Hack Your Bureaucracy

By simply following a process (e.g., a customer transaction) from start to finish, and paying particular attention to places where the process changes hands, you can uncover big wins while triggering fewer bureaucratic antibodies.

It’s so tempting to make lists of everything that’s wrong in your environment. This can be especially true when you’re new, and you (wrongly) believe that you are the first person to discover inefficiencies, gaps, and other issues. But lists of problems without context, and especially without practical proposed solutions, can cause much more harm than good.

Economist Horst Siebert coined the term “cobra effect” to describe perverse system incentives, based on a true story from Delhi, India. (It’s also known as Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”) The city was overrun with dangerous cobra snakes, and the local government sought to solve this problem by paying for every dead cobra someone brought in. But instead of diminishing the cobra population, this incentive scheme caused an explosion in the cobra population—because people started breeding cobras to earn the incentive payments.

to protect against the cobra effect: “Assuming I’m an evil Product Manager, what would I do to achieve this Key Performance Indicator or goal?”

The Paperwork Reduction Act defines the word information as well as what is not information. And right there in black and white, the exceptions list includes: Facts or opinions obtained through direct observation by an employee or agent of the sponsoring agency or through non-standardized oral communication in connection with such direct observations. Unfortunately, the exact letter of the law was not widely known in government. To combat this misperception, Erie, an incredible bureaucracy hacker, got the agency in charge of enforcing the Paperwork Reduction Act (the Office of Management and Budget) to publish a memo encouraging other agencies to conduct user research, citing her close read of the law.

Getting to the root reason behind a particular practice is often the key to changing it. It’s possible the original rule, policy, or law gives you much more flexibility than people think—and sometimes that original reason may not even apply anymore! Asking why repeatedly and tying current practices back to specific reasons makes it clear what needs to change, and what may not need to change at all.

a standard written by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) called control AC-8. This rule does say that information systems need to make it clear to users that they are accessing a US government system—but it says nothing at all about how to do this. Armed with the rule itself, Bret was able to put up instead a user-friendly sentence, with no capital letters or bold font, on his team’s site (cloud.gov) in a small yet visible banner. This was one of many steps he took in making government websites more accessible and authoritative while complying with the well-meaning letter of NIST guidelines.

Defend against becoming a future water cooler rule. Cite your reason where possible. For example, in Washington State, the foster home inspection checklist lists the applicable state law next to each checkbox. This makes it harder (though not impossible!) for the form to deviate too far from the actual law.

when COVID-related unemployment claims began to climb in California in 2020, the state moved quickly to hire thousands of new claims processors and call center agents. Many other states made similar moves. This seemed like the obvious first step: more humans could attack a backlog of unemployment claims faster, right? However, this solution was absolutely the wrong one. New employees now vastly outnumbered experienced ones, who had to spend all their time training new people instead of processing claims themselves. This meant that instead of thousands of extra hands, there were now almost no hands processing claims. When the State of California analyzed call center data, it became clear that the new agents could answer fewer than 1 percent of incoming calls;

What makes a compelling one-pager? 1. A simple title. The reader should be able to “get it” with just a glance. Consider introducing the name of your initiative in the title. 2. The BLUF. Put your conclusion at the top, known as the bottom line up front (BLUF). 3. Description of the issue. Why does anyone care? You might be living a particular challenge, but does anyone else in your organization think it is a significant problem? 4. An anecdote or statistic (or both) that illustrates the problem. What examples do you have to convince your reader that this matters? 5. Proposed change. What is the change you desire? 6. Concrete next steps. Specifically, who do you propose to do what, in what time frame? The next steps might seem small compared with the overall proposed solution, but it’s better to start with concrete, measurable actions. 7. It’s actually one page. We’ve all played with margins, fonts, and point size to make more words fit on the page; but the idea here is to genuinely limit yourself to one page with one-inch margins and a legible font set no smaller than 10 point. Ideally, it’s 1.5 line spaced for readability. There is a lot of value in several-page memos, but the discipline a one-pager creates is powerful.

large organizations often reject smaller or short-term ideas as “not big enough” or “not moonshots”—even though these organizations demonstrably fail to achieve their enormous visions and would be better off with many smaller wins. The key is to find the right balance between laying out a vision that will inspire others to support your goals, while leaving enough flexibility that you can get started with pilots and progress quickly.

A compelling North Star should: • Focus on what’s possible and the positive, not on what’s wrong. In other words, lay out what the future could be, not what the future won’t be. • Be inspirational. A North Star isn’t a small step change—it’s a big change for the better. • Balance the right amount of detail to paint a picture without being overly prescriptive. This is known as construal level theory. If your pitch is too short-term, your audience will get caught up in questions about the details. • Look visually compelling

Replace adjectives with data. This is one of Amazon’s “rules of writing.”

meetings (especially large ones) are not actually where decisions get made; that happens elsewhere.

A meeting with many participants is where everyone can see the enthusiasm of an executive for a specific initiative or project—and can see others moving to remove roadblocks. Witnessing senior executives champion your idea and peers commit to help, in person, can be a powerful signal to your colleagues, especially those skeptical or indifferent. But you don’t want to just hope to get lucky and have that kind of catalytic meeting; you have to do the hard work before and after. This may conflict with how you usually think about meetings: as places to show a presentation, make your case, and win over hearts and minds. Those activities are key to getting buy-in and support for your ideas—but we’re telling you that the place to do them is not in meetings. The real work happens outside the meetings—mostly before, but sometimes after. When you embrace this, you can change the outcomes in your favor.

Focus on the decision-making process before the meeting. All decisions and announcements should be orchestrated ahead of time. Is there a written agenda? Get on it. Is there a vote? Find out ahead of time how each person is voting, and what’s influencing their decision. Share your materials early and often for feedback. If there’s going to be a contentious issue or competing priorities, get time with key executives to hear your pitch one-on-one beforehand.

Ask for feedback instead of permission. Most people aren’t going to be the first villager to give you carrots, but many will opine on their favorite flavor of soup or how to best make a soup. Ask for feedback on your project, acting as if it is going to happen and you want advice on the best way for it to happen. If people provide useful feedback, incorporate it into your project, thanking them for their contributions. Even if they haven’t given permission or resources, you can mention their input to other groups to build social capital.

Using Smartsheet, Rebecca created a simple form for people to input litigation requests, instead of sending them through email. The form spit into a shared spreadsheet, where everyone had visibility into who owned each request, and its status. This new process halved the time it took to respond to requests. As an added bonus, the form made sure that every request had all the required information—something that email can’t do.

The more established the bureaucracy, the less likely it wants to be the first one to try a new process or adopt a new technique. Going first is often seen as risky and prone to errors or failure. Find or create precedents to make it seem like your organization is going second to create powerful peer pressure while mitigating risk.

If you believe your idea is a great one, it’s easy to think that a hundred other bad ideas in your organization won’t hold you back. And they may not. But when there’s a lot of competition for resources—time, money, people—it’s that much harder to get the resources you need. Forcing yourself and others to think through gating milestones for proposals can proactively and objectively weed out resource-sucking bad ideas, leaving more room for yours.

the Strangler Pattern is a theory of mainframe computer modernization where you chip away one piece of legacy functionality at a time, replacing it with a new, modern one. As you repeat this play, the behemoth mainframe becomes smaller and smaller—eventually small enough that you can replace what’s left in one final swoop.

An analysis of phone calls showed that over 98 percent of people were calling to check on the status of their claim—information that the call center agents couldn’t actually provide. A detailed claim status service was part of the planned modernization effort, but had not yet begun. Instead, Marina and her team talked to both real claimants and claims specialists to translate the existing system status alerts (which were mostly three-digit codes) into plain-language, easy-to-understand sentences. They then exported an existing report of these status codes once a night to an external website hosted in a secure cloud environment, which could scale up to meet high-traffic demands that the mainframe could not. In under two weeks, millions of Californians went from waiting on hold all day to using a self-service website

Start with existing technology. If you ever find yourself working with an older, legacy database, something that they are very good at is spitting out a spreadsheet of data at regular intervals (e.g., nightly). Rather than wait years (or decades) for it to be replaced, use this to your advantage. If you can get your hands on an existing nightly data report, you can use it to power an extraordinary number of tools outside the mainframe itself, such as status trackers or progress dashboards. Something legacy databases are not great at is scaling to enable many simultaneous connections (e.g., a million people directly connecting to the database to check their claim status, and compulsively refreshing). This is a commonly cited reason for why things like self-service tools don’t exist more often: the business usually wants this functionality very much, and is just waiting to completely replace the mainframe with a modern database that can handle the load first. Strangle this attitude with an approach that only needs to connect to the database once or twice a day, combining the mainframe’s spreadsheet export with a modern tool scalable enough to handle your audience.

Credit is not a finite resource like matter, energy, or money. If you give credit to others, you and your team can still get credit for the success of a project, too. In fact, the more you give credit and thank others for their contributions, both publicly and privately, the more they are likely to reciprocate. The net result is that all of you will be able to brag about the same project, and more people in your organization will hear about the project’s success.

There is also a risk when giving credit to people on projects that aren’t yet successful. We all like to be associated with the winning team. As the saying goes, success has ten thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan. So lavishing credit to colleagues on a project with unclear prospects isn’t doing anyone any favors—save it for later on.

The group learned that Illinois passed an executive order issuing a moratorium on aging out, allowing older youth to stay in care until the pandemic ended. The coalition also found other states that had taken similar, but slightly different, policy actions to achieve the same goal, like issuing internal policy amendments and passing new laws. Sixto and his team published a playbook that compiled the various, tested pathways to stopping youth from aging out, and they shared the specific policy language that Illinois and other states had successfully used. Other states literally copied and pasted these materials, enacting their own moratoriums within days. By making it as easy as possible for the agencies to do the right thing, Sixto kept tens of thousands of vulnerable youth from being kicked out of foster care during a pandemic.

In the halls of Congress, at 11: 07 a.m.—mere minutes before handing power over to Trump—President Obama signed legislation to make the Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program a permanent part of the federal government.

Marina offered to include their “no” vote in her automation. Whenever a vote was needed, a script would automatically generate the memo with the correct format and timestamp, documenting that the release team voted “no” on the current release. Paradoxically, the release team loved this—they would save time, and never have to assume any risk for any release. And Marina loved it because she no longer had to wait two weeks for their predictable dissent.

Sometimes a bureaucracy doesn’t solicit your ideas but pays a consultant a pretty penny for them. If your organization has an outside consulting firm show up to make recommendations, try to get time with them, and share your thoughts. Consultants are often quite game to include your ideas and materials (even if they’re inclined to take all the credit for them). As much as it doesn’t make logical sense, we’ve seen a lot of organizations that ignore internal pitches for years snap to attention when a high-priced consultant says the same thing.

Follow the established approval processes or change them—but if you want your project to succeed long term, don’t seek special exceptions.

Efraim Diveroli became a millionaire at just eighteen by selling supplies to the US military. Part of his strategy was to undercut the big government contractors on smaller-dollar contracts, but he also took advantage of the Department of Defense’s small business contracting goals, which required awarding at least 20 percent of contracts to small firms like his.

One of the strangest, and dumbest, battles Marina has ever found herself in was over which federal agency should own the domain name “veterans.gov.” If you think the answer is the Department of Veterans Affairs, we think you should be right—but you’re not. Since 2013, this website has been owned and operated by the Department of Labor.

Develop grit and resilience. Large-scale changes—and sometimes even tiny changes—can take a long time to bear fruit in a bureaucracy. But if you find a small way every week to keep the ball moving forward, one day you will be able to look back over the previous months or years and be glad you didn’t give up.

There is also a useful concept that applies here called ring theory that we borrow from caring for someone with a serious illness. In the center of the ring is the patient; the first ring around them is their immediate family; the next outer ring is extended family; then close friends; and so on. Your job is to locate yourself in the rings and share your negative feelings out, not in. If your sister-in-law has cancer, you do not go crying with your fears that she is going to die to her, or to her husband or children. You only do that to people outside your ring, such as to a friend or a work colleague. Similarly, if you’re fearful that your project isn’t going to work out, you don’t talk about that at a team meeting with your direct reports. You could get support from a trusted peer in another department, your own manager, or a personal friend. This advice is designed to help you regulate your emotions to stay calm enough to be a trusted, rational team player. We are absolutely not saying that your team shouldn’t discuss real risks or how to mitigate them; that you can’t share disappointing data; or that you should otherwise hide relevant project information from your team. But sometimes you need a friend or a counselor to share your fears with, and that can’t be the same team you are leading.

As for knowing when to “give up,” we have a simple question when people call us for advice on whether it’s time to leave an organization where they haven’t yet accomplished their goals: “Do you see any more doors?” If you still have another operating theory for how you can succeed, and you have the energy: stay and try it. If not: it’s okay to move on.