The previous post ended – as did my little book In
Transit – notes on good governance – in 1999, when New Labour’s programme
of “modernising” government was just getting underway……I’m still proud of its
20 page summary of the reform experience to that point - which you can read for
yourself in chapter 4, pp 70-90 simply by clicking on the hyperlink above….
For some reason, it’s not easy to find much on the internet about the
decade that followed – although I remember the Cabinet Unit being fairly
prolific in its production of strategy papers. “The
Meaning of Modernisation; new labour and public sector reform” gives a good
flavour of those frenetic years.
Not forgetting that the point of this series is to explore how on earth
we have been persuaded to surrender so much power to managers, I want in
this post simply to pose the blunt question of what 40 years of reform
experience has given us….A lot of words certainly…but what, as the
Americans would ask, has been the “bottom line”?
Chris Pollitt was one of the most respected of European public
management scholars and did a fascinating presentation in 2012 of “40 years of public
management reform” which you can watch here. It focuses on the UK experience of national
government reform and is quite withering, revealing
· an absence of clear
statements of reform objectives
·
Prescription before diagnosis.
·
Failure to build a sufficient coalition for reform, so that the reform is
seen as just the project of a small elite
·
Launching reforms without ensuring sufficient implementation capacity
·
Lack of interest in evaluation
·
Haste and lack of sustained application
For more on this, see page 34 of the current version of my How
did Admin Reform get to be so sexy? This leads back to the article on
the administrative reform industry I’ve mentioned previously -
Pollitt noted that there was massive reform action in some (not all)
other UK governance sectors, and noted also that, for constitutional reasons,
UK governments have more freedom to move than most comparable democratic government
systems. For this reason, the UK experience taught some valuable lessons. He
attributed the great volume of reform action in part to ‘the rise of the
managerial reform community’, with ‘change management experts’ everywhere, in
the public service, in the big consultancy firms, and so on. And, compared with
other things they might be doing, they and the political leaders they advised
saw that ‘reorganization can be undertaken rather quickly’; doing it conferred
on them ‘a badge of modernity’, and was a kind of ‘virility symbol’. But it was
also a ‘beautifully clear example’ of the lack of any stable, scientific basis
‘for the long-term organizational redesign of complex public services’
What the reform designers did not do anywhere near adequately was to
consider the consequences of what they were doing. The rate of change – the
state of ‘permanent revolution’ – made it impossible to find out which designs
worked well and which did not. And the transition costs were minimized if not
neglected altogether: as well as the costs of office redesign and so on, they
included the disruption of staffing and relationship patterns and routine
housekeeping systems that had worked well enough in the past, the loss of organizational memory, and ‘a general loss of faith
in stability and an accompanying diminution of willingness fully to commit
oneself to a particular organization’.
A few years back, Dutch-Australian academic Paul ‘t Hart compiled his own set of rules for
reformers - proposers of
reform activity are more likely to achieve some success if they take note of
these rules and seek, as far as possible, to follow them.
What follows
paraphrases ‘t Hart’s treatment (you can find the piece on pages 203–210 of Delivering
Policy Reform – anchoring significant reforms in turbulent times; ed E
Lindquist, S Vincent and J Wanna (2011)
_ Don’t overdo the rhetoric of reform,
and concentrate on areas of greatest need.
_ Don’t let a ‘good crisis’ go to
waste, for it may provide the best opportunity for serious change.
_ ‘Keep the bottom drawer well stocked’
with developed reform proposals, so that you are ready to run when an
opportunity presents itself.
_ You should invest in an ongoing
‘brains trust’ to be constantly thinking about such matters, and don’t ignore
knowledge available outside government circles.
_ Be prepared for ‘push-backs’, and
find ways of talking meaningfully to reform opponents.
_ Impeccable analysis is crucial to
the power to persuade.
_ Know the system you propose to
change inside out, so that you are prepared to cope with resistance from
within.
_ Give careful attention to
implementation and long-term management.
_ Create behavioural incentives to
encourage those operating the new or changed system to conform.
_ Be sure to incorporate mechanisms
that make the reforms self-sustaining.
Amazing that 40 years can produce such anodyne lessons as this!
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