Tangherlini: Agencies can learn a lot from startups

The ability to take risks and a hyper-focus on customer needs are just two of the things GSA Administrator Dan Tangherlini says the federal government can learn...

Agenicies can learn a lot from the technology start-up phenomenon, including how to take risks and focus on their customers’ needs.

“The one thing that I would want to see brought to any effort in government is urgency,” said Dan Tangherlini, administrator of the General Services Administration, during a panel at the 2014 ACT-IAC Executive Leadership Conference in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Dan Tangherlini, GSA administrator
Whenever the federal government is involved in a massive undertaking, from fighting a war to responding to a natural disaster, it’s able to find the resources it needs to tackle these complex problems.

“There’s no other better problem solver in the world, frankly, than the U.S. government,” Tangherlini said. “If there is some insurmountable challenge, like getting someone to the moon or saving freedom for the world, we know how to do it. The question is, why don’t we bring that same kind of urgency and sense of mission every day to the work that we do?”

One reason, he said, is agencies are “mousetrapped” by all of the oversight authorities they must answer to and regulations they must follow.

“Our biggest challenge is figuring out how to deal with risk, and how to give people the opportunity to engage in a little bit of risk, take that risk, experiment with it, see what the outcome is,” Tangherlini said. “And that really is the fundamental underpinnings of a startup. It’s that initial risk that someone goes in and says, ‘I think I have a better way to do this.’ They take a chance at it. They experiment with it. Maybe they pivot and they move towards an outcome.”

Hand-in-hand with this risk-taking ability is a startup’s hyper-focus on serving the customer’s needs.

“That’s something that we have to bring into everything we do and not just to talk about, but actually to really figure out who are our customers, how do we serve them and how do we give them the best possible outcome,” Tangherlini said.

With the cost of technology dropping, the economics have shifted and would seem to have created a climate in government for risk-taking and responsiveness to its customers. Unfortunately, the federal government suffers from what Tangherlini described as “Baumol’s disease,” which, in this case, is the inability of technology to yield any progress.

That being said, he does see “green shoots” of innovation here and there sprouting through the cracks.

“There’s a huge amount of frustration about the fact that people know that there’s something vastly better in the way of technology and a way of outcomes available to them,” Tangherlini said. “They can reach into their pocket and pull out a world that’s very different than the one they’re operating in often times in their government agencies. And they’re going to demand — they want that better outcome.”

The challenge, though, is to change the culture when it comes to innovation and technology, and that takes time.

“We work in a world where there are certain expectations, including the Form 300 process, the appropriations process, the oversight process, that really militates towards the waterfall,” Tangherlini said. “We spent 20 years learning how to do the waterfall. We built agencies and consultancies around waterfalling. And now, everyone shows up and says, ‘OK, that’s out. Agile. Do it agilely.’

“Part of the thing that we have to recognize is, as Yogi Berra said, ‘Rome wasn’t burnt in a day.’ It took a while to get like this. We’re going to have figure out ways to pivot. Now, the trick to pivoting is actually demonstrating that you can do it. People have just barely gotten comfortable that there is a path through the waterfall and we’re saying we need a different path.”

This is why it’s important to have digital innovation groups like GSA’s 18F, which help agencies approach new technologies at their own pace and in in little bites.

“I’m excited about the fact that that will give people then the confidence to take the risk to start moving bigger, higher value efforts into that kind of approach,” he said.

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