A Government that Can Imagine, Try, and Scale
By: Harvard Ash Center
Tags: Covid 19, Leadership, Crisis Management, Cities, Coronavirus

If “possibility government” and “public entrepreneurship” are not to be the oxymorons skeptics make them out to be, we have to be effective in their practice. This requires public leaders to do at least three things: generate new ideas, try them, and ultimately scale these efforts up to make a large and lasting difference.

Sourcing Ideas

Cast a wide net for ideas. Bring in traditional experts, non-experts, and experts from other domains.

Look to the crowd: leverage challenges, competitions, and contests.

Engage residents. Look for their workarounds. “Nothing about them without them.”

Be most interested in the quality of the best idea that crosses your desk, not the average quality of all the ideas. More ideas + different ideas = better ideas.

Don’t settle for “best practices” when “best” isn’t good enough.

Experimenting

Maximize learning while minimizing the waste of resources and time. Follow five steps (↗️ Detailed worksheet at the bottom here):

Envision: Set a vision, translate to a falsifiable hypothesis. o BUILD: Develop a “minimum viable product” — i.e. the smallest set of features or activities needed to test a hypothesis.

Measure: Run tests, using the real service with the real users. o LEARN: Was your hypothesis validated or not?

Decide: Persevere, pivot, or perish?

Experiment with the public, not on them.

Promise learning, not success.

Consider portfolios of experiments, then aim high so the “wins” cover the losses.

Scaling

Think about how you can use government as a platform: a way to bring individuals together in ways that create value for other individuals — and for the broader public.

Work to generate positive network effects, where user two makes user one better off. Look to mitigate negative network effects, where users make each other worse off (e.g., congestion, fraud, etc.).

Use four sets of tools to make your platforms function well: rules, process, software, and hardware.

Generate and preserve trust in the platforms.

Organize for Probability and Possibility; Craft an Ambidetrious Response

Possibility is fraught in public organizations. Expectations are high. Risk aversion abounds. Trying things that will only possibly work cannot and should not be the sole strategy. Public leaders must keep an eye on the present and the future; on doing what they already do well, and looking for new things worth trying. The crisis response should combine possibility and probability approaches. “Ambidextrous” leaders can perform this mental balancing act. They can also separate these approaches somewhat within their teams’ operations so that innovation streams canbenefit from “cross-fertilization” with other parts of the organization, but neither approach suffers from “cross-contamination” by the other.

Pursuing new — and therefore risky — efforts is difficult in public life and especially difficult in a crisis. But innovation can not simply be left to the private sector or philanthropy. Both can play key roles in catalyzing new efforts, but they cannot effectively solve public problems without the co-participation of governments. Governments are often better positioned to do this work, and they can lead meaningfully (as they have before) in the pursuit of novel approaches.