Channeling your inner salmon

Salmon live in the sea, but must travel hundreds of miles upstream to spawn. They're incredible jumpers, leaping tirelessly out of the water to climb rapids in the face of incredible hardship.

Like a river, the way a law turns into services and enforcement also flows downhill. Often, thousands of pages of internally inconsistent policies are simply thrown down the waterfall to those who must build them. When that's impossible, the bravest public servants must find a way to get back upstream, letting their superiors know that what's been agreed to is impractical, expensive, or simply impossible.

Nobody wants to be the salmon. But those closest to the end user—citizen, resident, or denizen—are the most likely to encounter issues. Unless we find a way for those ideas to swim back upstream, vaulting rapids and jumping waterfalls, nothing's going to change.