As we saw in Chapter 5, important NPM reforms were undertaken by various governments that had focused on instituting private business-style performance and accountability standards. A number of these quantitative-based performance standards were adopted in the name of promoting efficiency and increasing organizational performance. In focusing exclusively on the so called ‘bottom-line’, however, many of these approaches failed to address deeper systemic or structural issues underlying the actual causes of poor performance. As a result, a variety of alternative methods and approaches have been gaining popularity in the field and practice of public administration over the last few decades. Introduced by Donald Schon and others, reflective practice, for example, has been gaining a strong foothold in the areas of organizational management. Reflective practice hinges upon the ongoing exercise of self-assessment of what a given manager may be ‘doing right, what he/she may be doing wrong, and what he/she could be doing better’. Organizational members learn while doing so that they can make improvements to existing practices and methods in real time. Only organizational leaders at the highest levels, however, have the power to create a ‘learning by doing culture’ within their respective agencies. This means that employees must be given the freedom and flexibility by their leaders and managers within the organization to take risks and engage in experimentation.
Leaders who have taken the initiative to create so-called ‘learning organization’ cultures typically encourage employees to reflect upon both positive and negative feedback that results from the decisions that they make and the actions that they take. Moreover, conflicts and dilemmas in such organizations are resolved through frank and honest discussions among managers and their subordinates. Leadership and innovation specialist Gipsie B. Ranney has identified some of the key characteristics of a learning organization that are shared in Table 3.
Table 3 Characteristics of a learning organization
| Supports innovation | Does not support/Suppresses innovation | |
|---|---|---|
| Aims | Stakeholder, societal benefit, learning | Primarily financial benefit |
| Objectives | Organizational | Narrow functional |
| Structure | Heterarchy, adaptable interaction across functions | Hierarchy, rigid functional reporting |
| Internal relationships | Collaborative, cross-functional | Competitive |
| Rewards, recognition | Non-competitive, celebrates organizational accomplishments | Zero-sum, competitive, focused on the individual, based on executing assignments and meeting targets |
| Treatment of failure | Treated as opportunity for learning, value placed on knowing what doesn’t work, culture of intelligent risk-taking | Punishment, criticism |
| Treatment of success | Teamwork recognized, contribution to greater good celebrated | Ascribed to individuals |
| Time horizon | Long term as well as short term | Short term only |
| Basis for evaluation of investments | Consideration of potential markets, customers, competitors as well as financial evaluation | Use of common financial tools alone |
| Exploration for ideas | Wide-ranging search for new technologies and processes | Restricted to study of recognized within-industry competition |
| Experimentation | Encouraged, supported by education and training, time and coaching provided | Not recognized as a valuable practice |
Source: Gipsie Ranney, slide presentation on ‘Deming’s Ideas in the Twenty-first Century’, The In2In Network Forum Meetings at California State University Northridge on 20 June 2014. | ||
In the closing sentence of his widely read book, The New Economics for Industry, Government & Education, W. Edwards Deming asserted that management processes that overemphasize ‘conformance to specifications, zero defects, Six Sigma Quality, and other specifications-based nostrums all miss the point’. At a glance Deming’s carefully selected comments might appear to be a scathing condemnation of NPM-style quantitative performance measures. However, this surely was not the case. Rather, Deming sought to re-direct management’s narrow emphasis on technical measures of performance to the importance of adopting a wider philosophy of leadership. Efficiency, Deming reasoned, means doing something ‘right’, while effective leadership, he went on to argue, involves doing the ‘right thing’ in the first place. Accordingly, Deming insisted that leaders must possess a clear vision and be able to effectively communicate that vision to the other members in the organization.
Proceeding according to the belief that no agency operates in complete isolation, Deming asserted that well-functioning organizations characteristically perform their tasks and duties as part of an overall ‘system’ in the service of a common purpose. Traditional organizational cultures, by way of contrast, focus on improving the parts of a system (i.e. individual agency and departments there within), rather than focusing on the agency’s function within an interdependent system of other organizations. In Deming’s view, ‘a system is a network of interdependent components’ that work in unison to accomplish specified aims outlined and supported by organizational leaders. To illustrate this, Deming compared a manager within an organization to a conductor of an orchestra. The role of the conductor, in Deming’s illustration, is to get the individual musicians to perform as part of a larger symphony. If the most talented violinist fails to perform in synchronicity with the rest of the orchestra, the performance will be ruined. Indeed, in order to be successful, musicians must work together interdependently in a manner where each member supports the others and vice versa. To help us better understand the importance of leadership in shaping a system that fosters trust and cooperation rather than undermines them, Deming outlined his illustrious ‘Fourteen Points’ of effective organizations, which can be seen in Box 9.
Source: Adapted from: The W. Edwards Deming Institute and W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis.
Failure on the part of public administrators to properly comprehend how their work may be interdependent with the functions performed by other agencies can have catastrophic consequences. To illustrate this point, let us briefly look at one high profile case related to child welfare and safety. In Los Angeles County, the administration of child welfare depends upon the complex interaction and joint involvement of multiple county agencies and countless administrators. The Department of Family and Children Services (DCFS), the Department of Mental Health, the Department of Social Services, local school districts, the county sheriff’s department, as well as the district attorney’s office and the family courts are jointly involved in the process of assessing the well-being of a child who has been placed under the county’s oversight. While each of these agencies (and the departments within them) perform a number of important functions that are interrelated to one another in this assessment and protection process, they often carry out their duties as though they are unconnected.
In the most extreme instances, failure to coordinate and share information among agencies can be fatal. From 2009 to 2013, three children died while under the supervision of the Los Angeles child welfare system. Just as concerning, a Blue Ribbon Commission, appointed by the county to investigate the cause behind these tragic deaths, found that dozens of other cases of child abuse that had been reported had not been properly investigated by the pertinent agencies. Citing poor inter-agency communication and coordination, the Commission’s report revealed that the tragedy was the result of a systems-wide reporting failure. Many of these child welfare cases ‘fell through the cracks’ between agencies that were supposed to be coordinating with one another. Following the release of the Commission’s report, the LA County DCFS agency director confirmed that ‘there are a lot of challenges in the county [such] that no one agency can be totally responsible for child protection . . . Health and mental health and DCFS and probation and law enforcement and a whole host of other organizations, private included, have to be responsible for child protection’.
As we can see from the heartbreaking example just given, communication is essential to inter-agency cooperation. However, in order for genuine communication among public administrators operating across different agencies to occur, they must develop a shared awareness of how their respective duties and functions are interconnected. In reality, however, conversations among public sector organizations operating across county, regional, and state jurisdictions are rare. Closed organizational cultures often keep managers from seeing how their respective functions and duties may depend upon the work of others operating outside agencies. Indeed, most traditional top–down command-and-control organizational cultures have detrimental ‘blind spots’ that may keep their leaders and managers from seeing their many common problems, threats, opportunities, and financial resources as shared phenomena (in those cases where they may actually exist).
While the benefits of inter-agency cooperation should be obvious, cultivating pathways that facilitate communication and ongoing dialogues among different public agencies is no easy task. That said, inter-agency linkages are most easily facilitated through personal and professional interactions of their employees. For example, many deep and enduring professional bonds can be created when employees from different agencies interact with one another through common education and training experiences. To examine in more depth how this process works let us look at a case where a group of management-bound employees from separate organizations shared common post-graduate professional education.
A few years ago the Los Angeles County’s chief administrative officer led an initiative to explore ways in which innovative training and degree-based programmes could be developed to provide mid-career county employees with the essential skill sets required to meet new challenges facing their public agencies. As a result of these discussions, the county began working collaboratively with one local university to deliver graduate degree and training classes on-site at various county agencies through a ‘student cohort’ learning model. County employees who enrolled in the university’s Master’s degree cohort in public administration (MPA) would take the same classes together for two years. Through intensive classroom discussion and group interaction, cohort members gradually developed an acute awareness of how their own work was interdependent with the work of others outside their own organizational divisions and agencies. Perhaps most importantly, students engaged in substantive discussions related to how they could apply both the academic and practical organizational knowledge that they had shared over their time in the classroom to improve communication and coordination among their own agencies.
Having examined how systems thinking may work in theory and practice, let us look at another emergent public administration approach that has been gaining attention in recent years. Originating out of a fundamental philosophical dispute with core tenets of NPM approaches regarding the prime purpose of government and the public sector, a new paradigm known as the ‘New Public Service’ (NPS) first appeared at the beginning of the 21st century. Seeking to address ‘core questions about the nature of public service, the role of administration in governance and the value tensions surrounding bureaucracy, efficiency, responsiveness, and accountability’, its leading proponents, Janet Denhardt and Robert Denhardt, emphasized civic oriented virtues over business principles. Governance, they argue, needs to be focused first and foremost on creating ‘public value’, a term first coined by Harvard management professor Mark H. Moore of the Kennedy School of Government. The NPS’s emphasis on creating public value has been gaining attention in the field and practice of public administration over the last two decades. Creating public value involves encouraging citizens to get more directly involved in establishing collective goals and then working with them to develop strategies for achieving them. According to management expert John Bryson, this means ‘producing enterprises, policies, programmes, projects, services, or physical, technological, social, political, and cultural infrastructure that advance the public interest and the common good at a reasonable cost’.
It is incumbent on public managers to develop innovative ways for building greater citizen trust in their public institutions. In that endeavour, public managers must pose several essential questions. These include: for what purpose was this organization originally created? Why does it continue to exist? Who does it serve? How do we know if this organization has been successful in maximizing the public values and related policy goals that were established cooperatively by the citizens and the public sector organizations that serve them? (See Box 10.)
Source: Robert B. Denhardt, Janet V. Denhardt, and Maria P. Aristigueta, Managing Human Behavior in Public and Nonprofit Organizations, pp. 467–70.
Adopting the buzz-phrase ‘service rather than steering’, Denhardt and Denhardt sought to replace NPM’s rather narrow focus on ‘efficiency’ (and concepts related to it) with values like ‘democratic accountability’ and ‘citizen engagement’. The NPS is premised on the belief that giving citizens greater access to the political-policy process, and affording them a genuine voice in shaping these processes in the first place, would help them become personally invested in creating meaningful change in their own communities. Through a process known as ‘deliberative governance’, policy and administrative decisions are reached through consensus-building discussions with citizens operating on the same level as government officials, policy experts, business people, the media, and other pertinent interests. Under the NPS governance model, citizens are treated as ‘stakeholders’ who are actively involved in defining problems and helping craft solutions that reflect the unique conditions and features that shape the communities in which they reside. In stressing the importance of democratic values and participatory-based governance, the NPS is, in many ways, highly sympathetic to Dwight Waldo’s New Public Administration (NPA) approach that we mentioned in Chapter 5.
One tool that is being used to facilitate and help structure such discussions involving numerous stakeholders is a deliberative process known as a ‘strategic planning cycle’ (sometimes called a ‘strategy change cycle’). A strategic planning cycle is a more open and generally more inclusive type of strategic planning model that is particularly well-suited for use in the public and non-profit sectors. Often structured much more organically and informally than traditional top–down strategic planning approaches, strategic planning cycles are especially useful for helping public managers supervise how and when different stakeholders may participate in multistage deliberative planning processes. As part of this process, a stakeholder analysis is often employed to help participants develop a better understanding of the political, social, and economic environment surrounding the organization. Having an improved understanding of how the public organization is positioned within the broader system will prove extremely useful in assisting public managers identify important strategic issues and problems facing them and their constituent-clients. Employing principles of reflective practice discussed earlier, these public managers can use this vital information to improve the decisions that they make and the actions that follow.
As public managers transition to their new roles as facilitators and honest brokers between ‘the people’ and government agencies, they will have to become skilled in building unconventional partnerships with diverse groups of citizens when designing and implementing solutions to ever complex global problems. At the same time, the success of the NPS model depends upon the active participation of well-informed citizens who are equipped to engage in deep policy debates. Simply affording greater access to citizens to participate in the governing process is not sufficient. Citizens must become conversant with the important political issues facing society as well as the policy and administrative process related to them.
Critics of the NPS, however, point out that most lay citizens in the United States do not possess the knowledge of public policy (and its related processes) or expert administrative skills needed to successfully carry out ‘public work’ in a manner that creates ‘public value’. According to The Economist magazine’s well-respected Democracy Index, some countries are much better suited to NPS-style participatory forms of governance than others. Compiled by The Economist Intelligence Unit, the Index employs sixty separate indicators to rank over 160 countries according to their democratic status. Taking into account an extensive list of factors that fall under the general categories of (1) electoral process, (2) civil liberties, (3) functioning of government, (4) political participation, and (5) political culture, the index is one of the most comprehensive measures of its kind. According to the Index, countries like Norway, Sweden, and Iceland might appear to fare better with respect to the qualities required for NPS governance processes to work successfully, whereas a country that may rank further down the list, such as the United States, might be less likely to do so.
Even if a given country possesses the ‘correct’ mix of factors that would make them ripe candidates for NPS, these critics go on to point out, this still leaves us with unresolved questions regarding what it means to ‘create public value’ in the first place. Indeed, ‘what is it’ and ‘who gets to define it’ are burning issues that NPS advocates are still debating.