Ishmael Interactive – Details, episodes & analysis

Laetitia Wolff, founder of BESIGN School in France, discusses place-based regenerative design—an approach that prioritizes understanding specific community contexts and existing social infrastructure before proposing solutions, rather than imposing top-down institutional fixes. Through projects ranging from rebuilding police-community trust in Brownsville to empowering invisible small business owners in East New York, she demonstrates how designers can facilitate reciprocal relationships between institutions and communities by first listening, then curating resources and stakeholders to address actual needs rather than assumed ones.

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CX Research—Documented

Rebecca’s Reconnecting Nature School got to know its customers by showing up and relentlessly serving the community. If, like her, you need to get to know your customers, get Ishmael Interactive’s HCD Discovery Guide, and get the step-by-step manual for customer research that’s rigorous, replicable, and sustainable.

The Discovery Guide was developed alongside thousands of professionals working in healthcare, veteran support, education, and operations. When you open this Guide, you’ll see:

* The Why and How of customer research.

* Step-by-step, modular instruction that you can dip in and out of easily.

* Plain language for working professionals.

Buy the book at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, or at Ishmael Interactive. (Psst: when you buy at Ishmael Interactive, you get the ebook version included!)

You don’t need a full UX or CX team to get to know your customers: you need the HCD Discovery Guide.

Show notes:

Rebecca Westbrook Toker co-founded Reconnecting Nature School, a nature-based micro-school in Chattanooga that grew from 4 students to 25 in just over a year by focusing in on students in need of high-touch educational support. In this episode, she discusses how forest school methodology creates the right learning environments and how the micro-school movement is finding its customers and establishing financial sustainability.

Introduction

As in our reaction post, the scramble to build in-house design teams in the federal government comes as somewhat of a surprise. But as in our other posts, we’re still here to serve.

When I led the Service Design team in GSA, I wrote down how to build great, cross-functional design teams in the federal government as an article on digital.gov, Bringing Design In-House,* but I’ve further distilled that direction down into just 10 steps. These steps move from the strategic to the tactical in nature, and they appear in the order they should be implemented. These steps are not limited to application in the federal sector. Whether you work as a fed, or the state or local governments, or even in a private sector organization, these steps are the practical way to build a functional MVP design team that will take on complex problems and build solutions that last.

Take it from us here at Ishmael Interactive: a great design team isn’t just a bunch of designers and engineers. We know this because we built one that answered all of GAO’s questions in 2024.** So reach out to us with any questions. Happy building!

1. Start with executive buy-in and clear vision for design's role in solving complex problems.

This is a big one, and it takes a long time. While the impulse might be to get all the buy-in first and then start with the implementation, I would advise to consider this as a staged number one, instead of a hard-and-fast number one. Get some momentum on leadership consensus, and build your team at the same time.

2. Recruit a chief design officer with government experience, formal training, and an active practice.

This leadership role requires someone who combines theory and practice; philosophy and craft with specific credentials: experience leading teams in government, formal design training, and an active design practice. Without this foundation, the team lacks the credibility and knowledge to navigate federal complexities. As outlined in Bringing Design In-House, this leader serves as the "primary care provider" who can consult across all design specialties within the agency.

3. Assemble a diverse team of design specialists aligned to agency mission.

Just as you wouldn't ask a dermatologist about heart problems, agencies need specialists including product designers, service designers, front-end engineers, backend engineers, content strategists, design researchers, data analysts, policy wonks, and HR professionals. The America's Talent Strategy emphasizes building "industry-driven strategies" where teams are assembled based on actual organizational needs rather than generic structures.

4. Leverage professional networks and portfolios for targeted recruitment.

Designers gather in schools and professional organizations where agencies can find and recruit them. Portfolios reveal both technical skills and thought processes, showing theory and practice; philosophy and craft. The 21st Century IDEA's requirement for “data-driven analysis influencing management and development decisions" aligns with evaluating candidates through their demonstrated work rather than just credentials.

5. Accept non-traditional career paths and focus on portfolio-demonstrated capabilities.

Unlike healthcare providers, designers may not have attended design or art school and often have "non-linear" career trajectories working as "independent contractors or for small firms." The America's Talent Strategy recognizes the need to move beyond "college-for-all" approaches and embrace alternative pathways that demonstrate competency.

6. Integrate design leadership with agency executives for cultural alignment.

Design teams bring cultural and practical differences that may not match current, familiar office processes, but this diversity is "a strength, not a weakness." Executives must work closely with design leadership to integrate these new working patterns into agency culture. The Executive Order mandates that agency heads "consult with the Chief Design Officer" to ensure proper integration across government.

7. Establish design reviews and internal critique processes for quality assurance.

Design reviews involve the entire project team, not just the designer and focus on milestones, while critiques ("crits") are internal design team conversations about in-process work that generate direction and ideas. Implementing these processes simultaneously ensures quality while building team cohesion. This aligns with the 21st Century IDEA's emphasis on "continually test[ing]" services to ensure user needs are addressed.

8. Create unified access points and streamlined processes for stakeholder engagement.

The 21st Century IDEA and the EO emphasize digital modernization, focusing on replacing a fragmented customer experience of duplicative programs with a streamlined, coordinated system. To do this, design teams must provide clear engagement pathways for agency leaders and business lines, avoiding the confusion that comes from multiple, disconnected access points which can often result in that cultural breakdown that means modernization efforts fail.

9. Build formal partnerships between design teams and agency business lines.

In Bringing Design In-House, I emphasize that design leadership must "work with other agency leaders to define the skills needed on projects that the design team will support." Without these structured relationships, design teams risk operating in isolation while business lines continue old patterns of service delivery. This risk is called out in America's Talent Strategy, where the authors calls for coordination that eliminates silos and creates "unified workforce services." The formality of these arrangements means that design teams will avoid being treated as a service bureau rather than true partners in solving organizational problems, which isolates them in the organization.

10. Measure impact through user outcomes and service effectiveness rather than process compliance.

Design teams must demonstrate value through improved user experiences and service delivery, not just completion of engineering milestones. The 21st Century IDEA requires services to be "designed around user needs with data-driven analysis," while the America's Talent Strategy demands "linking investments to outcomes & enforcing performance discipline." Success should be measured by whether citizens can actually accomplish their goals more effectively, not just if KPIs and compliance boxes have been checked. My team used compliance and KPIs as sharp tools, but we always kept the measurement of customer experience at the center. That’s why we were the only team that build a Digital Experience Index that included 6 parameters nested inside a customer experience score as part of the overall index.

Conclusion

Federal agencies now confront a binary choice: evolve into design-driven organizations or remain trapped in outdated service delivery models. The policy architecture is in place—executive mandate, legislative requirement, talent strategy—but policies succeed only through competent execution. Building internal design capability demands cultural shifts that many agencies will find uncomfortable. It requires accepting non-traditional career paths, integrating unfamiliar working methods, and measuring success through user outcomes rather than bureaucratic compliance. The question is no longer whether agencies should build design teams, but whether they possess the institutional courage to build them properly.

* Bringing Design In-House

** Digital Experience: Agency Compliance with Statutory Requirements

What we’re into this week

Having thought about the problems facing federal agencies for this week’s pod, I really appreciated the article Systems Thinking Isn’t Enough Anymore from Super Cool & Hyper Critical, which is a substack devoted to, amongst other things, strategy execution & complex adaptive systems. In the article, author Aarn Wennekers points out that the assumptions of traditional strategy assume stability, but that assumption ignores complex realities. This hits.

— Ana

Having been on the front lines of a lot of things I never thought I’d see happen, I’ve been drawn to this article on Black Swans in Baseball. Author Douglas Jourdan introduces the concept of black swan events, that is, events that have very little statistical probability of happening that actually do happen. This article unpacks the concept and how to look at the data around these events in a fun way.

— Aaron

It’s fun if you like baseball. — Scott

Do you like baseball, Scott? — Aaron

I do. —Scott

So there ya go. What are you into this week? — Aaron

This week I was really excited to watch a youtuber build their own smartphone. It was clearly a crazy project, but it was a good reminder that innovation stagnation can lead to customer frustration

—Scott

Ishmael Interactive Consulting

Want to learn more about how to build a design team in your organization? Ishmael Interactive has an extensive consulting practice. Book a Free 15 with Ana and you’ll walk away with:

* Greater nuance and depth regarding how to start or continue your team building process.

* Insights into a specific issue you bring to the table.

* A follow up email detailing what we discussed.

Need more time? We also offer consulting blocks in 25 ($37) and 50 ($64) blocks. Let us know in your Free 15, or email us at hello@ishmaelinteractive.com.

Credits

Author: Ana Monroe

Artwork: Roses. 1890. Vincent van Gogh. via the National Gallery of Art.

Aaron and George Aye from Greater Good Studio talk the bob and weave of positive action paired with genuine concern for the world.

In the sterile corridors of business firms, a curious form of therapy is taking place. Scott Kellum, Design Officer at Ishmael Interactive, has spent two decades conducting what he calls "talk therapy for business"—the process of brand discovery that strips away superficial desires to reveal deeper truths about organizational identity.

The malady is widespread. Companies routinely confuse rebranding with genuine transformation, swapping logos and letterheads whilst leaving their fundamental operations unchanged. Consider the federal office that morphed from "Enterprise Information" to "Mission Support"—a textbook case of cosmetic surgery masquerading as organizational renewal. When pressed about what, practically, changes would actually take place in the organization, officials could only point to their new vocabulary.

This affliction extends far beyond government bureaucracy. MSNBC's recent transformation into "My Source News" exemplifies what Scott terms the "words are different" approach—a rebrand that changes everything except what matters most.

Proper brand development, Scott argues, mirrors the Shaker philosophy: purposeful simplicity achieved through rigorous intentionality rather than mere reduction. Like the religious sect's functional furniture, effective branding emerges only after discovering an organisation's essential purpose. This requires persistent interrogation: Why rebrand? What unique client experiences define you? Where do you envision yourself in a decade?

The late Steve Jobs understood this instinctively. Rather than bombarding consumers with technical specifications—megahertz ratings that meant nothing to ordinary users—Apple focused obsessively on tangible experiences: exceptional trackpads, brilliant screens, intuitive interfaces. The brand became the promise that every interaction would delight.

In an age of corporate shapeshifting, such discipline feels revolutionary. Yet as Scott's practice demonstrates, the most profound transformations often begin with the simplest question: what are you actually trying to accomplish?

Practice Makes Progress (free PDF download):

🔍 After talking to Scott, we created a free Organizational Purpose Assessment because most teams are building on quicksand. They've never actually figured out what they do or why anyone should care.

⚡ The brutal truth: if you can't explain your organization's value without buzzwords like "synergy," your branding isn't the problem—your clarity is.

🎯 This free assessment cuts through the fluff with 8 questions designed to expose the gaps between what you think you do and what you actually deliver.

📋 The real test: can your entire team answer these questions the same way? If not, you're not ready for a rebrand—you need internal alignment first.

🫠 💬📥 Subscribe and get this free download sent your way.

What we’re into this week

Speaking of knowing yourself, HBR published Your Company Needs to Focus on Fewer Projects. Here’s How, a sentiment we couldn’t agree with more, but persists in eluding even the best companies. Why is it so hard to focus? Because usually, organizations don’t know what they want to accomplish.

Sometimes, of course, there is one person who knows what they want to accomplish. The problem is that they’re in the corner office, and they’re out for themselves. When a company (or a government, for that matter) runs because of a single man, is that good for shareholders and employees? The answer, roundly, is no. From the Economist: The Elon Musk theory of pay.

And, if after hearing Scott out, satisfying yourself you’re a focused company and that you’re not led by a megamanic, you’re thinking “Ah well, we’re a data-driven company, so no need for the navel-gazing of brand self-reflection here; we have evidence!” take a look at Sangeet Paul Choudary’s latest article, The 'data moats' fallacy, wherein you mistake the simple presence of data for its utility, when its utility is meaningless without a navigable, flexible data architecture.

Climb on the couch, friends: there’s no substitute for a self-reflective, focused org that’s led with humility and applies all three of those attributes to tending its data.

Like proper branding, effective research requires therapy—not cosmetic changes, but deep discovery of what people actually need.

We reduced a major federal agency's digital footprint by 37% while maintaining service levels and earning perfect audit scores. The HCD Discovery Guides distills those lessons from agencies managing disability claims to student loans—contexts where failure means real hardship.

Learn to recruit people who give honest feedback and translate findings into recommendations that survive organizational politics. These aren't academic theories; they're survival tactics from the trenches of public service.

Credits

Interviewer: Aaron MeyersGuest: Scott KellumProducer: Ana MonroeArticle: Abigail AdamsArtwork: Tennis Tournament 1920 George Bellows Painter, American, 1882 - 1925 via the National Gallery of Art

Executive orders arrive with the fanfare of urgent necessity, though their actual urgency often proves debatable. The recent "Improving Our Nation Through Better Design" directive falls into this category—well-intentioned but perhaps historically naive about the timeline required for meaningful institutional change. Ana Monroe and Aaron Meyers, both of GSA’s Service Design team, offer practical perspectives on both the promise and peril of attempting to redesign government in a presidential term.

Their team at the General Services Administration achieved measurable success: a 37% reduction in GSA's digital footprint over three years, full marks on a Government Accountability Office audit, and the establishment of federal digital experience standards. These accomplishments required navigating the peculiar challenge of convincing auditors to soften their institutionally neutral tone, which Monroe diplomatically explained "sometimes comes across as slightly negative" in written form. Such victories illustrate both the potential for design thinking in government and the byzantine nature of federal culture change.

The executive order's scope reveals both ambition and confusion about design's true nature. While it correctly acknowledges both online and offline spaces, Monroe and Meyers warn of the professional divide between digital and physical design disciplines. As Monroe notes, exporting a three-dimensional book layout to digital format—essentially converting it to a webpage—typically produces chaos. This technical reality points to a deeper conceptual problem: the persistent misconception that design means "button colors and wall paint" rather than what Charles Eames defined as "the intentional arrangement of resources to achieve a particular goal."

Monroe's experience suggests that successful government design initiatives require what she calls "crazy unicorns"—professionals who bridge multiple disciplines. Her former GSA team included specialists who could simultaneously understand HR data requirements, IT infrastructure, and service design principles. This multidisciplinary approach proved essential when creating composite measures that tracked both digital and physical interactions, such as in Meyers’ experience with some Department of Labor programs serving coal miners who require paper forms alongside computer-savvy urban workers. To serve these customers, Meyers’ team had to offer fundamentally different design challenges serving the same policy objective.

The three-year timeline presents the EO’s gravest weakness. Government relationships with citizens span from prenatal care to probate court—a lifetime-plus commitment that makes brief policy experiments seem almost frivolous. Meyers recalls websites that updated only every four years because that matched their underlying program cycles. Against this institutional reality, a three-year design push appears both inadequate and potentially wasteful unless it builds upon existing expertise. Monroe's pragmatic hope is simple: "I hope they listen to people this time around." Her team's work proved that government design reform is possible, but only with sustained commitment, cross-functional collaboration, and recognition that many federal employees are already practicing good design principles—they simply lack coordination and strategic support to scale their efforts.

Get guidance built for this EO.

We’ve watched countless well-meaning research initiatives produce beautiful reports that produce elaborate charts that nobody reads and insights that nobody implements.

None of us has time or leeway to walk that road again, so we documented what actually works in the newest edition of the HCD Discovery Guide.

We know the process in this book works because we tested it in the real world—reducing a major federal agency's digital footprint by 37% while maintaining service levels and earning perfect audit scores.

The HCD Discovery Guide distills those hard-won lessons from government agencies managing everything from disability claims to student loans—contexts where failure means real hardship for real people.

Learn to structure research that reveals urgent customer needs, recruit people who will give you honest feedback, and translate findings into recommendations that survive organizational politics. These aren't academic theories; they're survival tactics from the trenches of public service. Because if you're going to ask people for their time, you might as well learn something that actually leads to better outcomes.

What we’re into this week

The story of Beekman 1802 hits hard: job loss, community loss, followed by a long period of building back. In Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcel’s journey, this has ended up in a thriving business built on kindness—something we’re really leaning into these days.

Give it a listen on Reconsidering episode 50: Kindness is a strategy

Credits

Interview: Aaron MeyersProducer: Ana MonroeArticle: Abigail AdamsArtwork: Study for a Border Design. 1890/1897. Charles Sprague Pearce Artist, American, 1851 - 1914. via the National Gallery of Art. Treatment by Ishmael Interactive.Referenced report: Digital Experience:Agency Compliance with Statutory Requirements

In this week's vlog, Aaron chats with professional community-builder and beloved design mentor Rachel Elnar. Hear about her work building and sustaining community in an over-stimulated, over-saturated world. Her work has taken her to corporate giant Adobe, to thrive in the loose and fast-moving design world, and to give back as a mentor, including or Ishmael Interactive CEO Ana Monroe!

Government agencies across the developed world face a familiar paradox. Despite unprecedented investment in digital transformation—America alone spends over $100bn annually on federal IT systems¹—public satisfaction with government services remains stubbornly low. The conventional wisdom holds that wholesale modernization is the answer. The evidence suggests otherwise.

When Silence Becomes Dysfunction

Large organizations, particularly government agencies, suffer from a peculiar form of institutional sclerosis. Teams operate in silos, communication flows poorly, and problems fester undiagnosed. This organizational quietude creates a vicious cycle: without regular informal dialogue between staff and customers, seemingly simple issues become shrouded in mystery and appear to require dramatic intervention.

The phenomenon resembles what economists call information asymmetries, but in reverse. Rather than one party hoarding superior knowledge, all parties—managers, frontline staff, and customers—remain ignorant of readily available solutions. The result is a collective misdiagnosis of organizational health.

The Modernization Fallacy

Faced with systemic dysfunction, government agencies typically reach for the most expensive tool in the shed: comprehensive modernization. These initiatives promise to rebuild entire systems from scratch, incorporating the latest technologies (artificial intelligence is now required) while training thousands of employees on new workflows.

Such projects exhibit the classic symptoms of what behavioral economists term "solution aversion"—the tendency to reject problems because the assumed remedies seem too costly or disruptive. Ironically, this leads to solutions that are both costlier and more disruptive than necessary.

The modernization impulse also reflects what might be called "technological solutionism"—the belief that complex organizational problems can be resolved through better software rather than better management.

The Track Record

The empirical evidence on government modernization is sobering. A 2025 Government Accountability Office report found that of the 10 most critical federal legacy IT systems flagged for modernization in 2019, only three had been successfully completed six years later—a 70% failure rate for even the highest-priority projects(2). Britain faces similar challenges: the UK's Major Projects Portfolio comprises 125 projects with a combined whole-life cost of £448bn, with a 2020 National Audit Office report finding that government programs "often encounter difficulties, taking longer and costing more than planned, and not delivering the intended aims, with significant and high-profile consequences”(3).

These failures share common characteristics: they discard institutional knowledge, create massive transition costs, and operate on the assumption that existing processes contain no wisdom worth preserving. The opportunity cost is enormous—resources devoted to failed modernization could fund hundreds of targeted improvements.

A More Efficient Alternative

Economic, management, and human-centered design theory suggests a more rational approach: treat communication as infrastructure and staff as internal customers requiring market research.

External communications represent the lowest-hanging fruit. Research from Nevada's unemployment insurance system demonstrates that behaviorally-informed messaging—brief, jargon-free, and realistic about timelines—can increase reader comprehension by 5% and efficiency in task completion by 4-5 times when compared with the original messaging(4) as well as in the IRS’ attempts to reduce likely errors in tax filings(5). The marginal cost of such improvements approaches zero; the benefits compound indefinitely.

Internal communications require more sophisticated intervention. Human-centered design research—ethnographic observation, structured interviews, collaborative problem-solving—functions as market research for internal processes. This methodology builds the trust necessary for staff to reveal inefficiencies they have quietly circumvented for years.

The Hidden Economy of Workarounds

Such research invariably uncovers what might be termed the "shadow economy" of government operations: elaborate workarounds that staff develop to compensate for systemic failures. One case study from the General Services Administration found an employee spending four hours weekly manually entering data because management policies from two different teams meant data from spreadsheets that needed to be synthesized both came to her desk locked down(5). Another project with the Veterans Health Administration showed that staff regularly had to block off hours of time to correctly enter data in a clunky, outdated interface(6).

These workarounds represent massive hidden costs—not just in labour hours, but in opportunity cost. Highly skilled civil servants spend time on data entry rather than policy analysis or customer service.

Unlocking Human Capital

The economic logic is compelling: removing friction from internal processes allows organizations to deploy human capital more efficiently. Staff currently trapped in mundane workarounds can focus on tasks that require judgment, creativity, and institutional knowledge—precisely the activities that justify their employment in the first place.

This reallocation effect generates positive externalities. When capable employees are freed from administrative drudgery, job satisfaction increases, turnover decreases, and institutional memory is preserved—all factors that compound organizational effectiveness over time.

The lesson for policymakers is clear: before embarking on expensive modernization programs, governments should exhaust cheaper alternatives. Better communication and targeted process improvements offer superior returns on investment than wholesale transformation. In the efficiency game, evolution typically trumps revolution.

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Footnotes:

(1) Federal spending on IT systems, IT Dashboard, Office of Management and Budget, https://itdashboard.gov/

(2) U.S. Government Accountability Office, "Federal Legacy IT Systems: Agencies Need to Maintain Adequate Documentation to Ensure Successful Modernization," GAO-25-107795, July 2025

(3) UK National Audit Office, "Lessons learned from Major Programmes," HC960, September 2020. 4-5.

(4) Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation case study, Behavioral Insights Team, 2024.

Any good basketball coach knows that a quiet team is a losing team. When your folks aren’t talking, they don’t trust each other, and they’re not working together. The crowd can feel it, too: desperation in sports almost always arrives quietly.

As with basketball, so goes any organization.

If you are in any large organization, especially if you work on an internal team, speaking up might not come naturally. But when changes must be made, lacking a habit of talkative teamwork is a real detriment.

It’s a detriment because, when teams don’t talk to customers or each other regularly and informally, problems seem mysterious, Gordian, and insurmountable. There’s a tendency to think change can only come in the form of “modernizations”, which are frequently just ill-conceived white elephants that completely dismantle what you have in the overbearing confidence that you, your team, and your moment, will be able to build it all back, but much better and without any flaws.

That approach is unwise for two reasons. First, it is very expensive. Second, it leaves all institutional knowledge as trash on the doorstep of the Grass is Always Greener. But, because it is a popular choice, let’s explore its effectiveness.

“Modernization” in government means spending years with various contractors building new workflows and tools (don’t forget to include AI; that’s a requirement now). It means training your workforce on those workflows and tools, trying to talk to a few customers along the way if you can, launching it all to see if it works, and seeing if you can sustain it.The majority of modernizations fail, but still—you can try.

All this, or you could try the cheap way. The cheap way has two parts: send better communications to your external customers, and treat your teams like internal customers by doing research with them.

“Better” means these communications that are brief, written in plain language, and set reasonable expectations regarding processing timelines and possible outcomes. As any restaurant hostess knows, being polite and honest about your timeline, even if it’s going to be a long wait, is a better way to handle customers than evasion or overpromising. Examples of better communications having enormously beneficial effects on programs can be found in the work of the Nevada Department of Employment, Training, and Rehabilitation as well as in the IRS’ attempts to reduce likely errors in tax filings.*

After that, use the human-centered design discovery process as you would with any external customer to build trust with your internal teams and understand what specific parts of different processes need fixing. This research approach—interviews, observation, and collaborative problem-solving—is what gains you the trust necessary for team members to reveal the real issues.

You will find that Laura has been flipping between the two monthly data pulls to compare column AG on the first one to column P on the second because they should add up to 100% every 10th row (except after the 300th row, then it skips to every 20th row because the spreadsheets’ field designations change). She has no way of doing this programmatically because the sheets are from different teams and they both lock them down. You will facepalm over the realization that Dave has been hand-entering data from customer submission forms for 6 years because there’s a bug in the form that results in that field messing up every 6 or 8 submissions, so Dave has to check each one manually. He blocks off 4 hours every Friday to do this.

These scenarios sound hyperbolic, but they are actual stories from my time as the Service Design and Enterprise Digital Experience Manager at GSA and as a designer working with the Office of Patient Advocates in the Veterans Health Administration.

Fixing these issues is not a major modernization effort, but getting the trust of your team to tell you about them is often a major management one. Laura and Dave have done this work without saying anything for so long because they have been taught through experience that speaking up will (a) result in no change at all and (b) might threaten their jobs. But their jobs are not flipping spreadsheets or checking data submissions: the very presence of their taking on these tasks demonstrates that they are scrupulous and dedicated employees. Fixing these issues means you can apply those human attributes better and get other, more important work done. Now that’s efficiency.

Better communications and fixing basic internal tools are two of the fastest, best ways to improve government services. A lot about the government is broken, but it’s not all so broken that it needs an AI deployment and/or a billion dollar contract. A lot of government just needs better communication externally and more trust internally. If you’re a program manager or staffer slogging it out right now, I’d advise you to focus down and to focus on these things. You’ll see results. I know because I already did both these things, in two different agencies. Good comms and good management: that’s the way to improve government.

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In the world of government contracting, where acronyms multiply like rabbits and money comes in colors, a peculiar figure sits somewhere near the middle: the Contracting Officer's Technical Representative (COTR). Part translator, fortune-teller, and marriage counsellor, these professionals weave together legal requirements and the delivery of the work—a multi-disciplinary job even for the federal sector, which routinely demands people to wear 17 hats at once.

Aaron Myers, a former COTR and now head of Data at Ishmael Interactive, describes the role as "sitting right between where two functions, that is, legal requirements and business requirements meet" but cannot speak to each other. Think of it as professional speed-dating, except instead of finding love, you're trying to prevent a contractor from submitting invoices to the wrong address for three consecutive years (a real occurrence that would make Kafka weep).

Standard contracting metrics focus on administrative compliance: tracking utilized contract ceilings, ensuring on-time payments, and managing work stoppages when funding authorizations lapse. These measures, whilst necessary, capture only basic contract mechanics rather than actual value delivery.

More sophisticated approaches examine programmatic impact and return on investment, particularly relevant for modernization projects where upfront costs yield long-term savings. Yet even these metrics depend heavily on external factors, including cooperation from business units and accurate future projections.

The most revealing indicators, however, remain largely unused. Myers advocates measuring contractor satisfaction, noting that motivated contractors produce superior work and volunteer valuable insights. He also tracks meeting frequency, arguing that successful contracts require fewer check-ins as relationships mature and processes stabilize.

Perhaps most innovative, Myers monitors the rate at which predictable contractor functions can be transferred to government employees, freeing resources for more complex challenges. This approach recognizes that contracts inevitably encounter unexpected obstacles requiring financial flexibility.

Ana Monroe, Chief Executive of Ishmael Interactive, suggests organizing these various metrics into two composite indices: uncertainty (declining over time) and value (increasing). Such an approach acknowledges the inherent complexity of contract management whilst providing actionable insights for oversight.

The broader lesson extends beyond government procurement. In any relationship requiring sustained collaboration between organizations with different incentives, success depends not merely on compliance monitoring but on actively managing the human elements that determine actual performance.

Other posts in this series:

FAR 10 Reaction: Flying over the changes in federal acquisition (24 June 2025)

Our First Response to a Federal Solicitation (22 July 2025)

What we’re reading this week:

We arrive in your inbox empty-handed this week—no books to recommend, no articles to tout. The culprit: launching an entirely new website, which proves surprisingly time-consuming. But visit the new site for three good reasons:

* To browse our archive of blogs, vlogs, and podcasts.

* To learn how Ishmael Interactive brings scientific method to product and service development.

* To find out about our human-centered design trainings and pay-as-you-go consulting.

In a world full of stuff nobody wants, building things people actually need seems worth the effort.

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