Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

In Search of Excellence — but Y’Aint Gonna Find It in Government!

Gov­ern­ment per­forms a wide range of absolutely essen­tial ser­vices, and many pub­lic ser­vants work very hard. How­ever, that alone does not an excel­lent orga­ni­za­tion make.

At least in the back-office side of things — if not always the front ser­vice coun­ters every­one in the pub­lic inter­acts with — I see peo­ple putting in long hours and push­ing hard to meet tight dead­lines. I hear the folks out in British Colum­bia aren’t quite so indus­tri­ous, but at least from what I’ve seen in the Ontario Pub­lic Ser­vice and from my inter­ac­tions with folks in Ontario munic­i­pal­i­ties, peo­ple in gov­ern­ment work hard. How­ever, excel­lence is not just about effort expended. It’s about how an orga­ni­za­tion is struc­tured and how it is built and how it is designed in its very core — down to its genetic code, if you will.

Tom Peters wrote the book In Search of Excel­lence back in 1988. Sure, that’s over 20 years ago, but the key find­ings and con­clu­sions still hold:

• Cre­ate a “bias for action” by allow­ing a vast net­work of infor­mal, open communications.
• Sup­port auton­omy & entre­pre­neur­ship — tol­er­ate & encour­age failure.
• Be value-driven, with a well-defined set of guid­ing beliefs.
• Stay lean, and keep rules & pro­ce­dures as sim­ple as possible.
• Allow max­i­mum indi­vid­ual free­dom while set­ting a firm cen­tral direction.

These are foun­da­tional prin­ci­ples for agile, respon­sive, inno­v­a­tive, and aggressively-competitive com­pa­nies. These are also prin­ci­ples you will not find in gov­ern­ment. In our demo­c­ra­tic soci­ety, it’s because of the fun­da­men­tal nature of politi­cians and the vot­ing public.

Elected gov­ern­ments and the bureau­cracy that sup­port them are incred­i­bly risk-averse. In direct con­trast to Gen­eral Patton’s mil­i­tary maxim, “A good plan vio­lently exe­cuted now is bet­ter than a per­fect plan exe­cuted next week”, gov­ern­ment oper­ates with the belief, “A decent plan that upsets as few peo­ple as pos­si­ble exe­cuted some­time in the future is bet­ter than a bet­ter plan exe­cuted now.” Taken to its extreme, it’s really about “Bet­ter to do noth­ing than to do the wrong thing.”

There are rules and pro­ce­dures galore, and untold lev­els of sign-offs and autho­riza­tion required for most activ­i­ties. The catch­word in these hall­ways is “account­abil­ity”, which in prac­ti­cal terms means you need to have every­one above you agree that what you want to do is a good idea. Tech­ni­cally that’s not true — there are del­e­gated lev­els of author­ity in terms of finan­cial expen­di­ture and scope of action — but in prac­tice I find that things have to flow pretty high up before they get okay’d.

You have undoubt­edly heard the motto, “Bet­ter to seek for­give­ness after­wards than to seek per­mis­sion before­hand.” I believe it to be a good rule of thumb, but unfor­tu­nately, gov­ern­ment doesn’t work this way. Why? Because the vot­ing pub­lic doesn’t think this way.

Politi­cians are not allowed to make mis­takes. If a politi­cian makes a mis­take — even an hon­est one, in an effort to make a real dif­fer­ence, he or she will either be ousted from office or just not get re-elected next time. The vot­ing pub­lic is a tough, unfor­giv­ing, and not-entirely-sensible boss. This risk aver­sion amongst the politi­cians inevitably col­ors the cul­ture and think­ing in the bureau­cracy under­neath that sup­ports them and that actu­ally does the work.

Every­thing is done to pre­vent, as far as humanly pos­si­ble, the very idea of mak­ing a mis­take or upset­ting peo­ple. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion is for­mal. Fail­ure is not tol­er­ated. Guid­ance comes from rules and direc­tives, not from an embed­ded set of guid­ing beliefs. Pro­ce­dures are com­pre­hen­sive and pre­scrip­tive. Indi­vid­ual free­dom is, in many respects, cur­tailed at least subtly.

Being a leader, tak­ing the ini­tia­tive, and being agile and respon­sive means you will make mis­takes. That’s part of the game, that’s just how it works. You can’t learn and you can’t truly lead at the fore­front with­out mak­ing mis­takes every now and then. In fact, if you ask Thomas Edi­son or 3M, it’s about mak­ing as many mis­takes as you can, as cheaply as you can, that leads one to the dis­cov­er­ies that make ground­shak­ing dif­fer­ences. Excel­lence is built on a foun­da­tion of innu­mer­able mis­takes and fail­ures — sure, small mis­takes, but mis­takes and fail­ures nonethless.

The vot­ing pub­lic will not allow this. There­fore, the lead­er­ship in gov­ern­ment will not allow this. There­fore, gov­ern­ment can­not and will not incor­po­rate the ele­ments that Tom Peters cites as the build­ing blocks of excel­lence. If you’re search­ing for excel­lence, you ain’t gonna find it in gov­ern­ment. It’s unfor­tu­nate, it’s a waste of your tax dol­lars, it’s a waste of lives, health, and eco­log­i­cal vital­ity, but it is what we the vot­ing pub­lic have cre­ated by the way we guide gov­ern­ment through our out­cries and, ulti­mately, our votes.