Deadlines are fast approaching for federal agencies to complete the initial tasks under the Open Government Directive. Publishing new data sets, opening websites, completing longer-term Open Government Plans, and dozens of others.

But notably missing is any deadline or deliverable addressing changes in agency cultures and processes. Yet every day those basic dimensions of government life influence managers and staff to resist new levels of openness. Nevertheless, staff are soon expected to:

• take initiative in sharing information and creating more extensive opportunities for public involvement “throughout the decision-making process” and especially in relation to “core mission activities;”

• embrace and experiment with new and unfamiliar internet technologies to open access to information, elicit public feedback and increase accountability to the public;

• regularly collaborate and partner with people and organizations outside of government; and

• generally “strive to incorporate the values of transparency, participation, and collaboration into the ongoing work of their agency.“

Like many bloggers, I’ve been emphasizing the need for changes in federal agency culture in order to achieve the broad goals of the OGD. Pointing to the need for culture change, however, shouldn’t imply that it’s all up to federal employees to act differently and think in more collaborative terms.

This level of change has to start with the whole system. Federal staff now live with agency cultures that often encourage them to look first at the risks of change rather than its opportunities and to choose the safety of established procedure rather than the uncertainty of innovation. Are those values changing under the influence of the Open Government Initiative, even without guidance from the OGD?

At a recent workshop on implementing the Directive, a group of federal officials brought up important cultural change issues. Despite their awareness of these problems, though, much of what they said reflected familiar assumptions about how to get things done. They seemed to convey a double message, urging innovation based in new values while imposing restrictions rooted in the old. That reflects the problem of the Open Government Initiative as a whole – trying to create a new collaborative culture by relying on current procedures and values that work against such change.

The January 11th workshop was the second in a series intended to open the process of implementation to collaborative discussion. Over 200 representatives of government agencies, open government advocates and consulting firms got together to review the early phase of agency responses to the Directive. (There’s an excellent collection of videos and background information of the workshops at the Open Government Playbook wiki site.)

The federal agencies represented were primarily the IT and public participation offices that are playing a lead role in developing the internet tools and interactive sites that the OGD requires. They showcased some of their promising work-in-progress as well as projects that are already up and running. They also brought up some of the hard problems they run into when trying to get managers and staff to embrace innovation.

One of those problems is fear. Many officials say they’re concerned about the potential misinterpretation of data by the public. Speakers mentioned that the fear of data “misinterpretation,” however, is often fear of disagreement or potential embarrassment. They urged their colleagues to think of this differently – as an opportunity to explore differences that could lead to improvement. That would mean regarding the public as a partner rather than a threat.

They also pointed to a fear of experimenting with new approaches and urged that staff develop a mindset that permitted a cycle of testing, failure and improvement. Trying new methods often involves failure, and one of the purposes of public testing and review is to gather ideas on how to make constructive changes.

It’s refreshing to know that many agencies have innovators urging new attitudes of openness. Those are important voices in any change process. The problem is that the system currently makes the fears they identify as reasonable responses to prevailing norms and values. That reality came through in other statements and presentations.

There were concerns about moving too fast, since other directives would doubtless follow, and about the lack of specificity in definitions and expectations. How far can we really go in openness? What’s the standard to guide our choices? The culture encourages an attitude of waiting for detailed orders from the top. Creativity and independent thinking don’t fit well in this system. It’s dangerous for your career if you get out in front of leadership and established policy or have your name linked to mistakes and failed projects.

These realities make people cautious, and that means implementing a sweeping new directive is likely to happen very slowly. Deadlines will be met, but the products may be sketchy, echoing general principles and laying out timelines of generic planning steps. That’s a common problem with government but another sign that speed and career safety do not go hand in hand.

At the very least, a new set of performance standards will be needed to make it safe for staff and managers alike to experiment and take a lead in innovative forms of collaboration. Those standards would also have to be modeled in the day-to day behavior and attitudes of leaders and managers at all levels.

The messages to federal agencies and staff, then, are contradictory. On the surface, the OGD says, move fast, but the culture of the system says, go slow.

Continuing to create expectations of rapid change through directives and the miracle of internet technology is bound to lead to disappointment.

Related posts:

1. The Open Government Directive & Changing Federal Culture – 2
2. The Open Government Directive & Changing Federal Agency Culture

The real test of a collaborative agreement only begins when the changes it requires hit the streets. That’s when it gets personal. Carrying out an agreement usually means that particular people will have to do things differently, pay costs they’re not used to paying, live with new restrictions, new requirements.

The negative side of change is often the first to be noticed, even if an agreement’s hoped-for benefits have been well-publicized. They may look fine on paper but quite different when change comes knocking on the door.

Half a century ago, Eric Hoffer wrote in The Ordeal of Change:

We can never be wholly prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs inordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling.

That’s especially relevant when it comes to implementing a collaborative agreement. Every collaborative leader and practitioner works hard to ensure that all the interest groups necessary to produce and support an agreement are in the room.

Even processes that are well designed can’t possibly include everyone. Representation is not a perfect system. There is a wider public and there are operational staff within implementing organizations who haven’t been in the loop. They may hear of it only during or after formal adoption. Even if they’ve heard of it, the potential impact may not have been clear.

The first test of implementation takes place inside the very organization(s) charged with turning its provisions into actions. Those actions may require changes in the way staff and managers do their work. They may have to master new skills, new procedures, new goals and metrics to measure progress. That can look risky to both career prospects and professional self-esteem. And fears at that level will likely trigger resistance to change.

As noted in the earlier post, resistance is often considered an irrational obstacle to implementing new ideas and methods. There is likely a group ready to embrace the changes; they “understand.” The resisters “don’t get it” and stubbornly cling to their familiar ways.

What is often overlooked, however, is that those in favor of the change also have an emotional response. Instead of feeling fearful and threatened, they feel empowered and excited. In both cases, what happens is that people personalize the change. They favor or oppose it by imagining what it will mean for their own lives and jobs.

Marketers and politicians, among many others, have long understood that people don’t accept something new simply because they hear a list of excellent reasons. They have to be moved to act in a new way. When it comes to accepting the changes called for by new policies, both the staff charged with carrying them out and the members of affected communities need to translate the abstractions they hear into specific ways their daily personal and work lives might have to change.

Yet responses by leadership to emotional resistance usually rely on efforts to educate, to provide additional information to persuade the skeptics. That’s a rational strategy. It assumes that if each individual grasps the benefits, which seem obvious to those who support the new agreement, they should understand how their interests will be met and their situation improved, despite certain trade-offs that might be necessary.

It’s also assumed that emotion is a negative that clouds judgment. Reason should prevail through a calm appraisal of the pro’s and con’s. Emotion needs to be vented, gotten out of the way as quickly as possible. They are matters of individual adjustment.

If the change is deep enough, those assumptions don’t capture the reality. There are several dimensions that will not be touched by additional information and education.

• Emotion and reason are not good or bad. They are different ways of evaluating experience. Emotional responses indicate not only the intensity and hence importance of the concern. They also are signals about basic values that shape daily life. And as noted above, they are a principal means by which individuals internalize and make sense of impending change.

• Emotions are not entirely internal to individuals. People react on a feeling level to an event or perception of some kind and look to others experiencing the same thing for validation of that personal reaction. If you learn that most of the other staff in your program or neighbors in your community or whatever type of group you’re part of may share the same feeling you do, it’s a great relief. In that sense, emotional responses are highly social and are legitimized by being shared.

• One of the realities that is often forgotten in the push to carry out the terms of an agreement is that whatever change it requires is experienced in a broad context of other, unrelated shifts that are taking place at the same time. If the cumulative effect makes life or work harder, the latest change might be experienced as the last straw. Future benefits may not materialize, but I’m paying yet another price in the here and now.

So what to do?

• Start by recognize the legitimate feelings of the opposition – and show understanding of the larger context of change that is also putting pressure on them. Demonstrating that understanding lets people know you want to be responsive to the impacts they face.

• Take a collaborative approach in figuring out how to proceed from this point. Those who believe they’ll be harmed need to have a chance to communicate exactly what they’re concerned about and know that they’re really being listened to. If the response is more one-way flows of information to show how mistaken they are, that may only increase the frustration. They’ll believe they’re not being heard, and the divide between adopters and resisters will be reinforced.

• Create a forum to allow the expression of the fears of loss related to specific changes but then go beyond that to elicit ideas for action that respond to those concerns. This may well require the help of a facilitator trained in the many methods for working in this context. They will know how to structure and conduct meetings of this type to produce positive outcomes.

• To build on those results provide learning opportunities on how to put new ideas for action into practice. Organizational staff need training and/or mentoring tied to their specific assignments and assurance that they’ll be given adequate time and opportunity to master new skills. Community members need hands-on workshops close to home that give them a chance to learn step by step what they can do to carry out the ideas they’ve helped develop.

There is no way to accommodate everyone’s needs or respond to every concern. But there are ways to address the ones that are widely shared. Publicity campaigns and testimonials won’t do it. Responsive collaboration during implementation can make a positive contribution.

Collaborative agreements often come together after seemingly endless sessions of hard negotiation. When reached, they may well represent a breakthrough achievement, finally getting long-time adversaries to agree on the toughest issues dividing them.

After that triumph, though, implementation may require continuing collaborative work for years. While there are many examples of success, others produce disappointing results. Why does that happen? How can it be avoided?

Once I had the opportunity to observe a collaborative group that had been working well for several years as an ongoing policy forum. Its focus was a large area of public land devoted primarily to recreation and managed by a dozen federal, state and local agencies. The signature achievement of the group had been a collaboratively negotiated management plan that was now a couple of years into the implementation phase. The meeting I attended was a progress review of the plan’s recommended action steps.

A large spreadsheet listed the 50 or so projects prioritized under the plan, and I wondered why the agenda only devoted a short time to such a massive review. It soon became clear, though, that little time was needed. A quick succession of speakers said more of less the same thing. The agencies responsible for most of the projects had no funding to carry them out. Yet each of these agencies had been full partners in the agreement and signed the final document.

As is not uncommon, implementation depended on the commitment of each of the group’s member organizations – both private and public – to take action on specific projects under the plan. Even though the commitments had been made in good faith, no connection had been established between the plan and budgetary processes. A few years into the implementation phase, most of the agencies seemed to lack incentive to push the necessary projects higher on their internal lists of funding priorities.

The problem this group ran into highlights a central aspect of collaborative policy groups. They are voluntary associations convened ad hoc to address specific issues. They have no authority either to make binding decisions or to enforce agreements.

As Donald Kettl puts it in his book, The Next Government of the United States, when discussing such cooperative systems: there is no overall coordination, and no one is in charge.

It is all the more remarkable, given the lack of centralized control, that so many collaborative agreements have been carried out effectively to meet ongoing needs. For example, collaborative implementation through public-private networks of independent agencies sustains the delivery of many social services, provides emergency response teams and creates joint management for large recreational areas.

There are many factors that can determine the success or failure of collaborative implementation. William Leach has provided an excellent summary (continued in this post). Potapchuk and Crocker also have an extensive discussion in Implementing Consensus-Based Agreements (The Consensus Building Handbook. These review the entire consensus building process to assess potential problems at each stage that could later undermine implementation

One factor is especially important in determining the outcome of a collaborative implementation process. That relates to institutional self-interest of parties to an agreement and their incentive to keep commitments.

The process of reaching consensus agreements often depends on defining joint gains for the participants through interest-based negotiation. A central tenet of this process is that all the interests around the table need to achieve at least some of their priority goals. So long as implementation of the agreement continues to meet the shared interests of the collaborating agencies, they all have a strong incentive to sustain their commitments to action.

That’s the case with most emergency response networks. Each agency shares public accountability for effective performance and finds the collaborative arrangement the best way to ensure this.

But there are also many cases where implementation depends not on the coordinated action of all working together in a single time frame but on a sequence of steps carried out by different agencies acting in turn over a long period of time.

For example, a complex agreement on habitat protection and urban development might involve the near-term approval of regulatory permits to allow construction of new housing projects based on time-sensitive investments and loans. Habitat conservation, however, is a long-term goal and may depend on private land transactions years in the future that are supposed to observe buffer areas between protected lands and urban development. Changes in market conditions over time may remove incentives for the developer to follow that part of the agreement. Threats of business failure, for example, may create new incentives that work against the interests of the conservation organizations trying to protect unique habitat areas. Collaborative implementation begins to fall apart.

This can happen even if the parties structure their agreement as a formal contract with mechanisms to ensure follow-through on commitments. If voluntary tools like mediation don’t work and the only recourse is to litigation, filing a lawsuit only confirms a breakdown of the collaborative implementation process.

Ultimately, every collaborative enforcement mechanism depends on the voluntary commitment of the independent entities that are parties to the agreement. If good faith and incentives for sustained involvement disappear, by definition no one can compel collaboration. The crucial preventive measures, then, need to take place before agreements are finalized.

That makes it all the more important to focus on the interplay of interests over time. One of the critical steps for avoiding later problems is to negotiate a structure of incentives that equally reinforce the commitments of all participants.

That will be the topic of the next post in this series.

As I summarized briefly in the last post, Bill Leach has identified 20 design principles for implementing consensus agreements. Of course, some are difficult to apply in practice, in part because of the great variety of local issues, conditions and competing interests. While many of the principles are established practice in consensus building, some represent new thinking about how to ensure consistent implementation over time.

I’ll focus in this post on the process design principle that deals with two critical concerns: 1) the need to include representatives from all levels of an implementing agency rather than only the top policy leadership and 2) the importance of addressing the problem of personnel changes over time. To quote from Leach’s presentation on the first point:

The implementation literature clearly demonstrates that commitment to a new policy is often needed at multiple levels of a bureaucracy. In fact, recent empirical evidence shows that low-level public officials can sometimes exert much stronger control over bureaucratic outputs than do legislators or high level political appointees [reference-1 below].

On the second point about maintaining continuity of organizational representation, despite changes of personnel, he writes:

… [I]ndividuals inevitably do switch assignments, change jobs, or retire. Successful implementation hinges on the new personnel emulating or exceeding their predecessors’ commitment to the process [reference-2]. Therefore, it is especially important to involve the understudies of senior personnel who may soon retire, so that the sense of ownership of the agreement will continue well after the senior signatories have moved on.

Represention

There is no question about the importance of securing full cooperation of all staff levels of an implementing agency. High policy officials come and go and elective leadership changes, yet the program and line staff are career civil servants whose jobs are protected from political changes. Under those conditions it’s possible for staff to resist a new policy or procedure and the behavioral and operational changes that it may demand. They can ride out the political appointee’s tenure until the next administration comes in.

This potential problem for effective implementation, however, may not be resolved by including even a broad cross-section of the bureaucracy in the consensus process. One problem is that there is always a sharp distinction in any agency between those responsible for on-the-ground operations and enforcement and those authorized to make policy decisions. Only the latter can commit an agency to the terms of an agreement and freely make proposals to a consensus group. Involving line staff is no guarantee that they will buy into the consensus process or its outcome for several reasons.

Lower-level staff attend meetings at the direction of superiors and often are reluctant to offer comments not strictly related to technical issues. They typically won’t venture an opinion that in any way contradicts the agency’s policy or that could be interpreted as suggesting a new direction or allocation of resources. Since they routinely keep their opinions to themselves, it’s possible that they could go all the way through the process without really buying into the agreement and its implementation requirements, despite the enthusiastic support of top leadership. If they disagree with its terms for any reason, they can help delay its implementation.

On the other hand, if they support its goals and provisions, they may find themselves lonely voices amid a crowd of skeptics in the rest of the organization. It certainly helps the process of educating staff if they hear about about an agreement’s impact from one of their own instead of only from agency leaders, but the task of securing internal compliance remains a daunting one.

The principle of including a cross-section of staff has the best chance of working if the agreement calls for implementation by a single program office or project staff in a relatively limited time frame. Where the number of personnel who need to be involved is small and comprise a team that has already been working together for some time, there is much greater likelihood that the influence of those team members who were involved in developing the agreement will be decisive.

Internal Agency Dynamics

However, if the implementation requires an agency-wide change in goals or procedures, there are further issues facing the consensus process team as they try to bring about buy-in from the entire staff. Any complex organization has its own internal politics. There are numerous centers of influence – often quite different from the official lines of authority indicated on an organizational chart. Many leaders, may rely on the authority of their positions and simply assume that staff will follow the directives for change that they issue. Leadership working in a more collaborative manner could approach these groups in the spirit of participatory planning by identifying and addressing staff concerns instead of assuming compliance. This approach would help broaden understanding and support for a negotiated agreement.

Another way of approaching the task would be to initiate an internal change management process, if warranted by the agreement’s requirements. Such an effort could take into account the complexity of the largely informal networks within an agency as well as its chartered hierarchical structure. This could also support the efforts of the handful of staff who were included in the consensus building process as they work with their peers. There are many types of facilitated change management approaches, but the most effective recognize that the whole system of the organization, representing every level of staff, needs to be involved.

A design principle for a consensus process could thus aim at securing a commitment from each implementing agency that it will undertake efforts at comprehensive internal education to obtain buy-in from all relevant program staff. Follow-through, of course, would be voluntary, but the entire consensus group would have been involved in identifying this potential problem and discussing ways of dealing with it. At present, there are many consensus agreements that have not recognized or dealt with this problem.

Continuity

Given the inevitability of changes in leadership, continuity of commitment to implementation over time is just as important and just as difficult. One problem is that changes brought about by electoral politics can result in a comprehensive house-cleaning that would sweep away top leadership as well as staff being groomed as their successors. While lower level staff would continue, they might be working in agencies that are suddenly required to reflect drastically different policies, perhaps stemming from a change in the philosophy of government itself. At the national level, we’ve seen exactly this in the shifts from Clinton to Bush to Obama. Similar changes have taken place at all other levels of government.

I worked on one consensus effort that took a couple of years to produce a negotiated plan relating to long-term changes in land use policy. As time went on, there was concern to get the plan ratified by a key appointed board before the next election, when it seemed certain the entire membership of the board would be replaced. It really didn’t make much difference, though, if the board approved the plan prior to that political shift or not. Since long-term implementation was required, the next change of administration, whenever it occurred, would call commitment to the agreement into question.

Every consensus process has to be designed with such political dynamics in mind. Changes in agency personnel, in particular, can be shaped much more decisively by politics than by routine turnover or retirement. Political changes, though, are hard to predict and beyond the capacity of most consensus processes to address. Focusing on the impact of personnel changes through attention to efforts that agency leadership can address under current political conditions is one important strategy. That needs to be augmented by consideration of the uncertainty about larger policy shifts – and attendant personnel changes – that could undermine agreements. The answer may lie more in adjusting agreement terms to reflect a realistic political assessment and provide for contingencies when major changes occur.

Bill Leach has accurately captured the need for both buy-in across all staff levels and continuity of commitment of an agency charged with implementing terms of a consensus agreement. His presentation makes a significant contribution by drawing these issues together in a key principle of consensus building design, one that is often overlooked. However difficult the issues may be to deal with in practice, it is essential that they become standard considerations in structuring a collaborative public policy process.

References cited:

1. Kenneth J. Meier and Laurence J. O’Toole, 2006. Political Control versus Bureaucratic Values. Public Administration Review 66 (2): 177-192.
2. Julia M. Wondollek and Steven L. Yaffe. 1997. Sustaining the Success of Collaborative Partnerships. Ann Arbor: Ecosystems Management Initiative, University of Michigan.
Seth Tuler and Thomas Webler. 1999. Voices from the Forest. Society and Natural Resources 12 (5): 437-453.

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