Google is one of the most influential organizations of our time. The company’s ability to innovate and drive change is remarkable. There are three fundamental principles for Google’s successful strategy that the public sector could learn and implement.
Focus on the user
Google’s primary strategy is to focus on the user. The user is at the heart of what they do. Google excels at this. The company was created to make information universally accessible and useful. As stated in the founders’ IPO letter in 2004 ”serving our end users is at the heart of what we do and remains our number one priority”.
This premise guides their decisions. According to Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, former Google Executives, user trust is just as important as money. They believe that the only way for a company to be consistently successful is product excellence, which can only come from having the user as an end goal.
In our case, the user is the citizens, the people we are mandated to serve. The same principle should apply. People’s well-being should be at the core of every government decision. From the delivery of public services to complex policy reforms. Every public servant or authority should have this on the top of their mind.
To innovate you must learn to fail well
If you want innovation, you need to have a higher tolerance for failure. From Google´s foundation, and later when the company went public, the founders made it clear that they were willing to take risks and they wouldn’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term earnings pressures. Furthermore, they took an unconventional approach by making sure that the founders maintained the voting rights to control strategic decisions.
One of Google’s policies in this regard is the 70/20/10 rule. Google employees spend 70% of their time on the core business, 20% on what they think will most benefit Google, and 10% on new (sometimes ‘crazy’) ideas. Their view about thinking big is not to make something 10% better, but ten times better, what they call the 10X factor.
The prototypes for Street View, Google News and Ad Sense came from that 20% time, for example. For Google, the biggest value of 20 percent time is not what they create, are the things people learn when they try something new.
The power of 10X thinking is the art of the possible… and the impossible. Ideas like Project Loon, which aimed to use helium balloons to bring internet access to 5 billion people who don’t have it, or Project Waymo, an initiative to have self-driving cars are some examples.
To fail well means having tolerance for your mistakes and learning from them.
One of the characteristics of Google is that people are not stigmatized or punished if a project fails. Larry Page says that ”if you are thinking big enough, it’s hard to fail completely”.
Another key element of failing well is the timing of failure. A good failure is a fast one. But, one of the symbols of an innovative company is that it gives time for the ideas to gestate. The key is to iterate quickly and establish metrics that can help you judge if the iterations are taking you closer to success.
Admitting failure in the public sector seems almost impossible. Yet, the lack of acknowledgment doesn’t erase the fact that failures happen. What we are missing is the learning that comes from it. The next step in the public sector is to learn to fail well. To learn from past mistakes, iterate and adapt quickly, and test again. As a recent study from the Centre for Public Impact states ‘failure is inherent in any complex system’.
Rapid iteration is critical for success
According to Eric Schmidt, Google’s first CEO, iteration the most important part of a strategy. Iteration has to be ”very, very fast and always based on learning”.
One of Google’s mantras is that you have to think big but start small. Perhaps the best example is Google Books. It started back in 2002 as an idea of Larry Page to have a public digital library. For some it was crazy. But he tried anyway. He bought a scanner and started scanning pages to measure how long it would take him. After running the numbers, he realized it was possible. Google Books now contains over 40 million books (Unfortunately, due to copyright violations claims the project didn’t reach its intended use).
The public sector has a long road to go in this regard. Many public organizations are still not able to easily adapt and change according to the circumstances. Furthermore, in the expectation of having the perfect systems or projects, sometimes we don’t even start. Even though technology has decreased the cost of experimentation and failure, the ability to learn quickly from our mistakes is still to be seen.
If you had no restrictions, what is a 10X idea you would implement in your area?
Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash
