For The Better - Email 1/16

For the Better comes to you bi-weekly with ideas about how and why to build companies focused on human flourishing and stories of the people who are doing it. Other enthusiasms may occasionally appear.

Change is Always Possible: Beating Bureaucracy at the California DMVI spend a fair amount of time meeting with people deeply interested in organizational change. These same people are equally sure it can never be made at their moribund companies because there’s no way to penetrate the overwhelming bureaucracy.To them – and you – I present this story about the transformation of the California DMV. Yes, I said the DMV. If it’s true that the second worst outcome for a company after devolving to pure evil is becoming bureaucratic and self-serving (and I believe it is), then it is also true that the DMV is not only the most pervasive form of this outcome, but the metaphor for inefficient, soul-sucking bureaucracy across the board. The resignation to its total dysfunction is so in-built that when now-director Steve Gordon visited a field office during his interview process, he “found customers waiting in line at 6 am, even though the front doors opened at 8 am. ‘One man brought a lawn chair for the two-hour wait and told me what others in the line also shared: They were there early to avoid an expected crush of people.’”Instead of being daunted by this reality, though, Gordon took the job, got to work, and got results. “By 2024, led by Gordon, the DMV had made impressive progress in its transformation journey since 2019. Online services had made common transactions more convenient and more often completed without visiting a field office. DMV employees and front-line staff felt safer—indeed, often obligated—to identify and communicate customer pain points to headquarters in Sacramento. As a result, processes had become more efficient and wait times had fallen.” The story has some really interesting details on how he made it happen, including:

• The importance of knocking down damaging systems and beliefs right from the outset as a powerful catalyst. As Gordon says: “It's so important to challenge and question whatever the perceived convention is.” He also highlighted the value of decisiveness and swift action in driving change in a complex and established environment. Reflecting on some of his first major decisions, Gordon recalled his move to remove a senior leader who was not a good fit for the new culture. “It got the attention of the team,” he explained. “There were obstacles that folks had refused to act on for so long. And all of a sudden, in the second week, we're taking decisive action.”

• The value of highlighting stories about employees making great decisions and using them as examples others can follow to help change permeate the organization. In Gordon’s case, two employees brought him feedback about some survey questions that were causing problems, which led quickly to a very helpful revision of the text in question. He then “banked” the story in an archive of similar tales in order to “use it as a symbol of the type of cultural shift he wanted to see across the thousands of his customer-facing staff. ‘We celebrated those two women. To continue improving, we need the ideas from those on the front lines to help us understand where the impediments are for our customers. We're using this story to try to encourage more staff to give us feedback.’”

If one person can help usher in this much change in the institution that is literally the poster child for hellish bureaucracy in just a few years, there’s no excuse for anyone not to try – for-profits and non-profits alike.

Things I’ve Enjoyed Lately 

🔵 Gendered Language in Teacher ReviewsThis is a really great example of how to do data visualization well. You can use the tool yourself to look at words and phrases of your choice.

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🔵 The Procedure FetishOr, “America has a procedure problem” – and it’s because much of our administrative state is built on “a bedrock of distrust” Beyond that, this argument goes, “We also need to revive a strain of thinking that connects the legitimacy of the administrative state to its ability to satisfy public aspirations. That means building up our agencies, not devising ever-more elaborate means of tying them down.” 🔵 The Artificial StateMore on trust and government, this time as it relates to data, AI, and what Jill Lepore calls “the artificial state: “a digital-communications infrastructure used by political strategists and private corporations to organize and automate political discourse.”