An alternative to the hackathon

by Nick Charney

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By now most are familiar with the concept of an open data hackathon: jam people and data together into a small space for a short time and ask them to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and/or publish analyses (often by providing a monetary reward as an incentive). This has been the model for a long time now and at the height of its hype its merits were debated extensively online. I'm not really interested in re-hashing the debate, but if you want some context you can go read the following from a few years back (and everything those pieces link to):

• Open government hackathons matter by Mark Headd
• Everyone jumped on the app contest bandwagon. Now what? by Alex Howard
• On Hackathons and Solutionism by David Sasaki
• To App Contest or Not App Contest by David Eaves

What I am interested in is fleshing out why we need an alternative approach, how that approach could be structured and what it could mean to the big picture.

Hackathons produce apps, not solutions to wicked problems

A bus tracking app is great at helping me leave the office just at the right minute to catch my bus, but it's completely ineffective at solving the gridlock that hamstrings the bus as soon as I board it.

A health tracking app may help me eat better and exercise more but does little to address the looming healthcare crisis in this country (See: Impossible Conversations: A Review of Chronic Condition by Jeffrey Simpson)

In short, apps address downstream problems facing individuals that are generally easy to deal with. Ought we not be digging in a little deeper, thinking upstream, and investing our effort into solving problems at the macro rather than treating their symptoms at the micro?

Refocusing on wicked problems

Maybe we ought to engage our best and brightest from academic institutions, the public and private sectors and create teams of cross functional experts to gather, crunch and analyse the data.

Maybe we shouldn't ask them to build a minimum viable product in a weekend but rather give them the time required for them to conduct a thoughtful analysis of the status quo, a desired future state, and options on how to get us there (See: Enduring Ideas: The Three Horizons of Growth from McKinsey).

Maybe then we can sit down, have the hard conversations, weigh the evidence and options and chart a coherent way forward.

The wicked impact of solving (or even mitigating) wicked problems

I have no evidence to support this claim so feel free to take me task on it, but I get the sense that solving (or even mitigating) a wicked problem in society will always yield better returns to society at the macro than any app ever could.

I could go down a long tangent on how I think the focus on apps (to the detriment of research) is a by-product of our shortened shadow of the future, our culture of immediacy and the omnipresence of attention economy, but I'll spare you the diatribe for the moment.

What I will say is that I think we need to spend less time scrolling up with our thumbs and more time leaning in with our shoulders.

Peak Bureaucracy: Perhaps it's time we considered alternatives

The Atlantic published a great piece last week by Eric Garland entitled Peak Intel: How So-Called Strategic Intelligence Actually Makes Us Dumber, here's a particularly powerful excerpt:

"Hierarchical organizations have a very different logic than smaller firms. In less consolidated industries, success and failure are largely the result of the decisions you make, so intelligence about the reality of the marketplace is critical. Life is different in gigantic organizations, where success and failure are almost impossible to attribute to individual decisions. Though a given conglomerate might have hundreds or thousands of "executives," each is much more beholden to a complex culture of bosses. Even if people mean well, they're living and dying by a system where the incentives are to seek advancement by pushing responsibility downward and pulling credit upwards. In large, slow-moving bureaucracies, conventional thinking and risk avoidance become paramount, irrespective of how many times a day people at that organization use the word "strategy" or "innovation." It is far more preferable to fail conventionally than to make a daring but uncertain decision without the full backing of the entire organization. Because massive bureaucracies are so much more common than they were even a few years ago, decisions are simply not in vogue right now."

While Garland, a (private sector) strategic intelligence analyst, is speaking mainly about large privately held companies the same could easily be said about public sector bureaucracies. In fact, it is probably one of the reasons why federal public servants in Australia prefer working in micro-agencies over larger departments. According to the Canberra Times, the recent Public Service Commission (of Australia) Survey found:

"... significantly higher levels of employee engagement than in the rest of the federal bureaucracy, suggesting micro-agency staff feel more involved with their work, their colleagues, their supervisor and their workplace."

And that:

"Micro-agency employees also rated their leaders more highly on every measure tested, such as whether the agency was managed well, and whether senior executives engaged with staff and communicated effectively."

Size, it would seem, acts as a force multiplier. The larger the organization the greater distance the work needs to travel for feedback and approval, the more consensus building needs to take place, the less likely any single person or decision is to be linked to success or failure. Even my rudimentary analysis of the (Canadian) Public Service Employee Survey seems to support similar conclusions.


So what does it all mean?

Well it could mean that public sector organizations could be more effective if they were smaller; and to be clear, I don't mean that in the "cut jobs" sense but rather in the "perhaps departmental mandates are too wide" sense. Theoretically one could divvy up existing mandates into smaller more manageable chunks and split resources accordingly to deliver on those mandates while leveraging administrative support solutions on a model of shared services. In practical terms, I'm not sure how much of that could be accomplished given established legal and policy frameworks. Surely there is a robust set of rules and conditions that must be satisfied before one can start rearranging the entire apparatus. That said, if the real problem is a disconnect between individual decisions and outcomes than perhaps we can pursue measures that make upstream decision-making more frequent (Note: by "upstream" I mean further down the hierarchy).

If Garland is right (and I think he is), this should free up decision-makers to make decisions in a more timely manner and generally cut the distance between those in the trenches and those directing the troops; and if the survey results are to be believed, then faster decisions and closer proximity should generally lead to better employee engagement and performance. Sadly, my sense is that pushing decision-making upstream would be incredibly hard to accomplish given the tendency for even the most straightforward request to get caught up in the hierarchy.

That said, many bureaucratic bottlenecks arise from the system itself, not the people within them. You could call it a design flaw of command hierarchy, scalability at the cost of efficiency (at least with respect to complex and interdisciplinary knowledge work). If you need proof, I suggest you speak with any of the system's Directors General who have more staff than a first year psychology class at a major Canadian university. You will quickly realize the predicament that they find themselves in. It's not that they don't appreciate your effort or want to get you comments on your work, its that she simply doesn't have the time to get her hands dirty with everything her employees generate. Add to that her fiduciary responsibilities, human resource issues, management meetings, interdepartmental meetings, and the list goes on. As Garland said, even the most well intentioned and hard working individuals (of which I know many) are to a degree stuck in the system.

As we continue to move forward within the confines of austerity there clearly remains an opportunity to design a better system. Perhaps we have not only reached the period of peak intelligence as Garland argues but also the point of peak bureaucracy.  The point where governments couldn't possibly become any more bureaucratic, the point where bureaucracy (the slow process, not necessarily the number of people) starts to decline in absolute terms.

The point where we have to start seriously considering the alternatives.




Originally published by Nick Charney at cpsrenewal.casubscribe/connect