Civic Fables: Developing New Language of Failure in Local Government Innovation
Editor’s note: This piece was researched, interviewed, written, and designed over the course of summer 2019 by Max Stearns (MONUM staff member, 2015–2018). It is the first in a series (of undetermined length) of reflective pieces — by different authors — to mark the team’s 10 years of practice.
Table of Contents
I. Introduction
II. MONUM: A department of failure
III. The intertwined nature of success and failure
IV. The many meanings of success and failure
V. The challenge of being a department of failure
VI. The benefits of a department of failure
VII. An alternative framing: Civic Fables
“The newer you are to the work, the more you assume that it is either a success or it is a failure. But, I think for people who have been at it for a while, you realize that it’s almost always both. And that… is both liberating and confusing.”
— Nigel Jacob, Co-Founder & Co-Chair
I. INTRODUCTION
Failure seems to be an absolute must these days. From TED Talks to design sprints, the propagation of failure as an essential means to success has built relentless momentum. This rings especially true in fields in which failure was once a taboo office topic. Take City Government as an example: failure has shifted from an outcome to avoid at all costs to becoming part of a method of productive policy design. Mantras such as “If you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough,” are increasingly commonplace, even in these unexpected spaces. It is beginning to feel like without failing, how can you possibly expect to succeed?
But, when it comes to innovation in City Government, what is ‘success’? And, perhaps more importantly, what the hell do we really mean when we casually reference the essential nature of failure?
These are massive questions. Questions which inherently demand context to be answered. So, that is what this piece is all about; responding to these questions and offering a context for recognizing particular values of failure. This is a dive into the fascinating and uncommon context for failure of the City of Boston’s Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (New Urban Mechanics / Mechanics / MONUM).
II. MONUM: A DEPARTMENT OF FAILURE
The Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics is unique in multiple respects. It doesn’t quite match other government innovation teams and it is certainly atypical when it comes to City Hall contexts.
Among the broader field of Civic Innovation teams, MONUM differentiates itself as a Research and Design lab, rather than an internal consultancy, creative agency, or innovation hub. Guiding principles — akin to core values of the team — include things like “Be delightful” and “Encourage and enable civic behavior”. The team members “work across departments and communities to explore, experiment, and evaluate new approaches to government and civic life.” This takes form in a mixed-methods practice of individual and collective conscientious attunement; thoughtful observations; critical questioning; hypotheses development; small-scale experimentation; and, from time to time, failure(s).
These failures have earned MONUM a reputation as, among other things, a Department of Failure. This is a non-traditional descriptor for a team embedded within a Mayor’s Office. In city halls across the world, the primary responsibilities have long been seen as consistency, dependability, and responsiveness — not experimentation. For better or worse, this has tended to manifest itself in departments that rely on status quo procedures and function with serious aversions to risk. MONUM offers a space to counter that trend. The team “exists to take risks that traditional City departments might not be able to take.” As Nigel Jacob, Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the Mechanics, puts it, “Other departments can’t fail. We can.”
But, the question remains: when Nigel emphasizes the team’s permission and capacity to fail, what exactly is he talking about?
“How do we characterize failure? How do we really unravel what it means?”
— Michael Evans, Program Director
III. THE INTERTWINED NATURE OF SUCCESS AND FAILURE
First, it is important to recognize the concepts of Success and Failure have particular meaning for the New Urban Mechanics. Furthermore, these meanings do not exist in isolation. Success and failure are not binary. The Mechanics play with the boundary markers by which the two are typically differentiated and intricately intertwine them.
The team’s main examples of ‘Failures’ seem chalked full of resilience, lessons learned, course corrections, and institutional progress. Likewise, ‘Successes,’ seem riddled with setbacks, misplays, false starts, and disheartening mistakes. This kind of symbiotic coexistence may be familiar to those in the creative practices, but it is nearly absent in the fields of civics and municipal government (despite the tremendous value it seems to offer).
Perhaps these non-traditional project through-lines described by folks in MONUM are merely a result of the narrative and storytelling capacities of the team. But, even if valid, that appears to be only a partial explanation. Rather, it seems evident and important to acknowledge that a strict success-failure binary is inadequate to describe the much more knotted relationship between success and failure for the City of Boston’s ‘Department of Failure.’
IV. THE MANY MEANINGS OF SUCCESS AND FAILURE
For some, success and failure may seem to carry intuitive connotations and simple definitions.
To succeed is to meet one’s goals or achieve a desired aim or result; and
To fail is to be unsuccessful in those endeavors.
Yet, the City of Boston and MONUM’s ambitions are not as simple as scoring a goal or winning a game. Boston — its many neighborhoods, communities, and its people — are living and evolving.
The goalposts of success and failure constantly shift as the City and its departments try to grow, learn, and improve their capacities to meet constituent wants and needs. So, a project’s “success” or “failure” must be rooted from within the context in which it develops.
To address this nuance of working in civic innovation, the Mechanics have become experts at navigating the ambiguous contextual spaces many of their experiments exist within. They find ways to identify the unexpected relevance of the twists and turns each project takes. They have made it a habit to navigate, evaluate and narrate the ‘excluded middle’ of many projects; rejecting the premise that a project must either turn out as expected (succeed) or ‘not quite do that’ (fail). Instead, they attempt to explore with a sensibility that processes and/or outcomes of any experiment can be both a success and a failure all at once. This, as Nigel says, is both “liberating and confusing.” It suggests there is not always a clear, absolute, or inherent set of metrics for determining success or failure. It insinuates that some civic projects exist more in the murky, grey space of ambiguous value than in the certitude of an either-or determination.
As mentioned, this perspective has evolved from an approach operating in spaces of the unknown; government services which could be, infrastructure which might come about, expectations which may evolve. So in evaluating what success and failure mean and the role they play for the Mechanics, one must begin by recognizing the complicated and multitudinal nature by which any experiment or grander project might be interpreted as a success or failure. Coming to terms with this perhaps uneasy aspect of the Mechanics’ work, makes it slightly easier to understand how the team pursues its work. That said, there are some threads that might provide a bit more clarity.
What are successes?
Unsurprisingly, success has multiple, simultaneous meanings for the New Urban Mechanics. Primarily, it means furthering the goals of the City of Boston. Additionally, however, it also means having a subtle or subversive impact on expanding departmental considerations. Lastly, success can have more messy and personal meanings. Interestingly, many of the projects taken on by the Mechanics demonstrate facets of all three of these examples; they achieve a City of Boston goal, establish or build inspiration to explore new ideas, and enable unexpected learnings.
Surely, other overlapping scenarios of success exist; However, for the purpose of providing at least some degree of legibility, the focus here will be on only these three types: (1) Institutional Success, (2) Inspirational Success, and (3) Generative Failure.
(1) Institutional Success
Generally, there are at least three traits which may suggest evidence of an Institutional Success: (a) Production of Public Value, (b) Meeting and/or Exceeding Public Expectations, and (c) Scaling an Impactful Project.
a. Production of Public Value
The production of public value is a critical ambition for the City of Boston. It is of the highest importance that the City provides services, programs, and infrastructure that improve the lives of those who live in, or visit, Boston. These improvements take many forms, since the City serves such varied publics. It can be added utility, amplification of historically marginalized perspectives, increased capacity for public input and/or control, and beyond. Admittedly, some improvements are recognizably more meaningful than others for certain populations. Regardless, an experiment, which demonstrates, with qualifiable and quantifiable evidence, the production of genuine public value for an intended public is an Institutional Success.
MONUM Project Examples:
b. Meeting and/or Exceeding Public Expectations
The City of Boston and its employees, across all departments, do their best to hear constituent wants and needs. Public commitments to respond are a prominent part of the City Hall process. Supporting a department to follow through on these commitments, particularly when the environment for implementation is more complicated or challenging than expected, can be, and typically is, considered an Institutional Success.
MONUM Project Example:
c. Scaling an Impactful Project
Too often, scaling, in and of itself, is considered a success. This seems to be adopted from the startup mentality that growth is the most important ambition. Startups “are under extreme pressure to grow,” as MONUM Program Director, Michael Evans puts it, “but they’re not necessarily under pressure to improve the world or make people’s lives better.”
The City of Boston, alternatively, is responsible for making people’s lives better. Whether a project is making a positive public impact is therefore a necessary consideration when an immediate association between civic innovation, scale, and success are made. Scaling really only constitutes a success when the positive impact at the experimental scale is actualized at the broader scale.
That being said, when that kind of scaling occurs, it is an Institutional Success.
MONUM Project Examples:
(2) Inspirational Success
As mentioned above, New Urban Mechanics is not an in-house consultancy. They are an R&D lab. As such, their ambitions go beyond adding capacity to existing projects. In fact, the team’s existence is based, in large part, on the exploration and identification of constituent wants and needs that the City does not yet know it should know to deliver. To this end, MONUM’s process includes an intention to identify the unknown unknowns of City Hall. And, moreover, to thoughtfully subvert status quo processes, which only meet known needs. Accomplishing this is Inspirational Success, and it tends to occur in two ways; By (a) Inspiring and/or (b) Building Momentum with other departments to uncover and meet unknown constituent expectations.
a. Inspiring
Inspiring the enhancement of the City of Boston’s capacity to meet constituent wants and needs is an Inspirational Success. Inspirational Successes are accepted invitations by other departments and external partners to engage in their own work differently; With a different course of behavior, optimism, or belief in the necessity to explore and/or expand existing City Hall offerings. As Sabrina Dorsainvil, Director of Civic Design for the Mechanics, describes it, these look like experiments, which “spark conversation, … excitement and interest to figure out what to do.” These successes inspire the effort to make life more meaningful for more people across the entire city.
MONUM Project Examples:
b. Building Momentum
Certain work led by the Mechanics can be understood more as a means to an end. These are experiments which build momentum for further action or create the necessary alignment for more thoughtfully informed projects to take off when the time is right. They are projects which are absolutely important in their own right, but as Nigel says, some projects are critical to “prepare the way for change to happen.” The intention to develop momentum is sometimes engineered, but even the Mechanics recognize the act of experimentation can enables important developments in unexpected and non-linear ways. Regardless, being able to identify the potential a project poses for establishing momentum is critical to the work MONUM does.
MONUM Project Example:
(3) Generative Failure
Generative failures are the not-so-hidden successes of the New Urban Mechanics. These are experiments that especially complicate the concept of a binary existence between Success and Failure; they toe the line between both. This is because Generative Failures are a mechanism for learning. These types of experiments, while not necessarily hitting their intended mark, provide valuable learnings, future experiments, or unexpected utility.
It should be noted here, and it will be touched on in more detail later, that the deciphering and decoding of valuable lessons is not inherent to the act of civic experimentation. It is a testament to the thoughtful curiosity, attentiveness, and reflective and reflexive consciousness of each member of the New Urban Mechanics. By virtue of the team’s commitment to interpreting the value of experimentation, the team, as Sabrina puts it, rarely “fails flat.”
MONUM Project Example:
- From Love Letters and Postcards to tactical decision making at the Engagement Center
Love Letters and Postcards was an experiment in which members of the Mechanics collected Love Letters and Fill-In-The-Blank style postcards from constituents around the City. The letters and cards enabled people to describe elements (spaces, services, experiences) of Boston they have strong emotions toward and articulate those feelings. It was a fascinating experiment, but it left members of the Mechanics with a sense of incompleteness and unfulfillment. That said, Love Letters and Postcards provided evidence, both internally within the team, as well as externally to other departments in City Hall, of the tremendous value of qualitative research. This element of Love Letters and Postcards created a foundation, which has since been built upon to enable multiple qualitative research processes within the Engagement Center (see above). This research has been used to develop important and impactful tactical decisions for the space, including spacial, service, and experience designs.
“The reason why failure can be an option is because we don’t fail flat. We fail with awareness and the desire to learn. You know, it’s not just: ‘oops, it didn’t work out.’ It’s: ‘Okay, well, there’s a reason; maybe it’s context, maybe it’s the moment in time, maybe it’s I should have done better with this relationship, or maybe I should have included this.’ We learn what to do differently the next time or in other situations. … So, in so much as they are failures, they have not stopped fueling my desire to do new things better, and maybe revisit them in the future.”
— Sabrina Dorsainvil, Director of Civic Design
What are failures?
As with most things for the Mechanics, failure takes various forms. Having already touched on Generative Failures, it is important to identify other kinds. The kinds which are harder to talk about, more painful, and emotionally affecting. These are the failures you hear less about because these tend to be felt more intimately, more personally. They take unique forms, are felt differently, and defined in particular ways according to the individuals who are feeling them. Nevertheless, the intimately felt and quietly reflected upon stories of failure should still be told. Vulnerability and a willingness to be reflective are critical to the team’s ability to grow, adapt, and learn.
With that in mind, it is time to shed some light. For the Mechanics, there are three common themes when telling stories of failure. These can be described as MONUM’s typologies of failure:
(1) Institutional; (2) Ineffectual; and (3) Degenerative.
(1) Institutional
Institutional Failures are project failures which constitute a major disruption to the capacity of the City to meet constituent needs. These are extremely uncommon for the Mechanics. In fact, it’s not clear they’ve ever happened at all. This is because of the small, near-term scale at which the team’s experiments typically operate. This scale is an extremely intentional decision. Experimentation should occur at a scale at which failure can happen, but at which the scale of failure is not institutional.
(2) Ineffectual
Outside of Generative Failures, Ineffectual Failures are the next most common. When the team, or members of the team fail, this is what they generally are talking about: (a) Dead-end Failure; (b) Apathetic Failure; or (c) Going Sideways.
a. Dead-end Failure
A project has failed if it hits a dead end. This means the inability to move a project idea forward or beyond its initial prototype. Essentially, in these scenarios, MONUM has hit a “brick wall” or run into resistance, unresponsiveness or unwillingness to move forward that is, for one reason or another, insurmountable (said differently: they don’t just hear the first “no” as the end of the conversation and chalk it up to reaching a dead end).
Common causes of this type of failure are (1) the inability for MONUM to find shared values with partners on the worthwhileness of a certain experiment, or (2) turnover of a close partner, from someone whose trust in the Mechanics has enabled experimentation to someone who is more apprehensive or unconvinced.
MONUM Project Examples:
- Hosting Social Emergency Response Centers (SERC) within City departments
A local design studio has created a model for small-scale sites that want to offer support to individuals going through a Social Emergency. The concept, similar to a Disaster Response Center, is to create spaces which offer needed services and support to those dealing with socialized trauma.
MONUM was attempting to create a collaborative partnership in which the City could host a SERC in a municipal space, thereby demonstrating their commitment to social support of Boston’s most marginalized publics. Unfortunately, the idea and the team were met with, potentially well-founded, logistical concerns, reluctance, and lack of willingness to move the experiment forward. It hit a dead end.
While this experiment might, and probably does, qualify as a Generative Failure, its trajectory also fits as a dead-end. The project was an attempt to explore new ways to engage families about their students’s bus rides and to ensure the City was communicating about how it was providing safe and effective transportation.
The experiment ran several rounds of prototypes, but the particular needs of the project partner, at that specific time, created a mismatch of value sets between their broader priorities and the experimental offerings of SafeBoard. So, given the context and the dynamics around the project, it hit a dead end. That said, returning to its generative potential, an initial dead-end failure may not, necessarily, mean an ultimate dead end. Future inspiration or momentum development may reinvigorate new life for SafeBoard.
b. Apathetic Failure
A project has failed if it results in stakeholder apathy. This means an experiment in which the process and outcome builds zero inspiration or momentum. It is a “boring project,” or rather, a “project that [doesn’t] give us anything new.”
MONUM Project Example:
The concept of this experiment was to allow residents to partner with Boston Fire to make sure a specific fire hydrant was cleared of snow. Unfortunately, residents just didn’t really get into it; no one used the app. Moreover, there was no momentum to try it, even in a in a subsequent year when there was a lot of snow. The experiment was met with apathy.
c. Going Sideways
A project can, and will, tend to fail when it goes sideways. This is a situation in which the MONUM Program Director or group of Directors managing an experiment lose control — or directive input — on its implementation, narrative, and generative potential. The team no longer has the capacity to guide the interpretation of learn-able elements from the project or chart course corrections; it has gone sideways.
MONUM Project Example:
- BPS Transportation Roundtable → BPS Transportation Challenge
The BPS Transportation Roundtable was an experimental approach to bring new partners and ideas together to address BPS students’ experiences riding yellow buses. By many accounts, the roundtable itself was a generative and institutional success. However, despite an attempt to nurture the instinct to explore potentially unconventional, people-centered ideas, the project took an unexpected turn. What resulted out of imaginative, sci fi-inspired conversations around changing the interiors of BPS’ fleet of buses to better support students’ experiences during their (often long) school commutes turned into the BPS Transportation Challenge, a public call for algorithms to “solve” routing for the BPS bus fleet and optimizing school start times — the latter of which came with massive public pushback. This set of experiments about experiences failed because they went sideways.
(3) Degenerative Failure
An extremely small percentage of failures are degenerative. These are different from being non-generative, which is essentially one of the variants of Ineffectual Failure, i.e., a failure insofar as an experiment does not result in productive learnings or opportunities to leverage.
Instead, Degenerative Failure is a consequence of an experiment in which the underlying trust, social/political capital, or relationships it’s built upon are detrimentally affected by its process or outcome. Fortunately, this type of failure tends to exist more often in the realm of risk and concept, rather than actualized consequence. Yet, that rarity is only because of the urgency and risk Degenerative Failure poses. It acts as a tremendously motivating factor for the Mechanics to ensure it does not happen.
“The challenge with failing and doing it for the public to see or with our partners watching, is that it ends up putting into jeopardy the future of the team, the work, all experiments.
It can shake the trust of a partner and make them less willing to work with you in the future or deplete political will to take risks on the next endeavor.”
— Kris Carter, Co-Chair
Fear of (Degenerative) Failure
Degenerative Failure inspires a sort of cautiousness reminiscent of fear of failure. This is because this kind of failure truly sets the team back. It frustrates long-standing relationships and can incur genuine distrust from stakeholders, including from residents and partners. This kind of failure does not abide by the same kind of risk taking and abandonment of fear typical of the Mechanics. This fear of failure, fear of degenerative failure, plays an important role in emphasizing the urgency for individual members of the Mechanics to invest significant emotional labor. It is this emotional labor which ensures projects not only tend to succeed or generate new ideas, but also that assures the avoidance of relational disruption and distrust.
V. THE CHALLENGE OF BEING A DEPARTMENT OF FAILURE
Funnily enough, for a team that calls themselves a Department of Failure, the New Urban Mechanics tends to be tremendously successful. This, as Sabrina describes, is likely a reflection of the culture on the team:
“I don’t think any of us could live with ourselves if we didn’t try as best as we could, with whatever constraints we were being dealt with, to make something work.. If the goal is to get this [project] to have legs, we want to make sure it has legs.”
Given this culture, the work demands a tremendous amount. It requires (1) logistical and operational wizardry, particularized to the bureaucratic and siloed nature of City Hall (or as Nigel puts it, Hustle); (2) immense emotional attunement and reflective consciousness; and (3) embodiment and projection of project inspiration. Additionally, it seems to depend on a willingness, on the part of team members, to accept the potential attribution of individual failure; the potential that you, yourself, may feel like a failure. This is the emotional labor that doesn’t generally get talked about when Innovation, particularly Civic Innovation, gets discussed. Yet, it is an enormous part of the work and the essential nature by which the successful experimentation of the Mechanics is made possible. Thus, it is tremendously important to acknowledge the significant emotional investment made by members of the New Urban Mechanics on a day-to-day basis.
The 3–fold task to steer experiments
(1) The Daily Grind of Logistical and Operational Wizardry, i.e., Hustle
A primary responsibility of members of the Mechanics is to find ways to make experiments happen. The reason an experiment fails, as much as possible, should be a consequence of an assumption of the intention behind the project, not because bureaucratic limitations wouldn’t let it get off the ground. So, the Mechanics — on the daily — finagle, wrangle, get rejected, come back, coordinate, and prepare the way for experiments to actually happen. This is the hustle necessary to make civic innovation possible.
(2) The Necessity for Emotional Attunement and Reflective Consciousness
Along with the project management hustle, comes an ever-present need to be emotionally attuned and reflectively conscious. Team members need to be attuned to all actual and potential stakeholder’s fears, concerns, joys, values, ideals, etc. They must be attentive to the way these emotions are demonstrated in small, conceivably unnoticeable ways because by noticing them, the team is able to create more deeply connected relationships and non-transactional motivations to pursue projects. Additionally, the team must be reflective and reflexive. It is by means of constantly returning to conversations about the role and identity of the team, on specific projects and at a more meta, City Hall level, that the team is able to recognize, interpret, and question generative opportunities. Through the exertions of consistent emotional attunement and reflective consciousness, the team is more adaptable, responsive, and capable of navigating projects toward success.
(3) The Demand to Embody and Project intended Inspiration and Momentum
The capacity for an experiment to generate inspiration and momentum starts with the individual members of the New Urban Mechanics. To get partners at the table and excited to stay, especially when the concept of experimentation might lean quite far from the conventional expectations of City Hall, the Mechanics must bring the kind of inspirational energy and momentum necessary to drive action. They must embody it and project it.
Folks often describe meetings with the team as carrying a ‘different kind of energy.’ Generally, people misnomer it as just creative energy. That is slightly inaccurate though. What people are feeling is a combination of creative excitement and the investment the team makes to see and be the inspiration necessary to make experiments happen.
“This is about the persistent, relational version of innovation, which isn’t just disruption. It is failure with repercussions, learning, and growth.”
— Jaclyn Youngblood, Chief of Staff
The individual weight of failure
The work of MONUM depends, in no small part, on the willingness of individual members of the team to invest their own emotional energy while accepting the potential attribution of individually failing. The weight of failure is felt individually because (1) individual members of the team lead entire experiments, and (2) those individual members are single-handedly responsible for generating the relational and institutional inspiration and momentum for projects to progress. This leaves a lot of room to feel like a failure if a project Goes Sideways or hits a Dead-end. When the team ‘succeeds’ at the rate it does, it can feel, as a single member of the team, like failing a project is failing the team. That said, teammates go to great lengths to be supportive of each other and to emphasize the importance of failure in experimental spaces. There is recognition of the weight these projects carry and acknowledgment that this work is not without cost. The Mechanics are highly aware that being a Department of Failure is an emotionally laborious task and do their best to support the resilience of each member of the team.
Patterns and trends of failures
In thinking about the challenges of being a Department of Failure, it is helpful to consider the associated patterns and trends by which failure occurs. Generative failure is most common when the Mechanics have a consistent role in an experiment and authority to interpret and set it’s narrative. Ineffectual and Degenerative Failures occur, most commonly, when the Mechanics are (1) unable to set common expectations or values with internal and/or external partners, (2) the project exists beyond the typical scale or setting for a Mechanics experiment, or (3) as has been alluded to directly above, the Program Director leading the work’s motivation is not high enough or has been negatively affected to the point they cannot inspire or motivate their partners to see the value in a certain experiment.
“Projects that have the most potential to fall prey to genuine failure — true collapses or lack of existence — are those that have the least emotional investment, or willingness to be emotionally invested. Projects in which it just feels like: ‘This is not the kind of idea that I stand for or with.’”
— Max Stearns, Former Program Director
VI. THE BENEFITS OF A DEPARTMENT OF FAILURE
There are tremendous benefits to having a Department of Failure at City Hall. They are well-documented. While concerns still exist about the effects of City Governments failing, the Mechanics have found a way to fail productively. They experiment and fail at a risk-‘insured’ scale; A scale at which failure tends to mean, at worst, nothing happens, and at best, deep learning occurs and departments get better at meeting the needs of residents. These experiments and failures have at least two particularly important benefits:
- They are a way to test, connect, and build small scale approaches, strategically, toward addressing the larger, more complex problems the city faces; and
- They introduce and build the comfort levels of individuals across City Hall to take on slightly risky, potentially ambiguous, but generative project paths.
Perhaps most importantly, success, at the small, near-term scale MONUM operates at, enables the inspiration and momentum necessary to meet the evolving needs of those who live in, or visit, Boston.
VII. AN ALTERNATIVE FRAMING: CIVIC FABLES
Given the complexity of trying to explain exactly what Success and Failure mean, perhaps an alternative conceptualization would be better. And even if you think not, we’d like to offer it anyways.
It is simpler to describe (and understand) the nature and function of MONUM’s successes and failures as akin to Fables. Fables are stories that inspire and teach someone morals, nuances of an environment, how to behave, what works, and what doesn’t. Is that not the role failure plays for the Mechanics? Is failure not, as has been discussed, a mechanism for learning?
Importantly, however, fables are not solely stories of failure. They are stories of growth and reinvention. They carry conflict, pitfalls, hurdles, and mistakes, as well as adaption, and collaboration, and increased thoughtfulness. Stories of failure alone are incomplete if they do not articulate the successes which precede, intertwine, and follow.
Which is why the braided complexity of success and failure is what makes the Mechanics and their work so fascinating. Their experiences are stories of dead-ends, apathy, going sideways, and the complex navigation, resilience, and progress they respond with. Rather than just studies of success or failure, the stories of the New Urban Mechanics are something more.
They are Civic Fables: Messy, knotted, non-binary tales of uncovering the unknown unknowns of City Hall and the city of people it serves.
