Monthly Archives: June 2009

Change: Make It Visible

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In an interview with Wired, Vivek Kundra, Obama’s Chief Information Officer, says Obama plans to post online every scrap of government information they can and make them easily to search. Why?

The key is to have debates and analysis and discussions that are fact-based. And for everyone to have access to that raw data, the raw facts. I would go back to 1776 and the model of the public square. Democratizing data enables comparative analysis of the services the government provides and the investments it makes, leading to a better government….

By democratizing data, the American people will be able to hold their government accountable, based on evidence rather than talk.

That’s essentially the argument of the next step in my model: to bring about change, you have to make the issue visible — and do it with evidence you can measure.

Why is visibility so important? Let’s go back to the issue of worklife balance. Suppose there was an easy way to tell how seriously every organization took worklife balance. With that info, we’d have several carrots & sticks we could use to push for change:

  • Stack the Deck in favor of worklife-friendly organizations, such as giving them tax breaks, a leg up in bidding for government contracts, etc. The higher the score, the bigger the bennies.
  • Create a movement to hold organizations accountable. If a company’s branding is all about how much they care about your family, why isn’t this “family-friendly” company helping its staff take care of their families? If their ads say, women should buy our soap/shoes/magazine because it’ll help them feel empowered, what about empowering the mothers who work for them so they can have a career and take care of their family without being a nervous, exhausted wreck?
  • Create competition between organizations — for bragging rights with customers, for competing to hire the best employees, etc.
  • Make it easier for workers to negotiate for more worklife balance, either through their union if they have one or through lobbying inside their organization if they don’t.

Here’s the catch: first we have to figure out how we are going to measure worklife balance. And that’s no easy task. It’s something I plan to work on over the next year or so. It’s worth putting the time in, because visibility pays off.

Visibility alone won’t solve most problems. But to solve most problems, you need to make them visible.

A side note:

When Kundra was asked, “Do you worry that all this data will come out and benefit only the few elite or tech-savvy groups that know how to use it?” he dodged the question. But even though this issue is near and dear to my heart, I think we ought to give him a break on this one. His real answer was probably something like, “Are you out of your freakin’ mind? Do you have any idea how insanely hard it’s going to be to wrestle all this data out of the claws of every bureaucrat who’s terrified of what will happen when everyone can see what they do? Not to mention all the corporations and everybody else who’s data we collect? You really think hospitals, insurance companies, and drug companies want any of their shared out in public? This is trench war, baby. Yes, eventually we want to make the data truly accessible to everybody, but first we’ve got to make it accessible at all.”

Getting Dirty on the Farm

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On Wednesday, The Kojo Nnamdi Show had a great example of how understanding actors & their ecosystem can be crucial for pushing the economy towards our values.

Today, middle-class professional folks like myself can get great tasting local organic produce from farmers markets, CSAs, etc. for a good chunk of the year. But for many folks, local organic produce is still too expensive — and if you live in the Hood in most cities, it’s both expensive and time-consuming to actually get to where the produce is being sold.

In the long run, we’re going to have to change the way we subsidize food. Taxpayers shelling out cash to make Twinkies less expensive (by subsidizing sugar & corn prices) instead of making local, organic fruits & veggies less expensive is just stupid. Why should that matter to us? If we can get more folks to eat more fruits and veggies, we could put a serious dent in healthcare costs — the one thing research studies agree on is that eating more fruits and veggies reduces the risk of everything from heart attacks to diabetes to some types of cancer. And if we do it right, it’ll also help revitalize local rural economies by creating more good jobs in sustainable agriculture.

But that’s a tough, long-term fight. What can we do in the meantime?

Turns out that if you take a close look at how local organic farming works, you can find unexpected ways to lower the cost of produce. An awful lot of fruit and vegetables don’t make it to your local farmers market — let alone to grocery stores that use local produce — because it isn’t pretty enough or perfect enough for what consumers expect. So farmers don’t usually turn much profit on that less-than-perfect but still high-quality produce.

Michael F. Curtin, Jr., Chief Executive Officer of the D.C. Central Kitchen, gave the example of a farm that wasn’t able to pick all of its cabbage quickly enough. As a result, many cabbages became so big you needed two hands to hold them. Curtin said grocery stores won’t accept these big, high-quality cabbages because most shoppers expect to be able to pick up most grocery store produce with one hand. So the DC Central Kitchen was able to get a really good deal from the farmer for those cabbages, and the farmer made a little money than they would otherwise have.

There’s another interesting side benefit. DC Central Kitchen operates on a large scale — they produce over 4500 meals for the hungry every day — so it’s worth their while to send their little fleet of trucks out to farmers to pick up the high-quality but not perfect produce that would otherwise go to waste. In turn, they are now able to transport some of this great but not perfect produce to local restaurants who can’t afford to regularly drive out to farmers, generating revenue for farmers and for themselves. In short, by targeting this overlooked produce, they are beginning to turn into a de facto regional produce transit network. Over time, this transportation network might open up new opportunities to get fresh, locally grown organic produce to people who don’t have access to it today.

None of this is a perfect long-term answer. But it shows how getting your hands dirty — really understanding how actors & their ecosystem operate — can open up new opportunities to push the economy towards our values.

Why Understanding the Actors & Their Ecosystem Matters

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Recently NPR ran a piece about the impact behavioral economists — the folks who argue that people aren’t calculators — are having on the Obama administration. NPR gave a sample of the dizzying amount of hard empirical research backing up behavioral economics, then asked, “So why would economists assume that human beings are so hyper-rational?” One answer’s obvious — house of cards, meet puff of wind:

An imperfectly rational human being challenges a really important idea: the notion that markets work well because individuals can be counted on to make the best choice for themselves.

But there’s another, less obvious reason. Economists like their models the way Martha Stewart likes her doormat: clean and under control. Their reaction to the little-kids-with-muddy-bare-feet messiness of how people actually make decisions?

“Behavioral economics has identified a dizzying array of human foibles. We clearly can’t incorporate all of them, and because of that, people feel that incorporating one error into your model may be just as unrealistic as incorporating none,” says Ed Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard University.

Or to use more technical language, ewwwww.

So if you decide that you can’t ignore the muddiness of reality, what do you do? That’s the reason for the next step in the model: Understand the Actors & Their Ecosystem. If we want to push the economy towards a particular value that matters to us, we can’t make simple assumptions about the way the world works just because it’s easy. We’ve got to dig in and get dirty.

Up next: getting dirty on the farm.

Why Choosing Worklife Balance by Ourselves Hurts Kids

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There’s another reason that we have to choose together if we value work life balance: if we don’t, we’ll hurt kids.

Not the kids of computer programmers. The market’s done a truly terrible job so far at creating computer programming jobs with worklife balance. But as our population ages, the number of people who absolutely have to have worklife balance — to take care of their elderly parents and their kids — will grow so large that people with more market power will get real worklife balance. When researchers talk about how companies will be forced to use worklife balance to assist in hiring and retention, these are the folks the researchers are thinking about. Their kids will be okay (eventually).

But janitors’ kids? Even if the market eventually provides work life balance for janitors — and that includes creating janitor jobs that pay enough so janitors don’t have to work two or more jobs & insanely long hours to just put food on the table — it’s going to be a very, very, very, very long time coming.

So if we just choose by ourselves, here’s how it’ll play out. If you’re clever enough to be born into a family where your parents are professionals, your parents will have the time and flexibility to go to your soccer games, to help you with homework, to really spend time with you. And if you’re born into a family where your parents have low-wage jobs, they won’t.

In other words, choosing by ourselves means we’re stacking the deck even further against kids on the bottom.

This is why the first step in the model — figuring out what are our values — is so crucial. If you focus on the value of worklife balance without also focusing on the value of equal opportunity, you’re gonna leave janitors’ kids behind. It’s scary how many good people who write about worklife balance miss this.

(It could also be that they are so elitist that they don’t give a crap about low-wage workers and their kids. But they seem like good folks, so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt)

Bottom line: if we value work life balance and we also value giving everyone a fair shot, we’ve got to Choose Together.

Choosing Together: Worklife Balance

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Suppose you want to be able to work hard at a job you like but also have time for your family or for a life outside work. Womenomics, new book just excerpted by BusinessWeek, says no problem, the market’s going to take care of it. Why? Because most of us really want it:

• 63% of us believe we don’t have enough time for our spouses or partners
• 74% of us say we don’t have enough time for our children
• 35% of adults are putting significant time toward caring for an elder relative.

Bottom line?
• Half of us want fewer hours
• Half of us would change our schedules
• More than half would trade money for a day off
• Three-quarters of us want flexible work options

And because more women are choosing jobs with worklife balance, and more companies are choosing to create those kinds of jobs:

But the most important component driving the change is that women are finally understood to be good for business…. And what’s remarkable about the process is that the change is coming as individual women everywhere negotiate to work the way it works best for them. And it’s coming in major waves, as companies start to open up their minds and company policies.

Oh, to live in the fantasy world of business gurus. Can I move there? And can I bring my friends — the ones who, forget about worklife balance, would be grateful just to work less than 50 hours a week? The world we seem to be stuck in is more like one Fortune Magazine described a few years ago, before the recession:

[Today,] declaring your interest in a human-sized job is like announcing a disease….

Either you’re a maniacal workaholic who runs the world–or you’re a Dilbert, punching a clock with little power and authority. Too many businesspeople think that’s just the way of the world. “You can’t have it all,” they say. But let’s be very clear on what “all” is. People want to work at the level they’re capable of and still have time for things outside work that nourish them…. To say this is “wanting it all” is like saying people should have to choose between food and water.

Even at the top of the corporate food chain, Fortune found a desire for work life balance but little room for it. Fortune’s 2005 survey of senior FORTUNE500 male executives found that

84% say they’d like job options that let them realize their professional aspirations while having more time for things outside work; 55% say they’re willing to sacrifice income… In addition, 73% believe it’s possible to restructure senior management jobs in ways that would both increase productivity and make more time available for life outside the office.

Of course there’s a roadblock to reform: fear. FORTUNE’s survey found that even though most senior-level men want better options, nearly half believe that for an executive to take up the matter with his boss will hurt his career.

And that’s the folks who have the best options in the market for individual choices. For the rest of us? Even Womenomics admits that “Almost half of working parents believe their jobs might be in jeopardy if they work flexibly.”

Step 1 of the model asks two questions: “What Are Our Values?” And if we choose to realize these values, “Are These Choices We’ve Got to Choose Together?” If most of us value worklife balance, the answer to the second question is pretty clear — we’re going to have to choose together.

Da Model v0.1

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Now that I’ve laid out some basic principles & assumptions, it’s time for my first extremely rough draft of a model for thinking about the economy to create a better world. With the principles & assumptions, I’ve been thinking about them for quite a while. This model? This is my first time — the “Stumbling Towards” of my blog’s subtitle.

A quick overview of where we’re headed in the next few weeks.

  1. What Are Our Values? What Trade-Offs Are We Willing to Make?
    • Are These Choices We’ve Got to Choose Together? (Principle #2)
    • Caveat: We Can’t Control the Economy (Principle #1)
    • Chocolate Cake Diets Are a Bad Idea (New Principle, #5)
  2. Push the Economy Towards Our Values (Stack the Deck , Principle #3)
    1. Understand the Actors & their Ecosystem (Assumptions #1, #2, #3)
    2. Create a Strategy Map
    3. Use 3 Strategies for Change
      • Make It Visible
      • Make It Easy
      • Make It Worth Doing (Carrots & Sticks)
    4. Make It Sustainable (includes Checks and Balances, Principle #4)
    5. Rinse, Repeat (feedback loops, see also Principle #1)

Since the basics of the first part — figuring out our values — are pretty straightforward, I’m going to start by just briefly discussing them. After I’ve gone through the second part, I’ll round back to some of the nuances of the first.

I’ve never tried to think out loud online, so this is a little nerve-racking for me. So, one last caveat. Obviously, this isn’t the model I’m going to end up with. But the only way to get there is by laying out some model, warts and all, then working on it.

Up next: taking this model out for spin using the issue of work-life balance.

User-Centered Policy Design

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As we saw in the last post, one reason computerizing healthcare records can be a disaster is that the people designing the software don’t pay attention to how people will actually use it.

Some software designers argue that the way to avoid this mistake is to use “user-centered design.” Don’t assume that nurses in a hectic hospital see the world the same way software geeks in quiet cubicles do. Instead, go talk to nurses, doctors, administrative assistants, and everybody else who’se going to use the system. Watch how they work. Use what you learn to create a clear picture in your head of the different kinds of users who’re going to use the system — what matters to them, what assumptions they make. Then create “user scenarios” that explain how each type of user would expect to use the software to do their job.

It’s the same idea as in industrial design. Here’s what Toyota did when they wanted to build the Toyota Tundra:

In August 2002, Obu and his team began visiting different regions of the U.S.; they went to logging camps, horse farms, factories and construction sites to meet with truck owners. By asking them face to face about their needs, Obu and Schrage sought to understand preferences for towing capacity and power; by silently observing them at work, they learned things about the ideal placement of the gear shifter, for instance, or that the door handle and radio knobs should be extra large, because pickup owners often wear work gloves all day. When the team discerned that the pickup has now evolved into a kind of mobile office for many contractors, the engineers sought to create a space for a laptop and hanging files next to the driver.

But they couldn’t just pay attention to users’ needs. They also need to understand the needs of the folks who have to figure out how to build the truck.

Design engineers, however, cannot simply create the best truck they can; they need to create the best truck that can be built in a big factory. In other words, Tundra’s design engineers had to confer with Tundra’s manufacturing engineers at every step of the way to create a truck — or 31 trucks, really — that could be assembled efficiently and systematically.

Once in a while, policy geeks pay the same kind of attention to how folks actually work. But just as often they act like the software geeks who build brain-dead healthcare systems that cause as many problems as they fix.

A few years ago I heard a health care expert cheerfully explain how to create financial incentives to keep people from going to doctors unnecessarily. I wondered if he had any clue about what it was like to have a low-wage job and not have any health insurance. The folks I used to treat when I worked in a free health care clinic didn’t need extra financial “incentives” to not visit us. They already had a big financial incentive — they didn’t have sick days, so if they didn’t show up they didn’t get paid and they might get fired. He didn’t know anything about their world — and he didn’t want to, because it would complicate his neat little healthcare model.

The same is true for developers if you’re trying to encourage smart growth. If you don’t understand their world, it’s easy to create rules that’ll make even pro-smart growth developers ask, what did I do to deserve this? And you’ll miss out on opportunities. For example, for developers time is money. So if you can create rules that save developers time — like fast tracking permits that are smart-growth friendly — you can create real financial incentives for smart growth without spending a dime.

If you start from my model’s three assumptions about people, organizations, and markets/politics, this won’t fly. If you want to shape the economy, you need to think more like Toyota Tundra designers and sweat the details of the worlds folk really live in.

We’ve even got an advantage over the Tundra designers. When making a truck, giving customers a say is a good idea. When making a better world, making sure everyone has a say is their right. They own the joint, so they get to have a vote.

I don’t yet have a good name for this approach. For now, I’ll stick with a not-great name – user-center policy design. If you’ve got a better one, help me out and put it in a comment.