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WHITE PAPER
Breaking the Failure Cycle
How Collaborative Technologies Can DriveTransformational Change
By Frank DiGiammarino
Just as managers in the public sector face an unprecedentedarray of challenges, they also face major difficulties in tappinginto their most valuable resource: their own organizations. Todaya new set of collaborative technologies allow public managers tobring together visionary leadership with critical data to make their organizations as agile as the emerging challenges andopportunities they face. But making the management and ITchanges necessary to employ these new tools and transform anorganization often meets with strong resistance.
A New Paradigm for Public Governance
The National Academy of Public Administration is looking at new models for collaboration that are driving the innovations our government needs right now.In looking at the trends in the over 50 cases onwww.collaborationproject.org,
the National Academy has observed that doing nothing is becoming less andless tenable. Action is required to move our government forward – Citizens,government employees and the problems our nation faces are demanding it.There are both incremental and transformative activities currently in placeacross government. Several of the most innovative solutions have harnessedtechnology with a clear business problem to transform the fundamentaldelivery or performance of the agency’s service or mission. This is wheregovernment needs to be headed.
We have Bureausclerosis
Our government has bureausclerosis – a hardening of the arteries of government.An old American proverb states: “You can’t leap a twenty-foot gap in two tenfoot jumps.” The current organizational culture of federal government hasalways emphasized reliable delivery of service over speed and efficiency.Most agencies are heavily constrained by rigid organizational hierarchies andstovepipes across organizations, all while pursuing narrowly-tailored
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Page 2mandates, undergoing rigorous oversight from multiple directions, andcompeting among each other for a fixed – and, increasingly, shrinking – poolof budgetary and human resources.The result has been a tangled web of organizational charts and appropriationsaccounts that, in many cases, bureaucrats themselves cannot decipher.Unclear accountability and fragmented processes result in too many points of contact for customers. Managers often lack any clear sense of how toincorporate new mandates into existing operations, let alone what delivery of those services should cost.Different agencies may face different constraints to varying degrees, but theoverall effect they have almost always takes the same recognizable shape:ideas, vision, and leadership emanate from the top, but data, experience, andinstitutional knowledge accrue at the bottom. A hundred thousand front-lineemployees can not provide the singular vision and leadership required tomanage a large bureaucracy, but the experience they bring to bear remainsinaccessible to those who are in positions of leadership. Managers are forcedto dictate change and do their best to filter it downwards.
Is there a Cure for Bureausclerosis?
Meeting the challenges of tomorrow requires closing the gap – not justbetween present and future states, but between leaders and employees,stakeholders, and citizens. It requires closing the gap between the leadershipnecessary to provide the vision of transformation, and the on-the-groundexperience that informs successful leadership. It requires a transformation inthe way government views and conducts business - moving leaders out of aparadigm that forces them to push potentially valuable contributors out of theprocess, and instead begin to pull them in. It requires closing the gapbetween ideas and data.For most managers, that’s a tall order because it requires them to go againstthe natural preference for the status quo. For this reason, whentransformational change does happen, it’s usually involuntary. It happenswhen the incremental adjustments we naturally favor just aren’t enough tostay ahead of the game, and we are overtaken by events.Consider the American auto industry’s failure to support innovation advancinghybrid technology and thus reinforcing America’s dependence on oil and gas.Similarly the recent collapse of the nation’s banking system stems from thefailure of industry leaders to adjust oversight policies in the face of the sub-prime mortgage phenomenon. In both cases, key decision makers chose torespond to developments with incremental change. Today, they’re strugglingto solve the problem because they chose to manage rather than lead.When this happens to individual organizations, or even entire businesssectors, the effects are usually survivable. Increasingly, though, a disquietingthought has crept into the minds of managers, into the political campaigns and
Proprietary and ConfidentialFebruary 20, 2009
Page 3across the public sector: What if this paradigm isn’t good enough anymore?The federal system that was born in the wake of Roosevelt’s call for “bold,persistent experimentation” has grown timid over the years and now faces, for the first time, a host of threats, challenges, and trends that threaten theviability of the public sector as we know it. American government itself headed for an overhauling moment. How do we change our course?
The Failure Cycle
In most cases, change today is driven by failure. When operations arerunning smoothly, leaders experience great comfort with the organization’sability to provide a quality product or service within acceptable timeframes.Subsequently leadership has high comfort with their mandate and ability todeliver on their mission. But what happens when the organization beginsfailing in its mission? What happens when the demands begin to outstrip theorganization’s resources?The graphic below outlines a very simplified series of steps that move anorganization from failure to success and if not diligently managed, back intofailure.Step 1: A new problem or challenge arises in your organization. You areexperiencing tremendous organizational pain because you cannot deliver on your mission and you are uncomfortable with your lack of control over mission outcomes.Step 2: When the pain and discomfort outweigh your resistance tochange, you respond to the problem, make progress and see someimpact from your actions. Your environment is now one of high painbuffered by the belief that the changes you are making will lead to aresumption of mission and more control over outcomes.Step 3: Here your actions have paid off and you are now back in control –you have a higher level of comfort and low pain. You are proud of your accomplishment, reward the organization, and feel pretty good about your work. Your organization goes into maintenance mode. You stop seekinginnovative solutions and take comfort in the fact that all is working well.Inattention to growing problems and innovative solutions lead to the nextfailure. The challenge is that your environment will change – thingshappen. In fact, the only thing we know for sure these days is thatchange is constant. Forces either in or beyond your control will drive youinto the crisis environment of Step 4. You have little time to assess or react. You find yourself in an environment of high pain with no comfortand control over your outcomes – squarely back in Step 1.
Proprietary and ConfidentialFebruary 20, 2009
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