First Day / Last Day

Yesterday marked my last day as a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow. 

When I joined the PIF program in September 2014, I didn’t do it out of a love for my country. Sure, the public service element was meaningful to me from the start, but I never would have used the word ‘patriotism’ to describe my reasons for joining. My reasons were more personal, perhaps more selfish – career growth, new opportunities for my family, that sort of thing.

As soon as I got started, it was clear I was in a fight to swim upstream. It turns out that getting stuff done in government can be even tougher than it looks from the outside, especially on a short timeline. The reality is that there have been many moments over the last two years where I have raised my hands in frustration and wished I could quit. 

Yet, as I wind down my stint as a Fellow, I can’t help but feel immense pride at having witnessed and perhaps even played a part (albeit a very, very tiny one) in the impact and legacy of the Obama Administration. It may just be coincidence that I am concluding my federal service as our next election is picking up speed, but watching the battle taking place – for our new leader and for the future of this country – I now understand what’s truly at stake, as well as what’s truly possible when people come together in service of mission that’s bigger than themselves.

Over the last 23 months, it has been a personal honor and privilege to serve my country in the way I know how, to do my part to make our government more efficient, effective and ultimately more successful in meeting the needs of the public. It’s been an experience full of big lessons and small victories, and I am so grateful for all of it. Thank you to all of my friends and colleagues at the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program, the White House, and across the government for inviting me in with open arms and supporting me over the last two years. 

While it’s bittersweet to close this chapter, I’m moving on with an expanded understanding of my own identity and purpose as an American citizen and patriot. I didn’t start out on this course because of my love for our country, but I am certainly leaving with it. 

See One. Do One. Teach One.

You know the expression, ‘See One. Do One. Teach One’?

In a medical context the saying always weirded me out a bit. (Like, really? You’re going to stick me with that needle only after seeing it done by someone else a time or two?) But, funny enough, over the last couple of weeks I’ve found a new meaning in this expression, and it has to do with the teaching part.

First, an admission: I really like leading workshops. I may not be a complete extrovert, but leading a workshop – facilitating discussions, working through challenges, seeing lightbulbs igniting over people’s heads and post-its flying in the air – is a guaranteed path to my own personal happy place. At IDEO I had the opportunity to run a number of client workshops on various parts of the OpenIDEO challenge process. Each time I ran a workshop I got a bit smarter, a bit more adept at addressing tricky questions or common hurdles, and a bit savvier at structuring the day so it was fun and productive. Which means that over time I developed a tried and true method for bringing clients through the OpenIDEO process – and I loved it.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago when I had the opportunity to lead a half-day design thinking and innovation workshop at the National Archives. Knowing that I’m a workshop person, of course I quickly jumped at the chance – even after I remembered that I’d need to create all my slides and accompanying materials from scratch (since I didn’t have anything from my IDEO days). This, I thought to myself, will be a lot of work. So I sat down and started on my deck.

And it turns out yes, it was a lot of work. But, so much more importantly, it was an opportunity for me to actually learn the content I was teaching. What I realized is that when I was leading OpenIDEO challenges, or even talking with clients about IDEO’s approach to design thinking and innovation, I was representing IDEO – using their stories and their content. Teaching the design thinking approach to a new audience and doing it in my own voice and with my own language really, truly helped me learn it, internalize it, and then share it in ways that I knew would resonate with my audience.

Creating something from scratch – even something that I thought I knew well – pushed me to understand my content more fully and engage with it more deeply. Getting my hands dirty through doing? Awesome.

I spent the next 24 hours after the workshop buzzing with the knowledge that I had just learned and practiced something new and important…and it felt really good. And, in that halo glow of those 24 hours, I actually got offered an opportunity to run the session again, this time for different clients. So I got back on the horse, reopened my slide deck, and set about recreating the wheel.

One week later, I stepped in front of another new audience to teach them what I know. This time around, like the session a week earlier, I didn’t have all the right answers prepped in advance. I didn’t have the best tips for overcoming hurdles on instant recall. Nor did I instinctively know the smartest ways to diffuse a difficult conversation.

Teaching something from scratch – even when it felt untested or uncharted – pushed me to open myself up to even more learning in the moment and to make small course-corrections throughout. Being able to respond to the needs of the room, as they arise? Even more awesome.

And in the process, I experienced the value of learning as I was doing, of challenging myself to know something inside and out through the act of teaching it to others.

See One. Do One. Teach One. I still don’t love it for needles! But in my own work? I’m onboard.

An Evolving Definition of Community

When I was in business school, I defined community as a collection of people – consumers especially – who were uniting around causes and missions that they cared about and using their purchasing power and their voices (especially on social media) to effect change in the world. Once I joined IDEO, I began to round out this working definition of community to include location – that is, whether the community exists online or offline – and how that location influences the type of work people can accomplish together.

Over the last 3.5 years with OpenIDEO, my passion for community – and particularly unlocking new ways of supporting communities to collaborate, innovate and see positive change where they live – has deepened and taken on new dimensions that I couldn’t have expected. And I’m very proud to say that my next step – as a Presidential Innovation Fellow in Washington, DC – is helping me continue to round out my understanding of community on a scale that I could have never imagined (Read more about the Presidential Innovation Fellows program and the incredibly talented folks who’ve joined this year’s class).

For my first project, I’ve been paired with an innovative team of strategists and doers at the National Archives and Records Administration. I, along with another PIF, are charged with exploring how crowdsourcing and online community engagement can help NARA accelerate its efforts to expand public, online access to our Nation’s most valuable historical records. It’s no small task when you consider NARA has over 12 billion pages of paper records within its holdings! Yet I’m confident that crowdsourcing, if applied in smart and intentional ways, can quickly and effectively scale this effort.

When I started The Changebase, way back as an MBA student in 2009, I had a hunch that the idea of community – a collection of people united by common experiences, shared values or like-minded goals – would play a large part in my professional career, but I couldn’t have anticipated exactly how.

In business school I defined community as a collection of people – consumers especially – who were uniting around causes and missions that they cared about and then using their purchasing power and their voices to effect change in the world. Once I joined IDEO, I began to round out this working definition of community to include location – that is, whether the community exists online or offline – and how that location influences the type of work people can accomplish together.

Over the last 3.5 years with OpenIDEO, my passion for community – and particularly unlocking new ways of supporting communities to collaborate, innovate and see positive change where they live – has deepened and taken on new dimensions that I couldn’t have expected. And I’m very proud to say that my next step – as a Presidential Innovation Fellow in Washington, DC – is helping me continue to round out my understanding of community on a scale and through a lens that I could have never anticipated (Read more about the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program and the incredibly talented folks I'm lucky to partner with in this year’s class).

For my first project, I’ve been paired with an innovative team of strategists and doers at the National Archives and Records Administration. I, along with another PIF, am charged with exploring how crowdsourcing and online community engagement can help NARA accelerate its efforts to expand public, online access to our nation’s most valuable historical records. It’s no small task when you consider NARA has over 12 billion pages of paper records within its holdings! Yet I’m confident that crowdsourcing, if applied in smart and intentional ways, can quickly and effectively scale this effort.

What will be the tangible outcomes of my time as a Presidential Innovation Fellow? Thankfully I'm only two months into the program, so I don't need to know that answer just yet. But I do know that over the next year I'm looking forward to further evolving my definition of community, this time on a national scale. How might we design citizen services that meet the needs of a community as diverse and complex as the American people? Wish me luck!