- "On Tuesday and Wednesday, we held the Action Planning Retreat, which went spectacularly well. Our clients chose to pursue seven change strategies. One was to redesign their slow paper-based purchasing process to eliminate many steps and signatures before putting it on an Intranet. Another sets outcome goals for the province, each ministry, and each program - to clearly focus on the things that matter most to their citizens.
- At the close of the two days, Victor called the governor up, asked him to put on safety goggles, and handed him a large hammer. After unveiling a huge pottery urn, with "Burocracia" painted on all four sides, he asked the governor to smash it. In Spanish, people called out symbols of bureaucracy, such as "turfism," timesheets, or an arcane rule. With each blow, the crowd shouted, "Out!" A local TV station captured it on tape. Afterward, people (including us) took pieces of the broken urn home as souvenirs."
I should hasten to add that not all vestiges of bureaucracy are bad. Bureaucracy was introduced to government as a reform - to increase efficiency and decrease the potential for favoritism and patronage. But like many things, its original strength - uniformity of service based on rules, processes, and lots of oversight - has become its greatest weakness. Too often, 'regulations rule' and hinder public organizations from being purpose driven and responsive to changing needs. Unnecessary bureaucratic traditions add to the cost of government and, worse, to a sense of mistrust. Here's one example of the latter from a public official's recent reflection:
- "There's one form that I intend to eliminate. I can't remember the name, but it's the form you fill out when you forget to get advance permission to spend any money. On it, you have to dictate how sorry you are to have been that stupid, and that no, you'll never again make the mistake of not planning four weeks in advance to pay for coffee and soda for an emergency task force meeting. Then you send it through the system for four signatures, so at least three different offices know how stupid you were."
And government is not the only sector concerned with bureaucracy. For example, General Electric's Annual Report 2000 contained this section:
- "Annihilating Bureaucracy. We cultivate the hatred of bureaucracy in our company and never for a moment hesitate to use that awful word, "hate." ... Bureaucracy frustrates people, distorts their priorities, limits their dreams, and turns the face of the entire enterprise inward. ...In a digitized world, the internal workings of companies will be exposed, and bureaucracies will be seen by all for what they are: slow, self-absorbed, customer insensitive-even silly."
(Pretty blunt language! Now, while GE leadership was referring to hatred of its internal bureaucracy, it's not hard to imagine what this one "small" company thinks when it encounters governmental bureaucracy!)
Several of my partners have written the premier books about what is possible when bureaucracy is challenged. If you haven't already done so, pick up a copy of Banishing Bureaucracy by David Osborne or Beyond Bureaucracy by Babak Armajani. These books were among the first to describe the emerging service paradigm of government. This paradigm asks each public organization to look outward to its customers, rather than inward to its rulebooks.
How might you get started? Some of our clients have sponsored "stupid rule" contests - asking employees to identify outdated processes or rules that are counterproductive to their mission. We have helped others negotiate Flexible Performance Agreements, where managers accept accountability for delivering customer-desired results in exchange for freedom from administrative rules. To identify high leverage post-bureaucratic opportunities, we often use action planning. The trip report from Argentina described that process in practice.
Whether you choose to annihilate bureaucracy, or simply eliminate unnecessary elements, you can become part of this larger bureaucracy busting movement!
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