How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems

All right, TGIF. Uh, Joe and I are back here to talk about a new model to transform the public sector and getting things done. Now we're super excited about this guest because this is someone Joe and I have followed for years and has really been on the pulse of all things in our market that have to do with innovation and best practices. And if you don't follow him on LinkedIn, you definitely need to because he's always cranking out great content. We're going to have Bill Eggers on, Executive Director for the Deloitte Center for Government Insights and co-author of Bridge Builders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems. We're excited to dig into this topic because we have more challenges than ever in the public sector and we need new models to solve it. So hey, thanks so much for joining us, Bill.

It's so great to be with 2 of my favorite thinkers on digital technology here and to be with government technology. I was just thinking back a minute ago to my, my first pieces I had in public CIO and government technology, probably 23, 24 years ago, an interview with Jeb Bush, then Governor Jeb Bush, on digital technologies. So we go back a long, long way.

Absolutely. Well, maybe to kind of help share some insight on that long, long way, I'd love for you to just spend a moment introducing yourself to our audience in terms of your background and your involvement in our space, because you have done so much in and around this market to really shape the narrative of public sector innovation.

Sure. So I've been working on government reform now for 3 and a half decades, and so it's been a long time, and I've written a bunch of books and hundreds of studies and run research institutes both in government, private sector, nonprofit around this. Years ago, I coined the term Government 2.0 in a book I wrote about 2 decades ago and also ran the eTexas Commission during the dot-com era when we were looking at how to bring digital technologies into state government and all the things we could learn from the private sector and all the action taking place at the time in Austin.

You know, you mentioned a few of those books and they're right there on your virtual bookshelf and on our real bookshelves. I remember reading the Government 2.0 book, but today we're going to talk about your latest book, Bridge Builders. So maybe you can tell our audience kind of what was the catalyst to write your latest book.

Absolutely. Well, so first of all, you know, Don Kettle, my co-author, who I consider the leading public management scholar in the country who's actually written 25 books, including the major textbook that's used in graduate schools of public administration. We've been in this business of improving government for longer than either one of us are really comfortable talking about. It's about 75 years of experience in the world of public management. Between us, published 35 books, and we've seen all sorts of reforms from the Reinventing Government days to the Federal Management Agenda days to all of the state reforms and local we saw in the '90s, which was a really exciting time for government innovation. And all these reforms contained a lot of good ideas, and I think we moved dramatically in a really good direction, but it was really clear to us that something important is missing, really a strategy for governance in the 21st century. So You had on a few weeks ago my very good friend, Jen Pahlka, the founder of Code for America and the author of a great book called Decoding America. What our work, Don and my work, and what Jen's book gets to, we really focus on implementation. There's so much out there on policy, policy, policy, and yet a real clear lack of focus in a lot of the public management community, certainly in politics and policy circles, on how do you actually get these things done? How do you implement them? I've really focused on that implementation piece for my whole career, as has Don. The thing is, if you talk about implementation now and if you talk about tackling any big problem that we have in the country or even traditional service delivery, you have to look at government not as this siloed hierarchical thing, but most of what government gets done today gets done through networks, through different levels of government, through working with the private sector, nonprofit sectors, social enterprises, academia. It's that twofold thing. We need to focus on implementation. Then secondly, if you're looking at implementation, how to really solve problems, get things done, deliver better services, you have to look at it through the lens of this kind of much more of a networked approach, which is how government actually operates today.

Yeah, I love that. And the focus on execution, I think, is something you hit the nail on the head of within the book, just because that is often the struggling point for public servants as they see all these great best practices, but how do they pull the trigger? Now, one thing I wanted to kind of get your take on, your book describes this older vending machine model of government. You know, why is the status quo of delivering services in that way no longer relevant in our present day?

Absolutely. You know, too often there's this mismatch between the mental model many of us have of government and the reality of how government actually needs to operate. And mental models are really important. Think about baseball. And, you know, before— some of you are from in here, California— and before Billy Beane came around in the Oakland A's, the way that scouts used to look at baseball players was based on a mental model of what a baseball player should look like and the physical attributes that they had and so on. And they ended up missing a lot of great players. Now, Moneyball and Oakland A's totally transformed that approach and transformed the mental model of what people saw in a baseball player. Because if you have the wrong mental model, you aren't going to be able to solve the problems. You aren't going to be able to address the issue in the right way. And when it comes to government, we have this old mental model of kind of a vending machine. You have a problem, you pass some legislation to deal with it, you build an organization, you put money in the slot, and you expect it to yield results. That simply won't work for many problems we face today, and it doesn't reflect how government actually operates. Because most societal problems extend far beyond the boundaries between how legislatures have defined the agencies or programs that are meant to deal with them. There's really no obvious solutions to a lot of these problems. Think about homelessness. Very big issue, certainly around the country right now and certainly in California. Is it an economic problem, a jobs problem, a mental health problem, a drug problem, a family problem, a criminal justice problem, or is it a problem for all of government, for nonprofit organizations, for the federal government, local government, states? Do private companies care? Do they matter? And the answer to all these questions is yes. And so the solution must go beyond the old lines we've drawn to address them because there's no departments of homelessness necessarily. You know, we've, we've really grown up for centuries with the idea that public management does this job of creating kind of building blocks and structures or organizations and leading them through authority and hierarchy. But, and everyone understands the basic pyramid of organizations, but what a lot of people don't understand is that pyramid is obsolete in today's world. They don't fit modern realities. Today's public managers have to figure out how to best build public value given the inescapable realities of what we're calling blended government, where the boundaries between the public and private sectors are really blurring. and in many respects collapsing in some ways. So given that, how do we actually operate government today? That's what this book's all about.

Well, let's dig into that. Your book outlines some fundamental challenges that are around the surface for modern governance. Maybe you can kick us off with digging into those modern challenges and deep dive into things like urgency, complexity, the mismatch that exists, data trust, and I think the last one was blending. But maybe you can walk us through them.

Sure, I can hit on a couple of those. Urgency is fairly obvious. The pace of change is accelerating. The most obvious example of that is certainly with GenAI, which is accelerating at an exponential pace. We're seeing that with other technologies too. Sometimes people almost feel like the Red Queen effect from Alice in Wonderland, like they're running in place and they're not getting anywhere. So The pace of change has dramatically increased, and so governments need to have much more agility. We think bridge-building across government agencies is really the best way of dealing with that urgency issue and having a much more agile government. Complexity. Governments are facing increasingly interrelated problems. In fact, in many respects, whether it's COVID-19 or the implementation of the 3 major bills of the Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS Act, which is putting $2 trillion into American competitiveness. But in some respects, for a lot of state and local government, it almost feels like a real-sized exercise in complexity theory because it's so complex, all those moving parts. Or think about health problems. COVID-19 also showed that there are also economic problems, or industrial policy is also a defense issue. And so it's really tempting often to pick off individual pieces of these problems that are very complex, but there's no solution to any problem without engaging all of its intricate and interrelated parts and all the players and all the different incentives involved. The mismatch That really gets to what we just talked about, which is the vending machine sort of model mismatch between how a lot of policymakers and the media think about government versus how it needs to actually operate today. The blending piece, I wrote about this in one of my books called The Solution Revolution, which I know both of you are aware of. And we go, this has only increased where there's been a massive growth in the range of actors in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors involved in governance. And that in turn has really blurred the boundaries between the sectors of society. And we're certainly seeing this in the digital space. And I think instead of lamenting this, that we should be embracing it because it offers the ability to have a host of new players involved in new ways of engaging the public, new ways of collaborating across sectors. And then lastly, I'll hit on just the data piece. The increase of information provides much greater capability to integrate action across all the sectors. However, too often the links remain unconnected when data really needs to be the language that bridge builders need to make the connections. A great example of that is in the homelessness area where the city of Houston was able to reduce homelessness over the last decade or so by 63% at the same time that most other cities were experiencing an increase in homelessness. One of the key ways they were able to do that was through a data system where the 100+ providers who are involved in trying to reduce homelessness and house people in Houston are all connected in real time through a system so they can see what services those individuals are getting from which other providers and they're able to connect where previously it was all uncoordinated between the providers. You need that data to offer that link and that glue across organizations, both across government organizations, but across the public and private sectors.

So I want to shift and talk a little bit about trust, because I know this is a big aspect of some of the narrative in the book. And, you know, we're in a polarized country. There's no news there as it relates to that. Citizens are struggling with how they, you know, trust government institutions. I mean, you look at the Edelman Barometer that they do every year, and trust continues to decline in the public sector. But at the same time, Kind of compounding this, the public has greater expectations on what they want government to be able to do for them. So I'd love for you to maybe share a little bit on, you know, how this distrust of government has made it harder to do things and execute in government, maybe any tips you have to regain that trust. And then, you know, back on the data front that you talked about, you know, what are some of those data-driven processes that might be a catalyst for improving this going forward?

Sure. And the first thing I'd note is that in the last 3 years, our Center for Government Insights here at Deloitte, which I lead, we've done close to 20 studies on trust in government, really trying to go into much more granular detail on how do we improve trust. And so when you look at things like the Edelman Barometer and a lot of the other big studies, OECD studies and so on, what they're talking about is wholesale, what we call wholesale trust. And it's really important to distinguish between wholesale trust and retail trust. Let me explain. So wholesale trust issues really strike at these very broad social and political questions over which individual officials, even a president or prime minister or governor or mayor, often have little control. Largely, they're driven by the political environment, by wider distrust in institutions. I don't know if either one of you followed, but the congressional hearings on UFOs last week, I believe they were, really exemplified the issues we face around wholesale trust, where you had a lot of the members of Congress just saying, we don't trust the government to actually provide what's really happening. In, in this area, what evidence there is and what data. So the wholesale trust is a harder one to really move the needle on in a big way, and a lot of it depends on, you know, who's in power today and other things like that. But then there's the concept of retail trust, and that's really the direct relationship between individuals and the government programs that serve them. And here we have plenty of examples of how governments can improve retail trust. The book contains a number of just really inspiring case studies of bridge builders who are able to do that. But for your listeners, our Deloitte surveys of more than 15,000 Americans on trust in government offer, I think, a lot of hope. So first of all, citizens tend to trust individual service agencies more than government itself. We found that at the federal level, we found that at the state and local level, and the trust does vary across different policy areas, whether you're talking law enforcement or immigration or social services and so on. So what we found was that taxpayers can and do discriminate among different government agencies, and so agency leaders who seek to earn the trust of their citizens can do so At that agency level, and a really important step they can take is improving the quality of digital services governments provide. And that might strike a lot of people as somewhat surprising. What does that have to do with trust? Well, in the surveys that we did, and we now have a global survey on this and we have 2 US surveys. And what we found was that citizens who said they were pleased with their government's digital services also tended to rate government, especially at the state and local level, highly on measures of overall trust. In fact, we found that that was the most important factor in terms of looking at the relationship between trust of citizens was what their digital experience was. So those unhappy with digital services scored much lower of government on trust and where dissatisfaction essentially wiped out any of the inherent loyalty to local and state institutions. But those that have had a good experience with the digital experience and with the experience of actually dealing with these government agencies and getting what they wanted tend to have much higher trust levels. And that's something we can fix by really focusing on all the things that you both have written and talked about for so many years, which is improving the digital experience. So I think there's a lot of hope here, and there's a lot of crosscurrents with misinformation, disinformation, a lot of the political things. But what— can be controlled by governments, there's a lot of hope for increasing those trust levels. And we have a variety of case studies in the book from the census during the 2020 census to Department of Veteran Affairs, to even the city of Edmonton and what the police chief Dale McPhee was able to do to increase trust in law enforcement that show a lot of, I think, hopeful signs in this area.

We'll make sure to link to that study because I remember when it did come out, I mean, that same optimism was kind of my takeaway as well in terms of the connection between trust and digital experience. You mentioned earlier, you know, Jen's book, and I think your book makes one point pretty clear and similar is that inside government sometimes we tend to emphasize process over outcome, and then you mix into changing administrations, changing priorities, risk aversion, the list goes on and on. I know for us right now, once you get past all the technology priorities, it seems like everywhere we go and everyone we talk to, the number one conversation is on workforce. What can government leaders do today to motivate their, their staff, motivate their leaders, and create an environment that more individuals can take a leadership role and have more initiative inside the public sector?

Yeah, I think that was such a really important contribution from Jen in her book, Decoding America. We wrote a lot about this in our book about a decade ago, If We Can Put a Man on the Moon: Getting Big Things Done in Government, where we actually talked about process and looked at what we call the Sisyphus trap, which is that feeling oftentimes in government where you're just rolling this boulder up the hill and you're never making any progress because of all of the process that you're dealing with. And so a central part of our book was really this laser focus on outcomes. And when you do this well in crises, that's what we focus on, right? We focus on the outcomes. We focus on getting things done quickly. A great example in one of your sister publications, Governing, and we'll have a piece out next week which looks the I-95 rebuild in Pennsylvania, where one of the most trafficked freeways in the country, you had a collapse, and it was supposed to take 5 months for it to be rebuilt. And that was going to cause just massive supply chain congestion issues and everything. They got it done in 12 days. Why? Because they focused on results, they focused on bridge building, and they focused on Governor Shapiro saying every single element of process, rules, and regulations that impeded getting this done quickly, I'm going to waive them. And it was a great example of agile government. And we saw the same thing with Operation Warp Speed in terms of getting vaccines into people's arms so quickly. Again, that was supposed to take 5 to 7 years for a vaccine to happen. And yet it happened in record time. And it was a resounding success. It was completed in 6 months. And one of the things that they did was they were laser-focused on outcomes, outcomes, outcomes. Everyone knew what the clear desirable end goal was, was to get vaccines into people's arms. And they had partnerships between pharmaceutical companies and government, between pharmaceutical companies even working together in different ways. What they're able to do is to focus on outcomes, but they allowed for a lot of innovation in terms of how those outcomes actually occurred. The big thing is how do we make this more a regular part of how government operates as opposed to something that only happens during a crisis? That's what Governor Shapiro and his team are really focused on right now. What are all those lessons learned in agility, uh, from I-95. And way back when I lived in LA, we saw the I-10, the same sort of thing happened. And again, it was repaired in absolute record time due to performance incentives. So some of the things that they can do, one is overturning orthodoxies, really, uh, bridge builders creating an environment in their agencies where managers can question orthodoxy, explore outside-the-box ideas. You need to think beyond the boundaries of the organization, of the agency, and even of government, not be hamstrung by existing organizational boundaries. The disruption of boundaries often requires a very coordinated response across the ecosystem, which can only occur when leaders transform the rules, the systems, and processes before the crisis occurs. There's a number Federal agencies that have really done this very well— NASA, DARPA, FEMA are 3 of them— where they're focused on partnerships, where they're focused on this sort of much more agile response and what government can do to catalyze things. And I would say lastly then, a formal process for breaking down barriers to improve outcomes. And that's really what kind of institutions, systems can we create to break down those barriers between agencies, between levels of government. Our Government Trends 2023 report, the whole focus of it this year was about breaking through, breaking down silos, was about coordinating across government and across levels. And we have Dozens of examples of government agencies who are able to do this effectively.

Love it. So, you know, in your book you describe 10 different ways of bridge building, you know, and you have over 100 strategies of doing so in an organization and across a network. And, you know, we could spend several shows just digging into all of that and unpacking it, but for the sake of simplicity, we're going to dig into a few of these and get your take on it. And I want to start first with nurturing private partners. and instilling kind of public spirit into private institutions. And when I think about like the way that government interfaces with the private sector today, it's very process-driven when it comes to negotiation, contracting, regulation, and so forth. But you advocate reconsidering the rules and regulations that impede kind of the free flow of ideas and innovation as a byproduct. So how can the emerging kind of purpose-driven landscape that's happening right now in the private sector help facilitate Partnerships that might have not been imagined in the past.

You know, and it's such an important area, and when I look at a number of the major focuses of my career, certainly digital government being one of them and technology, but this being another big part of it, which was how do we use the private sector to create more public value. It's so incredibly important. Some of the most successful governments are the ones that have really focused on creating value beyond the boundaries of their organization. In the book, we profile a couple of mayors who have done this very well. John Hickenlooper is now a senator. When he was mayor and governor, every single one of his major initiatives involve public-private partnerships and what he termed about creating mutual advantage, finding those— that nexus between where the private sector might have interests and profit motive and purpose and so on, and what the public sector is trying to do and finding those sweet spots in between so you can leverage all of that towards a greater end, towards producing greater public value. And that really does require, as you noted, rethinking these relationships which have historically been predicated on negotiation, contracting, regulation, and enforcement, and really looking at how do you co-create public value around shared interest. And it does require a shifting government to rethink the relationship with the private sector, especially around accountability. If you think back until— up until the 1970s and '80s, business leaders were generally content to leave societal issues to government and nonprofit organizations. That approach really has a lot less adherence today. We have so many firms pursuing a double or triple bottom line, seeking to maximize financial, social, and environmental benefits. They're reporting their environmental, social, and corporate governance impacts through ESG. And so that the traditional thinking that the private sector exists only to make profits and government agencies and is only focused on societal purpose and there's nothing in between is really no longer true. So that old wall is collapsing. So really then, so if you're a government official and you're working on, let's say, infrastructure or you're working on green energy, and other areas like climate or homelessness, it's really imperative to understand what the purpose landscape is in the private sector, what people are doing, what those incentives are, and how do you leverage those. We're with government playing this much more catalytic role in society. And if you look at the major pieces of legislation passed that I've mentioned before, the Infrastructure Act, Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS Act, almost most of that money is all going in the form of things like tax credits, loan guarantees, competitive grants, much of it to the private sector and to academia where government's playing that catalytic role because governments can't solve climate change. Governments can be a huge part of it and need to be, But the private sector is going to have to play an overwhelming role in that. And so then it's around what roles governments can take and the indirect tools it has, whether through regulation or tax incentives or other means of what's the best mix of those to play. So the key thing I think is really that again, it gets the mental models, this mental model that government and the private sector have no trust between each other and all of the sort of stories that they We'll tell inside the organization, but we really need to rethink that mental model and look at those areas of mutual advantage.

One of the other tactics, and you've referenced it now twice, is that growing catalytic government in terms of bridge building. And I don't know if it was just perfect timing or not, but with the Oppenheimer movie now currently in theaters and generating a fair amount of buzz, your book mentions the Manhattan Project Several times, and you pointed out that the federal government kind of had— was at the— had an operational part of the project, but it certainly played that catalytic role. How is the Manhattan Project the poster child of government acting as a catalyst?

I have not seen the movie yet, but it's right there at the top of my list. Have either of you seen the movie?

I haven't seen it yet.

We're all trying to transform government, so we haven't had a chance to go see it yet.

Well, it's, uh, it's, it's a project that I've, I've written about before and done a lot of studying because I think it's so fascinating when you think about it. Um, you know, we were, uh, we brought together, uh, the nation's best minds in this very far-flung research and manufacturing network, all under the leadership of legendary Army General Leslie Groves. And so the name might seem like it's a puzzle, but its offices were first at 270 Broadway in Manhattan, and that's, and that's how it got its code name. So Groves had to manage this extraordinarily complex $40 billion project. And at the same time, and the engineers and scientists needed to develop different ideas for the bomb. They weren't sure which ones might work or which ones wouldn't work. Secrecy was essential, uh, so Groves had to deal with the secrecy aspect of the program by using different manufacturing modules around the country. They were run by universities, private companies, the military, and, um, in, in the end, they With the Manhattan Project, they literally involved tens of thousands of partners in this, from business, from academia, from other government institutions, in this very far-flung network that— where they had to do this under secrecy in many respects. And what's interesting about the Manhattan model, it was really just in I think it really a model for innovation in a way. It had a web-like structure that maximized its potential for both secrecy, security, and creative thinking. You had different companies and universities producing all the different components to make the bomb. A private company ran the plutonium project, another one ran gaseous diffusion. University of Wisconsin supplied generators needed to measure nuclear contents and Oftentimes he would even assign the same task to several entities to spur innovation with it. And what was interesting that the federal government maintained this model for nuclear weapons in the years following the war, where we saw this with the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1951, all but 5,000 of the 60,000 people working for the Atomic Energy Commission were contractors. Then we saw again a very similar model for their Apollo mission and putting a man on the moon, where in that case it was James Webb, the NASA administrator, who played Leslie Groves' role in coordinating this massively complex network to actually put a man on the moon. We have some really interesting historical examples of this, and there's a lot of still good lessons to learn from that, especially As we move forward with the climate agenda.

So as we think about kind of the focus on outcomes as our next theme, you state that procedures can't dominate the search for success. And, you know, looking at our country, cybersecurity tends to be, you know, kind of the number one technology trend that a lot of agencies are struggling with. And, you know, government can't secure everything. But 2 weeks ago, the Biden administration released its National Cybersecurity Security Strategy Implementation Plan. And, you know, if you're familiar with it, I'm curious if you think steps like this are steps in the right direction when it comes to focusing on those desired outcomes and kind of putting a stake in the ground on where we want to be and then kind of reverse engineering those procedures into it. What are your thoughts on that?

No, absolutely. And, and cyber and public-private partnerships and especially the incentive issues is something that we've written a lot about. So when you think about cybersecurity, government can't simply secure every organization's networks and systems. They have to figure out a way to catalyze others to build the effective defenses themselves. And, you know, we've seen that a number of times when even when we think that it's a cyberattack on, say, a private hospital, or in the case of in the East Coast where we saw a cyberattack where on the Colonial Pipeline, which provided gasoline to stations along the coast, and where they then demanded ransom from the hackers. Well, that actually grounded some planes. 4 states had to declare a state of emergency. So what happens in the private sector there has big impacts on government and on citizens in general. And I think what it highlights is that really aggressive cybersecurity demands not only a heightened need for vigilance, but for collaboration across public and private players and really a sense of collective defense. And in that area, I think there's some, you know, there's a number of countries that we can look to who have done a really good job making it cyber more of a whole-of-society approach. Israel is one of the most famous ones, uh, where in fact their focus on cybersecurity has then now led to dozens of cyber unicorns, uh, which are over $1 billion value sort of startups there, and that they've established a national information security authority to protect the public and private sector organization computers. They've got a variety of other mechanisms, including training for students in K through 12 and research centers. And it's all really focused on the fact that cyber needs to be a whole-of-society approach collectively across the sectors, as opposed to something that's siloed one sector or another. And their cybersecurity has become a vibrant part of their innovation ecosystem, all sorts of cross-pollination among government, civil society, and leaders sharing information and responsibility. And I, I think that's a really good place to look. Another one is the leader in digital government, uh, which is Estonia, which, as you know, went digital before most of its neighbors. It's, uh, done some remarkable things in digital government. And they also established a national center to monitor threats and assist organizations across the sectors in cyber defense and response. And of course, very important from them being right next to Russia. So I think in the cyber area, you've got a government role of creating those goals like the administration has done. But then working through all the different incentive issues to incentivize the private sector to share much more information about cyber threats and incursions so you can have more of a collective security approach to the problem, especially now in this world of AI and GenAI where you can literally have millions of different attacks coming at you at one time.

So the last bridge-building tactic that we selected to cover was making data the language. And we've talked about cyber, we've talked about many of these, these top trending issues that governments across the nation are dealing with, and data is at the heart of almost all of it. And you went so far as recommending that government should establish a data steward. When you look at that role, what do you envision that person doing to lead better decision-making?

Yeah, and we just released a study, a series of studies last week from our center on CDO 2.0, Chief Data Officer 2.0, which really looked at the evolution of the Chief Data Officer role and where it needs to go to, what sort of resources, how to focus on issues, and maybe we can include that in the show notes, uh, for individuals. But I— the one thing I would just mention on the data piece is that it's really important now to look at the data sharing not just across government agencies, and there's a lot of barriers to doing so, uh, right now and across levels of government, but when you have a government services and responses where the other sectors, public, private sector, nonprofit sector, academia are playing such important roles. Those data platforms you create and systems need to go across the sectors too. And one of the big problems we've had in addressing homelessness is that a lot of those systems haven't done that. So no one can see what each other are doing. And when I mentioned the Houston story earlier, you know, 2 key elements to Houston's success in reducing homelessness by 63%. One was this remarkable weaving together more than 100 partners across all the sectors with the Houston Coalition for the Homeless seeing itself as kind of the conductor of the local homeless response orchestra. And then secondly was the coalition's data system, which helps each provider understand each homeless person's individual needs and concerns and share that information with others in the system. This relates very, very closely also to the cyber issue. If we had more collective sort of data and information on cyberattacks, all these organizations could learn from each other and being able to operate and respond much more quickly. A lot of cities have data hubs around homelessness like Houston said, but few cities have been as effective as Houston in using it to really attack the problem. So data is the glue behind this all. We have seen innovations around the world in this. I visited a few years ago the province of British Columbia where they actually have a data innovation group. And one of the main jobs of that group is just to look at all the different barriers around data sharing and act as kind of an ombudsman for helping the different agencies figure out how to collapse the time it takes to get the MOUs and other things involved in actually being able to share data, And being able to really make that much more effective and reduce a lot of those privacy and other barriers that are preventing the data sharing that we need to address these problems.

For the audience that's listening in, and there's a lot that you're saying that's resonating with them today, like Russell's comment here on the homelessness issue, what are some of the immediate steps that they can take to start bridge building within their organization?

Well, first of all, just understanding what that landscape is overall. You know, you're focused on transportation issues. What is the private sector doing there? What is the technology landscape? What are the innovations happening? And having a really clear view of that. We have a variety of things we look into. How do you map those ecosystems and mapping the incentives, feedback loops, and so on and so forth? Secondly, I think it's important to create almost what we call catalyst by design sort of structures in organizations. And we see that with NASA and DARPA, where it's not just a few people in a public-private partnership office who are charged with collaboration, creating that partnership, but it goes across all the organization. It's a core skill that people have, and it's a core responsibility. You bake that into the performance, that they have the performance evaluations. We— I think we need to create job series around bridge building and making that a career for people. I think looking at it, what John Hickenlooper did as mayor of Denver, Michael Bloomberg in New York, where they said every major issue and problem, we're going to involve the private sector, we're going to make this more of a partnership approach. And then lastly, I would say just this focus on outcomes and a laser focus on outcomes, not process, working across the sectors. I really have a lot of confidence we're going to be able to solve these big problems that we've been trying to address for many decades, and it's only through these bridge builders. I'm hoping those who are listening today, every one of you will want to be one of these bridge builders because Dustin and Joe, we don't need just hundreds of them or thousands of them. We need millions more bridge builders inside and outside government to effectively— to make government more effective in today's world.

That's a great way to put a bow tie on our interview today with you. And we're so thankful that you took time to join us and share this with us. Where does our audience go to get more information on bridge building and to get a copy of your book?

Great. Well, all of the major Amazon, Barnes Noble, and all the rest of the booksellers have copies of the book. We also have a website, bridgebuildersbook.com, which has a lot more information on it, including over a dozen different short videos from Don and I, 1-minute videos. If you want to see bridge building and innovation, we'll talk about that. So if you want to get a sense of Yeah. Some of the things, you can go on that website and peruse it. And we'll also link to a lot of the podcasts and other interviews that we've done on the book. So I want to end with thanking you both, Dustin and Joe, and Government Technology for the incredible work that you both have been doing. You've been so inspiring and we— and such a public service that you're providing to government officials in the private sector and helping them to really deeply understand the digital landscape and the changes that need to happen.

Well, Bill, we couldn't be more pleased to have you join us today and for the impact that you're— you've had and are continuing to have in making government better. So thanks again for joining us this week, and until we see you again, have a wonderful weekend.

Okay, thanks guys. Bye now.