A Life in Reform

 Books about management are big business. The Management section of any bookshop is therefore a big one – with what used to be a clear divide between textbooks (for the many students of the subject) and the more practical no-nonsense books written by business leaders/heroes That line began to blur a bit in the 1990s – with academics such as Rosabeth Kanter and Peter Senge, for example, producing best-sellers about the latest "best practice".

At about the same time, the field of New Public Management (NPM) began to make its mark – building on the success of David Osborne’s “Reinventing Government” (1992). By the new millennium, the shelves were groaning under the weight of the academic books appearing on the subject.

What, however, was most curious was the absence of titles from those with the practical experience of managing state bodies. And this despite the best intentions of someone like Mark Moore whose “Creating Public Value” (1995) celebrated the energy and creativity which good public managers brought to state bodies at both the national and local levels. 

Perhaps such people are simply too busy – or contractually prevented from sharing their insights? Only one other academic, as far as I’m aware, has tried to encourage public managers to speak out – and that is the late lamented Chris Pollitt whose The Essential Public Manager” was published in 2003. 

It’s this imbalance in the literature which has encouraged me these past few years to try to put a book together about my fairly unusual experience of administrative reform in some dozen countries - which I had been calling “How did Admin Reform get to be so Sexy?” but which is currently running with a new title “Change for the Better? - a life in reform”. I've been working on it fairly feverishly for the past week - and hope to put it up shortly on this site.....

It has an unusual structure - in that the two opening chapters were actually penned some 20 and 10 years ago respectively; and most of the others are based on posts from this blog – each prefaced by a short introduction. In this I follow the example of two writers I’ve long admired – Robert Chambers, whose Ideas for Development consists of essays he has written over a 30 years period – each with an introduction indicating the circumstances in which it was penned and how his thinking has changed. Roger Harrison, an organisational consultant who developed with Charles Handy the famous idea of ”Gods of Management”, did the same,

For me, too many books pretend to an authority and precision which life simply doesn’t have .....

"Not with a bang, but a whimper" - part VI

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!