REINVENTING GOVERNMENT: WHAT A DIFFERENCE A on Reinventing Government 1 Reinventing public...
Transcript of REINVENTING GOVERNMENT: WHAT A DIFFERENCE A on Reinventing Government 1 Reinventing public...
7h Global Forum on Reinventing Government
Building Trust in Government 26-29 June 2007, Vienna, Austria
REINVENTING GOVERNMENT: WHAT A DIFFERENCE A STRATEGY MAKES
David Osborne
The views expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the United Nations or its Member States.
7th Global Forum
on Reinventing Government
Reinventing public institutions is Herculean work. To succeed, you must find strategies that set off chain reactions in your organization or system, dominoes that will set all others falling. In a phrase, you must be strategic.
By strategy, I do not mean detailed plans. There is no recipe you can follow to reinvent government, no step-by-step progression to which you must slavishly adhere. The process is not linear, and it is certainly not orderly. Things rarely go as planned; reinventors must constantly adjust their approaches in response to the resistance and opportunities they encounter.
Rather, by strategy, I mean the use of key leverage points to make fundamental changes that ripple throughout the bureaucracy, changing everything else. Reinvention is large-scale combat. It requires intense, prolonged struggle in the political arena, in the institutions of government, and in the community and society. Given the enormity of the task and the resistance that must be overcome, the reinventor's challenge is to leverage small resources into big changes. Being strategic means using the levers available to you to change the underlying dynamics in a system, in a way that changes everyone's behavior.
To use but one example, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did not start out with a full-blown strategy to reinvent the British state. She came into office in 1979 determined to make it smaller, privatize many functions, and force the bureaucrats to be more efficient. But unlike her American counterpart, Ronald Reagan, she learned from the failure of her "jam the bureaucrats" approach. She also had more time in office. In her third term, she began to apply a consistent philosophy of extending choice and competition to public services and decentralizing authority so providers had the flexibility to respond to their customers' needs.
Thatcher put together a team of trusted civil servants—her "Efficiency Unit"—who came to understand the real problems that lay behind public sector performance. In her ninth year in office they articulated a set of systemic changes that applied her philosophy to core government functions. It took them a long time to get there, and they made many mistakes along the way, but they managed to find a series of key levers:
privatization of functions better performed by businesses operating in competitive markets;
uncoupling policy and regulatory functions ("steering") from service-delivery and compliance functions ("rowing");
multi-year performance agreements between departments and operational agencies, which exchanged managerial flexibility for heightened efficiency and accountability for results;
decentralization of authority to units responsible for work;
public-private competition, through "market testing;" and
accountability to customers through choice, customer service standards, and customer redress.
My colleagues and I in the Public Strategies Group have found these same levers used again and again, in every country, state, province, city, county, or school district that has undertaken serious reinvention. Why? Because these are the levers that change the framework within which organizations and people work. "It is usually not possible to command large organizations to make painful changes in long-settled routines," explains Ted Kolderie, one of the reformers who brought public school choice to America. "It is possible, however, to redesign the
institutional arrangement in which they operate, so that they come to perceive these changes as necessary and desirable, in their own interest."i
Business Professors Michael Beer, Russell Eisenstat, and Bert Spector made the same point in a 1990 Harvard Business Review article entitled, "Why Change Programs Don't Produce Change."
Most change programs don't work because they are guided by a theory of change that is fundamentally flawed. According to this model, change is like a conversion experience. Once people `get religion,' changes in their behavior will surely follow. ... In fact, individual behavior is powerfully shaped by the organizational roles people play. The most effective way to change behavior, therefore, is to put people into a new organizational context, which imposes new roles, responsibilities and relationships on them.ii
Dan Loritz, one of Kolderie's co-conspirators for public school choice in Minnesota, uses an agricultural analogy. "A farmer goes out and spends a lot of time making sure that the fields are just right, gets all of the weeds out, plants the corn with great care, puts enough herbicides on it to make sure that there aren't any weeds, and hopes that there's enough water," he says. "And if everything is right, the corn grows all by itself."iii
Reinventors should think like farmers, Loritz argues. If they create the right conditions, the results will follow.
Rewriting the Genetic Code
To extend the agricultural metaphor, think of public systems as organisms: complex, adaptive systems that live, grow, change over time, and die. Organisms are shaped by their DNA: the coded instructions that determine who and what they are. DNA provides the most basic, most powerful instructions for developing an entity's enduring capacities and behaviors. Change an organism's DNA and new capacities and behaviors emerge; change enough of the DNA and a different kind of organism evolves. Usually organisms change very slowly, as their DNA randomly mutates and some of these mutations make them more successful in their environments.
The same is true for public institutions: normally they evolve very slowly.
Bureaucratic public systems were designed to be stable. But we have reached a point in history where this stability is counterproductive. In today's fast-changing, globally competitive Information Age, systems that cannot change are doomed to failure.
In this situation, the solution is genetic engineering: change the system's DNA. Our research tells us that the most fundamental pieces of public sector DNA are a system's purpose, its incentives, its accountability systems, its power structure, and its culture. Successful reinventors have all stumbled across the same basic insights: that underneath the complexity of public systems there are a few fundamental levers that make institutions work the way they do; that these levers were set long ago to create bureaucratic patterns of thinking and behavior; and that changing the levers—rewriting the genetic code—triggers change that cascades throughout the system.
We have grouped these fundamental levers of change into five basic strategies, each of which includes several distinct approaches and many tools. For each lever, we have designated a strategy. And to help people remember the strategies, we have given each one a label that begins with the letter C.
The Five C's
Lever Strategy Approaches
Purpose The Core Strategy Strategic Management
Clearing the Decks
Incentives The Consequences Strategy Managed Competition
Accountability The Customer Strategy Customer Choice
Competitive Choice
Customer Quality Assurance
Power The Control Strategy Organizational Empowerment
Culture The Culture Strategy Changing Habits
Touching Hearts
The Core Strategy
The first critical piece of DNA determines the purpose of public systems and organizations. If an organization is unclear about its purpose—or has been given multiple and conflicting purposes—it cannot achieve high performance. As Yogi Berra is reputed to have said, "If you don't know where you're going, then any road will take you someplace else."
We call the strategy that clarifies purpose the core strategy, because it deals with the core function of government: the steering function. While the other four strategies focus more on improving rowing, the core strategy is primarily about improving steering—about doing the right things, not doing things right. At the most fundamental level, it is about creating clarity of purpose. When everyone in a public organization or system is clear about its fundamental purpose or purposes, improving performance is far, far easier.
This, no doubt, seems very simple and very obvious. Yet, it is also rare. Most public organizations have multiple purposes, some of which even conflict. Over the years, with the best of intentions, school boards, city and county councils, and state, provincial, and national legislatures have piled mission after m
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