ADAPT OR LOSE

Some time ago, in a conversation with a high-ranking county official, he told us about the three attributes that he sought when hiring a new employee: “attitude, aptitude and adaptability.” Subsequently in looking up those words online, we’ve realized that he didn’t make the “three A’s” up himself, but the idea remained with us as a sensible one.

Clearly, the fundamental hurdles before someone should be hired for a job in state or local government are attitude and aptitude. If someone has a contrary personality and creates drama in the office that kind of attitude can be lethal. And as for aptitude, the aptitude to do a particular job (with or without a credential) remains essential.

That said, while adaptability has always been an important trait, we want to argue that it’s never been more significant than it is right now. The world is changing at a frenetic pace, and so the absence of the ability to adapt to changes that weren’t predicted or predictable is a recipe for failure.

The most obvious example right now is artificial intelligence. We’ve done a great deal of reporting about this phenomenon in recent months, including an October report for the IBM Center for the  Business of Government, and we’ve become aware that there’s a lot of trepidation in government about adapting to this brave new world. Many fear that their jobs may be in jeopardy. Others just don’t like the idea that the way they did things until recently is suddenly being antiquated.

Notwithstanding the various issues with AI, government employees, at all levels, are seeing it enter their lives -- at least to some extent. Those who aren’t willing to adapt are going to be left in the same dust pile of history as the people who manufactured leather at the turn of the century. In 1900, the United Leather Company was one of the biggest corporations in the United States and was one of the first to be included in the list of firms that form the Dow Jones Average. Today, the US leather industry is barely noticeable in the world market.

AI is just the most obvious example of ways in which government employees are going to have to adapt. There’s a growing expectation, for example, that people who provide services to the public have to be citizen oriented. Disappearing are the days when they could harbor an internal process-focused mindset, without regard to incorporating citizen feedback in their work.

Then there’s the effort on the part of many places to break down silos and share not just data, but the tasks before them. Though it’s easy to say that silo breaking is simply logical, it can be somewhat easier said than done.

For one thing there’s an ever-present concern that the power wielded by one department will be diffused when it’s sharing tasks with others. In a world in which most people want to get credit for their successes, departments sometimes are reticent to collaborate on projects out of concern that they’ll have to share the “attaboys,” and maybe even see their collaborator getting more praise.

What’s more, two departments that are required to work together may each have a very distinct ethos. For instance, police departments increasingly collaborate with social service agencies.  But social workers and police officers may well not share the same sentiments regarding the best way to help fight violence or social strife. For the two units to successfully work together for the common good, both are necessarily going to have to adapt.

Then, of course, there’s the change in the workforce away from credentialism. A growing number of states and localities are broadening the net for new employees to people who have the capacity to do a job but may not have a degree that signals  that they do. As a growing number of non-collegiates enter the workforce, it seems inevitable that there will be resentment on the part of the old-timers who struggled to get their degrees in order to land a job.

Over the course of the years, we’ve been told that often progress in states and localities is stymied by the comment “but that’s the way we’ve always done it,” when a new approach to getting the work done is addressed. People who have been in their jobs for a while can be very comfortable with the tried and true. When that’s the case, new skills may seem like the enemy.

That may just be a matter of human nature. But it’s a losing game.

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