Jennifer Pahlka on Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age

In a special InnovateUS event on September 7th, Jennifer Pahlka, Former Deputy Chief Technology under President Obama and founder of Code for America joined Steve Kadish, Burnes Center for Social Change Senior Fellow and former Chief of Staff to Governor Charlie Baker, to discuss her new book  Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better with over 200 public sector professionals from across the U.S. and abroad Pahlka and Kadish shared their expertise and insights on how government is faring in the digital age and how we can move towards a system where we create bottom-up solutions in government, bring more people to the decision-making table, and insist on policy and process simplification to get systems that work for people in government and the residents they serve.  

Jennifer Pahlka is a tech pioneer specializing in making government work for people in the digital age. In 2010, she founded Code for America, an organization that helps build digital tools, design and implement policies, improve programs, and encourage community collaboration within government to maximize outcomes for constituents. Pahlka served as U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer under President Obama and helped found the United States Digital Service. She served on the Defense Innovation Board, started by the late Ash Carter, under Presidents Obama and Trump. In addition to founding Code for America, Pahlka Co-Founded the United States Digital Response at the beginning of 2020. Jennifer Pahlka was named by Wired as one of 25 people who have most shaped the last 25 years. 

Steve Kadish, who served as a host and facilitator for the workshop, is an executive problem-solver who has worked in the public and private sectors as COO, CFO and big projects lead for over 30 years. Kadish served as Chief of Staff for Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, focused on tackling urgent policy and operational problems. Kadish and Governor Baker co-authored Results Getting Beyond Politics to Get Important Work Done: A Leader’s Guide to Executing Change and Delivering Results, which was published in May 2022 by Harvard Business Review Press.

Code for America In Its Infancy 

To begin the workshop, Kadish asked Pahlka to share some of her background and elaborate on her experiences at Code for America in its infancy. Pahlka shared some of her lessons learned while running Code for America, and cited a project involving the City of Boston’s school assignment criteria, which was adapted to improve walking accessibility for students. 

The City decided to communicate this new criteria in a 28-page document, which placed a heavy burden on parents and caregivers to read and understand their eligibility status. Code for America took this document and designed a web application that would enable easy navigation for users. Pahlka explained that Boston’s Director of Public Schools at the time said to Joel Mahoney, the Code for America Fellow heading the project, “You are changing our relationship with parents”.

Pahlka explained how this project, which only took a small team 11 weeks to complete, would have taken two years and around $2 million through the normal mechanisms of project management. 

The biggest takeaway from this project for Pahlka was the relationship between delivery and policy; the reason why this project was possible to complete in a short time frame was the open channels of communication between the application developers and those who wrote and constructed the new policies. This idea was further cemented when Pahlka observed the inner workings of the United Kingdom’s Government Digital Service and its ambition of bringing delivery and implementation to the center of its policymaking. 

Motivations Behind Writing Recoding America 

Kadish then asked Pahlka what had prompted her to write her book Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better. Her response: individuals outside of government circles repeatedly asking for clarity on why things within government are not working. 

Pahlka explained, “As I wrote [the book], it became clear to me there are so many people pushing this ball up this hill of trying to change not just the practices, but the structures that enable the practices of our work.” She went on to say that we, as public service professionals, need external organizations to understand our work so that we can share our findings, hone our practices, gain support, and foster collaboration. 

“The Procedure Fetish” 

Kadish directed special attention to one particular chapter of Pahlka’s book titled “The Procedure Fetish”, a term coined by Nick Bagley, and highlighted the succinct way in which Pahlka was able to capture a problem that “everybody in any kind of government will know a lot about”.

In her book, Pahlka uses an allegory she learned when working in software to explain this conundrum. It is that of a lost hot-air balloonist asking directions from a stranger who is 30 feet below him. The stranger provides the balloonist with his height off the ground, latitude, and longitude. The balloonist says to the stranger “You must be an engineer”. The pedestrian replies “Yes, I am. How did you know?”. The balloonist replies “Everything you told me was technically correct, but it is entirely unhelpful and I am still lost!”

However, Pahlka explains in her book that when she entered government, it became very clear that the ‘butt’ of the balloonist joke, engineers and other digital team members, were often in the position where the balloonist found himself: on the receiving end of unhelpful yet technically correct information from bureaucrats invoking the law.

In her book, Pahlka provides multiple real-life scenarios from her various positions and professional experiences to demonstrate how this issue is widespread and indiscriminate.

Defining Service Designers and Product Managers 

“User Needs, Not Government Needs” 

Kadish drew attention to the gap in knowledge, particularly in the public sector and state government, of the role and potential of product managers. Effective product managers can add real value to government work. Natalie Kates, former Product Manager for the United Services Digital Service and former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the COVID response at the Biden White House, is an example of one such individual, who works with complicated policies and makes them “make sense to a person”.Pahlka explained that individuals like Kates reject elite professional authority, in favor of something more accessible, practical, and common sense. Furthermore, people like Kates invoke “a historically deep-rooted notion that we, the people, are allowed to interpret the law in a way that makes sense to us.”

Product managers focus on the concept of user research and on understanding how policies, law, and complex structures can be developed into usable end-products. What we are now seeing, with a huge amount of effort from passionate public service professionals, is a reclaiming of this type of work.

Where We Are Today, and What We Need to Move Forward 

Towards the end of Pahlka’s book, she makes the case that “technology has changed people’s needs, expectations and behaviors.” Government needs to adapt to support these novel needs, expectations and behaviors, and Pahlka offered the following suggestions for governments moving forward: 

1. A greater focus on acquiring talent and reducing the amount of time that government agencies take to hire;

2. Securing better funding opportunities that encourage teams to “learn as they go” and not hinder the potential of project outcomes;

3. Reducing risk aversion which stunts innovation, collaboration, and creative problem-solving

4. Highlighting positive and innovative outcomes, in an environment where public servants are hardly given recognition when their work results in innovative, useful, and usable outcomes. 

See Jen Pahlka’s list of core concepts from her book here.

Missed the workshop? Watch the recording here!