(Un)conditional Reform

Why long-term, conditional thinking might help us out of our transformation cycles

I named my newsletter “Bowl of Fish Hooks”, because it’s one of my favourite metaphors of how change works in complex systems like the public sector: you try to get one hook out of the bowl, and they all come out. Everything is interlinked, and spikey.

Today I want to make an attempt at describing one cluster of hooks that I think is central to the question of public sector reform, or its lack thereof. To do that I’ll hark back to the links between issues I’ve touched on before, and I’ll lean out the window a bit more than other weeks and declare my personal two cents on what I reckon ought to happen. What should work if we want to see lasting and effective reform, in my estimation – or at least, if we want to stand a better chance at getting off the not-so-merry merry-go-round.

Let’s set the scene: After studying public sector reform for the best part of five years, it’s my conviction that New Zealand’s public management does not have an effective way to direct change in its organisations in a way that can reliably create the desired outcomes. There are exceptions. But on the whole, the main methods out there boil down to new strategies, roadmaps and operating models, followed by restructures that “give effect” to them – in all their euphemistic namesakes.

These methods are being practiced in a way that systemically (if unintentionally) excludes the advice of practitioners when they foreshadow the unintended consequences that boardroom-conceived plans will have on their operations, and operate in a fog of unaccountability that raises serious questions about the ethos of transparency and fiscal responsibility considering the array of costs that come with structural reforms.

This is not the result of incompetence, lack of care or ill-intent on the part of managers, as there are many incentives in the public system that make it easier and more sensible for managers to restructure or to continuously refine the semantics of organisational intent, than to take any other actions. But with no tangible markers that a change process nudged the organisation closer to where it wants to be, I don’t see how I could come to any other conclusion, than:

Institutional reform in its current shape is about a lot of things, except about the stated goals from the well-worn phrasebook of transformation.

So that’s the depressing outset, great…

Last week I argued that the flip side of it all – efforts of innovation – struggle and fail to make an impact in public sector on account of the same factors that keep the internal restructure-wheel spinning: the way we plan, fund and govern work makes it nigh impossible for public service work to be undertaken in any innovative fashion. Consequently, public servants rarely find a way to “act” innovatively inside their given remits. The ‘“practice” of innovation mainly survives in sealed bubbles, “magic circles” in which the rules that exist elsewhere are suspended - giving many public servants the impression that innovative work is inherently unrealistic, disconnected and aloof. Get back in your business-case-box, design nerd!

What I don’t think I’ve appreciated (and written about) enough though, is the contextuality of it all. Transformation is not all wholesale doom or allround glory – it depends (a sociologists’ favourite phrase!). Or put in a more engineer format:

If x, then y

Photo by Emile Guillemot on Unsplash

The terms “tailored” or “fit for purpose” can be found in ambiguous, broad vision statements in many-a public strategy, but they rarely get filled with any methods of substance. But they could be:

IF you engaged in a structured and constructive collaboration with leaders and practitioners of a team or function in need of reform, THEN you might collectively pin down where the root-causes of strategic issues lie.

For example, plenty of leaders and practitioners seem to agree that their work is “too siloed” in their organisation. Your standard restructure™ will jump to solve that issue by lumping the siloed teams into one – and expect them to start communicating more… somehow. But if an analysis looked into the deeper, CONDITIONAL, reasons for the perceives silos, you might – for example – find that the teams in question work with entirely different IT tools, are exclusively buddy-trained, leading to in working realities that make crossover between the systems and people impracticable. The silo is here conditional on tools and training - not (just) structure - though I won’t deny that structure can also play a role.

As an example, this is semi-made up. Like the “based on a true story” at the beginning of a Cohen brothers film. Still, it represents my observations of the “big rocks”, the real determinants for the success of change and efficiency: IT systems.

IF the applications team had a new IT system (and IF that system was actually planned, procured and developed with competent user-input at all stages), THEN they could process applications in half the time.

But what we do know about IT projects? They’re a nightmare. They have huge failure rates. They almost always blow over time and budget. They leave the public service over the proverbial barrel, more often than not.

That may well be another big reason why we tend to avoid these big rocks in our innovation/improvement/transformation ecosystem. They leave even the most well-intentioned leaders with very little room to maneuver. As a leader, I may well be aware that the IT system or the lack of training is why certain things don’t sit right in my team – but what can I do about that? They’re too much effort, budget and take too long – but what I can do is rephrase the team’s strategy in an attempt to play the cards I’ve been handed the best way I can.

So, then what?

In a recent interview Ashley Bloomfield “floated the idea” of a bipartisan 10-year plan for the health system (from 6:10min in this video). While there wasn’t much concrete there, I was pleased to hear him explain that:

[A 10 year horizon is helpful because] “it’s a period of time you can really make a difference. You can make a different to training the workforce, you can make a difference to buildings and data systems and so on. “

In my estimation, he names the biggest rocks that get chronically left out of our short-term internal change cycles: training, infrastructure and IT. He notably omits references to operating models and talks about creating “not a strategy, not a vision, but a clear plan” for that timeframe. Whatever you might think of Ashley and his role in this – he’s got a darn point.

In such an environment, one might be able to circle in on the “big rocks” and build the plan around them. In our current culture it may seem a crazy idea, but:

What if a public organisation had a clear view of the conditions under which transformational goals can succeed, and systematically worked to create those conditions before pulling the trigger on disruptive and expensive internal change processes?

To paint a picture: If we know that improvements rely on a modern data management system, then all energy should be focused on that first, while other parts of operations may go into an intentional stabilising pattern, shielding them from disruption for the time being. For the duration, operational teams’ efforts should go to part-taking in the development of a realistic, practical system - and not into the storming, norming and forming of a restructure triggered by a new incoming manager or a newly worded strategy, for instance. Then when the system can be phased in, work can be re-focused on the supporting training and - dare I say - structural changes. I know this is simplified, but why not imagine something so wild for a moment?

Now you’ll say – we can’t plan all work on a 10 year scale, that’s just not realistic. And that’s true.

In many circumstances, simply an awareness of the conditionality of reform and a commitment to keeping calm waters for a certain amount of time will help. And then again: why is that such a strange idea? Isn’t it one of the building blocks of the public service is to have that longer-term steady hand, when political leaders come and go - bipartisan or not? Is that not simple the ideas of stewardship?

It’s utterly bizarre that we have gotten so used to the constant buzz of institutional reform that we perceive a call for long-term commitments to be outlandish and impracticable!

Think of this old wisdom: it’s expensive to be poor. You can’t buy in bulk, have to borrow more, need to buy cheaper things that end up breaking more often and costing you more in the end. That’s what we might be doing with public sector reform – expensive and un-monitored fiddling with many knobs, constantly - rather than feeling empowered to work on moving the big levers with a collective and continuous force.

And yes, this has roots in political questions. That’s why Ashley referred to a word you don’t hear much in New Zealand: “bipartisan”. But I can’t help but think that if we actually had a tallied bill of what our current transformation practice costs, and how little tangible progress that buys us, perhaps that might show things in a clearer light. Perhaps that would qualify any notion of “waste” in the public service more constructively, in the short- and the long-term.