When generations look back on this pandemic, will they see how COVID drove structural changes and innovations of substance, or just brought us more underwhelming technical advancements?
Brian Elms’ article in Governing.com from April 29th, 2020 “Government’s Innovation Surge Shouldn’t End with the Pandemic” notes that “service improvements that used to take years are now being accomplished in days.”
Elms oversaw the Denver Peak Academy for the city before writing the book Peak Performance about what he learned deploying LEAN Sig Sigma practices to teams, to offices, and to programs at the city. Since then, he has taken his show on the road as a government innovation guru leveraging a career nudging entire office teams to assess and improve processes.
Right now, necessity is driving innovation. There is tremendous external motivation exist to move service delivery for entire departments on-line if they were not before. It was something resisted or on to-do lists for years, and it happened overnight. This was not rocket science for vehicle registrations, document notarization or video conferencing. For systems that are suddenly experiencing high volumes the need for improving system capacity for loan processing or unemployment benefits will likely be forever improved when they are fixed. The same will likely be the case for mail-in ballots going nationwide in the November election. Governments are seizing the opportunity to adapt suddenly, obliterating the red-tape and bureaucratic patterns of work that most citizens have abhorred for years.
Video conferencing and working-from-home was on the rise, mostly in the private sector, when in a matter of weeks entire public department offices shifted to service delivery with remote employees. Think about how this IT/HR miracle just happened. Except many of us are suddenly aware of how vital in-person office culture, and the social proximity of our daily lives is vital to our mental/emotional health. If you want a real sense of the pace of change this article from March 11 about “Why Conference Call Technology Never Works,” is a brilliant, deep-dive that barely 8 weeks later seems obsolete. Transition workforce to remote work with video conferencing – mission accomplished.
Will remote work go down as one of those no big deal issues that company cultures resisted? Working remotely is not equivalent to, say, the invention of canals which brought freight from the Atlantic Ocean to the Midwest, transcontinental railroads, or the Interstate Highway system, Social Security or Unemployment benefits. Will real transformational change emerge from this crisis or will many of our adaptations just be temporary?
The problem with tech progress is that it almost always incremental. A perspective on this published what feels like 20 years ago, in February 2020—”The Real Trouble with Silicon Valley: The toxicity of the web is peanuts compared with Big Tech’s Failure to remake the physical world” points out that there are major social and engineering problems to solve—take finding a vaccine for COVID, for instance, yet much of the wealth and brain trust seems to focus around something only as impactful than more realistic gaming.
Will there be paradigm shifts from this time in history that we look back upon that remade our culture? I like Elms’ encouragement. As he points out, the trouble with normal was that it wasn’t evolving quickly enough.
