Overview of our latest event: Preparing governments for future shocks: Roadmap to resilience

Preparing governments for future shocks: Roadmap to resilience

Our Panel:

  • J. Christopher Mihm, Adjunct Professor of Public Administration & International Affairs, Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and former Managing Director for Strategic Issues at GAO
  • Eric J. McNulty, National Preparedness Leadership Initiative Associate Director and Harvard-affiliated Author, Speaker, and Educator
  • Kriste Jordan Smith, TSA DFW Federal Security Director and 2024 Chair, Dallas-Fort Worth Federal Executive

Board

The panel was moderated by Smith, who later summed up the event as follows:

Reading for Thought Leaders:

  1. Preparing Government for Future Shocks, A Roadmap to Resilience, lead author Chris Mihm
  2. Harvard National Preparedness Leadership Institute (NPLI) resources such as the Boston Marathon Case Study and Eric McNulty’s book, You’re It, both at https://npli.sph.harvard.edu/resources/.

Beliefs to Shift Towards:

  1. Whole of community efforts outperform agency-centric planning
  2. Give people permission to adapt, and they will figure it out
  3. Collaboration delivers better results than competition; pursue collaborative capacity
  4. Integrating and harmonizing is our most important work
  5. Remember that governance is not just about driving towards a Return on Investment (ROI), it’s about creating relationships that integrate the horizontal and vertical

Skills to Cultivate:

  1. Deeply listening to non-traditional stakeholders; what “keeps them up at night?”
  2. Boundary spanning; extending your network beyond command and control lines of authority
  3. Identifying your “barnacles of bureaucracy”, considering how to remove them
  4. Staying iterative, keeping moving to evolve
  5. Systems thinking; understanding the incentives and drivers at play
  6. Refine how you think about resilience. Explore it in multiple ways: psychological “it’s all in our head”, engineering “you bend it, you break it”, and evolutionary, “adapt or die”
  7. Effective, human-centered storytelling
  8. Negotiating and Resolving Conflict
  9. Decision Sciences
  10. Foresight
    *8, 9, and 10 are a “package”, the baseline for successful public service professionals

Tools to Use:

  1. Human-centered design principles
  2. Situation Connectivity Map, per Harvard National Preparedness Leadership Initiative
  3. Tabletop Exercises; a tactical way to cultivate relationships long before you need them
  4. After Action Reviews; build in that whole of community perspective
  5. “Julie” – the virtual assistant at Amtrak; it works! One of the better examples of how automation does not have to result in the endless doom loop of ineffectiveness.

Contact Information:
 Chris Mihm, j.christopher.mihm@gmail.com
 Eric McNulty, eric@ericmcnulty.com
 Kriste Jordan Smith, kriste.jordan-smith@tsa.dhs.gov

Attend our Upcoming Event: Preparing governments for future shocks: A roadmap to resilience

Last November, Government Executive reported on a new study, “Preparing governments for future shocks: A roadmap to resilience,” released jointly by the National Academy of Public Administration and the IBM Center for the Business of Government under the executive sponsorship of Global Public Sector IBM. The Government Executive summary brings readers up to speed quickly and links directly to the seminal new study, which emphasizes cooperation among cross-sector networks to enable detailed actions that leaders in each can take to meet eight imperatives.

The National Capital Area Chapter will host a panel discussion featuring the study’s lead author, J. Christopher Mihm. Chris, a long-time chapter member and NAPA Fellow, is Adjunct Professor of Public Administration & International Affairs at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He is the former Managing Director for Strategic Issues at the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) where he led GAO’s work on governance, strategy, and performance issues. Currently, he serves as Deputy Chair of the Governance, Audit and Compliance
Committee of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA).

The other two panel members are associated with the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative (NPLI) at Harvard University, as follows:
Eric J. McNulty, NPLI Associate Director and instructor in the
Health Care Negotiation and Conflict Resolution program.

McNulty is the principal author of the NPLI case studies on leadership decision making in the Boston Marathon bombing response, innovation in the response Hurricane Sandy and the professional/political interface in the Deepwater Horizon response, drawing upon his firsthand research as well as extensive interviews with leaders involved in the responses. Find the case studies at https://npli.sph.harvard.edu/resources/. He is co-author of You're It: Crisis, Change, and How to Lead When It Matters Most.

Kriste Jordan Smith, Director of Federal Security at DFW International Airport and 2024 Chair, Dallas-Fort Worth Federal Executive Board (FEB). Smith, who attended the NPLI program with Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Senior Executive Service colleagues, is at the tip of the spear when it comes to dealing with non-routine events that challenge resilience. Her TSA role’s efficacy depends on good working relationships with leaders of every other function at the 3rd busiest airport in the world by aircraft movements. The FEB role extends her network to 80 Federal Agency Heads and 220 Federal Departments, Independent Agencies, and Senior agency officials
throughout North Central Texas. Smith will moderate the discussion and Q & A.

2023 Annual Meeting

In May ASPA-NCAC held our 2023 Annual Conference on zoom!

Our keynote speaker was Beth Noveck, a professor at Northeastern University, where she directs the Burnes Center for Social Change and its partner project, The Governance Lab and its MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance. She is the author of Solving Problems: How to Fix Our Government and Change Our World (Yale Press 2021).

It was a pleasure having Beth speak to us about her book and have a discussion.

We also awarded our Essay Contest winners with their awards and heard from them about their papers.

Included in our Annual Meeting portion of the evening was the presentation of an NCAC Award.

You can watch a recording of our event below.

ASPA NCAC 2023 Annual Meeting

Jessica Nguyen Wins First Place in the 2022-2023 Student Essay Contest

NCAC congratulates Jessica Nguyen for winning First Place of the National Capital Area Chapter’s (NCAC) 2022-2023 Public Administration Student Essay Contest for her essay Mitigating Maternal Mortality in Maryland: Integrating Midwives into State Medicaid System to Reduce Racial Disparity!

Along with the distinction of the essay winning the Chapter’s Essay Contest, Jessica will receive a cash award of $2,000 that we hope will go toward furthering your education and a three-year membership to the American Society for Public Administration.

Jessica joined us at our Chapter’s Annual Meeting on May 18 to discuss her essay and express her gratitude for being selected. You can view the recording of our Annual Meeting here.

Congratulations, Jessica, on winning First Place for your essay in our Chapter’s 2022-2023 Student Essay Contest!

Dylan Desjardins Wins Second Place in the 2022-2023 Student Essay Contest

NCAC congratulates Dylan Desjardins for winning Second Place of the National Capital Area Chapter’s (NCAC) 2022-2023 Public Administration Student Essay Contest for his essay Open Algorithms: Moving Away from “Magic 8 Ball” Governance

Along with the distinction of the essay winning the Chapter’s Essay Contest, Dylan will receive a cash award of $1,500 that we hope will go toward furthering your education and a three-year membership to the American Society for Public Administration.

Dylan joined us at our Chapter’s Annual Meeting on May 18 to express his gratitude for being selected. You can view the recording of our Annual Meeting here.

Congratulations, Dylan, on winning Second Place for you essay in our Chapter’s 2022-2023 Student Essay Contest!

NCAC Board Member Sits on Panel entitled “Permission to Practice: Public Service Boundary Spanning”at NECoPA

One of our NCAC Board Members, Connie Berhane, recently sat on a panel at the Northeast Conference on Public Administration (NECoPA) annual conference, “Permission to Practice: Public Service Boundary Spanning.”  She presented on her contributions to a 2021 ebook project by the same name, which involved the collaborative production of original written content and video roleplays by nine practitioners and pracademics in Colorado, Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas, and the Washington, DC Metro Area.

Connie developed a script for the roleplay of an information interview she conducted the year before, turning it into a teaching tool.  She also was the subject of a recorded interview in which she explained how she used boundary spanning to uncover new avenues for career growth.  Her main takeaway for attendees was not to be afraid to reach out to a person or organization to seek information or request information interviews.  Check out the ebook and NECoPA session!

Ebook and videos: https://seniorfellowsandfriends.org/permission-to-practice-public-service-boundary-spanning

NECoPA session: https://youtu.be/jnNPDZAGybI

This video begins with a casual chat before the session starts.

         By NCAC Board Member Connie Berhane
Categories: ASPA News, Policy Tags: Tags: , , , ,

An Interview with Zina Merritt

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) was recently ranked #1 among mid-sized agencies as part of the Partnership for Public Service’s list of the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government. And while rankings for leadership on diversity issues were not conducted this year, GAO has long held a top spot for its commitment to diversity as well. To learn more about how GAO integrates social equity into their organization and work, I spoke with Zina Merritt, the Special Assistant to the Comptroller General for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Prior to this role, Zina directed audits of national security and international programs and was a longtime advocate of equal employment opportunity to support diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEI&A) at all levels of the agency. In November 2017, GAO expanded its mission core values of accountability, integrity, and reliability to include people values—being valued, respected, and treated fairly. The underlying tenets of these people values factor into values Zina has long advocated for, and consequently the Comptroller General appointed Zina to serve in this role as GAO’s executive level DEI&A strategist.

Zina has a variety of responsibilities at GAO that include identifying and sharing best practices and programs to support DEIA and monitoring and measuring related performance outcomes of programs and initiatives. She also advises GAO’s Executive Committee, other senior leaders, managers, employee resource groups, and individual employees, while addressing concerns and responding to employee needs throughout the agency. When asked about her strategic
management role, she explained that GAO’s commitment to DEI&A is codified into the organization’s strategic plan and DE&I Strategic Implementation Plan. Specifically, GAO’s current agency strategic plan includes a performance goal that promotes identifying, attracting, and retaining a workforce with the skills necessary to achieve operational excellence. Another performance goal promotes enhancing and sustaining a culture that is fair, diverse, and inclusive and provides opportunities for all employees to excel. In 2019, GAO transformed its prior Workforce Diversity Plans into what is currently our DE&I Strategic Implementation Plan, and it is currently expanding upon this effort by adding accessibility as a focus area. The plan establishes GAO’s processes to review data and trends on demographic characteristics, comparisons to other federal workforces, and DEI&A related performance management goals and metrics. GAO executive level leaders also have explicit leadership and management expectations. For example, the annual performance expectations for GAO’s senior executives clearly communicates the role that they should have as senior leaders in supporting and implementing these efforts. Management and employees also have a critical role in this plan’s implementation through their constructive ongoing engagement in DEI&A efforts.

Zina noted that “Most importantly, effective DEI&A efforts require commitment from the organization’s head, who sets the tone at the top by supporting and engaging in DEI&A efforts at all levels. This includes regularly engaging with senior leadership, managers, affinity groups, and employees on DEI&A related issues to include some of the tough topics, such as acknowledging and communicating with employees regarding external events impacting employees and their families.” She praised the U.S. Comptroller General, Gene Dodaro, for affirming the agency’s commitment to DEI&A in his annual EEO statement to employees, regularly engaging with GAO’s diversity counsel and affinity groups, and participating in many DEI&A events.

Zina explained that the strong emphasis GAO places on respecting, valuing, and treating its employees fairly through a strong commitment to maintaining a skilled and diverse workforce and fostering an inclusive work environment has a direct bearing on GAO’s ability to fulfill its mission: to support the Congress by making government more efficient, effective, and equitable. Research shows that diverse groups allow for critical and innovate thinking, as well as the ability
to better anticipate alternative viewpoints. By leveraging each employee’s unique skills, talents, experiences and characteristics, GAO can broaden the range of perspectives in and approaches to the work. Events over the past year included the pandemic, incidents of police brutality of African Americans, and the most recently, targeted acts of hatred towards Asian Americans. These have brought increased visibility of the inequities and disparities that exist in
this nation and in how the government is addressing these issues. Despite some of the associated challenges, GAO maintained continuity of its DEI&A efforts in their virtual work environment. Zina says that “GAO believes that our workforce should be as diverse as the populous we serve” and that this belief definitely contributes to making GAO such a great place to work.

It also reflects GAO’s commitment to approaching audits of federal programs with a critical eye. GAO included equity as one of the 5 core auditing pillars in an April 2021 Yellow Book update. The technical update provides expanded definitions and examples of the core pillars for examining whether government programs are being administered in a manner that is effective, efficient, economical, ethical, and equitable. This commitment is not new, as equity has appeared in previous editions of the Yellow Book, and GAO has been providing Congress with analysis that includes equity for decades. For example, since the 1970s, GAO has examined racial inequalities in education, voting rights, equal employment, racial profiling, representation in the census, access to capital and housing, health care, and the military justice system. In
September 2020, GAO launched a webpage on Race in America that includes a collection of  GAO reports on this topic.

GAO is currently reporting on how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting different racial groups and also has more work planned. GAO will be evaluating whether the Transportation Security Administration and U.S. Customs and Border Protection have controls in place to prevent discrimination at traveler screening checkpoints. Additionally, GAO has work underway examining law enforcement’s use of force and will be looking at initiatives, such as de-escalation training, that could help reduce the use of force. While GAO has been examining program disparities for many decades, it continues to refine its audit tools. In November 2020, GAO convened the Emerging Risks Taskforce to ensure the agency is positioned to tackle emerging risks of importance to Congress and help teams to identify and incorporate issues related to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in their assessments, consistent with the agency’s core values and quality assurance standards. This task force will help GAO develop tools to better assess whether and how DEI&A issues are important to audits, engaging the right people within and outside of GAO to provide a diverse range of perspectives, developing and employing the right methodologies needed to answer related researchable questions, and ensuring that review teams have an appreciation for the limitations and sensitivities associated with this kind of work.

Zina is responsible for providing progress updates to the Executive Committee, employees, and select Congressional Committees on GAO’s DEI&A efforts, and also represents GAO at external forums focused on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility topics. On August 31, she presented, along with other GAO staff, expert researchers, and federal employees, at GAO’s Centennial Webinar Series: Foundations for Accountability: Oversight Issues for the Next
100 Years, on the topic of Leading Practices to Manage, Empower, and Oversee the Federal Workforce. To see more opportunities to view webinars in the series go to https://www.gao.gov/about/what-gao-does/hundred-years-of-gao/anniversary-events.

 

Submitted by NCAC Board Member, Steven Putansu

Categories: Current Events, Policy Tags: Tags: , ,