may mean your project takes literally years longer, but I'm glad that I, as sad as I still am about not having automated claims, I now know in other spaces, even if it takes me two extra years, if other people own it and other organizations own it, and I'm not the one owning it,
00:38:50
Speaker
That's ultimately the correct form of success. That's sustainable success. If it's Marina's pet project that only Marina runs, will it work for some period of time? Yes. But also, just frankly, that's exhausting. You might not want the only person running your thing on year six. Really easy to fall in that trap because it's so much easier and faster when it's just you and when you're not trying to incorporate eight or nine other teams or departments or organizations.
00:39:20
Speaker
The common complaint is going to happen. So I see Marina's pet project and I see Marina incorporating other people in. You must have encountered people saying, I've got my day job. I'm too busy.
00:39:33
Speaker
How did you overcome that? Oh, a billion percent. There are a few strategies for this, but I think a key one is understanding what I need that person to do differently, understanding what their current role is, like what their quote unquote day job is. And is there some way that I can spend extra time getting something off their plate and doing a barter? So not expecting, I think it's really unreasonable, frankly, to expect people to do something above and beyond their day job, but what can work
00:40:02
Speaker
is taking something off their plate in an explicit exchange of, I'm going to automate this piece for you in exchange for doing this other thing. I have a pretty crazy story about that from a modernization project we did at the VA for our Board of Veterans' Appeals, which is actually an entire court system that also lives in the VA because the VA here in America has everything. They had an appeals process that was taking over seven years per veteran to work through.
00:40:33
Speaker
People who had the obvious answer, who just thought they knew the problem and had not really deeply understood it, assumed that the union was the problem because the union had only agreed that every attorney could process two appeals a week. If you just do the math, two appeals a week times the number of attorneys we had, it was actually going to take longer than seven years as you start moving out of time.
00:40:56
Speaker
And I had started learning that's not the where the obvious answer, let's go talk to people. And so my team went and met with one of the heads of the union and said, hey, look, we just want to understand what your workflow is like.
00:41:09
Speaker
And she showed us the most horrific workflow, which was to open an appeal, an attorney had to right click and save on over 700 individual PDF files, which took the better part of a day. And then because they're attorneys, they are very detail oriented. They would go back and double check they had not missed a file in the 750 PDFs.
00:41:32
Speaker
And when you understand that that's an required part of processing and appeal, it's almost amazing that they could even do two in a week, frankly, that's heroic efforts.
00:41:42
Speaker
She said, you know, if we're going to change performance standards, we need a tool that lets us download all these files. And so my team went off and built a download all button, which took us like maybe a week to build, gave it back to them. And now they don't have to right click and save on anything and they don't have to go back and double check because they're all downloaded.
00:42:04
Speaker
And when we did that, they said, oh, now we are incentivized to try your whole new system that has this download all button in it because it's going to save such a huge paint point for us. And while using this new system, we are going to create a new performance standard as well. So that was a really big barter relative to the kind of work that I do. But I think about it constantly and try to remind myself whenever I need someone to take on new work, is there some way I can take
00:42:30
Speaker
two pieces of work off their plate. So ultimately like they feel like they're coming out ahead and I get what I want. It's not always that simple, but often there's a lot more room than you may realize to include. It may be that you change what you're asking. The format or the data fields or even just like the order of columns is a seemingly simple thing that I've seen work a lot where you just make it, you get what you need, but you're making it
00:42:57
Speaker
take half as much time for the other person that you need to do it for you. So really thinking thoughtfully about that rather than sort of tossing it over the wall and expecting it to be done. Yeah, I did love that example of the download all button. That must have been so satisfying to...
00:43:12
Speaker
achieve and see the impact it had so quickly. I have never had an employee barter of that magnitude, and I may never again. We called it the $100 button because that's how much time it saved, which is not a exaggeration and it's pretty crazy.
00:43:30
Speaker
But no one was looking to them. They were not high on the ladder of getting budget or getting IT approvals. And so that also, frankly, was sort of an indirect bureaucracy hack as we chose to work with teams that were under-resourced.
00:43:43
Speaker
so that they were there for a little bit more incentivized to work with us, because otherwise they weren't going to get, sort of like Marina's crazy new team of new stuff for nothing. So maybe we'll talk to them. And then we build really great things. And then the incentives shifted where people are like, wait a minute, I want the system that the Board of Veterans Appeals has, or I want the system that the employment office has.
00:44:08
Speaker
Quite a few of the examples we've picked on have been quite tech related, but they're not all tech related, are they? With the work you're doing at the moment, one of the things you did was just purely about following the process and realizing that they were, was it faxing some adult? This is not high tech. This is just like, wow, communication.
00:44:37
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I would also argue at VA, I didn't do anything that was pretty high tech so much as we were all on paper and we wanted to move the paper to the internet. But my foster care work, I would say involves almost no technology.
Streamlining Foster Care Licensing
00:44:49
Speaker
And the story I think you're thinking of is a lot of my work in foster care has been around improving the speed of licensing foster parents, and in particular, improving the speed of licensing relatives who are trying to take in a child, because that can mean
00:45:05
Speaker
until recently, hundreds of days that a child is living on an office floor or living in an institution when they have an available grandparent or aunt or uncle or godparent because they have to get through this Byzantine paperwork process that nobody designed. It just became a hodgepodge of different requirements.
00:45:23
Speaker
were on top of one another. And so I was following the process from start to finish, having learned that lesson, and in a particular state. And I got to this one woman's desk, and her job was to request the caregiver's driving record from the Department of Motor Vehicles.
00:45:41
Speaker
And she's complaining to me about this step the entire time. Oh my God, the Department of Voter Vehicles lives in the 19th century. They're making me fill out this carbon copy paper form, which I don't even know if all your listeners know what it is, but it's like multiple colors of paper and you press really hard and it makes kind of triplicate copies.
00:45:59
Speaker
She has to find a stamp. She has to find an envelope. She's miserable and grumpy. And then she's like, and this takes forever to get back, which is delaying my step. And because this was a serial process, it means it's adding a good amount of time to the overall process of approving this caregiver.
00:46:14
Speaker
But I did what this woman was not empowered to do, which is I then went to the Department of Motor Vehicles and said, can you show me how you're processing this on your side? And the woman there said, oh yeah, no problem. So I pull up my email, and the requests are right here, and I double click on them, and then I email the results.
00:46:30
Speaker
back. And I was like, well, wait a minute, where's the carbon copy paper? And she was like, oh my God, were you at child welfare? Those people live in the 19th century. Why do they keep sending me these carbon copy forms when they could just email me? And I was like, hmm, I have someone you should meet. And I introduced these two extremely passionate, experienced civil servants, right? And they met within an hour.
00:46:53
Speaker
they had switched over to the email process, which shaved 32 days off the caregiver approval process. And it made both of these women much happier with their jobs. So it removed a step, but nobody wanted to do the step. I think there's sometimes this belief that no matter how miserable the step is, those bureaucrats just love
00:47:14
Speaker
their carbon copy paper. That was absolutely not true. And it's generally not been my experience. And so we did that. And that was all from following from start to finish. But if you had just read the manual of how that process works, you would never have picked up on that disconnect because it would have read something like,
00:47:31
Speaker
child welfare sends a request to the motor vehicles. The motor vehicle sends the results back. It was only by literally shadowing an actual family going through it that I was able to see the carbon copy paper and hear the frustration from the worker and then see that there was actually a whole other process available that just nobody, because nobody was in charge of the process from end to end, nobody knew to fix. So, and that's, you know, I guess it involves email, but I would not consider that to be a particular...
00:47:59
Speaker
All the years I've worked in foster care, it's all about updating policies, updating forms, updating recently laws, and spending a lot, a lot, a lot of time with end users, both families and civil servants, to identify opportunities for efficiencies, opportunities for steps that we can remove or replace, and then just ways to make the process less scary, less intimidating overall, which a lot of times can be achieved with, frankly, like a few differently worded sentences.
00:48:26
Speaker
I love removing things. That's such a nice tidy thing to have done. Great. So have you got any tidy little tips for listeners that you can throw at them? So I know we're picking up a few that are sound like standard ones that you do nearly all the time. And then any other tips?
00:48:50
Speaker
things from the book that would be worth sharing now. Yeah. I think one tip I'd love to suggest to people is like solve a mystery. I'm sure in your organization or the organization you're consulting with, you have some mystery big or small. Why do we do this? Where does this go? Why do you ask this question in this way? And I think very few people ever kind of pull the thread on solving that mystery.
00:49:14
Speaker
And I would encourage you, whatever the mystery is, again, however seemingly small, pull that thread and go solve it. Go talk to people in other areas, follow the process, get to the five whys to your root cause, figure out the answer to that mystery. And it may uncover a bunch of opportunity for you to fix something, or it may simply be an interesting answer. But I think everybody, wherever you are, if you solve one mystery, I think that'll be a good start to your bureaucracy hacking. No, but go look for your mysteries.
00:49:43
Speaker
It's been an absolute pleasure, Marina, talking to you and hearing, or I mean, I could just talk to you for ages. Your job seems so interesting and I appreciate that you're there for years. So lots of it probably is quite a slog and then occasional breakthroughs.
00:50:01
Speaker
For sure, bureaucracy hacking is not a... I mean, occasionally it can be fast, but for the most part, it is a longer road, but it is so satisfying on the other side. And I really wish everybody will get their own satisfying bureaucracy hacks in. Yeah. Now Anwar, you're helping us. Just give the title of your book again.
00:50:22
Speaker
Yeah, it's Hack Your Bureaucracy and it's available anywhere books are sold. And if you check out our website at hackyourbureaucracy.com, we've got some bonus content. And if you really want to get into bureaucracy hacking, we have an extra reading list of other books about bureaucracy that you can dive into.
00:50:38
Speaker
Brilliant. Well, I recommend picking the book up. It's super readable, even if you have no intention of hacking anything. It's still really interesting. I'm so sad, but brilliant, Marina. Thank you very much. Absolute pleasure chatting to you. Thanks for having me.
00:51:06
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Visible Leader podcast. To stay up to date with the latest episode, hit the subscribe button. And I'd love to hear what you think, so please leave me a review. If you have any questions or comments, reach out to me. Corinne Hines on LinkedIn.