Imagining Government from the Ground Up by Li Hongyi at TEDxSingapore

Problem

1. When you think of government what do you think of? Big, slow, bureaucratic. Most of all, you probably think of frustration. A website that didn't work, a form you had to fill in for the third time, or some process you got stuck in for weeks because of some stupid rule that just didn't make sense. You probably know someone who swears they will never work in government, and without asking another question you know exactly what they mean.

Introducing Hackathon

2. But what if it didn't have to be that way? A few years ago I started an experimental team in the Singapore Government. The idea was simple: Instead of the usual top down decision making, we would build small teams of skilled practitioners and empower them to seek out and solve problems all across the public sector. The way this works is that every year for the month of January we set aside all non-critical work.

3. We go on field trips to schools, hospitals, meet social workers to understand their problems and prototype solutions. At the end of the month we look at which projects have the most promise, and spend the rest of the year bringing them to launch.

Theory Why Top-Down Fails Graphics

4. The problem we're trying to solve is that government is traditionally based on a military structure: top down, central decision making, optimized for command and control. It's designed for a small group of people to give direction, and for everyone else to align quickly and consistently. This is great when you already know what to do and just need to execute. It's not great if you need to figure out what needs to be done.

5. With central decision making you end up with an intellectual traffic jam. Because ideas get stuck as they flow towards the center, waiting for attention from people with not enough time and even less context. You literally run out of brain power. So even if something does gets enough political attention to get pushed through, that just means everything else gets pushed aside. That's why the government can do billion dollar construction projects but still has to keep asking you for your birthday. When decision makers are overloaded you can make the government bigger, but it's hard to make it better.

6. The limit is not money or even political will, it's our ability to pay attention. If we have a lot of problems to solve, we need the creativity and initiative of a lot of people. This is the opposite of command and control, which means we need to approach this from the opposite direction. What if instead of a top-down structure, we designed government from the bottom-up? Rather than giving orders and ensuring compliance, leaders would focus on supporting people to take ownership. This would increase our intellectual surface area, giving us more ability to pay attention, build expertise, and solve problems.

Results

7. So that's my theory. How well does it work in practice?

8. One year a team visited a firestation and saw how firefighters spent so much time everyday just doing inventory of their firetrucks. They had to use these big paper logbooks that they carried around while they checked the equipment. (pause) So we built a simple app for them that let them do this more easily on their phones. It's now being used by all the firestations in Singapore, and saves thousands of man-hours every month that would have otherwise been wasted ticking things off on paper.

9. Another year a team met with social workers and learned that for every hour they met with a client, they spent another whole hour just typing up case notes. So we built a tool for them that doesn't just transcribe conversations, but automatically generates usable case reports.

10. Another team worked with ER doctors to help implement a queue management system. By prioritizing cases, it is decreasing emergency room wait times by 20%.

11. [callback to hackathon] So far we've done over 40 different projects. Each of them an example of a small but important problem that would have likely never gotten the attention it needed. They required solving tech, design, and operation problems together to address real pain points faced by real people. Similar government projects normally take years and cost tens of millions of dollars. We're able to consistently launch new systems in just 6 months with teams of just 5 people.

People want to do this

12. Because this worked well for government officers we decided to open it up to the public. This would expand our intellectual surface area by working with people instead of just building things for them. There was no prize money, just some funding to help bring promising ideas to production. We honestly weren't sure if anyone would be interested. As a government employee it makes sense that you'd want to be empowered to do your job. But why would a private citizen care about the public good?

13. We got hundreds of applications. Hundreds of ideas. Machine learning to predict the best time for beach cleanups. Tools to help seniors stay connected with their community. A system to track wildlife populations using audio recordings and AI. For a tiny fraction of what a single government project would normally cost, we gave Singaporeans a way to express what they were worried about and take action on it.

14. People want to do this. It turns out there is something very natural about wanting to do good. I think all of us here want to do something meaningful with our lives. We just need the opportunity.

Conclusion

15. Government is frustrating because of all the things we wish it could be. But it seems no matter how hard we try we get stuck, expecting more and more from a system that is already choked by the scale of its responsibilities. If we don't take a different approach, public service will get left behind while we get overrun by new problems like crypto scams, disinformation campaigns, or just plain old AI nonsense.

16. But it doesn't have to be this way. Government can be less about control and more about empowering more people to do good. To increase our intellectual surface area we're going to have to push for better structures, bring visibility to problems, and take action where we can to solve the challenges we can see. We can have a society that is not limited by the attention of its leaders, but one that is driven by the imagination of its people.