How Governments fail to govern

I had the pleasure to sit down with Andrea Uribe to talk about GLASS and how design and technology can build better pathways for the necessary changes in Government.

The interview was a day after my Covid Vaccine Booster, (please all get boosted) so I rambled here and there in my stupor. So I added a transcript below which is a little closer to what I intended to say. Thanks, as ever, to the founder and CEO Paola Santana and all the good people at GLASS, they are pushing us all forward.

Transcript (edited)

Andrea Uribe: welcome everyone my name is Andrea Uribe head of government intelligence at glass, thank you for joining us today and thank you Marc Shillum for accepting the invitation to participate in this event in which we are celebrating four years of glass transforming governments

AU: Marc is a multi-awarded designer he is the founder of Chief Creative Office and is a creative director behind Nike, HBO, Discovery, eBay, Aston Martin, Barnes and Nobles and others fortune 500 companies. Marc is also one of our advisors here at glass mark i am so honored to have you here with us and having the opportunity to discuss the future of governments with an exceptional figure in the world of design. Welcome.

Marc Shillum: Thank you i really appreciate you having me

AU: We are going to be discussing the future of governments with you and i have a few questions i would like you to answer. So the first question is what comes to mind when imagining the future of governments.

Marc Shillum: I pondered this over overnight, I was thinking about government. Before it became a noun it was a verb. The idea of governance rather than Government. If you look at any governance system, say one in a watch. ‘The governor’ regulates time and it's imperative that the governor is connected to the rest of the watch to retain that stablity. The relationship with the governor and the watch is symbiotic, the governor is neither the watch nor is the watch a watch without the governor. 

Government has become so firmly fixed in everyone's minds as a noun. ‘The Government’. I think it misses the fundamental bridge which is it's meant to govern society and culture and people in a way that's symbiotic. Ideally the government is us and we are the Government. We understand why we're not the same, we understand that this would  upset the the careful balance of what government has to do.

So when I think of the future, I start to think about what systems what what technology we have in place today where there is deep connection between everyone. Obviously it's the internet. It's a very scary idea isn't it? The idea that Government becomes decentralized. It's impossible. It could never happen. Because we're so used to the idea that government has secrets and they will get out. 

We would have said the same thing about banks. I can remember discussing bitcoin super early on. I’m no crypto lover, it has its good parts and bad parts but the eventual decentralization of economics and finance now seems imminent. If we went back 15 or 20 years that wouldn't have been the case. The same thing with information, libraries were invented to keep books inside safe from the people on the outside and then libraries became where books are kept for the people on the outside and now the idea of a library is an open network of information.

So when I imagine the future I imagine decentralization. A system of governance that's decentralized that is the people. Where the people fully understand why it exists, what it does. How do we get government back to being a verb?

AU: That's very interesting mark and and I think we're very aligned. Based on that answer, what do you think is the role of design in the future of governments?

This is a powerful question. So if we know anything about the design of other decentralized systems we understand that the initial designs never anticipated the end users misuse. And so we need to design for outcomes we don’t expect. For instance, if you think about the decentralization of information. With decentralization came defunding of information. And with defunding of information came a deprecation of quality of information. Suddenly you have bad information flowing at the speed of good information and nobody can tell the difference. Web 2.0 the eventual socialization of information was like turning on a tap to a bad water source and we just flowed bad water and good water into everyone's houses. Design has to understand what has happened before and understand that decentralization is going to have its risks.

We need to think like the founding Mothers and Fathers of America. We need to think about a constitution that is the foundation again. It isn't taking the existing constitution and digitizing it, it is understanding what would be the constitution in the networked world. I had the honor of sitting next to Tim Burners-Lee at an event, he said to me “what you don't understand is, hypertext protocol is very robust, it's very well made. if it gets used badly, it becomes a very powerful kind of bad. We need to design failsafes, we need to design feedback systems, we need to be able to see the system working. We need to make it visible.

If you were designing a system of governance that was visible everywhere, we’d believe that there would be so much noise that everyone would get overwhelmed. But if you look at nature, nature as a governance system. We wake up in the morning to see it, we dream of it, famous artists paint pictures of it, we visit it, we stand in ore of nature which is just bio feedback system saying this moment is passing to the next, you should get indoors it's going to get cold, or if you plant something now it will grow. We understand nature intuitively and we need to design a governance system which is as visible as nature and as beautiful as nature. So we can look at and see and feel rather than understand.

If I have understood anything from watching the journey of Glass, comprehending all of the information that exists on all levels of Government is impossible for anyone. It’s a Babel sized problem, design needs to help us comprehend the complexity. So information design and data visualization will be key. As a public, we must all know when to participate, know when to yield participation and trust others, know when to get more deeply involved and understand our roles. We must develop new tools for government that they can adapt, connect to the new technologies as they arise. This will take a massive level of collaboration, Government isn’t used to deep collaboration with the private sector not even within themselves across departments.

AU: So in that case Marc what's what makes a great user experience for government? How do we create these tools for them to use so that they can optimize their processes.

Everybody hates change, so everyone's going to deny it's happening. It was the same when I was designing newspapers in 1996, trying to tell everybody that the internet was going to change media and we couldn't rely on advertising, I’m still trying to help media companies today that still are denying it. 

Government change is an eventuality. Why? Because what we have today doesn't work sufficiently to even regulate today. It's it's currently the slowest gear. For instance the FAA can't keep up with the innovation in the air around autonomous vehicles, the FDA can't keep up with innovation in drugs and vaccines, medical science or food. Regulation has to move at the speed of the World and the World doesn't look like it's slowing down anytime soon. What we've got to do is to create a slip differential between what government is comfortable with, or most acceptably uncomfortable with and what has to happen.

We're not designing the interfaces to products,  we need to take the government through an experience design process to help them understand that they've got to and how to get there. They are dealing with the crust of 250 years of ways of doing things that are holding them back. We have to tell them that the librarians who's originally had to keep the public out of libraries made this transition. Libraries are still one of the great public institutions.

Gather the most enlightened government thinkers who are almost at the speed of what the public needs and work with them to think about how we build tools that can scale. One of the only things that scale without significant cost are robots, which implies a certain level of automation. Maybe there’s a Henry Ford moment coming. Some parts of governance may have to be automated for other things to be prioritized. The infrastructure bill that the Government just passed looks at roads and bridges, actually i think the roads and bridges are just a symptom of a larger problem which is the failure of governance.

Military strategists understand this, because they have to move at the speed of a war. No-one likes the idea of impact of war of war but it builds exceptional understanding of how you must move. Consider bringing in military strategists to roadmap the future. Take the government into the field, take the government on the road, set up a kind of temporary government service 

and then prototype new approaches, build from what we learn. I swear at least for the next 10 years the will is there in the people, but after 10 years i'm not sure the world's going to wait. We don't want chaos, it's not beneficial to prosperity. Overthrowing the capital makes no sense, what makes sense planning what the capital should become not not invading it and hunting down the people who are trying to find solutions.

AU: Marc, everything that you said takes me back to a blog that we published at the beginning of the month in which we researched the role of government in innovation. More specifically in funding R&D. GPS, the Google engine, the internet, Siri, everything came from government R&D. 

Yes, the people that run government R&D, like Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and NASA are military strategists. I’m not saying that having the military more deeply involved in Government isn’t problematic, but military minds are more focused on driving outcomes. They are outcome led. They working out all the edge cases that might happen, digital twins triple redundancy, they're always thinking about the slowest part of the system and how it may fail. These kinds of people don't want to get involved in government per se because they see it as weighty, slow and full of red tape. Maybe because Government is too analog. Digitizing the government is the first step to increasing momentum, digital is designed for input and output, digital means that it's a conversational relationship and at the moment the government is a more of a dictatorship. I’m not trying to point fingers at any government or political party but it's just the way it's set up. Government is secretive and so therefore it is not visibly governed. Today the government is not governing because it does not connect it to the people.

AU: Marc, how would you evangelize design thinking methodologies in government that would give room for innovation 

The problem is with design itself. Design is stuck in the opposite problem. Design is understood as a verb, rather than the noun. And so it can be seen as very tactical. I had a wonderful moment where the Department of State invited me to give a talk. I was amazed by her team, very very smart people at the cutting edge of technology and they wanted to also understand how design could serve the country better. I mentioned, when people are usually asked to talk about the decisions are already made and the job was to make the decisions more palatable. The real role of design is to form decisions based on a consistent set of criteria that brings about a universal system.

So my challenge more is to the designers to be actively thinking about models of governance and role of Government. Designers and engineers, the people who can actually make things like the hypertext protocol should want to be inside government. Thinking how do we start building connection points. This is probably going to happen in a small government first because they don't have the legacy systems to deal with. Designers and engineers building the connection points between organizations.

The challenge is to understand, process, law and legal frameworks. A designer has to start there first. Unless you understand the needs of the system it’s very hard to deliver functionality. Conversely once you've learned the system it can be hard to unlearn it and imagine new systems. There are a few examples of success. The Government Digital Service who redesigned https://www.gov.uk was a particularly beautiful solution. They did an exceptional job of sharing information, inviting interaction, being clear. Of course what they didn't do was challenge the idea of government. It wad an effective interface into the existing models of governance. Unless we design the root causes of the problems we all face, we’e just decorating. But, does a senior political or governmental figure trust a designer to come in and comprehend the problems? That's a design problem.

We need to fo a better job of communicating what design is. Much as i love the brilliance of Jony Ive or James Dyson, the design is a commodity. We really need design heroes that are designing the protocols of governance. The designers that are closest to understanding this were at Disney. They understood very early on that the engineers weren't enough to create great experiences, so imagineering became a fusion of design, imagination and engineering. I wonder what the imagineering team would do with Government? Obviously you know the government isn't a teacup ride or a roller coaster, but it

it has as much power and effect on the lives of the people. Walt Disney understood that the child just wants to go for a ride in the designer's mind and the designer just wants to find their inner child. So the question back to you and the team at Glass – what does everyone who gets into government really dream of? What do the people desire from governance. That's the first place we start.

AU: Wow, I love that because it's you know like what you're trying to say i think is that it's everyone's role,  even if you're not like a designer a professional designer to design the future of Government. 

I imagine most people got into Government, i will remove my intensely cynical mind here, but i imagine that most the good people got into Government because they thought “like it's clear to me that this could be better and i could get it done”. The danger is of course then they begin the march up the Tower of Babel, and they tell each other but it could be better and everyone tells each other that it could be better, eventually everyone tells each other the reason why it isn't better. And they no longer feel compelled to challenge that. This is the problem with the caucus, the democratic sensibility arrives at zero momentum. There are usually the same amount of people who say no or yes to anything. That's why the government moves at that speed. The right question is, is the government moving at the right speed to govern and i don't believe it is.

This will become apparent, someone like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos will become a government, because they're moving at the pace of the Worlds problems. They're adopting more mindshare, more money, more infrastructure, more outcomes. Elon Musk is governing. He's saying electric vehicles are the future and batteries aren’t efficient, so we're gonna have to go back into why batteries don't work. Back to raw materials, first principles thinking. Make batteries cheap enough, accessible enough, how do we get the power to a car or a house, how do we harness the power of the sun okay, can we harness the sun we from smart roof tiles. He's basically governing. Asking how do we get to space? So we need reusable rockets that can land back down from space and that's impossible so how do we design that. All he is doing is governing. He is that bit in your watch that says, no no hold on time moves like this. But Elon Musk is unelectable, he's too polarizing and his first principles thinking doesn’t stretch to the lack of abundance of raw materials, or employment principles, or sharing of wealth. But he’s found a model that drives momentum. Maybe we should just look at the way he governs and think about the governing systems and principles he applies. 

I agree with you, everybody has a role to play. But then if everyone has a role to play it should be fun, at least fun-ish. I’m not saying that filling out tax returns is fun but it must be more engaging. I’m now an American, like all immigrants I took my civics test. It wasn't easy but it was fun-ish. I can remember Woodrow Wilson and his connection to World War I. I had to sit and learn those things, I had to interact with the governing system, and because i understood a set of ideological points it meant that i was unified with the people of the country that also learned these things. It had a governing function. But we have to make it fun. There's a ton of civic will, that people, especially those who are underrepresented are eager to take part and that can be converted into momentum.

I have a feeling that we're going to have to leave ‘The Government’ the noun behind. move forward the things that make more sense.

Happy Birthday Glass