Devta Kidd, Innovation Director for Bloomington, Indiana joins the Govlaunch Podcast to share their recent work to improve sidewalks through their "put it on the dot" project, supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, Centre for Public Impact.
On this episode, Devta Kidd, Innovation Director for Bloomington, Indiana joins me to talk about low budget, impactful innovation that any local government can try. We'll talk about cross-departmental buy-in strategies for engaging the community and what questions we should be asking as we progress through a project lifecycle to ensure innovation remains at the center.
Featured government: City of Bloomington, Indiana
Episode Guests: Devta Kidd – Innovation Director
Visit govlaunch.com for more stories and examples of local government innovation.
Lindsay (00:05):
Welcome to the Govlaunch podcast. Govlaunch is the Wiki for local government innovation, and on this podcast, we're sharing the stories of local government innovators and their efforts to build smarter governments. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, co-founder of Govlaunch and your host. Today, Devta Kidd, innovation Director for Bloomington, Indiana joins me to talk about low budget, impactful innovation that any local government can try. We'll talk about cross-departmental buy-in strategies for engaging the community and what questions we should be asking as we progress through a project lifecycle to ensure innovation remains to the center. So, thanks Devta so much for joining today. We're excited to have you on the Govlaunch podcast on behalf of Bloomington, Indiana. Quickly introduce yourself and share a bit about your role.
Devta (01:02):
Yeah, sure. My name's Devta Kidd, I'm the Director of Innovation for the City of Bloomington. I've been in this role for about four years. I'm the second person in this role, first female, and I get to work with all those city departments to explore how they might make their services more efficient, more in alignment with what our residents are telling us that they want, or more flexible to better position ourselves for the future.
Lindsay (01:32):
Well, Bloomington sure has a lot to boast about in the innovation space. Everything from efforts to engage young people in government to city fiber, to a really impressive social media presence to promote the city's great work. What drew you to Bloomington's Office of Innovation in the first place?
Devta (01:49):
Well, for me, it sounded like a dream job. I have a background in positive organization development, change management, process improvement, and this was a position where I could leverage all of those tools to help make this city that I love even better.
Lindsay (02:08):
Bloomington was recently selected as one of 13 international cities for Bloomberg innovation training. Tell us a bit about this and what you're working on so far.
Devta (02:19):
Yeah, I'm really grateful for the support from Bloomberg Philanthropies. The Center for Public Impact, which is part of the Bloomberg Philanthropies family. For a number of years they've been actively investing in growing the innovation capacity in cities. I think it's for cities who have at least 50,000 residents. We applied and were accepted to their innovation training program, and it trains an intentionally cross-departmental group of city employees in human-centered design on a project of their choice for the better part of a year. And this is actually our second time receiving the training grant. In 2020 our project was Leaf Management and the project that we selected for this year was our city sidewalks.
Lindsay (03:15):
Well, now I'm curious about the leaf management, so we'll have to get back to that, but, but the sidewalks is the most recent one you're working on. How in the world did you come up with sidewalks of all things?
Devta (03:24):
Yeah. Well, we did consider a lot of other thornier issues like homelessness and opioid addiction, and everybody will tell you that they have a concern about scooters, but we really wanted to select a project that was more within our sphere of control and one that we could really understand within the course of a year, using really only part-time resources. Right. So the, the time commitment for the project for the cross-departmental participants was a maximum of just five hours a week. So you can only do so much with five hours a week. You have to be really strategic about what kind of project you, you choose. And sidewalks, we know from our 311 reporting system, you'll hear me reference that. We call it You report. We have information from you report, also from our biannual resident satisfaction survey. All of those things we're pointing to that our residents think that sidewalks are important and that there are some things about maintaining them that we still need to work out. And I also asked the cabinet, the heads of all the departments, what they would like to see an innovation team work on. And a few of them, including our director of engineering, Andrew Sebor, said if we worked on sidewalks, that there were a lot of different directions we could go. So it could be a really good candidate for our project.
Lindsay (04:57):
Well walk us through the details of the project, like what are the biggest complaints about sidewalks and really what, what have you accomplished so far?
Devta (05:05):
Great. We've actually just wrapped up, so this is a great time to talk about this project. Our starting point was really broad. It was really maintaining sidewalks is problematic. There are a lot of challenges around sidewalks in Bloomington. And when we dove into it, a lot of our research was pointing us in the direction of the decision making process. How our limited funds are used to determine which sidewalks need repair, where to place new ones. Doing that in a way that's centered our residents that need those sidewalks to be in good shape because they use them as their primary or secondary transportation. But what was interesting is that when we presented our findings to the cabinet at the halfway point, they said, that's great, that's true.But we are already working on implementing some new criteria for more equitable distribution of those funds.
Devta (6:00):
And is there a different angle that you might take? So we went back to the data and found that our residents really just wanted us to solve for all the things that make them have to step into the street when they're walking on a sidewalk. So these are things like low-hanging branches and overgrown hedges and scooters, trash and recycling bins. And when we looked at all of that, the thing that was most within our control were the placement of the trash and recycling bins. So we started working with our sanitation department and with our residents to understand all the reasons that they might think that the best place for their bins is to be on the sidewalk. We empathize with their reasoning and we worked with them on some other solutions, like maybe having a mark on the ground or a flag in their yard, something that is really super simple and clear and visual that shows them where to put their bins so that they don't block the sidewalk.
Lindsay (07:08):
So essentially what I'm hearing is that we went through all this data and we're coming up with a solution where you're gonna paint some dots on the ground that's gonna give people better inside where to put the cans, and it's gonna give the pedestrians better ability to navigate the sidewalks without these trash cans everywhere. Correct?
Devta (07:26):
We hope so. This was a year-long project, and what we're calling the campaign, put it on the dot, that is only one of about 11 ideas that the team generated. And by team, I mean not just the cross-departmental team, but we generated a lot of ideas in conjunction with our residents at the farmer's market and at a community engagement session and our Crestmont neighborhood. So the put it on the dot campaign is the only one that we were able to prototype and test. So the other ideas including an update on put it on the dot will be presented next week to our mayor and the cabinet and any of the folks who were involved in prototyping and they'll be able to get a sense for everything that was accomplished in this project, and then our recommendations for how we might continue to explore and improve the maintenance of our sidewalks.
Lindsay (08:28):
Well, what I love about this project is one, the implementation, it tackles an issue that's universal. You know, I'll tell you, I've lived in a lot of different cities. Trash Day specifically is madness
Devta (09:39):
Yeah, sure. So, well, the one that I liked the best, and I gotta give a shout out to Clarence Boone of our parks and rec department, because this was his idea was using augmented reality. So imagine that you're standing in the street looking at your house, you open an app and you hold up your phone and you're looking at your house through the app, but now you see digitally where the optimal placement of your bins would be for your particular configuration. And I have to say, I can't say that we won't explore that in the future, but as you mentioned, because of the cost considerations, it wasn't the first thing that we tried. I also love that you're talking about how innovation may include but is not equal to technology. And that's actually, if you look across the US across the world actually, where there are chief innovation officers, a lot of them position organizationally within the information technology services department. And our mayor intentionally positioned this role within the office of the mayor so that we wouldn't equate innovation with technology, that it could be about process improvement, that it could be about just preparing ourselves for the future.
Lindsay (10:59):
Sometimes when you have solutions that are a little over-engineered or rely a little bit too much on technology, there's a whole group of residents as you know, that's not gonna adopt that. And if your goal in the innovation department and in city leadership is to engage with the greatest number of residents possible and give everyone a solution, sometimes steering away from technology intentionally can be, can be really beneficial or just doing a gut check, asking your team, are we over-engineering this solution? Are we relying too heavily on technology? Assuming we're going to get users of that technology. There's a lot of barriers too and campaigns around getting people to download an app to participate in that. And then you need tech support around the app. There's a lot of infrastructure that goes into these decisions as you well know, that sometimes spray painting a dot on the ground might be the better play. So there you go back to engaging the community, What strategies does the Office of Innovation or Bloomington more generally employ for engaging your residents?
Devta (12:02):
Well, overall, my philosophy is that you either invest upfront in engaging with those who would be impacted by a change you're considering, or you're gonna end up investing in the reactions and the pushback because they weren't informed or involved enough to buy into the change in the first place. So for the Sidewalk project, some of the ways that we engage with residents, we're going to where they were like the farmer's market and offering a prompt like how might we ensure that every property owner knows city and resident sidewalk responsibilities like the back of their hand? Because that's one of the things that came up in our research that many residents aren't even aware that they're responsible for the upkeep of the sidewalk adjacent to their property. So we would tell them a little bit about our project, pull out a laminated sheet, so going real low-fi here again that had the question prompt on one side and we gave them a dry erase marker and asked them to give us five different ways to answer that question and then give them permission to get as wild and crazy with their suggestions as they like.
Devta (13:21):
Because a lot of times it's really easy to rattle off one or two things off the top of your head, but when you go deeper, you have to go crazier. And sometimes the best idea is hiding right next door to that crazy idea. And if they could get to five, then we gave them a Popsicle. So
Lindsay (14:07):
Well, I think what we're kind of unraveling here is that by engaging the community, you're you're going to have community champions for these initiatives and really buy in from the community, which is very important. Something that a lot of people that I've spoken with in innovation departments or office of Innovation, they're surprised at the pushback that they receive internally actually. You assume you're going to get buy-in initially from all of your fellow public servants and that it's going to be convincing the community that's the difficult part. I've been hearing a lot. It's not necessarily convincing the community that's the difficult part. Talk to us a little bit more about your experience there, and the frustration that you feel maybe from other departments toward your department and why you think that is.
Devta (14:50):
That's a great question. I think in any organization, the difference between your internal stakeholder's perspective and your external stakeholder's perspective is, is quite different. But one of the ways that we're trying to bridge that gap is through a cross-departmental approach to this. So we are just like we were doing with the residents, we're bringing those departments, especially the ones who would be most impacted by the change in on understanding the problem space and walking with us through the whole journey of hearing from our residents what they're saying, the barriers are hearing from other departments, what they're seeing the barriers as being, connecting with other cities to see how they are experiencing the barrier and any solutions that they might have come up with. So it's really about baking in, as you said before, those champions on the front end so that we're not springing anything on anyone. And when I was introducing the sidewalk project at the beginning of the segment, I mentioned that we had a pivot. You know, you don't always get it right the first time around. So when, um, the communication really needs to be frequent and the innovation team also needs to be flexible enough to adapt to the feedback that is given to them. So in our case, we thought the problem was one thing, and in fact it, it's a problem, but it's already one that the departments were working on. And so we pivoted and in doing that we got deeper and better buy-in from those departments. But I think in general, a lot of the internal departments are strapped for people. Resources are being stretched really thin, and innovation
Devta (17:06)
In the short term it's changing things for them, which may mean that they need to learn something new or something different, and that takes time, that takes resources. Sometimes it does require them to purchase some new technology, which is money that they may or may not have had appropriated. So innovation is inserting something different into their normal process. And when you have a lack of resources, then your tendency is to want to just nose to the grindstone, get it done, and just keep moving forward. And innovation does require that you stop, that you step back, and that you give yourself the space to be creative and inclusive. And a lot of times we don't make that space or, or time for innovation to happen.
Lindsay (18:04):
Right. Well you give us a little bit of an intro here? Wanna talk more generally, what do you think the role of the Office of Innovation should be and how have governments missed the mark?
Devta (18:17):
Well, I think there are a couple of things. One is that in government in general, I think our structure gets in the way. This goes into my personal philosophy also, being both a resident and director of innovation. I think our residents don't care which department fills their potholes or builds their sidewalks. They just want their potholes filled in, their sidewalks built and maintained. But we have departments and we have budgets for each department. So it's really hard to not think in those siloed ways. So I think one major role for innovation is to connect the dots at a higher level and kind of ignore the silos in service of the greater good. And one of the ways that we do that is through involving a cross-departmental team, because we have lot in the sidewalk project. We have many different departments who don't have a role at all in sidewalk development and maintenance, but having that diversity of perspectives is gonna help us come up with a, a much better solution.
Devta (19:25):
The other thing, and I am as guilty as anyone of this, is that we too often start with a solution and then we try to sell everyone on that solution instead of spending the time to really deeply understand the needs of the current situation. We call that understanding the problem space and then working creatively to fulfill those unmet needs. Because if you, if you already know the solution, then you don't need innovation. You, you just need project management. I think the, the role of innovation should be to connect those dots at the higher level and then to, to slow things down a bit and make sure that people are starting with a, a deep understanding of the problems base instead of the solution.
Lindsay (20:17):
Right. And to your point, with just the sidewalk initiative, you had to pivot halfway through, and if you are, if you just have a project manager on that working toward a solution, you aren't gonna have the space to potentially do that. So that's an excellent point there that if you start with a solution, it's not innovation, it's just project management. So really getting a clear definition of what innovation is, I think gives, gives a great mission statement for an office of innovation. So what advice would you offer to others to really make innovation a success? Like what questions should departments be asking themselves or what are some key aspects they should focus on to be more innovative?
Devta (20:56):
Yeah,
Lindsay (23:28):
Yeah, some really great advice. Yes. You have to be able to make space for people to come up with these creative ideas. Like you said, the resident with their laminated sheet of paper, it's like, great, you got your two solutions, I need five. That's a great example. Other takeaways from this episode really to focus on issues that impact the community issues that are meaningful to the community, which I think you really made that point. And then just to not over-engineer a solution. So for other local governments listening in, maybe you should explore this dot solution, put it on the dot and see if that impacts walkability in your city. So Devta thanks so much for joining me today. A lot of great nuggets you've shared with the community of local governments looking to be more innovative and we wish you the best of luck in Bloomington.
Devta (24:11):
Thank you so much for having me.
Lindsay (24:20):
I am Lindsay Pica- Alfano, and this podcast was produced by Govlaunch, the Wiki for local government innovation. You can subscribe to hear more stories like this wherever you get your podcast. If you're a local government innovator, we hope you'll help us on our mission to build the largest free resource for local governments globally. You can join to search and contribute to the wiki@govlaunch.com. Thanks for tuning in. We hope to see you next time on the Govlaunch podcast.