Any good basketball coach knows that a quiet team is a losing team. When your folks aren’t talking, they don’t trust each other, and they’re not working together. The crowd can feel it, too: desperation in sports almost always arrives quietly.
As with basketball, so goes any organization.
If you are in any large organization, especially if you work on an internal team, speaking up might not come naturally. But when changes must be made, lacking a habit of talkative teamwork is a real detriment.
It’s a detriment because, when teams don’t talk to customers or each other regularly and informally, problems seem mysterious, Gordian, and insurmountable. There’s a tendency to think change can only come in the form of “modernizations”, which are frequently just ill-conceived white elephants that completely dismantle what you have in the overbearing confidence that you, your team, and your moment, will be able to build it all back, but much better and without any flaws.
That approach is unwise for two reasons. First, it is very expensive. Second, it leaves all institutional knowledge as trash on the doorstep of the Grass is Always Greener. But, because it is a popular choice, let’s explore its effectiveness.
“Modernization” in government means spending years with various contractors building new workflows and tools (don’t forget to include AI; that’s a requirement now). It means training your workforce on those workflows and tools, trying to talk to a few customers along the way if you can, launching it all to see if it works, and seeing if you can sustain it.The majority of modernizations fail, but still—you can try.
All this, or you could try the cheap way. The cheap way has two parts: send better communications to your external customers, and treat your teams like internal customers by doing research with them.
“Better” means these communications that are brief, written in plain language, and set reasonable expectations regarding processing timelines and possible outcomes. As any restaurant hostess knows, being polite and honest about your timeline, even if it’s going to be a long wait, is a better way to handle customers than evasion or overpromising. Examples of better communications having enormously beneficial effects on programs can be found in the work of the Nevada Department of Employment, Training, and Rehabilitation as well as in the IRS’ attempts to reduce likely errors in tax filings.*
After that, use the human-centered design discovery process as you would with any external customer to build trust with your internal teams and understand what specific parts of different processes need fixing. This research approach—interviews, observation, and collaborative problem-solving—is what gains you the trust necessary for team members to reveal the real issues.
You will find that Laura has been flipping between the two monthly data pulls to compare column AG on the first one to column P on the second because they should add up to 100% every 10th row (except after the 300th row, then it skips to every 20th row because the spreadsheets’ field designations change). She has no way of doing this programmatically because the sheets are from different teams and they both lock them down. You will facepalm over the realization that Dave has been hand-entering data from customer submission forms for 6 years because there’s a bug in the form that results in that field messing up every 6 or 8 submissions, so Dave has to check each one manually. He blocks off 4 hours every Friday to do this.
These scenarios sound hyperbolic, but they are actual stories from my time as the Service Design and Enterprise Digital Experience Manager at GSA and as a designer working with the Office of Patient Advocates in the Veterans Health Administration.
Fixing these issues is not a major modernization effort, but getting the trust of your team to tell you about them is often a major management one. Laura and Dave have done this work without saying anything for so long because they have been taught through experience that speaking up will (a) result in no change at all and (b) might threaten their jobs. But their jobs are not flipping spreadsheets or checking data submissions: the very presence of their taking on these tasks demonstrates that they are scrupulous and dedicated employees. Fixing these issues means you can apply those human attributes better and get other, more important work done. Now that’s efficiency.
Better communications and fixing basic internal tools are two of the fastest, best ways to improve government services. A lot about the government is broken, but it’s not all so broken that it needs an AI deployment and/or a billion dollar contract. A lot of government just needs better communication externally and more trust internally. If you’re a program manager or staffer slogging it out right now, I’d advise you to focus down and to focus on these things. You’ll see results. I know because I already did both these things, in two different agencies. Good comms and good management: that’s the way to improve government.
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