Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Reinventing Government

Over 20 years ago, David Osborne and Ted Gaebler wrote a book, Reinventing Government.  The book served as inspiration to many local government managers who believed that governments need to be more mission-driven, competitive, customer-driven, anticipatory, and results-oriented.  Many of these principles and concepts from that book remain relevant today.  Recently, I had the opportunity to listen to Ted Gaebler, one of the co-authors, speak at the Wisconsin City Managers Conference.  One of the most interesting facts about Mr. Gaebler is the fact that he is a practitioner, serving as City Manager for Rancho Cordova, California.

One of the major premises of the book is that most governments are customer-blind.  As you know, we are working for the City of Eau Claire to provide a service to our citizens and customers.  This is much different than working for a business, which exists to make profits.  Yet it is business that obsessively seeks new ways to please people.  As City employees, we need to try to find ways to make things happen and think how we can meet the needs of our citizens.  Too often we think in terms of how it has been done in the past and do not think outside the box. That is why people think of government as bureaucratic.

Therefore, we need to change or reinvent government.  After all, Thomas Edison didn’t set out to improve the candle!  Mr. Gaebler offered the following five secrets to revolutionize governance:

1.       Recover the power, tools, and ability to manage what may have been eroded over the last 100 years

Over time, many managers have lost or let go of many of the duties and responsibilities that were initially put in place to manage the organization.  Managers should try to recover administrative functions to effectively run organizations.  In addition, we need to streamline and modernize authorities, capacities and roles including fundamentally changing how they work.  We need to change the interactions between employees, citizens/customers, and the City Council by building a positive culture in City government.  We need to provide excellent, not mediocre, government services that are efficient, effective, well-respected, and (most importantly) entrepreneurial.

2.       Partner with a good administrative professional and fully utilize your administrative team

The demand of being a good manager needs support of the entire administrative team.  It is important for the organization that the manager’s attention is on the outcome and not the input minutiae.  Having a good administrative team is important to create multiple systems of follow-up.  A bureaucracy succeeds when things are either ignored or when decisions are made not to do something. 

3.       Test the real edges of community and council values

We should be creators as well as conservers.  Our organization will benefit when we use our creativity to examine ourselves and our community imaginatively and even critically.  It is important that we have a climate that supports taking risks and recognizes the freedom to fail.  Only in such a climate can we generate new ideas and foster the fresh discoveries, the unexpected connection, and the untried solution that will move us beyond the status quo.

4.       Encourage employees to innovate more

In the private business world, innovation is driven by many factors that are focused on a sense of urgency: fear of bankruptcy, fear of product obsolescence, beating the competition, return of investment, earnings per share, and market share.  In government, many times, there is not a sense of urgency and, thus, no drive for innovation.  I think it is important to create a culture which encourages and supports innovation.  I want you to know that it’s okay to try new ideas and it is okay if new ideas are not successful.  As a manager, I know that sometimes government creates rules to address the times people do not act in a responsible manner.  My job is to hold people accountable for their actions and not to make rules that irritate everybody based on the action of a select few.  We should all try to behave like we are in business for ourselves and see ourselves as a service center.

5.       Be a shape shifter

Being a shape shifter is having the ability to take the same information everyone has and then providing a new perspective - in other words, to change paradigms.  The job of government is to steer, not to row, the boat.  Delivering services is like rowing a boat, and we need to be better at steering the boat in the right direction.  We should ask the question: “What business are we in?”  It is assumed that government is here to provide a service; now we need to have the courage to challenge the assumption that we have to provide a certain service.  If we as employees don’t have the courage to change that assumption, the public will. We all need to be a catalyst, broker, facilitator, and educator.  In the words of Thomas Jefferson, “I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.  As new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, institution must advance to keep pace with the times.”

Mr. Gaebler challenged participants to think about where we are in the change process, to get rid of rules and create empowerment not only with employees but with customers, and that we should learn to collaborate and focus on external services, not internal.  The positive outcomes of reinventing government are that government works better, costs less, can add to economic competitiveness, increase productivity, increase employee morale, increase citizen satisfaction, increase societal equability, and is more respected.  We all need to do our part in reinventing government.