We the Possibility

Harnessing Public Entrepreneurship to Solve Our Most Urgent Problems

Mitchell Weiss

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781633699199
• eBook ISBN:
  9781633699205
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Processo decisionale
• Index: Business

Public entrepreneurship is not an oxymoron.

During his years as a public official, Mitchell Weiss was told that government can't do new things or solve tough challenges--it's too big and slow and bureaucratic. Sadly, this is what so many of us have come to believe. But in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, he and his city hall colleagues raced to support survivors in new, innovative ways. This kind of entrepreneurial spirit and savvy in government is growing, transforming the public sector's response to big problems at all levels.

In this inspiring and instructive book, Weiss, now a professor at Harvard Business School, argues that we must shift from a mindset of "Probability Government"--overly focused on performance management and on mimicking "best" practices--to "Possibility Government." This means a leap to public leadership and management that embraces more imagination and riskier projects.

Weiss shares the basic tenets of this new way of governing in the book's three sections:

• Government that can imagine. Seeing problems as opportunities, and designing solutions with citizens.
• Government that can try new things. Testing and experimentation as a regular part of solving public problems.
• Government that can scale. Harnessing platform techniques for innovation and growth; and how public entrepreneurship can reinvigorate democracy.

The lessons unfold in the timely episodes Weiss has seen and studied: a heroin hackathon in opioid-ravaged Cincinnati; a series of blockchain experiments in Tbilisi to protect Georgian property from the Russians; the U.S. Special Operations Command prototyping of a hoverboard for chasing pirates, among many others.

At a crucial moment in the evolution of government's role in our society, We the Possibility provides both inspiration and a positive model to help shape progress for generations to come.

PART ONE

GOVERNMENT THAT CAN IMAGINE

1

Problems as Opportunities

The ratio was telling.¹ Just one safety check to two camera checks. It was spring 2016, and Franky Zapata was about to try a four-minute trip on the flying hoverboard he had built. It would dart thousands of feet above the ground at fifty-five kilometers per hour. Four engines, each with 250 horsepower, would give him flight, and Zapata wanted to be sure the cameras were ready. His team at Zapata Racing would later post the video to YouTube. They’d better get some good footage.

Beyond that, Zapata, a former champion Jet Ski racer turned entrepreneur, had not much of a plan. “You know when you decide to have a child, you decide to have a child because you want it. You don’t decide to have a child because it will become a surgeon or a lawyer,” he later explained by way of analogy to a reporter.²

It’s possible Zapata’s “child” was about to follow a decidedly different career path. A commander within one of the classified programs at the US Special Operations Command saw the clip on YouTube not long after. He forwarded it to James Geurts and Tambrein Bates along with the text, “Why aren’t we doing this?”

Geurts was in charge of equipping, training, and supplying the nation’s most elite warfighters: the Navy SEALs, the Army Special Forces, the Air Force Air Commandos. Bates was a former special operator himself. He had been deployed all over the globe: Somalia, South America, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq.³ He ran an outpost of the Special Operations Command, called SOFWERX, that Geurts had set up (in a former tattoo parlor) to be best in class “in the future.” And the two now found themselves intrigued by a 121-second video of a French thrill seeker on his flying board.

Geurts wasn’t sure the flyboard was real. Bates found the music kind of “campy,” but he cold-called Zapata Racing anyway. “I told them who we were and said I would love him to come talk to us . . . If it’s real, let’s see what you can do with it.”

And with that, Zapata flew to Florida to meet with Geurts, Bates, other SOFWERX affiliates, and special operators—though without his flyboard, because it couldn’t get through French export restrictions. Reporters had wondered whether the flyboard was “the coolest thing ever invented” or “a massive hoax.”⁴ Geurts and crew were about to find out.

After Geurts tipped me off to the video and I learned of his sincere interest in it, I wanted to uncover something else: Why?

Why were Geurts and Bates and the commander who had sent them the link trolling for ideas on YouTube? The US Department of Defense spends more than $600 billion a year.⁵ It employs more people than any other organization in the United States. Among them are the country’s bravest and most ingenious. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the DoD’s research arm, is one of the most renowned in the world. Scientists there helped invent the internet, developed GPS, and built the ancestor to cloud computing.⁶ On top of that, American defense firms spend billions on research and development every single year to invent new solutions to the nation’s security challenges. So why was Geurts mining ideas for the most elite warfighters, who get sent on the most dangerous missions, in the same place you and I watch prank videos and clips of Colbert?

In chapter 2, we’ll address more directly the virtues of looking for ideas among so-called nonexperts. But I wanted to be sure as I took my own trip to Tampa that we really had to go looking for them at all. When I think of most of the public problems we face—from poor nutrition to low literacy rates to crumbling roads—the argument that “we know what to do, we just have to get people to agree to do it” sounds pretty darn compelling. Too little commitment. Too much politicking. Too much partisanship. Too much red tape. Those are the reasons, we’re told, why we don’t solve big problems anymore. It can’t really be from a lack of creativity, can it?

SOFWERX

With a few exceptions, the SOFWERX offices looked like every other startuppy “this is where new ideas are made” space I’d ever been in. It had the requisite open floor plan. Plenty of bricks, exposed beams, and cement. The cool swag. The digital monitors. Groups of young people, and some not-so-young ones, tinkered away. When I walked in, the only thing that stuck out—other than the fact that I’d just wandered into an outgrowth of the US Special Operations Command with a colleague and there were no military police, not even a gate, to stop us—was the fitness room. It was more metal plates than Peloton. Geurts had said he wanted to create a “mosh pit.” The office looked to me like Google’s, but with power drills and 3D-printed explosives.

Not on the day we were there, but on many other ones, SOFWERX hosted a wide variety of activities to give life to Geurts’s pit. There were rapid-prototyping events and “collaboration and collision” events, which Geurts liked to call “rodeos.” At ThunderDrone, in 2017, the team had invited companies to demonstrate their drone technologies (officially, “unmanned aerial systems”), with a special focus of getting the drones to work together in swarms. A Game of Drones was scheduled for the next year, where top performers would compete for cash prizes. Earlier, SOFWERX had organized something called a Pirates Exercise, where the team worked to imagine how Special Operations Forces might be interrupted rescuing a captured tanker by the capturers using technologies they’d bought off the shelf. Spoofed GPS locations and jammed bulkhead doors were on the lists the team conjured up . . . and then published on the web. Pirates would be on Geurts’s mind when he saw Zapata flying for the first time⁷ (flying warfighters as counter-countermeasures to pirate countermeasures, perhaps).

The participants in these events were a motley crew. There were operators from many different Special Forces units. Government employees. Private entrepreneurs. College interns. High school students. I met some of University of South Florida’s young engineers working on shoebox-sized satellites that might capture battlefield intelligence. “People are bouncing in, people are bouncing out, some stay for a while, and some go,” Geurts explained. Clearly he hoped that this new generation would be among the some that stayed.

Geurts had conceived of what became SOFWERX three years before we walked in. He and a friend (a retired Air Force officer) had gone for burgers at a new restaurant in an old building in Tampa, Florida. Geurts left with an idea about how to “reinvent the way SOCOM invents.” What was wrong with the way Special Operations Command had been inventing?

Inventors from the Beginning

US special operators began as inventors. Forerunners to the Navy SEALs were the Naval Combat Demolition Units that were stood up during World War II. NCDUs raced into idea-making from the very start.⁸ Hitler’s army was relying on Belgian Gates along Omaha Beach and Utah Beach to thwart the Allies’ Normandy invasion. These German obstacles were “three tons of half-inch thick angle iron welded and bolted together into a ten foot wide by ten foot high barricade that would tear the bottom out of a landing craft at high tide and block them at low tide.” The trained warriors of the brand-new demolition units would have to figure out how to take down the gates, and in “such a way that they didn’t send shrapnel from the explosions whizzing around on a beach full of soldiers and demolitioneers.” More than fifty thousand troops would land at Omaha and Utah beaches, and the fate of the free world depended on inventing a means of getting through. So an NCDU Lieutenant, Carl Hagensen, did. He created a waterproof sack and filled it with C2 explosives, adding a cord and hook at each end of the sack so that it could be hooked to the gates and into other charges. He experimented with this “Hagensen Sack,” and then ten thousand of them were sewed and filled and used in the invasion. The NCDUs and Army combat engineers were able to blast open “five of the sixteen corridors assigned to them” and to create three more partial gaps, and “that was enough to allow the landings at Omaha beach and the Allied forces to pursue Hitler’s Army.”⁹

The special operators’ reputation for bravery was born on those beaches, and so was a legacy of ingenuity. It would continue via different units that also paved the way for the later SEALs, out in the Pacific Theater of the war. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Maritime Unit was known, “of all the forefathers of the SEAL teams . . . for pushing the limits of technology.” It adopted the first one-man submersible—calling it the “sleeping beauty”—used to propel an operator along the surface before submerging for an attack. It deployed the “floating mattress,” which could carry two people and was propelled by an electric drill drawing on a 12-volt battery. It hired Major Christian Lambertsen, who developed rebreathers in the 1940s for the Navy frogmen. The bubble-free diving apparatus initiated a new phase in underwater warfighting.¹⁰

From their inception these units attracted inventors, and that was still true—two generations later—as Geurts and his friend were brainstorming over burgers in Tampa. The special operators themselves were often inventing, and they had plenty of people inventing for them. The 2011 raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound was aided by all manner of sophisticated technologies that had been developed for use by special operators, including drones that provided air support and stealth helicopters that ferried the operators into Pakistan. The team even included a military dog that had undergone sophisticated training to sniff out explosives and booby-trapped doors.¹¹ In 2015, the Special Operations program under Geurts’s oversight forged ahead with a list of innovations that seemed to me like it had been swiped off of Tony Stark’s desk: low-cost/expendable satellites, advanced armor/materials, deployable rapid DNA analysis, unique night-vision devices, and even a Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit, a kind of armored warfighter exoskeleton nicknamed, yes, the “Iron Man suit.”¹² So, what was wrong with the way SOCOM invented? Geurts and Bates were looking for ideas on YouTube, but Special Operations seemed, at least to my eye, chock-full of them.

New Ideas

“If we had a new idea around here, it would die of loneliness,” Mayor Menino used to tell us, and not happily. If he was right, I’d like to think we could be forgiven. Teams with people in their roles for a long time struggle to come up with new ideas. In government, people stay a while. We’ve learned since grade school the art of self-protection: We don’t want to look intrusive in our organizations, so we don’t offer ideas. We don’t want to look negative, so we don’t criticize the status quo.¹³ Rare is the organization designed to allow people to take the interpersonal risks of learning and sharing; these organizations do so by generating a sense of “psychological safety.”¹⁴ Public organizations conspire to provide not a lot of that. Moreover, even if we were brave enough to share new ideas, a kind of risk-aversion-induced unimagination takes hold (more on risk aversion in chapter 3). That is, if we won’t be allowed to try it anyway, why would we even bother to think it up? And on top of all this, an acute case of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome in government means that ideas from the outside, which might help generate new ideas on the inside, are rejected.¹⁵ In government, we even have our special idea frailties. Old bureaucracies get “ossified”; a buildup of programs leads to what one scholar has called “demosclerosis.”¹⁶ Furthermore if my mayor and others were expecting us to dream like Apple’s famed Steve Jobs, well, that was just expecting too much. We weren’t born Steve Jobs.

Some of these excuses would have withered under scrutiny if I had offered them to the boss. The truth is, you don’t have to be Steve Jobs to be entrepreneurial. There is scant evidence that entrepreneurs are born but not made. Entrepreneurship is a “what” and not mostly a “who.” You don’t have to be special. It can be learned and practiced, and designed into organizations, maybe even public ones. When Menino hectored us for new ideas, he wasn’t trying to get water out of a rock. He was trying to mold us into wells.

Opportunity Driven

In 1983, Howard Stevenson, a professor of entrepreneurship, described what that molding would take and foretold what was ailing—to the extent it was—Special Operations when I met Geurts. “Strengths have become weaknesses, and weaknesses strengths,” Stevenson noted while describing how resources wring the innovation out of us and how we might get it back.¹⁷

In the early 1980s, Stevenson set out to redefine entrepreneurship. Though the term had been defined many times over since being coined by French-Irish economist Richard Cantillon in the early eighteenth century, Stevenson found contemporary definitions wanting. He felt that by the 1980s the common understanding of entrepreneurship had come to rest too much on the notion of the entrepreneur as a risk-seeking, creative, brave (you can pick the adjective) individual.

In place of a “single model of the human being who is the entrepreneur,” Stevenson—later with colleague Bill Sahlman—laid out a range of six entrep...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Can We Solve Public Problems Anymore?
• Part One: Government that Can Imagine
• Part Two: Government that Can Try New Things
• Part Three: Government that Can Scale
• Part Four: We Get the Government We Invent
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author