There was an interesting piece
in the Toronto Star (The Treasury Board’s inefficient mission for efficiency, June 25, 2012) concerning a recent Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS)
initiative to spur innovation in the civil service of Canada. The article points out how an exercise to
achieve greater efficiency in the civil service became hopelessly
inefficient.
The TBS basically oversees all
of the bureaucracy of Canada; the civil service of the civil service if you
will. The Canadian public service includes about 200 departments,
agencies and crown corporations comprising about 283,000 bureaucrats (about
0.83% of the population). It's the
biggest organization in the country.
This particular initiative
involved offering civil servants cash-money if they could come up with
innovative ideas that would save the government money. It looked god on paper. Anyone, in theory, could float an idea. If the idea didn't result in policy changes
and if it saved more money than the actual award, a worker bee in the hive
could walk off with $10,000.
I've worked in large
bureaucracies most of my career. And of
course, since I basically inhabit the philososphere, I spend a lot of time
thinking about how they operate. Here in Afghanistan I have occasion to study
the most advanced form of this particular phylum: the multi-national military
environment.
As an environmental scientist,
I've likened the bureaucracy to essentially a kind of ecosystem, filled with
creatures that have adapted over time to survive and thrive in this unnatural
environment.
 |
| The bureaucrat in his natural habitat. |
In a true ecosystem, innovation
and competition are the engines of survival.
But, of course, the civil service, being the government, has no one to
compete against, and no clear bottom line against which to measure its
success. In theory, success should be
measured by the satisfaction of the people of Canada. In practice, since it is ostensibly run by
politicians, it's also about getting the ruling party reelected.
It’s a very
centrally-controlled, hierarchical structure.
Information flows very well from the top down, but not so well from the
bottom up. Now, we've known since the
days of Adam Smith's The Wealth Of Nations that a centrally controlled economy
is much more inefficient than a distributed economy where individual agents act
in their own interest—enlightened self-interest is the term Smith used. It seems intuitive to me that the same would
apply to an organization.
The mandarins of the civil
service are concerned with consistency and control, retaining decision-making
ability at the top. To my mind, you
can't have that and expect an innovative workforce. Innovation is grown, not imposed. It arises from individuals coming up with a
new idea so that they can do their job more efficiently or effectively, and
that idea catching on with others. In
nature, most innovations—normally manifesting as genetic mutations—don't
work. Now and then, however, you get one
that increases the fitness of an individual making it more likely to survive
and procreate, passing on the innovation to the next generation.
I'm not blaming the mandarins or
the politicians. I firmly believe that
Canada, being a democracy, gets exactly the civil service it deserves. As implied above, innovative ideas often
fail. The media, being the media, don't
report on successful civil service innovations, or successful anything for that matter.
(The media report bad news, not
good news. Perhaps the same reason
Shakespeare's tragedies are considered more important than his comedies. Why?
Some aspect of human nature. Perhaps it's a built-in efficiency of our
minds. Why waste precious conscious
thought on what's going right; it's what's going wrong that you, from a
survival standpoint, needs to know.)
Sorry—drifted off there. Anyway the media will be all over the
screw-ups like a pack of starving chihuahuas on a pork chop. And since politicians who get
bad press tend not to get re-elected, you end up with a pathologically
risk-averse organization.
The folly of those on top, I
think, is having the hubris to think that they can change this.
I've always been impressed with
the caliber of people who rise to the top of bureaucracies. I've found the General Officers here in
Afghanistan to be competent and sharp.
The government bureaucracy I worked for in Canada, similarly, seemed to
me to have very able and hard-working people in the higher echelons.
But the system they presume to
run is not dead. To continue my
ecosystem analogy, it is very much alive.
Look at the common etymology of the words "organization" and
"organism." The senior managers may be the conscious brain of this
organism, but they overestimate the importance of the conscious brain. Even in a human, with the most advanced brain
function in the animal kingdom, the conscious mind is far more limited than we assume.
We can't tell our heart to stop
beating, our lungs to stop breathing. We
can't turn off our fear of heights or love of strawberries. Even to stop a habit like drumming your
fingers when your bored takes a supreme and sustained effort. You can decide not to act gay, perhaps, but
you cannot decide not to be gay. The base motivations that drive us bubble up
from some primordial id that we do not understand. Many of the decisions we think we make, we
don’t actually make, or, put another way, we can do what we will, but we cannot
will what we will.
In other words, the brain of the
human organism or the civil service organization does not control in the manner
we commonly think it does—rationally collecting, processing and analyzing
information. What's more, the human
organism's sensors relay accurate information to your brain, for the most
part. Imagine if your eyes only
transmitted information it thought your brain wanted to see. This is frequently what happens in large
organizations.
It is, in fact, very difficult
to change who you are in any fundamental way, and similarly it is very
difficult to change what the civil service is.
In the government, for example,
Human Resources reform has been a perennial fixture in attempts to transform
the bureaucracy. It's takes too long to
hire people. It's difficult to fire
people. Annual evaluations are a
resource-intensive paper exercise. The
thicket of rules, regulations and policies is stultifying. And yet, despite these bright and determined
people at the top, and despite their stated desire to make HR more effective
and responsive, HR remains essentially the same beast it was in the 60s when it
was called Personnel.
And all the management models of
the past forty years—Quality Management, Learning Organization, Results
Measurement, Change Management—hang like hunting trophies in the corridors of
the TBS, and yet the civil service is essentially the same animal it has been
for decades, heck centuries (the word Byzantine, meaning unnecessarily
complicated, comes from the royal court of Byzantium).
The reason the civil service is
the same as it always has been is because it is adapted to its environment, and, because it is adapted, it resists change.
The reaction to this resistance is for the "brain" of the
organization to introduce more neurons (managers). They’ve made a fetish out of management: time
management, people management, project management, crisis management, process
management, information management. The resulting
level of control at the worker bee level is simply not conducive to innovative
thinking. To quote T.H. White, "Everything not forbidden is compulsory."
So what's the answer? Who knows.
I'm great at pointing out problems; not so hot about doing anything
about them. Maybe I'll introduce a new
fad called Organic Management and make millions. Treat your
company like a garden. Like Chauncey
Gardner said in the 1979 classic film Being There.
P.S. Rats! Just did quick Google and there's already
whole slew of "Organic Management" websites. So much for that get-rich-quick scheme,
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