Many of us have looked forward to getting to the new normal or next normal, where things would slow down and return to a more manageable pace. Our current tempo is the new pace of change and, even when this public health crisis is behind us, government leaders will be expected to move quickly and solve complex problems. This requires a new model for getting things done and, fortunately for us, Mitchell Weiss has written an operating manual for what to do now and for what comes next.
Weiss has been a pioneer in government innovation for many years, co-founding the city of Boston’s New Urban Mechanics, a first-in-nation research and design team launched under Mayor Thomas Menino in 2010. Since then, Weiss has been researching and teaching public entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School as a professor of management practice and Richard L. Menschel Faculty Fellow at Harvard Business School. Weiss’ deep experience in innovation has allowed him to ground this thinking and research into an actionable framework.
Mitch Weiss
The thesis of his book We the Possibility is that to solve the most complex public-sector challenges, we must leverage an entrepreneurial framework to move government from safe, probabilistic approaches used to navigate change to one that enables us to explore and experiment in the art of what’s possible.
Using countless examples and stories, Weiss breaks down the key elements of a “Possibility Government” into three distinct attributes:
- A government that can imagine with new ideas. There is no shortage of new ideas in the public sector, and Weiss makes the point that agencies need a process to generate proposals from multiple sources and not just from the top. Good ideas also do not always originate on the inside or an agency; they can come from the government outsiders that are the daily users of services and see problems firsthand.
- A government that can experiment with things by testing ideas. Experimenting and testing ideas may seem like foreign functions in a government agency. Still, Weiss shows that experimentation can generate results by having a defined process with pre-set expectations and transparent results. This portfolio approach also allows government agencies to further mitigate risks by having a portfolio of experiments with different risk and yield factors.
- A government that can scale by expanding successful ideas. One of the biggest challenges many agencies face is how to scale one best practice across their organization and beyond. Weiss points out that government agencies should embrace a “platform” mentality to accelerate the scaling of best practices, leveraging the network effects one can see with most online platforms. This same process and connectivity can also enable government agencies to learn from failures together.
Listen to Dustin Haisler’s interview with Mitchell Weiss here.
Title: We the Possibility: Harnessing Public Entrepreneurship to Solve Our Most Urgent Problems
Author: Mitchell Weiss
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press. Pages: 288. Price: $30.00.
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