NJ Chief Innovation Officer on Solving Public Problems

She was the U S Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government and led President Obama's Open Government government initiative at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She's got a new book out. It is called Solving Public Problems, A Practical Guide to Fix our Government and change our world. She is on the phone in New York City. Beth, Welcome to Bloomberg Radio. Hi Carol, Thank you for having me. It is so great to have

you here. We do talk a lot about innovation and disruption, not just from an investment perspective, but how it is either improving the livelihood of individuals and citizens around the world. Tell us about your background and how it set the

stage for this book. Oh Well, my background, I have been both a professor of engineering and a professor of law, and I've had the pleasure to serving government both at the federal level and now at the state level, and work with international governments around the world, and my capacity as director of the govern Lab, and that's where we've gotten to see and especially something we've all witnessed out

during COVID. We've gotten to see countless failures and bungles, really the problems what happens that happened when government doesn't work well. But at the same time, we've gotten to also see a lot of successes and we've come, I think, to really realize how important it is to how how

important it is to really have government that works. So in my own background, especially when I was in the Obama administration, we got to see how much of a difference it made when people started to do things like use open data, which we were putting online for the first time to help solve problems in a more evidence way.

What it meant to actually use new technology to then go out and engage with citizens, to use with some people calling Human Center Design to really ask citizens about the problems that we're facing and how we can deliver services that work for them better. It's something that we now do regularly in our work in the state of New Jersey. So we really got to see about what it meant to work differently and how important those different working practices are to innovating and to improving how we

solve problems. So, Beth, I have to ask you, as a member, me, as a citizen of the United States, as someone who has lived in New Jersey her whole life, I have seen a fair amount of dysfunction in government. Does government work right now? And if it doesn't in your view, or are there ways that it could work better in your view? Well, again, there are lots of things. There are lots of success stories that I can tell you, um.

But at the same time, regardless of those stories, most people today feel that government is a clumsy, bungling giant that is not in a position to spend its money. Well, as we stand poised today to have one of the largest federal budgets and World War One. Really, um, I think all of us are very concerned about how government spends our money. And you know that's reflected in the

poll numbers. Which over not just since COVID but over a generation, have seen declining rates of trust and government. So as many things as are going right, and we're all looking around us as New York and New Jersey are reopening obviously, and we're all happy, maybe not to be out in the heat today, but happy to be able to leave our houses at least um uh and

go to a restaurant and whatnot. We see the benefits again of when things work, but we know that they could work better than they're doing today, and especially we know that we need to take advantage of the tools we have available today, big data, new technology, UM, human centered design again, innovations in ways of working that we need to adapt and adopt in order to do a

better job at solving problems. Well does the pandemic and everything that kind of how it played out, And obviously this was in many ways of black swan event, but nonetheless the inequities that were they bear once again there weren't new problems. Is that an indication that government hasn't been working as well as it could, that we still have such incredible gaps in our society. We've got about forty seconds and then we'll come back and talk some more.

Absolutely so, I think COVID brought a lot of this into release. But the acute challenges we saw during COVID, whether it was the public health crisis, exploding unemployment, rampant racial inequity, just amplify the long term and chronic inequalities we've been seeing, whether it's climate change or whether it's economic inequality. We have tremendous challenges ahead of us that

we need to do better at fixing. So as well as we might have done things up until now, and that's a debatable point, we really need to do better if we're going to respond to the tremendous crisis that we're facing. All Right, best to time for a second. We're gonna do a little bit of news, then we'll come back. We are talking with Beth Simo Novak, chief Innovation Officer for the State of New Jersey, former Deputy

Chief Technology Officer. She did that in the Obama administration and her new book that's out, Solving Public Problems, A Practical Guide to fix our Government and change our world. She lays it out, but she also gives advice on how to make those changes and help our world. I want to get back to our guests. We're talking with Beth Simon Noveki. She is the first Chief Innovation Officer UH in New Jersey. She was the US Deputy Chief

Technology Officer for Open Government. That was during the Obama administration. Her new book, Solving Public Problems, A Practical Guide to Fix our Government and change our World. There's a lot here, Beth, and I do wonder you know, one chapter. I just love the headline of it. The government that governs least governs best. Is that an argument for smaller government or just more effective government, or government with real leadership or a little bit about your your your onto exactly what

I'm getting at. We've had a generation long debate about bigger versus smaller government. I think that's really a red herring. It distracts us from the idea that we need to have better governments, and frankly, not just government, it's business. It's activists and students and every one of us as well as our government that needs to really develop the skills I would argue for being more effective at solving public problems. So a lot of us these days really

want to, you know, man the barricades. There's a lot of demand for social change. But I think the ability to go from demanding change to really making it happen, to cross that chasm from idea to implementation is something that I think a lot of us find very difficult wherever it is that we work, whether it's in the private or the public sector. Well, when you look at something like climate change. We we talked earlier um with Sura Manker. She's created this company called grow Intelligence, and

she was a former commodities trader. She's a Bloomberg New Economy catalyst and she basically is gathering tons of global data using aime machine learning to tackle things like food security issues and climate change. And our customers are food suppliers, food producers, governments, the financial world. You know, these are some really big problem is that if we don't tackle, we're all going to be not in a good way.

So I do wonder about in particular, I guess what I wanted to ask you was the use of data, smart data to get us to a better place. Absolutely. I think you know, every day we were glued to the television screen or the radio to hear you know, the governors or the mayors of our communities show the graphs with race of COVID and how transmission was progressing. If we didn't know about the value of data before, we definitely I think all understood it doing during COVID.

But if you look around and look at the fact that the top twenty five schools of public administration do not require the teaching of data science. If you look at the fact that in government, we have the majority of our government, only five percent of people are under

the age of thirty in our civilian government. So if age is any proxy for mastery of new technologies, digital skills, big data, um, you know, we really are I think lacking in the way that we're training and teach people to use these new tools that are available to us. You know, our training law and government dates to ninety eight are training framework. Uh there's yeah, there's a need for a refresh and really looking at what are the

skills that we're teaching people inside government. Um, but it's not limited to government. Look in universities, we're teaching people to become the next Mark Zuckerberg. We're teaching everybody to become entrepreneurs and to start a business, which is wonderful, but we also need to equip people with the skills who want to do things like tackle climate change, or tackle racial inequities, or tackle some of these big societal problems,

and all the more so really in business. So you know, today I think CEOs really know uh and the Aidelman Trust Barometer shows it. You know, people want CEOs to speak out on societal issues, they want CEOs to be accountable to the public. The new movement around stakeholder capitalism really is a movement towards companies playing a more socially responsible role right and employees frankly or demanding it. You know, millennials who are the people going into the jobs of

both today and tomorrow. Of millennials are considering a company's social and environmental commitments when they're deciding where they're going to go to work. So I think there's a real need for people also in the private sector to upscale themselves to be able to tackle society societal problems because

it's everybody's responsibility, not just people inside government. It's funny we just had Richard Edelman on because we often talked about the trust Barometer and your spot on what's also interesting and having recently talked to a bunch of CEOs that are in the food space, leading companies. They are definitely watching climate change because it's impacting them and their businesses. Is it ultimately you know, I have worked in a

capitalistic society. I cover the capitalism that goes on globally. Is it money that ultimately brings about the change? Because I feel like we've been talking about climate change for a long time, We've been talking about diversity for a long time, but finally it feels like the needle is changing, partly because it's having a financial impact on companies, on cities, on states, on governments and countries. Absolutely. Well, look, we

can always use more money put towards social good. But right now we're seeing you know, the largest federal budgets in a very very long time. We're seeing companies also wanting Especially during COVID, we saw a lot of corporate social philanthropy, social responsibility, people spending money on trying to

do well by doing good. I think it's really a question though, of skills and of know how and the ability to understand how to leverage the tools at our disposal, and that includes both digital tools and data, but also includes institutions and how we can leverage institutions and their power and their convening power to really implement change. You know, when we talk about innovation, a lot of the focus

is on the spark of the good idea. So you talk about the social entrepreneur who has this cool new app for this cool new thing, um, But the real question is driving through implementation. How do we make change happen in practice? How do we go again from the good idea to implementing that good idea. How do we take these amazing new technologies around machine learning and AI and translate them into social good impractice for real people. That's a skill set, and it's a learnable skill set.

Is the argument that I make. I love what you're saying. I feel like I've been having this conversation a lot lately, especially in the last year, but also for a little bit longer, Like these are all great ideas, they make sense. Someone a loyal listener and watch her on our YouTube channel tweeting at me and saying, better government begins with better people running for public office country before party. Isn't

that part of the problem? And just got about forty seconds left here, Well we're going to solve it all in seconds. But you know what, I'm saying, in terms of politics, EEP getting in the way of kind of some really smart and needed and necessary, very longer term planning. Just quickly, let me just say I'm so glad we're having this conversation because so much focus is obviously on what happens on election day, and not enough is what

happened on what happens to day after election day? What are the skills we're developing with the capacity that we're building. Are we up skilling ourselves to be able to tackle the challenges that we're facing today. So it really is about first and foremast focusing on the problems that we're solving and not on the politics around those problem. Well, I hope you will come back. Beth Simone Novak, chief Innovation Officer for New Jersey. Her book is Solving Public Problems,

A Practical Guide to Fix our Government and change our world. Bet, thank you so much.