AUA: Is Real Change Possible Inside Federal Bureaucracy?

**Sam Spurlin** (0:03)
Hey, everyone, welcome back to At Work with The Ready. I'm Sam Spurlin, and I'm joined, as always, by Rodney Evans.

**Rodney Evans** (0:09)
Hi, Sam. Hi, everyone.

**Sam Spurlin** (0:11)
Every other week, we're tackling one tough, thought-provoking listener question and sharing a few ideas that might help. So let's dive in. Rodney, what you got for us this week?

**Rodney Evans** (0:21)
I am an internal consultant within a giant federal agency. Much of the context of your podcast is corporate focused. There are times when the incentives you describe don't match feds.
Many of my internal clients are tasked with the mission of maintaining and regulating rather than innovation of underlying concepts. Can you do an episode about federal agencies tasked with regulating or administering and what dynamics you see come up there that are different from corporate sector? I especially found the episode on dual transformation not resonant, noted. We could innovate processes, but usually not the fundamental goals of the agencies.

**Sam Spurlin** (1:02)
Yeah, I'm not surprised that the dual transformation topic didn't quite slap. It is a different context for sure. What I think about with this question is any client we have worked with, and we have worked with federal agencies, where there's a lot of regulation.
And I think the kind of step zero of any sort of work, like the work we talk about in federal agencies or any highly regulated space, is to really, really understand the landscape, really understand what the regulations allow for and do not allow for. In a lot of the places that I have done this work, the regulations are vaguely understood by most, very understood by very few, and generally just used as a bit of a cudgel to keep people away from the edges. For probably good reason, don't want to be breaking the laws and whatnot. However, I think if you care about doing organizational work, the way we talk about it on this podcast, and you're in an environment like this, you have to become the deepest expert on the actual regulatory environment in which you are operating, so that you can have a lot of confidence and trust in the white space that exists below or around those lines that you can actually do something with. That's for me is always step zero, because once we can define the true boundaries, then we can actually do interesting things. I think there's a lot of great work to be done, even if you're holding purpose constant, which is essentially what this question is saying. We're not changing the purpose of a federal agency. So does that mean there's nothing else worth doing?
Absolutely not. That's not the case. There's 11 other fields of the operating system canvas in The Ready's parlance that probably has some work that we can do.

**Rodney Evans** (2:54)
I just want to say, having done work with federal agencies, first of all, I actually find that there are a lot of people working in agencies that have a more innovative mindset than people in large, antiquated, bureaucratic companies. In some cases, I think there's less ego because I think that there are a lot of mission-driven people and very service-oriented people in federal agencies. We have a lot of really smart clients in federal agencies that could just make a shitload more money in the private sector, and they choose to do this because it's important to them, and they feel like it's their civic duty.
I say this because I have personally had the experience of introducing more radical ideas in federal agencies than my corporate clients would let me say on a stage. So first, I would parse out the regulatory landscape that Sam just very eloquently discussed with the posture of innovation, because I actually don't think that Venn diagram is not a circle. You can be very innovative in mindset and still work in a company or in an organization that is highly regulated and highly administrative in nature, which leads me to what you can actually innovate. That's what's going to be different is like, you're probably not innovating product or creating a new growth engine like your company be, but a lot of the best work that I've seen, the innovation is around execution. And it is around the removal of broken process or the re-imagining of workflows or the inclusion of automation or whatever and actually on that, service design.

**Sam Spurlin** (4:44)
A lot of federal agencies are interfacing with the public. Like there's a lot of innovation to be done about how that goes.

**Rodney Evans** (4:50)
Totally. Right. User centered design.
And generally speaking, because federal agencies aren't trying to hit a quarterly number, there's a lot more patience for that stuff. So I've seen better work of that stripe unfold in an agency context because people have patience for something to happen, and it doesn't have to immediately translate into a lagging metric on a spreadsheet in order to be worth doing. And so I say this because I would like, I understand what you're saying, and I would sort of like flip the script a little bit to be like, use the mindset of innovation that is almost inevitably there to tackle the inverse problem, which is removing friction rather than growth, and use the fact that you work in a place that doesn't completely function on a three month cycle to your benefit, because that's actually a pretty rare condition, and it makes doing this kind of work a lot more fun.