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Book
Summary: Banishing
Bureaucracy: The Five Strategies for Reinventing Government
Printed
with permission from TCI
Management Consultants. A group of senior-level management
consultants, offering strategic planning and marketing services
to a wide range of public and private sector clients.
Banishing
Bureaucracy: The Five Strategies for Reinventing Government
by David Osborne and Peter Plastrik
Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1997
Eight years ago, in 1990, one of the authors of this book
(David Osborne) co-wrote a book (with Ted Gaebler) entitled
Reinventing Government, in which several principles for
reorganizing government departments and agencies for improved
effectiveness were espoused. The present book builds upon
that work, dealing more with the implementation of change
in governments to achieve these ends.
"..Reinventing
Government was not designed to help readers figure out how
to proceed. It described the characteristics of entrepreneurial
governments - how they act and what they do - but it did
not discuss how to create them. It did not lay out the strategies
by which bureaucratic systems and organizations could be
transformed into entrepreneurial systems and organizations.
This
book does. A few of the principles of Reinventing Government
such as "customer-driven government" also define
key strategies you can use to leverage transformation. But
not all do. Reinventing Government was primarily descriptive,
while this book is prescriptive. It provides practical know-how
you can apply, whether you are a politician, a public servant,
or a citizen.
Reinventing
public institutions is Herculean work. To succeed, you must
find levers that can move mountains. 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. This book lays out the five strategies
that have proven the most effective - and describes how
the world's most successful reinventors have used them."
(pp. 9,10)
As background,
the ten principles for reinventing government articulated
in the book of that name were as follows:
1. Catalytic
government - separating steering (policy and regulatory
functions) from rowing (service delivery and compliance
functions)
2. Community
oriented government - empowering rather than serving: in
other words, enabling the community to serve their own needs,
rather than the direct provision of services for them
3. Competitive
government - injecting competition into service delivery
to ensure cost-effectiveness and quality services provision
meeting the needs of the market
4. Mission-driven
government - transforming rules-and-procedures-driven organizations
into entities that are clear on their missions and mandates,
and have few internal obstacles in the way of accomplishing
them
5. Results-oriented
government - funding outcomes, not inputs
6. Customer-driven
government - meeting the needs of the customer, not the
bureaucracy
7. Enterprising
government - earning rather than spending
8. Anticipatory
government - prevention rather than cure
9. Decentralized
government - from hierarchy to participation and teamwork
10.
Market-oriented government - leveraging change through market
mechanisms
With
this background, the authors of this book have turned their
attention to the bureaucracies that exist within all government
departments, and identified strategies to overcome the inertia
and unwillingness to change that often exists. They have
outlined five areas of action that should be considered
in making government departments more effective (which they
call 'levers of change'). They describe this as changing
the basic 'genetic code' (the DNA) of government. These
five areas of action are summarized in the chart below:
The
Five C's - Strategic Approaches to Changing Government's
DNA
|
Lever
|
Strategy
|
Approaches
|
|
Purpose
|
(1) Core Strategy
|
. establishing
clarity of purpose
. establishing clarity of role
. establishing clarity of direction
|
|
Incentives
|
(2) Consequences Strategy
|
. managed competition
. enterprise management
. performance management
|
|
Accountability
|
(3) Customer Strategy
|
. customer choice
. competitive choice
. customer quality assurance
|
|
Power
|
(4) Control Strategy
|
. organizational empowerment
. employee empowerment
. community empowerment
|
|
Culture
|
(5) Culture Strategy
|
. breaking habits
. touching hearts
. winning minds
|
Under
the first of these areas, the Core Strategy, the authors
discuss three approaches to focussing on the essential purpose
of an organization. The first of these is to ‘clear
the decks’ — that is, to critically examine all
functions undertaken by government in order to determine
which ones are truly essential to the core goals of the
organization. The second approach is to uncouple what they
call ‘steering’ (the policy-making and evaluation
functions of an organization) from ‘rowing’ (the
program and services delivery function). The third approach
is to improve the aim of programs and services, to ensure
that they are being delivered to the right target markets
and are meeting their needs. The examples cited in the book
of governments that were successful in re-thinking their
core missions in this regard were New Zealand, the U.K.
, and the State of Texas. (Canada under the Mulroney government
was even mentioned as a nation that had started into this
approach but lost their nerve mid-way through.)
Regarding
the implementation of these approaches, the authors discuss
several tools:
Tools
to Clear the Decks
•
performance or program reviews
•
prior options reviews — developed by the British government,
which require that every five years an agency be reviewed
with a view to whether it should be abandoned, privatized,
reorganized or restructured
•
sunset rules that require that public agencies be re-authorized
periodically
•
asset sales to move public assets into private ownership
•
quasi-privatization methods, which allow governments to
retain ownership of an asset but turn its operation over
to the private sector
•
devolution of activities to a lower level of government
Tools
to Uncouple Steering and Rowing
•
a flexible performance framework, which separates the discrete
functions of policy-making (‘steering’) and service
delivery (‘rowing’)and into different organizations
and uses contracts to specify purposes, expected results,
performance consequences and management flexibilities
•
competitive bidding
Tools
for Improving Your Aim
•
outcome goals
•
steering organizations
•
strategy development
•
performance budgets
•
long-term budgets
•
accrual accounting, which depreciates assets and enters
debits on the books when they are incurred, not when the
money is actually spent
The
second area is the Consequences Strategy, which entails
the notion of introducing consequences to managers and employees
in government which result from their efforts. These consequences
can act as either powerful incentives or disincentives for
bringing about certain behaviors. There are three basic
approaches discussed: enterprise management, which takes
a certain government activity and essentially privatizes
it by turning it into a separate profit-seeking venture;
managed competition, an approach that allows the private
sector to compete with the public sector to provide goods
or services; and performance evaluation. The examples cited
in this area of the book are the City of Indianapolis, the
State of Minnesota, the Province of British Columbia, and
Australia and New Zealand.
Tools
that the authors discuss in implementing the Consequences
approach are:
Tools
for Enterprise Management
•
corporatization, which turns organizations into publicly
owned businesses that are quasi-independent of government
•
enterprise funds (also known as revolving funds) —
public organizations that are funded with customer revenues
rather than tax dollars
•
user fees
•
internal enterprise management: making internal service
units within an organization accountable to their customers
Tools
for Managed Competition
•
competitive bidding
•
competitive benchmarking
Tools
for Performance Management
•
performance awards
•
psychic pay (non financial rewards such as time off)
•
bonuses
•
gainsharing (i.e. having employees participate in the financial
gains made by the organization over the course of (usually)
a year
•
shared savings (‘gainsharing for organizations’)
•
performance pay
•
performance contracts and agreements
•
efficiency dividends, which occur when an organization reduces
its budget incrementally, but requires that output measures
of performance remain unchanged (an approach frequently
used in the U.K.)
•
performance budgeting
The
third approach is the Customer Strategy, where the focus
is on serving the key customers and stakeholders of the
government department or agency. Here again there are three
basic approaches outlined, and a series of tools suggested.
The first approach is to give the customers (i.e. the recipients
of the government department) a choice between being served
by the public sector, or some other organization or entity.
The second strategy is to introduce the notion of competitive
choice, where the public can choose the provider of the
service, and the public funding for that service goes to
the provider chosen. The third approach is to ensure that
customer quality assurance mechanisms are in place. The
examples used in this section of the book are schooling
in Minnesota, New Zealand and the U.K.
Tools
for implementation of these approaches that are discussed
in the book include:
Tools
for Customer Choice
•
public choice systems, which allow the public to choose
between different vendors — public and private —
of goods and services
•
customer information systems and brokers
Tools
for Competitive Choice
•
competitive public choice systems, which allow the public
to choose between different vendors — public and private
— of goods and services, and public dollars follow
the customer
•
vouchers and reimbursement programs
Tools
for Customer Quality Assurance
•
customer service standards
•
customer redress (e.g. financial compensation when an organization
fails to live up to its promises)
•
quality guarantees
•
quality inspectors
•
customer complaint systems
•
ombudsmen
The
fourth area of investigation is the Control Strategy, which
focuses on the levels where decisions are made within a
government organization. The basic strategies envisioned
are to empower organizations, to empower employees, and
to empower communities. (The U.S. National Forest Service
is examined as a key case study example in this regard.)
The specific tools for implementation discussed in the book
are:
Tools
for Organizational Empowerment
•
decentralizing administrative controls
•
organizational deregulation
•
site-based management (rather than centralized management)
•
opting out or chartering (which allows existing or new public
organizations to operate outside the jurisdiction of most
government control systems)
•
reinvention laboratories ( i.e. areas of experimentation,
free from much government interference)
•
waiver policies
•
beta sites
•
rule sunsets (i.e. a time limit on rules governing organizations’
administrative behaviors)
•
intergovernmental deregulation
Tools
for Employee Empowerment
•
management delayering (fancy talk for eliminating middle
management)
•
organizational decentralization
•
breaking up functional silos
•
work teams
•
self-managed work teams
•
labour-management partnerships
•
employee suggestion programs
Tools
for Community Empowerment
•
community governance bodies, which shift control over the
direction of public organizations from elected officials
and civil servants to members of a community
•
collaborative planning
•
community investment funds
•
community managed organizations
•
community government partnerships
•
community-based regulation and compliance
Finally,
the fifth strategic approach examines the cultural makeup
of the governmental organization. Using the City of Hampton,
Virginia ('the most livable city in Virinia') as the case
study, the authors identify three approaches in this 'Culture
Strategy'. These are: changing day-to-day habits, winning
hearts and winning minds. The implementation tools discussed
in this section are:
Tools
for Changing Habits
•
meeting the customers
•
walking in the customer’s shoes
•
job rotation
•
internships and externships, which involves bringing in
outsiders for work stints for some period of time, as well
as sending employees to other similar organizations to work
for temporary periods
•
cross-walking and cross-talking
•
institutional sponsors
•
contests
•
large-scale, real-time planning exercises
•
workouts: or ‘brainstorming sessions’: intensive,
short-term group exercises in barrier-free climates to generate
ideas about how to improve targeted work processes
•
hands-on organizational experiences, or teambuilding exercises,
where larger numbers of employees gather to share new experiences
and challenges that foster teamwork skills
•
redesigning work
Tools
for Touching Hearts
•
new symbols
•
new stories
•
celebrating success
•
honoring failure
•
rituals
•
investing in the workplace
•
redesigning the workplace
•
investing in employees
•
bonding events
•
'valentines’ - group exercises where employees tell
other work units what they would like them to do differently
in an open and honest environment free from workplace rivalries
•
surfacing the givens — a facilitated group exercise
where people identify the hidden underlying assumptions
that shape their system or organization
•
benchmarking performance
•
site visits to other model organizations
•
learning groups
•
creating a sense of mission
•
building a shared vision
•
articulating organizational values, beliefs and principles
•
using new language
•
in-house schoolhouses: training employees to become agents
of positive change, and in turn training other employees
•
orienting new employees
As the
foregoing undoubtedly illustrates, Banishing Bureaucracy
is a very rich resource for those in the public sector (or
in charge of the public sector) in determining how governments
can maximize their effectiveness. Highly recommended!
The
above summary has been provided to you compliments of TCI
Management Consultants
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