185 – Leader predation – an issue for local government?

Posted on October 21, 2015 by lancingfarrell

Posted by Whistler 730 words

I must be reading too much. Along with the article on colonialisms, I re-read an article on pirates that resonated with me and the thoughts I have been having about local government leaders. I am not suggesting that CEO’s are pirates but do we need our version of the pirate code?

In a fascinating article about piracy, written to investigate the ‘internal governance institutions of violent criminal enterprise by examining the law, economics, and organisation of pirates’, author Peter Leeson examines the ‘system of piratical checks and balances crews used to constrain captain predation’, and how pirates ‘used democratic constitutions to minimize conflict and create piratical law and order’.

It is a fascinating read. It started me thinking about the checks and balances in local government that constrain (or otherwise) the behaviour of the CEO.

‘To effectively organize their banditry, pirates required mechanisms to prevent internal predation, minimize crew conflict, and maximize piratical profit.

Captain predation didn’t just occur on pirate ships. Continue reading →

184 – Long Read: What matters and what works. Why feasibility is important in local government.

Posted on October 19, 2015 by lancingfarrell

Posted by Parkinson 380 words

I have a colleague who often uses an analogy that I have always liked but never really understood why. Recently I have discovered that it is called the ‘streetlight effect’ or the ‘drunkards search’.

In the analogy two people are walking down a street to where their car is parked when they realise they have dropped their car keys somewhere in the pitch black darkness. They must find the keys before they can go home. They are looking around blindly in the darkness for the keys when one of them sees a light further down the street. They then go and look for the keys under the light where they can see.

The two people can’t do what they really need to do so they go off and do something that they can do. Even if it will never achieve the outcome they want. He often uses this analogy when talking about matters of council policy. What I have realised is that he is questioning the feasibility of the actions being taken to achieve something important.

I was recently listening to a podcast of the first Cranlana lecture for 2012 on the topic of the ‘Good Society’ given by Professor Dan Russell. In it he talks about the importance of feasibility in public policy. He says that often ambitious public policy fails because of the unavailability of feasible actions to implement it. Professor Russell says that putting feasibility first is the answer to the challenge of how to make hard moral decisions. This seems like good advice.

It is a variation on the streetlight effect, where what needs to be done to achieve what matters is known but impossible. Instead, effort is put into doing something that will never achieve what matters but it enables something to be done. It is pointless activity but it makes people feel better than they would just waiting for daylight.

Professor Russell believes that you must first look at what is feasible before setting priorities for action – we must think about both what really matters and what really works. If we do not do both, he believes it can makes it difficult to convince people that the action taken is really trying to do something about what matters.

So, how is this relevant to local government? Read on …

183 – ‘Power without knowledge’ – local government leadership?

Posted on October 15, 2015 by lancingfarrell

Posted by Whistler 530 words

I was reading a paper about colonialism and the use of power, in this case violence, to coerce people into compliance. There is no need to understand people and negotiate when you have power, and the people subjected to the power soon stop trying to negotiate when they are being hit with a large stick. It crossed my mind that this is an extreme version of what happens periodically in local government.

The revolutionisation process brings in new leaders with positional power, which they often use to impose their will on the organisation. They know what needs to be done and what is best, that is why they have been put in charge. Through their actions it is apparent that they don’t believe the current organisational management has much to offer.

The recent post by Colin Weatherby suggesting that new CEO’s could hold a summit to gather ideas about how to improve the organisation before acting ignores this reality. CEO’s don’t have to engage or ask and they usually don’t.

I am sure they would say that they are ultimately accountable, therefore they need to do what they think is required. I don’t disagree with this view – they are accountable. But they don’t have to make these decisions without engagement with the rest of the organisation.

A colleague was recently talking to me about discussions occurring in their council about ‘strength-based’ management. It is picking up on a community development approach that focuses on the ‘assets’ that the community has available from each other, and their ability to meet their own and each other’s needs without relying on the council. It is premised on the idea that it is more sustainable for people to figure out how to help themselves than it is for government to make service consumers out of community members and create dependencies. Within an organisation, this idea could be mimicked by recognising that everyone has something to offer and tapping into it through meaningful engagement.

It would be the opposite of treating the organisation as a blank sheet that just needs someone cleverer from outside to come in and draw on it with their cronies. The colonial powers took this view with indigenous people and set about controlling them through the use of power. A ruling elite made all of the decisions without recourse to the general populace – many of whom were ‘contracted’ into a form of slavery anyway – and the potential for progress was limited by the ability of the ruling group.

Someone said to me recently that ‘ideas are like water’ at their council – they only move downwards – in a trickle and they are drought stricken.

At the end of the day, the CEO and top management will exercise power as they see fit and with little control. Councillors cannot see into the organisation and CEO’s are careful to make sure that their every need is met. The leaders of dysfunctional councils are often held in high esteem by their councillors and peers.

However, if power is used without the knowledge required to effect change that is positive, sustainable and creates community value, they will just perpetuate the cycle of ‘revolutionisation’ and be replaced by the next lot. It may have served their career well (every day top management who are failing leave for more senior roles elsewhere) but it will have done little for the organisation or the community.

Just like the colonial powers.

Breckenridge, Keith, 2008. ‘Power without Knowledge: Three Nineteenth Century Colonialisms in South Africa’, Journal of Natal and Zulu History, 26.

182 – Public management, or management in public?

Posted on October 14, 2015 by lancingfarrell

Posted by Whistler 220 words

I was reminded today of a practice that seems to have crept into local government with the increasing insecurity and risk aversion of top management. It is similar to the concept of ‘risk farming’.

The practice involves your manager avoiding responsibility by setting up meetings for anything that is happening that they sense could have a down side. In the past, a discussion with your manager at your one-on-one meetings would have sufficed. You could let them know what is happening and undertake to keep them informed.

Now, they are likely to ask you to set up a series of meetings involving them and anyone else they can think of who may have an interest in the matter. The purpose is to ‘keep an eye’ on the issue and ‘support’ you in seeing it through. At the meetings you become publicly accountable for your management of the matter.

In the event that the matter blows up, your manager will implicate everyone else involved and they will be witnesses to your failure. Your manager will no longer be held accountable for your performance – after all, there was a whole group of people ‘supporting’ you.

I am old enough to remember when a manager would provide support by encouraging and advising, and by standing by your side when things were getting tough. They don’t seem to be able to get out of the way fast enough now.

As someone said to me recently, when people don’t know something they get sacred and when they get scared their aversion to risk goes up.

181 – Applying the public value concept in local government using systems thinking

Posted on October 12, 2015 by lancingfarrell

Posted by Colin Weatherby 1100 words

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Systems thinking is potentially a great lever for improvements in the design and delivery of local government services. However, it will require a major shift in thinking about how work is designed and managed because the systems thinker is focussed on the purpose of a service from the customer’s point of view. This is a change from the needs of the organisation and the people working in it driving the design of work and delivery of services. Here are some thoughts building on the earlier post by Parkinson.

Local government needs to work harder to put the needs of customers first despite the realities of multiple and conflicting accountabilities, limited potential for increased income from rates, difficulty defining who the customer is, and increasing expectations of service levels, reliability and speed.

The principal focus of systems thinking is designing and managing the organisation with the customer mind. Continue reading →

180 – Long Read: Managers as designers in local government.

Posted on October 9, 2015 by lancingfarrell

Posted by Lancing Farrell 300 words

This is a long read compilation of the series of posts on the manager as designer in local government. For those who prefer to get the whole story in one go, here it is.

Some years ago I read a book called ‘Managers as Designers in the Public Services’ by David Wastell (Professor of Information Systems at Nottingham University Business School). It made a lasting impression on me. It is a book worth reading for its treatment of systems thinking in public service management.

More recently, I read two articles from the September 2015 issue of Harvard Business Review; ‘Design Thinking Comes of Age’ by Jon Kolko and ‘Design for Action’ by Tim Brown and Roger Martin. Each article extends the idea of the manager as designer with specific application to improve corporate processes and culture.

Jon Kolko discusses the application of design to the way people work. He says that people need help to make sense out of the complexity that exists in their interactions with technologies and complex systems, and that design-thinking can make this ‘simple, intuitive and pleasurable’.

“ … design thinking principles have the potential to be … powerful when applied to managing the intangible challenges involved in getting people to engage with and adapt innovative new ideas and experiences.”

The principles he is referring to are empathy with users, the discipline of prototyping and tolerance of failure.

Roger Martin and Tim Brown provide a related but different view of design in organisations. They see it as helping stakeholders and organisations work better together as a system. The focus of their article is the ‘intervention’ required for stakeholders to accept a new design artefact – whether ‘product, user experience, strategy or complex system’.

They argue that the design of the ‘intervention’ (i.e. the way a new product or service is introduced to users and its integration into the status quo) is even more critical to success than the design of the product or service itself.

In effect, there are two parallel design processes; the artefact (i.e. a new service) and the intervention for its implementation (i.e. the change management).

So, how is this all relevant to local government? Read on …

179 – Some thoughts on local government and public value.

Posted on October 6, 2015 by lancingfarrell

Posted by Parkinson 1400 words

A number of posts written have been written about public value by others (see Why do we provide the services that we do in local government?, Customer, client, citizen, resident or ratepayer. Who are we dealing with?, Applying the public value scorecard in local government services. Part 1. , Applying the public value scorecard in local government services. Part 2., Public value gap analysis. A tool., Public value gap analysis. Some actions., Making high performance happen through value-led management., and Value-led management in local government. Some further thoughts). This post is an attempt to provide a context for further thinking about public value in local government.

Common good and public value

The political philosopher Michael Sandel has identified that rising social inequality is leading to a separation in ways of life between the rich and the poor. He believes that when this happens there is no longer a common way of life because “they don’t use the same public institutions, don’t inhabit the same civic spaces, and don’t avail themselves of the same public services”. As a result, Sandel believes that we can cease to think that we are ‘in it together’ enough to even deliberate together as members of a political community to determine common good.

The gap between the rich and poor is growing in Australia. According to the Oxfam report ‘Still the Lucky Country?’, the wealthiest Australian are disproportionately influential and the poor are at risk of being marginalised and unheard. Extreme wealth provides the power to influence government policies that favour those with wealth, regardless of what would work best for the whole of society.

The common good is the ‘large’ form of public value. Continue reading →

178 – The Prime Minister’s mini summit – is there a lesson for local government leaders?

Posted on October 5, 2015 by lancingfarrell

Posted by Colin Weatherby 500 words

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Some time ago, I posted on what I would do if I was the CEO. This post is in a similar vein.

The new Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull called a mini summit last week and invited leaders from the worlds of business, unions, community organisations and think tanks to discuss the state of the economy and the best way forward for economic reforms.

Reporting about the planned summit reflected the openness of the new national leader to discussing ideas other than his own. It was a move that his predecessor failed to make. The Sydney Morning Herald described the summit as suggesting that the new Prime Minister is keen to discuss big ideas and ‘send a message of creative optimism’ to the leaders invited. The Prime Minister is quoted as saying that the summit is a ‘rare opportunity to achieve consensus on the most pressing economic and social issues’ facing the country.

I am not sure whether the summit reached consensus or whether it will really influence government thinking and action. It has certainly signalled a new approach by Malcolm Turnbull.

It occurred to me that local government leaders could take a similar approach. Continue reading →

177 – Decision making: some tips for local government.

Posted on October 2, 2015 by lancingfarrell

Posted by Colin Weatherby 420 words

There have been a number of posts on decision making in a recent series. This post is a quick overview of further advice available from four Harvard Business Review articles in the September 2015 edition; ‘From ‘Economic Man” to behavioural Economics’ by Justin Fox; ‘Leaders as Decision Architects’ by John Beshears and Francesca Gino; ‘Fooled by Experience’ by Emre Soyer and Robin M. Hogarth; and ‘Outsmart Your Own Biases’ by Jack B. Soll, Katherine L. Milkman, and John W. Payne.

Read them if the ideas are relevant and potentially useful to you. I have simply cut the main tables from them and provided a brief overview of the context.

The first table is from the article ‘From ‘Economic Man” to behavioural Economics’ by Justin Fox. Continue reading →

176 – In-vehicle GPS – Part 2: How every council can have it.

Posted on September 29, 2015 by lancingfarrell

Posted by Lancing Farrell 550 words

In part one I discussed the features and benefits of in-vehicle GPS. Because councils deliver services at locations dispersed across a large geographic area and vehicle ownership is expensive and utilization is often low, in-vehicle GPS has the potential to provide significant benefits. It links the planning undertaken in asset maintenance systems to in-field work planning and delivery to ensure that resources are used efficiently to complete the planned work. The key barrier has been how to get in-vehicle GPS installed in all vehicles.

I think the trick to implementing in-vehicle GPS is the strategy and policy sitting behind it. Here are some tips. Continue reading →

Local Government Utopia

Two hundred and fifty (or so) opinions, essays and observations

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