Hello, welcome to another episode of Unlocked. I'm Skot. Today, we are going to talk to Marina Nitze like knits a sweater. I thought that was super fun. So I just wanted to share that with you. Marina is an author. She just finished her first book and called Hacker Bureaucracy. And that... Bureaucracy, say that like 20 times really fast, bureaucracy. She is releasing this book. It's coming in September. If you're already listening to this, then it's already out and you can go get a hold of this book. She was super interested in just getting stuff done. How many of us wanted to just get stuff done? Right? Raise your hand. That's right. She wanted to just get stuff done. And there's an idea. This idea of bureaucracy that holds us back, that she wanted to tackle. How can we hack this bureaucracy to the point where we can get stuff done and stop feeling like we're being held back.
So she is working in America's foster care system right now, helping to improve that process and that system, we talk about that. She was the Chief Technology Officer of the US Department of Veterans Affairs under president Obama and after serving as a senior advisor on technology in the Obama White House and the first entrepreneur in residence at the US Department of Education. So she's been there and she said, is this at the end, if this worked for the federal government and the White House, it'll probably work for you and even your local HOA, right? So there's a proven method here that she's presenting to us. We're going to get into this. She shares some tips in this interview. It's going to be fun. All right, here we come, Marina.
Marina, welcome to the show. It's so fun to have you, first of all, tell some background on you, where you from, what do you do? Why does it matter? Why should we listen to you?
Marina Nitze:
Yeah, so I've been a technologist literally since I was three. I got my first start, I used to make websites for soap opera stars when I was a teen. And so I started my own business then and have since been, self-employed doing business process reengineering and finding ways to use technology, to solve problems. And then 10 years ago, I was accepted unexpectedly as part of this new program at the White House called the Presidential Innovation Fellows. And they were looking for a handful of tech savvy entrepreneurs to come in to government for just six months and try to disrupt government, try to make things better. And that sounded interesting enough that I sent in my resume. Didn't hear back for a long time, which I don't know that I expected to, but then suddenly got a call on a Thursday saying like, Hey, would you like to be the fellow at the department of education, but you have to be here in DC.
And I lived in Seattle at the time on Tuesday, and that sounded just crazy enough that I was like, sure, I'll try it for six months. And then I just fell in love with the problem space. I ended up staying, I joined the White House as a senior advisor on tech, and then I became the chief technology officer of the VA for five years under president Obama. And now since I left government, I work a lot in foster care consulting and also do kind of IT crisis consulting at big and large firms. And so everywhere I am, I'm in a bureaucracy somewhere. And the book really came about because Nick, my co-author who was originally my boss at the White House. And I kept seeing people trying the same things over and over and then not working. And then we started studying, what are the people who are getting things done doing and how do we do what they're doing? And we really wanted to share those stories and those tactics for everybody to use.
Skot:
Okay, very good. Let me ask you this. The books that they write usually comes from some sort of dissatisfaction or some aha moment they have or something that you feel is broken or something that either again, irks you, that kind of makes you mad, irritates you in some way, shape or form, or that you're just super passionate about. And it usually comes from that dissatisfaction, but something you're just driven to do, that's your purpose in life? So where did the premise of this book come from? Which kind of camp did that come from now? They evolved too, at times too. It goes from I'm really angry and irritated by this thing. And this is an injustice in the world that I'm trying to solve, but then it comes this, my passion. It becomes that. So where did yours come from?
MARINA NITZE:
Yeah, well, I think we definitely saw a lot of injustice in change that we wanted to make in the world. And I think everybody feels really stuck right now in some kind of bureaucracy. It's your kid's school, it's your homeowner's association. It's your workplace. It's zoning rules at your city council, something like that. And Nick and I have certainly felt stuck in a lot of those. And when I was at the VA, I spent five years trying to get a dry erase board because I couldn't get enough office budget to buy a government approved hundred dollar dry erase board. And then you needed a special approved employee to hang it on the wall. And so those sorts of frustrations were incredible, but I want to get things done and I want other people to get things done.
And so this really ultimately comes out a place of inspiration of wanting people to know that it is possible, but the ways that I consistently saw members of my team or colleagues come in and try to solve a problem, weren't the ways that really worked. And so we wanted to share the stories of ways that we saw work that in a repeatable way, that anybody, wherever you are, whatever team you're on could use.
SKOT:
Okay. So bureaucracy. Define that word for me first. Let's just set the stage.
MARINA NITZE:
Sure. So actually, when we were writing the book, we were trying to find examples of things that weren't bureaucracies. We were looking at, like co-op grocery stores in Berkeley, California, and schools and other things. And I think we ended up being that everybody's operating in a bureaucracy once you add just a few people. It's processes and rules that are designed to keep an organization, whether it's a nonprofit, a school, a corporation, or a government moving forward. And there are the rules that you have to learn in order to make the bureaucracy actually work for you.
SKOT:
Do you feel that bureaucracy is a bad word?
MARINA NITZE:
I don't. It's more people feel that it's a bad word and it has definitely a lot of negative connotations, but it's everywhere. It's like saying that oxygen is a bad word.
SKOT:
And I ask you that because the way I hear it thrown around, people only use it when they're talking about a negative thing. Yeah. That's the bureaucracy of this. Or we got to fight against this bureaucracy or, oh, you got the bureaucracy that's holding us back from doing all these things. And so nobody's like, oh, the bureaucracy has set me free. Nobody talks about it in that sense. You don't hear that language. So why do you think that is?
MARINA NITZE:
Yeah, because I think people feel incredibly stuck in bureaucracies. And I think there's an incorrect belief that they are immovable and that they don't change. And again, as writing the book, we spend a lot of time looking at how do bureaucracies change and wherever you are in one, they do change some things pretty often. They change people, they change pay scales, they'll change updated strategic goals. And you have to find those opportunities where they're making a change and then use that to your advantage. I don't expect anybody to read our book and come away thinking that bureaucracies are awesome fun-filled fields of flowers that they're going to skip through, but we do hope that they leave it rather than saying this bureaucracy is an immovable thorn in my side that instead it just is, they're not going away. And so we have to learn how to work within them and alongside them.
SKOT:
So you changed your title from bureaucracies are fun to ha I'm just kidding. I'm just saying bureaucracies are fun. Here's a popup book about bureaucracies because you know, why not?
MARINA NITZE:
That might be the sequel.
SKOT:
There you go. There you go. All right. I'm going to say, is it possible, but you're saying yes, it is to change the idea of bureaucracy. How do you do that?
MARINA NITZE:
It is absolutely possible to change bureaucracy, whatever one it is. And we tried to include a really wide swath of stories in the book. So Nick and I worked together at some of the hardest, most storied bureaucracies in the world, the White House, the Department of Defense, the VA, and now Nick teaches at Harvard, one of the most storied academic bureaucracies. And he's a venture capitalist, which is another set of bureaucracies. And I work in foster care and I do kind of IT crisis consulting with different private firms. And so we really tried to pull together a lot of stories of successful bureaucracy hacking. That's the book. The book isn't just ideas. It's stories that illustrate tactics that really work. And we think anybody can learn them.
Does every single tactic work in every single situation? No, the book is actually 56 different mini chapters. Each one is focused on a different tactic, but whatever the problem that you're facing and whatever the bureaucracy you're in, some of them will work some of the time. And so we really wanted to give people a toolkit for how they could make the changes they want to see in the world.
SKOT:
So it is possible to change. Tell me about the story that opens your book.
MARINA NITZE:
So the story that opens the book is me in a cabinet meeting with president Obama and it really illustrates a misbelief I think people having about bureaucracies and that I absolutely myself out about bureaucracy, which is that if the guy or girl in charge says something should happen, that's what makes change. And I had a team that was working on a project at the VA, we were trying to help thousands of veterans whose appeals had effectively gone missing in this technological error. And the problem was we couldn't get this other team to connect two computers together because there was a lot of paperwork and process steps in the middle. And in that meeting, president Obama is upset with me for not making progress and is offering genuinely his help. How do we help get these two teams working together, connecting these computers so that we can help these veterans?
And at the end of the day, everybody's realizing like, oh man, even the president can't connect these two computers. You actually have to follow the bureaucratic process itself, which took some number of more months and forms and policies. But once we did it, the problem was fixed for good. And so that was a really eye opening lesson for me. But it's one that I've carried with me and used again and again and again, which is you've got to use the bureaucracy against itself when you're making change.
SKOT:
Okay. Use the bureaucracy against itself. Give me another example of that. Is there something else there?
MARINA NITZE:
So when you are, again, it's not that the head honcho or hunchess is the person that's making all the decisions and dictating how things are. You have to learn, how your organization really works. And it may be that there's a particular people in charge of particular processes and decisions mapping out your stakeholder tree of who kind of is holding what power, whether it be monetary resources or decision making power, or literally setting the agenda. How are the decisions made? Is it policies? Is it board meetings, et cetera, and mapping all that out, which is sort of a puzzle sort of a detective puzzle. And then once you learn how that is, you follow that same process to make the change that you want to see in the world. So you write the draft, you write the agenda, you do the work outside of a meeting so that you know how the vote is going to go at the end of your condo association meeting. So we have a lot of tactics in the book about how to apply that depending on the problem that you're working on.
SKOT:
Good. Okay, good. So tell me, you've spelled this word lots of times. Bureaucracy, spell it for me really fast.
MARINA NITZE:
B-U-R-E-A-U-C-R-A-C-Y. Bureaucracy.
SKOT:
Really good. Really? People don't write that. I'm just writing notes. I'm going, wait, how do I spell that word? I had to spell check myself really quick. Okay, cool. All right. So if you are saying this book is full of hacks about hacking the bureaucracy, because we all exist in one. And so what's another one of your favorite hacks?
MARINA NITZE:
So one that works again and again, and again is a space between the silos. So bureaucracy tend to be pretty siloed, especially the bigger that you get and the silos tend to be, have full of defensive antibodies. They don't want to change. The older that they are, the more kind of institutional history they have and different ways they have to prevent changing at all or quickly. But the space in between the silos is where there's a lot of opportunity for change. And let me tell a quick story here from some of my foster care work. So I was trying to help a particular state make their foster care and application process more efficient because it was taking hundreds of days. And in those hundreds of days, kids don't have homes. So it's a really big problem to solve. And so I watched, and this is what I recommend everybody do when you're trying to solve this kind of problem.
I just followed a real application from start to finish. I would wander around the building or what other building. I would go to the mail room, wherever the application went, I would follow. And at one step there's a woman and she's filling out one of those carbon copy, triplicate forms, the ones that's like pink and green. Some of your viewers may not even be old enough to have ever used them before. And she's like, Ugh, this is required by the DMV. The DMV lives in the 19th century. They still require these old ancient paper forms. This sucks. And so I said, oh, okay. And I went across the street to the DMV and I watched them cause I wanted to see what did with this paper. And I asked them, Hey, could you show me how you process the request from the foster care agency?
And the woman there said, oh absolutely. And she pulls up an electronic system. And I said, well, Hey, wait a minute. Where's the carbon copy triplicate paper? And she said, oh, you were at child welfare. They live in the 19th century. They keep sending me these carbon copy papers. Why don't they send me an email like everybody else on the planet. And so by finding this disconnect, I was able to connect these two employees up. The carbon copy paper goes away immediately. Everybody is happy and we shaved 27 days off of a process that was really high impact. And I have examples of that again and again and again and again, in my career of just following something from start to finish and then looking for the space between the silos, for the opportunities to change processes or steps, whatever it may be in your problems phase.
SKOT:
Those silos are a big deal because obviously people were not communicating very well between those silos and it was causing disruption and some pain and animosity back and forth and some misjudgment happening, back and forth. That happens all the time. A couple days ago, I was in working with a client in St. Petersburg in Florida. And one of the guys there was saying it was a private school. And just saying, we feel like we're siloed. We feel like we're the rings of Saturn kind of thing. We're all tightly bound together in our own little thing. When you zoom way out, we look like we're all together. But when you get in, we're very individualized as far as what we do and how we do things. We run the ship, but we don't feel like we talk to each other very often.
And I said, you know what? Every organization out there is siloed. We do that on purpose because it sets organization. It sets tasks and it sets lanes for you to stay in. I think, and you can tell me about this, right? But the problem with that is that they don't talk very often. They get, so this, blinders on the side that they don't talk. What have you seen as far as whoa, I'm sure I'm trying to stay in my lane. I'm trying to stay in my lane versus others that are trying to bridge that gap of communication.
MARINA NITZE:
We always encourage you. You want to go out and you want to at least wherever you are in an organization, talk to the people that are immediately upstream of you and immediately downstream of you. And if you really want to be that like A star player, you should understand how the whole process works from start to finish. Organizations, the bigger they get, the more they have to have silos and teams and discrete steps, and then they'll measure them et cetera. But so often as a result of that, everybody misses the force for the trees and they don't understand how the whole end to end process works. And this can have really bad impacts on the end users. We had a really transformative experience with the VA around veterans healthcare. So when I was there, there was a pending paper application, backlog of 800,000 applications from veterans who had applied to get into the VA healthcare system and had not yet been processed. We're on the front page of the New York times because the lawyers estimated a hundred thousand of those veterans had died waiting for their paper applications to be processed.
And then a member of my team, Maryanne, had gone and sat with real veterans that were really trying to apply and get into the healthcare system. And with permission, she recorded this one gentleman, Dominic trying and failing to apply to healthcare 12 times. And I couldn't have cast, Dominic is real human, we did not cast him, but I couldn't cast a better person if I had tried. He was tech savvy, funny, smart, broke all the stereotypes you may have of a veteran that was struggling with housing and some other issues. And by recording his experience of being unable to get through the VA healthcare system at all, that was what transformed and brought about the willingness to try something new. And that was when my team was able to say, Hey, what if we put an application on your mobile phone? And we let veterans apply there. And since then we've had 2 million veterans instantly enroll in VA healthcare from their mobile phones, which is a pretty... I sleep pretty good at night looking at that number.
But that all came from getting out of the office and sitting down with a real veteran and watching his experience and how those siloed pieces and that warehouse and that backlog really impacted humans at the end of the day. So the more that you can get out and talk to your end users, whether you're in retail or you're serving constituents in some other way, get out and see what their actual experience is like. And that will also reveal changes your bureaucracy needs to make. And it may kind of spark the fire and the inspiration to make those changes.
SKOT:
Why don't people do that?
MARINA NITZE:
I think they are afraid. A lot of what we talked about in the book are people's risk and incentive frameworks. Ultimately at the end of the day, a bureaucracy is a bunch of people and you need to understand what is someone... What is their view of themself? What rewards them, what incentives are they after? Are they trying to do a good job? And then what does a good job mean to them? And if a good job to them means they follow their position description exactly. And they make sure that the paperwork is always filled in exactly. It may not occur to them, or may not feel safe to them to go out and talk to other offices or to go out and talk to actual end users. They may feel actually that they're not even allowed to. And so empowering people, giving them opportunities to go out and sit with folks in whatever capacity and whatever environment you're in, the value there can't be understated.
SKOT:
So I almost hear you saying, Hey, leaders, give your people permission or almost force it to happen that you are having these conversations, whether it's quarterly, whether it's whatever on some kind of rhythm to make sure that you're communicating. Because I know in our day to day grind, we're just going to get blinders on. We're just going to, Hey, I'm doing my job. I'm filling out my paperwork. I'm filling out my carbon copy thing, because that's my job. And that's what I'm supposed to do. And in the meantime, I'm griping about this other process over here, because now you're coming to me asking why can't this get done faster? And I'm like, I just got to meet... So I think a lot of that metaphor while it's real, it represents a lot of us in our organizations and what we're doing and what could be holding us back is that lack of communication, almost a lack of permission and structure to make sure those conversations are happening. I like this. What's another one? Give me another one. I mean, without giving me away the whole book, but just yeah, give me one.
MARINA NITZE:
No, happily. Another one that I learned the hard way, but that I still use a lot is what I call stabbing people in the chest. And by that, I mean is everybody in your bureaucracy is not going to agree with you. And you're probably going to find yourself in a lot of meetings and a lot of situations where you want to change and someone else doesn't want that change. So rather than stabbing them in the back and showing up at your condo association with a new vote or a petition that you didn't tell anybody about, you have to sit down with the people that you're going to disagree with and tell them exactly how you're going to disagree with them and where, so that they're prepared. And this builds sort of an unexpected form of trust because I want you to know that I might not agree with you. I might have a different perspective on this issue, but I'm not going to blindside you.
I'm not going to embarrass you in front of your boss. And so if you could do that with your opponents or with your people that aren't agreeing with you in the office or your condo association or wherever it may be, that's one of my favorite tactics too, because it really surprises people. It's not something that people do ever. I think people actually get sort of a sense of a thrill out of dropping a bomb at a meeting. And I just think that's not productive. Like that doesn't help you move forward. And you never know where the person that you stab in the deck is going to end up next. I mean, the longer that I have a career, the more that I'm like, oh man, that person, if I had done that differently and now learn this whole new position in this whole new industry, and I really need something from them now. And that sort of, again, unexpected unconventional trust that you built earlier can really go a long way.
SKOT:
So good. I talk a lot about, I have a lot of brand strategy background work that I've done and your brand is really their reputation that you carry around with you. And I was speaking recently to a group of bankers about this. And it matters when people think about you and it matters how you behave and how you react to things because that brand impression that you have is going to follow you around forever. And you may not get a chance to shape it again because that person may leave and you may not really have any other interactions with them. And now you're just going to be known as Skot, the guy who goes around, stabbing people in the back or the Skot, the guy who likes to drop these bombs in meetings that just like cause reactions across the board. And sometimes they're not good.
And so I don't want my reputation to be that. And so being mindful of those interactions and how they're going to affect your reputation over time is a really big deal about what you're doing and how you're doing it. So in your experience of doing this and learning along the way, what would you say is the biggest, the big injustice that you're working on solving when it comes to this idea?
MARINA NITZE:
Well, I think we all feel particularly trapped in government bureaucracies. I work in foster care now, as I mentioned, I used to work with veterans and at the end of the day, if people don't understand how to navigate these organizations and make them work for end users, then a lot of people are dying and suffering, just to put it bluntly and that's not okay. And so I think it's really important to whatever your issue may be, whether it's at work or maybe it's an issue that you feel personally passionate about. It really warrants the time to understand how you could actually solve a problem. And I think people that analogy about eating the elephant, right? How do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? I think it's really easy to feel overwhelmed by problems like climate change or how do you fix the VA or foster care and all these other things.
And the thing that I've seen work again and again, is finding one discrete problem that you can solve and solving it really well rather than being overwhelmed and trying to eat the whole thing, eat the whole thing at once. And I see that happen a lot where people will make 10 year plans or they'll try to solve one enormous problem. When a much more affected way is to take really concrete steps that start bringing in these things that we want to have happen, like incorporating real users in your solutioning and going out and talking to them and understanding what their real experiences are so that you can make them better.
SKOT:
So do you think it's a mindset thing or do you think it's just a straight up communication thing or is it something else?
MARINA NITZE:
I think it's a little bit of mindset, but I think a lot of it is honestly skills. There are things that you can do again and again, that people, it may not be initially obvious. It will definitely not be written down in your bureaucracy, but that are ways that make things work. For example, I think a lot of people go to meetings thinking that things happen in meetings and I would die on the hill that nothing ever happened in a meeting, things happen outside of meetings that are noted in a meeting. And so doing that sort of work, understanding how is everybody going to butt ahead of time? Who has the agenda? How can I influence the order of the agenda? How can I influence the order of the vote so that John doesn't go first because John always goes on for five minutes with some negative diet trap, really strategically thinking about all the puzzle pieces to try to make your change happen, I think is a skill, but it's a skill that anybody can work on and develop.
SKOT:
Okay. Hack make sure John doesn't go first.
MARINA NITZE:
Yes.
SKOT:
Okay. Good one. I like that. Yeah. I'm looking at this and what we do and what we talk about. It's really important to understand how we can function better. We're looking for high performing teams and there's a lot of things that can get in the way of that and this idea of the bureaucracy holding us back. I don't know if I would really say the bureaucracy's holding us back as much as we are holding ourselves back as being part of this thing and how do we hack this idea of the bureaucracy and what it means? I think it's what the bureaucracy, we give meaning to that word and to what it means and we think of it as holding us back. Yeah. Feeling stuck in this bureaucracy and the bureaucracy, imposing these things upon us and being victims of the bureaucracy, as opposed to, how do we empower ourselves with tools and resources to help us overcome what we feel like the bureaucracy does to hold us back.
And it's really actually not that at all. Bureaucracy's just an institution. It's just a thing. We all exist in one, but it's really us that kind of hold ourselves back. Do you agree.
MARINA NITZE:
Yeah, absolutely. We should have hired you to do our branding, that's a perfect summation.
SKOT:
Well, for everybody out there that writing a book on bureaucracy later, I'm available. If you want to do that. Really cool. What do you want people to take away from this book though? If I'm going to read this book and I do some work with the CDC, so federal, but ultimately I don't do a ton of federal work. I mean, who's this book for and what do you want them to take away?
MARINA NITZE:
Yeah. I want this book to help anybody that's feeling stuck by a problem in their life, that's in a bureaucracy, whether it's their PTA, their homeowner's association, their workplace. There's the Frank Sinatra song, My Way, right, where he says, if I made it in New York, I can make it anywhere. So some of the stories in our book were really meant to say, Hey, if this worked at the department of defense, this is probably going to work in your PTA and you should try it and make a difference. And there's really, there's no harm in trying. So I really hope people take away from this book that there's something concrete they can do instead of throwing up their arms, instead of feeling defeated that there's something they can do to make the change that they want to see in the world.
SKOT:
That's cool. And that's a pretty good argument. If this worked in the Department of Defense, it can probably work in your HOA. That's pretty val... I don't know how many people can say that have written a book and have tested it with the white house. So that's pretty cool. Pretty cool. To be able to say that. Now, if people want to get in touch with you, if they want to find out more about you or get a hold of the book, where are they going to be able to do that?
MARINA NITZE:
Yeah. So Hack your Bureaucracy comes out September 13th and you can pre-order it at your favorite bookseller like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, IndieBound and you can learn more, read some new blog posts, or contact us at hackyourbureaucracy.com.
SKOT:
Very cool. Good. So brand consistency. Well done. I like that. So good job.
MARINA NITZE:
Thank you.
SKOT:
Good luck on that. I'm super excited for you. I interview a lot of authors. I know there's a lot of excitement around the launch of a book and just praise you for writing about this topic because it's a big deal. And again, it's a mindset thing, but I think if we can be equipped with tools, it gives us hope, right? It gives us an idea that, Hey, this can happen. You can change it. There is a culture shift that we need to make, a mindset shift as well to overcome what we're doing here. So I appreciate you and all your efforts and all your work and good luck on what you're doing.
MARINA NITZE:
Thank you so much. This was wonderful. I appreciate you having me on.
SKOT:
That was a fun punchy interview. Marina gave us a lot of insights about things that we can use to hack our bureaucracy, but it's also about hacking our mindset. So I want you to think about that too. How many of you take on the victim mentality of the bureaucracy is imposing this upon me or doing these things to me and we just can't get anything done because of the bureaucracy. Now, part of that, there may be some truth to some of those obstacles that happen, but it's how we tackle those things in our minds that are going to set us free and help impact our enjoyment and what we're doing and our ability to get things done. That was what Marina started out with. I just want to be able to get things done. I want other people to be able to get things done.
So we've got to understand how we are going to impact the idea of bureaucracy in the negative sense of what we tend to think about when we're thinking about bureaucracy. She gave us some great tips in there about stabbing people in the chest. How do we have open communication to the point where we're lifting people and we're upfront and honest and transparent as opposed to doing it behind their back, where it damages our reputation, it damages what we're trying to build there. The space between the silos. How many of us take the time to focus on what's happening between the silos? How are we able to create some cross conversations, some cross pollination between those silos in order to be effective in what we're doing? Really great tips. So that's just a few. And the book is chock full of stories like this, like the ones that Marina shared on our interview.
If you're interested in that, go out and check that book. If you're interested to find out more about me, you can go to skotwaldron.com. I've got some resources there, some free resources for you. Other interviews on my website, if you would like me come speak at your next event, please let me know. I talk about the idea of unlocking your potential in cultures and as leaders and as individuals. And you can find me on LinkedIn, connect with me there, YouTube channel, like subscribe, comment, all those things. Would love it. I appreciate you. We'll see you next time. On another episode of Unlocked.
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