Federal innovation resolutions for 2024

The Partnership’s Federal Innovation Council is a community of career leaders from across the federal government. Each member enacts or enables transformative civic innovation, and together, they demonstrate the promise of engaged public service. 

This month we gathered the council to discuss its innovation priorities for 2024. We see these as members’ “innovation resolutions” for the new year, collectively forming an innovation agenda for more effective, efficient and equitable federal services. 

Federal innovation in the year ahead 

These resolutions manifest as commitments to culture, collaboration and equity: 

1. Commitment to culture:

Our members commit to holding themselves and their leaders accountable for maintaining an inclusive and evidence-based, innovation-forward culture. This includes demystifying and de-risking failure, motivating experimentation and curiosity, and leading with candor and empathy. 

• Business intelligence for organizational culture: Our members apply commercial acumen to reimagine daily operations. From instituting optimization frameworks to investing in training and change management, they are redefining how government does business with a mindfulness of how process impacts people. Our members use data to study, and with insights improve, agency culture. They calculate, for example, where and how employees are spending time and effort to determine process interventions that could improve the employee experience and free time for creative problem-solving.
• Real talk: Our members are also witnessing burnout. Those who lead others take burnout seriously and plan to spend time in 2024 caring for their teams, accommodating difference, addressing toxicity and motivating reengagement with agency mission.  

2. Commitment to collaborative infrastructure:

This year our members are organizing support systems for collaboration by establishing mentorship programs and informal knowledge networks to improve the individual employee experience and deliberately connecting teams who are actively addressing big issues. The goal of these collaboration infrastructures is to share resources, create trusted relationships, distribute knowledge and encourage intentional problem-solving. 

• Addressing siloed data and data expertise: Data sharing within and across agencies requires collaborative infrastructure for collective access. As our members advocate for cross-agency data infrastructure to aid mission outcomes, they are also expanding data literacy training to empower novices across the organization to analyze and visualize data. Addressing siloed data is a two-pronged approach: Accessible infrastructure and distributed expertise require each other.
• Celebrating and attracting talent: In addition to supporting their teams, our leaders hope to focus time on communicating the benefits of federal employment and constructing landscapes of belonging for a diverse government workforce. Government service is sexy (yes, we said it!), and our members hope to spend more time this year amplifying the work of exemplary teams to attract future leaders. 

3. Commitment to equity and accessibility:

At the heart of the council’s work is a commitment to enabling a government that is made for and by those it serves. And as agencies become more diverse, organizational culture needs to represent a broader base of life experience. Our members are inviting and honoring individuality to ensure the work and the workplace are inclusive. 

• In 2024 our members will (still) be working to increase accessibility of and access to internet and critical digital services. From immigration to Indian affairs offices, our members are making sure public services equitably serve diverse communities.
• Climate commitment: Our members are committed to including considerations of environmental health and sustainability in their decisions about acquisition and service delivery. The effects of pollution, changing climate and extreme weather disproportionally impact historically marginalized communities. 

Some resolutions are of the do more, do better variety while others are evidence-based experiments. All are grounded in the hope for positive progress toward excellence in employee experience and mission delivery.   

Amanda Starling Gould, PhD, manages a portfolio on the Partnership’s Technology and Innovation team with an eye toward building a modern government that is equitable, accessible and sustainable.