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Posts Tagged ‘Management’

Christian Bason

A new welfare model – yes, but how?

By April 22nd 2013

This article was previously published in the Danish weekly Mandag Morgen.

Co-production of our welfare tasks, whereby we activate citizens’ own resources and the resources of those closest to them can provide us with a cheaper and better public sector. That is some claim. After all, where are the benefits going to come from?

Once, when I was a young hopeful management consultant, we were asked by the Ministry of Finance to “deconstruct” the benefits of outsourcing. In other words: If outsourcing of public sector tasks to private companies can mean an increase in efficiency by perhaps ten per cent, to which factors could this be attributed? Is it possible to find a range of examples in which there was an increase in efficiency and isolate the reasons from one another in a way that indicates which factors generated which savings?

This is not the kind of job you turn down when the order comes from by the Ministry of Finance, which is paying for the privilege.

Outsourcing fails managers

This resulted in an inspirational journey all the way to Jutland and to successful or less successful outsourcing experiments, year 2000-style. Sadly, the conclusions from the exercise that were published in a blandly-titled publication called “Efficiency through competition” were not so inspiring. The benefits were primarily down to good management and the reason why outsourcing meant good management was pretty banal. When implementing the outsourcing of a municipality’s care for the elderly, for example, it meant that you were able to get rid of bad managers and replace them with better ones. A more rigid way of saying it might be that outsourcing thus became a way of circumventing the development of good public sector management and of taking responsibility for getting rid of those who did not possess the right skills. We even noted in the publication (due to respect for the fact that there are skilled public sector managers out there) that “the efficiency of a well-managed public sector welfare task cannot be increased significantly based on competition”.

This leads me to the point for the day: The reason why we can achieve this in a wide range of welfare sectors in a way that is both better and cheaper, as I wrote here recently, is purely and simply down to the fact that they are not being managed well enough at the present time.

Users’ motivation generates energy

In a research project about public managers as designers of welfare, I have taken a look at the origins of some of the future models for welfare. And here it turns out that public managers experience two things when they engage in innovation that is based on design methods such as ethnographic research, user involvement, visualisation, experiments, etc.

First of all, managers acquire new insight into why their current efforts do not succeed well enough, and how they can develop an entirely new relationship with their users. This was for example the case for Christina Pawsø, who was head of Camillagaarden, a workshop for mentally handicapped adults in Odense that won Local Government Denmark’s Award for Innovation in 2010.

Working together with a design agency, Pawsø took initiatives to listen to the users and asked them to share their hopes, dreams and desires for stimulating and meaningful lives. Pawsø became aware that it was actually the users themselves who held the key to both increased productivity and increased job satisfaction.

“I became aware that we do not have to be ahead of our users, but rather behind them or at the most beside them.” says Pawsø.

This was reflected in the fact that if Camillagaarden’s users did not want to take part in theatrical activities, then there was no reason to start them up, even if you had already hired someone to help out with it. The organisation of tasks needed to be based on what users wanted to do and where they had the motivation and resources to contribute. This in itself meant that it was possible to complete a greater number of activities with fewer employees. The more general point here, however, is that you trigger an incredible amount of energy in an organisation when you find ways in which users can thrive and even take co-responsibility for the production of welfare, be they mentally-handicapped adults, patients or perhaps pupils.

30 per cent greater efficiency without outsourcing

Secondly, managers who employ design methods are able to shift focus away from their use of resources and daily activities towards the results or effects they create. At Camillagaarden, there was a shift on the part of the employees away from the notion that “this is what we think we should be working towards”, in favour of “actually, it’s you, the users, who have the best idea of what works for you”. As a result, the focal point of the relationship is no longer the services that the organisation has “on the shelf”. The focal point becomes the difference that managers and employees are able to contribute to creating for the users. It is a hugely powerful transformation tool.

Camillagaarden illustrates that skilled public managers are perfectly capable of figuring out how to switch to a different and better business model. The changes set in motion by Pawsø and her colleagues led to significantly increased well-being and job satisfaction for the mentally handicapped adults, while Camillagaarden was able to handle 30 per cent more users with the same number of employees.

Now, that is what you can call an increase in efficiency. With no outsourcing whatsoever.

 

Christian Bason

The public sector manager’s responsibility

By January 11th 2013

This article was previously published in the Danish weekly Mandag Morgen.

Public sector executives can begin taking greater responsibility for creating real change for Danes. Their tasks include practicing the concept of “systemic contexts”.

“Climate change was the systemic cause of Hurricane Sandy,” wrote researcher George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science at the University of California at Berkeley, in the introduction of a recent article published in the American online news website, Huffington Post.

In the article, he provokes the many pundits in the United States who claimed in the wake of the devastating hurricane that climate change may have played a role, but that it was not the cause of the devastating hurricane.

Lakoff argues that climate change was the cause – if we understand the kind of cause we are talking about. This requires that we understand the difference between two types of causation: systemic and direct.

Systemic causation may sound rather abstract, but according to Lakoff it is quite familiar: Smoking is a systemic cause of lung cancer. HIV is a systemic cause of AIDS. Drunk driving is a systemic cause of traffic accidents. And last, but not least, sex without contraception is a systemic cause of unwanted pregnancies.

Direct causation is also well known: Hitting someone in the face is the direct cause of the pain they experience. Throwing a rock through a window is the direct cause of the broken window, etc.

According to Lakoff, the challenge is that direct causation is straightforward to understand and control, but the systemic causes are what really matter. Thus they are important to understand.

A systemic cause can be one of many and can be due to a variety of factors. It is often indirect and works through a chain of relationships. It may reflect a probability or arise through a feedback mechanism.

Public sector managers’ responsibility

Why is all of this interesting to managers of public organisations (or advisors to managers in public organisations)? To quote Lakoff:

“In general, causation in ecosystems, biological systems, economic systems, and social systems tends not to be direct, but is no less causal. And because it is not direct causation, it requires all the greater attention if it is to be understood and its negative effects controlled.”

In other words: Public sector managers are responsible for creating change via systemic causation. This has implications for their approach to management and leadership, whether they are responsible for reducing accidents at work, preventing food scandals, improving well-being in day care institutions or creating innovation and growth in the Danish economy.

One of the most common excuses I hear from public sector executives when it comes to creating tangible results for citizens and society is that there are so many other factors in addition to the efforts of the municipality, region, agency, or ministry, all of which impact the success of a desired change. For example, the efforts of other organisations, companies and people, economic trends, etc.

Lakoff would respond that this is precisely the point: Public sector results – results that must be created in a complex and changing reality – are not usually about making a direct impact on the world.

Management and systemic causation

If you want to strengthen your ability to lead through systemic causation, there are three things you should do:

Firstly, you should establish a clear overview of the system or the network of stakeholders that comprises the cause-effect chains in your area of responsibility. My experience is that public sector managers rarely do this formally – but why not do this using graphic or digital mapping, for example?

Secondly, you should work consciously and strategically to influence all of the stakeholders in the area, thereby increasing the systemic impact on the issue you are working to address. For example, by actively seeking to influence all stakeholders that have any sort of connection to the set of relationships that create or diminish a safe working environment at Danish workplaces, the factors that promote or hinder our food safety, the stakeholders and actions that affect the way our children develop and thrive in day care institutions, etc. This may also involve targeting the complex relationships that ultimately form the competitive and innovative power of our universities and businesses.

Yes, this is already being partially done today. But no matter what political area you look at, it is not being done with sufficient clarity or direction.

Thirdly and lastly, an acknowledgement of systemic causes entails taking responsibility for the effects that are ultimately created for citizens, companies and society – despite the fact that they do not occur as a direct result of decisions or actions over which you have control. Taking that kind of responsibility would be fitting for many public sector managers.

Christian Bason

Leadership. The secret formula of a successful public sector?

By April 7th 2009

On the afternoon of Monday, April 6th, in a small and rather dark auditorium at the Copenhagen Business School, Alexander Kroll from the University of Potsdam concluded that the term “leadership” is quite rare in public management. That theme came back to haunt me three times over the rest of that day.

First, it haunted me at the workshop. More precisely, a review Mr. Kroll conducted of more than 1.200 academic articles about New Public Management shows that only six percent of them mentions the word “leadership” at all. Now, that might, or might not, be a problem. As a British professor commented, perhaps the reason leadership didn’t pop up more often is that the review was limited to New Public Management — and many, if not all, academics in fact distinguish between leadership and management. If that was the explanation, we wouldn’t have much of a problem. Leadership could still be a central feature of public administration research.

Fun aside, I did get the feeling that we were dealing with a serious question. The workshop participants spent some time debating the leadership theme, and a Brasilian participant asked whether leadership didn’t have to do with a notion of moral authority rather than (administrative) position. For exactly that reason, leadership in the public sector might be suspect in itself. It is not the role of public employees to lead. Moral authority is the sole domain of politicians, not administrators. A scary thought, I believe. But true?

The second time leadership showed up was during my own presentation in the late afternoon. A U.S. professor asked about MindLab’s experience with successful cross-ministerial collaboration and innovation. What does it take? I humbly apologised for not being able to come up with a better suggestion than … leadership. He agreed and said he couldn’t come up with a better suggestion himself. So, perhaps leadership isn’t dangerous, but rather critical to the success of the public sector?

The third time leadership emerged as a theme that Monday was in the late evening, when I visited the blog of the newly established NESTA Lab, an organization focused on public sector innovation, much like MindLab. On their blog, director Rowena Young describes a lunchtime conversation with her new team about innovation leadership in the public sector, and what it would take to switch more managers on to public sector innovation. They decided on the following recommendation:

Start somewhere. Better to have lost in innovation than never have innovated before.

I couldn’t agree more. And maybe the same applies to leadership. Let’s get the secret out.

MindLab at the IRSPM conference at the Copenhagen Business School.
MindLab at the IRSPM conference at the Copenhagen Business School.