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Notes from a Reflective
Practitioner of Innovation
Part 3 of 4
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Regrettably, no blueprints are available for organizational change. Like
unhappy families, each managerial situation is different. And yet as in
families, some structural decisions can add value and increase the chances
of success. What follows is our contribution to the lore of effective
organizational structure.
Develop a Long-Term Strategy While You Manage the
Short-Term Crises. The
demands of the immediate crises can easily drive out any long-term
thinking or planning. Consequently, any public manager who wishes to
succeed and to effect significant innovation must develop the capacity to
build a long-term strategic agenda while simultaneously managing the
short-term crises. Do not wait until the short-term crises are resolved.
Public agencies crash on this shoal all too often. We public sector
managers assume office with our eyes and our hopes on the future but tell
ourselves we first need to attend to the present. A constant and
unrelenting focus on the crises of the present will yield, at best,
short-lived gains.
At DJJ, we found ourselves too easily falling into this trap. Thus we
decided that the way for us to focus our own attention on the future was
to create a group and then a schedule of meetings. We invented the
"strategy group" whose task it was to decide where we were going with our
mission of custody and care and then how we were doing getting there. In
monthly meetings, over the space of a year, the strategy group developed
the theme of case management. When the direction setting was sufficiently
clear, the group disbanded and the responsibility for implementation was
put with the line managers.
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When we waited until we had time to deal with the long-term, we did not
get to it. When we created a mechanism to force ourselves to focus on the
future, the effort was worth the pain. The success we saw in the seven
years, and since, very much stands on the early, creative, and thematic
work of that strategy group.
Change the Culture. Before a leader can attempt to change the
organization's culture, she or he needs to understand the existing
culture. What are the organization's basic assumptions? What behaviors do
people assume, count on, and accept? What underlies why people act the way
they do?
15 Only once the
leadership understands the existing culture can it develop a vision of the
new culture and create new artifacts to exemplify it.
For our central office, this meant everything from expecting excellence,
to starting meetings on time, to having nice offices. Each of these shifts
involved a struggle. Each began with an understanding of the role the
original aspects of the culture played and an effort to devise a strategy
that would help move people in a new direction. Some things were
reasonably straightforward. I was aggravated by meetings that started
late--by the time wasted and the acting out displayed by people who
arrived late knowing that nothing began until everyone was there.
Convinced that it would work better for all involved, I began and ended
all my meetings as scheduled even if everyone was not there to start.
Soon, people started showing up on time.
Setting a standard of excellence included sending written work back until
it was right. I remember an early bar chart that a staff person prepared
for a city council hearing. The length of the bars bore no resemblance to
the size of the corresponding numbers. I sent it back. I kept returning
work until it was right.
At the most significant level of culture change, we had to act revitalized
before we were. Early on, for instance, we had to act as if we were
certain we could find a solution to the stalemate around the replacement
of Spofford even when we had no clue whether that was so or what the
eventual solution might be. Like much else asked of leaders who aspire to
be innovative, this required a great leap of faith, fueled by arrogance
perhaps, and best tempered by humility. We had to hold the future as real
as we struggled to overcome the difficulties of the present. We needed to
believe we could make a difference before we could do so. We had to
convince others of our capacity before we were completely confident in it
ourselves.
Get Help When You Need It. Good leadership means acknowledging what you
know and what you do not--what you can do and what you cannot. Leaders
need to hire people who are better at what they have to do than the leader
would be. And they have to get the right kind of help from outside their
organization.
We used this help early and often. We found the outside perspective that
consultants brought very valuable, but we learned the hard way not to
over-rely on consultants. We found out that we needed to manage the
consultants' work, that the end product was only as good as the thinking
we contributed up front. To improve the timeliness of the arrival of
children in court, we asked one consultant to develop new schedules for
DJJ buses. But the effort floundered at the first handoff to the
consultant because we relied too much on what we thought was his generic
expertise and failed to ground his work in the specifics of our needs and
issues.
Learning the hard way about consultants meant once having a meeting in
which more consultants were in the room than DJJ staff. It also meant
being disappointed at first when we realized we could not shift
responsibility for developing the long-term agenda to a consultant (who
was smart enough not to be seduced into overfunctioning).
Plan From Both the Top Down and the Bottom Up. Once you sort out what work
belongs to internal staff and where consultants can be helpful, the trick
is to get decisions made at the right level. Policy decisions that involve
awareness of the whole organization and the outside boundary generally
need to be made at the top. Implementation decisions can often best be
made by those involved in carrying out the actions.
At DJJ, the executive staff was responsible for the major policy
decisions; for example, the decision to implement case management or to
develop a family-based alternative to detention. We got input from others.
But we never suggested these policy decisions were democratic. In fact, we
had staff who made it clear that they disagreed with our policy, and we
made it equally clear that we were proceeding.
As we moved to implement any policy decision, however, we made sure that
the planning involved the line staff. For example, when we set up the
case-management system, the line staff involved in doing the case
conferences decided how often they were to be held, who was to be
included, and what information was to be gathered.
Face Mistakes and Fix Them. Facing and fixing mistakes is tough in the
public sector, where they are less easily tolerated.
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We managed by starting new efforts small. We believed that this approach
offered a more protected space in which to experiment and to learn from
our early efforts.
Small is a relative concept. You are looking for whatever size effort
allows for a "dynamic interaction between the innovation and the
organization that maximizes the chance of learning as the new program
unfolds and of having learning influence the ongoing conceptual design.
The scale is small enough when [you] can hold the conceptual and the
operational close at hand and manage the interplay to the benefit of
both."
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By working to get it right first, a manager can see gaps in the original
design and thinking. This approach offers the manager the opportunity to
get the program on a sound basis and document results before having to
argue for more resources or for expansion.
Pick Fights Carefully. We fought hard on selected issues and won. If you
pick your early issues with care, you are likely to care more about them
than the people on the other side and that will help you prevail. We were
determined to get the city's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to pick
up funding for Aftercare, which began with a federal grant. Appeals to
OMB's sense of what was right were getting us nowhere. Deputy Commissioner
for Planning and Program Development Kathleen Feely invented a brilliant
if far-fetched argument that Aftercare, by returning children to school,
would allow the city to claim more state dollars in school funding because
the city's claim was tied to school attendance. OMB was won over, perhaps
as much by the lengths to which we were prepared to go as by the few
dollars possibly gained. The point is we established ourselves as an
agency always prepared, very determined, and incredibly insistent.
Once you win a few fights, people are less likely to take you on. This is
particularly useful advice with oversight or support agencies in the
public sector. Budget staff have many potential places to look for cuts.
If they believe you are likely to appeal their decisions and win, they may
think twice before they push hard.
Create Opportunities. We did not wait to be asked to invent. We moved
ahead and took risks. No one suggested that we find ways to work
effectively with the families of children in our custody. It was our
conclusion based on our work with clients, and we authorized ourselves to
move ahead. We decided to bring the Homebuilders program to New York. And
then we decided to do so in a way that encouraged the city agency with
overall responsibility for funding preventive services programs to learn
about Homebuilders and consider its usefulness citywide.
Much can be said for clear mandates or direct authorization of work, or
for the notion that it is the citizens, or the elected officials who speak
for them, who set the parameters of legitimate action. Certainly, much has
been written about the legitimate sources of executive action.
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It is not that we considered those theories and rejected them. Instead, we
just moved ahead, being as careful as we knew how to keep our various
overseers and involved publics informed. We moved ahead as we figured out
where we wanted to go and how we might get there.
The Brookings Institution Press ©1997.
