From Elections to Governing: Getting Beyond Politics to Get Things Done

Salimah Samji Welcome. We are so excited to have you at our fourth and final Building State Capability Event series for this semester. And we have some pages outside with QR codes where you can learn more about Building State Capability, our events, who we are, what we do, etc. Our tagline is Resolving Public Problems with purpose. So you can imagine my delight when I picked up this book results earlier. I think I heard it on NPR that Governor Baker had written a book about results, and I thought, That’s interesting. And so I looked it up and I was like, This actually sounds very interesting. I’m going to buy it. I bought it. I actually took it on a vacation to Europe. I kid you not and I read the entire thing and it was like music to my ears because here was a group of people we’d never met in the state that we live in buildings. That capability has been around for more than a decade. We’ve never met each other so close and had such similar approaches to doing implementation and solving complex public problems. So we’re delighted to have Steve here today. I’m just going to read a little bit of bio of Steve. Steve Kadish has been the senior research fellow at the Center for State and Local Government here at us for five years. And previously, he served as the Massachusetts Governor, Charlie Baker’s first chief of staff, where he helped shape and implement policy and operational improvements in key state agencies working with the governor’s cabinet, Massachusetts State Legislature and the external stakeholders. Steve and Governor Baker have coauthored this book Results: Getting Beyond Politics Important Work Done A Leader’s Guide to Executing Change and Delivering Results. It was published in May 2022. Prior to this appointment. He has served in a number of roles in the public and private sectors, including senior vice president and chief operating officer at Northeastern University. Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Dartmouth College. Director of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts Undersecretary for Health and Human Services. Massachusetts Assistant Secretary for Administration and Finance. Senior Vice President for Administration at Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare. And I think that’s where you work with Governor Baker.

Steve Kadish Four or five times, actually, through those through those through those positions where it looks like I couldn’t hold a job.

Salimah Samji So the associate vice chancellor of operations at UMass Medical School and Assistant Commissioner for operations at Massachusetts, Division of Medical Assistance, Medicaid. We are so delighted to have you here, Steve, and we’re excited to hear your talk. Welcome. Give him a loud round of applause.

Steve Kadish Can everybody hear me? Okay, great. If anybody can’t hear me, wave. Okay. I intend to talk softly, so I’m going to practice speaking loudly. I am delighted to be here. I am so impressed that you guys are here on the last day of classes as I’m walking around. It seems very quiet and I thought, oh, no, but here you are. I am, I have about a 35-minute presentation that I’m going to race through which I’ll make the…the…the PowerPoint available to you. And you see my contact information there. If you have a question or if there’s a follow-up that you want to do, write me and tell me. Tell me who you are so that I have some idea of where the connection was made. So without further ado, I’m going to, I’m going to walk you through, I’m going to run you, I’m going to jog you through the slides. And we can always come back at any point. This will allow us time for questions. So, so, so, so, so. Here we go. I’m just going to move this chair a bit. So I start here and I know that folks are both domestic in the United States and international, but this book is not about political results. This book is about programmatic operational results that help individuals, families, communities really thrive. And we love this quote. Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future. John F Kennedy. So for us, this vote is strongly, strongly, strongly nonpartizan and that’s not what not what it’s about. So here’s me. You can see Governor Baker. This was in January 2015. Interesting time, right? This is the time of gubernatorial transitions. I don’t know if any of you all are helping with any of the gubernatorial transitions or or following them. This had to have been in the first couple of days that we were in office. So why am I starting with this picture? Well, first, Governor Baker’s about six, five, six, six. He’s this very tall man. He is a lifelong Republican. I’m not as tall. I’m a lifelong Democrat. So the fact that Governor Baker asked a Democrat to be his chief of staff to start with was incredibly unusual. I wasn’t involved in his campaign. Yes, I did a donation and made some phone calls for him. But I wasn’t a campaign operative.

Steve Kadish I had worked together up until this time, three or four other times, both in in in the public sector and in the private sector. And I served as his chief of staff for about two and a half, close to three years. And as I was stepping down, we talked and we talked about writing a book, and we wanted to write a book about how we had approached things and we had shared. Other books, other monographs, other articles over a 30, 30 year period about how to do things. Every single one of these articles, books that we shared, they were private sector books, and they were they were interesting and they were good, but they all required a translation from the private sector to the public sector. So the purpose of this book, our idea about this book was to write a book about how to do things in the public sector, not a not a translation of how things work in the private sector, but to write it from our experience, which was both public and private sector or for the public sector. So we wrote this book for public sector leaders, by public sector leaders, and it’s about improving public sector services. The book started off as a book about how and it fundamentally is a book about how to accomplish things. When the January Six riots occurred in Washington, D.C., we actually asked ourselves, did the book make sense anymore? And we…we…Thought that we doubled back on it and said if there are strong public sector services, that in a way is a contract between the citizenry and the government about delivering things. So we wanted the book to be a book about not only how, but also about hope. So now I’m going to go through the results framework. There are four parts to the results framework. People or policy. Follow the facts. Focus on how push for results. There may be a quiz at the end. So take note. So, but these are the four pieces. The book is written in two parts. The first part of the book takes each one of these major precepts, describes what they’re about, uses some examples, and then we have tips, tools and tactics throughout, and I grab a couple of them here. The second part of the book is our four case studies. One is on the Health Connector, a way to access health care in Massachusetts. The other is on transportation. A third is on the Department of Children and Families. And I’m going to spend some time there. And the fourth is on COVID and the co-op. I think they’re all interesting. I know several people have read that through all of them. The COVID chapter may be especially interesting because it has to be one of the first times of a sitting an elected official actually writing about what was happening with COVID.

Steve Kadish So so here we go. We always start with people in policy. And it may sound. Funny, but this was a learned thing. We were such fact geeks that we would focus on facts, assume that the facts would tell us about ways about the problems to solve, and then go at it. But it became clear to us, through both successes and failures, that if you did not have the people in place to start, you did not have the capacity actually to act. So we always start with people or policy. We start here to assure that you have the capacity to act. We will actually. We have stopped stop the start of some things until we’ve had a core group of people identify. This is about selecting the leader who is responsible and the team. And it’s about selecting people who have the knowledge about what to do and importantly, the know. How about doing it? We like to construct teams and approaches that include both current staff and new staff, especially when you’re tackling existing problems, when you’re tackling existing problems. They’re there for a reason and the current staff may be okay at identifying the problems, but they just may not have been able to actually figure out what to do. Bring in new folks, new ideas, new approaches, and the constructive tension there is incredibly important. I I’ve really come to appreciate the concept of a dedicated team on a project, and dedicated doesn’t mean that I am personally committed to it. Dedicated means that you’re 120% focused on that and really not anything else. And I can talk about that more. But the concept of a dedicated project team on a project helping to pull together various pieces has been a critical piece in our success. A second piece of you have people are policy. The second precept is backs. There are two kinds of facts that we look at and facts for us. Define the problem. We look at these two kinds of facts to define the problem. First, and you hope this is true, particularly in the public sector, but in general. But it’s it’s not. We call it data evidence. And it’s the reports, the budget, the the current staff, the program descriptions. It’s the hard stuff you can read or or view and if there are performance metrics there as well. The second part of follow with facts are points of pain. And this was actually a. A learned activity for both Governor Baker and I as we were so hard data oriented that we it wasn’t until we actually were back in the private sector. We’re working for a health health company where we spent time with the medical providers, the our our our customers and the people who are getting the health insurance to understand what their problems were. And what this did for us was flipped the focus, as opposed to being hard data driven, to being focused on the customer, to be focused on the individual and to hear those stories and to honor those stories. And the combination of both that that that hard data and the points of pain together were providing an incredibly important perspective of what is the problem to solve. We look at both of these. We think that both of these are important. I’m going to do two tips. As I said in the book, there are maybe a dozen or so tips, tools and tactics. They’re called out. I’ve had folks that have read the book to say, I have literally copying this this tip, and we’re we’re now using it in our work. This tip is an interesting one and it can be used anywhere. I just use this in another class at Ohio State University, a class of nurses. And we were talking about COVID, and I wanted them to talk about their experience experiences. But the idea of this is with the leaders in the room and the other folks that are involved in the project is to literally go around the table, around the room, either at the beginning of a project to identify what are the points of pain. Or as a project is going on at the end of a meeting, a project status meeting, so that somebody could say, I don’t understand what that point is. Or, Yes, we said that was accomplished, but there’s still a gap between what that is done and this is done.

Steve Kadish Or somebody could say, I’m still looking for X or a celebration, but the idea of around the table and it’s it’s anti hierarchical and it throws lots of leaders off. But the leaders that do use that, it’s incredibly empowering for the entire team and it would be literally would be if we had more time. And if I were to ask you. And I’m going to do I’m getting to green kind of thing. It would be literally going around the room and saying, How do you approach X or what? What do you what do you think about what we just talked about? Or if we’re talking about an issue, what do you think the point of pain is either personally or what you or what you’ve heard? But the round the table is something that I strongly encourage you to do. And it’s incredibly empowering for leaders and for teams and getting something done. And it’s something you can build into the agenda and there’s a little bit more about how to do it in the book. The second tip that I have for you and Charlie Baker, Governor Baker is great at this, and it’s too often organizations just listen to what’s inside their organization, whether it is the the reports inside their organization, the individuals inside the organization, but getting, quote unquote, out of the tower, out of the Kennedy School, out of out of your organization. It’s literally getting out of the office, talking and listening to people, going beyond internal reports, seeking peer data, making site visits, and. There’s nothing like it. There’s nothing like a conversation with the folks that you’re working with, a partner that you’re working with, going, visiting an office, etc.. And so these two things are incredibly important about the facts, but they’re also important to help you determine what the problems are. So the first precept of the results framework are people are policy. The second is follow the facts. This is the third focus on how and.

Steve Kadish This.

Steve Kadish Was really the initial core of the book of where we started and where we realized we intuitively do this. So how do you set it up and what comes after? But the focus on how is the. It’s the it’s the requirement to have a structure to approach your work. It’s not enough to have good people. It’s not enough to have a good understanding of the facts. It’s not enough to have money. But it’s it’s the requirement that you actually have an approach in terms of how are you actually going to deliver the new program, solve the problem, solve the problem. And on and so we use that. I’ll talk about the work management triangle in a minute. We always now when we’re tackling a major issue is create some kind of dedicated team. I’ve been focused on project management in a variety of forms. I’m a big believer in that. There’s a variety of ways to do that. I’m going to talk a little bit about Agile Scrum and particularly a daily scrum, if you’re not familiar with it, if you find it an interesting tool. And I’ll end here with the focus on how it’s not enough for a good team to be working on something. It’s so important for that team to have regular reports into the leadership in crisis situations. I’ve been involved in regular reporting where there were four times a day where there was reporting other, sometimes twice a day, more often once a day or once. If it’s less than once a week, you’re not moving urgently enough. And the reason you have these leadership reviews is not only to quickly do project status update in terms of what’s going on, but importantly, it’s to describe where you might not things might not be going well, where you’ve hit a roadblock and what needs to be done. And the idea of these leadership reviews is to engage the leadership to as quickly as possible, make decisions to move these things along. So there are two parts of.

Steve Kadish Of.

Steve Kadish Focus on how the what to do. And that is often where, honestly, a lot of the Kennedy School and a lot of government get stuck or done with good stuff. They stop. It’s the announcement. It’s the drafting of a law. It’s the budget. It’s all really, really important stuff. But the work is not completed until you focus on the how to do it, because you need both. And we emphasize.

Steve Kadish Both what.

Steve Kadish To do because that provides the guidance and how to do it. And I hope these diagrams work. But my thought here is, is that too often politicians, government sector focuses on the what and on the announcement of the budget and the law and so forth. And if you were to diagram that a little bit on the why, some on the what and then a little bit on the how, and that’s a diamond set and you could easily tip that over in too often it does tip over, but if you build your work on a foundation of a strong Y, which is a lot of the idea piece which I think Salima can speak to, but with building state capacity can speak to a strong word. But most of your energy resources intelligence is on the how are you going to stand the best chance of succeeding? So there’s something in project management work or in your work, which you probably do intuitively, but but we call it out. We call it the work management triangle. And there’s three pieces to this scope. What are you trying to do? Time and then? Resources. Now, I approached the the work management triangle for a couple of decades. Plus I’m focused on scope and I would I would spend all this time developing what the problems were and an incredible. With detailed plans about how to resolve them. That almost always took a year or two or three years and. I thought I was pretty good at it. My success rate was maybe 5050. And and coming into this administration eight years ago now, we, we we decided to flip and approach things within an agile scrum way. And we started to focus on time as the first thing. And then what could you get done within that period of time? So it’s flipping the work, the work management triangle on its head and starting with time. In some cases, Governor Baker would say would say, you’ve got two weeks to do this or you have 45 days to do this. It was so energizing. It broke through a whole bunch of. No crap, actually, in terms of getting things done, it really helped things help help people focus. And it wasn’t to say that you were getting a year’s worth or two or three years worth of work done in that 45 day period. It was the start of a series of releases, but you were getting the most important thing done to solve the problem and starting to make progress. So this is a really important concept that I would like to stress with you. One is people, another is the dedicated project team and this idea of leadership reviews and then starting time. So I’ve been alluding to this concept of a release now of our phones. Right. They they have releases our laptops, they have releases technology uses releases. All releases have bugs, but they have dates when they when they’re when there’s a new set of functions and they go out. We started to approach our work in a series of releases, time based. At.

Steve Kadish Most typically 6 to 12 weeks, depending upon what was going on a couple of times, just two week periods. And then did did a project project management approach. You can see here some of the things that we did that were important in terms of breaking the work and the work problem down into Workstreams and then within the Workstreams, having dedicated teams to those Workstreams and that they had deliverables that they needed to get done during a certain period of time. Very powerful. Another way to use time as an urgent tool. So this is the last element of of the framework. So you have people are policy, right? Then follow the facts. Then focus on how to push for results. And push for results is about actual measurement of performance. I love this quote from John. John Wooden, who was a famous college basketball coach in the sixties or 70 here in the United States. Never mistake activity for achievement. Your your emails, your text, your messages, your meetings. That isn’t the same thing as actually getting things done. And so we focus on performance metrics and we focus on a red, yellow, green in terms of project status. We’re going to talk about why we.

Steve Kadish Ask you.

Steve Kadish Not to distrust averages. Whenever somebody says the average is, is is X, we almost always roll our eyes and then we go, go, go at it. I talked about the importance of discussing things in leadership reviews. And then this last point is the most important point. Besides actual measurement.

Steve Kadish Of.

Speaker 4 The performance metrics, it’s measure. See what’s there, honestly and objectively, evaluate it, make adjustments, and then do it again. And so the idea that a budget, a law, a program rollout is perfect when it rolls out is is a crazy notion. But, I mean, that’s how that’s how I thought. And it’s it’s typical for how the public thinks. And I think many leaders and managers think. But the power of acknowledging that. Get it started. Tackle it. Be measured the results and be honest about the adjustments that need to be made is very powerful. So we use a green, yellow, red methodology over and over again. Green means that the deliverable is going to happen on time. Yellow means that the team thinks that they’re going to hit the deliverable on the date. But there are issues and they’re flagging the yellow and red means that they there’s no way that they’re going to be able to accomplish the deliverable by the date set. And so red, yellow, green isn’t a nice feeling about how you’re doing it. It’s, it’s whether you are going to meet the deliverable date deliverable by date certain. So it’s it’s a hard it’s a hard measure and red and it’s really hard for all of you in credit. You all are brilliant. Every single one of you, you’re all tops. And what you guys do, it’s really hard for you guys to say, Guess what? Three elements of my project are red. You want to tell that to your boss? You want to tell that to the commissioner? You want to tell that to the governor? Really, really hard to do. And so you might squash that yellow or try to move out a date and so forth. And so we it’s really important to be as honest and objective as you can. And you guys who are either leaders today or will be leaders is to create an environment where it’s okay for people to say, my project isn’t all great. There are three issues that need to be dealt with. I need we need help. Our team needs help. An important and important thing. So I want to start I’m going to spend maybe six or seven, maybe a little longer minutes on talking about the Department of Children and Families and.

Steve Kadish I had. When I had this.

Steve Kadish And I had a standing desk. And when I was in the governor’s office and I had this on my wall, it’s this front page of the Boston Globe. Her name was Bella. I’ll describe what this is. But I was the chief of staff of the governor. I had the governor’s office on one side of me, the lieutenant governor’s office on another side of me and all the lobbyists and the big power people that would come in. This would have been one of the first things that they saw. And it’s it is a tragedy.

Speaker 3 And but.

Speaker 4 But powerful. On Thursday, June 25th, 2015. So this is six months after Governor Baker took office, right? 2015. A woman in Winthrop, a coastal town just north of Boston, made a horror discovery. She was walking her dog along the shoreline of Deer Island when she found an object that concerned dirt. And she called 911 the emergency hotline. The Massachusetts State Police uncovered the remains of a girl of a toddler age. And it was just horrific in terms of how this child was found. The news was stunning. As a community, we had not yet recovered from the loss of Jeremiah Oliver one year earlier, who was also found in her. In a suitcase along the highway. Just horrible. Now, this the hunt for more information about Baby Doe. Drove national news stories throughout the summer. What happened to this innocent child would hang like a dark cloud over us. Well, Baby Doe was Bella. So throughout the summer, we would hear police announcements and calls about or rumors about Baby Doe. And on this day in September, the Globe blasts this.

Steve Kadish Headline. For her. Her name was Bella. By then Governor Baker had asked me to work with the team at DCF on a on a turnaround, and that’s it. I said, I’m going to talk about because it’s quite, quite powerful and quite dramatic. So the…the that the leadership at the Department of Children and Families was responsible for at that time about 45,000 children and their families in the most difficult circumstances. Linda Spears, she’s one of my all time heroes, and she has stayed with DCF for the entire eight years. And I hope that the new governor has the wisdom to keep her on. But we we we approach the work this way. We tackled it from a governance point of view. An executive team led by Commissioner Spears and Agency Improvement Leadership Team, which you talk about in the book, this included for the first time, most most state agencies have a central office which sends out dictates to the local offices about what to do, and there needs to be that. This was the first time in people’s memory that there was a turnaround effort at the agency that included both the central office leadership and the local office and regional leadership. A dedicated project team, a release based project method, agile scrum, which I’ll get to get into Green, which I’ll get to project management updates and then these five workstreams and then there were regular leadership reviews. We started three times a week and then went to twice a week. And one of the things that was interesting after after almost every single one at the end, almost every single one of our leadership reviews after people went through their red, yellow, green status, and we went through the metrics for each of those five things. Commissioner Spears let around the table. And it was this incredibly powerful, sometimes emotional, emotional experience. So many folks are familiar with Agile Scrum. Okay.

Steve Kadish So you know what the daily scrum is at DCF. So DCF part of the children and families, they’re not technical people, they’re not policy people. They are social workers. They like to talk through stuff they like processes. The idea that they were willing to embrace something like Agile Scrum and a daily scrum, they ended up doing it about three times a week, not daily, but follow these precepts was incredibly powerful. Now, for each one of these five areas, people, people, policy and practice, people management, structure, metrics and reporting and communication, think about those as the workstreams. And for each of them there was there was a single release date and that. We.

Steve Kadish Wanted to make sure that each of these got launched in a way to succeed. We call that getting a green. And so a clear objective scope is to find the product backlog and sprint backlog are our terms with that. You guys who are familiar with Agile Scrum would know about whether there was a communications plan and whether there were metrics defined. So those six elements, if they were green, we thought we had a chance to succeed right at the beginning. So here’s an example of the report that each one of those five or six workstreams did the objective, the scope, the Sprint backlog, the product backlog, communications and metrics. There’s an example. So here’s an example of this is an agency, the Department of Children and Families, that to make a single hire, it would take six months to a year to write. A policy would take several years. We were now asking this agency to hire hundreds of people, develop. At least a couple of policies immediately, if not every few months. So here is that this effort started in the middle of September. Here is the status update to the Agency Improvement Leadership team for October one. Two weeks later. It’s going to be hard for you to read, but clearer about their objective. But I love this. Right. They had a goal of. By. Uh. November, they had a goal of

Steve Kadish Of posting 200 positions. Now, this is an agency that is going to repeat. It would take them months to to hire people to post and to get 200 people hired was an amazing thing. And so so the people task force had these key tasks. And I love that this one is green. Within two weeks, they had 83 positions posted and they were so ecstatic about it that at the of that at the leadership review team meeting, they took this picture and posted it because they wanted to say, we’re not just bluffing. We’ve actually posted these positions. And it was just a moment where, as you could imagine, everyone started clapping. So. ECF use the release. This release process release one was heavily focused on two major policies posting mace positions, restoring a management region. And that was about ten weeks, nine weeks from the middle of September to Thanksgiving. But now. Release two was focused on more stuff requires its first medical director and that was two more policies continued the onboarding and that was for March and then more hiring new medical social workers which hadn’t existed before a major foster parent recruitment effort. And then this last item I want to spend a minute on, and this is that 95% of ongoing social workers have fewer than 20 families in their caseload. So in March. of 2016. So this is we started this effort in September 2015. This is six or so months later. That.

Steve Kadish We had we had kept hearing that the caseload for social workers was a problem now. But the mean. Or the median for for social workers was 18 or 19. And so if the goal was to have a caseworker to have 16, when Governor Baker and I and Secretary heard that the number was 18 or 19, you think it’s not bad. But we kept hearing from social workers, the union families, is that people had crazy caseloads. So this is one of the things that this chart did not exist before Governor Baker insisted upon it. He said, okay, break down this, break down the median median by every single social worker. So what this chart represents is this all line in the middle yellow is that there are 186 social workers who have a caseload of 19. Here there are 96 caseworkers who have a caseload of 22.

Steve Kadish Six, 60.

Steve Kadish Caseworkers with a caseload of 24. So it’s green, yellow, red. So anything that was 16 or below was green, 16 to 20 was yellow. And it was over that. That’s a dangerous situation for the kids. And so what you had is 42% of the social workers with a caseload not of more than 16, but of more than 20, a dangerous situation. No wonder so many bad things were happening.

Steve Kadish So jump. Are.

Steve Kadish So 18 months later, something like that to 2017th August 2017 from March 2016. And you see, what’s the median read? Good, right. That’s what you want it. Then when you break it down again, there were only 11% of the social workers that had more than 20 cases. Dramatic improvement for the kids and for their families almost. So this is a data now which we can go over. You guys can go over and take a look at in terms of what was accomplished with DCF from September 2015 to the end of December 2017. It’s quite remarkable and the work continues. But I wanted to end with a couple of quotes. This woman, Mary McGeown, is the executive director of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. When there was a major incident that happened. Just a couple of years ago where it looked like that the Department of Children and Families had failed to take care of a couple of children with disabilities. This was Mary’s quote. And she said, you know, this is a different agency. It’s a it’s a different way, the way they work. They when they say they’re going to get something done, they do. And this is a quote in the Globe. If I could change just one thing, I think we should stop referring to it as reforming the department. That suggests there’s going to be an end. Our child welfare system needs to be continually enhanced. This is true for all of our work in terms of no matter what it is. But to have an advocate come out and say, this is so important. And then finally. One of the greatest humans to walk on this earth in 100 years. Plus, we will use this quote in our book. But a similar thing to Mary McGeown, but more eloquent. After climbing a great hill and he climbed many great hills, one only finds there are many more to climb. And I close with this a story in the.

Steve Kadish You know.

Steve Kadish I don’t know if anybody’s written a book. It’s a bear. But at the end, the publisher says, okay, now you have a chance to write. The dedication is for or career acknowledging. And so we had two versions. One was to the folks that are doing the work and the other was to our spouses and Governor Baker and I going back and forth on the phone. And so long story short, he says, you know what? This is our chance to actually dedicate the book to the.

Steve Kadish Folks.

Steve Kadish Who are doing the work. And we will acknowledge our spouses, as we did in the acknowledgments piece. But this is for you guys. To those who believe in public service, in the good it must do, and who constantly strive to deliver on its promise, that is that’s the show. So I don’t know how long that took. So I apologize.

Salimah Samji No worries at all. Thank you very much. So we’re now going to turn to questions and answers. But before we do that, I just wanted to comment on how incredible this was and some things, you know, you talk about releases, you talk about short sprints. And in media we call them iteration. Yes. So everything is an iteration. The tighter the better. But it has very similar flavors, which is why I was so excited when I did read your book. And I think your when I read your book, the, the Red, Green and Yellow, what I found really empowering because you’ve seen these kinds of either checklists or dashboards and people just misuse them because you want to be in the green. But what I really like that you guys did differently is create the safe space to be able to put something Red, because by putting something that should be Red, Green, you cause more damage. And they actually highlighted that with the people who are doing it. And when someone raised something as a Red, it wasn’t pointing fingers at the person. It was the message, not the messenger. Right. And that’s really powerful. So it’s not just about thinking about Red, Green and Yellow, but creating that safe space for someone to say, this isn’t working, I need help. And then people being able to jump in and with the tight iterations, you can make change and turn things around. So thank you very much for that, Matt. I’m going to come to you at the end to share your reflections. Matt is our faculty director, Matt Andrews, and he happens to be here. So I do. I wanted him to come and see this because I’ve read the book. I gave him a copy of your book, but I thought since you were here, it would be really great for him to kind of listen to you. And he’s from South Africa. So the fact that you ended with Nelson Mandela, I’m sure he was like he worked for him, too. So I think that was also very exciting. We’re going to take three questions at a time. If you could just share your name, the program you are at and ask your question. We will then turn to Steve to answer your question. Yes, we have a microphone Nishant?

Steve Kadish And are our folks listening?

Salimah Samji Yes. And for the people who are online virtually listening to the session, please put your questions in the webinar Q&A and we will ask one of our colleagues to ask it on your behalf. Yes.

Matt Andrews I thought.

Attendee 1 You might. I might, but I had a question. Okay. Oh, I’m Sravya. Yeah, I have an MPP 1 and I was asking. So sometimes what I’ve noticed is the high level, like high level executives are like very keen on, you know, implementing things like this and like people on the bottom more like suffering, like are keen on implementing change. But like the junior management, like are sometimes the most reluctant to implement change because they kind of like how things have been going and maybe they feel like this is sort of invading on their space like. Did you encounter that at all in your work and do you have any suggestions on how to deal with that both from like the bottom up perspective and also like the top down perspective? Thank you. You could just pass them like. Thank you. Oh, you have one.

Attendee 2 Hi, I’m Alwyn. I am a second year MBA student here at each class. My question is that I saw that you kind of like encourage us as public service officials to be in the customer’s shoes when we’re like assessing projects and doing stuff. Have we ever thought of doing an Undercover Boss style of intervention where, let’s say, someone from the higher ups goes down and disguises as someone else and see whether is complete? Because if you like, for example, let’s say you are Governor Baker, go down to one of your agencies. They know it’s you or Governor Baker. They would probably try to like, you know, hide somewhere the bad stuff or tend to be nice, be polite. That’s my question.

Steve Kadish Thank you.

Attendee 3 Great question. Thank you. Yeah, we’ve had Yung Jun and MCMPA I’ve always been curious about the round the table because I’m like, one thing I’d be nervous about is groupthink, especially if the leader goes first in sharing their opinion and then others not being or others being afraid to share their honest opinion. So it seemed like that didn’t happen as much in the team. So can you say a little bit more about how you prevented groupthink? And people began to be honest.

Steve Kadish So.

Steve Kadish And I’m not going to take names. But for the first question, I. One of the most important things to it. And. It’s a tip that we have and I should have included the slide, but it’s a focus on the status quo. And it’s when I talk about the potholes of what can go wrong. One of the major things that I talk about is not being aware of. And in a way, respecting the status quo and understanding the status quo. So for any kind of change that you want to do, whether it is to move from paper to a laptop, changing a form. Having one system connect to another system, changing a vendor, changing a schedule. You have to tackle what the status quo is and be aware of that. And and that is. And there’s a combination of honor and. But don’t don’t let it be like gravity and just pull you down. But it’s it’s an awareness so that you can tackle things from where people are and then work with them to where they need to go. A lot of projects say this is where we’re going without starting with where people are at and respecting what’s there. And sometimes that fear is legitimate. Often times the fear is legitimate because. And this is where the the iterative piece is is important, but it’s the ordering awareness and then being directly tackling the status quo is really important. And if you don’t do that, you’re going to get the kinds of situations, whether you’re at a leadership level, a mid-level or at a at a service level. On the undercover boss idea that that could be a fine, fine, geeky, you know, public service TV show. The you’ve never done it the closest. We came was. At the Registry of Motor Vehicles where we had. Folks just normally dressed go and literally tie how long it took for certain things to be done and how the offices worked. And we did that in three or four different places, and as a result of that completely changed to…How to do queing, how you actually count time. But that was the old. And so I like your idea. I don’t know that. I don’t know if Charlie Baker could never pull it off. Right. But but a lot of us could, you know. But I like that idea. And then round the table. One of the important concepts of round the table is that the the leader goes last. And the leader could open it up to say, okay, now I’d like to hear this. The leader goes last. And that the leader does not respond to every point. You know, too often in a meeting, whoever is leading the meeting feels like. You know. Charlie’s made a point, and I have to respond to it. Around the table doesn’t. You can capture what those things are and then address them. And sometimes when you’re going around the table, other people will. Respond to what is said earlier. So the roundtable works. When the leader does not respond to every point, the leader goes last and it’s. It’s pretty cool. I just did it, I said the other night with nurses. It was a remote class, but with nurses talking about COVID, I was like, I was exhausted after hearing their what they had gone through. But it works. I continue to use it. I’ve used it in in some of my work at the World Bank as well, and I’ve used that at times in state government.

Salimah Samji Right. Thanks. Or look, more questions. We’re going to start with Zoom. But before we do that, one of the things that came across also in the book is this idea we might have that people don’t complain to the governor. That’s not true from the book. Whenever they do town halls, people would be lined up to yell and scream and tell them what was not working, especially the broadband when you guys went out west and then say, Why do we not have broadband? And they actually ended up fixing it because the people were just yelling at the governor and saying, What are you doing for us? So some things I think if you are out enough, also, people will yell at you. And I think getting out of the tower is really important to make yourself accessible so that people can actually talk to you and tell you these stories. All right. We’re going to do the Zoom question first. And then you can raise your hands.

Nishant Singh We have two questions from Joshua Valet. Coming back to the how, how did you sustain motivation in the teams? Joshua is a PDIA graduate from Malawi, the warm heart of Africa. The second question is regarding being aware of and respecting the status quo. Any advice on how best to deal with stretch codes? Use release dates to map the way all the way to the ultimate results.

Salimah Samji Thank you. All right. We’ll start in the front. And then you think go next.

Attendee 4 I am Kofi from the GSD. And I have this question here in terms of getting out of the toilet, would it be more personality driven so that your life experiences shape you to go towards that option? And also when probably an agency feels like they are the only one in that space? How easy is it to also seek views outside as it was.

Attendee 5 My name is Nandita. I’m a MPP One student from India. It’s kind of related to the first question, but in a different way. Do you consider this process as an ebb and flow, or is it like nonstop because this seems like a high pitched rate of activity? So how would you sustain that? Because especially unless it is the top driving this mid-level official, don’t get a lot of control over programs and results. That’s why I said it’s related. How do you sustain that? And if it is top down, would you have suggestions on how as perhaps not that senior level of official? There are ways we could incorporate some of these learnings. So. Welcome back to you. Hi. Sylvia Brodie. I’m a mid-career MBA and I have been living in Boston for the last 16 years. So really pleased to be here. My question is, I’m really interested in how to create an environment where people can say that the project is in the red. And I think that is really different than what is so often the dominant culture. And so I would love to hear more about how like how you made that happen.

Steve Kadish These are fantastic questions. And so the. The combination question about sustaining motivation and honestly, what what level does this effort work? Well, let me tell you a little bit where I think this does not work to solve policy differences. This does not work to solve where there are. Irreconcilable fields, like political differences that are different than policy differences. It works when there isn’t an understanding of doesn’t have to be a total 100% agreement, but that you’re focused on the improvement of a public sector service or private sector service or rolling out a new program or solving a problem. So. It. It works best when the top leadership is imbued with the process. And you’ll see in each one of the examples. Commissioner Spears at Department of Children and Families, Luis Gutierrez at the Health Connector, the leadership at the MBTA, Governor Baker and Secretary Sudders leading the COVID effort. So it works best that way. And. It. And then I would say it works best in a…Spears at DCF and at the Health Connector…Spears and Gutierrez have made this part of how they do their work. The agency does its work. The MBTA started doing some of this and some of it’s fallen off. And so is that leadership? Is that culture? Is that so at COVID… Fortunately, the COVID, the COVID experience has passed us, but the approach was taken for two plus years. So I have experienced and I’m sure you guys have, too, you can tell when you’re when the person you’re working for doesn’t care. When you’re doing a project update or you’re in a meeting and you could see you could smell it, you could feel it. And no matter if they’re nodding their head and sort of saying the right kind of thing. And so like other processes, this works when the leadership is engaged, is asking the questions you might not want to ask or might not be able to answer. And as far as motivation, I have found that the shorter time frames with deliverables that matter are incredibly empowering to get something done. And. And I’ve seen that over and over again. People say, Wow, we didn’t think we could get that done, period. Never mind get that done in a short period of time and then go on to something else. I feel like I’m forgetting the last question. Help me.

Steve Kadish In the red…Oh. Really? Really. So the last question about. Creating a culture where people are okay, not saying everything is green or even, you know, being able to put a yellow up there, but is in fact to say this efforts in the red. I, I think. You know, when Governor Baker and I started doing this at. When we were at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and the health insurer was going into bankruptcy. And he asked me to establish a project management unit. And before when they would do project management, all their projects were always green because they would always push the date out. And which works. Right. But. When we were focused on these deliverables needed to be done by this time frame or actually the the entity was going to go into bankruptcy or not come out. We had a…We did two things. One is our dedicated team did an objective review of where the projects were and said, this one is yellow, this one is green, this one is red, and these are what the issues are. And then it ran that by the project team, but it took the experience of somebody having their project read and seeing that the world didn’t tumble down and that it actually became an opportunity to get help is where that that that became proven. And so I think it takes some experience actually. Of. Of living the living red, yellow, green dynamic. And. At honoring that and never shooting the messenger. Right. You want to you want to respect the person that was brave enough to say I need help. I’m an all star. I believe I’m an all star. I’ve always been an all star. But, ah, you know, we need somebody else to do this piece. You don’t have enough resource. This isn’t working. We thought we could do this really hard. It’s really hard for any. I’m going to say it’s going to be hard for any one of you that are sitting around in this room right now to be able to say their projects in their head. To their boss or their bosses boss.

Salimah Samji Great. Thank you. And if there’s any other questions, our last set of questions.

Attendee 5 Yes. Yeah. Hi, Steve. Thanks so much for your time today. My name is Zipporah. I’m a Mid-Career. The question I had was on the teams. You talked about mixing both new members and current members. How do you manage that tension and create psychological safety? Because you want them to scale and work together really fast, but they have different ways of working.

Steve Kadish Yeah.

Salimah Samji I wonder, Steve, if you could also answer why you do that. Right. And then answer a question as well.

Attendee 6 Thanks so much for coming in and taking the last question. Can you speak to your role as chief of staff? And, you know, you have the strategic operations division within the governor’s office. I did. How was your time? How did you decide to focus your time within the different contexts and projects that you would need to quickly deploy on and then to? Can you speak to what happens after that team? The strategic operations team needs to like move on and do something else. Is there a key to this happening back to your team in your office?

Steve Kadish Any other question?

Attendee 7 I’m Valeria. I’m also an MPP One. And my question is about and that those management techniques are very, I think, more frequently used in the private sector. And I would love to hear your perspective on why it is so hard to implement those in the public sector. And what are the most common roadblocks you found?

Steve Kadish Before people go. Do you want to do your book thing?

Salimah Samji Yeah, it was free books that were given out. So if you look on your chair, it’s an Oprah moment and you find an orange sticky, you get a free book.

Salimah Samji So you’re just you’re close to. Or if you’re close to one, yeah. I’m there. I thought, okay. You have a book. Okay. There’s one on the front. That’s right. Yep. And just keep it because you will then come and get your book. There’s one in the front if anyone wants to run. Sorry. And since.

Attendee 7 There’s a book copy here.

Steve Kadish And if you run out, I have a few, too.

Salimah Samji All right, Steve, you get answers, questions at the three.

Steve Kadish Be. So. It’s really hard to get. It’s really hard for new people to work in an existing team. And so. It’s one because of all the status quo stuff. And to a new person coming in is new and people are trying to figure out who, why, where, where do they stand and. I knew it works best. When the new person is. I don’t want to overuse the word humble, but is humble enough to appreciate that there are always good people in an organization and that and how to learn from that. And that isn’t a jerk. And is actually bringing something of value that wasn’t there before. It could be an approach. It could be a facilitation skill. It could be business process redesign. Could be the development of metrics. It could be. Here are three other different ways that something could be done. But it’s hard. And so. But. I’ve found that where that organization is in trouble and you simply ask the existing team to tackle, it never works. So you do need to bring in and sometimes it’s raising somebody up into a new role and that’s new for them, but it’s bringing in new thinking, new ways of doing it and often the resources themselves. I’ll come back to the chief of staff question. I’ll end with that one, but. The the. The. How do you know what’s valued in the public sector? If you just follow the media. It’s about somebody who did something wrong. Or an agency that did something wrong. It’s rarely a success. And. And then our processes that we see here are our ways of doing things are so heavily process-oriented that, you know the John Wooden quote don’t don’t mistake activity for actual results. Is that. Unless you are holding either private sector or public sector organization. Responsible for an actual result, a measurable result. Then all you have is a talking process. And a lot of our leaders are one have grown up and aren’t experienced with that to be more policy oriented than the results oriented. So that that’s what I’ll say. They’re chief of staff. QUESTION Well, there are three people in this room who interviewed me extensively that I don’t know if you guys want to take a take a crack at that. So I appreciate them being here, but I’ll start. But these guys might want to jump ahead. Oh, you are?

Steve Kadish Okay. So. There were two innovations that we did at the start of the Baker administration. The first is less talked about. But, you know, as important and it’s I wanted to have a deputy chief of staff that was responsible for access and opportunity. This was before I was aware of the term D.I. And it was specifically focused on the, the people who were employed by the state and by the by where the state was spending its dollars, actual contract dollars. And so we had a team of people that were focused on that. So boards and commission appointments are figuring out helping the state state purchasing agent, figuring out how to do things incredibly important, and that we would then have regular meetings at a cabinet level to go over where things to it. And it was a powerful thing. The second innovation was what we call the strategic operations team. And it would be like. Hiring you guys is what my thought was. I wanted to I wanted to have read the paper, but for those that have it, I wanted to not have to go out and do a bit for the you know, the McKinsey’s, the Bain’s, the Boston Consulting Group’s other consultants, where I knew we needed their their kind of expertize to get something done. I wanted to have that ability in-house and to be able to deploy it immediately and not be in an argument about the dollars and the scope and all of that. And I thought that, for one. Six week. Eight week. Yeah, I could buy her six people full time. And. And so that’s what we did. And it and it proved to be incredibly important. These four people that like you guys, that you could go in, know how to do things and add value immediately on stuff. And in my one other thing about creating this, I didn’t want these people to be there forever. I wanted them to be there for a year or two and then roll out ideally to other state agencies so that their methodology and their experience could be out there. So how did I divide up my time? I know this is a certain amount of your time that is focused on the meeting, stuff about an organization and cultural stuff, certain kinds of meetings in an organization from a problem point of view. I would I would personally and a couple of members of this team focus on whatever the most critical issue was for the governor. And we started with the MBTA failure during this, the snowstorms of 2015. And that. I’ll start and I’m sure I’m keeping you guys way late. So, yes, so.

Salimah Samji Thank you very much for giving a round of applause. And before before we end, Matt, I was wondering if you could just share some words. And there are people who are virtual…

Matt Andrews Okay. So thank you for coming and sharing. And even even more than that, thank you for. Thank you for doing all this work. I always think just thanking people for doing public services. And it is something we should always remember, but it’s just like it to me. And it’s it’s always thought me to see how some of the things that you did, all the things that we’re doing all over the world. And what’s so interesting to me is how these practices, people will say, well, they look like this, but this isn’t how governments work. But whenever you see results being delivered and I really mean this, it’s like it’s always this, it’s it’s always this. It’s not the other stuff. The other stuff is just delivering on stuff that we know how to deliver. And we’ve been doing that forever. And that’s where bureaucracies work. But but but the world is so, so, so complex right now. And all of the things that we did know how to do, we don’t anymore because we’re delivering to different communities than we did before. And and we’re delivering to bigger communities and we delivering to more complex and diverse communities. But even the things I think that we knew how to do, we need to be working. But to me, as I listen to what you’re saying and all of the questions that are being asked, that there’s there’s one thing that just comes down to it is where you started. It’s really all about people. And I think that if you remember that it’s about people and the process is not just about kind of mobilizing people at the end of the day. And and as you say, you know, when you know, when a boss gets that and you know when they don’t, you know, in middle people get that. You know, when people at the bottom get that, when they all realize that this is about them and the people who they serve, not just the people they serve. Right. Because it’s also about that. It’s about yeah, it’s about them doing their jobs in a more vital way than they’ve ever done it before. It’s about them feeling, feeling like they’re making a difference like they haven’t before. It’s about them being on the best team that they’ve ever been in before. When people realize that they are people and this is all about people, I think all of those other things kind of just lock into place. You know, they had a final cause today and I had Peter Harrington speaking to the class and he’s been work with us all over the world people. But also to ask us to some of the questions I said, I kind of think you get the people who don’t want to be involved, involved in that. How do you get this and how do you get and and he kind of said, you know, there’s a weird thing about like progress and momentum. It’s like with when he said, like the problem in public policy is often when when we spend the time tinkering with the car, then all of those debates and arguments and all that status quo stuff that allows itself to just creep in. When you just say, let’s get into the car and it’s just like drops the end of the road, see what it’s like. It’s like it’s like people change their mind and they realize that it’s that people thing. And I think feeding that people thing is the key to this. I think the one thing that we are we are pushing into quite a lot with the PDA work is is the the area of that. This is very, very useful when you kind of know where you’re going and enough people agree. But this becomes harder when you have those political disagreements. Yes. We find that that the one of the things that we spend quite a bit of time with is the questions on the Why.

Matt Andrews And the questions on the way are really kind of like, what is the problem? Why does it matter? Who does it matter to? Who does it need to matter to more? And how do we get people into that conversation that it’s it’s almost like that the first part of what you do but spending a little bit more time on it but actually doing it in exactly the same way, just kind of saying, okay, we’re not going to get to the water right now, but we’re working on an agreement around the way and we’re just going to give ourself two days to have this part of the conversation. A week for this part of the conversation, ten days for us. And part of it is just getting the right people into the conversation, allowing the conversation to grow. And and and it’s the same principles just on that question rather than on the what. But we can see people see even there that they can make progress on these political differences that they’ve had or these deep seated policy differences between agencies, because sometimes that can exist there and they see that just going in these kind of like these quick released activities can even help you to come to agreement with people. It’s incredibly powerful. And as soon as you get this momentum, I think, you know, you almost you you almost don’t have any problems anymore. It almost just it almost just resolves itself. So, yeah, very powerful. Thank you very much for everything.

Salimah Samji Great. Thank you, Matt. And with that, we’re going to end our zoom. Thank you for all the people who are online and have actually been here to watch this presentation. We really appreciate it. Another final round of applause.