Bill's Notebook

It is time to move from creating a more open government to sustaining open government. Yes, there is a lot more work to do in making agencies on all levels of government are releasing their data and becoming transparent. Governments have successfully picked the low-hanging fruit of opening up their datasets. It’s now time to change the culture of government so that openness, transparency, and collaboration is embodied in everything government does. Ten years from now (if not sooner) government employees shouldn’t even have to think about if they are being open, transparent, and collaborative because the culture of the agency insures that they they are.

Culture is a natural byproduct of humans as social beings. We develop culture so that we can get along, survive, and achieve goals. It is only naturally that we develop cultures at work because a large part of our waking hours is spent at work or thinking about work. A single person cannot have a culture; it takes interactions between each other to create a culture. But what exactly is culture?

There are many academic definitions for culture but for our purposes I prefer this simple definition: the way we do things around here. “We” come together in a defined group (eg. IBM, HUD, Star Trek fans) and in a defined boundary such as a department, office, or online community (“around here”). We develop methods, practices, policies, etc. (“way”) that govern the actions (“do”) members of the culture take in response to “things” (issues, events, etc.) that we face as a culture. Essentially, organizational culture is how we collectively solve the problems we face everyday in our work and life.

Thus, the resistance to changing the organizational culture. Problem-solving is hard and takes a lot or resources and effort. Humans are incredible at problem-solving but they are also good at optimizing. We don’t like having to solve the same problems over and over so we create things like writing, forms, email, databases and the like to embody the solutions we have created so that the next time the same problem shows up we can just solve it without having to think about it. We only give up our solutions when a demonstrably better solution comes along. And it better be a really good solution if it has a chance of displacing the current solution.

Cultural change is not only possible but it is necessary. Groups change, new events confront the group, and new problems face our culture. I believe that the reason why many intentional cultural efforts fail is that they don’t recognize the paradoxes of cultural change. This is what I can the Zen of culture because we blend many paradoxical ideas to develop culture. Here are three paradoxes that makes cultural change difficult for those who do not first seek to understand the culture:

1. The culture is not the culture. There is no one culture but many cultures that people belong to. You may have an overall agency culture but you also belong to the subculture of your department, the subculture of Redskins fans, the subculture of people who eat out for lunch, and so on. Some of these subcultures are easily changed while others are ingrained in you. And how these subcultures interact cause the resistance to change. For example, IT folks are often most open to new technologies while the law department would rather stay with the software they have been using for the last 20 years because they have built many of their processes around how the software works.
2. We seek the novel and the safety of the familiar. A colleague has a great example of this. Imagine a playground in an open field without fences. The children will often huddle together in the middle of the playground and are reluctant to wander out in the field. Now, put a fence around the playground. Then the children will often hang around the fence and are more willing to venture out in the open field. It is the setting of boundaries that makes us adventurous. We have the safety of the fence that we can run to in between our adventures. Culture equals safety.
3. Culture remains the same by changing. Thanks to the Internet, many ancient religions are now being practiced today. Many Amish businesses use a personal computer in their business dealings with the outside world. There are numerous monasteries that sustain themselves by creating websites for clients. Cultural groups will often use the new technologies or practices as a way to sustain the culture and its core beliefs. This can be frustrating for a change agent when they see their innovation being used to defeat the intent of the change.

I want to invite you to join the conversation on cultural change and keep Open Government alive. There is well-justified concern that the 2011 budget cuts to the Open Data sites will stall the Open Government but I believe that the best way to keep Open Government going is to change the cultures in our agencies and governments so that the citizens demand further change. This concern has prompted several of us to start an online group with two purposes:

1. to collect the best thinking on how to effectively change cultures so that they are more open, transparent, and collaborative, and
2. to establish worldwide unconferences where government workers, academics, and citizens gather to discuss how to change the culture of their governments to be more open, transparent, and collaborative.

Please join us at Culture Change and Open Government.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed are my own and do not reflect the views of my employers or any groups where I am a member.)

You ever wonder about the first person who bought a fax machine? The first person to buy a cell phone? How about the first person who set up an email account? These early pioneers must have had some difficulty in demonstrating the benefits of these these technologies because of the very small base of users. It wasn’t until a critical mass of users adopted the technologies that the fax, cellphone, email, and other networked technologies demonstrated their true value. This is the network effect – the more people that using a networked technology makes it more valuable.

I remember when I set up my Commodore 64 with a 300 baud modem to connect to my high school friend across the small town of Winchester, Kentucky so that we could type text messages to each other. I spent an entire weekend typing in machine code from RUN Magazine to create a bulletin board system (BBS). My parents didn’t understand why I went to all this trouble when I could have just called Steve, mailed him a letter, or just see him at school the next day. Today, billions of texts and tweets are sent daily all thanks to the network effect.

The Internet has fundamentally changed our world because it has helped us connect on a level never seen before in human history. I don’t believe we can go back to a time before we had the Internet because so much of our current economic and societal systems depend on this connectivity. And, according to William Davidow, we are realizing new dangers as we go from highly-connected to overconnected.

Davidow argues that as complex dynamic systems (such as economies) become more and more connected they shift from stability to instability. There is a cultural lag as organizations and societies cultural practices lag behind technological advances. Institutions begin to falter because they are not flexible enough to keep up with the rapid changes and increasing demands of more and more connections. We enter a vulnerability sequence as positive feedback from the connections lead to more specialization and network lock-ins.

Davidow gives numerous examples of the dangers of overconnection such as Three-Mile Island, the decline of the American steel industry, and the 2008 mortgage meltdown. His best example is a two-chapter examination of how Iceland’s attempt to be an Internet banking superpower led to the collapse of the Iceland economy and government. Here we can see how positive feedback driven by the Internet led to riskier investments by Iceland banks and citizens that made them very vulnerable to an external event – the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Thanks to a chain of connections from New York to London to Paris and so on, the ripple effects from Lehman Brothers collapse were magnified so that the ripple became a tsunami that led to a massive devaluation of Iceland’s currency.

That is the secondary danger of overconnection – the magnification of the effects of small events into greater dangers. You may have heard of the black swan theory in which Nassim Taleb describes events that are so highly improbable that they are hard to foresee but can have significant impact when they occur. Thanks to overconnection we are subject to more black swan events that have their effects magnified by the positive feedback of overconnections.

So what does this mean for government agencies? As agencies rush to increase social networking inside and outside of their organizations they are in danger of becoming overconnected. Can the agency’s culture deal with the increasing demands of the connections? Is the agency flexible enough to deal with the unexpected events that will come being more open to the world? Will the management even realize when a black swan event has occurred?

To combat the effects of overconnection Davidow describes three things organizations must do:

1. Provide buffers to mitigate the increasing positive feedback.
2. Develop more robust systems that can better handle system accidents.
3. Restructure organizations to be more effective and adaptable.

As we embrace Open Government we must realize that increasing transparency, openness, and collaboration has great benefits but can also lead to major unintended consequences. We need to strike that delicate balance between highly-connected and overconnected by moving at a pace where we transform agencies into more effective and adaptable organizations without going into a vulnerability sequence.

Reference:
Davidow, W.H. (2011). Overconnected: The promise and threat of the Internet. Harrison, NY: Delphinium Books.