Here is Bob's overview of Beth Noveck's book, "Solving Public Problems".
Solving Public Problems – A Practical Guide to Fix Our Government and Change Our World – by Beth Simone Noveck (Y*le Press, New Haven, 2021) This is my Book of the Year for 2021. I cannot recommend it too highly! Beth Noveck has been at the forefront of governmental innovation for years (See her Wikipedia page HERE). This is the third book of hers I’ve read and treasured. Her earlier books are Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger and Citizens More Powerful (2009) and Smart Citizens, Smarter State: The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing (2015). In November I attended the National Academy of Public Administration 2021 Fall Meeting and she was a presenter on the first day. I ordered this book on Amazon while she was still speaking! In essence, Solving Public Problems takes the Design Thinking paradigm from Stanford’s D School (and many others) and shows how it has been (and must be) applied to public and governmental innovation across America and abroad. Some of the chapter titles are: 4. Defining a Public Problem 5. Human-centered Design, or Understanding Problems with Help from People 6. Understanding Problems Using Data 7 Using Collective Intelligence to Solve a Problem: Crowdsourcing, Collaboration, and Codesign 8. Fast Field Scanning 9. Implementing Solutions with Partners 10. Testing What Works: Evaluation and Evolution You could say that this process addresses societal problems “from the bottom up,” in the same sense as Participatory Budgeting and Oregon’s Kitchen Table, versus the ubiquitous “top down” approach, wherein a government department defines a category of problem and invites applications directed at only that type of problem. I’d say that from the governmental perspective Ashby’s Law favors defining categories, while from the public’s perspective Ashby demands more flexibility from governments. Not every problem defined via crowdsourcing and collaboration will fit into a narrow pre-existing category! Having a broader approach to problem definition also requires a more exacting effort at evaluating the success (or failure) of projects and programs, which in turn requires more and better data. Fortunately, this is becoming more available in this digital age. This also led to my consideration of the finite set of “the tools of government,” as described in Lester Salamon’s book of that title. The book assumes (presumes?) that ANY government action must fit within a previously defined category of “tool,” whether Direct Government (example: TSA at airports) or Tort Liability or any of the dozen tools in between. And such categorization in itself limits both imagination and action. Example: When I was growing up in South Carolina, it was “well known” that if you passed a school bus with flashing lights and hit a school kid, the highway patrol would come to your house and set your car on fire, and there was NOTHING you could do about it! I once asked Lester Salamon to identify which “tool of government” encompassed this virtual threat. He said “Public Information” – but I was (and remain) unconvinced. Noveck’s book (all three, actually) requires us to think about “the design of government” in ever broader terms – not only must we look at the advantages of “bottom up” conceptualization of what needs to be done, but also the stove-piped structure of today’s governmental categories of available assistance. If applications for governmental assistance (financial or otherwise) need not fit with well-defined categories, each with its own checklist, then the evaluation/approval of such applications will need to be more complex and less formalized. And questioning the approval processes will likely be more frequent as well – and more difficult to justify. This will make governing more costly and time-consuming – and may well push both funding and decision making “downstream,” to states, counties, and cities. Will this increase or decrease “politicization?” Who knows? Some unanticipated consequences for sure! Noveck’s last two chapters, Doing Differently, Learning Differently, and Training the Next Generation of Leaders and Problem Solvers, address the design and updating of government itself. Assigning government-wide “missions,” such as reaching the moon within a decade, provides the urgency needed to work across silos. New “styles” of governmental organizations (her list includes Agile Organizations, Experimental Organizations, and Open Organizations) are needed to address today’s complex problems. Public-sector training must include Training Needs Analysis, Hybrid Learning, Digital Government, Qualitative and Quantitative Skills. Training government workers must be done at scale, with incentives, often sector-specific (e.g., health), with a focus on coaching and mentoring. She takes to task the professional schools of public policy and administration, law, and business as focused on knowledge and theory, as opposed to practice – especially the practice of solving public problems. She says, “…we have to look at infusing an ethos of ethical public problem solving across engineering, law, business, computer science, and other disciplines in order to ensure that more young people have the opportunity to work on real-world challenges.” And then, “We cannot continue to teach as we have before simply because it is how we have always done things. Our curricula are outdated, unattractive, too exclusionary, and too silent on issues of social and racial justice.” (page 347) The book brings together theory, practice across an enormously broad range of subjects. Perhaps most important, and surprising, are her examples of successful innovations around the glove that highlight both theory and practice – often with links to their websites. Each chapter ends with a To Do section, with very specific exercises for those who wish to pursue public problems. The book ends with sixty pages of notes. The book’s website, www.solvingpublicproblems.org, is as advanced and in depth as the book itself. The free course offered provides interviews with twenty-four “leading changemakers” from across America and around the world. The site claims the course can be completed in twelve hours. Based on my years of teaching public administration & policy, I’d say that the book offers more material than I could fully explore with a graduate class in one year. My Book of the Year! Bob Knisely