We Don't Make Widgets

This morning, much to my dismay I awoke 30 minutes early so I could get to work early enough to car pool another hour to a two hour training session called "Making Government Better".

This already sounds fun, no?

This afternoon, much to my surprise I find myself still thinking about the principles the speaker discussed.

The speaker Ken Miller (right- yea thats not a picture of me), used an interesting quote to describe government:

"Government is a bunch of hard working people trapped in dysfunctional systems producing invisible things for people who do not want them, on behalf of others that do, for reasons we can rarely articulate much less measure"

For those of you who have ever worked in government, isn't that great?
For those of you that haven't you're probably thinking "Hard Working?"

The biggest part I got out of the seminar was that we focus on what we produce for customers (yes government and its employees has customers), and that we focus on meeting their needs as we create them. These things we produce are referred to as "widgets" and we need to work to make the widgets the best we can to achieve the best result. However, in government, the best result is not profit, its some other measure- well being, healthy citizens, great and friendly services.

One of the challenges was to figure out what widgets your agency produces - pretty easy. Next was to figure out what widgets you produce. Not as easy, especially sitting next to your boss. I was pretty embarrassed that I couldn't just start spitting out widget after widget I'm responsible for. I kept thinking, but what I do is different, I make things that FEED our widgets. I feel like the BASF of the agency, I don't make the products you love, I make the products you love better. (Again I'd like to give myself a pat on the back for that analogy. I haven't come up with one that good since my reference to Willy Wonka's hate for wangdoodles.) The point is, I'm hiding behind the same "but I'm different" argument government has for years.

So now, I'm back at my desk preparing for a relatively important conference call tomorrow actually trying to make sense of what Ken Miller was talking about today. I'm actually trying to figure out what it is I do, what I produce and how I can do it better for the customer. I guess this was a valuable session after all.

While the link that comes next isn't exactly related to what I learned today, its pretty close. It's perhaps a touch corny but a good story. I stole this link from ROTUS.

http://www.stservicemovie.com/