Lucas Cherkewski

Burning, 18F, and change

Hit and Miss #391

Oh boy. Where to begin, and where to go? Today, let’s meander.

The last few days have been weird, energy-wise. The go-go-go of the last few weeks finally hit, delivering a day or two of tiredness in exchange. Today was better, somewhat—the sunshine helped, as did spending some time poking away at a data project.

I’ve been considering a post Tom MacWright wrote last year, “Work hard and take everything really seriously”. The closing line captures it well:

You can burn out by going too fast, or your flame can dim because you don’t let yourself spend silly amounts of time on silly projects to satisfy your intellectual curiosity. Beware of both outcomes: cultivate your enthusiasm for the things you want to hang onto.

I’ve been attentive to the burning out side of that equation, but maybe too attentive to it at times: doing enough, but also not enough; forgetting to do that which feeds the flame, for fear of burning out. Look, I still don’t want to burn out, and remain very fond of balance, but it was helpful to be reminded that, sometimes, doing things is good, actually.

Pairs well with Mandy Brown’s “Energy makes time”.

Early yesterday, news broke that 18F is being shut down. It’s the latest in a long line of senseless cuts. It’s less directly harmful than, say, cutting foreign aid, or firing those responsible for public benefits or nuclear security or bird flu. But it adds to the growing message that competent staff are not welcome in the American government, no matter how important their mission.

For those who don’t know it, 18F is similar to the Canadian Digital Service (CDS), where I worked for nearly five years. At times, digital government teams like these are described as “bringing modern ways of working into government”, “hiring top technical talent to solve government’s biggest challenges”, and so on. They’ve been around for 15ish years, in various forms, with varying track records.

More humbly, but more accurately, we might say that teams like these convene talented individuals from outside government—and, just as important but less often noted, from within government—in a single organization, providing them sensible tools and an enabling working environment, creating space for good folks to run at hard problems. And, because this is government, those problems happen to be very hard. (Sometimes for technical reasons, often not!)

In so doing, they don’t always succeed (I can count many failures from my time at CDS!), but that’s part of the model: for anything to work, you have to try, and trying implies the possibility of failure. This work often includes (and understandably so) a wary reception by those in other government departments who have long been working under much worse conditions to try to get things done. A key part of doing the work, then, includes building empathy for and understanding of the working realities of those you work with elsewhere in government.

Importantly, these organizations are structured around teams (a group of people from different disciplines, working as a single unit over a sustained period of time), and these teams are structured around learning, whether it’s their first or fiftieth time doing something. They recognize the importance of the people at the heart of work—both the people doing the work, but also, even more importantly, the people for whom the work is done.

Working at CDS remains a highlight of my working life. My heart goes out to those at 18F now enduring this terrible tumult—and to those whose experience of government will be that much worse because they’re gone. I linked to it the other week, but Ethan Marcotte’s description of working at 18F aligned well with my experience of working at CDS, and that of many others working in such teams.

A few others have written about 18F’s closure. Ben Werdmuller captured succinctly why a group like 18F would be a natural target of Musk’s senseless rampage. Don Moynihan puts 18F’s closure into context, with words also on the fate of the United States Digital Service, a similar unit with a different model.

The last word’s yet to be written about 18F. While 18F.gov now returns an error, 18F.org offers a closing message from the team—and opens the possibility of more.

I had written a whole other section on how 18F worked in the open, offering a window into its important work, and how that window remains open even as the organization is shut down. This newsletter was too long, so now the section’s on my site: “18F worked in the open”.

Many, many, many others have written about Friday’s debacle in the White House. Reflecting on that exchange, and the likelihood of tariffs this week, and the President’s persistent assertion that “we have been treated very badly … we have been taken advantage of”, highlights for me the very different understanding of strength of those now leading the American executive branch.

This is a different understanding of strength, of strength through reward instead of relationship; the US has abided these (sometimes admittedly unequal!) relationships for decades because of its strength, because it could afford to, and because doing so actually increased that strength (in part, by increasing dependence on the US, the risk of which is now on clear display).

This has a lot to teach us, I think, about how to bring about change. We can demand it through coercion, whether through the exercise of raw power (as here), or, more often, by encoding our preferred view of reality in rules (policy, process, whatnot), that others are expected to follow. That can work, but it’s a bitter, weak form of change—people know when they’re being forced into something, and resentment is sure to undermine long-term efforts at change.

There is another way, of course, one centred on forming and respecting relationships with others, on accommodating disagreement while being level-headed about the impacts change will have on all of us. The same change may result, but doing so without coercion can result in a far more durable version of that change.

Doing this, though, requires showing up to conversations in good faith, even and especially when we’re the more “powerful” participant. It also requires making space for the possibility that we haven’t—and can’t!—think it all through ourselves, that we may be in the wrong. That’s strength, to me.

Okay, let’s have some links:

All the best for the week ahead. Let’s hope for more sun, amongst this gloom.

Lucas