Bridgebuilders: Today’s Way Forward for Public Leadership to Solve Complex Problems

0:00 The topics and opinions expressed in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not those of W Forcy Radio, it's employees their affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability explicit or implies shall be extended to W Forcy Radio, its employees or affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FORCY Radio. What's Working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential.

0:45 Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want Working on Purpose. Now here's your host, Doctor Release Cortez. Welcome back to Working on Purpose program, now eight and a half years on air. Thanks for tuning in again this week. I'm your host, doctor Elias Cortez jo An Eli from Dallas homebase. For me if we've not met yet and you don't know me, I'm a management consultant, organizational logotherapist, speaker and author. My team and I at Last Cortez and Associates help companies enliven their operations by articulating their purpose and building inspirational leaders and cultures activated by meeting and purpose to turn those companies from a flatline EKG to a vibrant workplace. There, people are intrinsically motivated to perform with their best, grow into their full potential, and are committed to stay and help deliver in the company's mission. You'll learn more about us now we can work together at elist Cortez dot com. Now let's get in today's program with us. Are the authors of bridge Builders, How Government Can Transcend boundaries to solve problems.

1:49 They are William Egers, the executive director of Deloitte Center for Government Insights, where he is responsible for the firm's public sector thought Leadership. Has several books out, with one delivering on digital the innovators and technologies that are transforming Government. The other author is doctor Donald Kettle, who specializes in public management and public policy. He previously served as dean in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, and is a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Vulcar Alliance, the Brookings Institution, and the Partnership for Public Service. He has authored or edited numerous books, including The Divided States of America, White Federalism Doesn't Work, and Ken Governments Earn Our Trust. He has consultant for government organizations at all levels, including most recently, the US Department of Veteran Affairs.

2:38 William and doctor Kettle. It is a pleasure to have you on. Welcome to working on Purpose. Eden's great to be working there. At least. That's quite a mouthful to try to try to introduce the two of you. Let me just say, it's pretty amazing to have both of you on. I loved, love, love reading your beautiful book. This is really something so what I alred to learn about the two of you as you guys are slightly ambitious and slightly smart, so looking forward to digging into what you've created here. You're ready, ready, Okay, Well let's do this just because our listeners and viewers don't know you quite as well. As I do, and I can't quite do justice to your introductions. Can each of you just give a brief introduction of yourself so they understand how you're anchored in the content we're talking about today. In my case, this is done. And I've been kicking around the world of public management for about the last forty five years and have been looking in particular about the ongoing problems trying to figure out how to make government work, but devoted at the same time to the idea the government can work, and in particular learning from those who have succeeded in doing that so that we can put ideas together, both in teaching students over the years, but also in working with people inside government and writing about it so with luck, other people can pick up the band and to be able to lead it forward down the street. And I'm Bill Lakers, working around public management for thirty five years myself, both in think tanks in government and at

4:09 Deloitte, and a big focus of my work over the years has been around public private partnerships. In particular I've written a number of books on that, including a book a number of years ago very tied in with your podcast also, which is called the solution Revolution, how business, government and social enterprises are teaming up to solve society's biggest problems. And so this book really is a kind of continuation of a lot of the work that Don and I have been doing over seventy five years cumulative. What's just astounding, gentleman. It's really really great to have your beautiful minds here on the show to share with our listeners across the world. So before you came on, William Don and I were chatting and he mentioned that there's kind of a fun story of where this how this book actually became. What is the story of why you guys decided to write this book and where it came from. Well, we've been We've known each other for a long time and always loved getting together to compare notes about what's happening out there in the world. And I was lucky enough for Bill to have a business meeting here in Austin, where I'm speaking to you from, and he said, how about we get together for lunch?

5:15 So I said that'd be terrific. So we sat there and started talking, and the more that we talk, the more that we talked ourselves into a set of problems that we thought that government needed to address, but also a series of solutions that we thought were essential. And so by the time we finished lunch two hours later, as was about two years ago, we ended up with the idea for a book and from there what you see in front of you is what it is. It was the product of that work over the last two years. This took me just two years. That's crazy till well, I think we actually wrote the book in about six months, and then the rest of it was a review and that sort of thing. Donal I had both focused a lot of our work on implementation over the year, policy implementation because if you look at all the think tanks, since there's so much work right now on policy development and policy and this notion of let's just you know, pass bills and a lot of ideas, but a lot of the notion of the hard work of implementation has really been ignored in many respects, and so we focused on implementation. But now implementation actually means implementing very across a very complex network of usually private sector, nonprofits, oftentimes academia and elsewhere, and so it's a very complex sort of web that you have to navigate through, and we wanted to write about. How do you actually do that? Yeah, and so one of the things that I really wanted to

6:47 call out here a couple of things. And one of my ways that I host a show is I am, you know, a researcher, So I love to be able to you saw on my notes I take. These are copious notes with pay numbers, et cetera. I'll let you be able to also preserve the content of your writing, because your writing is beautiful. And the other thing I want to say, this is a very dense book, but it's it's meaty, but it's also incredibly accessible, gentlemen. It's really incredibly well organized and accessible so that people that even aren't in the government space can benefit from this as well, people in different sectors, nonprofit, for profit. I totally see some application across all these different spaces. So you did say in the book that you wrote it to help people expand their vision of how government can solve today's problems, and importantly, how it can bridge gaps between agencies, between levels of government, and between social service agencies and police departments, between public and private, nonprofit, all these kinds of different things. I think that is incredibly compelling and important for our listeners and viewers to understand that's why you wrote the book. Did you want to see anything else about that? I'd add one thing, I think, which is that we came at this with a kind of twin focus. The first is that we saw a kind of basic core problem that increasingly we thought hung up the problems of implementation Williams subscribed, and that is that we've got a challenge of the fact that there's no problem that matters that any one government organization can control anymore. There's just nothing that anyone organization can control. And so the question was how do you go by trying to solve that problem? And the flip

8:18 side of that is that we came at this book by seeking to discover how other people have done it to succeed in solving these problems of implementation, to demonstrate that solutions are possible. And so one of the things that's probably most important about our book here is that this is not ivory tower, pie in the sky stuff that we thought about, but rather things that we've discovered that successful managers have done to solve this basic and fundamental problem that people across the country, really across the world are struggling to try to deal with And I would add that a lot of your viewers maybe from the private sector or nonprofit sector, and we really wrote the book for them also because it lays out the context of their work. We describe the purpose landscape out there and how it's grown so dramatically over the last twenty years, and then how do you connect the work that you're doing in purpose in the other sectors with the work that government's doing, so you can leverage that and you can have really a force multiplier. I've worked with a lot of social entrepreneurs over the years.

9:30 I have sponsored work that we've done helping doing pro bono work for social entrepreneurs, and the one thing I always emphasize with them is the importance of government and really understanding how to navigate it, not only for contracts, but for a whole variety of different things. It's really important to understand if you're a social entrepreneur, if you're working in a purpose office, how you're going to connect with the public sector, because it it's very complex, it's very different to do so, and so we're hoping the people who are engaged in that purpose work will also find a lot in this book to help them in their quests. I already know that they will. We're going to be talking about some of that as they go along here. And I think as you as you've been talking about that part, William, I want to gravitate to a term that you use in the book, which I think is capturing what you're talking about there, and that's this idea of blended government. And I obviously here we are working in a boundariless world. You talk about that, and I think it's interesting well that you describe. Of course, this is the complexity here, and this isn't This is the theme that I keep seeing by the way in the show, that we're seeing that the world is changing so fast, the complexity is so enormous that one no one can do it alone, and we must find a way to activate more people. So I'm seeing that as a trend in everything individuals, how we lead inside organizations, and certainly in your book, on a much more mackerel level to address huge problems

11:01 in the world. Absolutely, I mean, these are incredibly complex systems. Just think about when you look at some of the major pieces of legislation that have been passed by Congress over the last few years, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Act, that Competes Act. We're talking about over two twillion dollars of investment in American competitiveness. That's all coming down into state and local governments, but the vast majority of that funding is actually going towards the private sector, nonprofits and others in the form of tax credits and competitive grants and so on. And so if you're a government official, you have to figure out how to apply that holistically and breaking down silos and how are you going to incentivize the different sectors, What are the different tools you're going to use, whether it's through tax credits or prizes and challenges and so for, and also navigate the different cultures. So we really believe you need sort of that ability to have cultural competence, and that means cultural competence both across the sectors, but also understanding the different communities you're working with and so and these are some of the really important skills that are needed today, not only in government, but in purpose offices, nonprofit, social entrepreneurs and others who are trying to create public value. And we want to flip this on its ear too.

12:30 On top of it, because so often we tend to see these as problems that, Okay, where's government going to come from to try to fix them. But one of the things that we discovered, too, is that a large part of the business about creating public value is coming from private organizations as well, in ways that I think we're in many ways not even imagined in which the public sector doesn't really succeed at this point, I think in being able to put its arms around If you want to understand what's going on, for example, to try to help the problem of refugees coming into the country, you have to understand two basic facts. One is of the federal agency that's in charge of the Office of Refugee Resettlement has a total of one hundred and fifty employees to try to deal with tens of thousands of people, and so the government isn't going to can't possibly manage all those problems. But at the same time, go two or three blocks in from the border, not too far from where I'm sitting here in Austin, and what you see is a whole collection of religiously based organizations, nonprofits and other non government organizations that are taking the lion's share of the burden and housing people who are coming in or providing food, providing the transportation that's required, job training, and efforts to try to navigate the immigration system as well at the same time.

13:48 And so we not only have government relying on non governmental partners to do government's work, but we have non governmental organizations creating public value at the same time. So to understand the way that the system increasingly is working, it's important to come at it from both sides of the street. That was incredibly well articulated from both of you. So what I want a presence for our listeners and viewers who haven't read the book just yet, as I have what this whole set of skills that you've been talking about here, if I have this right, you are referring to that as a bridge builder. Correct, absolutely, there's there. You know. They're like orchestra conducted. They do the hard work of convening and aligning all the different players, making sure that they're said, they're playing from the same sheet of music, and they're cea beyond boundaries, breaking down silos, forging unity from diversity, seeking mutual advantage, aligning incentives to achieve shared goals. It's hard work. But it's also incredibly valuable work. And you know, when I speak to students and Don's been teaching for decades, this is the kind of work that they want to do today, whether business schools, where in the Social entrepreneurs Club is the most popular club, and so many business goals or school policy. So this is actually a nice fit with the kind of work that people want to do today.

15:11 But this is actually the work that's needed the most also today. And there's a great example of that. If you look at a typical symphony orchestra. It's between seventy and one hundred musicians who get together to play with any beautiful music if they know what they're doing, and if the conductor knows what the conductor's doing. But again, not too far from where I'm sitting now in Houston, they succeeded in reducing the level of homelessness by sixty three percent in about five years. Sixty three percent on a problem that most people around the country think is just absolutely impossible. And how do they do that? They did that by pulling together a coalition of more than one hundred different organizations to try to work on this problem. That is, they succeeded in making to get work together a group larger than the largest symphony orchestra, but did it in a way that had everybody focused on the goals that they shared in common, with a data system that provided a language for them to speak and connect with each other and to accomplish the shared objectives by weaving all those pieces together. And it was the orchestra conductor, the bridge builder, who was successful of being able to make this happen, and as a result, the level of homelessness was reduced by sixty three percent. Beautiful example, don And with that, let's take it. Let's go into our first breaks. Who can give our listeners if you were something to chew one and consider just the import of what we're talking about today. I'm your host, doctor Relis Cortez.

16:40 We've run in the air with William Eggers and doctor Donald Kettle, the authors of bridge Builders, How government can transcend boundaries to solve problems. We've been talking a bit about where this book came from, why it's important. After the break, we're going to get into and cover as many of their ten keys to unlock the solutions for foobridge builders as we can cover along with scific examples of the real albums that they're actually out to address. Stay with this, We'll be right back. Doctor Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for a greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elise Cortez dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortez. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with a lease, send an email to a lease a l se at least cortez dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on

18:12 Purpose. If you're just now joining the program, I guess are William Eggers and Donald Kettle, who are the authors of bridge Builders, How Government can transcend boundaries to solve problems. I'm your host, Doctor las Cortez, So from here that I've been going forward I want to be able to give our listeners and viewers as much leak from the book as we possibly can to help help them walk away with something they can usually easily put to work. So one of the first things that I want to cover is, as I mentioned before the break, is you put forth in your book ten keys to unlocking these solutions for bridge builders, and then in each of your chapters you actually have I think it's something like ten ten ways or ten ten ways to support the bridge builders and so on. Of your One of your keys is is to knock down barriers, and you say that a siloed perspective guarantees failure.

18:56 So can you speak a little bit to that particular key, And then I want to talk about the application around it through Hurricane Katwin. It which I have a connection to you as well. The basic problem that's so often both government managers but also individuals experiences that they say, Okay, I have a problem that I need to solve, and I need to find whoever it is who's in charge of solving it. There's nothing that's more frustrating than to discover that you've come to the wrong door and that you can't get in that you can't get the solutions that you need to the problems that you've got. And the people describe it as silos, but the real problem is the kind of well, not my problem or somebody else's problem, or if you want me to solve it, you've got to go someplace else. And in a world where it is the case, as we said before, the no organization that exists can solve every problem on its plate, and no problem that it faces can be solved by any one organization. It inevitably requires these connections across these boundaries. And so as a result of that, the existence of silos that really create tall walls between organizations and a deep moat full of regulations that prevent people from working together is something that gets in the way of the kind of problem solving that the twenty first century demands. That was very You actually distilled everything everything beautifully from chapter one in a way that I didn't think you can do in just a short amount of time. So kudos for that. Now,

20:30 if we could, and I want to do this with each of the keys that we can cover, I wanted to have you talk and speak from from that particular key area about Hurricane Katrina which happened, of course in two thousand and five. I remember that very distinctly. I ended up housing three students and a set of parents for about four months after that. So part of the part of the offload crew, if you will, to help cover that. So if you could just speak a little bit to how that particular key is addressed through the Katrina experience, absolutely well, thank you for doing that, by the ways, that was amazing of you. As we know you know, Katrina was a Category four hurricane, caused over eighteen hundred fatalities, over one hundred billion dollars in damage, particularly hit hard with New Orleans surrounding areas, and the initial response to the hurricane was just chaotic, uncoordinated, inadequate. And that's when Homeland Security Secretary marcol Churdoff he called Coast Guard Chief of Staff bat Allen and asked him to go to New Orleans to take over the struggling federal effort. And it really turned out to be a prophetic decision. Now Alan, The rub is that Alan might have been in charge of the federal response, but he had no legal authority over state and local resources. But he recognized that a lack of coordination would absolutely cripple the response.

21:55 But instead of giving orders, he focused on building credibility and trust. And one of the first things he did was to gather two thousand responders federal, state, local NGOs, private companies that have Dillards, department store, warehouse. He got up on a desk with a loudspeaker and told everybody that's giving only one order, treat everybody affected by the storm like a member of your own family. It was simple but very powerful. And what Alan did was he found a way to lead in a system with lots of players but no one officially in charge. And there's a lot of examples in the book like that. So he had to find those who had the resources to solve a particular problem, regardless of what kind of organization that they were in, and weave them together in a seamless coordinated response. And that was really the core of his bridge building. This was one of the toughest emerges and See response efforts in the nation's history. It required pulling together a collection of state agencies across the Gulf, for local governments, nonprofits like the Red Cross, companies from Walmart to banks to gas stations, and instead of viewing the cleanup effort as a problem of how to manage a particular agency. He worked hard to manage the problem, and he pulled in all the resources needed from all the organizations involved, wherever they were located, and so it was a whole of society response which made his leadership of success. And after howar King Katrina, FEMA adopted this whole of community response as a core of their response to

23:27 disasters, and in the decade since then, FEMA has become really one of the best government organizations in bridge building and weaving together these different organizations, and Katrina was really the beginning of this effort to do that. And one of the things that is one of one of my favorite stories about this is not only the story of fat Allen getting on top of a desk with a bullhorn and telling everybody to treat everybody's remember their own family, but also some of the people who worked for him, because one of the things that I think sometimes we tend to think as well, this is Admiral fat Allen. This is a guy who's been appointed by the president to come in and solve the problem. But there was also a case of a woman who was piloting a helicopter who had orders to get back to headquarters to be able to make sure that she could shuttle the next rout of equipment. Equipment was really in short supply at this point, and so everybody was super hyper about making sure they didn't waste a single seconds worth of energy. But here she was flying back to base. She looked down. She saw a family stuck in the rooftop of one of the places in New Orleans, and she stopped to be able to pull those people off. They had been stuck there for days. They had no other way of being able to get off. And why did she do this, because she had violated her orders. And the answer was she was treating those people as if they remember their own family, and so they got their problem solved. She only lost a few minutes and being able to

24:59 get back to base, And it was an example about how you can transfer the kind of broad guidance that comes from the top into a situation where individual leaders become leaders at all levels of the organization who see it as their job to work on solving problems and reaching across boundaries in ways that often is something that wouldn't occur, and it may not even be something thought of as safe, but the fact is that Admiral Allen made it safe and as a result, that family guide and self rescued. I want to situate this for our listeners of viewers that have been tuning in for quite some time. In their parlance, they're used to hearing from me, and that is wow. Talk about mattering with your one precious life. Wow. Really making a profound difference across this community in this area. So just and you do talk about that example about him on the desk with the bullhorn in the book is beautiful.

25:52 So listeners and viewers, you can catch it right there in the book, just the way that they were talking about it there. Okay, well, let's go on to the next one because I want to get as many as I can. One of the other keys you talk about in the book is to seek mutual advantage, because you say shared governance bills on the mutual pursuit of shared strategies. Let's hear about that one. Go ahead, and then we've got We've got so many stories to come up upon this. But that was really at one of the cores the issue about how it is that in Houston that the Coalition for the Homeless found a way to be able to solve the problem of homelessness that they did for and reduce it by sixty three percent. And the way in which they did that was to say, not here, we're going to give you orders about what is that you need to pick up. Instead, what they did was to identify the kinds of problems that each individual experiencing homelessness had and then tried to match them one by one by one by one with the organizations in a position to try to solve that problem.

26:51 And by finding a way for those organizations to achieve and pursue their omission while at the same time they pursued the goal of trying to solve the problem of homelessies with the individuals. Was a way that this came together. Organizations did what the organizations were supposed to do, but they were woven together in a kind of steamless web to ensure that the results that the community needed were a set of results that they got. And I would say that this is really key the seeking mutual advantage when you're working with the private sector, and that's why it's so important in government now to understand what the incentives are what the goals are in the private sector, and to figure out how to leverage all those resources that are now being invested into social impact. And partly the chapter title was inspired by former Denver mayor and then Colorado governor and now Senator John Hickenloover. Public private partnerships and mutual advantage was at the very core of hickenloup governing philosophy. Both as mayor and as governor, he was able to cobble together partnerships together that raise more than two hundred and ninety five million dollars from the private sector and foundations and philanthropists towards all of his major efforts, ranging from homelessness prevention to workforce development. And one thing that higgen Looper has

28:26 said is that he found that government. He says that government is very different than the private sector. But in both cases, generally, people start with a narrow self interest, starting with what they think they really need to get out of each negotiation. But when you get different voices at the table, it's generally not that difficult to show people that they can benefit from a broader variety of outcomes. And once you get alignment on the self interest, you start to see overlaps, and that's where the transactions happen in the private sector and where you can create real change and progress in the public sector. So this becomes a core bridge builder skill is really understanding the incentives the cultures of the different sectors and finding ways of creating that mutual advantage because then it's a multiplier effect in terms of the resources that are available to you to solve these problems. One of the one of the more interesting things that you said and everythings that that really appealed to me when you because at the end of each of these chapters, you're giving you're giving keys for these bridge builders to be able to use this particular this particular idea, and I really was compelled by the idea of reframing wicked problems as wicked opportunities to unlock solutions, which I use that phrase all the time, wicked problems, but wicked opportunities sounds much more compelling to me. That's precisely what they are. I mean, if you think about it, there are there are really tough problems that everybody solved, and you know that everybody faces and the problems are not getting any easier,

29:57 and we know that, but The thing is that the more complex the nature of the problem, the greater the opportunity there is from creating value added for everyone involved, and especially for the people who ultimately are the reasons why we have what we have and do what we try to do. And one of the things that in many ways is most reassuring about the book from our point of view, I think, is that there isn't a single one of these issues and not a single one of these approaches that somebody somewhere hasn't already demonstrated can work. And so it's not only a wicked problem, Oh isn't this a terrible thing you have to try to solve, but it is also an opportunity that a leader has discovered how to grab, how to solve, and how to try to advance. If you go back just for a second to what happened in New Orleans, that was horrendous. I had a conversation one time actually with some of the reporters who were there in the scene and ask them, well, how come that you were in the situation of saying, you know, we're here, and where's the government? Everybody was sitting there watching Anderson Cooper and saying, well, la Anderson's up to his hips in watered walking down Charles Street. But where's the government. Well, it turns out that it was as wicked a set of problems as you possibly could have, but it turned out to be a set of enormously wicked opportunities that then the government was able to turn around by using the kind of strategies that we're talking about. There is a solution that is hiding behind every single one

31:29 of these wicked problems. And part of the again, inspiration for the wicked opportunities idea was actually from Bill Gates and the work that he and his foundation have done around malaria reduction. Throughout history, malaria has been one of the most world's most deadly diseases in twenty twenty alone that killed over six hundred thousand people, incredibly dangerous for youngsters. Not long ago, child died from it every thirty seconds, and about half the world's population lives in regions where malarious spreads easily, particularly in Sub Saharan Africa, which is home to ninety percent of the cases. And it's been it's been a disease that we've been trying to eradicate for centuries now and unable to do. So we've got scores of organizations involved in it, and so it's them, it's the challenges are enormous, but Big Gates has now spent over two billion dollars attacking the problem, and he called the situation one of the greatest opportunities the global health world has ever had. So you say, wow, opportunity. That's a pretty surprising word to describe a scourge that people have been trying to eliminate for centuries.

32:47 But it's also really a fair statement of what's possible in the twenty first century when you have an abundant sort of mindset, and Gates actually believes that disease can and should be eradicated in a single gene narration and in fact through an blended government approach with a lot of organizations playing a role, including the United Nations and including some major nonprofits who act as integrators. Valeria immortality felled by sixty percent between two thousand and twenty nineteen. They prevented one point five billion cases, saved millions of lives. So there's been a huge scale up and the resources and brain power focused on this disease, and I think we will eliminate this disease within the next decade or two, and by really looking at this complicated, dynamic and really seemingly intractical problem with a renewed vigor. And that's what some of these opportunities give us an opportunity to do, which is really to focus resources, time, attention and talent about solving a problem.

33:52 And it shines the spotlight on where those opportunities lie and how to take advantage of them. Beautiful gentlemen, let's go ahead and grab our last break. Here. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortez. We've gore on the year with William Eggers and doctor Donald Kettle, authors of bridge Builders, How Government can transcend boundaries to solve problems. We've been talking about a few of the keys for bridge Builders they talk about in their book. After the break, we'll finish up as many more as we can cover. See you. There'll be right back. Doctor Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elise Cortez dot com.

34:57 Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with Doctor Release Cortez. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with a lease, send an email to a lease a l se at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. If you are just tuning in at this time. My guests are William Eggers and Donald Kettle, who are the authors of bridge Builders, How Government can transcend boundaries to solve problems. I'm your host, Doctor Release Quartz. So one of the next key areas that I want to talk about that's in your book, that of course totally aligns with what we do here on the show and the work that I do as well with companies, is the notion of nurturing private partners. And you talk about effective accountability requires building a public spirit into private operations. So if you can speak to that key just a little bit here and then I've got us particular y i'd love for you to focus on to illustrate that as well. Sure thing. I mean, what we've seen increasingly is that it's increasingly difficult for government to do whatever it is a government needs to do without involving private partners, in part because the alternative is creating a government so big and so large that nobody would ever tolerate it. But also it would create lots of problems of effectiveness because there's just no possibility of having as much expertise gathered in one place that government on its own would be able

36:30 to put together. And so that what we need is a system where the government can leverage its private partners, but understand what kind of advantages the private partners can bring in. One of our favorite examples of this is what happened with Y two K back in the year two thousand. That was a case where have you talk to people about it today, They say, well, you know, I'm not so sure this is a real thing. Let me tell you this was a real thing, and if it had not been attacked successfully, we would have been sitting there in the morning of January the first two thousand trying to figure out why nothing was working. I even had an example myself where there was a horn that went off in my car in the morning that we couldn't turn it off. And we just had one tiny example what might have happened if we had not succeeded in attacking the problem. So how do we attack the problem? The President had called in John Koskinen, who had a reputation as a major problem solver in public and the private sector, and said, John, I want you to try to take over this problem. And he looked around over his left shoulder and his right should and tried to figure out I must have run out of other people to ask, and said, well, mister President, I'll do this. And so the first thing he did was to set himself up, and somebody said, okay, let's bring your staff, and how big of a room we went in, and he said, I got three people. I've got me a public affairs person and an assistant. And he said, you got to be kidding, and I said now that it wasn't. And in fact, later he grew as a norm of his office enormously to eighteen people. And so for

38:00 the entire effort he had to fight and win the battle against Y two K in the United States and across the world. He did it with a total of eighteen people. But he did it by understanding that his role was to try to leverage the private sector and to create a sense of shared accountability for the outcomes that we all needed, by getting everybody on the same page, having them all roll in the same direction, and producing a kind of shared conclusion that the sort that the government on its own never ever would have been able to accomplish, but which working together, they did end it all with a total staff of eighteen people, And I would say this is increasingly recognized by leaders in government. I was on a panel discussion earlier today at New America, a think tank that I've been involved in, hosted by Anne Marie Slaughter, who used to be a senior official at the State Department when Hillary Clinton was there at Jim Thompson was one of the panelists. Jim was a key person in the Office of Public Private Partnerships the State Department, and now he's in charge of public private Partnerships for the intelligence community. And you'd say, well, what role with the private sector play in this? But so many different areas from the data piece too, if you look at what's happening all over the world. Today, you know, companies are playing a bigger role in all elements of foreign policy. During the obviously after the invasion of

39:31 Ukraine, you saw the private sector move out of Russia very very quickly, and that played a really important role from a foreign policy perspective. No governments were asking them to do so, they did so out of their commitment to purpose and ethics. And so you've got a lot of offices of public private partnerships, from everything from the Department of Homeland Security to the FBI to the USAID, the USA Agency for Internet National Development, which has about one hundred people just working on these partnerships. And one of the agencies that does this very well as NASA, the Space Agency, which if it wasn't for NASA, we might not have the thriving commercial space industry we have today. They've helped to nurture it through a series of different tools, using tax credits, competitive grants, prizes and challenges, public procurement contracts and so on. And they have lots of people whose only job is to really focus on how can they be a catalytic force to drive wider innovation and space exploration. Even if they're not doing it themselves. And I think that's a key element, is to understand that government doesn't anymore have to be doing all of this themselves.

40:49 You now have a kind of a thriving private sector and social enterprise community who is working on these issues too, and if government can work with them leverage all of those resources by understanding what's happening in the purpose landscape, they can create more public value. There's actually a smart manager inside the Office Management and Budget too, who understands that if you want to try to get things done across the government, you can either try to give orders and wait for everybody to laugh because they know that they can duck, they can wait you out, they can find ways of being able to avoid it, or they can find both the sense of shared purpose but also the kind of cultivation of these cross boundary leaders that we've talked about, and the federal government has had for some time. Cross agency priority goals kind of a mouthful, but it's an effort to try to get agencies to work together and precisely the way that we're talking about, but it's not easy to do. So how to go about trying to do that, well, there's one person who's created a team of thirteen people, and the team of thirteen people in turn has developed a network of more than one hundred people throughout federal agencies who turn then have created a broader network rippling out trying to focus on these goals that all of them share.

42:05 And so instead of saying we have a new policy, and thou shalt follow it, or thou shalt be submitten from heaven, it is instead, here's an idea that we think makes sense. And the way to go about trying to do that is to understand our shared commitment to this and using this to try to not to drive out the policy, but to build partners and trying to achieve it. Oh, gentlemen, there's just so much goodness in this book. There's so many amazing examples, which is why I wanted to make sure that as we spoke about the keys that you offer for bridge builders, that we also give examples like this, because they're so alluring and they really show just the promise of how we can use this stuff. I think in that particular one too, if I'm not mistakened on that, you're also in that example you just give, you're also alluding to the key of building trustworthy networks is that right. That's right. And one of the things that's important, crucially important about trust is that we all know that nobody trusts government anymore. You didn't look at the kind of surveys and do you trust government to do the right thing? And the answer is overwhelmingly no. Do you trust Congress and it's down below twenty percent, And it's kind of a pretty discouraging picture all in all. And part of this is because politics is just nasty and sloppy and sometimes ugly because of the battles we fight. But the reality is that there's something that's fundamentally important we've discovered about building trust. It is sometimes very hard to build trust at that level what we call the wholesale level, where at a grand scale it's very hard to move the needle.

43:37 But on the other hand, it turns out that what people really appreciate, what they want to kind of trust that they have is in the way in which as they have a problem, their problem gets solved. And at the retail level is where the opportunities for building trust lie most. Fundamentally, it may be very hard to try to build wholesale trust, but at the retail level. The success of government managers and agencies and reaching out, connecting with people to solve their problems, and doing it in a way that works effectively is something that is at the core the lesson for building retail trust, and we've seen it in case after case, not only the kinds of examples that we've talked about so far. You want to build a trustworthy relationship with the government, and you pluck somebody off our roof has been stuck there for days, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. But at the same time, it turns out that we've in the past until the travel surge, really is swamp passport office. But the passport office has turned out to be far more effective than people. They've discovered they can actually engage in getting a new passport by putting in their application getting it back in the mail, and the Passport Office now is working on trying to ramp that up again with the infusion of extra resources. But trust really depends on the way in which those transactions happen case by case, person by per some program by program, and it's by focusing on the retail level of rebuilding trust that we think the greatest potential really lives.

45:07 And one of my favorite examples of this, and it's certainly is retail level, is the twenty twenty Census April versus the traditional Census day when the Census GROP kicks off, this once in a decade effort to conduct the nation's census. Ever since eight seventeen ninety, we've conducted the census and there's never been a significant delay, even despite a civil war, major depressions, two World wars. But April twentieth, April twenty twenty, what was happening, Well, the pandemic and effectively closed down much of the country. Census day couldn't come at a worse time, and they needed to collect all the data collection by July thirty first to get their portion accounts. But they couldn't send people door to door before safety reason. And so they've tried to anticipate a lot of things around the twenty twenty Census, but they didn't anticipate a global pandemic. Now that wasn't the only challenge. They also the census was being conducted a miss a near collapse in public trust in government. The Trump administrations attempt to add a citizenship question to the census politicize the debate. There's online rumors that the Bureau would share data with immigration enforcement. Rumors continue to plague the census. So what did they do? They had these twin monumental challenges.

46:36 So first they launched a Trust and Safety Team and it assembled the whole network of partners and experts to mitigate the threats, to combat the misinformation and even working with the major social media companies and one of the guys in charge of this, Zach Schwartz. He understood that partners were going to be key here, so they tapped a massive ecosystem of state, local, tribal governments as well as more than four hundred thousand national and grassroots partners and even Schwartz's local barbershop had a Census sign up and then recruited dozens of specialists to facilitate the partnerships. And one of the biggest challenges facing the census was reaching minority communities, especially where distrusting government was high. COVID it compounded the problem and so were many people were very concerned that these historically hard account population will be undercounted. But one of the most important partners they were cruded as black churches, Black church networks created it and Everyone Counts website to encourage participation. They organized block parties, recruited DJs to promote completion in the census, and the result was, in the middle of a global pandemic, ninety nine point nine eight percent of all housing units and addresses were accounted for. It was a remarkable achievement that could not have been possible without all of these partnerships with all of those partners. So they found partners who are trusted at the local level, they partnered with them to get the message out to complete the census,

48:07 and it was a really great and historic example of this notion of retail trust that Don's talking about, and how to engage with trusted partners to accomplish an incredibly important public goal. Guys, this is amazing. We are out of time. That was a fantastic way to finish. I would love for you to be able just to say, if you can say, in like twenty seconds, what is the promise of your book? The promise of the book, I think is not only in trying to excite people about the possibility of success and understand the possibility of success lies in building bridges, but also that you can rely on others who have already proven that the job can be done, and so it is at its score, I think as optimistical books as I've ever written, and that's one of the reasons why I'm so very excited about it. And you also talk about really how it really allows us to really save democracy, which sounds pretty good to me as well. So great way to finish the show, Gentleman William eger Is, doctor Don Kettle, Thank you so much for gracing working on Purpose. It was amazing to read your book. Now we'll share with listeners and viewers. We want to spread the word. Thanks for being on the show. Thanks so much. A lease listeners viewers go to learn more about William Eager's Donald Kettle, their book Bridge Builders, or the work they do with public entities, start by visiting bridge Builders book dot com. Last week, give you miss the live show, you can always catch it via recorded podcast. We were on the air with Curtis Bateman, who oversees the success of Franklin Covey's entire international division, and there's a co author of Change How to Turn Uncertainty into Opportunity. This

49:42 episode will give you an elevated insight into how to manage change effectively, give an incredibly coach and interview on the matter. Next week, we'll be on the air with Tiffany Bova, the author of the Experience mindset, changing the way you think about growth. See you there, and remember that work as an integral and important part of our lives, and it can be one of the best adventures and means of realizing our potential and making an impact we crave. So let's work on Purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortez, each week on W four CY. Together we'll create a world where business operates conscientiously, leadership inspires and passion performance, and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave. See you there, Let's work on Purpose.