>> Timothy Persons: Welcome, everyone. My name is Tim Persons and I have the privilege of kicking off today's Centennial Celebration with GAO. So good afternoon, good morning, good evening, whichever time zone we're in. We are thrilled that you're able to join us for this discussion, which is the capstone of GAO's Centennial Celebration, focusing on the next century of accountability. Before we get started, there are just a few housekeeping notes I wanted to say. The first is that this event is being recorded and will be made available online for future viewing. We encourage you to submit any questions or comments you have for our panelists throughout the event using the chat function in Zoom, and we will have Q&A at the end of each panel discussion. Our goal is to be as interactive as possible. We have a fantastic group of experts with us today on two panels, and we want to engage the audience as much as we can. Finally, for those who are planning to submit for a CPE, there will be a link to the certification. That's placed in the chat box toward the end of the program. So please stay around to get the certification link and to claim your CPE for this event. And so now it's my pleasure to kick off GAO's Centennial Celebration event. And as you know, 2021 marks the 100th anniversary of GAO. And over the past year, we have been examining the trends that have shaped our agency and our country over the last century. But today's discussion looks forward to the key trends of tomorrow that will shape our future and how we might best position ourselves to navigate tomorrow's opportunities and challenges. As you know, we are living in a time of incredible trends. We're in a transformative moment, even now, and have to deal with many, many things. And so it's a privilege to be able to introduce both my friend and colleague and practitioner in Foresight, Steve Sanford for a few opening and welcome remarks.

>> Stephen Sanford: Thank you very much, Tim. It is an honor to be here today to help celebrate GAO's first 100 years with this final event of the Centennial Celebrations this year for the agency. My name is Stephen Sanford, I am GAO's Managing Director for Strategic Planning and External Liaison. I am also the Director of GAO's Center for Strategic Foresight, and our office at GAO helps connect the agency to the rest of the world, both with partners across the US in the domestic accountability community, and international partners. And we also help the agency think about and plan for the future through strategic planning, and through strategic foresight. So it's very fitting that we're gathered today, as Tim mentioned, to look ahead at what is coming for the next 100 years for our agency. And as you'll hear today, we have had an amazing transformation as an agency over the last 100 years. And we look forward to continuing that journey to serve the Congress and the American people. It is my pleasure at this point to now introduce the Comptroller General of the United States, Gene Dodaro, who will provide welcoming remarks for today's event. Sir?

>> Gene Dodaro: Thank you very much, Steve, and Tim, for your introductory remarks. Good day, everyone. I'm very pleased that you're able to join us to talk about GAO's work as we move forward into our second 100 years. As both Tim and Steve have mentioned, we've been celebrating our 100-year anniversary this year by looking back at how GAO has evolved over the past century. And today we're going to focus more on how we've been preparing to do our work in the future. And I'll talk a little bit about those preparations in a second. But I wanted to mention to you that this month marks my 49th and a half year in GAO. So I've been very fortunate and privileged to be a key participant in GAO's evolution from largely a financial management organization to a multidisciplinary organization that can take on and review virtually any federal program, policy, regulation or federal government activity, both underway or contemplated. Each year we produce hundreds of reports and testimonies before the Congress by assembling multidisciplinary teams of subject area experts, including those across the full breadth, and scope of the federal government's activities, and a wide range of technical disciplines, so that we produce high quality, interdisciplinary institutional products for the Congress. These efforts result in significant legislation, hundreds of billions of dollars every year in financial benefits to the government and the American people, and important improvements in government operations, including public safety and health. Now during the time that I've been Comptroller General, over the past decade, I've worked hard with our team at GAO to strengthen our capabilities to do not only contemporary audits, real-time auditing, but also looking to the future to identify emerging issues, and to try to focus on issues before they get to be of crisis proportion and more difficult than to deal with. On the real-time auditing front, during the global financial crisis, the Great Recession, and now during the pandemic, we've actually been doing real-time auditing helping the Congress and the country deal with these national emergencies. For example, during the pandemic now, we've been providing monthly briefings to the Congress on how the $4.8 trillion its program has put forth to improve our public health and to deal with the economic repercussions of the pandemic had been achieving their objectives. We've issued over 200 recommendations with dozens of reports, eight government-wide reports, every two or three months, in order to provide public transparency to what's happening with this huge amount of money during this national emergency. Now, in terms of strengthening our ability going forward, it's really several different dimensions of what we've been trying to do. One, as Steve mentioned, strategic planning. We've strengthened our strategic planning effort to produce five-year strategic plans. We're on the threshold of a new one for the next five years that we'll publish early next year. And in these plans, we do environmental scanning to identify trends that will shape the environment in which federal government will operate and Congress will be making decisions. And these are very important that we use not only our own institutional knowledge, but the knowledge and the Congress, because we do work for over 90% of the standing committees of the Congress. So we have a wide footprint there. And we have a wide range of external advisors and experts, some of which you'll hear from today during this discussion. We've been broadening that group all the time to give us additional perspectives. So that's a really robust strategic planning process. And what we like to produce is what I call a shared agenda between things that we think are important, Congress thinks it's important, and all the experts that we consult with think are essential that we take a look at with our work. And the goal is to work on the most important national issues always. Secondly, we established a Center for Strategic Foresight, which includes some futurists and others, both from the private sector, academia and others, some of which you'll hear from today as well, to further strengthen our ability to look ahead on emerging issues and build that into our work. The third, and one of the main focuses of today's discussion is to build our capacity in science and technology issues. I've been working on this with Dr. Persons now for well over a decade. We've great made great achievements in this area. I'm going to continue to ask for additional resources to expand our work going forward. But this is essential for two very important reasons. One, science and technology issues are so ubiquitous. The federal government programs and activities that we normally review, they're essential that we have the requisite capabilities to deal with national defense issues, homeland security, energy, environment, transportation, healthcare, and many more issues. Secondly, the science and technology is evolving faster than at any time in human history. And Congress needs to have more and more frequent information concerning science and technology issues to be able to respond quickly. It's always difficult for government to react, and in this area, the pace is as never before in our government's history. So we need to be prepared to help the Congress meet this growing and increasingly rapid need. And we've been able to do that. We've increased over the past few years with support from the Congress the number of technology assessments that we're doing, where we bring together both our technical experts and the science and technology analytics team, along with subject area experts, so we can understand the policy implications of the technology developments. In 5G, artificial intelligence for healthcare, both in more rapid development of drugs, diagnostic capabilities, as well as treatment capabilities -- we've been doing that work in partnership with the National Academy of Medicine. Quantum computing, forensic algorithms. We've also created an effort to provide more short -term technical assistance to the Congress and medium-term projects, developing science and technology spotlights that are two-page explainers of different technologies, the benefits, the implications, some of the policy considerations as well. We've greatly expanded our technical assistance capability to provide more direct assistance to individual members of Congress as well as the committees of the Congress as they carry out their activities. We've developed a foundational document for evaluating algorithms using artificial intelligence, so that we can hold that accountable to certain sets of standards, both from an ethical standpoint and performance standpoint. As well, we've created an innovation lab where we're testing new technologies and techniques, not only in artificial intelligence, but blockchain technologies and how to audit those areas, and many, many other initiatives in this area. So this is a very important component of GAO's most recent evolution, an ongoing evolution that we've had underway for now. It's been accelerated with congressional help the last couple of years under Tim's leadership. And I think we're doing very well, but we need to continue to build that capability going further in the future. Lastly, I would just say that GAO is very well-postured to continue to evolve in the future, and to continue to change and meet its needs, which has been a characteristic of our history over the past century. But going forward, not only do we have a good strategic planning process, we have a good not only diverse workforce, from a subject area and technical standpoint, but from a demographic standpoint. 58% of our people are women, 35% are minority, so that enriches our ability to have a diverse set of perspectives, as well as all the subject and technical experience that we need. 40% of our people are 40 years or younger. We're working on succession planning challenges, and we want to have a good workforce of the future that can continue to build these capabilities. We've been rated as the best place to work in the federal government by the Partnership for Public Service for the last 15 years straight. This year, we achieved the number one ranking in the best places to work for the federal government, which I'm very proud of. So we have a very good, vibrant organization that's highly efficient and effective. But we need and are committed to continuous improvement going forward. So I'm anxious to hear the suggestions today from the panelists. We're always open to suggestions in GAO. And with that, I would again like to welcome you to this session, and turn it over to Dr. Timothy Persons who's just one of our outstanding senior executives in GAO, leading our science and technology work. Tim, over to you.

>> Timothy Persons: Thanks, Gene. And I think it's in order for me just to thank you for your leadership, to have the science tech assessment analytics team. For instance, you testified during your Congressional hearings, and then building the team around -- we could not do it without you as well as the leadership and support of the legislative branch of probes committees that have been supportive of this. So I wanted to, again, reintroduce myself. I am Tim Persons, the chief scientist of the GAO. I'm also the Co-Managing Director of our Science Technology Assessment Analytics team. As Gene mentioned, this is a key thing that we've been growing. We're not quite done yet, and we're still working on it. But to understand a little bit more about the team is that we help GAO and the Congress understand the science and tech innovations and their effect, either current or their potential future effects or effects on our nation, on the environment, the economy, society, et cetera, and the ethical, legal, social issues. We also do oversight of federal S&T programs and research and development. And we have thinkers on that today to talk about that, especially as it pertains to the new fourth industrial revolution that we're in, this digital economy, and how we maintain or encourage competitiveness and innovation for the benefit of the American people. But I really just wanted to amplify -- as I pivot, I'm going to introduce our experts in a moment -- but three things that the Comptroller General said. One was the number of challenges that we are facing today, right? Think climate change, cybersecurity, global pandemics, et cetera. So we have a large number of things. And that's a key factor of why we are needing to even more so today look to the future century at GAO to deal with these issues in an agile and digital content-centric manner. The second is the breadth of the issues. As Gene had mentioned, there's AI, there's 5G. He mentioned nationalist insecurity and homeland issues, homeland security issues. Those are -- we just cover a very broad area. S&T isn't strictly just within STAA. We have all of our sister teams working on various things in science. Tech is popping up there. But the third area is the rate of those things. And so it feels like when it rains, it pours with these shocks of these trends all coming and converging at one time. And so now more than ever, we are thinking with foresight, for sure, as we look forward to our forthcoming century. So very excited today with the distinguished panel of experts that we have. And I'd like to just pause and introduce them one at a time. So the first I'll introduce is Bill Bonvillian who's a lecturer and who's the senior director or director of special projects with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or MIT's Office of Digital Learning. And he is also importantly, a Polaris council member. And Gene mentioned our expertise that we've been building and the advisory bodies that we have, and we were honored to have Bill on Polaris. And we're thankful for his insight for that. He's been a lecturer at MIT since many -- 17 years. He's been a senior policy advisor in the US Senate. He's been in directing MIT's Washington office from 2006 to 2017. And he teaches on science and tech policy at MIT and again, leads this Office of Digital Learning. So welcome, Bill. If you turn your camera on, and just wave that will be helpful. Thank you. Next is Suzette Kent. I'm delighted to introduce Suzette. She's our former Federal Chief Information Officer. And she had served in this role from January 29 in 2018, through July of 2020. And as CIO, Suzette was responsible for setting federal IT policy and leading the Federal CIO Council, which is composed of CIOs from various federal government departments and agencies. So prior to this, she came and she was a principal of the banking and capital markets advisory team at the Ernst and Young Financial Services Office in Dallas. Importantly, in her post-government life, Suzette -- I'm proud to call her friend and she's a great thinker and leader about data and analytics and what that means. So I have no doubt we'll be hearing about that kind of discussion today with Suzette and others as we think about AI. Then next we have Yuri Beckelman, who's the staff director for the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. Yuri was appointed on January 26th of 2021 as the staff director for the Select committee, but he is a veteran congressional staffer with more than 15 years of policy and management experience. Most recently, he was serving as the Deputy Chief of Staff to Representative Mark Takano. Mr. Takano is a big proponent of the growth of S&T capabilities within the Congress. And so Yuri has a lot of depth and experience through Mr. Takano's office and now with the Select Committee on Modernization of Congress. He also has experience as a senior advisor to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs. And then last but certainly not least, I'm proud to introduce a member of STAA's staff, particularly the innovation lab, our newest entity within STAA and GAO that the Comptroller General mentioned. This is Jessica Guillory, she is a senior data scientist and she spent her career in analytics as a statistician, as a survey methodologist, a research administrator, working in the academic environment. And as one of GAO's data scientists in the innovation lab, she focuses on data-driven designs that include data literacy, data governance, automation, visualization. And really the whole purpose of the innovation lab is to try and drive evolutions or maybe even transformative capabilities to support evidence-based policymaking for both GAO and the Congress moving forward. So those are our distinguished panelists. Thanks, and it's a delight to have you all here. As a reminder to the audience, we're going to ask -- we ask you to ask your questions in the chat throughout the hour. We're going to try and address them as they come up. And then, especially if they're relevant to the real time discussion, we will have an open Q&A session beginning at 2:00 PM Eastern time. And at that time, again, we'll encourage the use of the chat features to raise any questions to the panel. So with that, let me kick off the panel discussion with the question. Bill, I'll just start this one with you. And this is a multipart. You know, this is consistent with the way oversight operates. As you know, having been a staffer yourself. There's layered questions. So we'll get through this, but I really wanted to have you kick us off and tell us what you see as some of the key trends in the S&T policy community that we need to be getting smart on right now. Right. The other thing related to that then, Bill, is what are the fundamental changes that you see, and how the federal government approves and manages major R&D spending now and into the future? And you might want to talk about the Endless Frontier Act. I know you have a lot of thinking on that, writing on that, as well as the infrastructure bills, as examples of how you see oversight of R&D needing to change moving into the future. So, Bill, if you kick us off, then we'll allow comments for the other panelists once you make your make your remarks. Thank you.

>> Bill Bonvillian: Sure, Tim. Let me try and give you kind of an integrated answer to that and reflect on some of the things that I'm seeing starting to emerge. Look, there really is an emerging US industrial strategy that's starting to happen. I'm really kind of seeing something of a sea change in US R&D policy. It's going to require new science and technology capabilities, and new oversight. You know, what are the drivers here? You know, we've got a very significant competition over technology leadership with China that's involving a lot of impetus for new energy technology development. And then we're in a pandemic. The pandemic in turn has driven a significant science response as well. Over $100 billion is either in place or is now pending for these kind of what I will call industrial strategy programs, that move from our historic kind of, let's do research, leave the rest to something else -- industry primarily. But moving from that research only kind of focus to including the later stages, the later stage development, the prototyping, the demonstration and testing, pilot production, and market creation and implementation. In other words, these policies start to move us down the innovation pipeline to include not just research but the later stages as well. So this is not the first time we've done this, right? So there have been at least five periods when science and technology policy was driven to include this industrial strategy element, i.e. to become more connected. During World War II, we really created a very connected system between industry, government and universities in the course of that conflict. Then in the post-war period, there was a real disconnect. Vannevar Bush the architect of US science organizations in many ways, pushed for a basic research model that got applied to the civilian R&D agencies. Then Sputnik was the next stage, third stage, where the Defense Department really had to fully reconnect its system, really reintegrate with industry and with university research. And DARPA, NASA came out of this period. Fourth period was around competitiveness, the kind of 1980s competition over manufacturing and quality production with Japan, the Bayh-Dole Act, SBIR, Cemetech, the manufacturing extension program, the R&D tax credit. A suite of programs that move further down that pipeline began evolving. In more recent years, we have kind of two major efforts. Starting in the 2000s, a real focus on reorganizing for energy technology development. And then lately, for the last five or so years, a focus on advanced manufacturing. Each one of these was driven by its own kind of crisis need, which are historically the big drivers for science and tech change. The driving factors during the Cold War was strategic competition. In this new era, strategic competition for sure, but a whole new dimension of economic competition has been added to that, plus energy, plus the pandemic. So we've got five major industrial strategy efforts reflecting one or more of these sets of issues that are on the way. And let's quickly look at what some of those are, Tim. You know, Operation Warp Speed, kind of a model industrial strategy. The coronavirus exposed incredible supply chain vulnerabilities. Operation Warp Speed really played a significant role in moving the vaccine development and production period from like four to 10 years to eight months. Very dramatic shift with a lot of lessons learned there for the future. It used a portfolio approach. It picked winners by selecting the companies that were furthest ahead in kind of four areas of vaccine technologies. It relied deeply on a financing mechanism, guaranteed federal contracts, the preordering of vaccines. There was a deep integration of agency personnel from the health agencies with the companies to help them through the approval processes. No compromise on standards, but a lot of communication. The federal government funded and organized the clinical trials in a very systematic kind of way with industry. And there was a major role in a certification and validation step, this emergency use approval. And then vaccine delivery with military and FEMA systems. So that was kind of a standout project with very dramatic and quite successful results. The Chips Act which, you know, confronts growing international competition in the critical underlying technology semiconductors. The Chips Act has been passed by Congress as a $53 billion appropriation that's pending, inserted into the Endless Frontier Act that I'll get to in a minute. It finances new fabrication plants and foundries for US Chip manufacturing, has a big research technology developments scale-up set of programs and advanced chip technologies, new research consortia and strengthens manufacturing and supply chains. Funding here is for both commerce and defense, as well as industry. The Endless Frontier Act passed the Senate 64 to 32 in June. It's now renamed Innovation and Competition Act there, and then a narrower house version called NSF for the Future passed by a wide bipartisan margin over there on the House side. It has funding for over a five-year period to NSF commerce, energy. It creates a new $29 billion Technology Directorate within NSF. Historically NSF, the basic research agency, this is a new Applied Technology Directorate. It's going to look at 10 advanced technology areas, from AI and quantum to high-performance computing and robotics and biotechnology, cybersecurity and others. It funds the Chips Act, so it's got a major semiconductor element. The new Technology Directorate will fund a whole new group of university technology centers, sort of a new applied focus at universities. It has testing and demonstration funding. It's got a financing provision, and it creates regional innovation hubs, you know, on a competitive basis around the country to spur innovation regionally. A fourth measure, the infrastructure bill, there's $25 billion in there for energy technology, demonstration projects and carbon management, clean hydrogen, renewable energy, nuclear energy, and critical materials and minerals. It creates a whole new DOE Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations. Fifth element here is supply chain resiliency. There was a major White House report in June. Preparations are pending in many of these areas to implement new programs in areas like pharmaceuticals ingredients, supply chains, advanced battery supply chains, critical minerals, semiconductors, all looking at the supply chains, not just the research side. But there are blind spots. You know, we need a new framework to cope with these industrial strategy kind of requirements. We need kind of a new infrastructure here, as well as the talent base to staff it. There are a series of foundational elements that we're going to have to think hard about that are not necessarily in place now, that we're going to have to have to manage these kinds of massive programs. We're going to need better connections to research programs. We're going to need a whole new cadre of trained and experienced managers. This is not like managing an R&D project. It is very different. We're going to have to have teams that are experienced in development, project management, finance, implementation. We're going to need to understand regional innovation. And then for scaling up, a new level of integration with the private sector, because all these sectors are going to be led on the private sector side. New kinds of public/private partnerships are going to be required here. Testing and demonstration so that we get to working prototypes. Technology certification by creating standards, attempts to move technologies and accelerate their production. Integration on the manufacturing side. We learned lessons about the problems with trying to innovate here and produce there, which in turn has been leading to a tendency to produce there, and therefore we have to innovate there as well. Those are very problematic future developments in the US that we need to watch if we want to preserve manufacturing capability here, and the innovation capacity that goes with it. And then on the support side of an industrial strategy -- and there are elements that call for this -- there are financing pieces, there are federal procurement pieces outside of defense, and there are flexible contracting mechanisms. The Defense Procurement Act has been widely used in Operation Warp Speed, and it's called for in the supply chain initiatives. And then other transactions authorities as well, other kinds of contracting mechanisms too. So to wrap up, there's elements of US industrial strategy that are starting to merge outside of the defense sector. It's going to be development, not just research. It's going to be supply chain support, it's going to be critical technology implementation. It's going to be manufacturing programs. It's going to be financing elements. You know, there have been failures in industrial policy kind of areas in the past, particularly for energy demonstrations. So we're going to have to organize. We're going to get these right, and the stakes are very high in getting these right. Thanks, Tim.

>> Timothy Persons: Thanks, Bill. I appreciate that. It just seems like I've noticed a similar thing in terms of a summary comment, is just using the Apple iPhone. Right, the idea of designed in Cupertino and manufactured in Foxconn is -- that's being rethought. And this whole reshaping of supply chain is really accelerated by the pandemic. I think it's a big trend. So thanks for that. Let me just see if there any comments from the fellow panelists here? Very briefly. Any questions from the audience, please put them in the chat.

>> Suzette Kent: Tim, this is Suzette. And I want to just add, Bill laid out such a great framework. I'll just tuck in a couple of interesting points. So industry, government, universities and public/private partnerships. I feel like that's one of the areas we still get to work together, in public/private partnerships. And I should have also said congratulations to comptroller Dodaro and the whole GAO team on hitting 100 years. But as you look at that framework that's laid out, we're trying to advance all the pieces at the same time. Right? So the funding goes to American citizens and universities and our federal agencies that are leading the charge. And that piece of the revolution does force us to look at -- and Bill pointed it out -- cross-discipline capabilities. And you asked a -- kind of in your layered question, you kind of ended that with some of the things that were going on in oversight. And Jessica may have additional comments there. But all those pieces, we see them manifest themselves in both the data acquisition and use space across all of those. What we do with citizens, how public and private come together, what we're doing in research, the capabilities that we're trying to launch. And the oversight in R&D has such an important role in helping ensure those connections are staying in place. And as Gene said in his opening, asking the technical questions, as well as sometimes the ethical and service level, you know, questions about, you know, how do we treat privacy and individual rights, you know, in the right way and consider those as we're moving at an incredible pace? Because of the technology, the high-performance computing in a very challenging cyber world. So that that oversight role becomes a key part of advancing the whole, at the same time, across all those different components that Bill talked about. Especially because the agencies don't own them singularly. They are also working, you know, in hopefully cooperation in their ability to deliver that. So those are some of the things that when I think about the role for the next 100 years, are going to be critically important to our success as the world leader.

>> Timothy Persons: Thanks, Suzette. Very well said. I think again, just hearing the summary because -- like you said, the comptroller general talked about interdisciplinary. Like that's what we're doing as a team here, reflecting what we're trying to do to support oversight, insight and foresight for Congress moving forward. But the general ecosystem, as Bill was outlining things, we really do have to have what I call a large aperture look at things to have this interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral, and I would add the way of business has to be agile. We can no longer take as long as you know, we used to take to try and drive things. I think the time dimension is just the rapid rapidity of the change and the shocks that come upon us, and that's causing things. Okay, so if there are no other comments from any of the panelists, Suzette, since you have the floor, let me just pick on you to go to a question. Because you did mention data. Data are the new oil, right? And we talked about trends and oversight. And you certainly know what that's about, having a key role as our federal CIO. Think about implementing [inaudible] and having that, again, broad look at all of the various things that you had to do. By the way, thank you for your tremendous leadership and what you did in your service and then certainly as you've continued to move forward. But really, I think the key thing is, what are the in the new digital innovation world, these sort of trends, including technologies using data and analytics and AI? How's that going to affect operations in federal agencies? What can we learn from each other in the federal agencies when they're using things like AI? And have we seen any agencies make transitions? Because as you know, change is easy to say, harder to do. And what were some of the use cases or success stories in that regard? So, Suzette, over to you.

>> Suzette Kent: Yeah. Sorry, my video kicked off there. There we go. Well, the exciting thing, Tim, is this is not a conceptual discussion. It is here now. And there are use cases, you know, and we have made progress both on the first year and now they just put out the second year federal data strategy across agencies. And that's about not just using data with a disciplined approach inside federal agencies, but many agencies who have a mandate to share that for reasons to support, you know, our economy, Homeland Security, and very specifically, research. And how we make that available to research communities and support that in different ways. But, you know, we saw situations where now, in various agencies, they've been able to use AI, machine learning, other types of automation and high-performance computing, to advance you know, important things. HHS shared a business case where they took out, you know, repetitive regulations. The VA did some really important things in combining different types of data to help intervene and help situations with veterans and situations that were very dire. Just early November, the IRS chief procurement officer shared an RPA case that I love. They had to modify almost 1,500 contracts, which that process would have taken them a year to do manually. And they did it in 72 hours using automation. They shared that success case, but to be able to do that in all those situations, there had to be fidelity of data and, you know, a rich examination and understanding of not just the capabilities and the build of the technology and the key algorithms, but the business processes and the data that went along with it. So those success stories demonstrated the evolution of the capabilities. And I think we're going to, you know, continue to see more. But as we look to the next 100 years, and that data is coming from many different devices, different places, and gathered in different ways, we have to also be very focused kind of on the provenance and fidelity of the data that we're getting, where it's coming from. Not only just, you know how we're using it, but are we comfortable and confident in the integrity of that towards the purpose that we're trying to use? And on my screen, I keep looking over at Jessica, because I know she's done lots of work in this space. And I'm going to end it with one last thing, Tim. You know, the public/private partnerships. And I know that you have joined us in some conversations with the, you know, Coleridge Initiative, which is a group of universities and private interests and companies in looking at ways that we can use federal data to solve big problems faster and transparently in the public forum. And that's one of the -- it's another kind of key to how we go forward, is finding ways to move faster, and then embed those inside how we deliver services and capabilities inside the federal government.

>> Timothy Persons: Thanks, Suzette. The case for speed is definitely -- that's incredible. 72 hours is what's -- often what we're really trying to look for in the innovation lab is driving to solutions with exponentially less time. But at the same time, the Comptroller General absolutely correctly has the key focus is on quality with respect to our work. So we're never going to sacrifice quality. It's how you get quality in an efficient way. And so that's where we're excited to do that. Let me see if other candidates -- I'm sorry -- other panelists have other comments on, Suzette, what you were just talking about. So Jessica or --

>> Jessica Guillory: Yeah.

>> Timothy Persons: Oh, you're ready. Yeah, go ahead.

>> Jessica Guillory: Yeah, Suzette brought up some great, interesting ideas about our favorite federal data strategy, which we plan on implementing, and we are implementing quite well within GAO. And automation and data governance -- those are two big key items that I plan to go on a little bit more in detail. And I'm glad she brought those up. So those are really good things. And also Bill mentioned Operation Warp Speed. Dashboarding, quick data is something that is very important to us to give people the keys to get quick insights. That's really important in terms of having the data available quickly for them.

>> Yuri Beckelman: Yeah, I'll jump in here a little bit. We would spend quite a bit of time on the committee kind of trying to assess Congress's ability to make decisions based on high-quality data. I love this conversation of data fidelity, right, like the idea that congress has a really difficult time finding, you know, pulling the noise and the static out of really complex datasets and making decisions based on it, right? The signal and the noise is something that is often discussed. You know, as we're building out our capacity, Congress needs its support agencies to continue to share what they are capable of, and what they can achieve and what they can pull in. Congress doesn't have an understanding of that. If you are discussing things like AI, there are extremes here. And there is a belief that either it is magic and it will solve all of our problems, you know, or that it just doesn't work and is totally fallible and there is no business case scenario for it. And we need to get -- on these complicated technology issues, Congress starts in these two camps of it's either magic or it's broken. And through the great work that you all do of trying to help partners understand these technologies, we have a better job -- we do a better job of turning them into real life applications that benefit the work that -- the legislation that we work on and the tools we try to provide to the agencies. But at this point, it's still pretty difficult, as we say, especially when it comes to data. So we need to do a better job of trying to kind of get across what data can do in its current form for Congress.

>> Timothy Persons: Great, thanks, Yuri. Yuri, since you said that, let me go with you. Because, again, you talk about the business of oversight and the future of it. And by the way, I love the -- like I said, I love the wall hanging behind you because, you know, Congress gets a lot of ask. I've heard and I think it's argued it's one of the most solicited bodies in the world. You know, and yet also probably the most criticized, for good or for ill, whichever part you think about that. But oversight --

>> Yuri Beckelman: It deserves both. It deserves both. Both love and affection, and it deserves criticism.

>> Timothy Persons: Yeah, exactly. So really, when you think about the first branch and doing oversight on that, and where we are, you know, you know, since over a century of being a key -- by at least my headcount -- the largest of the congressional apparatus elements to help you do your job. Really this question is about the future of oversight. So what does it really look like when, you know, sometimes getting agencies to transform is already a challenge. But sometimes even when they're doing that, maybe not the clock speed that we want to, it still feels like sometimes oversight committees that have jurisdiction over them are yet still behind even that. So the thing is trying to keep up. It's almost like a double problem. How do you keep the oversight up with the change that it needs to be doing to have its scrutinizing function, you know, under Article One of the Constitution? So what are the challenges that you see the Oversight Committee facing, and not only coming to speed on cutting edge policies, but the basic tools of daily communication and coordination?

>> Yuri Beckelman: Yeah, collecting, understanding and deciphering and translating data is something that Congress as an institution has a real gap in understanding. I've been working in this space for a while, and we still have a large technology gap that we've had for a while. We do a really bad job of conflating four areas of technology for a staffer. Your technology staffer is the person who does your IT, who does your social media, you know, who builds the technology tool for your office, and also handles technology policy. It's way too often those four are conflated there. We are small offices and small operations. But we've gotten better in that space, frankly. And it's a kudos to everyone that's worked on highlighting how big of a problem that is. And, you know, you look at people like Travis Moore over at Tech Congress, you know, Zack Graves over at Lincoln, who have really highlighted this big problem. And there has been attention paid to it. I will say that even though we've gotten better at it, understanding and deciphering data is something that we have almost no capacity, very little capacity on in a meaningful way. Our committee has been looking at and offering recommendations on spending more time trying to train staff so they understand how to get through this. As someone who's tried to dig into this in the past, we have a big problem of data being really difficult to dig through. I'm sure, as you all know, every agency that we speak with has a different protocol for how they provide access to that data, what data that comes in. You know, I've been sent, you know, 300,000-cell Excel nonsense spreadsheets that like are not useful. Similarly, you go to the Census, or you go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and you can get one set of data by using their public facing website and another set of data by calling the Congressional Relations. And that doesn't serve anyone well, and these are frustrations we are dealing with and trying to understand. And we need to spend some time in digging through this. A recommendation we actually passed today -- we passed 25 recommendations today, which we're very proud of in both the civility and collaboration space, but also in the commercial support agencies and evidence-based lawmaking space. And one of them is a recommendation to put together a task force to look into things such as a chief data officer. And a chief data officer is not just about compiling data that we produce. It's also about deciphering and collecting data that is useful to Congress and training staff on how to understand that data. So we are digging into this, but it is a huge staff capacity issue that we have not paid very much attention to that we need to.

>> Timothy Persons: Yeah, thanks. It really is, to Suzette's point about the complexity of the challenges, sort of the interdisciplinary nature of things, even with committees with large jurisdictions, sometimes things just aren't fitting neatly into that. So really the coordination is easy to say but hard to do. And, you know, I think I hear you saying we can have data-driven, evidence-based policymaking might help out in that regard, even though that's still harder. Is that correct? Or would you add to any other thing? Like how do you attack that problem? People want it.

>> Yuri Beckelman: Yeah, absolutely. People want it. People are desperate for it. People are hungry for it. I can tell you that, you know, when we are putting together proposals, we are trying to understand the real-world impacts of them. And too often, we assign either a binary like look at it, that is either going to, you know, cost too much or cost too little. And that's not the point of data. The data gives you a range to try to understand the real-world implications of it, and how we can continue to adjust. And that is something that Congress does a really bad job at understanding. I'll tell you about a fun project I did, though, to try to kind of get Congress more in this space. Congress, while it might be averse or lacking an understanding of data, it does love a good chart. And I worked on a project here -- it was kind of a fun idea called International Chart Day. And we brought in and highlighted how some of the world's great data visualization experts build and populate and translate data for the public, and had them come in and share that information. And then did an evening kind of reception along with some of the best flow charts we'd seen for the year, to kind of build a culture around the idea that data is interesting, informative, can be entertaining, grab people's attention. And so we need to continue to keep doing some fun projects like that, as well as building capacity amongst our staff. But there is a hunger for people who want it. You know, people -- and frankly, the American people are demanding more of it. It's almost like the CSI effect, right? Like that if you hear law enforcement folks, they hear the public has a higher expectation of forensic tools being used that are somewhat unrealistic for everyone but are expected, because that's the perception that media, you know, has given that is available. That is carrying over to lawmaking. The public expects a certain amount of data collection and understanding of real-world implications to go into these decisions that we are making, that we are not equipped for yet, and that we will have to meet if we are going to make the public happy, which is sort of what we are constantly trying to do in Congress, to make our constituents feel like they're being represented well.

>> Timothy Persons: We also have in partnership with our communications team -- because part of this is just the need for digital communications. When STAA was stood up, there was a strong need to help Congress not only deliver good quality work, but help Congress absorb that in an efficient and legislative ops tempo for the 21st century. And so we did stand up our -- Gene mentioned the digital dashboards and how we're thinking about oversight now. We did that for OWS. Bill mentioned that program. It's in the chat. But let me throw it to Suzette. I think you have an example for this, as I recall, as well. Is that right?

>> Suzette Kent: Yeah, a specific example. And in what you just said, you said a key word -- helping Congress absorb before, kind of during, as a part of a lifecycle, versus only when you're talking about an event or a particular issue, because sometimes that is overwhelming. And you know, one example or one, you know, situation -- almost every member of Congress wants to talk about outcomes. And whereas not many people wanted to talk about data cleansing or anonymity or collection or whatever. And there was, you know, a particular thing that we're doing now about, how much does a healthy meal cost Americans around, you know, our country? And we're using scanner data, you know, from public/private partnerships and USDA and all these different pieces. It's a very complicated set of, you know, data collection and algorithms and oversight. But that's not as interesting as the outcomes, right? And so in engaging in the conversation with members of Congress, to Yuri's last point, starting with, what's the outcome we're trying to achieve, what's the thing that's being driven? And then highlight, you know, the pieces that are needed for policy or funding or resourcing support. It is a way that that we can help be translators. And I know that, you know, GAO does that and brings in other people to help do that, to help move faster. So making something that may, you know, seem complex, bringing it much closer to the outcome and the results that we want to achieve.

>> Timothy Persons: Thanks, Suzette. That's fantastic insight. Bill, let me just -- because I know we're going to pivot to Jessica in just a moment, because we're going to hear from a practitioner of this. Like you said, Suzette, you know, nobody wants to hear about how hard the data engineering is, although it's critically important. That's usually the heavy lift behind things. And it's, you know, again, easy to say, hard to do. So we'll hear from Jessica in a moment about that, and especially governance. But before we did, I wanted to see if Bill, in your 17 years on the Senate, you know, you have a lot of experience in oversight. Where do you see it going today to deal with these complex, adaptive systems challenges that we really are facing today?

>> Bill Bonvillian: You know, Tim, I concur with the comments that that Yuri and Suzette have been making. I mean, this is a capability that we're going to need to have in the oversight process to really be able to do the kind of analysis that's needed. You know, but as you heard from, you know, my rap, you know, there's a whole series of kind of new roles that the government is going to be playing here, as we move towards an industrial strategy kind of approach. Data is one analytical piece. But there's a whole series of skillsets that the government is going to have to have. And we're going to need to build the oversight capability to be able to understand where those are working and where they aren't working and how to fix them. Because at the moment, we don't really have that capability piece in place to kind of manage these new strategies that are going to be sent our way.

>> Timothy Persons: Right. Thanks, Bill. Appreciate that. So all right, well, let me pivot, just because the phrase data governance has come up a number of times. And I'm actually -- after I introduce her, I'm going to put it in the chat box, we have a GA report that actually just went out on the status of data governance in the federal government. So a big topic, big time. But we're going to hear from Jessica as a practitioner on this particular topic to help us out in this regard. So really, Jessica, from the perspective of the practitioner, what do you see the key areas of growth, and upscaling that federal knowledge workers like analysts, data scientists, et cetera, are going to need in order to effectively utilize new technologies? And with that, what are the tools in the trade that are going to be for oversight of the oversight community? It could be GAO auditors, it could be congressional staff. What is that going to look like in the next century or after a century? And how are we at GAO planning to upskill in that regard? So Jessica, over to you.

>> Jessica Guillory: Okay. Well, Tim, in the next 100 years, I'll still be here at GAO to help us navigate through that.

>> Timothy Persons: I'm very pleased to hear that. That's very comforting.

>> Jessica Guillory: So Yuri, Suzette and Bill brought up some very good points, interesting topics that I just want to go over in general of how us at GAO are modernizing our data strategy. First, we're looking at data literacy, then data governance, and then data science. So within data literacy, we focus on being problem centric, no matter what part of the -- what part or what area of GAO you're in, whether you're in engagements to Congress, or you're in HR, building operations or IT. So we want to encourage and enable everyone to use data to make decisions. So in our data literacy program, we want to give support and motivation, and the tools, abilities and also give access to the data. Now in keeping up with that, and I think it was Bill, who mentioned something about that -- Bill and Suzette -- in keeping up with the outside skills to integrate, we want to maintain and improve contractor and private sector relationships, which involve learning and data literacy. So the next focus would be data governance. Now, data governance is very -- it's a very broad topic. But overall it's the strategy for handling data to maximize its value. One important thing at GAO is also knowing what we have. So that's one part of data governance, is knowing what we have, right? So in that, we want to build a robust data governance ecosystem to eliminate these data silos. Because once Bob retires, we need to know what data is out there, what he did, quick access to it. And that's one component of data governance. And the next part is data science. So in terms of data science, we could talk about the data science infrastructure. Bill, Yuri and Suzette all mentioned all this data that's hard to get easy access. We want to have scalable storage capabilities of data. So within data science, we have different parts, not only the actual analytics part, but we have the data architecture and data engineering. So we want to increase our computing power, what's going on now, because we're going to have a lot more data in 100 years. We have a lot now. So we need that efficiency and speed to decisions. Bill mentioned Operation Warp Speed as a dashboard. We want to have easy and available access. So we want to have these, I would call it self-service analytics, creating automated processes, creating dashboards, as Bill mentioned, with Operation Warp Speed. And just having data available for people. Now as we go from the value, we go from hindsight to foresight, so we looked at the value of previous centennial events. And now we're going into foresight. And the same applies to data analytics, right? We want to apply this to data. What did we do in the past -- the hindsight part -- and also what we can do in the future. So we could use the data to decide what should we do next. And we also have a lot of data out there, right. So we have more data options. And we also need more storage, for example, we just don't have tabular data anymore. We have video data, we have image, we have audio, text, tweets. We have to have that available to us, and we have to have it in a storage system that's scalable and that we can easily get to and analyze.

>> Timothy Persons: That's great. So I really want to focus on the human capital piece. So part of this, Jessica, because you're an example of that. So I like talking with you because you are the vision of the future. And I sincerely hope you stay around as much as we can, with advances in regenerative medicine or things, we'll keep you for another 100. So no, we'll let you retire when it's time. But the point is, is really human capital. And the comptroller general has spoken well on this. We in STAA have work on the STEM or the science, tech, engineering, math workforce. And of course, data science is involved in that kind of thing. How can we think about developing and getting more Jessica's, right? So we need more of that. How should we think about that? And what should our strategy be?

>> Jessica Guillory: Yeah, so I would say, you know, we have people not only -- you know, we can get people with PhDs in statistics, but how do we focus on those people who have humanities degrees? I think that's where it comes in important with the data literacy. So data literacy is pretty broad. We could have it from the leadership perspective, all the way to the analyst or the PDP here, right? So we can give access, and we could give tools and abilities to grow, whether they want to just learn how to build dashboards, versus where they want to learn deep learning or predictive modeling. So giving people the tools to be able to learn this and upskill themselves for that would help with increasing our capacity.

>> Timothy Persons: Yeah, so it seems it's almost as if we're going to have -- just like decades ago with the rise of the desktop, you know, personal computer and the PC, having a PC was necessary, but not sufficient. You had to have usage of that. And there are folks who are going to work on computers all the time and be very in-depth technically. And then there are folks that are going to use a computer as a tool, and they don't really need to know all the back-end type things. They need to use it, they need to have a general understanding, but there's a variance. In other words, for things like data science and AI, you know, does everyone need to have a PhD from MIT or Carnegie Mellon in order to do the work? And the answer's no. But we do have to think about that spectrum of work and look across those various things. Suzette, jump in, please.

>> Suzette Kent: Tim, one thing you know from our other conversations in the private sector work that I do, this is one of the areas I'm really passionate about. I'm going to answer it a little differently and even more blunt. We need to start the conversations younger in school. We need to be making the future roles in technology and critical thinking interesting and exciting in elementary school. And you know, those are some of the things Congress has their hand in, and making those available along the whole pipeline. But for everyone that's currently part of the workforce, making continuous skilling and reskilling and access to capability development part of our working world, right? We have, you know, we have things we have to do today. But as we look to that next 100 years, we have to start the foundation a long time, you know, before. Otherwise, every single agency is going to be fighting you for Jessica to come work at their agency.

>> Timothy Persons: Oh, that's already happening.

>> Suzette Kent: Because they need the skills. So it's a bigger conversation. And that's a conversation about today, the future. And then like I said, investing in our workforce, whether it's the GAO team or agency teams. I know the thing that often frustrated me when I was inside the government, is I would see some of that continuous learning in places when we would move to a major new technology not be part of the plan. And, you know, if we're not investing in all of that kind of simultaneously, back to the way Bill started us off, we can't advance that cross-disciplinary agenda at the same time. So what the folks here can do is be aggressive in all the places where we need to build talent.

>> Timothy Persons: Thanks. Yeah, I knew that was a key thing you'd jump in on, Suzette, the passion you have which is great about the human capital issues.

>> Yuri Beckelman: And I want here too, really quick.

>> Timothy Persons: Yeah, please.

>> Yuri Beckelman: I think it's not just about human capital and understanding that. It's also about data communicators, right? Like what I was getting at earlier is that there is a community of really excited data communicators who have taken digital visualization and adapted it for our pop culture society, right? Like there was like a Tumblr that was like -- there was a whole like Tumblr community, online community about charts who turned it into a bunch of books. And we need to bring them more in-house about, what did they see that they can tell us that connects with people, that tells a story? When we did this, you know, this International Chart Day, I found two things really interesting. It ended up being less about explaining and bringing people into the world of needing to have digital data understanding, and more about a celebration of these digital data communicators. They really appreciated it. And the other thing is I found out how much visual data communicators hate pie charts. Yeah, like, I never really understood why. And the explanation is that if you're using a pie chart, you're not really explaining anything, if you have more than three slices to that pie. It becomes very convoluted and not really a good job of condensing. And the only thing that's worse than a pie chart is a 3D pie chart, because it does an even worse job at telling that story. Right? And these are things that, if we can bring these people in to kind of help our technical people through the lens of good old-fashioned kind of pop culture marketing, I think that would spread in a way that is organic, that is not just about sitting down and taking a course on, you know, on Tableau or whatever the latest tech tool is.

>> Timothy Persons: Right. No, that's very important. I mean, on the visualization thing, when we founded the innovation lab and stood up the team, I like to quote something attributed to St. Francis centuries ago, which was he would say, "Preach the gospel always, but use words if necessary." So not making things simplistic like pie chart only, but trying to convey the complexity of things in an efficient manner. Yuri, that's our focus in terms of what we're wanting to do, using the digital platforms of today, being data driven and so on and efficiently providing it to you all, our clients, to operate at the 21st century tempo that you're now in. Right? But for us doing that, it feels like -- or I've heard but you can tell me one way or the other. I've heard that, you know, other than that, you're just relegated to some issues or whatever the staffer can pull up in the top five hits of Google, synthesized by lunch and delivered to the -- so you know, decision makers are being fed but maybe not the best things necessarily in all issues.

>> Yuri Beckelman: You just described like a job description for a second-year legislative assistant, right? Like that is exactly what it is. Right? "Help me make this argument," rather than, what are the facts and figures behind the issue that I'm trying to understand? And we need to reshape that so that we are looking -- when we have a problem, the solution is based on what we discover through understanding the data sets up front. It's much more valuable, much more interesting, rather than then coming back to, "Give me some data that will back up my point of view."

>> Timothy Persons: Yes, exactly. I'm going to turn to Jessica and then again throw it over. This is just -- this is a very important -- it's a practical question. Right? So for our audience, the key thing is about, what can I do now? Right, we can talk about the trends, but we can also like think globally, but act locally, right? So how do I start to think about preparing myself now for this more tech- and data-centered auditing or oversight future? So this just goes right into what you're saying. How do we not, Yuri, and up in that, you know, I Google something and deliver it like this, the second year legislative assistant or something? So, Jessica, why don't you kick us off with that? And then I have no doubts Suzette will have lots of great things to say. Yuri and Bill, please jump in.

>> Jessica Guillory: Well, I think it would be also ways to increase efficiency and monitor performance quickly. So some skills related to that would be reaching out also to people who are more analytically inclined, to talk to them about their process and what they think data analysis would mean in terms of what project they're looking at. So it all comes -- and it's very broad, but I always go back to data literacy, understanding, knowing what you have and how you can use it. And talking to some -- if you don't know how you can use it, you could talk to some people to kind of flesh out those ideas. Staying up to date on current technologies. That's like Yuri said, we talk about just Googling and looking at things. You can be a part of email distributions, not only within the government, but outside in the private sector that will keep you updated on things. We also have a lot of -- within the learning center, we have a lot of tools that are available to learn data science, or just in general data analytics. So I think it's more about going out there and understanding what we have or learning what we have to increase your knowledge, both within GAO, within the government, and also in the private sector.

>> Yuri Beckelman: Yeah. And I would jump in and say that, as for the experts on here who do have a very technical background, who are building these tools to help Congress understand, even when they are available, Congress feels a level of frustration that the tools that are available to them are not intuitive. And even sometimes feeling that, depending on where I go and enter that dataset, putting in the same query will get me different results. And there's this feeling of anxiety as a staffer when you are dealing with data, that someone is going to be able to able to easily disprove the data that you found, even though you thought it was from a government site and pretty infallible. So there needs to be both intuitiveness in how it's accessed, but also just a trust in that they will be able to stand by the data and how they accessed it. So we need your help in in creating the access platforms and really backing up what we're able to get out of it.

>> Timothy Persons: You hit on a key issue. Just real quick, you said the T word, which is trust. And trust in government, you know, it's such a critical thing in terms of just trying to reinforce from the lowest level, you know, evidence-based policymaking, those sort of things. And that's a key challenge indeed, especially because when the same technologies and analytics can help you drive toward insights and so on and truth, other things can be used for disinformation. And that's a big challenge.

>> Yuri Beckelman: Well, let me give you a little fun example. I'm not going to name any names, but I've been in meetings where I'm the one who produced the data. And inevitably, there's going to be some back of the napkin math that says that the reality of data is that you are making some safe assumptions when you are trying to take the data that is available and turn it into a narrative or a story that is supportive of the argument that you are making. But I've gone into meetings where people have looked at that data, and based on their own internal assumptions, not based on actually looking at data, told me that there is no way that that is correct. In fact, it is so incorrect, you should be ashamed to have brought that in. And my boss who was relying on me for that data turns to you and says, you know, "Where did you get this data from?" And I will tell you as a as a second-year legislative assistant, your knees start to tremble, and you worry about your future career prospects. But if you have an ability to really dig through these things, you can stand by it. That happened to me. And what's funny is that a member of the other person's staff came over to me and said, "You're data's right. Don't worry about it." But that is the fear and terror that exists inside being that junior staffer, you know, who was who was trying to kind of access and trust and understand the data.

>> Timothy Persons: Sure.

>> Suzette Kent: Yeah. Tim, I want to jump on Yuri's comment. Very often, if people don't like the outcome of the results, the first thing they'll do is either attack the process or the data, right?

>> Timothy Persons: Exactly, right.

>> Suzette Kent: Or this source information's wrong. It's kind of human nature. But back to I saw some questions in the chat and your question. Sometimes in my discussions, I use the tactic of reverse engineering. And literally say, this is the outcome that we got to because -- and then share some of the insights of it was gathered in this way, it was used, you know, for this. These other processes around, not all the weeds, but just enough of the weeds to build, to your point, trust. Especially if it's someone who you don't necessarily have a relationship. Or be highly selective in your data sources. Start with a set of trusted data that that member or that staff team sees frequently and they're comfortable with it, right? Because then you kind of have an advantage or a jump, because they have some level of familiarity. And sometimes that means you have to do a different kind of homework if you're trying to bring something. The other tactic that I love to use when I think the gap in explaining is long, is share pre-reads. Share information that's been gathered before to make people feel comfortable. They may not understand it, either. And in so many cases, there's supporting information, even if you're just recapping the process and how we got there. And say, "Hey, you want to ask me about this before we get there?" And those are just all tactics, practical tactics that anyone at any level can use with anyone, you know, at any level if you're trying to prepare that conversation.

>> Timothy Persons: Yeah, that's great. I appreciate that, Suzette. So I did want to pause. There's a great comment from our colleagues who are also doing, by the way evidence-based policymaking of their own. And this is our Dutch colleagues, Mark Smolenar from the Netherlands court audit. They have some work there that I commend that to you. But we have seen some other things. It's great to have connectivity, both domestically in the US and internationally with the oversight community on just how do you, what I call convert question to answer in an efficient manner, accurately, data-driven, resulting in trusted and more virtuous policy outcomes and things like that? Think of the pandemic. In 2020, we had many briefings every day. You still had models, however, imperfect they were. We are still going to make decisions on what do we do with this and that? That's my favorite example of saying, you know, the decisions aren't going to wait around. So many of them can't wait. And so we have to think differently in terms of what we're doing. So I wanted to -- there's a question here from Jess who's asking -- let me just toss it to Bill -- how does the federal government take, you know, agile lessons? Because Bill, you mentioned, Operation Warp Speed, a stunning success in that sense, right? It moved normally a 10-year process to 10 months. And you know, to speed up vaccines. Of course, Congress is naturally going to ask, why don't we do 10 months all the time for that? So the answer's more complicated. But just going back to your opening comments, Bill about Warp Speed and things, how can we take these agile lessons learned and sort of generalize them to other, you know, economic and innovation systems? You may be on mute, Bill.

>> Bill Bonvillian: Sorry, I think we need to build in an analytical piece after we take each one of these steps to really have kind of a lessons learned process. You know, the military does this after operations, but I think we're going to need to do it in a more encompassing kind of way across government to really kind of take the lessons learned and figure out, you know, how they bode for further or comparable kinds of efforts. We don't have that process locked in place. But I think, you know, GAO, for example, could play a very important kind of role in that analytical process. And obviously, it's doing a fair amount of it already.

>> Timothy Persons: Yeah. Yeah, we are big fans of agile. We're doing agile implementing for our work ourselves. And then we also have an agile best practices guide that we put out of our team. We're very proud of our group that has a lot of engineering sciences things there to help essentially curate and develop best practices ideas, in this case of agile. So I'll put that in the chat as well. So one of the things I just want to turn to is that, Suzette, I'm just going to pull out from the federal CIO perspective, in my opinion, you were of course the CIO. You were kind of a CDO as well, the chief data officer. So it was really cool to see a CIO working in a CDO, or could speak like a CDO, and I think it was very important. It was recognizing the data as an asset. And I put earlier in our chat that our team had just done some of that oversight work on the improvements that we've seen, which is good. But really, when you think about the data as an asset, and then pivoting towards the future, which is going to be AI-enabled government services, those sort of things, what are the key things that still need to be done? You know, data governance, easy to say, but harder to do. You know, what are some of the things? I know you initiated the things that need to have continued focus, particularly from the oversight community.

>> Suzette Kent: You know, Tim, kind of in sharing that, one of the reasons that I wanted to be very close to all of the activities is, as you'll remember, we just implemented the Chief Data Officer role as an outcome from evidence-based policymaking and the Data Act and others. And it was very important both to understand what the role needed to be and separate it from other things that we already have. But ensure that we were clear on what we were hoping to achieve with every agency. Not just getting people, you know, in seats, but clarity around the actions. And the way that we did that and ensuring that those individuals were important contributors to their agency, because that's really what the law was about, was getting results. And the way that -- again, the way that we did that was taking that 124-person group of chief data officers, and bringing them together and finding the common ground for both problems that we could solve as a whole and what was missing. Because in many cases, somebody was named to the chief data officer, but in, you know, their own words, they said, "Well, I don't know that I have the skills." Or, "I can do some of that, but I'm also doing this other thing." As we looked to the future, we had to be much more robust in definition of expectations and acquiring skillsets. Some folks if -- I don't know who out here is following certain pieces of legislation -- you know, that on the federal agency side, we don't even actually have a chief data officer job family. I mean, excuse me, a data scientist job series.

>> Timothy Persons: Job series, right.

>> Suzette Kent: Job series. We put it in different places. We ran to -- I think Bill used the word a couple times and Yuri used it, and Jessica, all -- data literacy. We ran programs to not just -- you know, for the technology staff, absolutely. But also for leaders and agencies to understand, what does data driven mean? How do you work in an evidence-based environment? What does that mean? And you know, quite frankly, some of the conversations were tougher with the business side than the technology side. But to your question, we have to continue to build the talent. We have to continue to embed the disciplined processes in how we operate day to day or how we drive and plan technology change. And we have to make our form of communications -- Yuri said communications. I heard someone else say translators. A couple of the questions in the chat were asking about learning. We have to make data-driven conversations and data-centric conversations as part of our standard mode of communication, so that we're building those different expectations. And many times, it starts with the top. So when you have an agency head who prioritizes and helps drive, it helps move the needle faster. But I think the GAO team has opportunity to drive that expectation, even in how conversations happen, you know, whether it's with members or with agencies.

>> Yuri Beckelman: I would like to just jump into that, too. I think that one thing I would hope that we get to a place on is that the data starts to look more similar from agency to agency. And that's something that I think I want Congress and our committee to look at. That the data from BLS can be compared to data at the Census in a much clearer and simpler way for Congress to understand and put up against one another. It's no longer acceptable for our government to say that this dataset doesn't speak to this dataset. I think that people are demanding quite a bit more from us. And I think the way to get there is by Congress setting out some guidelines with support from experts. I think that's the future of data understanding for all of us.

>> Timothy Persons: Thank you. I did want to just mention, because Suzette, you mentioned chief data officers, and again, thanks for all that great work and elevating that role. We also have within STAA, but really for the institution, our newest chief is our chief data scientist, Taka Ariga, who is recently in partnership with Steve. So we're going to hear from Steve in just a few minutes in his panel as we come to a close on this session. But Taka and Steve partnered together, put together a very important accountability framework around artificial intelligence, how to look at that. Of course, data governance is central to that, but also the quality monitoring and the data engineering and the data science type pieces of things that are important with that. I'm going to just put that in the chat, if only to say, you know, as GAO looks to its next century, we are taking that evidence-based posture with a lot of powerful data science, creating an environment in our innovation lab to de-risk things so that our clients don't have to have that risk. We can try and do that and put that and keep it within the frame of GAO's Quality Assurance Framework, which is quite strong. And just like you said, Yuri, when it's wobbly knees time, GAO has experienced that before. You know, challenge the data, challenge the methods. That's why we have and we do have a strong quality metric system here. So if there are -- let me just pause and see if the panelists, if you have any closing remarks. Otherwise, I'm going to close with a thank you all. And we're going to pivot to our next session. But let me pause here. Any final thoughts, comments, remarks? Anything left unsaid?

>> Yuri Beckelman: I would just always make the pitch that, you know, Congress is an institution with, you know, all of its foibles that we should all be investing in and trying to help do its job. And its job is to represent and serve the American people. And we can only do that job if we have the data to back up the decisions that we're making. That is the future of legislating. The future of legislating is evidence-based legislating, and we need your help to get there. And GAO, CRS and CBO, as well as other agencies, have been kind of helping us the whole way, and we're only going to start asking more of you. So you've got to be ready for it and work with us. And we genuinely appreciate you and all of the work that all of you do. It really does kind of -- it does improve the product that we're putting together over here. And I don't think you're going to find a single staffer over here that doesn't genuinely enjoy and appreciate these support agencies like CBO, CRS, and GAO. They're always amazed by what is coming out. And I know plenty of good entrepreneurial staffers who are digging through reports, looking for recommendations that they can turn into policy. So it doesn't go away. You have good people who read your long reports that are meaningful, that impact the work that they're doing.

>> Timothy Persons: Thanks, Yuri. And on behalf of GAO, thank you for that kind remark. We really do appreciate it. So Suzette, Bill or Jessica, any final comments?

>> Suzette Kent: Yeah. Thanks, everyone, for their investment of time here today. You know, as I've again watched the chat, there's been lots of resources and insights and things, you know, in that chat. And just by being part of this conversation and making a thoughtful reflection on what you heard, you are making an investment going forward. And I already said congratulations. But when Gene shared the diversity metrics of GAO and the accomplishments on Best Places to Work, that also says so about your leadership role, you know, across government in bringing differentiated thinking and helping us all move forward. So thank you for that work.

>> Timothy Persons: Thanks very much, Suzette. Go ahead, Bill.

>> Bill Bonvillian: Tim, as a longtime Hill staffer and frequent user of GAO's capabilities, they're really crucial. So thanks to this group for their focus on these issues. And I'll just close by saying, you know, the role of science and technology is going to be more and more profound as we look ahead toward this future. It's going to be more and more embedded in everything we can undertake. And building the resources and capabilities to use those tools, but also to manage the new tasks that the tools will compel, I think is going to be key.

>> Timothy Persons: Yeah. And thanks, I'll just say thanks, Jessica, for being our young generation, rising up and saving our older generation. This always sort of happens in cyclical form. So we appreciate what you're doing. We're out of time. So I'm going to just close and say thank you, Jessica, Bill, and Suzette, and Yuri, for your tremendous work and then your time here today to talk about these particular issues. In just a moment, we're going to hear from representative Robin Kelly, as well, as former congressman Will Hurd. I'm going to pass it right now to my colleague, Steve Sanford, passing the baton. He's going to carry forward and lead us into those comments and then into his panel. So Steve, over to you.

>> Stephen Sanford: Thank you, Tim. Thank you, everyone who participated in the previous panel. Very happy to be continuing the conversation today. I think this first panel ended on an apt note talking about GAO's service to the Congress. So we're very pleased to hear shortly from current and former members of Congress, taking stock of some of the issues we're talking about today. Then following that, I'm very excited, we're going to go into our second panel where we're going to have leading global thinkers and leaders in the field of foresight, strategy and global affairs talking about some important issues moving forward in terms of the global context we find ourselves operating in, and the importance that plays in the mission that GAO has going forward into the next century of our operations. So before we get to that second panel, I would like to introduce Sharaelle Grzesiak. Sharaelle is a member of our team, is the Assistant Director for the Center for Strategic Foresight, and has been a valuable member of our team in terms of strategic planning and bringing foresight thinking to GAO, and is a leading thinker and practitioner of foresight and future studies. And Sharaelle will introduce our congressional remarks today. Sharaelle, over to you.

>> Sharaelle Grzesiak: Thank you, Steve. What an honor to be here today on such a momentous occasion. I would like to take the opportunity today to share a bit about the Center. The Center for Strategic Foresight was established at GAO to identify emerging issues, challenges and opportunities to help GAO fulfill its mission to support the United States Congress in making the federal government more efficient and effective. The Center launched in 2018 with an inaugural cohort of nine resident fellows. These fellows are experts in foresight and future thinking from around the world. Collectively, the fellows' backgrounds span government, the private sector, nongovernmental organizations, academia, and international organizations. And today you'll be hearing from a few of them. The Center for Strategic Foresight is a unique entity in the United States government, and reflects the full scope of GAO's oversight mission across the entire federal enterprise. The center embodies GAO's core values of independent, nonpartisan and fact-based analysis, and works closely with all of GAO's Mission Teams. Today, as part of the Centennial Celebration, we have remarks from both US Representative Robin Kelly, and Representative Will Hurd, who will echo the importance of foresight and the value GAO can offer in making government more effective and efficient. First, I will read Miss [SS1]Robin Kelly, the US representative for Illinois, second congressional district, who has provided us with her remarks. It is hard to know what Congress will need to focus on in 100 years, but our responsibility to oversee the executive branch will continue. Even as agencies become more complex in their operations, the federal government is already using technologies such as facial recognition, AI, and machine learning in a myriad of applications that affect American citizens every day, as they visit a doctor, apply for a mortgage, walk through an airport or many other day-to-day activities. It is our responsibility to provide oversight and ensure that agencies are using these technologies appropriately, especially when their use is invisible, yet omnipresent and interwoven into many different programs impacting the people we serve. This is a critical responsibility for Congress and for GAO, knowing that the pace of technological change will only continue to increase. GAO, and especially its Center for Strategic Foresight, the Science and Technology Assessment and Analytics team, and the Innovation Lab play a critical role in helping Congress to navigate these complex challenges moving forward. Next, we will hear some pre-recorded remarks from Will Hurd, the former US Representative, Texas' 23rd congressional district. Please enjoy the video.

>> Will Hurd: Howdy, everyone. I'm former congressman Will Hurd, and it's a pleasure to welcome you all to this virtual panel of science and technology thought leaders who are going to grapple with big questions, like how is GAO preparing to meet Congress's oversight needs for the next 100 years? And what will the oversight needs of Congress be in the future? Since being out of Congress and advising technology companies who have a national security application, I have seen how tomorrow's technologies like hypersonic weapons, cryptocurrencies, artificial general intelligence, and quantum computing are quickly becoming today's reality. This is not just true here in America, but around the world. How do we make sense of technologies like these quickly enough? And then how do we use them to enable security, innovation and competitiveness for our citizens? These are the kinds of questions that will have to be answered to keep America as the global leader of advanced technology. Foresight is absolutely critical to addressing these issues, especially since we are in the middle of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, where the technological explosion we are going to see in the next few decades is going to make the technological change of the last 47 years since the introduction of the personal computer look insignificant. This tech explosion will bring a substantial amount of pressure on our government to modernize. This need to modernize will require us to forecast over many time horizons. Forecasting out a few months is important, but forecasting out a few years or even a few decades is the strategic long game that we must win. This is what GAO has been doing for 100 years. And this is what GAO and especially its Center for Strategic Foresight, its STAA team and the Innovation Lab will need to do for another 100 years. Enjoy this conversation on how we will all need to help Congress navigate these complex challenges so that this century stays the American century.

>> Stephen Sanford: Thank you, Sharaelle. And I wanted to thank former member of Congress Will Hurd and also Representative Kelly for providing input into our event today. We are very excited now to embark on the second part of today's event, bringing in our second panel where we're going to talk more broadly about foresight and the trends affecting government and society. The global trends affecting all of us, and especially thinking about how the intersection of things like global financial markets, climate issues, trade and supply chains, health issues of course like a pandemic, and the marketplace of ideas, which are all international in scope and yet greatly affect the domestic context in which both GAO and the Congress operate. We are very fortunate at GAO as part of our Center for Strategic Foresight to have a number of fellows who are experts in foresight, futures thinking, strategy and leadership. And foresight has been an important part of the DNA of GAO for a long time. We've had futurists on our advisory boards. We have engaged in foresight practices as a way to inform our strategic planning efforts for several decades. And we are an office that I lead, where foresight and strategic planning are married up and work in concert, not only to help the agency with its planning, but also to help us with our operations, and to assist the GAO mission team to do all of the analytical work on behalf of Congress. So I'm very excited to welcome the next panel as we continue today's conversation. We are joined by Kristel Van Der Elst, who is CEO of the Global Foresight Group. Jens Wandel, who is Special Advisor to the UN Secretary General on reforms. Also, we have Angela Wilkinson, who is the current CEO and sixth secretary general of the World Energy Council. And finally, we're joined by GAO's own Jason Bair, who is a director in our International Affairs and Trade team. So I want to give everyone a chance to make some introductory remarks. We'll start with Kristel, and then we will proceed through the panel, and then have a kind of convenient discussion where we all get to dive into the issues in a bit more detail. So first, Kristel, welcome. And thank you for joining us on the centennial event. Over to you.

>> Kristel Van Der Elst: Hello, Stephen. Hello, everyone, and congratulations on the occasion of, you know, the 100th year. So I was asked to talk a bit about, you know, how do we achieve actually that aspirational future? What are some of the ways we could do that? And indeed, it's, you know, as you come just out of 100 years, and you go into 100 more years, which will probably even the change -- the speed of change will be a lot higher. It's a really important question to think, how do we achieve those very long-term goals that you're actually pursuing when you're kind of shaping a society? With the fact that it's constantly changing, because in the past -- in the past 100 years, probably, or a big part of that, a lot of the time when we think about the future and the decisions about the future, we kind of use what we know that is built up in the past. And then we use that kind of forecast on what might happen. And we put some imagination on that for our reasoning. These kind of tools that we've been using a lot, and they have worked in certain sense, but it gives us a sense of like agency and control and certainty. But in these times of really quick change, none of this actually works -- certainly not in a crisis like the pandemic. So what we're seeing is actually that there's some other ways to deal with that which other people use, so we can know what tomorrow is going to be about. And it's going to be really difficult to forecast. Why even try then? And then you see people kind of, you know, going one day at a time. And you also see other reactions in times of crisis and big change, which is to worry a lot, to ask a lot like, "Oh, what if? What if?" in quite an unstructured manner. And none of this also seems to work, because you get a lot of knee-jerk reactions, which we've seen also through the crisis, obviously, and you don't have good decision making. So and it's really a problem when the stakes are big, obviously, like they are now. And so that's why a center like yours on Strategic Foresight is so important, obviously, because it really allows us to kind of take a more strategic approach to the future, to really work with those uncertainties, think through some of these circumstances that we might be facing through these futures we might want to create. And being able to bring that actually back to current day decision making. So it's super important. And so you see these capacities of foresight actually being beefed up, I would say, in a lot of public institutions such as your own also. And usually it's with the perspective of kind of what might happen, right? How might the future play out? What new technologies might we see? What kind of new economic circumstances might we see? And so then we can actually start to think about how the world might play out, how it might play out differently than what we're expecting, so that we can start to prepare for different scenarios. Because as you know, like for a company, they might kind of go under if they made bad bets about the future. That's usually not an option that public institutions have. They are to be a lot more prudent. And while scaling up kind of new initiatives and while scaling up policies and initiatives might be easy, when you find yourself in a situation of quick change or crisis, there's a big policy risk, right, that you get it wrong. And because you have to invent, you have to adapt, you have to scale everything at the same time. So during that foresight of really thinking about what might happen, and how will we react when that happens is really crucial. But I think there's two other things that are really important. And that's the fact that -- and we see these evolutions also, and probably when you go forward, you're doing this already, and you're continuing working on this. It's really to bring that future thinking, that foresight, that understanding about what might happen in the future -- to bring that down and hardwire that impulsive decision making so that it's not just a thought experiment of thinking about what might happen, but it is really driving current data decision making. So that hardwiring is very important. And we see a lot more efforts around that kind of in public institutions. But then I think another point is very often we use foresight in thinking what might happen, but we don't see a lot of work actually being done. I don't see that at least in public institutions where we are thinking about what are some of those futures that are being created? And I think some of the speakers before have already indicated, there's a lot of work around science and technology and how that might actually move forward. And very often I find those conversations are about technical feasibility, but not necessarily about what we want as a society to happen. So what are some of those intended/unintended consequences? What do we want? What do we hope for? What are we afraid of? And kind of bringing that kind of home. Then maybe one last point is, because we talked about aspirational future in the session description, how do we achieve these aspirational futures? Well, the question is, for me, then also, whose aspirational futures are we kind of talking about? Because we have, of course, a concept of democracy and public institutions. But ultimately, a lot of the new evolutions or what might happen in the future -- we haven't really thought through that as a society. So there's a lot of stakeholders involved. There's a lot of changes, profound changes that are happening and transformations that will happen in the coming 10 to 20 years. And I think most of the people don't have the luxury or the time or the opportunity to really think through what that might mean. And so, when moving forward and using strategic foresight in a context like yours, or in public institutions, I think it's really crucial to bring the different stakeholders together, and to really think through what that might be in the future so that we have actually aspirational futures that, you know, society can actually stand behind, and they're kind of desired by all. So I will leave it there.

>> Stephen Sanford: Great. Thank you. Thank you so much, Kristel. Appreciate that perspective. And I think we're going to dig in a little bit more into this whole stakeholder question a little bit more in the panel discussion. So thank you for teeing that up. Next, I'd like to turn to Jens Wandel for his introductory remarks. As I mentioned, Jens is a former assistant secretary general at the UN DP, and also is currently serving as chair of Sustainable Now. And we're very glad to have you with us today, Jens. Please, the floor is yours.

>> Jens Wandel: Thank you. Thank you, Stephen. Thank you very much for having me. Looking ahead, using foresight, I think accountability, society and government will depend significantly on how we understand our economy and what constitutes future progress. Some will say sustainability or sustainable growth. In a sense, as we heard from the earlier panel, what data will we be looking at? And from my perspective, and to quote the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, now is the time to correct the blind spot on how we measure economic prosperity and progress towards sustainability. It's well known that when economic activities come at the expense of people or planet, then we are left with an incomplete picture of these true costs of economic growth. As currently measured, gross domestic product, it really fails to capture the human and environmental -- you can even say destruction of economics. And just as important, GDP underreports some of the positive consequences of specific investments, again, both in people and in planetary issues. So I think putting kind of the long view on central to accountability and the effective societal stewardship, that would be new measures to complement GDP. So people can get a full understanding of the impact of both public and private economic activities, and how we can do better to support people and planets. And from a global perspective, I would venture that getting these GDP complementary measures right, that will constitute a new capacity that well-functioning societies, they can use to achieve new levels of prosperity on a sustainable basis. So let me just turn to, what does this mean? The GDP of the future, it is based on the current you can say flow-oriented GDP, but we need to complement that by a new set of measures that capture two things -- both the negative externalities and the positive ones. So on the negative side, we know climate crisis. And we need to understand, in a sense, the value of current economic activity and then factor in future minus, future downside. And today, financial macroeconomic models, they do not really reflect that type of relationship. And we need to adjust that so we understand the consequences now of what we're doing. And we need to in a sense move the future into the present. Yet another thing which is also not discussed very often is the focus on positive externalities. One such area is investment in people. Globally, it is well established that both bringing men and women into the economy has been a strong force in economic growth. And societies that systematically today are able to include all its talent in its economy, they tend to be successful. However, we do not really capture these positive externalities in our macroeconomic growth analysis. And that means, from my perspective, we are undervaluing this type of investments. So positive externalities, these need to be understood and analyzed correctly and should show up as growth in a future GDP model. Now, more broadly, it also means that this we can call it enhanced GDP, it would correctly measure sustainable growth from various sources. Some of them have been discussed, both general technological innovation, but growth can also come from inclusion of all groups in society. It can come from a circular economy, where we decouple growth from resource use. And then it can all be underpinned by renewable energy. Then, another point I wanted to make is that, of course, human beings are not saints. So globally, we will probably continue to end up in situations such as climate change or the current biodiversity crisis, or even in conflict, which requires -- or we should understand that we need to bring more explicit risk analysis into the current day GDP discussions. So it's clear if our economic activities, planned and actual, reduces our risks or increases our risks. Generally, our record is mixed. With ozone depleting substances, globally, we did react on science and risk and took global action that actually mitigated this issue. However, clearly in retrospect, the world had access to reliable science and prediction models for climate change back in the early '90s. And still it's only maybe over the last 10 years that we have reacted at a level more commensurate with the actual threat. Looking ahead, the risk horizon needs to, from where I stand, play a more integrated role in our understanding of venue, economics and financial flow. And let me just take one example. And that is the current utilization, both you can say public and private, of space. It's a possible test case to establish whether we have really learned something from the climate crisis and whether we have an increasing capability to react now to things we can see in front of us. Very simply put, with the density of objects that we put into space, as the density increases, so does the likelihood of collisions. And each collision will create further debris in a chain reaction, potentially rendering space unusable for generations. Extrapolations today are available. And it points that if we intervene now, we can secure space, avoid pollution of space, and make sure it's available for future generations for economic and public purpose. And the question is, can we bring this kind of foresight into current economic thinking? So we don't only take the net value of getting the space used. But we also start, what is the impact of us using the space this way for future generations? So let me just conclude my remarks by saying that looking ahead, an effective accountability is one that is connected with a new enhanced GDP, or beyond current GDP set of metrics, that both reflects the negative as well as the positive externalities in the economy. And it's also an accountability that uses foresight to understand future risks, and then bring mitigation strategies into the current. So societies that aim to deliver growth, they do it in such a way that is compatible with an improved version of the planet, and making that improved version of the planet available to future generations. So let me leave it at that and hand it back to you. Thank you very much.

>> Stephen Sanford: Thank you very much, Jens. Appreciate those comments and that perspective. I think this concept of the positive externalities you talked about will also be an important concept as we continue the conversation, as well as the type of risk horizon that we're all looking at. So thank you for those remarks. I have the pleasure now of introducing Angela Wilkinson, who, as I mentioned, is the current secretary general of the World Energy Council, and has been a leading global expert working on a number of national and international multi-stakeholder initiatives covering the economy, energy issues, climate and sustainable development, including with the OECD. So Angela, thank you for joining us today. The floor is yours.

>> Angela Wilkinson: Thank you, Stephen. It's a pleasure to be with you today. Congratulations on your 100 centenary anniversary. There aren't many organizations that last 100 years these days. And I'm pleased to say that we celebrate our centenary next year. So congratulations. Let's have a celebration together. And what I'm going to do in my opening remarks is I'd just like to touch a little bit on what Kristel has started about the nature of the future, and also resonate a bit with what Jens has been talking about in terms of the challenges ahead. And you know, we humans live in an era of globally connected challenges and existential crisis. And many people are looking at the future with fear and hopelessness. We're trying to avoid a sense of future crisis and catastrophe whilst trying to work out how to recover from crisis and catastrophe today. And I will touch upon, you know, issues such as climate change and the importance of energy systems as we progress forward. How can we build a better future is a question that many governments and societies are asking themselves across the world today. How do we build a future now for those who are still living in energy poverty, whilst at the same time nurturing a healthy planet? How do we avoid a return to an era of strife and war? And how do we coexist in peace? These are very big future questions. And although human beings spend a lot of their mental time thinking about the future, we seldom stop to consider how we think about the future and the nature of future thinking itself. And Kristel was drawing out the differences between forecasting and foresight. And for foresight, the future is always first and only a fiction, and the future we imagine shapes our understanding of reality. If we imagine better futures are possible, we make different decisions in the present. So it's important to reflect on not just the data-centric future, but also our storytelling and imaginative future, if we really want to get ahead of today's connected challenges and create better, I want to look back 100 years. So I'm going to look back 100 years not in terms of your history, but I'm going to look back 100 years in the history of energy, just to try and draw out some comparisons about looking at the future. When we started up 100 years ago, similar to yourselves, the world was in an era that we called energy for peace. It was about peaceful coexistence of nations, the community of nations, and about the technologies required to exploit the resources that would lift people out of poverty. About the use of coal, oil and gas, in order to save forests, in order to save whales, in order to improve people's livelihoods. It might feel impossible to think that way now, but that was the great hope, then. Then we've moved through a period of energy for prosperity, another era of energy transition. And this was an era in which we have seen the increasing electrification of the world. We've started to look at the decentralization of energy and the rise of energy services. And we've started to think about energy in terms of not just resources, but in terms of numbers and pictures. Today, we're living in a different era of energy for people and planet. There are many things of people and planet. And we have to think not about the era of prosperity, where we were measuring things and we were thinking about energy for growth and the interconnectedness of quantity. We are now thinking about energy for people and planet, and the challenges of health and the interconnectedness of quality. And for that, we're not just working with data and data visualization. We're also working with our quality of storytelling and our ability to expose and question fundamental assumptions about the way the world works. When I look to the next 100 years, I want to come to the US itself, and talk a little bit about how we can imagine alternative futures to help us think about what reality are we in. And what are the decisions today that will live in those futures? And how do we stress test whether they're going to be effective or ineffective? So I went and looked around the US and I went on to the US National Intelligence Council website, and I found there are five scenarios now coming out of the US on the future of the world. And fascinating they are. They're five scenarios, the renaissance of democracies, a world adrift, competitive coexistence, separate silos, tragedy, and mobilization. And what's fascinating about these scenarios is when we look at the underlying framework and assumptions of them, what's clearly coming through is the challenges of whether we're going to have global rules or not live by global rules and have chaos, and whether we're going to manage our affairs as top-down or as bottom-up. And whether we're going to be able to get ahead of the challenges of digitization, which is a double-edged sword. It's no longer technology is giving us just solutions. It's also creating new problems. And whether we're actually going to navigate through these new dynamics of confrontation, cooperation, and competition. So one of the things that we're learning to do as policymakers and as decision makers is to live in a world in which we have the certainty of uncertainty. And we're trying to learn to work with new approaches and principles, not just of rethinking progress, but what I would call realistic hope. And the five principles of realistic hope are about diversity -- who is in the room that's salient to the decisions and the plans on the table? Dialogue -- how are they interacting? Experimentation -- what are they going to do together? Systems thinking -- in which context are they approaching the problem? And futures framing relates to the purpose of co-creating a future that's different to the present. These principles are the principles that we need to build into anticipatory as well as agile policy and planning. Let me stop there, Stephen, for now.

>> Stephen Sanford: Thank you. Thank you very much, Angela. I like that finishing note of anticipatory and agile policymaking as a kind of watchword for us as we move through the conversation. I'm happy now to introduce Jason Bair, who is director for International Affairs and Trade at GAO, where he leads efforts to provide nonpartisan and fact-based analysis for the US Congress as part of GAO's core mission. Jason, over to you.

>> Jason Bair: Thanks so much, Steve. Thanks for this tremendous honor. It's a great honor to be the last presenter at the last event celebrating GAO's illustrious 100-year history. It is perhaps an equally great honor to be a part of this esteemed panel. When Steve first asked me to consider participating, you know, I racked my brain for a minute and you know, among this group of incredibly knowledgeable people on the panel, I said, you know, "I'm not quite sure that I belong here." Probably the best credential that I have in terms of being a futurist is I've taken my kids to Disney World a few times, and we all really enjoy Tomorrowland. But that doesn't exactly qualify me to be on the panel. But, you know, when I thought about it, who am I? I'm not a futurist, but I am a professional auditor. And I think the message that I want everybody to take away here is that we as auditors can help demonstrably improve agencies', long-term planning, as well as their ability to address the challenges of the future that you've been hearing about so much over the last two panels, by helping to conduct some prospective analysis. That's where we can really make a positive contribution to shaping what the futures look like. To get to that, I really have just got a couple of high-level points. You know, the first is, when we think about, you know, the Federal Government at large, especially the federal agencies responsible for implementing all the programs and activities that we look at, it's undeniable that they have a number of challenges to effectively doing long-term planning. And I think to this audience, none of these is going to be a surprise, but it probably makes sense to just walk through them so that you understand, you know, the depth and the breadth of the challenges that a lot of these agencies face. And then we can move on and talk about the role that we can play. You know, first and foremost, there is, of course, going to be a constant tension for these agencies between dedicating resources to current needs and priorities, and preparing for the future. It's inescapable. What gets them tripped up often is there's always also going to be something urgent that is distracting the agencies and perhaps their leadership from the efforts that they have ongoing to plan for the future. You know, you think about a federal agency, they're obviously headed by Cabinet Secretaries who provide, you know, the overall strategic direction. They often serve for, I think, on average, about three years. And then the political appointees who serve under them, whether they be deputy secretaries, undersecretaries, assistant secretaries, they are often serving for less time. And so you have this instability there and the shorter time horizons that they're looking at in terms of their tenure there. You combine that with the fact that funding is appropriated to agencies on an annual basis. And so agencies are in a position where they're concurrently executing the funds that they've just been given, as well as either developing or supporting the next year's budget request. It puts them in a really difficult situation. And it creates situations where even when they are doing some long-term planning, maybe they're not thinking about things as comprehensively as they need to. So how does this kind of show up in the real world? As Steve said in my introduction, I cover international issues. I do a lot of work with the State Department. So I'll give you kind of a relatively contemporary example. Following the horrible bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the State Department decided that they needed to get US diplomatic personnel overseas into safer, more secure facilities. And they embarked in a strategic effort to build those new facilities to make sure that US personnel were going to be safe. It's a massive building program. It's going to take decades to complete and tens of billions of dollars. And they, along with congressional support, have put in the resources needed to build a lot of new embassies. What we found most recently is when we look at where they are, they're not paying as much attention to the maintenance side. They're putting a lot of attention on getting the new buildings built, but the funding for the maintenance essentially flatlined. And so as a result, they had about a quarter of their facilities that were in poor condition. They had about $3 billion in deferred maintenance, which had developed a huge backlog. And at current funding levels, it would take them about 30 years to address all of that backlog. And so in some ways, they were being strategic, but they had to comprehensively think not just about the new buildings that they were building -- some of which, oh, by the way, are 20 years old now. They have to take care of what they already have. And they need to look at the whole property picture writ large. But let me bridge for a minute and talk about the second key point, which I think is an important takeaway. And that's that we as auditors have a really key role in helping shape the future for the federal government. And that is in conducting prospective analysis. And let me just pause for a minute here and say I know there's a lot of you in the audience across the audit community. And I am speaking to, you know, my colleagues at GAO, or folks in the Inspector General communities, state auditors, the supreme audit institutions of other countries, the internal oversight bodies of multilateral institutions. I think what I'm saying is going to be true for all of us. And while we are certainly known for the high quality and insightful products that we put out that are financial audits or internal control reviews, or our effectiveness and efficiency audits -- I want to remind you, prospective analysis is another type of performance audit. For those of you who are policy wonks out there, if you want to go look it up, you can look in paragraph 1.26 of the Yellow Book, you'll find it there. If you haven't had the opportunity to do prospective analysis, let's just talk for a minute about kind of what that is and what the Yellow Book lays out. Really, it's about drawing conclusions based on kind of a variety of opportunities. It could be as simple as looking at program or policy alternatives, including doing some forecasting or looking at the outcomes under some various assumptions. Or it could be about looking at policy or legislative proposals, including identifying and then laying out advantages, disadvantages, and stakeholder views on potential alternatives. Or it could be about digging into budgets and agency forecasts to confirm that they're based on assumptions that are realistic about what the expected future is going to look like. Or that they're valid understandings of what stakeholders and management might do to respond to future events. So these are all the kinds of things that we can do even in the performance audit context. So let's talk for a minute about kind of potential real world applications. Again, I'm going to fall back on my experience looking at the State Department that issues millions of passports to US citizens, and visas to citizens of foreign countries to travel to the United States every year. This is a process that we charge fees for. And historically, those fees have more than covered the cost of doing the processes that I've talked about. That worked until the pandemic hit, when of course we all know there was a dramatic decline in international travel, both Americans needing passports to travel abroad and foreigners looking to come to the United States. And so they had this tremendous fiscal crisis where their opportunities to look at, what's the range of tools in the toolbox for the State Department and Congress to address these kinds of issues? You know, where might there be opportunities to adjust fees? Where might the State Department need additional legislative authorities? Where might they need to think creatively about how they're approaching how to handle the entire process? What opportunities do they have for cost savings? If we can look comprehensively at those things and allow policymakers to have fully informed information space that they can draw from to make those challenging policy decisions, then we've truly provided value to Congress and the American people. Let me kind of close by addressing two additional questions. You know, one is kind of why the Congress and the executive branch need this kind of analysis from us as auditors. I think the answer is simple, but it's twofold. First, the problems that US agencies are facing are getting more complex, not less. On the first panel, you know, you heard a lot about science, technology, data. All these things are making the world more challenging, more complex to deal with. The second part of this is solving really difficult and maybe sometimes intractable policy problems inherently is going to involve tradeoffs. And policymakers have to have a clear sense of what the range of options are to make informed and good choices about those. The second question, just to close with, is kind of, why is it that we as auditors are positioned to provide this kind of perspective analysis? Well, the first is in our context, Congress is flooded with information. You know, they get information all the time. If anything, maybe they have too much information on some issues, and they've got to sort through it. I mean, I think in the first panel, we heard about how, you know, folks on the Hill, you know, you get five minutes to Google and synthesize information. What they need, though, is objectivity. And that's what we as auditors can provide, because with that objectivity comes credibility and reliability. And that's where we can provide value in helping them make informed decisions. I think the second part of the reason that we're really well positioned, is, you know, frankly, kind of a self-promoting one in the GAO context. And it's about expertise. And this is true at GAO. And I know it's true in a lot of other audit organizations. You know, we're blessed to have wonderful access to tremendous methodologists and statisticians and economists, legal analysts and all the technologists that you heard about on the first panel. This is where we really can bring these resources to bear to help Congress and the executive branch as they have to confront these issues. And so I guess I would just end by saying now, certainly more than ever, policymakers across the government as well as in national governments around the globe and multilateral institutions are going to benefit from perspective analysis, as they have to make really difficult policy decisions. We as auditors are really well-positioned to provide valuable insights to them, especially on some of the complex issues that they face. But we can do that if we bring to bear the same kind of rigor and objectivity that we bring to our other types of performance audits that we're very, very comfortable doing. And so I guess, returning to the theme of today's panel, that's my aspiration for the next year -- next 100 years for GAO and the audit community, that we can really improve prospective analysis. With that, I'll turn it back to you, Steve.

>> Stephen Sanford: Thank you so much, Jason. Appreciate that perspective. You know, something you talked about especially resonated with me when I think about some concepts and [SS2]design thinking. I'm both a student and a fan of design thinking and human-centered design. And one of the key phrases in that practices is to ask, how might we? And I think that's a phrase, that's a question that too often does not appear in the context of public policy discussions when thinking about the execution of public sector programs and activities. And so I would call on all of us who are at GAO and listening today to think about, as we embark on the next century, that phrase, how might we? And where that's applicable across everything that we do. So thank you for those comments, Jason. I invite all the panelists now to turn on their cameras and join for a group discussion. One of the things I would really like us to explore generally as a panel is looking at what are some of the global trends that are going to be affecting us, especially in our context as an agency providing analysis to Congress? What are some of the things that forward-looking agile, best practices organizations are doing to respond to the current sets of challenges and opportunities facing us? And especially, you know, the future opportunities and challenges facing us? And finally, what is the role that foresight can play in making all of that happen and, and why foresight as a practice and as an idea is so important to making progress in these areas? So I'll start with concretely asking, Kristel, if you could kick us off, you know, your thoughts on what are some of the major drivers you are seeing, you know, globally that over the next 5, 10, 20 years are going to be key factors as organizations and their leaders are going to need to be aware of and consider as they chart a path forward.

>> Kristel Van Der Elst: Okay. Thank you for that, Stephen. Yeah. Just fanciful [SS3]of course. So I'll name a few that I think are really important. Obviously, we are still in the pandemic and so the control of the virus, although we might have hoped this was going to go away quite -- people might have hoped it was going to go away quite easily. It will not, so we're going to have to kind of learn to live more in a world of crisis response. Also with climate change coming, it's going to become more important, and extreme events. So I think it's going to be important that we think about like, how do we live more in a world of kind of emergencies, to say so? And so what does that mean, actually, in terms of how governments and public institutions and private organizations, et cetera, function? Because it will have a huge impact, obviously, on the economy, on inequality, on trade, on value chains, et cetera. So another one is like really the digitization of the economy. I know, it is not new, like there's a lot of digitization that happens. But if we look forward over the next 10, 15 years, we will see, I think, tremendous like change still, because we have really this new, you know, infrastructure, economic infrastructure, coming up with a lot of technologies that were mentioned before being explored in innovation labs, like blockchain, artificial intelligence, et cetera. But when it all combines and matures, your economy will look a whole lot different. But more importantly, I mean, additionally, we see a lot of it was also referred to by the Congress -- the person who spoke from the Congress. Like we have a lot more in the built environment. You know, the Internet of Things is coming becoming a lot more -- even if it's invisible -- still, it's becoming a lot more pervasive in our lives. And on top of that, we see that we're really at the beginning of bio-digital convergence, that revolution where the digital and the biology is really coming together. And it will change industries. It's not just a health story. It's also about energy, a lot of industries, security issues. And so by consequence, what we'll see is that there's a lot of industries that will change. There's a lot of opportunities that are going to be created to solve some of the really difficult challenges we're facing as a world. But it's also going to change what type of resources hold value. And that's where you're going to see a lot of competition and innovation, and some of that industrial policy competition coming up, obviously. But we're also going to see exponential growth, I think, in ethical issues, by consequence. Of course, climate change, evolution of ecosystems, whether we're going to finally think about really living in the carrying capacity of our planetary ecosystems is going to matter tremendously, because in the next, you know, 10 to 15 years, we'll see start to see tremendous migration, you know, food, water insecurity, political instability -- very important also. I think at the bottom of all this, like, underlying all this, which I think about a lot, and I don't have an idea about how it will really -- I hope we're not going to go into a bad future on that one. But it's kind of more in the way, I think what's really profoundly important is how we relate to each other. Like whether it's between individuals or groups of society, or between nations, we're seeing a lot of changes happening there. And I think COVID has produced and made a lot of things transparent about kind of people's priorities and how we relate, how important social connections are, but how important self-interest is also, the vulnerabilities in society. And so kind of the way it showed also, I think that the way we now make decisions and what our behaviors are based on, it's vastly different. We have very different and competing worldviews happening for the moment. And I think it brought it all out. And we saw that also at the global governance level, obviously, which seems to be at the crossroads. And all of this will change kind of, you know, how markets work, how our norms are set, our capacity to respond to some of those really big challenges that we're talking about. It will determine how coherent we can be about these aspirational futures, what we actually want to create, and what opportunities we want to take. What some people might think is amazing progress, and then something to want to achieve -- some other people might be completely opposite opinions about that. So how do you create actually those features? And how are you accountable for that? And so I mean, it's been mentioned before, I very much think we -- if you bring all this together, there is this big question that we might be going into a world of like high technology-driven strategic competition between different spheres of influence from some very powerful economic and political nations. Let's call it like that. Where you might end up actually with a lot of innovation, but that innovation is used competitively in ecosystems that don't necessarily interconnect or are interoperable, and that might come with some type of suboptimal kind of kind of world. And my question is, how do we, you know, make sure that we're actually achieving some of those big transformations that the world needs in a very coherent, peaceful way? That's what I would think is one of the major things that should be on your mind.

>> Stephen Sanford: Thank you, Kristel. I think you've certainly, you know, covered a lot of important ground there. I think this idea of how we relate to one another is a really important one that maybe doesn't get talked about as much alongside all the other trends. I'm really glad you pointed that one out. As maybe the rest of the panelists start to collect their thoughts on this question, I do want to encourage the audience who's joining us today, if you have questions that you'd like to tee up to the panel, please feel free to put them in the chat. And those questions will make their way to me, and we can put them to the panel. So appreciate your participation in that. Other panelists who want to weigh in on this question of some of the other key trends that really are going to be drivers over the next decade or so.

>> Jens Wandel: Stephen, I could offer one, just one perspective, which is an additional. I think, again, from a global, you can say UN perspective, what is showing up as a new thing is this issue of interconnectedness. And there the concept of network multilateralism has been introduced. And it's to recognize that while by definition, multilateralism means collaboration by nations, that is insufficient. And therefore, network multilateralism is about opening up and recognizing that academia works internationally in multilateral ways. Private sector does that too. Civil society. But you also have a lot of other network type organizations. And it's a matter of, can we bring them together around common goals? Can we bring them together on platforms where there can be, you can say, conversations that is not blocked by some of the global competition we're talking about? So it's just to say that it's a kind of, can you push forward a meaningful network multilateralism? If we can, that can accelerate an interconnectedness. And inversely, if that gets blocked by, you can say competition and even a division in the world, then obviously, these kind of conversations will be blocked, making it more difficult to achieve some of the goals we need to achieve in handling, for example, crises, the pandemic, et cetera. So let me just stop there offering that concept.

>> Stephen Sanford: Well, that tracks, Jens, I think, quite closely to what Angela said in her opening about the importance of interconnectedness. And it raises an interesting question of, is interconnectedness an asset or liability as we all move forward? And, you know, maybe it's moving in parallel with the technology question that's also been raised as the double-edged sword. These things are complex systems with positives and with challenges, and it seems the interconnectedness piece is maybe in that same category.

>> Angela Wilkinson: Yeah, I can build on that, if that's possible, Stephen. I think, you know, we're not -- let's say we have to get real about how we're organized as well. Right? We tend to like to focus on the trends in the world out there, and very little about how we organize to deal with reality. And I'll base this comment on my reflections of working in the OECD with lots of different governments around the machinery of policymaking. And there's a big challenge in that we deal all the time with a myth of the policy machine rather than the reality of it. We have this nice, neat model that science fixes power, policy makes some rational plan, then somebody else goes and implements it. And then hey-ho, at the end, we've got an outcome and we can measure and audit it. And the problem with that process, which is called the linear waterfall process, is that the thinking gets done five years before the action gets implemented. And then somehow at the end, somebody works out, were we successful or not? And the reality has changed completely in that period. And one of the challenges in the way we have to think about trends is also to think about the trends in mindsets and cognition and policies, policymaking itself. What is the policy machinery? How is it becoming more -- we talk about agile policy, but actually our policy machinery is wired for stability. We talk about transformational action, but our policy machine is wired for incrementalism. So I think it's also important when we're thinking about how do we open up to either creating or preparing for new and better future possibilities, that we also get real with the institutional basis of the policy machinery, and not to blame or expect too much from the so-called futurist or the "foresighter", but actually to ask policymakers. Policy design is a new concept. It's very different from policymaking in the old style. So I think the process of policy is changing. And it's changing in response to the reality and the stresses of trying to solve new challenges which are more connected and concern judgments of quality, not just quantity. And that becomes very important as we think about the role of organizations like yourself.

>> Stephen Sanford: Thank you. And, you know, if I could just -- your comments have prompted a follow up, Angela. Which, as you talk about this shift to policy design, is that something that you are seeing happening through an organic process that's just naturally evolving? Or is it out of necessity from external shocks? Or are we seeing an inflection point that's requiring that in a more dramatic fashion?

>> Angela Wilkinson: I'm sure everybody else can chip in here. But I think there's two things. First of all is the pattern in the world is still the replication of hierarchy for most organizational forms, right? Top-down, command and control, linear leadership. That's still the majority models everywhere. But the world doesn't conform to that model anymore. It's sort of 19th century organizational forms. But when we see this shift to policy design, I think there's two things going on. One is ad hoc. But the other is, I think, much more organized. If I look around different governments, if I look to Singapore, to Finland, to the UK, if I look into the US, we see nock units, we see new policy design forms. They're called different things, but they're trying to grapple with the issue that the machinery of decision making by government, the processes of decision making by government, if they're really to absorb the open future possibility, they have to change the process by which policy is being made.

>> Stephen Sanford: Thank you. Any other final thoughts on this topic from the panel before we move on? Okay, so you know, COVID has come up a few times today already, the pandemic. Obviously, it's been with us now, you know, nearly two years. And organizations, institutions, governments across the world have been working to respond to this crisis in real time. As the Comptroller General in his opening remarks talked about trying to operate in a real time environment here. Now, the current crisis, right, it's become a bit of a cliché to say we are in unprecedented times, and it seems every few years we're saying we're in unprecedented times. So I don't want to fall into that trap. But if we're to look at what we've been through in the last couple of years with this and think about the lessons, but also some of the innovations, the ideas, if we're going to put a bit more of a positive spin on this -- what are some of the ideas and innovations that have come out of the crisis that are important lessons to keep in mind that you think we ought to be carrying forward as we kind of build that aspirational future we've all been talking about? Jens, I wonder if we could start with you on that question.

>> Jens Wandel: I would like to mention three, maybe, that comes to mind. First and foremost, apart from America's COVID emergency medical response, one thing that just has been accelerated significantly and has shown as being you know, an absolutely effective way of dealing with the situation has been accelerated digitization. So that means across all economies globally, it has been absolutely no regret investments. And therefore, what Angela has mentioned is that now the question is that the downside of digitization doesn't get ahead of us. You know, there's such an upside. But a lot of people in the world are very, very vulnerable and therefore global regulation for cybercrime, cybersecurity is probably an area where there will be increased multilateral revenue. It has been kept out. It has been very much US/Europe-driven. But I think everybody realizes now that it requires more broad global regulation, so we can bring everybody in. And I think as we continue to see in the corona epidemic or pandemic, that, you know, global digitization, not only bringing people on the internet, but also truly digitizing education, health, et cetera, that I think holds enormous potential if the other thing doesn't get ahead of us in the order. Then there are two other things. I think that it has done something to the way many people in the world think. Those who are closer to getting high quality information on the pandemic, they realize that every person is part of a global chain. And therefore, if the pandemic stops with you because you take a vaccination or you behave a certain way, or you pass it on, it is truly a global chain you're part of. So I think some people in the world have gotten a better perspective of their role and how they connect with others. And I think that that will in some areas give a possibility for a more global conversation, and a way back to that feeling of connectedness. And then finally, contrary to how it looked in the beginning, I think that there's a global realization that no country can stop this pandemic. So therefore, there is only a global solution. And it is the speed of that solution that will determine whether we need a next one in the Greek alphabet or, you know, we stop at this winter. And then I don't think we will eradicate it, but we'll get to live with it the way that other issues like HIV/AIDS and others, you know, that we understand it, it is there, et cetera. And that sense that only global action gets us there. And then finally, global action was possible. And while there's enormous discussion of vaccine disparity, where clearly Africa is right now underserved, nevertheless it is global and it's surprisingly low. So the combination between we can find the remedy, we can find it in multiple countries, and now we can learn that if we're a bit smarter about how we get certain things organized, then we can globally address global things. And you know, a year from now, two years from now, we may look back at some of those experiences, and then say, "Hmm, can we do better?" and then apply them to other global crisis like the climate or biodiversity. So in what I'm saying is that in the middle of this problem, there is a sense of optimism, because the realization is this is truly global. And you cannot outperform global from a national perspective in these areas. And competition has no place. We can compete as much as we want, but the more we compete, the longer this thing will stay around for all of us. So it forces collaboration maybe where collaborating otherwise is difficult. So these are some of the perspectives.

>> Stephen Sanford: Thank you, Jens. Any other thoughts on this question from the panelists? Yeah[SS4], Angela?

>> Angela Wilkinson: What we've observed is that it's a bit of rethinking of resilience, particularly of critical systems resilience. So that now extends to people and supply chains, not just to the kit and the technical cadre, but to people and supply chains. So that's another positive thinking. I do want to say though, it's also prompted a rethinking about meaning and purpose, particularly for the under 40 generation. We are witnessing the grand resignation. I don't know if that's a term that applies in the US, but people are not sticking with jobs that they don't like, that they don't want to put up with this anymore. Life is to be lived and is to be lived purposefully. So that's another -- whether you take that as a positive or a negative, it's certainly is tough because it contributes to the war for talent because some of these people are taking big skills out of the market. But it also is, I think, you know, a reassertion of our everything isn't about material and data and numbers. It's actually about relationships and meaning and life's purpose. That's, I think, come to the fore. And I think the other piece that we will have to be aware of is COVID context response has created a new context of affordability and demand for justice. The revelation of the great unevenness on many things. I mean, Jens was talking about the positive side of that. But I think the jury is still out as to whether the trigger long-term -- you know, we're two years into something that's at least five years long. There's a great impatience to get it over with. And I'm worried that the impatience turns into a negative re-localization of resilience. Security becomes withdrawing rather than persisting in trying to make the benefits of doing things together work for them, because we can get better scale in doing things together. But I am worried about patience and impatience when people want it to be over and the messages are, "We're over it." Oh, no, we're not. "Oh, we're over it." No, we're not. "We're over it." No, we're not. So there's this tension between, it's going to be around for five years, but everybody wants to be able to say they can see the end of it now.

>> Stephen Sanford: Yeah.

>> Kristel Van Der Elst: Maybe, Stephen, I think these two points has been a bit discussed. But it is kind of, I think, two big things actually is like one is that certain things are essential that I've noticed. Certain elements were seen as costs, right, to the public, like the healthcare system, and certain people are invaluable, et cetera. And, you know, but I think that this has shown that the view of some of these very basic elements that create that resilience, that if you get it right, you have more resilience into society, they become more seen as investments. But what I'm wondering about is exactly that, like, it's going to depend on how much time this is going to last, the crisis, for actually budgets to shift, for actually -- because if you have to hold your breath for three years, you might change your mindset. But it doesn't structurally change anything in budgets or in kind of where talent is developed and where investments are made. Well, if you have a long-term perspective on this, or you think this is going to happen again and again, then we go into a life of crisis, and we will have more of these things or "biowarfare" or whatever it is, where it comes from, or from the climate change. Then you start to actually have another mindset and actually shift budget. So I haven't seen too much shifts yet. I think that the jury's still out on whether we're in this mindset or in a bigger one. On the collaboration, yes, people have started to understand they are part of large, bigger system. But I also have my doubts sometimes about kind of whether that has created more openness to other people, or the fact that the self-sufficiency, the self-security might have taken over more. And also the jury's out on that. People have left the travel plans also. People have less connection. And as we all know, one of the real good ways of creating a global sense or a community sense is to get to know each other. And to know each other, it's been so much easier to not have that in the virtual world. We all live in that virtual world that we don't like our kids to live in. Because, you know, there's a lot more negative things going on in social life that are happening. We are all living in that kind of more in the world. So there is less like social connection, let's say, that creates some of that compassion and that connection. And so it's at the human level, again, and how we relate to each other, but also at national levels. We are realizing we're all part of that bigger world, and our actions matter. I'm not sure we're all taking the same conclusions on whether we need to connect more or that we have to retreat more.

>> Jason Bair. I'll take one stab at it. And I agree with many of the other things that the panelists have said. I'll just add one additional thought. And that is, it's about the relationship between governments and the private sector. You know, there are a couple of areas where I see that it's really fascinating to see how things have changed. So let's just take, you know, pharmaceuticals. You know, the narrative before the pandemic in, you know, a lot of the public was they didn't like pharmaceutical companies because they thought they charge too much for drugs, and they weren't very happy about that. And there are lots of things that, you know, individual companies can do, and there are lots of things that the federal government can do, but it was only when the federal government and the private sector came together and we had this explosion of creativity and tremendous power put behind and, you know, we now have vaccines to combat the virus. You know, it'll be interesting to see if that narrative continues in the trajectory that it has, or if things revert. I think the second area where it comes up again, the government can do certain things, and the private sector can do certain things, but you've got to have concerted effort between the two, is on the topic of disinformation. So the reality is in the United States and across the globe, there are some number of people who just aren't going to believe, you know, narrative that is going to come out of the government about a vaccine or wearing masks or things like that. That's the reality we are in now. And so the government can't address that issue in and of itself. And then you've got the private sector and the discussion and the debate about the contributions of social media companies to spreading disinformation and the extent to which they've successfully addressed that. It really does take effort on both parts. And so it'll be interesting to see if that shapes some of the future debates about the intersection between the private sector and governments across the globe.

>> Stephen Sanford: Yes, Angela, please.

>> Angela Wilkinson: Much like the board convergence and agreeing with each other on things. So I want to punch -- I want to kick the tires on this one. States and markets. I think we have seen a great response from big states and from big business. But I think small and medium-sized enterprise might not think it's so hunky-dory, what's been happening around this whole coalition of public/private sector. And I think, you know, ever since public/private partnerships came out after the First Earth Summit as the answer of how we have to bring states and markets together. And I think for the last 20 years, we've been living with this myth of public/private means government and business. There's always a third leg on the sustainable development stool, and its communities. And community cooperatives are on the rise. Community ownership is on the rise. And communities come in all shapes and sizes. That's why we don't like to deal with them. They're so messy. We've got coalitions of industry, we've got rural communities, we've got cities as community. And again, I was very interested to read the US scenarios from the National Tenants Council, because when you look at what you're measuring for your scenarios, cities and digitization preparedness, those cities are an actor now -- not just governments and businesses. So where does that fit in to the way we think about what's happening as we emerge from this project?

>> Stephen Sanford: It's a great segue, I think, into the next topic I wanted to get us into a bit in terms of inclusive futures, ways foresight can try to bring that perspective to the table. As you just described, Angela, having communities represented. And certainly we've been seeing the trends, not only in the US, but across the globe in terms of inequities and various outcomes, whether it's widening disparities in household wealth creation, in home ownership, access to healthcare, or various financial services, just to name a few. So where can foresight help in the policy space with some of these questions? And how does that, you know, create potentially better futures as we look at some of those communities? Jens, maybe we'll start with you on that question.

>> Jens Wandel: Let me be very brief. I think that we are also as part of the learning on the COVID, we've come to the realization that inequality or exclusion, apart from it being a problem in itself, it actually is increasingly visible as a political parameter. So, therefore, in societies where you have high level of exclusion and high level of distrust, you do not have policy agility. And it is not because those countries do not know what to do, but it is because swathes of society or parts of society feel that they are not part of benefited generally from top-down policies, then they will not accept another top-down policy, however sensible it may be. And secondly, if they feel that nobody cares about them, so that means they cannot appear as a community in some kind of a bottom-up -- to use Angela's way of thinking about it -- if they cannot come in bottom-up and respond to a situation that the environment is created for them so they can respond to the situation, they end up blocking it. And obviously, in Europe, the yellow vest is the strongest example. But more from where I sit, there are just examples in practically every country today that has policy issues, that they are obvious that change is required, but they cannot execute change because part of their population feels excluded. So inversely, if foresight can bring that as as a kind of capability parameter and then add value apart from the intrinsic value of inclusiveness, also explaining it makes for more agile societies, it makes for societies that can have a deeper dialogue about the futures they want. And that it makes for a society that can kind of co-create certain things, and that means adapt to the realities throughout the specific territory. Then I think foresight could help tremendously. So it's understood that way. I'll leave it at that.

>> Stephen Sanford: Thanks, Jens. Any other thoughts on that question?

>> Kristel Van Der Elst: I mean, I think it's one of the things I said in the opening. Also, I mean, I think like these participatory futures, inclusive futures, whatever you want to call it, kind of bringing people together to actually really think through what the future might be, is really important in the sense of most people. And that short-term thinking that was mentioned before, like if policymakers have not been long in their jobs, et cetera, I think that's kind of a false way of thinking about it. Most people do not think about what the future could be or what the future will be. So it's really hard for people actually to have opinions about these things, right? And so some experts kind of make those conclusions for society. If society obviously is not kind of taken on the journey of thinking through what might be the positives or negatives about a certain technology or something or a way forward, then you can't really blame them on the other side too kind of. You know, people don't like change if they don't see why it's needed, or they don't come together necessarily, if they don't understand what kind of, you know, the tradeoffs are. So I think foresight is like really helping people come together and think through that future. What are some of the things that might happen? And what are some of the things we will have? It's been proven in certain cases that it's really good. The problem is that it's really hard to do. I think it's really hard to do because you expose yourself, right? I mean, it's kind of a lot of policymakers would think it's their job to know. It's a level of expertise, right? And then what Angela was saying, like, it's messy to work with all of these people, right? It's long, it's messy. Who do you bring into the thing? How do you react? And how do you bring, you know, people together that have very different views and worldviews, et cetera. It doesn't necessarily make it faster, right? But it might make it better. And it is that tradeoff, actually and it's just a very different way of working and operating in society that's just not been traditionally done. So I think if foresight can bring that, it would be a big advantage, actually. Even if it's hard to do, we should at least try.

>> Stephen Sanford: Thank you, Kristel. I'm keeping an eye on our clock. This has been such a fantastic conversation. We're rapidly running out of time. We do have a lot of people from GAO tuning in today and who will see this session in the future. And I wanted to give you each the opportunity briefly to just say if there was one thing you wanted to tell our people as we start creating the next 100 years for our organization. What's one message you would like to emphasize from where you sit for our people to think about? I'm going to start with Angela on that and then circle around my screen to Kristel, then Jason, then Jens. Angela, please.

>> Angela Wilkinson: Wow, one thing. I shall pick up on the last one around participation, simply because that's where my head is. If I was to give you one phrase to think about, having listened to the initial opening in the first panel, it's that the future is about experts on tap, not on top. And that everybody now is an expert of some kind. And then when we want to do these -- when we want to do these multidisciplinary things, we have to think, what does multidisciplinary really mean? And it means as much about craft and doing as it does about thinking. And I think that multi-discipline to me in foresight is not being a future thinker. It's being a future maker. And that disciplinary difference is remarkable. So experts on tap, not on top, and having the capabilities for future making, not just thinking.

>> Stephen Sanford: Thank you, Angela. Kristel?

>> Kristel Van Der Elst: Yeah, I would say it's, what's your mindset? I would say, because good state, good decisions -- bad state, bad decisions, as they say. And so if you have negative mindsets -- I'm very good at that -- a negative mindset about what might happen and be in the fear of kind of the future, then you're going to try to solve problems and more hanker, kind of keep that stuff out, right, and stick with the past. While if you're in a good mindset and you think about possibilities and about opportunities, then you're going to become a lot more resourceful to actually shape the future. So really, that mindset is not very great in surveys that we're seeing coming up. So what's your mindset? Be in a positive, resourceful opportunity kind of state and watch that.

>> Stephen Sanford: Thank you. Jason?

>> Jason Bair: Yeah, I would say I've got the benefit of being the insider on this question. And so I think it really does come back to our mission. You know, we're really aimed at trying to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of federal programs and activities for the benefit of Congress and the American people. Much of our work is focused on auditing programs that have already been implemented, and making recommendations for how they can be improved moving forward. But I think the other piece to this is we can improve the future effectiveness and efficiency of federal programs and activities when we do some of these prospective analyses, lay out those options for the policymakers. We're not the policymakers. But when we can give them really good, high quality, reliable information upon which they can make those decisions, and understand those tradeoffs, I think that's where we should be headed.

>> Stephen Sanford: And last word, Jens?

>> Jens Wandel: I think when one considers both policy and progress, one wants to accept the multidimensionality of what is good for human beings, you know, the complexity of it. And a good way to think about that is to understand the word sustainability, the way you know, there are 17 goals behind it. And then, as I mentioned, accept the centrality of our current growth paradigm driven by GDP, and then adjust the GDP to better capture that which we have to navigate in. And so we still use a reliable tool, but we just use it more efficiently. So the word is accept and embrace multidimensionality and then give it direction.

>> Stephen Sanford: Thank you, Jens. I wanted to thank this panel very much. Jason, thank you for providing the inside perspective from GAO. And also very much thanks to Angela, Kristel and Jens, valuable members of our Center for Strategic Foresight and great thinkers on these issues. So thank you for your time today. Tim and I want to close out with a few final statements. Tim, over to you.

>> Timothy Persons: Great, thanks very much, Steve. And just adding to Steve's thanks, thanks so much to our panelists today and for all of the folks tuning into this. This has been an extremely important discussion. Just a note as a reminder, for those of you claiming a CPE in today's event, the link to the CPE certificate is going to be put in the chat box. So for our GAO colleagues joining us today, a link to the certificate will also be placed on the GAO Centennial webpage. Let me just summarize some of the top-level key messages from both panels today. The first is that we live in a world of complex, adaptive systems challenges that are increasing in frequency, impact and number. All right, think climate change, think emerging infectious diseases, digital security inequities, et cetera. So that's our baseline state. So therefore, two, the future of oversight and policymaking is digital. It's content-centric, it's interdisciplinary, and it's agile. And so we have to think differently about how we do our jobs, both in the oversight community and as we support our policymakers. And then third, we would do well to view our challenges through the optic of foresight. How might we, as Steve asked -- that's the design question that drives STAA. How might we design the future we want and shape it based upon a more communicative, collaborative, cross-sectoral and problem-centered approach? So those are the three key things I think to summarize where we are. There's a very exciting future before us. For the last century, GAO has played a vital role in its support of Congress. But I know GAO's value to the American people will only continue to grow in the next century. And I don't think it's a linear growth. I think it's an exponential growth in terms of impact and importance. So thank you all for joining us today. And now I'll toss it back to Steve for his closing remarks. Thank you.

>> Stephen Sanford: Thank you, Tim. First, I [SS5]just wanted to thank everyone who made today possible on the GAO side, and also our external partners. And you know, to [SS6]pick up on a phrase we heard from Angela, future maker, as we all turn from the centenexnial year to look ahead at the next 100 years for GAO and for our place in government and in our democracy. We all play a role in creating that future, and the next evolution of GAO as an institution and as an organization working inside that democracy -- we are all helping create that future. So I heard lots of words today about agility, dialogue, and finally future maker. I think those are all fantastic concepts for us to take forward into the next 100 years of GAO. We thank you sincerely for helping us celebrate this year. And today, be well, take care and have a good rest of the year. Thank you.

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