with that I will move on to our next speaker she currently sir the CIO for the County of Santa Clara previously was the CIO for the US Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration I love that we have to say it that way because everyone gets so excited about Obama she spent ten years as a senior positions at HP and today she's going to talk to you about growing innovation from within please welcome and Duncan thank you thanks for making me ten years younger there that was great all right I set myself a timer in the hope that I cannot make us any further behind than we already are so we are going to talk about building a culture of innovation so earlier speakers said you can't plan a plan a culture change and I'm going to tell you how you can plan a culture change right because innovation is all about culture right and I was invite I was asked into my last two jobs to come in and change the structure right and no one thought about changing the culture they just said well redesign the organization and it will all get better right well it's not all going to get better just if you consolidate and redesign culture is what's important for innovation you can't work differently in the same environment and you can't just change the physical structure and expect the environment to change so in this very short time I'm going to try and give you some idea of some of the things that I think matter in order to change the culture and to enable innovation so first of all bring new skills we've heard a little bit about that already right so you know the the half-life of a technologist skills is really short you could say it's two years you could say it's five years it's really short whatever it is so if you have all the same people in your organization they're not going to have all the skills you need doesn't mean you don't value those people it means that if they're not if they haven't learned something new they're not going to be a value to you in changing and in fact they're not going to learn something new in your organization hasn't changed so you need to bring in people and whether that's things like 18f and you SDS bringing in fellowships from the private sector whether it's just hiring new people whatever it is you need to bring in new skills you need to look everywhere that you can think of to get those new skills and so one of the interesting things as you probably know is the model of USD s and 18 fi was in the federal government in fact I stole the director of 18f to come be my seat so I'm pretty familiar with both of those things and we used to say that USD s fought fires right if you'd broke something if you had a crisis they'd come in and help fix your crisis 18 F came in and built a building for you my goal at EPA was to build buildings myself right so I could bring someone for me from 18 FN to help me but my goal was for them to teach me so those people I bring in with new skills they're not supposed to sit in their silo with their new skills their job is to share those skills with other people who are already in the organization and by the way those people are in the organization know things those people don't so you may have new skills but the people who are in the organization know how to get something done right so between those two you're gonna teach each other and you're gonna be more successful in general with those new skills so next thing is build skills inside your organization we've created something or we're creating something to be perfectly transparent it doesn't exist completely yet called TSS University it's called TSS University for two reasons one is because my organization's new name is technology services and solution and the other is because our CIO came up with the name so when your boss when you're when one of your peers who's the most powerful guy on the staff says that's the name you go great that's a great name Miguel thank you so the goal of TSS University's to everything from sending you to its training class getting your certificate or sending you to get a four-year degree even a master's degree and so yes in the in the county we plan to send people back to school and pay for them to get a degree no I'm not gonna send someone to Stanford they can go to Stanford if they want to but I'm gonna pay what it costs for them to go to Santa Clara to San Jose State right and if they want to go to Stanford they can pay the difference but the point is we need to rescale the people we have right we have a lot of people who've been around a really long time who are great employees but whose skills are a little long in the tooth right so the second thing about changing that culture is to give the people the skills that they need to be more successful in your organization in the future right though you know what what people there's a saying that says you can train your people and be afraid they're gonna leave or you cannot train them and be afraid they're gonna stay right so what I tell them is I want to give them all the skills they need to leave and then I hope they'll stay right that's my goal I want to be a place where they'll stay once I give them those skills okay and then léa change from everywhere right the biggest challenge you'll hear from anyone who's trying to adopt agile and to be more innovative is middle management right so executives get a great idea they want to do something and in fact by the way almost my entire executive team is brand new and from the outside so that's strike one to begin with because it's those outsiders who brought those ideas in and you know you've got new employees you've got young people primarily but some of your older employees as well who are excited about these new things right well middle management they don't want to change they like things the way they are in fact agile what happens with agile innovation you give up your power as a manager you have to give up your power to your team they don't like that right their old style classic government managers they don't like that you've got to get everyone including your middle managers on board to lead or your change will fail and your innovation will fail so there are plenty of ways to do that but you have to figure those out work through those and get those people engaged they have to be part of it they can't be collateral damage so I want to talk a little specifically if that's about half my time so I'll spend the second half of my time talking a little specifically about some of the things we've done so we've taken four organizations it was three but on in in July one we're picking up the finance agency's IT because I never understood how in the public sector the thing that no one should be running outside ideas run outside IT which are which is the finance system I thought why is someone else wearing those so July 1 will pick up the finance systems along with HHS social services core IT I now about 90% of the IT staff in the county which is over a thousand employees which is kind of crazy we're gonna work on that problem later but now we said what's our mission well our mission is to transform county services through collaboration technology innovation and operational excellence right now operational excellence is fundamental right it's the table stakes it's what gets you in the door no one lets you do anything unless you're operationally excellent because you just look like idiots right if you can't solve the basic problems if you can't keep things from breaking why would I trust you to do anything else but that is intentionally last on our list because we want people to think about us as innovators and as partners right that those are the number one and number two things we're going to do in fact when I talk to my managers about our new structure I they have three jobs number one is to lead and develop people number two is to collaborate and communicate across the organization and number three is to get the work done because if I do one and two the work will do itself essentially the staff will do the work so that is aligned with the our first job is to collaborate it's to understand our business partners not simply to make sure that the trains run on time so to do this we had to create a set of values and principles and I'm going to spend a few minutes going through them because they're illustrative of what we're trying to do and my timer went to sleep that's not really very helpful all right so and and they're different right so these are different than the values and principles we set up at EPA because we have a different group of people we're trying to accomplish something different so you know these are these are good values and good principles but you may not need the exact same set in every organization but you know our County's culture is maybe not the best culture in the world so we said we don't care what the overall County culture is we're gonna have our own culture number one is you're going to treat each other with respect all right that's the number one thing we're going to be respectful to each other we're gonna behave appropriately we're not going to you know say because I'm a more senior person than you I can treat you badly second one is integrity right that I can trust that you are going to behave with me honestly and fairly and that you are going to do what you say and say what you do right the third one is accountability right and this is a can be a huge problem in the public sector in general you need to deliver the results you said you were going to achieve right that's what accountability is about it's we said we're gonna do something as an organization as an individual and we delivered those results pretty transparent people are gonna understand within our organization outside organization what we're doing why we're doing it how much money we spent compassion right we're creating a performance organization we didn't put that as a value with the values compassion right we want excellence but the compassion is how we create excellence because we're gonna be nice to each other I'm you know if the manager I need to coach you I don't have to be a jerk about coaching you know I can be positive about the way I coach you so and then excellence obviously we need to achieve excellent results going to be a great organization even though that's course none of our success it's last on the list because we don't want to focus on it to the exclusion of everything else and then finally I talk about our principles that we set up in terms of being and these are more in many ways these are what guest innovation in our culture right people are most valuable assets and you know if people are stealing I certainly still list from HP right because I spent 20 years there that was my comment about you made me 10 years younger was that that if you don't care about people you're done right and and in the government sometimes even though we care deeply about people we sometimes don't make it clear to people that we do right our whole our whole structure particularly California Center on taking care of people but somehow they don't feel like we care about them so that's number one but bias towards action and change so what happens in government you learn that change happens when it happens it's slow it'll happen when it happens I don't you know I don't care because it's you know no one is trying to make things happen so it's incredibly important that we point out to people that we actually want to bias towards action so you're gonna move forward what's the next thing I can do to move this project forward what's the roadblock that's stopping it how do I solve that problem how do i s callate to solve that problem we want people constantly thinking about that the work is one IT that's about the fact that we've brought four organizations together and we're trying to make sure people understand well one but we also about 200 IT employees outside of my organization and the message is we call them federated they're part of RIT too and we want them to behave like they're part of IT even though they're independent and don't you know don't tell them I think that they should behave like us because you know they think they're independent but we build partnerships to maximize value of technology that can be with partners across the county that can be with private sector companies that can be with state and local agencies whoever it is we're gonna partner with people we don't have to solve every problem ourselves and then most importantly in many ways and the government is we each person gets to lead through risk-taking what that means and I used to say is a lot of EPA we don't want people to take stupid risks with their take smart risks we want them to talk to their managers to get their buy-in and to take a risk right that's about pilot projects that's about solving problems in innovative ways and if you tell people that are empowered to take risks and then you've got their back they will and I want to take risks with $50,000 not with five million dollars because I could explain $50,000 to anybody but when you lose five million dollars or you're six years behind on a 20 million dollar project that's a lot harder to explain we don't want anything to get that way we want to we want to learn and want to take risks we want to fail fast and then finally as I talked about the beginning we're a learning organization we want our employees to grow and develop all the time as unusual move for a lot of government agencies in addition to the TSS University we have development plans in place we're going to have it open plan as a place for every single employee they're gonna have a conversation with their manager then to create a development plan that is a combination of what the employee wants and what the county needs and they're gonna be held accountable them and their manager to delivering on that development plan so those are the things that we're doing to change the culture right the important part of all this and I'm probably over time by now is to create an understanding of where your organization needs to go and what the changes are they're gonna get through there because this set of things will get us where we're trying to go it's not necessarily what's gonna get your organization where you're trying to go although some of those things like being willing to take a risk learning bias towards action are important for every organization and it's the places where the government is the most challenged so I actually do believe you can create a culture change I'm not saying it's easy right but I think with a concerted effort you can and we are seeing that now as we move forward and I encourage you all to embrace that that it that journey with me thank you [Applause]