People are at the center of our government.
Perspective of the Washington Monument (Photo courtesy of author, icons adapted from thenounproject.com)
An easily forgotten fact: everyday people are at the core of how our government works.
Oftentimes, government can feel more like a complicated, theatrical performance rather than a hardworking community of people with good intentions. Day to day, we, the people, make government complex. Making that government more accessible, or modernizing it, is less about ignoring the entanglements that our people dynamics can create and more about devising new methods to be more flexible alongside changing relationships. We should be prepared for certain amount of change, it is what makes us uniquely human. As a Veterans Affairs leader recently said to me, “It’s one thing to have good intentions. But you need the right mechanism.”
I am a new federal employee. One month ago, I was hired as a Presidential Innovation Fellow (PIF) detailed to the National Cancer Institute (NCI). I enter into this role from the perspective of an entrepreneur, having co-founded and cultivated a vast social innovation portfolio at the strategic design firm The Work Department. For 10 years, by melding strategy, business management, visual design, and technology, I actively helped to rebuild and re-envision the former heart of our nation’s economy: Detroit. Suffice to say, serving as a leader in a complex system is not new to me.
My new charge at PIF is to amplify the NCI’s reputation as the leading resource to navigate cancer care. I seek to uncover a focused opportunity to develop shared mechanisms that unify the efforts within the densely populated NCI cancer care research ecosystem. Looking forward, one of our greatest opportunities is to embrace emerging technologies that have the power to envelop our imperfect and human organizations, so as to help us manage — and do — our jobs better. Are dreams of management systems that are effective, healthy, just and predictable only keeping me up at night? When we focus our collaborative efforts to boost our strengths and align our efficiencies, we drastically improve the way we serve and remain accountable to our nation’s people.
Answers to harnessing more value in government lie within the design of smart systems — technology paired with new ways that we, the people, work together in real life. When we craft a conversation between people and information technologies, we improve the way we make decisions by means of more predictive and adaptive network behavior. Improving the relationships between people and more legible, free-flowing data is an innovation will make good government even better. These worlds have been siloed for far too long and I believe we have the infrastructure to improve communication by building bridges between data and the people who ultimately create that data. We just need to create the connection.
When I think of smart systems, artificial intelligence and machine learning are a default part of the strategic connectivity package. AI algorithms are already all around us, and they don’t look like those over the top sci-fi images of glowing robot brains you see when you Google AI. They should look like us because we are making them. It is simply a matter of how we, the people, advance AI datasets with what partners. While conversation and research are essential, I believe it is too early to define precisely what the smart system mechanisms will be. We need to invest in the businesses and platforms that will encapsulate American values of a modernized government. More importantly, we need to understand our role, as the federal government, to get ahead of the regulatory and ethical curve. For example, a recent piece in the New Yorker titled “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain” points to unregulated marketing and service delivery as a core root cause of the current opioid epidemic. What lessons can we learn from these life-threatening crises?
During my term, I look forward to working with colleagues at the NCI to demonstrate a successful model that galvanizes the power of people and data. NCI is the leading investor in cancer-fighting care with an $5.389 billion 2017 fiscal year budget and $300 million for the Cancer Moonshot in December 2016. It is an honor to facilitate strategic partnerships and amplify the efforts of NCI’s constellation of assets that include (and aren’t limited to): 30 divisions, offices, and centers, each with their own unique portfolio of resources; 69 NCI-designated Cancer Centers; several dozen federally appointed committees and subsequent working groups; and thousands of dynamic and genius personalities who all serve different and critical functions.
The process — as with all work I do — begins by listening to our key stakeholders. But gathering that core sample and merging those myriad of perspectives and priorities is just the beginning. I’ll work with my colleagues to synthesize a shared vision and construct a framework that guides us towards building smart systems that empower people. In looking at what we do know — that the number of new cancer cases will rise to 22 million within the next two decade — it’s clear we’re going to need more people working on public-private partnership efforts to transform cancer care research into sustainable cures. Smart systems will grow the economy by creating jobs and improving health, now and for future generations.
Investigating how smart systems shape economic development initiatives that empower our citizens to innovate opens the door to more opportunities. Given that the US is forecasted to spend nearly $156 billion dollars on cancer care in 2020 which is over 350% more than the projected market size for partially autonomous vehicles in 2025 (per a Boston Consulting Group report). We can safely say that cancer care is a high priority economic driver. Is care the new mobility? How will we spur growth through economic incentives that prioritize our nation’s regions of emerging talent and markets, like movements to invest in AI and hard tech in the midwest? Or create smarter systems to support a culture of supporting entrepreneurs that will advance cancer care cures more swiftly and efficiently by putting people and data first, like Grail’s $1B claim on the perfect cancer test? The list goes on.
All of this is about putting people at the center. Government is about people. Systems are about people. We, the people, are smart. But let’s get smarter. Smarter systems will be the first step. Let’s make it easier for those who show up.
