Cross Collaborate» politics

Can Government Solve Big Problems Collaboratively?

John Folk-Williams — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 23:22:47 +0000

The Open Government Initiative of the Obama Administration has given high priority to increasing the use of collaboration in the federal government. Yet many federal offices have not in the past encouraged the sort of collaborative mindset that is necessary for meaningful efforts in this direction.

As William Eggers and John O’Leary have noted, it’s often the failure to work inclusively that leads to disappointment or even disaster, as they discuss in the fatal tunnel collapse of Boston’s Big Dig project. If We Can Put a Man on the Moon draws lessons from many other examples of what can go wrong when government tries to solve the big problems.

What I want to look at in this post, though, is one of the major positive cases they cite: the successful effort to reform the healthcare system in Massachusetts. Their summary of key steps in that process nicely defines the elements that characterize good collaborative work to solve a critically important public problem. It’s a useful example for federal officials to keep in mind as they move ahead with the Open Government Initiative. Although this case occurs in a legislative context, the model can be effective in most public policy settings.

Here are the major steps they single out:

High Level Leadership: Governor Mitt Romney made a priority of reforming the health care system in Massachusetts and defined a set of principles to guide the effort. When he turned to the state’s health staff for proposals, however, he found they were too narrow in scope and tied too closely to the existing system.
Outside Team: In a controversial step, the Governor brought in a team of outsiders who could bring new ways of thinking to the problem. It was their task to develop proposals for fundamental change. He made clear they had his complete support by locating their office close to his own.
Consultation with Key Players: After a false start when the team’s proposal, prepared without input of the Legislature, was rejected, they regrouped and changed their approach. They set aside their own work and began a process of regular consultation with all the key players. This collaborative approach ensured that no one would be surprised and that everyone could feel satisfied that their concerns were being addressed.
Collaborative Mindset:Turning to a collaborative process required an important change in thinking about the team’s own role. Instead of acting as the experts who would analyze data and design their own reform policy, they realized they needed to keep an open mind and consider a wide range of alternative proposals, including many they disagreed with. Switching from a technical to a collaborative mindset was itself a remarkable adaptation. Most expert consultants practice either one approach or the other, but this team realized they had to respond to the situation before them instead of following their customary practices.
Collaborative Leadership: Even more important was the Governor’s adoption of this same approach. Instead of presenting his plan to the Legislature as a definitive position, he gave speeches describing what the team was finding and what he and the Legislature need to consider. In this way, he demonstrated his willingness to propose the ideas of other leaders and to share credit with them for the ultimate decision. That’s an important quality in a collaborative leader – the use of power, in Mary Parker Follett’s terms, “with” others rather than “over” them.
Collaborative Decision-Making: Eggers and O’Leary praise the collaborative approach in contrast to a collective one based on consensus, or unanimity, of all the major interest groups. They see the typical “blue ribbon committee” process as an attempt to bring dozens of representatives of different interests together in a room to reach agreement among them all. That’s a formula for gridlock. They see the essence of the collaborative approach as drawing on the ideas of the key groups without expecting the impossible of total agreement. The Governor was seeking fundamental change, they point out, and that comes hard. Inevitably, some groups will resist and try to slow down or kill the process.
I would add that there are many techniques available to move beyond gridlock or the seeming impossibility of producing agreement from a large number of groups represented around a single table. Mediators and facilitators typically describe a collaborative process as consensus-seeking precisely because they understand that a complicated process shouldn’t be held hostage to the demand of one or two groups. To deal with that problem, they have devised alternative decision strategies when unanimity is not possible. One of the most authoritative references which closely examines this issue is The Consensus Building Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Reaching Agreement.
Design: Once the proposal got to the Legislature, the Governor and leaders of the Assembly and Senate maintained a pragmatic approach to produce a final package that represented a balancing of the different interests. As a Republican Governor with only a small base in the Legislature, Romney had to work collaboratively with the Democratic leadership, and they responded in the same spirit.
Adoption: As a result of this collaborative work, the Legislature adopted a bill that had included them as partners in its design. Every agreement, whatever the form it takes, faces this test of formal adoption, often in a political forum. Success requires the satisfaction of major interests in order to prevent or minimize significant opposition that can kill the whole thing.

It’s important that following such an achievement there be a public celebration of some sort that recognizes the leaders and the groups they represent for their ability to work collaboratively. In the case of major legislation, like this one, that usually means a formal signing ceremony. This reaffirms and publicly demonstrates the shared credit for the result of the process as well as the collaborative commitment that made the agreement possible.
Implementation:

Since the program includes major changes in the health care system, it will be a long time before its full impact will become clear. Doubtless, that process has been greatly complicated by the recent storm of controversy over national health care reform and the sharp ideological divisions it brought to the forefront of policy debate.

Changing political attitudes and electoral trends, however, are always a factor in implementing any new collaborative agreement over the long-term. Whether collaborative approaches can survive the present atmosphere of sharp ideological division is an open question. That is also the crucial question in the case of Massachusetts health care reform.

The collaborative model that emerges from Eggers and O’Leary’s accounts of numerous examples follows most of the steps defined in the practice and writings of professional mediators and facilitators. These steps include the roles and functions that need to be carried out by collaborative leaders and those who serve as technical experts and facilitators.

While many practitioners in the collaborative public policy field like to point out their unique expertise in helping leaders convene and manage these processes, the fact is that public officials with the skills of collaborative leaders most often carry them out. They may use outside expertise to gain a fresh perspective, as Romney did in this case, or they may assemble a collaborative working group that draws together the key players and interest groups. There are many ways to get the job done, but the principles remain the same.

The Open Government Directive & Changing Federal Culture – 2

John Folk-Williams — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 23:19:42 +0000

As a mediator, I have this annoying habit of taking all sides of an issue seriously. Further, as a colleague once put it to me, people in our line of work need to combine optimism about outcomes with cynicism about motives. So I thought I’d offer doses of both in looking at the brighter and darker prospects for the federal agency culture change promised in President’s Open Government Directive.

As I pointed out in an earlier post, without fully cooperative staff and management at all levels, especially beyond the ranks of White House and other political appointees, the entire initiative can become an exercise in mechanical, even reluctant compliance.

The Directive points to the requirement of Open Government Plans as a primary method of instilling the values of transparency, participation and collaboration throughout each agency. That can be a major step but hardly sufficient, given the scope of the task. Plans can set the tone for future change, especially if they’re the product of committed leadership and significant employee input. That process itself can serve as a model of collaboration, and plans can build on that example to create new performance mandates and expectations.

The long list of deadlines, actions and deliverables (more than 70 by one count) can also begin to induce change by getting staff used to meeting the new standards. Culture change, in fact, does happen gradually, rather than as a result of a burst of directives from the top down. New practices and values are at first eagerly embraced by the early adopters – those already committed to change. Others follow in time as the new methods and attitudes actually help them do their jobs, while many will comply with indifference only because it’s required. Setting tight deadlines forces the process to get going.

The primary purpose of those deadlines, though, is the need to show quick results. Having created expectations of rapid adoption of these practices, especially during the campaign, the Administration faces demands for immediate action to prove the sincerity of political commitments. Despite this demand, no one will be satisfied unless staff in charge of data and participation cooperate fully. Employee values and attitudes are critical for consistent results, yet federal staff don’t find a place for their contributions in the Directive, except as the soldiers following orders from above.

The comparable Australian Government 2.0 effort has explicitly emphasized the central role of employee participation in its draft report:

Agencies should support employee-initiated innovative Government 2.0 based proposals that create, or support, greater engagement and participation with their customers, citizens and/or communities of interest in different aspects of the agency’s work. They should create a culture that gives their staff an opportunity to experiment and develop new opportunities for engagement from their own initiative, rewarding those especially who create new engagement/participation tools or methods that can quickly be absorbed into the mainstream practice that lifts the performance of the department or agency.

We have yet to see how that will work in practice, but there is an example of employee-centered culture change in this country’s relatively recent experience. Here’s Bill Clinton introducing the National Performance Review (NPR) in 1993.

Our goal is to make the entire Federal Government both less expensive and more efficient, and to change the culture of our national bureaucracy away from complacency and entitlement toward initiative and empowerment. We intend to redesign, to reinvent, to reinvigorate the entire National Government.

… We will turn first to Federal employees for help. They know better than anyone else how to do their jobs if someone will simply ask them and reward them for wanting to do it better.Remarks by President Clinton Announcing the Initiative to Streamline Government March 3, 1993

Throughout the eight years of the NPR, later renamed the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, culture change was identified as a critical element. Federal employees needed to learn new levels of efficiency (do more with less), adopt entrepreneurial attitudes toward the “business” of government and reframe dealings with the public in terms of service to customers. The method was to combine committed and energetic leadership with employee initiative.

Here’s the way it worked at the Bureau of Reclamation, at least according to a highly promotional status report of 1994 (no assurance of accuracy here, but the idea is a good one):

What the commissioner has launched is, in essence, a culture change, one that transcends jurisdictional boundaries and encourages employees to think creatively about how to do their jobs better. At his initiative, teams of workers developed all of the bureau’s new organizational structures, work processes, and implementation plans.

To increase staff input, [Commissioner Dan] Beard distributes what he calls “How Am I Doing?” cards. On one side is a series of questions about intra-bureau communication, cooperation, empowerment, and recognition and rewards. The other side, under the heading “Make A Difference–Talk Back to Dan,” asks staffers for their ideas and for suggestions about what they would like to see more or less of. He has received more than 700 responses, each of which he answers.

… To encourage his senior managers to take risks, Beard gave them “forgiveness coupons” that they can cash in upon making a mistake. (“It is easier to get forgiveness . . . than permission,” they read.)

Forgiveness coupons sound great and typify the optimistic attitude toward culture change. Install the right leadership, unleash staff creativity and implement their ideas, and then culture change follows. There is no question that this approach can work well. Employees need recognition and reward for their effort, and leadership needs to know how to make use of their contributions. Changes happen because they make sense to the people who are responsible for putting the new policies into practice.

OK, that’s the optimistic view of the outcome – it’s all about voluntary collaboration. The cynical – or just realistic – view takes a harder look at motives. There was a far less voluntary side to the emphasis on staff initiative in the NPR. Al Gore put it bluntly in another early statement: “We must reward the people and ideas that work and get rid of those that don’t.”

If employees, especially managers, didn’t demonstrate inventiveness about cutting budgets and “doing more with less,” there was a real possibility that they could be reinvented out of a job and their offices disappear in reorganization. In fact, as budgets were reduced, federal agencies dropped more than 425,000 positions, consolidated hundreds of field and district offices and stripped authority from others. That was a clear message and provided a strong motive.

This example touched on an aspect of federal agency culture that never gets into the language of directives and press releases. A 2004 post on the Government Executive.Com blog by Brian Friel of the National Journal reported that, for all the talk of a federal agency culture, he could identify only one defining cultural factor shared across the great diversity of federal agencies: politics and the fear it engendered.

“Do not get out in front of the secretary/director.” That’s one key rule that one former federal executive said governs behavior. Another is the understanding of operating in a fish bowl and the realization that their actions might appear on the front page of The Washington Post the next day.

Politics, managers said, trickles down through the bureaucracy as fear. “The fear is the fear of powerful others [managers, Congress, stakeholders] that might be displeased about anything at any time,” explained a federal management analyst. “Fear that careers will be affected, programs will lose funding, one will be marginalized and therefore will not be able to apply one’s abilities to any effect. The cultural effects include indecisiveness, suppression of surfacing issues, little open dialogue and withholding of information.”

Behaviors like these are not just the result of inertia, old school attitudes or personal unwillingness to give up control. They may be partly that, but they are also reasonable responses to conditions far beyond the control of career civil servants.

This bleak assessment doesn’t bode well for the current effort at culture change, since politics ensures a regular shift in priorities and values at the top. As a federal employee under Clinton-Gore, you reinvented and served customers. Under Bush, you shut the doors in the name of national security. Under Obama, you’ll fling them open in the name of democracy. Through it all, you cooperate with the trend or face the consequences.

If it’s true that politics is the overriding force influencing agency culture and behavior, who’s going to change that?

People become politically active because they want their values and policies to control government, especially its employees. There will always be tension between those emphasizing the need for top-down control to get quick results and those who see the need for collaboration by all the key participants in change. That’s no less true when the values and practices in question are themselves collaborative.

Reuniting America 2006: An Example of Leadership Dialogue

John Folk-Williams — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 05:50:11 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

Reuniting America convened a series of leadership workshops on major issues from 2004 – 2007. These sessions drew together 140 leaders representing the full range of political values and perspectives that dominate discussion of public issues in the U.S. The eventual result was to develop the principles of transpartisanship, an effort to replace the demonizing debates of public policy with dialogue in the exploration of shared values. That work is continued by the Transpartisan Alliance, at the grassroots level, and the Transpartisan Center, with national leadership.

This 2006 video highlights the guiding themes of the leadership workshops. Mark Gerzon, one of the leading facilitators of cross-partisan dialogue in this country and around the world, facilitated the dialogue featured in the video. His book, Leading Through Conflict, is a guide to leadership emphasizing the use of dialogue and conflict transformation methods.

The Wisdom of Crowds, Collaborative Networks & Public Policy

John Folk-Williams — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:38:47 +0000

Over the last few years, concepts like collaboration, the wisdom of crowds and collaborative networks have taken hold as innovative ways for involving large groups of people to help solve complicated public policy problems. However, the terms are often used so loosely that they’re in danger of being lumped together and, in effect, dismissed, especially in the public sector, with the comforting assurance that “we’ve been doing that all along.”

That may be partly true, but these forms of collaboration are not just group structures for problem-solving. The structure is simply the means to a specific end: successful adaptation to rapid change. Government in general has a lot to learn about adaptation at the institutional level. Discussion about how to make use of collaboration is taking place everywhere, especially on the internet. This post – and future ones – are part of that overall dialogue. Everyone concerned about the future of public policy and government action should join in.

The Wisdom of Crowds

In his book, The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki argued that large groups of people – acting in a specific way – can often solve problems more creatively and effectively than individuals acting alone. While the positive side of consulting the wisdom of crowds has gotten most of the attention, Surowiecki also explored several reasons that crowds fail to behave in this creative, productive way. As he puts it, the alternative to crowd wisdom can be crowd irrationality.

What is the potential for strengthening public policy by turning to the crowd of the citizenry for answers? In consulting a public that behaves in the distinctive way identified by Surowiecki, is government likely to encounter the crowd at its best or worst?

What Is a Crowd?

Here is Surowiecki’s list of the characteristics that must prevail within a crowd in order for it to function creatively and wisely:

Diversity. The crowd should be diverse and include people with a wide range of experience, knowledge, values and opinions.
Independence. People form their ideas and opinions without reference to those of others in the crowd.
Decentralization. Each person focuses on whatever is of interest and relies on personal knowledge.
Aggregation. All the independent judgments need to go through a further process that results in a decision.

To quote the summary of one of Surowiecki’s presentations:

… [G]roups are typically smartest when the people in them act as much like individuals as possible–when they rely primarily on their own private information, when their opinions are independent, and when their judgments are not determined by their peers. And in an ever-more connected world, this creates a challenge: how can we reap the benefits of collaboration and collective decision-making, while still ensuring that people remain independent actors? Are networks problems as well as solutions? What might it mean to be too connected?

This view runs counter to the recent trend of looking to collaborative networks as the answer to many public policy problems. How do the crowd and the network compare?

Crowds and Collaborative Networks

For Surowiecki, the crowd does not function as a group at all but only as so many individuals with loose or no connections among them. That permits each person to reach conclusions and offer new ideas entirely as an individual. The crowd is most creative, then, when its members are unrelated. If they do have close connections, Surowiecki believes they will tend to think alike and produce uniform views, suspending independent judgment.

A collaborative network, as Charles Leadbeater explains, takes advantage of intricate sets of relationships among members to produce results. In this view, it is the exchange of ideas that leads to greater creativity because of the diversity of the network members. The more actively information flows among the connected individuals, the greater the likelihood of innovation.

There is also a basic difference between the two in the way decisions result from the multiplicity of ideas. The crowd comes into being in response to a request from an agency of some kind. Since the crowd has no internal structure, individuals can only direct their ideas to the group that issued the request. That agency interprets the results to find the smartest and best answer among the many suggestions. This is a hub-and-spoke pattern in which all the individuals are connected to a central actor but have no connections among themselves.

The collaborative network does this filtering and decision-making internally and functions as an independent entity. That is because there are always members who devote more time and effort to the process than others. They tend to form a core group that works on sifting and integrating ideas so that a decision can be reached and action taken.

However, this structure is very different from the management level in a hierarchical organization. There are no formal leaders or defined levels of authority. Anyone in the network is free to step up the level of involvement and join that core group, just as anyone may reduce involvement. It is all voluntary. They key dynamic is not the flow of power but the flow of information that keeps everyone informed and encourages a continuing circulation of ideas.

Network connections, then, do not stifle originality of thinking and operate very differently from an organized advocacy group. Advocacy organizations recruit like-minded people and thrive by building an influential mass of supporters backing a dominant ideology. The rules of membership are intended to keep people of sharply differing values and opinions.

Where’s the Real Public?

Surowiecki’s concern about individuals losing independence of judgment as they get closely connected to others is widely shared. The perennial problem for government agencies is how to use public involvement processes to hear what the “real” citizens have to say. It is the organized interest groups that tend to dominate public hearings and meetings, not independent citizens. Advocacy group members come to such events to support proposals and organizational positions – not to present their own unique ideas.

Public officials often regard interest groups as separate from the “genuine” public, and by that they mean what Surowiecki is describing – citizens who form opinions based on whatever knowledge they possess and who don’t simply follow an organizational position.

The Deliberative Democracy movement also attempts to get around the influence of the advocacy groups to focus on the judgment of independent citizens. Many of the deliberative processes confine the role of advocates to offering information as part of an effort to inform participating citizens of the full range of views about the policy problem under consideration.

As Surowiecki emphasizes, there are big differences among the types of connections people form to influence policy. But the tension is not between network relationships and crowd (lack of) relationships. It is membership and other formally governed organizations that seek out only people with shared values – and that is important to serve the goals they aim for. Crowds and networks, on the other hand, thrive on the greatest possible diversity.

Both can be powerful engines of creativity in seeking successful adaptation to change.