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In response to the Open Government Directive, federal agencies have been meeting its many deadlines, though the quality of the results at this early stage has been uneven. Next is the April 7 deadline for publishing the Open Government Plans that will guide long-term implementation for each agency.

A February workshop, sponsored jointly by federal agencies and private sector groups, took a look at dozens of ideas for these plans. Using collaborative methods, the 55 participants, about equally divided between public and private sector groups, reviewed the proposals in a series of intensive sessions and came up with a priority list. (The workshop report can be downloaded here.)

The report presents a set of strong ideas that could do a lot to keep the Open Government process on track toward meaningful change. Nevertheless, in reading them and looking through the Directive, I keep asking myself, What is Open Government really about? How will its grand principles of transparency, participation and collaboration turn into meaningful action that makes a difference in people’s lives?

I’m reminded how different the public expectations can be from those of government employees. What looks like big change from the inside may not register at all with the public. Most people, of course, will never know or care about the Open Government Directive or Open Government Plans, and most don’t have time to spend downloading data sets or finding each agency’s website in order to contribute ideas about policy.

The starting point that tends to get lost in the attention to the details of the Open Government Directive is clear enough. The public doesn’t trust government. A lot of people experience it as closed-minded, ineffective at solving problems, and inefficient and wasteful in the way it spends the taxpayers’ money.

That’s what Obama was responding to in the original Memorandum on Openness in Government. He went right to that problem and made a promise to the American people that the federal government will earn the public’s trust by:

• giving people a greater voice in the decisions that directly affect their lives

• solving the big social and economic problems effectively

• spending money efficiently

• delivering results that matter to people.

At the end of last year, the Progress Report to the American People kept that basic concept in the forefront by using examples of everyday benefits: information for travel plans, nutritional meals, response to local disasters, opportunities for small business. A seldom-mentioned document that is offered as part of the Open Government policy is A Strategy for American Innovation: Driving Towards Sustainable Growth and Quality Jobs. Open Government in that context is a chief contributor to cultivating public sector innovation as a source of sustainable growth and job creation.

That’s the sort of thing Open Government is all about. Transparency, participation and collaboration are only means to that end of unlocking innovation not just for effective and efficient government but also to spur growth. The sharing of ideas and experience should become the norm to create economic benefit, end waste and restore confidence in government.

But it doesn’t sound quite the same when translated into a directive from the Office of Management and Budget. The emphasis shifts from on-the-ground results that benefit people to the more formal steps agencies must take to satisfy a new standard of performance for openness. Granted these are some of the necessary changes inside government that make possible what the public will see outside agency walls. The Directive as a whole, though, tends to reframe the action-oriented language of the White House into terms that better fit existing agency cultures.

That worries me because the whole initiative can start to drift toward compliance with directives and business as usual. As I’ve discussed before that’s an atmosphere in which innovation carries risk, and safety lies in following detailed definitions of what each agency and manager are empowered to do. Going beyond those boundaries can get into the zone of “no good deed goes unpunished.”

That reality is captured in a key recommendation to come out of the workshops: find a way to guarantee anonymity and safety to employees who are bold enough to offer new ideas. Such protection is necessary because innovative ideas are quite likely to be taken as unwanted criticism by leadership. Good call by the workshop group, but it doesn’t sound like setting free the creative torrent of innovation that the White House expects from inside government as well as from the public as a result of the new openness.

This danger is exactly what workshop members are worried about, and their proposals try to steer implementation of the Open Government Directive toward fundamental change rather than passive compliance. Some of the strongest ideas address the need to integrate openness into long-term agency operation and decision-making. In particular, changing performance standards for staff and agencies alike would add a more lasting level of accountability than launching a website or publicizing an exemplary project.

Ongoing training for federal managers and staff is also critical, as is spending the time to ensure that program and agency leadership are really committed to action. The hope, of course, is that the various agencies will act on such ideas and not simply tuck them away in an Open Government Plan that may or may not survive the current Administration’s push for results.

The workshops are performing a great service by getting such proposals into circulation. They have much more influence than individual contributions precisely because they come from a collaborative public-private effort. It’s one that includes leading agencies like the General Services Administration and the Department of Transportation as well as influential activists, consultants and private companies. The workshop series helps build a core of agency supporters who can act as internal advocates of change while the private sector and non-governmental organizations can monitor from the outside.

The first sign of their success will be the release of the Open Government Plans for each agency in early April. The collaborative group is working hard and will reconvene shortly after the plans are out. We’ll keep watching to see what happens.

Related posts:

1. Will Open Government Policies Build Trust for Effective Collaboration?
2. The Open Government Directive & Changing Federal Culture – 2

Deadlines are fast approaching for federal agencies to complete the initial tasks under the Open Government Directive. Publishing new data sets, opening websites, completing longer-term Open Government Plans, and dozens of others.

But notably missing is any deadline or deliverable addressing changes in agency cultures and processes. Yet every day those basic dimensions of government life influence managers and staff to resist new levels of openness. Nevertheless, staff are soon expected to:

• take initiative in sharing information and creating more extensive opportunities for public involvement “throughout the decision-making process” and especially in relation to “core mission activities;”

• embrace and experiment with new and unfamiliar internet technologies to open access to information, elicit public feedback and increase accountability to the public;

• regularly collaborate and partner with people and organizations outside of government; and

• generally “strive to incorporate the values of transparency, participation, and collaboration into the ongoing work of their agency.“

Like many bloggers, I’ve been emphasizing the need for changes in federal agency culture in order to achieve the broad goals of the OGD. Pointing to the need for culture change, however, shouldn’t imply that it’s all up to federal employees to act differently and think in more collaborative terms.

This level of change has to start with the whole system. Federal staff now live with agency cultures that often encourage them to look first at the risks of change rather than its opportunities and to choose the safety of established procedure rather than the uncertainty of innovation. Are those values changing under the influence of the Open Government Initiative, even without guidance from the OGD?

At a recent workshop on implementing the Directive, a group of federal officials brought up important cultural change issues. Despite their awareness of these problems, though, much of what they said reflected familiar assumptions about how to get things done. They seemed to convey a double message, urging innovation based in new values while imposing restrictions rooted in the old. That reflects the problem of the Open Government Initiative as a whole – trying to create a new collaborative culture by relying on current procedures and values that work against such change.

The January 11th workshop was the second in a series intended to open the process of implementation to collaborative discussion. Over 200 representatives of government agencies, open government advocates and consulting firms got together to review the early phase of agency responses to the Directive. (There’s an excellent collection of videos and background information of the workshops at the Open Government Playbook wiki site.)

The federal agencies represented were primarily the IT and public participation offices that are playing a lead role in developing the internet tools and interactive sites that the OGD requires. They showcased some of their promising work-in-progress as well as projects that are already up and running. They also brought up some of the hard problems they run into when trying to get managers and staff to embrace innovation.

One of those problems is fear. Many officials say they’re concerned about the potential misinterpretation of data by the public. Speakers mentioned that the fear of data “misinterpretation,” however, is often fear of disagreement or potential embarrassment. They urged their colleagues to think of this differently – as an opportunity to explore differences that could lead to improvement. That would mean regarding the public as a partner rather than a threat.

They also pointed to a fear of experimenting with new approaches and urged that staff develop a mindset that permitted a cycle of testing, failure and improvement. Trying new methods often involves failure, and one of the purposes of public testing and review is to gather ideas on how to make constructive changes.

It’s refreshing to know that many agencies have innovators urging new attitudes of openness. Those are important voices in any change process. The problem is that the system currently makes the fears they identify as reasonable responses to prevailing norms and values. That reality came through in other statements and presentations.

There were concerns about moving too fast, since other directives would doubtless follow, and about the lack of specificity in definitions and expectations. How far can we really go in openness? What’s the standard to guide our choices? The culture encourages an attitude of waiting for detailed orders from the top. Creativity and independent thinking don’t fit well in this system. It’s dangerous for your career if you get out in front of leadership and established policy or have your name linked to mistakes and failed projects.

These realities make people cautious, and that means implementing a sweeping new directive is likely to happen very slowly. Deadlines will be met, but the products may be sketchy, echoing general principles and laying out timelines of generic planning steps. That’s a common problem with government but another sign that speed and career safety do not go hand in hand.

At the very least, a new set of performance standards will be needed to make it safe for staff and managers alike to experiment and take a lead in innovative forms of collaboration. Those standards would also have to be modeled in the day-to day behavior and attitudes of leaders and managers at all levels.

The messages to federal agencies and staff, then, are contradictory. On the surface, the OGD says, move fast, but the culture of the system says, go slow.

Continuing to create expectations of rapid change through directives and the miracle of internet technology is bound to lead to disappointment.

Related posts:

1. The Open Government Directive & Changing Federal Culture – 2
2. The Open Government Directive & Changing Federal Agency Culture

As a mediator, I have this annoying habit of taking all sides of an issue seriously. Further, as a colleague once put it to me, people in our line of work need to combine optimism about outcomes with cynicism about motives. So I thought I’d offer doses of both in looking at the brighter and darker prospects for the federal agency culture change promised in President’s Open Government Directive.

As I pointed out in an earlier post, without fully cooperative staff and management at all levels, especially beyond the ranks of White House and other political appointees, the entire initiative can become an exercise in mechanical, even reluctant compliance.

The Directive points to the requirement of Open Government Plans as a primary method of instilling the values of transparency, participation and collaboration throughout each agency. That can be a major step but hardly sufficient, given the scope of the task. Plans can set the tone for future change, especially if they’re the product of committed leadership and significant employee input. That process itself can serve as a model of collaboration, and plans can build on that example to create new performance mandates and expectations.

The long list of deadlines, actions and deliverables (more than 70 by one count) can also begin to induce change by getting staff used to meeting the new standards. Culture change, in fact, does happen gradually, rather than as a result of a burst of directives from the top down. New practices and values are at first eagerly embraced by the early adopters – those already committed to change. Others follow in time as the new methods and attitudes actually help them do their jobs, while many will comply with indifference only because it’s required. Setting tight deadlines forces the process to get going.

The primary purpose of those deadlines, though, is the need to show quick results. Having created expectations of rapid adoption of these practices, especially during the campaign, the Administration faces demands for immediate action to prove the sincerity of political commitments. Despite this demand, no one will be satisfied unless staff in charge of data and participation cooperate fully. Employee values and attitudes are critical for consistent results, yet federal staff don’t find a place for their contributions in the Directive, except as the soldiers following orders from above.

The comparable Australian Government 2.0 effort has explicitly emphasized the central role of employee participation in its draft report:

Agencies should support employee-initiated innovative Government 2.0 based proposals that create, or support, greater engagement and participation with their customers, citizens and/or communities of interest in different aspects of the agency’s work. They should create a culture that gives their staff an opportunity to experiment and develop new opportunities for engagement from their own initiative, rewarding those especially who create new engagement/participation tools or methods that can quickly be absorbed into the mainstream practice that lifts the performance of the department or agency.

We have yet to see how that will work in practice, but there is an example of employee-centered culture change in this country’s relatively recent experience. Here’s Bill Clinton introducing the National Performance Review (NPR) in 1993.

Our goal is to make the entire Federal Government both less expensive and more efficient, and to change the culture of our national bureaucracy away from complacency and entitlement toward initiative and empowerment. We intend to redesign, to reinvent, to reinvigorate the entire National Government.

… We will turn first to Federal employees for help. They know better than anyone else how to do their jobs if someone will simply ask them and reward them for wanting to do it better.Remarks by President Clinton Announcing the Initiative to Streamline Government March 3, 1993

Throughout the eight years of the NPR, later renamed the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, culture change was identified as a critical element. Federal employees needed to learn new levels of efficiency (do more with less), adopt entrepreneurial attitudes toward the “business” of government and reframe dealings with the public in terms of service to customers. The method was to combine committed and energetic leadership with employee initiative.

Here’s the way it worked at the Bureau of Reclamation, at least according to a highly promotional status report of 1994 (no assurance of accuracy here, but the idea is a good one):

What the commissioner has launched is, in essence, a culture change, one that transcends jurisdictional boundaries and encourages employees to think creatively about how to do their jobs better. At his initiative, teams of workers developed all of the bureau’s new organizational structures, work processes, and implementation plans.

To increase staff input, [Commissioner Dan] Beard distributes what he calls “How Am I Doing?” cards. On one side is a series of questions about intra-bureau communication, cooperation, empowerment, and recognition and rewards. The other side, under the heading “Make A Difference–Talk Back to Dan,” asks staffers for their ideas and for suggestions about what they would like to see more or less of. He has received more than 700 responses, each of which he answers.

… To encourage his senior managers to take risks, Beard gave them “forgiveness coupons” that they can cash in upon making a mistake. (“It is easier to get forgiveness . . . than permission,” they read.)

Forgiveness coupons sound great and typify the optimistic attitude toward culture change. Install the right leadership, unleash staff creativity and implement their ideas, and then culture change follows. There is no question that this approach can work well. Employees need recognition and reward for their effort, and leadership needs to know how to make use of their contributions. Changes happen because they make sense to the people who are responsible for putting the new policies into practice.

OK, that’s the optimistic view of the outcome – it’s all about voluntary collaboration. The cynical – or just realistic – view takes a harder look at motives. There was a far less voluntary side to the emphasis on staff initiative in the NPR. Al Gore put it bluntly in another early statement: “We must reward the people and ideas that work and get rid of those that don’t.”

If employees, especially managers, didn’t demonstrate inventiveness about cutting budgets and “doing more with less,” there was a real possibility that they could be reinvented out of a job and their offices disappear in reorganization. In fact, as budgets were reduced, federal agencies dropped more than 425,000 positions, consolidated hundreds of field and district offices and stripped authority from others. That was a clear message and provided a strong motive.

This example touched on an aspect of federal agency culture that never gets into the language of directives and press releases. A 2004 post on the Government Executive.Com blog by Brian Friel of the National Journal reported that, for all the talk of a federal agency culture, he could identify only one defining cultural factor shared across the great diversity of federal agencies: politics and the fear it engendered.

“Do not get out in front of the secretary/director.” That’s one key rule that one former federal executive said governs behavior. Another is the understanding of operating in a fish bowl and the realization that their actions might appear on the front page of The Washington Post the next day.

Politics, managers said, trickles down through the bureaucracy as fear. “The fear is the fear of powerful others [managers, Congress, stakeholders] that might be displeased about anything at any time,” explained a federal management analyst. “Fear that careers will be affected, programs will lose funding, one will be marginalized and therefore will not be able to apply one’s abilities to any effect. The cultural effects include indecisiveness, suppression of surfacing issues, little open dialogue and withholding of information.”

Behaviors like these are not just the result of inertia, old school attitudes or personal unwillingness to give up control. They may be partly that, but they are also reasonable responses to conditions far beyond the control of career civil servants.

This bleak assessment doesn’t bode well for the current effort at culture change, since politics ensures a regular shift in priorities and values at the top. As a federal employee under Clinton-Gore, you reinvented and served customers. Under Bush, you shut the doors in the name of national security. Under Obama, you’ll fling them open in the name of democracy. Through it all, you cooperate with the trend or face the consequences.

If it’s true that politics is the overriding force influencing agency culture and behavior, who’s going to change that?

People become politically active because they want their values and policies to control government, especially its employees. There will always be tension between those emphasizing the need for top-down control to get quick results and those who see the need for collaboration by all the key participants in change. That’s no less true when the values and practices in question are themselves collaborative.

Related posts:

1. Ideas for Implementing the Open Government Directive
2. Moving Fast, Going Slow: Implementing the Open Government Directive
3. The Open Government Directive & Changing Federal Agency Culture