(Illustration by Melinda Beck)
For decades, outcomes-focused government has promised a more effective and accountable public sector. Yet the reality in communities looks fragmented and the results ineffectual, in part because public agency professionals lack the support required to build capacity and institutional culture, especially the time, means, and space to adopt an outcomes mindset. What would it take to accelerate that shift? The work of our organizations, together with the Transformational Change Partnership (TCP), offers some early answers.
Realizing the Promise of a Truly Responsive Government
Deep misalignment exists between what the American people want from their government and what they believe they are getting from it. To address this problem and unlock the possibility that our government can be a true partner, truly responsive, and a more effective force for good in our lives, we must shift how entire government agencies do their work, and most importantly, what they understand their responsibility to the communities they serve to be. Sponsored by Third Sector
Reframing Government From Within
Despite decades of reform efforts, many government institutions remain structurally misaligned with the needs of the people they serve. From health and human services to workforce and education systems, public agency staff have greater incentive to implement regulations and ensure compliance than to fulfill their mission of addressing community challenges or improving lives. This disconnect between the how and the why is not just a policy matter. It’s also embedded in how public servants are trained, evaluated, and supported throughout their careers.
Trust in government has declined while the sense that systems are failing to deliver on their most basic responsibilities has increased. Americans share a belief that government systems are rigid, opaque, and unresponsive to everyday struggles and long-term goals. One explanation is that government agencies have not been equipped to define or pursue success in meaningful ways.
In this context, “outcomes-focused government” is a paradigm shift, not simply a technical fix. It requires agencies to reimagine their work as achieving measurable, equitable improvements in people’s lives. It depends not just on leadership or data infrastructure, but also on the capacity of public servants—an often overlooked factor. If we expect civil servants to focus on outcomes, we must invest in their ability to do so, which requires a combination of culture shifts in policy and administration.
That’s the challenge we confronted with the Transformational Change Partnership, a pilot effort to reimagine how public professionals are equipped to think about their roles, tools, and accountability to their communities.
A New Model for Accelerating Outcomes Orientation
Launched in 2023, the Transformational Change Partnership is a first-of-its-kind fellowship that uses a structured learning and capacity-building model to help county-based agency professionals reconceive the implementation of new policies and programs. TCP integrates the comprehensive capacities required to improve services with a learn-by-doing approach that accelerates proficiency.
County-based teams, comprising public servants from various departments, community members, and partner organizations, collaborate on improvement projects over a nine-month period. These projects address pressing implementation challenges and policy mandates while serving as a vehicle for capacity building. The program effectively braids together well-tested elements, such as data analysis, interagency coordination, and performance management, with newer tools from service design and implementation science. The result is a pragmatic structure that not only resolves immediate problems but also seeds longer-term, sustainable changes.
Participants are supported through a series of structured progressions:
- Break free from the status quo: Practicing skills to set strategic direction, build community relationships, and rethink entrenched processes.
- Learn by doing: Applying change management and continuous learning tools to real-time implementation challenges.
- Sustain and grow: Refining and scaling the work to strengthen systemwide capacity for innovation and outcomes orientation.
The program emphasizes ease of understanding, relevance to daily work, and applicability to live projects, allowing new knowledge to be readily redeployed across agencies and contexts.
What Emerges From the Cohorts
When TCP cohorts conclude, participants recognize how structured learning and real-time application can generate system-level improvements.
In Placer County, California, for example, a cross-agency team focused on improving the reentry process for individuals exiting jail with serious mental illness. Facing overlapping mandates from California initiatives (CARE Act and CalAIM), the team reduced siloed communication, aligned partnerships between the sheriff’s office and community providers, piloted new reentry aids such as contingency housing plans and peer involvement, and developed infrastructure for a more responsive system of care. These efforts addressed a critical service gap and strengthened the team’s long-term capacity for continuous improvement. A follow-up survey eight months after the close of the cohort revealed that the team’s ability to implement change remained high.
Cohorts have focused on areas such as Medicaid payment reform (under the CalAIM waiver), justice-involved services, and behavioral health services for children and youth, using TCP projects to measurably improve implementation while building shared practices among agencies. One participant reported that the “experience has given me new skills and insight … and what I, as a leader, can do differently to help create change in our system.”
What ties together these experiences is an emphasis on learning through action. By integrating data analysis, interagency coordination, performance management, and service design into real-world projects, participants build practical capabilities they can carry forward. TCP supports the creation of project-aligned teams whose members champion improvements within their agencies, ensuring that new capacities don’t end with a single project but extend into future efforts.
Reclaiming the Public Role
At its core, TCP helps public servants reclaim the purpose of their work. An outcomes-focused approach repositions them not as enforcers of static processes, but as adaptive leaders with public value who have the skills, permission, and confidence to achieve better results for the community. This reframing is vital in areas marked by historical disinvestment or structural inequity, where new policies and programs seek to transform the service delivery system to improve outcomes.
A change to outcomes orientation requires more than a one-time training. It calls for long-term investments in professional development, continuous learning, and alignment at the system level. It also means confronting the structural incentives that keep government agencies focused on compliance: risk aversion, budget silos, and limited feedback loops.
That’s why we see TCP not as a stand-alone intervention, but as part of a larger strategy to rehumanize public work. By embedding capacities for transformational change in agency roles and functions—and making real progress on real challenges—we can begin to make government more effective and more just.
Toward a More Responsive Public Sector
If the United States is to move beyond piecemeal reform and toward a responsive, equitable public sector, developing civil servants’ capacity must be a top priority. Agencies have to move beyond the assumption that change can be mandated from above to build the conditions for civil servants to lead from where they are. We believe that outcomes-focused training and structured improvement experiences such as TCP can become an essential part of that investment.
Scaling this approach will require the collaboration of public, philanthropic, and academic sectors. It will also require patience. But the early promise of TCP shows that when given the structure, support, and opportunity to act, public servants can help transform government from the inside out.
Read more stories by William Rhett & Jason Willis.