Many organizational problems aren't people problems. They're systems problems. The challenge is that "systems problem" isn't a diagnosis. So where do you start? When I'm trying to understand why a process isn't working, I don't start with solutions. I start with questions. Who owns the process? Can anyone see where work is sitting? Where does work change hands? Is the process documented? How do people report problems, and what happens after they do? None of those questions

Shared inboxes are a great place to start asking questions. Who decides what's urgent? How is work assigned? What happens when two people assume the other is handling it? What happens when no one responds? How do you know whether a message is being worked on, or just sitting? Does using the inbox require additional flagging, categorization, or workarounds that create more problems than they solve? Shared inboxes are often an easy solution to a problem that wasn't fully diagno

Yesterday, I wrote about one of the fastest ways to predict implementation problems: ask who was missing from the planning. New Jersey's 2024 OPRA changes are a great example. Commercial vs. Private Requests Intent: Provide agencies with more time and revenue from requests serving a commercial purpose rather than the public interest. Challenge: Agencies now have multiple timelines governing records requests. In well-staffed agencies, that may be manageable. For lone Records O

Most exclusion doesn’t announce itself. It appears as: Forms that assume everyone has the same background knowledge. Office hours that require someone to miss work. Websites that only function on a desktop computer. Public notices written in language that large portions of the community can’t understand. Meetings held in locations that residents can’t access. Hiring processes that reward people who already know the unwritten rules. These are often treated as inconveniences, b

People who design processes tend to focus on what happens inside the organization, but the public experiences what happens outside it. A delayed response feels like indifference. An unclear process is exclusion. Repeated requests for the same information feel like incompetence. Conflicting instructions feel like nobody is in charge. Most system failures don’t look like system failures to the people affected by them. They look personal. Someone assumes they are being ignored.

People experience government through systems long before they experience it through politics or policy. Most residents never interact with an organizational chart, strategic plan, budget document, or legislative agenda. They interact with a form, a website, a permit application, a records request, a utility bill, a phone tree, an inspection process, a missed notification, or a confusing instruction. For most residents, the system is the government. When I was a Village Clerk,

A 60-minute meeting recording is not a meeting summary. A transcript is not a procedure. A Teams recording is not a training resource. And "it's in the recording somewhere" is not a documentation strategy. Many of us have probably found ourselves digging through old recordings (or *ahem* 36,910 screenshots) trying to answer what should have been a simple question. The information technically existed. Somewhere. In a recording. Maybe in a transcript. Possibly in a Teams chat.

Organizations make a huge mistaken when they treat project management and operations as separate disciplines. They're not. They're siblings, not neighbors. People always talk about project management and operations as though they're completely different functions with completely different goals. Projects launch things. Operations maintain things. Projects create change. Operations create stability. Projects are temporary. Operations are ongoing. All of that is true, but it's

Organizations often invest in new tools to fix existing problems. Sometimes the tools help. Sometimes they expose what’s already broken. When workflows are unclear, ownership is inconsistent, or standards vary across teams, new technology tends to amplify those issues instead of solving them. I’ve seen this happen with records systems, intake processes, and internal tracking tools. The system works as designed, but the underlying process was never clearly defined. Better outc

“This meeting should’ve been an email.” But what about the meetings that needed an email? I can’t count the number of times I’ve participated in a meeting where the meeting happens and… that’s it. That’s the deliverable. No agenda. No recap. No action items. No record that the meeting happened other than a calendar block and, maybe, a recording no one will ever watch, or a transcript someone might dig through later, trying to find what could’ve been documented from the outset

One of the most common operational issues I see isn't complexity. It's unclear ownership. A task gets shared across teams. Responsibility gets assumed, questions get redirected, and deadlines slip. Everyone is involved. No one is accountable. I’ve seen this in policy implementation, internal workflows, and public-facing work. A request comes in, touches three departments, and no one is clearly responsible for seeing it through to completion. Clear ownership doesn't mean doing

When organizations feel pressure, one of the first instincts is to add people. Sometimes that is exactly right. But frequently the problem only looks like staffing. If workflows are unclear, ownership is fuzzy, tools are outdated, and priorities shift daily, adding headcount will only increase confusion. I’ve seen teams grow without improving outcomes because the underlying process never changed. A practical step before hiring is to map the work: where it starts, where it slo

I’ve worked in government, nonprofit, and private-sector environments, and I’ve noticed something consistent. Most organizations have the same core problems. Unclear ownership. Weak process. Poor communication. Misaligned incentives. Too much urgency and not enough planning. The language changes by sector, but the underlying issues are usually the same. A policy initiative stalls in government. A nonprofit program struggles to grow. A private-sector project misses deadlines.

There’s a difference between a transition question and ongoing reliance. A quick follow-up a week or two after someone leaves is normal. It happens. But when an organization is still calling months later, something else is going on. That’s not about helpfulness or professionalism. It’s about missing infrastructure. If knowledge lives in one person’s head instead of in systems, documentation, and clear handoffs, the work doesn’t transfer. It follows the person out the door. At

Most discussions about records and information governance focus on federal or private-sector frameworks. Those are complex, but relatively structured. Local government is where things get messy. FOIA does not apply to municipal records. For that, you need state law, and those laws vary widely. Just the acronyms can be confusing: FOIL, OPRA, APRA, FOAA, CPRA, GRAMA, IPRA, PIA, Sunshine Law, Open Records... even the baseline is hard to track. Then come the state-by-state nuance

Ballston Spa’s FOI debate gets at a problem I see often: agencies talk about records access as though the main issue is requester behavior, when the real issue is usually process. Volume is unpredictable. Capacity is limited. Training is uneven. When agencies are not set up to efficiently handle routine requests, legal review, delays, and frustration multiply. All of that is real. But FOI is still a right. It can’t be treated as abuse simply because compliance is inconvenient

Documentation is accountability. The fullest full stop. Every single one of us has been there: "I thought someone else was handling that." "I don't remember agreeing to that." "Nobody told me." "That's not what we decided." "We've always done it this way." “Does anyone remember…?” “I think maybe Mike was supposed to…” Without documentation, we're relying on memory, interpretation, assumptions, and whoever happens to be the most confident person in the room. We need a shared r