Civilla: Tackling Complex Problems with Common Sense and Efficient Solutions for the Future
An Interview with Michael Brennan and Adam Selzer
Michael Brennan – Michael Brennan is Civilla’s CEO and co-founder. He helps lead Civilla’s long-term vision and strategy and focuses on building a diverse team of designers while cultivating an environment where they can grow and thrive. Michael and his fellow co-founders (Adam and Lena Selzer) founded Civilla in 2015, after studying together at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University (commonly known as the Stanford d.school). Prior to that, Michael spent 30 years in leadership at the United Way, where he earned deep respect from changemakers and leaders across the country. His achievements include overseeing the national rollout of the 2-1-1 social service hotline program – a program he also implemented in Metro Detroit that now receives 400,000 calls annually. At United Way, Michael fundraised over $700 million and provided innovation leadership and coaching to heads of organizations across four continents. He completed his undergrad at Michigan State University.
Adam Selzer – As a co-founder and senior director, Adam Selzer’s work focuses on Civilla’s operations, culture, and pulling the organization towards its future vision. He designed Civilla’s physical studio, leads its foundational initiatives (like the team’s work on design, equity, and inclusion), and supports teammates through on-going coaching and mentorship. Adam and his fellow co-founders (Lena Selzer and Michael Brennan) founded Civilla in 2015, after studying together at the Stanford d.school. Prior to that, Adam worked as design director at United Way for Southeastern Michigan, a lecturer and fellow at the Stanford d.school, and a design and innovation consultant on the national and international level. He earned an MS from Stanford University in learning, design, and technology and a BS from Vanderbilt University in human and organizational development.
Deepa Krishnamurthy: What is Civilla’s origin story and what is your vision and mission to strive for systems level change?
Michael Brennan: In many ways, Civilla is my ‘output’ for what I might have done if I were at a program like Harvard ALI. I spent 30 plus years at United Way, primarily leading as CEO of local United Ways, and I spent 12 years in Detroit. I have been trying to solve social problems in communities at a local, regional, national, and international level for a long time. I was increasingly unsatisfied with how the helping system was progressing. The solutions tended to be heavy on resource use with an institutional lens and not sustainable once resources were depleted – they were very focused on money and outcomes. Increasingly I noticed an inability to understand problems from the end user’s perspective, to better imagine and understand, let alone to step up and develop new solutions. I saw the same pattern and folks reaching for the same tools in not-for-profit or government.
Through the grace of God and support of the United Way, I got to go to Stanford d.school for a deep dive for three months. I had the opportunity to meet a great guide and mentor there. I also met Adam Selzer on my first day, as he was on the teaching team. I spent three months learning to look at things in a different way and to develop a design sense. I am not a designer in the conventional sense; our team has deeper design expertise. But I had a good design sense and a vision for what the organization ought to be for the design capability to move forward. When I came back from Stanford, I was quite clear I wanted to bring the intersection of human-centered design and social impact more into the world. I spent some time trying to do that within existing organizations. I then determined the best way to do that was to create something that I had not been able to find. Civilla is the expression of that goal.
I knew I could not do it alone. It required partnership, and I realized that my own version would be incomplete, and a collective version could be dynamic and powerful. Adam and Lena Selzer had come to Detroit previously to help me with the United Way. After I left the United Way, we decided to join to prototype and brainstorm an idea we had. We took our own resources and gave ourselves four to five months of runway. It was taking a hunch, idea, and belief from a lived experience of 30 years that there would be leaders in public service institutions that knew that the tools they reached for consistently were not getting them where they wanted to go. And that some may be open to working on the problem in a different way that was focused on their end users. Civilla could be an organization that could have the capacity to walk side-by-side with the leaders to bring that new way to life.
Adam Selzer: Lena, who is the third co-founder of Civilla and unfortunately unable to make it today, and I had grown so much in the Stanford d.school community and had altered the trajectory of our profession and life. We wanted to put into practice what we had learned. We had seen the edge of human-centered design and we wanted to know what was beyond that. We were not going to be able to do design work for the long term unless it was accompanied by soul and a spirit-level connection. We had done work with big corporations in the U.S. and abroad. We needed to find a user group that we felt connected to and were inspired by that we could advocate for. Otherwise, it was not going to be viable in the long term. Mike’s proposal was an opportunity to collaborate with public service institutions, leaders and communities and bring greater function into that dynamic. So, we made the bet.
From a systems-level change perspective, we proved the hypothesis that the challenges we were seeing and hearing in the early stages of the organization were near universal dilemmas. The dilemma is underscored by the fact that these are long-serving public institutions that have grown large and serve an important social function. Their responsibility and stakes are very high. From working on the challenge of bringing change in one specific arena, there may be patterns that could be applicable from a systems-level perspective to other arenas. We wanted to understand how tools of human-centered design could be further developed in those environments. That is what we have been doing for six and a half years.
Krishnamurthy: Walk us through your design process – Mike, you talked about people doing the same things and expecting a different outcome, being set in their ways and in need of a fresh way of thinking. Adam, you spoke to systems thinking and working on test cases to learn and apply at scale. Could you both explain, using a couple of concrete examples, how you bring public/city leadership, community, and users together?
Brennan: One example is from our origin story and experience with the leaders in the public service system for Michigan. Since September 2015, I had been carrying around in my briefcase a scroll – a single application you would complete if you wanted to access food assistance, childcare support, or health insurance in Michigan. It was 42 pages, 18,000 words and over 1,000 questions. This document had been built out over 30 years. Nothing about it was designed around the end users – the 5,000 case workers and the 2.5 million residents they served each year. For example, Question 17 was, “What is the date of conception of your children?” I give all the credit to Lena, who had the instinct that we should meet with the residents to understand their thoughts and experiences with regards to this application. We did this day in and day out and after a few weeks we had some insights. We were following our curiosity and did not really have a business plan. We were prototyping. I had an instinct that if someone shared these insights with me and I were the leader of a program, I would find it very valuable. So, I made some cold calls to leaders in the department of health and human services in the state of Michigan. The deputy director took the call. I did not know him. I talked to him about what we had done and invited him to our office. He drove 2 hours with his head of field operations to visit us when we were only six weeks old. We walked them through the insights we heard from the residents. That is how we began a relationship with leaders in public serving institutions. Our further engagements have not been all that different. It is about walking them through the work that gives them the permission to say, “I don’t know how to solve the problem; I have tried a bunch of things and I am very open to trying something new.” We have tried to stand tall and believe that this work can earn its stripes. That it can speak strongly to leaders in a way that can engender a depth of conversation and trust, that we could start walking together to better understand the problems through the eyes of those that they serve.
Krishnamurthy: Are the leaders open to listening because they already know that the current methods are not working, or do they have an “a ha” moment, or a combination of both? How does persuasion work? What role does Civilla play in building an empathetic bridge between the residents and the leaders and agencies?
Brennan: Adam, maybe you can describe the power of storytelling that we use.
Selzer: We had been hearing all these stories about how difficult the experience had been for the residents. When the leaders from the state first showed up at the door, I remember getting almost flushed with the sense that these are the people responsible for that onerous system. It was a beautiful moment of leadership and learning for me, watching Mike walk up to them, put out his hand and say, “Before we get going, I want to acknowledge that you all have some of the most complicated jobs I could conceive of. Intense and consistent volume and velocity of work, chronic shortage of resources, 360-degree scrutiny.” Shaking their hand, he said that we are not here to point out one more thing they have done wrong. It is that we have heard these stories and we think there is some wisdom in them that we can all learn from together.
What I saw in that moment was that a couple of individuals went from shoulders clenched defensively to taking a deep breath and feeling like we are all on the same side here. What unfolded for them as we walked through the work our team had done, was that it was not something Mike, Lena or I had done or that we were the smart ones who had figured it out. Instead, we had positioned ourselves as representatives of stories that were indisputable. These were people’s experiences, and as advocates for those perspectives, it positioned us in a really advantageous place. We could all look at it together. It was not about us being right and them being wrong.
Then they walked to the other side of our office, which is a really unique physical environment. I want to mention an HBR article that was done a few years ago called “To Persuade People, Trade PowerPoint for Papier Mache.” It outlines an expression of storytelling that is in a physical environment. You walk through it like you would walk through a museum exhibit. It deploys certain artifacts and presentations like large scale portrait photography, metaphor and symbolism that gets used in space. What we tried to do was tell a story that aimed to grow their context and helped them understand from the sea of problems they were aware of, what was the more coherent way of understanding it all. It bridged their emotional experience to an intellectual one and pointed out certain strategies or opportunities to explore a different approach.
There was something about starting with a relationship, being on the same side and not being there to attack, growing their context, helping them feel the importance of the work and connecting that to their intellect with a concrete way forward. That was central to the early moments of going from no partner, no contract, no formal relationships, few prospects as an organization to something that started to shore up. It has not been a one-off project. We have worked with the leaders in the same organizations for six and half years. It has deepened and deepened into the heart of how this $25 billion a year public service operates in terms of its technology, its policies, its business process, how it trains people, and its physical space. Its broader strategy has gotten wrapped around these perspectives of focusing on the user and meeting their needs.
These public service institutions have approached it with a level of commitment through three different heads of department across two different political administrations in a very politically divided environment. One of the things we are proud about is that Civilla operates in a purple state. The stories that we tell help a lot of people see themselves in it. Whether they come from a liberal standpoint where they see access to services as a core of their motivation or come from a conservative perspective, they see the unique approach we have to strengthening government and bringing new effectiveness in the operations. It is a unique story in these divided times that we can find common ground, and opens the question of what to do about environments where it does not seem to be working well for anybody. That is what we study.
Krishnamurthy: That physical piece of paper, the scroll of over 1,000 questions, is so powerful. It hits home. If I may use the term Kafkaesque. Who created that form? It was no one person who decided to make things difficult. Who takes responsibility? In this world of scale, it is an amorphous leadership. It takes away from accountability. There is a cloak of layers. There is no single person taking responsibility to fix it. Storytelling exposes the absurdity. It is like a satirical piece but not in a mocking way. The physical scroll is a very powerful tool to bring home the point.
Selzer: We often get questions about the individuals in government who are somehow standing tall for the bureaucracy or creating this scroll. Our experience is that almost everybody we work with, and it is hundreds of leaders across the state, all show up with positive intent, a strong intellect, a sense of creativity and a commitment to relationships. It is the only way you would survive in a system like this, in some cases for thirty to forty years in public service. Yet these systems have a way of conspiring. There is no one leader responsible for them; it is a system wide challenge with distributed responsibility and distributed leadership. That is one of the primary characteristics of a system we need to design for. It is not as simple of getting rid of one bad person who caused that one bad thing. That is not how any of these systems seem to be created or sustained.
Brennan: One of the big things in this whole story is the optimism we carry for the role of public service institutions in our society. It is the optimism that change is possible. These are not forever broken. Great progress can be made. The beautiful thing about Adam’s story is not that the problem was identified and understood. It is that the leadership was shepherded through a human-centered approach all the way through on a statewide basis. That brought forward a new scroll, or form, that was 80% shorter in words and questions, 60% shorter in pages and went through the system in half the time. 75% percent less time was spent on error fixing; applications were coming in 96% complete where before 25%-30% was left incomplete, which caused unnecessary work for all parties. That proof point gave the leaders the confidence to say that there is a way that we can come up with solutions to entrenched problems that not only meet the business requirements, but also meet the needs of the end users in a much more humane and effective way.
Krishnamurthy: Michael, you brought up the focus on outcomes in your earlier career. For me, these are compelling outcomes. These statistics you just shared are tangible, understandable, and impactful. Therefore, these are measurable outcomes. So how has this informed Michigan, especially in the context of it being a purple state? You talked about change in political leadership. How do you believe these outcomes have informed your current work or will inform your future work? Storytelling is powerful but the outcomes are as powerful.
Brennan: One of the things we learned is that the story alone isn’t enough, and data alone aren’t enough. When you combine deep, authentic story rooted in the user experience with a few vital statistics that show change is possible, then you have something that is quite powerful to help move pretty entrenched cultures. It is very difficult for these public service institutions to just say that here is qualitative information and therefore we should do something. They need solid proof points, as they are in front of the legislature or in front of the public. They are stewarding public dollars. They are very clear about that. They want to do it well. If they can be deeply rooted in the user experience and know that what they are bringing forward has a demonstration of real progress, it allows them the competence to not only implement, but also uncover further pain points that need attention. These are very large, complex systems. No one thing carries the day. It is a collection of change efforts that is going to be required. This becomes a critical mix.
Selzer: A big thing underlying our work, and something we would like to see more of, is that our projects have three different phases of work. The first phase is discovery research or environmental scan – that is a lot of the deep listening and analysis of stories we hear to create a sense of direction or design. The second phase takes the early design and brings it to life through a pilot. We think more about how it would operate at scale and what the quantitative measures are that help us understand what kind of outcomes we can expect. If we were to stop there, a lot of the human-centered ethos and spirit of the work would not have been pulled through to fruition. The third phase our team tackles is implementation. Our perspective is that not enough design outfits are structured in such a way that they can work on design projects throughout the lifespan of that work. We are trying to show that it is really important for human-centered design ethos to get pulled all the way from concept to implementation. In this context it is 5,000 state workers, 100 plus state offices and the largest entity in Michigan state government.
Krishnamurthy: When we speak about implementation in human-centered design, is it people that volunteer to test out that the new form is working for them? How does human-centered design come into the implementation phase? How do we visualize that?
Selzer: Often, a pilot may be two or three offices. In that setting, we are trying to dial in our understanding of the viability of the design, its dimensions, to help us predict. If we did it at scale, what would happen? Getting from two to a hundred offices is a whole thing, and it requires quite a lot of work on communication and training, getting together legislators or advocates like union representatives or staff. How do you get 5,000 people to stop doing the thing that they have done for ten years and start doing it a different way? Often there is the issue of translating it to technology. Just because it works on paper does not mean it works with technology. Often there is policy work to transpose the changes into written word. There may be more threads.
Those are moments when even the most pure and wonderful concept can get steamrolled by the inertia of an institution if it is not championed by a group that is constantly calling into question whether we have continued to develop something that represents the user voice and the ethos of this work. What we found is that we have gone from a bell curve of support to something that is highly skewed due a high level of receptivity as it starts to enter the world. It can apply to training too. What is common across institutions is that you have a webinar. It was not uncommon for people to navigate 65 protocol slides in two minutes, but that did not represent deep understanding, commitment, or appreciation for it. We have developed a whole practice about how to train a staff of 5,000 people so everybody feels they had an opportunity to kick the tires, get their questions answered, understand the story of the work and what has inspired it, what has guided it. Why they are important to it. A great idea can turn into a train wreck at rollout if not tended to with a great understanding and commitment. Our team is often trying to find these opportunities for seeing the work through rather than putting a pin in deliverables and expecting it will take care of itself.
Brennan: This is one of the key elements of the story. Using human-centered design all the way to implementation is the Mount Everest climb. Generating the concept and idea are not the most difficult part. It is bringing it to life in the real world where it works on an ongoing and consistent basis. We knew that the state had all these stakeholders. How do you actually have them understand, hold and provide support? For example, we took an immersive storyboard installation and put it in Lansing in a vacant space. Over eight weeks, we walked 500 people through the story. What was it like for people to navigate public assistance? What was the prototype that came forward? What was the user tested application that was about to be launched? How was it going to be launched? What would it mean? It was a wide range of stakeholders. It has been amazing - you want people in on it and up on it, so they are not down on it. That ended up being really central to getting people to understand and support it.
Selzer: The work we are doing in Michigan we view as a blueprint. We are flattered when it is referred to as a parable. It is not just about public benefits, government, or state government. It is not just about Michigan. We view this as the institutional dilemma, that all these systems we rely upon in our society seem to be so far behind and are struggling to catch up to people’s hopes and expectations. We see the same essential DNA in all of them. The work ahead for us is to find ways to keep deepening our perspectives by doing concrete work that helps us not only put something good into the world, but also sharpens our understanding of organizational change and pulls these extensions into different environments similar to the one here. Can we create concrete tools and proof points that other leaders can use in their domain that might have elements of magic to it?
Krishnamurthy: Let's say that you made the change – how do you ensure stickiness? How do you make sure bad habits do not come creeping back into the system? How do you make changes more permanent, or maybe impermanent because you don't want it fossilized? How do you make it more generative and responsive in the future?
Brennan: An important mentor in our life once told me that one of his regrets in bringing an organization to life under a set of principles is that he did not embed enough ‘antibodies’ inside of the institution to keep it from rolling back to its former incarnation. We took that seriously. As part of the important implementation process Adam referred to, we make sure we design the right governance, or ‘antibodies,’ that ensure that the historical inertia does not steamroll over the new. There is high intention on that design, holding close fidelity to the leadership in honoring the process. They have been quite good about that. I can’t say enough about the quality of leadership that resides within the Michigan department of health and human services. Across administrations, they have held steadfast and focused on this approach; they honor it and adapt. Inevitably things will have to change but they have to make sure that if something is going to change on the form, it should be field tested with residents and frontline workers. It can’t just get changed because someone wants it.
Krishnamurthy: How has COVID influenced your mission? Your work was so important even before COVID. What are some of the COVID-related pivots or impact? How has it changed the approach to your work or changed the level of urgency?
Brennan: COVID brought a wider understanding among the public to the complexity which resides within these systems. Millions and millions of people started accessing these systems for assistance – for unemployment, food assistance or medical coverage. For some, for the very first time in their lives they had to step in and navigate public systems of this nature. There has been a growing appreciation for the administrative burden for both the institution and the person that is trying to navigate it, and a greater sense of urgency that we need to do something. More public service institutions are realizing that they need to solve it in a much more user centered approach. We are a high touch, in-person team. Just like everybody else, we had to adapt to the virtual and learn how to do consistent, high quality, meaningful interviews with residents or public service institutions. How do you maintain confidence in the output and results you are going to be able to produce from that? The team has been highly adaptive and creative in bringing forward new ways and solutions.
Krishnamurthy: Can you give a peek into the lens on the future of Civilla? Using cities and state governments as one of the stakeholders you seek to serve with a user perspective, what comes next over the next five years?
Brennan: Our long-haul view – and we take a 100-year view of the organization – is that we think we will, over time, positively impact a billion people on the planet. We think in the next five years we will see Civilla engage in other bodies of work. Access to benefits in America has been our first body of work. By year ten we see a second and third body of work emerging. In working with public institutions, we see opportunities in education, healthcare. We imagine that we will be able to take the learnings from the first body of work and apply them to different areas. We are actively thinking that through. We don’t see ourselves as a single entity. There could be a day down the road with Civillas throughout the world that are place-based and are doing deep work in partnership with people who they live and work with each day.
Krishnamurthy: Your story, approach and experiences are invaluable for all of us that are tackling complex social problems and are looking to make an impact. The beauty is in its common sense and simplicity, but simple things are anything but. Thank you both for sharing your stories and experiences.
About the Author:
Deepa Krishnamurthy is a 2021 Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow with strong real estate finance, retail, general business and small business sector knowledge. As partner, COO, and CFO of Linear Retail Properties, an institutionally funded firm investing in and managing shopping centers and other retail storefronts, she helped assets under management grow from a start-up stage to $800 million during her 16 year tenure. Earlier, Deepa worked for a large-scale urban real estate developer, a publicly-traded real estate investment trust, and a North American office and retail properties investment firm. She began her career at Mahindra and Mahindra, an Indian conglomerate, and the Industrial Development Bank of India. Deepa is a board member of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board’s Real Estate Finance Association, Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance, and Sea Bags of Maine, a retailer making and selling bags and accessories from recycled sailcloth.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.