Let me try to summarise the argument of the recent posts
about public services reform……
Our
view of the State (and what we could expect of it) changed dramatically in 1989
– and not just in Eastern Europe. Boring “public administration” gave way to New
Public Management (NPM) – with its emphasis on the “consumer” (rather than
citizen) and on “choice”…
A
series of blogposts last autumn used
15 questions to explore its state almost 20 years on….
Anglo-saxon
voices were loudest in what was essentially
a technocratic debate, focussing on concepts such as “good Governance” and
“public value”.
Last
week I wrote that it was nothing
short of scandalous that, in comparison with the thousands of books written
on the subject by academics in the past 25 years, there seem to be only two
written for the general public by journalists….Even if I add in those written
by consultants
(such as Barber, Seddon and Straw) the total comes to under a dozen….
A
question which is surprisingly rarely explored in the vast literature on reform
is one relating to the sources of change. We all too readily assume that
effective change comes from politicians and their advisers…..The
sad reality is that this is generally the kiss of death.
Of course this seems to fly in the face of the narrative
about democratic authority and political legitimacy….
But that just shows how two-dimensional is the concept of
democracy which prevails in anglo-saxon countries.
Effective change doesn’t come from the “ya-boo; yo-yo”
system of adversarial power blocs of the UK and USA – it comes from sustained
dialogue and coalitions of change.
And, often, it starts with an experiment – rather than a
grand programme…Take, for example, what is now being called the Dutch
model for neighbourhood care – started by Buurtzorg a few
years back which is now
inspiring people everywhere. That is a worker cooperative model… which,
quite rightly, figures in Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing
Organisations
And when “mutualisation”
was being explored by the UK Coalition government in 2010/11 (see reading
list at end of this post) it was a bipartisan idea which had strong support
from the social enterprise sector….
There was a time when people were interested in the
process of organisational change…..it even spawned a literature on
“managing change”, some of which still graces my library shelves (from the
early 1990s). …The titles figure in this Annotated
Bibliography for change agents which I did almost 20 years ago….
Most of the literature was paternalistic but a few
writers understood that change could not be imposed (however subtly) and had to
grow from a process of incremental adjustment….that was Peter Senge at his
best….But the most inspiring book on the subject remains for me Robert Quinn’s Change
the World (2000) – this
article gives a sense of his argument. At a more technical level, Governance Reform under real world Conditions (2008) also offers an overview with a rarely catholic perspective.....
I don’t understand why we have lost interest in the
process of change – and why leaders seem doomed to reinvent the broken wheel…..
Postscript; for the record, this post probably encapsulates
some of the most important messages from this series about reform I have been
writing in the past year
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