Pivot for the United States

Pivot for the United States

Time to Pivot?

A “Pivot” is a term from entrepreneurship that is used to describe changing your current strategy because it isn’t working. You track the data that matters most, and when it starts to show that you are no longer making progress, but hopefully before it’s too late, you decide whether to give up, or change your approach..

Choosing to pivot is a very hard decision. It means giving up on the direction you are going, discarding the work you did, and recognizing that all the other things you promised people — the revenue, the solid business, the market — were not there, and the results of all your labor were the experience, knowledge, connections, vocabulary, and team you acquired along the way.

You may feel like it’s over. You may even feel like you’ve decided to give up.

Pivoting is not giving up. It is having the maturity and insight to realize that although unsuccessful, what you have created is still worth it, that the original vision and goals are still as important as before. The difference is that now you know more, and from this new vantage point you can make better decisions.

Once your team pulls through the pivot, you’ll know you’ve made the right decision, because suddenly everything makes sense again, and you feel like every hour you devote to your strategy moves you further forward than the last time.

I have been feeling this for a while now, as I’m sure many of you have as well.

The United States needs to pivot to become effective again.

Why Now?

So much has changed since the United States was formed. As a country, we were an experiment to see if a group of people could rule themselves. We succeeded many times over, and in many unexpected ways. But we are still an experiment: we are the oldest startup that was ever created. And we are still evolving.

What has changed is that piece of glass and electronics in your pocket. The connectivity, the data, the ability to process data on a massive scale, the security, the culture of innovation, and the way that we can now unite billions of people. At no time in history could you poll information, ask for comments, or collect arguments at such scale. No one had time for this before. Now we can click a button and respond to an argument from anyone else on the planet. Let that soak in. This isn’t normal, but it is amazing that we think it is.

We need to acknowledge that we live in perhaps the most amazing time in history, and this gives us a chance to reinvent ourselves and pivot one more time.

A pivot doesn’t need to be a revolution, but it is time for a transformation. We have the technical skills, infrastructure, knowledge, vocabulary, and talent to make this work. My vision is to organize our government to make it vastly more efficient and agile, so that there is less government that does more.

Pivot toward Data The scope of what I’m talking about doesn’t change anything in the Constitution. It is an upgrade to the internal bureaucracy that is impossible to understand or view. Currently the Independent Agencies of the US Government are obfuscated because the systems they use are not configured to be transparent. This is something we can change.

For example, we deserve to know how the mission statements of the CIA connects to its current objectives, and if they are actually accomplishing them. If the entire government had a mandate to publish their objectives, scorecards, and the data they used to show this being accomplished, then as a people we could verify that these groups are working on our behalf.

In the simplest form, this pyramid represents the vision for how the US government could be transparent, with its objectives and the data used to grade its effectiveness.

Objective Pyramid #1.png

Deciders: We elect them so that they can make decisions on our behalf but they work for us. Make sure they have a vision and track record for sticking to it.

Objectives: Our deciders should tell us what they are going to do every quarter and how that accomplishes the annual objectives every year. They should publish a scorecard every quarter and use the “State of the Union” address to show what was done in the last year, and what the plan will be for the next.

Key Results: Decide how to measure the success of an objective before you start pursuing it. This removes all the drama of “fake news”, because you can’t keep moving the goal post. Don’t use just a checklist of promises, use one to three sources of data to show that we are moving toward a goal.

Data

I’m talking about clean, time series, cited, data that is coming from multiple sources, to lessen the chance of distrust or accusations that you’re “faking it”.

The best part of this is that we already have all of these parts, it is merely a change in how WE THE PEOPLE think. We can talk about objectives, we can measure our results with reliable data, and we can elect decision makers that respect our priorities.

What would this look like to us? What this turns into is a dashboard. I live in King County in Washington State. When Covid-19 hit our area, Governor Inslee’s team came up with a dashboard to show us how they are making decisions about closing and opening businesses.

Click through to see the real Tableau Dashboard Click through to see the real Tableau Dashboard

This is exactly what I was talking about. They didn’t call it Objectives and Key Results but they appear to be using a system that looks just like it. This transparency shows us how the decisions are being made and as a result I really like our Governor.

Conclusion

I believe that lobbying, politics, and propaganda have made for the ineffective government the U.S. is saddled with today. This sort of behavior is simply human, and we see it when companies get large enough that the deciders lose touch with the citizens. Today, techniques like OKRs and Data Science are already used to make companies more effective.

Why shouldn’t our government do the same?

If you agree with what I’m talking about, please spread these ideas.