Public sector deep dive: Professionalism for performance: Innovative public management

you i-i-i think it's on the welcome to this public sector deep dive session on professionalism for performance innovative public management my name is Carl Eva I am an associate professor of economics here at the providing at school and my panelists are on my left I'm not going to do long introductions because you've all got those buyers in your conference packs but let me just say the names there's dr. martin williams nana quasi a jicama mana Teresa Reno Webb and Kate Joseph and the panelists are all going to speak in turn for five to seven minutes very precise Ben told you and then we'll have a chance to respond to each other and then we'll have moderated discussion with the pool okay so over to you Martin great Thank You Claire so as we were as we're trying to frame this panel and thinking about what I was going to say for it the the the brief was on you know how do we actually get a public sector that delivers and to bridge this gap as we've been talking about this morning between what citizens expectations and what government is able to deliver our and you know at conferences like these there's a lot of there are a lot of sessions like this and most of them revolve around sort of well for the past three decades not only has these kind of sessions but also most civil service reform efforts have revolved around in some sense how do we make government more like the private sector and so there's been a lot of emphasis in in rhetoric and in reforms on introducing incentives into the public sector both in the sense of sort of performance-related pay but even sort of softer incentives like just having performance be in some sense relevant for promotion or for for firing that kind of thing there's also I think in the past 15 to 20 years that's been joined by a focus on data and transparency and monitoring that the way that we're going to get performance in the public sector is by having more data by monitoring what workers are doing more strictly by having kpi's by reviewing them and that kind of thing and kind of together I think I think of these two approaches as being comprising what we think of as performance management and it's it's kind of the default way that we often talk about performance in the public sector but there's also another approach to managing government organizations and bureaucracies which is to think about professionalism right not only are a lot of people who go into the public sector very public-spirited and motivated to go into the buff expect to the public sector because they want to make the world a better place but you know even people who don't particularly go in for those reasons are professionals and want to see themselves as professionals and what professionals like to do is be able to do their jobs well and use discretion and use it appropriately and go home at the end of the day and say thank ya I did a good job today I use my expertise as it should be that's that's also got a long tradition in in the public sector but I think in the past few decades there's been sort of a shift away from it or kind of a mistrust of this idea that pub that civil servants should have autonomy and we should rely on their professionalism we should we should actually allow them to have discretion rather than trying to remove it and there's a lot of reasons for that and well-founded reasons right there are a lot of contexts where there's very little accountability where corruption is a big issue where lack of motivation is a big issue and so people I think rightly distrust or worry about what will happen if we give public servants autonomy are they just going to abuse it so as an academic I thought you know this is this is a case where there are plausible arguments on both sides let's actually go out and do some research and get some data and see what we find and that's one of the things that we've been able to or that myself and my co-authors have been able to do as part of research collaboration these last five years with the government of Ghana and which then is going to going to speak more about I think and so what we did is we went out and we did a survey of all 3,000 senior civil servants and Ghana in Ghana central government across 47 different organisations so these are sort of Ministry and Department headquarters in the capital city these aren't nurses and teachers and doctors these are people who are in charge of budgeting and monitoring and Human Resources Management policymaking what we think of as core civil servants alongside that we had a really huge effort of digitizing data on project and task completion so from a situation of not knowing or not having readily analyzable data about the delivery of outputs and completion of projects of all of these 47 organizations we're able to identify and code in a fairly reliable way about 4,000 projects and that were on the work plans of these of these organizations and were and should have been completed in the year and we can look at whether they are actually completed and why and why not and as we were doing the survey we focused we focused on these questions about how are you managed and we thought about it as as in this kind of way that I described before with this division between there are practices that are related to monitoring and incentives so do you have KPIs do you actually track them how frequently do you review them are there incentives of some sort either positive or negative formalin or or informal that are tied to your performance on these indicators and does your performance have some kind of impact on your career progression on the other side there's a whole bunch of management practices that relate more to the use of autonomy and discretion in the organization do individuals know their roles and responsibilities do they know there's the roles and responsibilities of others and how they relate to each other do they know how what they're doing on a day to day basis it contributes to the overall mission of the organization and intermediate steps do they know in what in what cases they can use their discretion are there are there venues available where they can use their or where they can innovate where they can suggest ideas is there a culture does the organization does the organization have a process in place to create a culture where those kind of innovations and flexibilities are actually encourage rather than discourage and what we found it was a bit surprising so first of all these two different approaches to managing are not substitutes they're actually complements so the better managed organizations have more and better incentives and monitoring but they also have more and better autonomy and discretion for their for their for their officers but that said if you look at a given sort of given level of monitoring incentives that organizations are are doing or sorry for a given level of autonomy within an organization there's actually a negative relationship between monitoring and incentives and performance so the more the more that organizations are leaning towards these kind of hard tools of management like monitoring of data like incentives the more that or the the worse that they're actually delivering their outputs and when you step back and think about its kind of obvious why that might be so right a lot of the things that the public sector does as was mentioned in the past section or in the past session and particularly in the core civil service are things that it's not delivering a tangible output it's not delivering a passport it's creating a policy it's working in teams and trying to coordinate not only within the teams but also across the teams as we were looking through these different types of projects that the public sector executed we also looked at what kind of coordination was required to deliver each of the projects there were almost no projects that didn't require any coordination outside the individual zone team in that context designing a good incentive system even designing a good monitoring system is really really hard and one thing that's been shown by research not only in the public sector but also the private sector is that bad incentive systems backfire so we think that that's exactly what what's happening in Ghana this is not also and I think this finding is not it goes it's it goes against the controvert the conventional wisdom of the past three decades of public sector reform thinking but it's also not an isolated finding so my co-authors did a similar study in Nigeria and they found again across a huge sample of organizations across the whole of the public sector the exact same finding this positive effect of autonomy on output and conditional on that an egg an actual negative effect of monitoring and incentives this is in some ways I think also quite useful research because Gunn and Nigeria are often used both by people within West Africa and without West Africa as examples of places where they would they would expect the corruption would be a huge issue where lack of accountability lack of motivation might be a huge issue they're the kind of places that people don't necessarily expect autonomy in the public sector to be a good thing and yet we find that it's so it's also not just in these countries so other researchers recently have have done research showing that eight agencies that give more discretion to their country offices rather than their headquarters office in designing programs perform better and the place that that discretion makes the most difference is in contexts that are complex and unpredictable and unstable so I think that there's there's a sort of this recent wave of research suggesting that actually we need to think again about professionalism and autonomy not as not as alternatives to this agenda of performance management and data but as thing as things which we've been overlooking and which need to accompany them okay great so we save your thoughts about martin's presentation and we'll move straight over to Nana and we'll go through the full panel and bring together thank you very much and good morning kaliesha and I thank Pro food and the team in the school for inviting me to be part of this session let me begin that when I became head of civil service about 2014 I went with just two ideas do monitoring and get performance management going so let's uh performance contracts let's sign them as do all those let's get our structures in place let's do an organizational Manos all the normal things because I've had a long history since 1998 of 88 of doing this big big reforms structure adjustment the centralization or that but then suddenly realized that things were not working and thankfully Martin a nod what previously in my other life as head of management so let's look at these things and the issues raised a very important currently we focus on and very very simple things and I think it's very important in this conference I've had a lot of big big things but if you look at what we had this morning the lawyer from America he started with small things we listened to our colleague from India he started with small things and I go by the rock budget example where there's more small things as you consistently hit the Roku brick and brick through what did I after having learned from this simple things give more autonomy to the organization's let them do will reduce this quest for what we call best practice travels to Singapore to Malaysia no no if you have a problem go to that department Environmental Protection Agency they are doing something would go to Energy Commission or go to a director within your own place and gradually we're making a bit of impact there the key thing for me and I'm happy came out this morning the ocean of morality attitude and spirituality in these hours are very very important a lot of the things people tend to forget that attitudes play a major role the way people look at issues and I do ask very simple questions if it were to be your organization's I met my two directors or what we call permanent secretaries if this were to be organization will you manage it as we will you spend money that we will that we will use resources and gradually people were beginning to change it's a difficult struggle that are unconvinced sincerely that it tastes the way to go does that mean there's no room for big projects I've seen a lot of that but the people just always come with issues of allowances become looking for new vehicles they come looking for new computers and at the end of it after three years four years the deep is added when partners withdraw and we are back to square one the emphasis now is on and while this kind of three let me tell you the average director deputy director and a civil service if you look at their civvies I mean I usually they have enough left s to be able to sink a ship I mean if a tenant orders programs here all over the world but there is a much power of getting things done so what do we do we run instead of emphasizing individual training we are moving to the team approach bring a team together bring a unit together bring a directory together let them I get on two three four things and then let them go and do it we so do monetary that's a different kind of monitoring we don't go there as inspectors we're going just to find what have you achieved as a person as an individual and basically based on the riches that is what they wanted they weren't a bit more technical support that is true so what I'm trying to say is look I'm sure as I'm concerned I want with a different view because I came from Management Service I'm not saying performance management is not good in that traditional way I'm not saying performance contractors know right it is okay we so do it but beyond that we need clearly to get to that very and I thought the very simple simpleton the subsystem when I became a tow service era had a team from these multilateral organization they came and they said Nana we had I've been reformed all your life want to do reforms we want to help you and I said no I don't need your help you go when we are ready we will come I said we have a lot of money to support you I said then you come with contradiction a letís and all that and I said no no I'm not interested and let me do that various importance that I think we must do in the Ghana civil service an interest in what's happening because I suppose as a Sentra gradually it's going into the other places the other departments that are there are also beginning to learn it's a long journey it's a difficult one but I sincerely believe that once there is always a start and there's a willingness and there's a commitment to do that this morning we had up our chamber narratives what I normally tell Michael is is the last change I don't use night say let's change the story the silver service 7 accepted to be Lizzie corrupt thus chamber story we have an African proverb that see that as long as they're there the hunter goes to the farm a lot of Bush alone and kills an animal and comes back and the story is written by the hung anta they will always be glorified but maybe that's our grandma's Marx was already our own stories because when they begin to write their own stories you tell us how the hunters have made several times an order what I'm trying to see so that seemed to be my emphasis tell your own story in your meetings tell your stories when I get to the media and the media in Ghana we have a very proactive media of course there's a lot of illiteracy that is shared under the guise of knowledge but by the other well prior to media and they go and their fasting is a civil servants are lazy and I say you small boys smugger what have you achieved in your life you've not achieve anything so I always turn run and change the story and as I was very hard when he said let's change the narrative colleagues what am I seeing it's important that reform civil service is very important service delivery is critical but with all these strategies and all this gym I believe sincerely lights attitude first and foremost systems are useful and all those the attitudes number one autonomy number two allow people the freedom let them make the mistakes that's one of the major things the average public in Ghana doesn't understand that between the periods of August and much the average civil service manager will not receive any resources because that's the way our system works so between October too much meanwhile you're expected to manage organizations you pay electricity bill you pay or whatever you peel everything it has to manage the stuff how do you do that so when people get upset say corruption and all that you don't understand the difficulties within which we are pretty and I say let's tell the story lector people there are small small things look about punctual - one of the greatest problem having Ghana is what we call Ghana mean time it means all event starts one hour after when I got in the office the first thing I did was all my answers before all my programs will start on time my first meetings my permanent secretaries does shuttle for a thirty the first person should about 8:45 and by 10:00 we started when they went to the office and I'm telling this a serious matter in Ghana when you become a director there's no assessment you have free you can loaf around as long as you don't have a problem with any politician now comfortable chief directors we don't do anything permanent secretary I sent each of them those who came late a note our query explaining why this plan action should not be taken against them I was weird the next meeting to a shuttle for 8:30 and by a 20 95% web presence also I just want to conclude by saying it's attitude it's a lot of hard way and these things gradually are changed because then it's and you wouldn't believe it our politicians and Barossa my meetings people I don't know through be recorder but I don't really care people think I'm not a normal person by all of the head of civil service because I don't believe in behavior with it but the point is I've had politicians embarrassed in my meetings because they came 5 minutes 10 minutes or 15 minutes late I simply say that we are starting this meeting 15 minutes late because there's many stuck him in late so everybody knows in Canada if it's a meeting that is being organized by an ANA and the team then you have to be there on time talking about teachers friends we can talk about the big big things but just to summarize to say that look all the good things you further very powerful but I believe that less also a time to look at the small small things and that can we cannot touch it thank you every team well thank you so much for having me and I will just start by giving a little bit of context on my background because it says president and CEO of Metro United Way which is a nonprofit in Louisville Kentucky but I just joined that agency about six months ago so prior to that I was the chief of performance improvement in technology for Louisville Metro government and prior to that I was actually consultant at McKinsey and company and spent four years there working in the public sector practice but also with some private sector clients and then before that I was an officer in the United States Coast Guard and so I've had experience in the sort of government side as an officer in the military then working from an outside point of view as a consultant in a world-class firm that was going in and trying to add some structure to these conversations and different organizations and then a practitioner really trying to lead it in in a city government and so I'll definitely be speaking about all of those different experiences and what we tried to bring to the government of Louisville as it related to trying to deliver better services for citizens and a lot of what I put in place there with the mayor and with others my colleagues and peers were based on things that I saw work really effectively in both a military setting and then also in the things that we were putting in place and organizations as we were consulting with them and so some of them have been hit on already and they're part of this theme of conversation over the last day or two but I'll talk through some of the examples of how they really powerfully changed the culture and the environment in city government because I think it's not I referred to you know what I have seen is that government embodies both our highest aspirations right we expect government to do so much for us it is going to pick up our trash it is going to fix our roads it is going to make sure that ambulances and medical personnel get to us when we need them it is going to do all these fabulous things protect our property but then we have this flipside of really low expectations it is super bureaucratic it is super slow there's a lot of red tape folks who go in there are lazy I mean there's this narrative of stories around what you can or should expect from government and some of those are based on you know one anecdote one instance that somebody may have had at one point with government and that persists as the sort of story that everyone associates with what you can expect from your government and you've got politicians who come in selling to people a narrative of what they are going to bring promises of a new day a new government new services better services better responsiveness and I think that's really important that clarity of what success looks like is an important piece of what is required if you are going to actually improve services in government but there's two ways about going about that that I think we sometimes fail on one is this idea of not only does what success look like from the elected officials view which sometimes is often informed by citizens because they're reacting to what is happening in their community but it also needs to be this idea of the civil servants of those working in government going and connecting with citizens and hearing from citizens the things that aren't working so that helps define what success should look like for the Public Works employee who's picking up trash it helps define what success should look like for the urban planner who is designing the next sort of set of policies that are going to inform 20 years of city development you need to have that proximity and that connection to citizens to understand what do they define success as that's really critical to this conversation the other piece of it is and I saw this happen quite often is that when an elected official would come in there talking outward to citizens about what success is going to be and what they're going to do but they never turn around and transfer that message down into the organization of the government so how do you cascade that message and tell that story to those who are going to actually make it a reality because if you don't then take a moment to say here's what I'm saying to the public because not every civil servant is watching every press conference that the mayor is doing then those civil sermons aren't going to change their behavior they're not going to start to do things differently and then citizens are never going to get something different and I think that's what we see often when you've got politicians who talk about a lot of stuff but then there's never really the action to fall behind it because you haven't taken the time to really build the structures within the government to do work in a different way and there were some things that we did when we got into city government to make sure that this wasn't what we dealt with and so very early on our mayor was doing quite the same thing he was talking outward about all of the things that he was going to deliver to citizens and all the ways in which he's going to improve city government and we said okay well now we need to translate this into what does it mean for our departments what does it mean for the police officer on the street for the Public Works employee who's picking up trash what are they going to do differently because of what you're saying and we needed to put some structures in place so this idea of performance management I do think it's a helpful place to start to ground the conversation because you need to know what you're doing currently and in some cases we found that employees didn't have a good understanding of the big picture of what was currently happening so they know their little piece of what they're doing but without putting that together in a broader context of hey we're actually you know not picking up the trash on time you know you might be but consistently as a whole our organization is missing it this many times consistently as a whole our organization is not repairing the vehicles for fleet on a time frame that's going to let folks get back out and get to their job consistently our Parks Department is not maintaining the parks in a way that not only our citizens expect but that is equitable across our community right so when you start to look at the data and ask these questions about what we know citizens expect I'll take the parks example a little further that our parks are going to be maintained at a level that would make us proud to go to those parks that our kids are going to be able to run through the graph and it's not going to be above their heads and that the playground equipment is going to be maintained at a level in which it's safe for them to be on that the bathrooms are going to be operable well how often does that actually happen so we put in place a system we called it our Louis stat program or Louisville statistics to be able to ask these questions of our departments what does success look like for your agency and how would we know if you were actually being successful so if those are the markers of success for a parks department and their maintenance of our parks well how do we then go out there and get the data to tell us how frequently our parks live up to those standards and we that were able to see that in some cases we're doing a fantastic job but as you get more granular with the data you recognize that wow there's several parks where the grass is not being maintained as frequently as other parks where the equipment is not being maintained as quickly as in other places and when you start to see where those parks are you start to see a picture of the more economically depressed areas of our community which happen to align to some of the racial divides in our community and so then you get into these questions of equity and it's not by any intention it's not that those employees were intentionally necessarily trying to be inequitable so but you have to put that forward in the conversation and start to say well now how do we change this we know now that this is what it looks like how do we start to do things differently so that that's not what we see the next time we come together and so in the performance management conversation it was not faulted to folks that this is the reality and now you're in trouble for it because that's I think sometimes what happens with the performance management conversation is there's a set of standards and if you don't live up to those standards then you are faulted for it in trouble fired whatever the thing is really negative incentives and we made it very clear that we wanted to have this weakness orientation to understand and identify what wasn't working but not to fault the messenger for raising that up but to say now it is on all of us as a collective to solve it because when one area of government is not working it persists the narrative that government doesn't work at all and so this idea of working together across sort of the silos and government also starts to come forward and one of the things that we heard through our Parks Department about why they couldn't get to all these different places was because you know the fleet and facilities group wasn't maintaining their cars and fixing them fast enough so where they could go to you know a jiffy lube which is a company in the u.s. that does oil changes and get an oil change in an hour it would take them six days to get an oil change done and get their car back from the fleet facilities group well sharing that message with the fleet and facilities group and saying hey here's your impact on this thing that is out we're touching citizens made them say well now I need to change my process and I need to work to improve and so how do they do that well benchmarking and looking outside of government for ways to do that better we brought actually Toyota in who maintained vehicles and and are very professional and how they do it to help provide a benchmark and a process improvement for that group so bringing that in is really important and the last piece that I'll say in all of this was putting this power into the hands of the employees so that empowerment piece I mean people want to have agency they want to work on things that are meaningful they want to know that their work is valued and it's really important to make sure that we give them the space to do that and when I say the space to do it it is not only the time to do it but the resources to do it and consistently in government we undercut people we pull resources away if you're doing a good job it's not necessarily that you're going to get more resources but you're going to get more work and it makes it harder for you to do your work well and so if we want people to operate in new ways we need to give them the space to be able to do that we need to give them some of the skills and training to allow them to do that and the time and the grace to potentially fail because when you're doing new things you're not going to get them all right on the first try and so having that idea of it's a weakness orientation it's okay if you're right bringing the problems it's okay if you're testing and trying new things we're going to give you some space to do that we're going to celebrate the wins but we're also going to celebrate the failure failures as learnings and I think that starts to create a culture that is much healthier and that gives people that sense of pride in the work that they do at least that's what we saw in our efforts in Louisville as we work to transform the government I'd be happy to give more examples but I know I need to see my time to my wonderful colleague to the left okay hi everybody my name is Kate Joseph's so I am a civil servant a career civil servant I've worked in the UK government and very fortunately in the United States federal government where I was executive director of the White House performance improvement Council returned to the UK in September and I'm back now at the Department of Education and so the kind of thread that's run through my career as a civil servant I probably came in like many public servant centers that have been quite excited about the idea of policy and very quickly a sort of common sensical bit of me realized that it really all none of it matters very much if we don't deliver so I love the quote we're not quite sure where it came from possibly Thomas Edison vision without implementation is hallucination and I try all the time to try and talk about that with with my teams because I think that while huge strides have been made and we've talked about a lot of that over the course of the day even in in developed central government certainly in my experience both in the United Kingdom and in the United States it is still the case that that sort of hard slog of delivery work is often seen as there's a less glamorous or Glee sister of a big policy vision and and so what I wanted to do today is just talk about a few observations I have three observations I have about how that kind of manifests but also some hopeful building on there are earlier speakers and some hope around how we can address that and it does a lot of it comes back to mindset so the first challenge that I've really observed a number of governments is is around the pressure to deliver results and that risk of enter are sort of getting into a kind of gotcha mentality around the use of performance management performance data and the idea that that pressure to deliver results which is real and real and genuinely felt by politicians and civil servants I think isn't always much for the sustained and intentional leadership attentional on capacity capability and sort of an honest conversation at what is actually gonna take to deliver so I have a slide sorry I know I'm not supposed to but this is a really this is a this is a hand-drawn picture a napkin so I think I'm allowed to have it and this is something as I'm gonna hats it my old boss in the font improvement council who's now the deputy mayor and district Columbia a guy named Kevin Donahue's brilliant guy and he shared this with me earlier my career in the US to try and help me understand the way federal agencies work in the United States I shall not tell you which agency is but essentially he started off by drying drawing these dots and at the top there is the secretary so that the ministers a tree of state and at the bottom is the caseworker and so first of all you know you can see there's this sort of visual representation of hierarchy and layers which everybody understands is you know come a classic bureaucracy and then he drew these kind of semi circles and I'm like what are these and he's like these are force fields these are force fields that let the good news up and stop the bad news going up and you can take those force fields I think you know building or Teresa said I think sometimes what those force fields also do is they don't enable a kind of really clear communication throughout you know down a really clear storytelling or our whities were here so there's a bit of a now I'd be interested in whether anyone people recognize this if I was getting over the top I'd start to draw lots of them because of course the other thing I think many of us recognize in our careers in government is that it is the reality of silos so so first of all it you know how do you how do you grapple with this I think the first thing that lots of us who've worked in performance and delivery try to do is sort of poke holes in those force fields and say actually you know let's systematically try and get at what's going on here because again thinking about proximity there are people in our teams who are proc proximal that people out there on the front lines working every day with human beings and some of those are in our own teams and yet within our organizations we're not always very good at hearing from them or empowering them to to bring that voice and again Teresa's examples already give them realities to that the second challenge that is really clear for me is around complexity and it might seem trite clearly if we're focused on delivering outcomes which you know we should be by definition what we are seeking to achieve in government is really really complicated and and we're also working within these kind of delivery ecosystems that are just messy they've been developed through years of sub layers of reform they've evolved over time they're sort of finally in balance and so so that that complexity is there I think we've got quite good in government and I've certainly seen this in the UK and the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit we did a lot of work around building capability to describe that complexity so to map it and to understand the system and to see what it looks like and I certainly did quite a lot of that in the United States working with multiple federal agencies on cross agency goals but but what we do so well that's positive and we're good at describing the reality well I think we still haven't got very good at doing is actually thinking and remembering that delivery is all ultimately about people not just citizens and users out there who are really important but our people and our people in our teams and so that understanding of what motivates them and sort of coupling the company understanding of the complexity of the system with an understanding of the complexity of human behavior and a recognition that that's actually part of our job in in delivery so so as well as sort of poking holes in force field I think one of the things I'm really interested in doing is understanding how we build our capability to understand public sector motivation how we transform our feedback loops and engagement and our approach to engagement I loved what Jeff Morgan said about you know the way you design engagement can change then the kind of just the nature of the discourse I also think there's a huge you know how many of us this morning what we're really kind of deeply moved by what we heard by our first speaker that was because he spoke both - he spoke to it the emotional part of our brains and that idea that's telling a story is actually is not a kind of you know it's not just it's not an add-on it's a really important part of leadership and it's a really important part of motivation and inspiring our people so and I don't think we spend much time talking about that in terms of government capabilities the final challenge is just in terms of how we sort of make all those feedback loops and those holes in forcefields work comes back to data and you would expect with Nia Theresa and I to talk about data because we're sort of self-confessed confess performance geeks but I think one of my things around performance see if I could ban the phrase what gets measured gets done tomorrow I would ban it because it sort of belies a sort of history and Martin spoke to this of the idea that by measuring things and sort of seeking to develop the perfect measure of something that's inherently very complicated we we sort of we solved the problem and it's surprisingly I think that attitude the sort of focus on measurement is still really prevalent in a lot of public sector organizations in both especially I found in the u.s. actually and in US federal government it really is and so we get sucked into reporting for reporting sake analysis for analysis sake you know in my current job we've had a lot of conversations around who's using this data who's using this analysis our decision-makers not just very senior decision-makers but our frontline workers are they're using this analysis are they finding it helpful and the decisions they have to make every day and if the answer is no then how do we make having make it more useful I think actually that's increasingly easy and hopeful the the kind of opportunity that new technologies bring the kind of increasing move towards open data and sharing of data and frankly a sort of opening up of our analytic capability and government to bring in you know more folks with background in data science who can take very complicated later and say actually there's a story here that you may be missing I think is hugely hopeful and what I think I'm getting out there is instead of trying to remove the force field in a sort of classic sort of visionary strategic civil service way well we know will systematically change structures and remove the force fields the force fields are there they're probably there for all sorts of reasons what we can do is through the use of data and through the use of understanding motivation poke those holes and then make them bigger so I don't if this metaphors losing everybody buts essentially try and make the force fields a bit irrelevant so to conclude I think that at the heart of what I'm saying all these challenges are insurmountable but we do need a mindset shift and I think that's where is leaders in the public sector it's really important that we say that yes performance is about accountability and it is about assurance and it is about risk and it is about all those things especially a gentleman mentioned Grenville this morning I think you know we can't lose that it's really really important that we have those features and we we do that very well yes and it's also about foresight and learning and encouraging our organisations to to you know build that autonomy and then learn from it and just think you know that for me it's sort of about saying how as leaders can we model that reward that recognise that create the conditions and the space for that to be the conversation we have so I'm really happy to talk in kind of more specific detail about examples from the kind of US UK or whatever but rather than get sort of sucked in I wanted to kind of create that context and then open up hopefully for a useful conversation so thanks ok you can lose the napkin eclis right now ok great so what I'll do is just pull things together a little and then suggest the direction we might take the discussion in and then open up to general questions so I think the thing that struck me was and it was one of the things he said it was around people there was a common theme running through all of all of what you said and I mean Martin started by highlighting that actually perhaps challenging some of the wisdom that people had a few at least over the last couple of decades that it's all about incentives and monitoring and that actually maybe looking at both the Nigerian data and the Gungan a-and data that autonomy and professionalism are what's correlated with good performance in the public sector and that then fed very nicely into what Nano said which is it's all about attitudes and trying to change attitudes and you gave a really great example of challenging lateness is one way in which you might challenge attitudes and then coming through to what Tracy said about empowering people to have the space to you know use the data that you are collecting and think how to move forward rather than and focusing on the failures but actually learning from those failures and then coming back at the end that's what Kate said in terms of well how do we understand human behavior that was perhaps one of the challenges and now you all say focused on data and the pressure to deliver results and then those force fields but but to do that you really need to understand human behavior so it's a common theme running through all of this so that we could start the discussion on well how do we try and better understand what motivates people in the public sector and how do we change these attitudes and encourage professionals and when autonomy say thoughts from the floor I'll take questions in threes and so who's got the mics okay one at the back there that was what I handed the lady at the back thank you um one of the things that I've seen working within the civil service in the UK is that these sort of conversations around empowerment motivation about being able to be autonomous about experimentation is all very present so I don't think it's that it's not going on but I do think that one of the reasons that people behave in the way that they do is because every time they try something and potentially if they fail at something there is a parliamentary select committee or the media out there saying that that is a failure of government and the Cascade are that that happened that happens then is that ministers you know kind of push back against that experimentation so my observation rather than a question necessarily is that we're only talking about of one side of the challenge and we need those mechanisms of accountability but by default those can have a suppressive effect on the creativity and innovation within government okay great I should have said can people make sure they introduce themselves so can you just say yeah and I'm Leon Saunders I'm the director of strategy at the Foreign Office in the UK fantastic and I'll take one more question from this side a chaplet check sure Richard Stirling from Oxford insights and my question is around confidence in public services and public servants you know a lot of the behaviors that we've talked about in this session and actually over the last day and a half are behaviors which are modeled by people who are self-confident they're people who are open to criticism they're people who are humble in when they're taking a leadership role they're people who see the opportunity to talk to the people that they're working with directly as an opportunity to learn and do to some of the things that my colleague was just mentioning you bound parliamentary Select Committee's and accountability mechanisms and all of the strength has gone into those over the last few years are we there's a risk that we're in danger of removing confidence from public servants so my question is like how do we find those confident public service leaders how do we build them where we need them and how do we reward them for demonstrating some self-confidence and some leadership and do so even if the bets that they make don't come off okay and I think one more question in this round from the middle there - OH - hi there Mike Mark Robinson Durham University thank you for a very interesting panel and I've actually changed my question because of Kate I listen to nan and I had one question and where I was going to have a go at what we can't measure we can't manage but then Kate saw how to go at it now I feel jus duty-bound to defend it and Peter Drucker was the management guru who brought that idea in and he has disciples on his website where they challenged people to come up things in life that you can't measure and you know things like poetry and they they then give a counter-argument no no you can measure this so my point is um whilst you know it can be taken too far and there are bad examples where kpi's have been used ridiculously often they have been very useful and they've flushed out a lot of ineffective bad management in a lot of areas and it's shown light in where it wasn't previously there so my point is in terms of motivating people I agree it's not everything but it's got to be you know the basis for having some idea what on earth's going on in what you said were very very complex areas of delivery so back to my original question Anana you said you note about attitude as well as you know performance and you gave one example of punctuality can you give any other you know examples where you've you've tried to you know make people change attitude and motivate people because because of that okay great so first question on well so far we've only captured one side of the argument what about the external forces select committees in the media how do we get confident and public servants and then a push back on what gets measured what gets done so should we go let's start with Kate as the last question was directed to you can I come out urge you brief answers and then we'll be able to take a look so just on the what get what gets measured gets done and believe me I am a you know a disciple of measurement in the sense that I do it an awful lot and spend a lot of my time building capacity and my team to do it and I'm indeed held to account for lots of very complicated so I'm completely with you on the power I think for me it's the sort of simplest it's the sort of perverse effect that's happened I think in some cases that people have become so focused I mean links to the sofa focus on that part of the of the of the work that that they're happy when they have a measure as opposed to saying is it actually well now what do we do with it and the only other thing Oh I'll reflect on is just around which I think the first two comments are sort of linked - lay around you know confidence of public servants and how do we reward and recognize that you know maybe I'm a sort of naive or optimist I think that I think we have to I think partly we just have to sort of start small almost and every one of us that thinks it matters do it and do it visibly and talk about doing it and encourage our own teams to do it and and try and build up from there and I think we can talk with you know we can we can have conversations with with ministers about those difficulties if it's done in a in a collegiate way I mean there are often charts or sometimes challenges you can't get round but and some I'm not naive there are some situations as civil servants where that's not possible but I still I you know my view is that we have to try as senior leaders in government to model it and be resilient and sort of be brave on it so I would on the first two questions because I think that they can be linked slightly you know part of what we also need to do is to celebrate the successes and to make the successes of where government works well very apparent and visible for the public and there's a lot of things that work really well about government and no one ever wants to focus on that and I get that that's not gonna be a headline every day but one of the things that we've done in Louisville which has been really powerful and it was modeled off of something we saw in Buffalo New York is a program called building our blocks and so we recognize that every day we've got different departments going out and doing things that better our community but they do them all over the community never are they all aligned in one location and so whether that is picking up the trash whether that is fixing potholes whether that is cutting back debris whether that is fixing a water main break whatever it is we don't ever do that in a coordinated fashion it's normally done all over the place spread out and so we started to say well what in one morning we coordinated all of those different departments and agencies to go together and to do that in a four or five block neighborhood so that citizens saw their city government at work in force and oh let's connect that with maybe some other social service groups so that we could knock on doors and make folks who are at home at nine o'clock in the morning on their porch able-bodied not working aware of services that might get them into the workforce or if they had children in the home aware of places where they could go to get their dentistry done or where they could get a health check-up let's go to the people and it's been a huge powerful thing of showing people what government does really well and it doesn't cost anything because we're doing it already but now we're just doing it in a coordinated fashion that's very visible and so it's been a really good thing also for the people in government to feel proud of being in government because I think that successes we get sort of that spirit of wow no I'm proud to be here and we're doing great work and others are seeing it and when you start to do that you start to build confidence in the public sector and in your own confidence as an individual because you're part of a quote unquote winning team that others recognize and celebrate and then that leaders should also be celebrating that too and so we also did an annual celebration that were awards for things in daily work things in continuous improvement things that have innovated innovation that we're celebrating the the wins that we were having in government we invited the public in we didn't get a lot of public there initially but then we coordinated it with other events that were naturally bringing people in so that they were forced to see some of these successes and I think that that's really powerful and helpful and it started to change some of our council members so the legislators opinion of what government was doing to make them a little bit less lyrical of it thank you the issue about what else have we done I can give me any examples no big ones but they do a lot very of coordination see until wanting to conversation under 1992 one of the requirements of the office of the heterosis opposed to produce this another part on a civil service from 1992 up to 20 fifteen it's never been done on time because it's a service white coordination collaboration thing I call that team together first few directors and there is a look why do we have to do that in the law but access some of our do you have to do somebody said look it's useful because people president would know what we are doing and shall good report and blah blah blah we even can learn from it fine so I would prepare to be the deadline he said yes and since 2015 we did it 2015-2016 we've met a deadline biscuit that's talking together letting people have an understanding of the value of what they are doing as it's still fun just provisions and report for you it requires a lot of personal context I must admit but that is one of the things the other thing that we can do which we have done also very well relatively it's from higher office one of the things akiima from Martin's work was that people needed more support previously I thought look visible our directors managers let them manage but they're chemically that he needed more support so office became much more visible and suddenly the colleagues in my office by the way in Ghana my office used to be called its office of head of civil service but that anecdotally to ask all office of hardships Soros and cut because people treated our place as if it's a Sahara me so really a punishment to go to that place suddenly that someone has change and if L not know improved financial but you feel good the gooc organizations and people are listening to them so in that case we can do that let me just quickly make mention about the confidence and and the fear the externalities I think one other thing that money just leaders can do is to be able to support them I mean quite recently there was a case where administer ask for some information and I think one of the civil servants collect Arab idol information did not GU rights and he was not given the full information so and the militia were angry surround work with you that cheap light that comes to me I said I don't have a problem bring that guy to my office but you won't get another person but because this is a silly reason to sound work with all of us make mistakes so they brought a person and then that means how course now we want a replacement I say there's no replacement because all of them behave in the same manner so there's no replacement he goes back and after one month he comes back in is okey I'll take this guy so that I goes back to them what I'm saying is how do you improve confidence by also ensuring that the leadership really stands up and support I'm not quite sure where I'm nesting by this time still be the head of solutions but I don't really care about that my main concern is let's do a bit and less support a sister once we get a system going and we change small bit by bit then we can make a making support of kaypea if my present creature was that those performance magnitudes were non Porter they're critical but I'm saying beyond that there are these most Morton though we need to do to true self and just very briefly I think one thing which nana has also done as head of civil service which she didn't mention was which really speaks to this issue of people is being very conscious about involving younger officers at the beginning of their career in high-level policy discussions and doing challenging tasks and offering their opinion and I think what that does is create a culture that breaks down some of these napkin hierarchies and force fields and authorize it you know if the hips level service cares what I think then also you know my director should care what I think and I can go and come with an idea but also raise raise a concern and I think you know there's a lot of the discussion about risk aversion comes from the fear that we're going to do something and then get in trouble but there's also the issue of you know there there are many many scandals in government that happen precisely because lots of people know that there's a huge issue but it gets covered up because of these force fields and so I think from a leaders perspective you know breaking those down as part of how you stay out of trouble as well ok can I take chairs privilege and just respond to your point about these external constituencies so one of the things that's come out of what you the need to encourage professionalism but I remember reading James Q Wilson book where he says one of the things that defines professionals is that they draw a lot of their awards from external communities the importance of peers and so forth so I think if we're actually building up professionalism as a source of motivation then the points that you raised about select committees within Parliament but also the media is going to be even even more important so I think we need to think about how we change attitudes in those external constituencies as well as changing attitudes within the organization okay I think we've we got time for one more question we like one more question okay whose hand was up first I think it was Tom over on this side I think your question what your hand was up first so thank you I'm Ruth Dixon I'm a researcher here at the Blavatnik school and I oh is it is that on now Thanks um um I really took your point Tories are about celebrating success and so on but one thing that really builds confidence and in a government is how it responds to things that go wrong and that a big source of information that we haven't touched on I think is is complaints from the public about things and we set quite high barriers for people to make a formal complaint we they have to negotiate websites and so on have to write things down they lose their anonymity and I was wondering how government can use that for learning rather than for blame and kind of take make that part of their achievement of how they deal with problems that arise say can I ask you to run perhaps you want to start Twitter cause you're some of what you were talking about touches directly onto that and then maybe a sentence or two response from the other so we definitely started analyzing our complaint system when we first got into that Louis stat program that I was speaking of the point on is that a system that's accessible to all I think is a really good one and I think it's a question that came up at the end of the last session around just technology in general it's only one piece of the puzzle and you have to allow for other avenues for citizens to you be heard and to put in to place their complaints and so some of the things that we've been really intentional about are again how do we go out to where citizens are but you can also use data to do that sort of more generally and one of the things that I thought was really important in our discovery and I've heard other cities speak to it as well is when you start to look at where you're getting complaints and where you're not getting complaints and then you layer that with the context of what you know is happening in your city where investments are where poverty is in some places and in some regards you actually don't ever hear complaints from citizens in those places and it could be because they don't know how to access it but it could be because they've also given up on government right and so they just aren't going to actually call you and report anything and that was the premise of where we actually selected to go for our first set of building our blocks sort of concentrations of work was to those places where people weren't calling us but we knew there were needs and then our engagement with that with them was through that door to door you know set of volunteer conversations of what's going on here what are you concerned about in this neighborhood what do you have questions about that maybe don't come up and so it was another way to engage people in that conversation to understand that you know you can't just rely on our formal complaint system because it may not be accessible than many people do you want to offer a personal mark on it and yeah just to sort of build on the theme I had around sort of how we need to also apply these dis mentality to our own organizations internally I think the same applies for you know what could be perceived as you know also and so over then this team's whinging about this thing that sort of centered actually are we listening to our teams and our staff particularly those staff who are actually out there working with you know real human beings everyday and and getting that feedback and sometimes you know having the real sense and we we sort of creating the conditions to have an open discussion about their bad perception but also to help see if they have a solution to the problem which is you know should be easier to do within our own team so I think it is a hard thing to kind of manage your own personal response when you see a complaint you think well I immediately want to be defensive about that and then to say actually no we all need as leaders to say okay I can have a little bit of defensiveness but I also need to understand why this is coming from and and again to sort of model up for our team's final remarks and complaints it's one of my regrets not in a negative way because I've open a mechanism and I think we spend a lot more time responding to complaints than had ever been done but the Ghana civil service so I agree future good thing across the surface one of the ways in which we can improve performance and service delivery but I litigated that takes a lot of your time that is good okay so unfortunately we're now pretty much out of time and we all need to go from here through to I think a plenary address with nari but just before we do I think I'm going to just offer my takeaway sound bites and from from the panel say if as being start small and gradual and change attitudes which came from naina the importance of data but in particular using data and measure means of learning from failure and I'll we'll always remember the napkins now breaking force fields and the importance of understanding public service motivation and on the research side that there is credible fara academic research showing that autonomy is associated with good performance even in the most challenging environments like Nigeria and Ghana so great for things to take away from this session and into the next one Thanks [Applause]

Channel: Blavatnik School of Government

Views: 1,261

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford, Public Policy, University of Oxford

Id: txAnw8YA-Ns

Length: 71min 32sec (4292 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 20 2017