what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Monday, February 22, 2021

Good techniques, leaders or institutions?

Books about getting public services to run well for the average person are little fun to read – which is a crying shame since the issue is of fundamental importance to almost all citizens.

Arguably, it was Gerald Caiden who first made administrative reform sexy – in the late 1960s

Because it’s an issue which has been central to my work, as academic, politician and then as consultant, for the past 50 years, I’ve had to wade through thousands of books and article on the subject since then – most of them academic. A few only have given real pleasure – those written by people such as Chris Hood, Chris Pollitt and B Guy Peters – exposing the nonsenses of the fashion for New Public Management (NPM) which started around 1990.

Most of the writing is spoiled by the appalling academic tic of backing up every statement, in almost every line, with named references (in brackets) linked to long bibliographic lists. And academics have to demonstrate their cleverness – so the articles and books consist of long descriptions of innovations – with results difficult to measure but almost certainly with little real impact…  

 

You might think that the net result of this torrent of negative academic coverage would have discouraged innovators in government – but, hey, there are reputations and careers to be made out of the change process. And staff turnover is such that the disappointing results which eventually come in can be blamed on others

 

Managers first started to make an appearance in government in the 1970s – they were the magicians supposed to turn dross into gold. I confess that I was an early enthusiast for “corporate management” which is indeed still alive and well in the continued reference to managerial silos which are to be slain…..John Stewart of the INLOGOV institute of the University of Birmingham was the guru who inspired a whole generation of local senior officials to think more creatively about this and indeed led me, in the mid 1970s, to help set up in Europe’s largest Region two new types of structure – area committees and scrutiny groups of middle-level officials and politicians  

But it was the Department of Government at Harvard University under the leadership of Mark Moore which began to show what it was possible to do at a more local level…His “Creating Public Value” (1995) celebrated the energy and creativity which good public managers brought to state bodies at both the national and local levels. By then, however, the formulaic NPM had got its grip and Moore, despite teaming up with Stewart and producing a second book, remained a lone voice – with his message that people (rather than techniques) made the difference. 

In recent years Ive noticed a little ripple of interesting titles about more creative ways of working – such as Frederic Laloux’s “Reinventing Organisations” (2014),  Jorrit de Jong’s (of the Kafka Brigade fame) “Dealing with Dysfunction” (2014), Hilary Cottam’s “Radical Help” (2018)  culminating in Strategies for Governing (2019) by Alasdair Roberts 

But it’s only in recent weeks that I’ve realised that Mark Moore’s influence has inspired a few Europeans (particularly from the Netherlands) who have been producing a series of books on good practice in public management – of both the “heroes” and “institutions” (of integrity) sort as they are called in the recent Guardians of Public Value – how public organization become and remain institutions (2021) ed A Boi, L Harty and P t’Hart This seems to take inspiration also from Hugh Heclo whose “On Thinking Institutionally” I wrote about some years ago 

At this stage I would normally conclude with a “resource” of relevant titles – but I realise that this can look a bit off-putting…..so those interested can ask me for the list (or I’ll add it later)

 

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