Wisdom from Experience: Three of the World’s Top Digital Government Leaders Share Their Lessons for Getting Things Done
Author: Beatriz Vasconcellos, Master of Public Administration in International Development, 2021
Context
The last panel of the convening gathered three senior digital government leaders to reflect on their experience leading some of the most successful digital teams in the world. The three panelists had distinct and complementary trajectories that added to the discussion. The first, Cina Lawson, is the current minister of digital economy and digital transformation as of November 2021. She has been in that role since 2010. Initially considered an outsider, today Lawson’s success is frequently associated with her previously accumulated private sector experience in Europe and the US.
The second, Matt Cutts, served as the head of USDS from 2017 to 2021. Before USDS, Cutts worked for almost ten years at Google, where among many of his contributions was the development of the search engine. He joined USDS originally from the Department of Defense in 2016, and upon being appointed administrator in 2017, he experienced the transition between presidents Obama and Trump. Cutts had to adapt to getting things done in the context of a shift in national policy agendas.
The third, Tom Read, became the CEO of the UK’s GDS after more than four years serving as chief digital and information officer at the Ministry of Justice. Read’s background put him in a strategic position as an insider to the organization with a lot of experience in execution. This enabled him to quickly realize that the GDS should better define its boundaries and objectives when working across departments.
Despite the differences in context and background, the panel was focused on finding their shared lessons. Specifically, we focused on their priorities, routines, and visions and found many of them converged. Most importantly, the three agreed that the hard part about being a leader in the digital space isn’t defining the strategy but delivering it. To be effective, they must be able to navigate internal and external relationships, developing skills such as convincing, motivating, creating a shared vision, being clear about the agenda, and building trust.
Throughout the discussion, there were five main shared lessons for getting things done:
- Look for sticks but avoid using them.
- Frame your message differently according to the audience.
- Bring digital and IT teams together.
- Decide and be clear about the teams’ boundaries.
- Remember your North Star but be flexible during a crisis.
The focus of this article is to expand on each of these lessons and derive insights for how leaders in the digital space can get things done.
Five lessons for getting things done
The role of a digital leader is not always clear. Even when it is, what should one expect once in the job? The truth is that most likely the person who takes on a leadership position doesn’t know. Even experienced and outstanding professionals like our panelists admitted having some insecurities when they became the heads of their countries’ national digital teams. What they learned on the job is that the hardest and perhaps most important part of their mission to advance the digital agenda is to convince people that they will benefit from it. In the lessons below, they share insights on how to get political support and mobilize people and resources to get things done.
Lesson 1: Look for sticks but avoid using them
Large digital transformation projects in governments often involve governance changes and renegotiating power relationships. For example, in a project to build a unified notification system, the teams in every ministry and department might feel that their working process is being supervised by — or dependent on the performance of — another agency, meaning they are losing ownership. To overcome these barriers, some leaders prefer to use a top-down approach, leveraging their legal and hierarchical power. This approach is sometimes referred to as “using a stick.” While the panelists agreed that it’s critical to their role to maintain or strengthen their formal power structures, they suggest that leaders avoid explicitly using them.
The biggest reason for not using a stick is straightforward: people don’t want to feel like a condition has been imposed against their will. In the long run, using formal power makes one more likely to have enemies, and this prevents serious work from being done. This is true even if the stick enables a project to be executed in the short run. Consider, for example, a change in leadership in the department that has used the stick in the past. The new leadership will arrive at the office being locked out of many departments, and opening doors again is burdensome and sometimes impossible if trust has been broken. Ultimately, the excessive use of power raises attention, making it more likely that other groups will want to remove some of the sticks from the owner.
Therefore, although it takes more time in the short run, focusing on motivating people and having allies tends to be a more effective approach in the long run. Some examples that Lawson, Cutts, and Read described were publicly acknowledging colleagues for their achievements, creating internal challenges to generate new ideas, and developing motivational laptop stickers. They found that in most cases they were able to mobilize more people with this approach.
Lesson 2: Frame your message differently according to the audience
Every person has their own bias in the way they receive a message. We are all subject to different previous experiences, political and religious views, and personal values, and these influence how a person makes a first judgment about a project. These biases and experiences also tend to be accompanied by a specific vocabulary. For example, when developing a COVID-19 contact tracing app, a person who supports individual freedom will probably be immediately resistant if they hear the word “surveillance” or even “tracking” being used to describe the project. The panelists highlighted that a large part of their role in gaining allies is adapting their messages to different stakeholders and audiences.
Lesson 3: Bring digital and IT teams together
Digital transformation projects can face many sources of opposition. One is internal conflicts between the digital teams and the traditional IT team. While the former often work on political projects and leverage innovative practices (e.g., agile methodologies), the latter usually deals with more technical matters (such as internal network, servers, IT equipment, stabilizing long existing or legacy systems). Digital service teams often try to avoid being compared with IT and as a result sometimes avoid engaging with the department, which is a mistake since doing this prevents them from learning about essential processes and getting more technical minds to collaborate on their projects. Ultimately, this attitude and the fact that IT professionals might see digital professionals as a threat can result in resentful relationships. It’s hard to imagine how governments will become effective in the digital era without the support and engagement of traditional IT groups.
How can we solve this conflict? The three panelists agreed that heads of digital government should play a stronger role in bringing those teams together. In their views, digital and IT teams have a lot in common. For example, they usually get excited about technology-related topics, and the solutions they brainstorm together tend to be more effective. Therefore, backing and getting the support from IT teams is key to the success of digital projects.
“You will be amazed how similar an IT engineer and a digital technologist are. Co-locating workers is amazing.” — Tom Read
Lesson 4: Decide and be clear about the team’s boundaries
What is the role of a digital team? Even when a strategy is well defined, there is significant latitude around what work they should do and where and when they should intervene. Read highlighted the consequences of not making clear the criteria for deciding on the scope of work. There is also a matter of respecting other teams and being humble in the approach. Eventually, digital teams can end up doing projects that could and should be undertaken by other departments. The consequences are not only a deviation of focus from the main objectives and a waste of human and financial resources but also a loss of political capital by intervening too much on other teams’ agendas.
The questions that remain are how a team should decide on which boundaries it will have and how to communicate them. The panelists offered two insights. The first is to prioritize projects aligned with the digital team’s main values and principles. For example, its mission might be related to efficiency and cost reduction, like the X-Road team in Estonia. Therefore, such an organization would probably prioritize projects that reduce administrative costs over one whose primary goal is to expand social protection.
Still, even if the goal is to save money, should a federal digital unit be responsible for all cost reduction projects? The second insight from panelists is that it shouldn’t. They believe that the most effective use of digital teams is to work on problems that go beyond a specific department and require coordination. For example, a cross-department digital team would be more effective when working on a process that is being done in multiple ways by different departments. In that case, the digital team finds one common and more efficient solution, saves money, and adds value to every team.
Lesson 5: Remember your North Star but be flexible in crises
Once a strategy is set, getting things done requires building political capital to mobilize resources, as explained in the previous lessons. However, like any government institution, it is highly likely that a team will face crises — probably many. When they happen, two common reactions occur: the leadership prioritizes the crisis response and shifts long-term priorities based on the new context or is somehow inflexible to the new context. Although the latter is rare, when a team drafts a strategy, it rarely accounts for changes in plans.
Our panelists therefore suggest that the strategy should be seen as a North Star. In the short term the trajectory toward the final goal will not be linear, and you will have to deviate from the goal to solve the most urgent public problems and to gain political capital. But in the medium run, the trend toward the North Star should be positive. If a project isn’t solving a crisis, building political capital, or isn’t aligned to the long-term vision, it probably shouldn’t be undertaken.
Conclusion
As Lawson, Cutts, and Read reminded us, experience matters when it comes to getting things done in the digital government realm. But unlike before, we now have a growing community of digital enthusiasts across government departments who are willing to support and advocate for the work to be funded, even in the face of failure. When leaders like these panelists get together and share stories, a lot of knowledge is generated and we all incorporate some insights from their experience. We can only hope there will be more moments like this.
