PLEASE, not another new operating model

First signals sent by the new Public Service Commissioner

Last week new Public Service Commissioner Brian Roche shared with the media what he had told the leaders of public service institutions in a letter. This has been interpreted as first indicators of what’s in store for the public sector this next year. I’ve seen a few different pieces quoting Roche, but the major themes of his message seem to summarise well in:

[Issues included] “operating with an outdated model within an inefficient system, with too many meetings, too many layers of management, too many double ups and fragmented decision making.”

I must admit that at first reading of this, my heart sank. Because this entirely matches the narrative of the nigh 700 restructure documents that I had the dubious pleasure of reading for my PhD. It’s the seemingly ever-repeating language of transformation, the holy quaternity:

Efficiency, operating model, silos, not the right capability

Don’t get me wrong, it makes a lot of sense to begin with. Those truly are the building blocks of organisations. If you were to think of the issues in your workplace, you might list them under similar headings, right?

Trouble is, in Roche’s letter to public sector CEO’s, they:

“were tasked with reflecting and suggesting changes, which would feed into a smaller group of public service chief executives to work on those changes.”

And I’m starting to ask myself: how much longer do we want to ask the same people to “reflect on” the same generic issues, equipped with the same tools (= external reviews, new operating models, restructuring), who have cut their teeth in the same hierarchical, managerialist culture, before we come to the conclusion that this is exactly how the system continuously reproduces itself and the very issues that it’s attempting to address?

But let’s take a few steps back and deal with the issue of the outdated operating models.

Operating models - it’s such a widely used and abused term. Many leaders seem to place the operating model at the root-cause level of all that’s good and bad in an organisation. So if we see inconsistencies, inefficiencies, or lack of clarity and how an organisation functions, we conclude that the operating model is not working as intended and should be looked at first and foremost.

What I can say from my research and having seen nigh a hundred of them I can point to two issues with how they’re currently used in the public sector:

1. They have little, or nothing to do with how an organisation operates. They are more akin to stakeholder maps or visualisations of some kind of strategic intent.

2. They are virtually interchangeable. I've looked at restructures from 62 public service organisations, And if you view them all side by side, you'd struggle to see the difference between a policy function, an IT team, comms, or even some frontline services.

Let’s illustrate that with a few examples. Full disclosure: these are operating models from restructure documents that were released under the Official Information Act, so they're publicly available and not confidential. I have still chosen to redact the names of teams or functions that might indicate where they are from.

Here is a model from a smaller public service organisation that was used to motivate the full restructure of all tiers. It was presented as the “north star” that sets out how the organisation will work:

Or this one:

This was presented as the new and revised operating model for a corporate team. Or this one from an HR team:

A good 2/3 of operating models that I've seen in my research are at this level – I’m not trying to pick the worst ones here. A slightly better example is this one:

But this still merely maps the elements that exist in a team.

Some of these examples were accompanied by bullet point list of principles or ways of working (“flexible, trust, customer-centric, learning” and the likes). Without fail, newly defined operating models are framed as a major innovation and the enabler of the magic: more efficiency, fewer silos, and the right capability in the right place.

I’m not showing these as some kind of ‘gotcha’, look how dumb they all are. I want to point to a pattern that I believe exists in Aotearoa’s public sector practice, and how we attempt to articulate meaning and direction. A practice that is often fed by the advice of private sector consultants and yes, I think we’re lacking.

In my view, the public sector ails from a HYPER-FOCUS on strategy, and a massive under-appreciation of the interactions between policy, process and practice.

If the public CEO’s now go ahead and “reflect” through an “operating model” lens the same way that they’ve demonstrated time and time before, then we may very well see the same outcomes: a list of high-level descriptions of pain-points, articulations of visions, principles and ways of working. The same ones as before, over and over.

I can seal them in an envelope right now, place it in a drawer, and run the saddest party-trick at the next all-staff meeting.

We seem to expect that if we only find the right strategic vision, worded just so, and expressed in the simplest and most clear model, then my organisation is set up for success. Then we kick the power point down the totem pole and expect each tier to “give effect to” the carefully crafted- and modelled ideas.

This happens under the guise of giving managers “the freedom to manage”. But effectively, it requires each function to justify and re-articulate itself under the ‘semantics du jour’ – usually with the trusty means of a restructure. All the while, there are still no robust mechanisms to feed practical concerns upwards and handle the complexities that come with understanding real root-causes – ultimately triggering breathless cycles of “storming and norming” and change washing at all levels.

Why do we have so many meetings? Perhaps because the demands on the public sector coming from all sides require a huge amount of coordination, and we keep expecting everyone to individually diagnose, fix and innovate from the top?

As a new commissioner, Brian Roche may very well have chosen his words carefully – and when I read the interviews with him, there’s a way that I can read my own gripe with operating models into what he says. Like a horoscope, I guess that’s the skill.

What gave me a little hope is that Roche stated in the Herold interview referring to the CEO’s:

“I don’t want to impose it on them — but I will impose it if we don’t make progress.”

It’s fair to remember that he’s the direct manager of the public service CEO’s, so to ask them for their input is a reasonable (and necessary) first step. The question is where it goes to from there.

Will he be satisfied with supervising his CEO’s as they proceed down the well-trodden path of a.) top-down, b.) strategy-heavy, c.) manager-exclusive (i.e. lacking direct practitioner co-design, not just pain-point workshops) analysis and design processes that d.) lacks robust metrics – then the odds are that the disconnect between leadership and practice is set to continue. But maybe, just maybe, he means business when he speaks about “imposing” on them. To me, that would mean to look at procurement and business-case processes, how work happens, how it gets prioritised and how we delegate decisions - just to name a few.

Two closing thoughts:

A lot of this language matches what has been written and said at the outset of John Key’s Better Public Service initiative.

“[There is a] lack of coordination, poor economies of scale, slow pace and little innovation. (…) agencies will need to be better attuned to the needs and aspiration of communities, and more agile in quickly designing and implementing responses to complex and changing needs. Agencies will have to transform and reinvent themselves to do this, changing internal cultures to support greater innovation for continuous improvement.”

Yes, history is a flat circle. We should take great care to learn from the past and be aware of what didn’t work, what worked, and what is different today that might give any initiative a new outset.

And I noted that none of the interviews seemed to ask him (or at least they didn’t report it), what aspects of public service where working well and should be protected. Whenever there is talk of change and transformation, this gets sorely left in the dust. If we do indeed want to change, we should just as much look at what is working well and make active plans to protect those things from disruption. Again, one dare dream…