This article is written by Josh Solinger, operations data analyst, Pierce County, Wisconsin

The dramatic rise of GameStop in the stock market captivated, if not inspired, a global audience. A large number of so-called retail traders catapulted share prices from roughly $17 per share at the start of January to nearly $350 by the end of the month.

The mechanism by which the share price soared — many people buying stocks at once — is not new. What is new, however, is how it happened — as part of a crowdsourced campaign on social media.

A forum on the popular Reddit platform called ‘Wallstreetbets’ is credited with the share’s meteoric rise. The forum (also known as a subreddit) began 2021 with a little over one million users. By the beginning of February, the community had ballooned to eight million users and was publicly cheered on by well-known entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, and Chamath Palihapitiya.

Policy-makers such as Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ted Cruz were even compelled to weigh in. Crowdsourced investing not only produced dramatic results for GameStop, it also garnered attention from America’s leading entrepreneurs and policy-makers.

While it has been a slower burn and hasn’t attracted the same media attention as the GameStop saga, the stock market itself has also changed dramatically over the course of the last year. Spurred on by the pandemic, technology companies experienced massive demand and large increases in share prices. In particular, companies involved with cloud computing produced strong gains. Software as a service (SaaS) and low-code, do-it-yourself apps proliferated and became mainstream. Years of progress arrived ahead of schedule out of necessity.

At this stage you may wonder why I am writing this in Apolitical — after all, this is a publication for public servants, not retail traders or stock market observers. My point in writing all of this is that the GameStop saga is a sign of things to come. People plus technology will drive societies to new, surprising and disruptive places. In government, we can either try to ride that wave or be engulfed by its tsunami.

In contrast to the flourishing technology sector, local governments around the world spent much of 2020 on their heels as they grappled with the pandemic. However, as we move through 2021, vaccines for Covid-19 hold the promise that the pandemic’s end is in sight. Local governments will be able to pursue more aspirational work in the months and years ahead. Developments in crowdsourced ideas and a flourishing tech sector should provide a roadmap for local governments as they transition out of survival mode.

The value of citizen experts

The exciting thing about local government, and perhaps its greatest challenge, is the amount of information that exists in the communities it helps foster.

Unlike most businesses that provide niche services, governments are asked to directly provide many disparate services and indirectly support an innumerable number of others. But what happens when governments support increasingly disparate services in a world growing more specialised and awash with information?

The amount of new information public servants in local government must learn to stay relevant requires more generalisation and adaptability.

To quantify this challenge, consider the ‘Knowledge doubling curve’ developed by the American architect Buckminster Fuller. Fuller postulated that human knowledge doubled approximately every century until 1900. By the end of World War II, human knowledge doubled every 25 years. Today, on average, human knowledge is doubling every 13 months. When the Internet of things is completely implemented, one observer has suggested that human knowledge may double roughly every 12 hours.

On Reddit, a community of eight million people were able to produce an extraordinary outcome. There’s no reason we couldn’t do something similarly ambitious in government, if we just extended an invitation to participate

As information grows exponentially, the churn of information becoming obsolete will also increase, forcing everyone to become lifelong learners to some extent. In the case of GameStop, information can become obsolete in minutes or even seconds. While this is of course an extreme case, it is clear that adaptability will be key, also for public servants — ideas that feel like a bridge too far today may be mainstream within months, or sooner.

Maintaining a generalist mindset will become important as governments grapple with new ideas and concepts that force a shift in mindset from specialties operating in silos to systems-level thinking that create synergistic outcomes from disparate parts.

For public servants, the risk is that they will be paralysed by information overload. The good news is that we don’t have to tackle all this information alone. On Reddit, because information was freely available, a community of eight million people were able to produce an extraordinary outcome. There’s no reason we couldn’t do something similarly ambitious in government, if we just extended an invitation to participate.

Make friends with citizen engagement

Public servants can engage citizen experts in many easy ways, including by inviting citizens to help audit your organisation’s processes, forms, and documents. Be prepared to accept criticism and enact change based on the feedback. In addition, citizen surveys can help point to problem areas in your organisation’s service delivery, but don’t stop there.

When problem areas are identified, draw parallels to similar functions in the community and tap into that expertise for help. For example, when lines for Covid vaccines got backed up in one South Carolina town, the mayor enlisted the help of a local fast food restaurant manager. The result: An hours-long wait was reduced to 15 minutes. There is a high likelihood that citizens within your community have already solved many of your most knotty problems. Leverage the power of crowdsourcing!

Making decisions in 2021 without supporting data is akin to piloting an airplane at night with the control panel turned off

My own experience of working with citizen experts involved identifying why so few young people were using our municipal transit system. A policy-maker posited that fees to ride the bus were cost prohibitive for many families in the community. I reached out to a number of organisations that work with kids in low- and moderate-income families and formed an ad hoc committee to explore the issue. By simply inviting these experts to a discussion, we found that the perception that transit was unsafe rather than cost was the main reason so few young people were taking the bus. This information was in turn provided to a consultant hired to assist the municipality with updating its transit development plan.

The exponential growth of information, and fragmentation of information into a growing number of new disciplines, challenges the ability of local government to keep up. Public servants must do their part to cast aside traditional norms of opaque bureaucracy and siloed thinking. Instead, they must be willing to make themselves and their service delivery vulnerable to critical examinations by citizen experts, and adopt systems-level thinking to use the growing wealth of knowledge within their communities.

Making data-driven decisions in a world awash with information

If local governments want to keep up with the pace of information growth, they’ll have to be nimble and spend less time slogging through bureaucratic structures.

Routine business processes generate tons of data, most of which is not captured and converted into useful information. The reason is that capturing and converting data into information using legacy systems, or worse, by hand, is time consuming. Such data may exist in highly specialised, siloed programs used by individual departments with no access granted to non-departmental users. In these cases, co-workers across multiple departments may not even be aware of relevant data being generated by one another.

Making decisions in 2021 without supporting data is akin to piloting an airplane at night with the control panel turned off. Adopters of data-driven decision making will outperform non-adopters, and the gap will grow over time. Younger, more value-oriented employees often express a wish to work for organisations whose values align with their own. If you can’t use information to assure the next generation of workers that what they do matters within the context of their value system, they will seek employment with organisations that can.

It’s too early to say how the GameStop story will end. But it’s not too early to learn from it

For the six sigma or business optimisation enthusiasts among us, without data-driven decision making, you cannot assure board members or customers (taxpayers and rate-payers in the government context) that your organisation is delivering the best services at an acceptable cost. In addition, in a forward-looking sense, without good information, there is no way of knowing if the organisation is stalling or flying blindly towards disaster.

I have also personally used data to help my organisation prevent a disaster. It happened as we were examining a minor special revenue fund for which the balance sheet data had not been reviewed in many years. A forecast was put together showing that the fund was in jeopardy of running out of cash completely. We then made adjustments to not only avoid the outcome, but to also improve the fund’s cash position over time. By reviewing data and creating forecasts, we turned on the control panel in our plane and corrected the course.

Data also elevates an organisation’s potential by allowing employees to find opportunities to act. With good data, information such as strategic plans and financial plans can be developed to strategise, prioritise, and empower employees. Employees that are empowered with information and a clear sense of purpose are poised to capitalise on great opportunities that might otherwise be missed. Data management, despite the work involved, is the foundation that makes it possible to avoid problems and capitalise on great opportunities. Once that foundation is solidly in place, organisations should look towards cloud-based technologies and low-code, do-it-yourself apps, which are likely to be the next frontier in the democratisation of technology.

Get comfortable with technology

As you’ve now read, use of technology boomed during the pandemic and the writing is on the wall that it is here to stay.

Adopting technology like cloud-based platforms and low-code app development will soon be a requirement for governments to keep pace with the changes in our world. In addition, citizens will tap into new technologies and become empowered to create massive change in their societies like never before. These citizens will be outstanding assets for local governments to use for building better communities.

This will require governments to make better sense of information. If we don’t, the risk is that engaged citizens won’t see their local governments as partners in community building. Likewise, if we ‘get with the times’, local governments can take a leading role in what will be a golden age of cross-sector collaboration.

Your staff should become comfortable with the leading cloud-based and low-code app technologies, even if it requires re-training or continuing education. To accomplish this, your organisation should review its current business processes and systems used. Where possible, you should migrate to cloud-based, all-in-one or integrated platforms. This ensures equitable and reasonable access to information for all of your staff that is located in one place and available to them from anywhere. Although there will be costs involved in this process, such an investment will ensure your local government is best positioned to allow your citizens and community to flourish in the post-pandemic, high-tech world.

It’s too early to say how the GameStop story will end. But it’s not too early to learn from it. — Josh Solinger

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