In this episode Professor Steve Goldsmith interviews Professor Elizabeth Linos, director of The People Lab and an expert in evidence-based policymaking and data for government improvement.
In this episode Professor Goldsmith talks with Professor Elizabeth Linos, director of The People Lab and an expert in data and evidence-based policymaking who researches how to best support the people of government and the communities they serve. They discuss Linos' path from practitioner to academic, the role of geographic data in service improvement, and how behavioral science can help governments do more with less.
Music credit: Summer-Man by Ketsa
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Data-Smart City Solutions, housed at the Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School, is working to catalyze the adoption of data projects on the local government level by serving as a central resource for cities interested in this emerging field. We highlight best practices, top innovators, and promising case studies while also connecting leading industry, academic, and government officials. Our research focus is the intersection of government and data, ranging from open data and predictive analytics to civic engagement technology. We seek to promote the combination of integrated, cross-agency data with community data to better discover and preemptively address civic problems. To learn more visit us online and follow us on Twitter.
Betsy Gardner:
Hi, this is Betsy Gardner, senior editor at the Harvard Kennedy School and producer of The Data-Smart City Pod. Since we started this podcast, we've had great support from our listeners, and to make sure that you don't miss an episode, please find us under the new Data-Smart City Pod channel wherever you listen. Make sure to subscribe so you get each episode, and thanks for listening.
Steve Goldsmith:
Welcome back. This is Steve Goldsmith, a professor of the practice of urban policy at Harvard's Kennedy School with another one of our podcasts, and we're delighted today to be able to invite Elizabeth Linos, Emma Bloomberg, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School, a colleague of mine, and she's faculty director of an interesting lab called The People Lab, and so Elizabeth, start with telling us a little bit about yourself and why your lab is a people lab.
Elizabeth Linos:
Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for having me. As you said, I am currently an associate professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and run this lab called The People Lab, but the story behind this work really started when I was myself in government, I worked for the Prime Minister of Greece, Prime Minister George Papandreou, during the last large financial crisis that Greece was at the center of, and at the time it became very clear to me that we had some of the smartest people in the world thinking about policy design and some of the smartest people in the world thinking about program evaluation, but I felt like we didn't have enough people thinking in the same rigorous way about the public servants that were called to completely reform and change government almost overnight, and so it became really important to me to conduct research that really centered the people of government as we thought about broader public sector reform.
And so when I became an academic, I started The People Lab. The focus of the lab is really to do cutting edge research on the people of government and the communities they serve, and so we think about that in three big buckets. The first bucket focuses on how to recruit, retain, and support the government workforce. The second bucket thinks about what all of this means for service delivery, so how do we reduce the burdens or the barriers that people face when they have to interact with their government, and the third bucket tries to take a step back and think about the role of evidence-based policy making and all of this, so really trying to reimagine how to do evidence-based policy making better by putting people at the center, and across all of these buckets, we're working with government agencies to both co-design and test solutions and ultimately answer questions that they care about.
Steve Goldsmith:
Well, I've got now four or five hours of questions about that list. That's a terrific list. Let me ask a generic question first. Most of my work has been inside government as contrasted professor, and I've been worried or concerned about this lurching from no evidence to too high of demand of the requirements from structured evaluations to just winging it. So if we think about re-imagining evidence based policy making, and you are a state or a local official without a huge evidence budget, how should one reimagine evidence at least informs the way you make decisions?
Elizabeth Linos:
Yeah. I think, Steve, you said something that was really important, that sometimes academics don't do a great job of explaining, that there isn't this fixed hierarchy where either you're doing the most rigorous academic data analytic project or nothing, there's actually a whole world of improvements we can make to how we use evidence that start on the front end, so how are we doing data collection? Who are we asking for their insights or lived experience when we're designing policies, all the way through, once we have a rigorous study, how do we adopt that?
So I'm really interested in all the work that happens to make the infrastructure for using evidence easier for governments to use. I really think we have a lot of work to do on all parts of that, I don't want to shun rigorous research, but I do think that if we want the local governments to actually use evidence, we have to make it as easy as possible on each of those pain points for policy makers who have other things to do with their day, to actually build the infrastructure to collect data and evidence, actually do the evidence building themselves in their own context and learn and adopt evidence that has been created elsewhere. So my lab really thinks about those as behavioral questions with behavioral barriers that we can start to overcome.
Steve Goldsmith:
I want to get to behavioral in other aspects of your work in a second. Let me see if I can make my question more confusing about your coherent answer. So in my experience, often government measures performance by the efficiency of the agency that provides the service, as contrasted to the ease of use or take up from the resident standpoint, from the people standpoint. So when we're thinking about re-imagining evidence based policy making, how do you think about that from evidence related to the human center design, the person themselves, as contrasted to the agency itself?
Elizabeth Linos:
So what I'm hoping to do is further a narrative or an agenda that says that these two things don't have to be in tension. So ultimately we need to be thinking about the people who are most impacted by government and government change. On the one hand, that is absolutely the communities that are hoping to interact with government, but it's also your frontline workers who are literally at the frontline of making these operational shifts. If it doesn't work for residents and it doesn't work for frontline workers, then it's a bad reform, and so when we think about bringing those players in, in a more systematic way, I think there's a very important role for bringing in residents to define what success looks like, so we're making a big public safety reform, for example, rather than saying, "Look, the data we have is on crime, so we're going to use crime statistics as our success measure", it's really important to say, "okay, how would the communities that are most impacted by the criminal legal system, how would they define success? What would public safety look like from the perspective of the communities that are most impacted?"
And then it's our role as scholars to find a way to design programs where that's the success metric. Same thing with efficiency or operational changes, frontline workers have so much insight into how to make their lives easier and make residents lives easier by streamlining processes, the hard part is, how do we make sure those insights are captured in a systematic way and then used to design innovations? And so a lot of the re-imagining public policy more broadly with a human centered approach is just asking the right people questions about how to define success and how to operationalize some of these changes, and then finding a way to streamline those innovations.
Steve Goldsmith:
Yeah, that's a really interesting answer that presumes though for you as a scholar that the officials who are working with you are thinking or asking the right questions, I loved your answer about criminal justice and you could use the data you have now or you could think about the data that the community could produce itself. So how would one structure, say you're a city official and you're sensitive to the argument you just made, how would you think about generating the right question that would lead the right data? I had a question here, I was going to ask you about data collection, but that presumes that we're asking the right questions around which we're trying to ask the data. So, what's the best way to structure that interaction?
Elizabeth Linos:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think it comes down to a bigger question about who gets to decide what success looks like in terms of defining those outcomes, and I don't think there's one way to do that. Obviously we elect leaders because we want them to make some decisions on how to define success, I don't think the answer is always going to be ask the community, ask the community, ask the community, because then we're overburdening people who have other things to do with their day as well, but I think there is some really interesting models where we can think about community engagement in a way that allows success to be defined by the communities that are most impacted. Different cities are trying this in different ways, different local governments, some are trying to think about diversifying the surveys that they send out to community members about, how should we invest our capital improvements budget? Or how should we think about re-imagining public safety?
I don't know that we have a really good model yet that is scalable about how to actually collect information from communities about what is most important. All the models that I've seen so far are really effective at the local scale or are really effective if you have a huge budget. What my lab is trying to think about is, what does this look like at scale? So what does it look like to build enough trust that if you did do a huge community engagement survey, people would participate and the groups that are most burdened would feel comfortable sharing their thoughts because they thought something would happen.
At the same time, I do think it's really important for policy leaders, whether those are the mayor all the way through the manager of a specific department to be really clear and crisp about what is the outcome they want to move, and we've seen a big shift in that over the past few years, so rather than saying, better, faster, cheaper, now we are saying things like, "Does the community trust us? Or was this a stigmatizing experience? Was this an experience where we basically put the burden or the time tax on the resident rather than taking on the burden or the compliance costs for the state?" And so we're starting to ask those questions as part of service delivery, and I think that's going to be a big part of how we think about these questions in the future.
Steve Goldsmith:
We have two groups of practitioners that we work with frequently, one are geographic information system, facial analytics, geographers for government. The others are chief data officers, so we thought about preparing data for evidence based policy making. Does that necessarily need to be about a certain subject like safety or would you have recommendations for the chief data officers or the GIS folks about how to prepare for evidence based policy making, facilitating it by the preparation of data more generally? So general institutional structuring of data as contrasted to around a particular program or policy.
Elizabeth Linos:
In an ideal world, you're doing both, but the hardest part is that broader non-policy-specific data infrastructure, and there's two components to that. One is, what are we doing on the back end? What are chief data officers and departments doing to combine administrative data source across departments? So any topic we care about, whether it's housing or economic development or public safety or education, actually touches on multiple government departments, and so thinking about way of combining the data sets across those departments feels like a nerdy exercise, but is actually really fundamental to be able to track progress and really see where the pain points are, and I think chief data officers have a really important role to play to create the logistical and the legal infrastructure to be able to do that. I do also think that because of the nature of systemic issues in the US and abroad, a lot of challenges end up having a geographic focus.
So because of the way, in the US, we run our schools and how that's linked to geographies and how that's linked to food insecurity or other areas, we do have versions of this where geographic focus allows you to touch on many policy areas at once, so why are some communities underserved across all types of government services? Why are some neighborhoods not responding to a community engagement survey at all?
There's a geographic focus to that, that has to do with systemic and historical reasons why some communities are not heard by government or don't have opportunities to be heard by government, and so I do actually like the approaches that some cities have taken to really pinpoint what those neighborhoods are or what those communities are and think about, how do you build trust and data collection in those geographic units as well? My sense is that, if we could get that right, if we could look at a heat map of a city and say, "Last time we ran a citywide engagement survey, these 10 communities had really low response rates", that's telling us something about where investments need to be made that might cut across a whole bunch of different programs and ultimately lead to better engagement in the future, more trust in the future, and ultimately a better co-production of services in the future.
Steve Goldsmith:
I've got two more questions, two more subjects. I'm resisting the temptation to ask you a lot of follow up questions, which I have. In our group of city leaders that we convene regulated, the Kennedy School, one group is deputy mayors or chief of staff, what would you recommend to them about strengthening the government workforce? How do we think about this data collection, data culture training issue as it relates to the public workforce?
Elizabeth Linos:
I think we're just at a point when we start talking about workforce issues, we're just at the point where we're realizing that this is more than just an HR question. So if you think back maybe a decade or so, we had kind of a collective revelation that data is not an IT question, that data is a fundamental tool for meeting your vision as a political leader, I think we're just getting to that point when we think about the workforce, where people issues are not just the transactional components of an HR strategy, they're kind of a strategic decision about how you build and invest in the people who are going to deliver your vision and data is a big part of that. The way I think about these workforce questions are really the same way we would think about a service delivery model.
So if you think about the journey of a person starting with whether or not they decide to apply for a job all the way through whether or not they get that job, to their experience in the first six months of onboarding all the way through promotion and retention, each of those points, in an employee's journey, is an opportunity to either strengthen the workforce, invest in the vision of the local government, or is a place where things start to fall apart, and you can look at pain points at each of those stages to see kind of, is the problem that people are falling out of the process? Are they disengaging? Do you have disproportionate drop off for specific race and gender groups? And that's where data really is critical, data is going to tell you where to invest in terms of the people strategy because it will tell you where the pain points are.
Steve Goldsmith:
Yes. In our next seven episodes of our interview with you, we'll come back to whether city systems actually strangle individual initiative in the hiring process or whether they welcome it, it will be an interesting story. Elizabeth, in one additional subject, let's just touch on it, it'll be a much larger subject, but you're an expert in behaviors, so city officials, when they communicate with the public or when they communicate with their employees, they're sending signals, they're encouraging certain behaviors, so what's the connection between The People Lab, re-imagining evidence and behaviors that our officials should keep in mind?
Elizabeth Linos:
So as you said, my research really sits at the intersection of public management and behavioral science, and what that means is, we believe, at The People Lab, and we're not the only ones who believe this, that policies and programs in government should be designed with an understanding of how humans actually behave and not according to how we wish they did if they were just rational models of a human. What that means is that every time a government tries to encourage behavior, an understanding of how outreach efforts make a difference, messaging makes a difference, messengers make a difference, as well as how seemingly small barriers can have these disproportionate impacts on people's behavior, all of those insights that have been developing over the past 10 years or so in the field of behavioral science have a role to play in government. What I find most exciting about this space is that if you're in a world where you're resource constrained in other ways, which many governments are, so you can't fundamentally shift your customers, you're not going to fundamentally shift people's salaries.
Like all the big policy levers that you might have if you were working for a private organization aren't really available to you if you're leading a public sector organization. Well in those settings, tools within behavioral science that allow you to do tweaks to existing programming in ways that have a disproportionate impact end up becoming quite exciting and promising, and we've seen success in using these tools across a wide range of policy outcomes, both nudging outwards, so how do you encourage more people to do things like pay their taxes or get vaccinated or sign up for snack? As well as nudging inwards, how do we recruit more diverse police officers? Or how do we encourage more people to take up a training or how do we reduce burnout so that people stay longer? There's so many different applications of the insights from behavioral science and government, and I think we're only scratching the surface. So I'm excited to see where that goes next, but it really does require an appreciation of the people at the center of all of these efforts and what we know about what makes them tick.
Steve Goldsmith:
Well, speaking of scratching the surface, we now scratched the surface of about a half a dozen questions that are great interest or our audience and all of which deserve more attention, but maybe we can be tantalizing enough that we'll get you back and maybe get you in front of some of these audiences on these important issues. So this is Steve Goldsmith and I want to thank Elizabeth Linos, the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Policy at the Kennedy School, and an expert in so many issues relevant to our audience. Thank you so much for your time today.
Elizabeth Linos:
Thanks for having me.
Betsy Gardner:
If you like this podcast, please visit us at datasmartcities.org or follow us @DataSmartCities on Twitter. And remember to subscribe at the new Data-Smart City Pod channel on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. This podcast was produced by me, Betsy Gardner, and hosted by Professor Steve Goldsmith. We're proud to be the central resource for cities interested in the intersection of government, data, and innovation. Thanks for listening.