I really enjoyed this conversation with three of the country’s smartest policy folks. The book is easy to read, very funny, and full of stories applicable to your life, whether you run an office in a transit agency or just want to get better at negotiating your life.
You, my friend, are the bureaucracy, and you are capable of learning new things.
If You Only Have a Second…Three Big Takeaways
Leadership matters a lot, and smart leaders delegate. Windows for change open and close over the tenure of a CEO. Phil Washington helped to keep these windows open longer, and when they did shut, they didn’t slam. But Joshua and his team at the Office of Extraordinary Innovation learned to go through them with renewed purpose.
Relationships, persuasion, and permission structures matter almost as much as data and information. Purely analytical cases rarely win in policymaking. Change depends on reacting to and anticipating different colleagues’ incentives, and building trust before presenting an idea allows leaders to feel confident making a decision.
Failing fast is part of the process. The team failed often, but no failure was catastrophic, OEI and they got comfortable with small fails because they had a CEO who backed them, and they eventually made small and big wins, too. My takeaway was that over time, you learn to fail faster and push through bigger windows.
