Agile Government Initiative

What is the Agile Government Initiative?

Improving public service requires creativity, vision, and nimble adaptation to changing social conditions.

Now a key ambition in public service education, “Agile Government” seeks to apply agile methods of project management and team organization [familiar in numerous industries and originally captured in The Agile Manifesto (2001)] to matters of social choice, agency operations, and policy design. We aim to translate these principles to our practice and pedagogy, in order to accelerate the pace of social improvement, innovation, civic engagement and inclusion. 

The School’s agile government principles buttress our longstanding emphases on training the next generation of leaders and doers in the advanced arts of policy analysis and implementation. Agile mindsets offer a distinctive new frontier in facilitating community problem-solving, governance renewal, and restored trust. Agile fosters GSPP’s mission to promote standards of excellence and a deep sense of pride among those working most devotedly to fulfill the public interest and reinvent how we reach our loftiest objectives, together.

Inside the academy, and among our communities of practice in the field, continuous cycles of learning and response re-energize our work and promote trust in government. 

We see two major pillars for the Agile Government Initiative at the Goldman School moving forward:

• Agile Policymaking - design-based, user-centric
• Academic Innovation & Learner Experience - public need meets public service education

Agile in Sacramento

Agile Policymaking: Analysis, Design, Results

Agile government models aim to replace predefined roles with ones making ingenuity and public connectivity paramount. For all their demonstrable power advancing social objectives, expert policy analytics - so central to the School’s hallmark Eightfold Path method created here by Prof. Eugene Bardach - function best when complex situations yield specific directions and mesh well with existing government capabilities.

Agile transformations give policy design new centrality, and this brings implementation and the production of ground-level outcomes greater primacy. A realignment of traditional policy roles might proceed according to this set of correspondences:

Table Source: Larry Rosenthal, GSPP, based on Bardach, E., & E.M. Patashnik, A Practical Guide For Policy Analysis (6th ed.) [Part III - “Handling A Design Problem”]

We seek to galvanize renewed opportunities making government work more user-centric and giving stakeholder experience highest priority. This means reimagining traditional policy roles, moving them toward a new frontier of “agile policymaking.”

Academic Innovation & Learner Experience:
Practitioners, Cases & Curriculum

A new era of agile government would both accelerate program design and insist upon regular monitoring of success and paths to improvement. The pyramid of capabilities (drawn from this early volume on agile enterprise generally) informs how resource/practice reorientation can occur in the governance sectors and other community-based and private-industry work in the public interest.

Relayering capabilities will redirect learner experience at the School and elsewhere. The Agile Government Initiative seeks to enrich existing discovery pathways in three interrelated ways:

• Ensuring exposure to agile mindsets and approaches in the School’s classroom and experiential curricula
• Integrating instruction on agile-government methods, tapping the visionaries within and adjacent to government who are making these transformations happen
• Generating case-based teaching materials illustrating agile government in practice and stimulating action-based learning and discovery.

Join us!

Interested in collaborating with the Agile Government Initiative at the Goldman School? Please reach out to Larry Rosenthal.

GSPP’s Agile Government Initiative receives generous project funding from The Samuel Freeman Charitable Trust.

Leadership

Larry Rosenthal

Senior Lecturer, Agile Government Initiative Coordinator

David Wilson

Dean

Jean Cheng

Director of Strategy and Innovation

Collaborative Faculty/Staff Work Group (as of Spring 2023)

• Todd Achilles, Lecturer
• Mia Bird, Assistant Research Professor
• Hector Cardenas Suarez, Continuing Lecturer
• Josie Innamorato, Lecturer
• Kiran Jain, Lecturer
• Lindsay Maple, Senior Project Lead, Possibility Lab
• Rohit Naimpally, Director of Innovation, Possibility Lab
• Michael O’Hare, Emeritus Professor of Public Policy
• Erika Weissinger, Visiting Assistant Professor
   

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