Reducing government bureaucracy.

Reinvention experiments are turning up promising results.

Imagine a future in which government works. An efficient public sector could lower costs, lessen taxes, and get more accomplished. The best people for a job would do the work, and they would do it in the best way.

Impeding

this utopian scenario is the need to change the culture of civil service - a Herculean task. But David Osborne and Peter Plastrik, authors of Banishing Bureaucracy, believe that reforming civil servants is possible. As evidence, they offer several examples of successful government reform efforts launched and sustained in response to citizen frustration and exasperation with bureaucracy. These programs are still experimental, yet the early results seem promising enough to consider the possibilities of such change on a global scale.

Although various government reform efforts have been tried out over the years, Osborne himself is credited with helping launch the current wave with his 1992 book Reinventing Government, written with Ted Gaebler. This follow-up is intended to help government reformers replicate the success of the pioneers.

In the United States, both Bill Clinton and Al Gore, campaigning for the presidency and vice-presidency respectively, immediately seized on the politically appealing ideas in Reinventing Government. Upon election, Clinton created the National Performance Review (NPR), led by Gore. So far, NPR has had moderate success in renovating a variety of federal agencies, by eliminating cumbersome purchasing and personnel regulations, for example. Now a real test is under way. In September 1997, federal departments submitted their first plans under the Government Performance and Results Act, which requires agencies to set specific management goals and demonstrate progress toward them each year.

In Europe in 1996, the 24-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) discovered that the member governments have found similar challenges and have responded similarly: reexamining what government should do and how it should do it, decentralizing authority and giving more decision-making freedom to lower-level units, developing customer-service attitudes, and using tools such as benchmarking - i.e., researching the state of the art for any task and changing one's own operations accordingly.

Other bureaucracy-banishing tools include performance or program reviews, sunset rules requiring periodic reauthorization of programs or agencies, and making certain public functions private. In developing nations, privatization often involves whole sectors, such as telecommunications, but the more practical examples are in routine operations, such as filling potholes on city streets. The key to making such privatization work, Osborne and Plastrik say, is competitive bidding. In fact, when public agencies have been allowed to compete on a level playing field free from regulation, they sometimes have offered the lowest bid and the best service. However the work gets done, there must be both incentives and consequences for levels of performance.

Osborne and Plastrik maintain that, unlike the stereotype of the lazy bureaucrat, most government workers are frustrated people who want to do well but have been kept from doing so. To the extent that it liberates workers to do their best, reinvention is eventually greeted with cheers from workers.

Banishing Bureaucracy offers numerous examples of agency-level success, but the reinvention movement is still in its early stages. Osborne and Plastrik focus on a handful of democracies and only gingerly and briefly discuss how their concepts could be applied in places like Argentina and Brazil. The learning curve may be steeper in such countries, they note, but customer-based governing could also save a lot of wasted time in development. As in all reinvention, much depends on attitudes.

The potential benefits of governmental reform are even more enticing than the successes to date may suggest. Once the skeptical public sees ground-level improvements, bottom-up pressure for better government will likely grow. Raising expectations of such improvement could build a momentum that compels governments to clean up their acts, whether they want to or not. The long-term results would be more-effective democracy, a spread of democracy in corners of the world in which it doesn't exist, and a better-managed planet.

Given today's public cynicism and despair over government, just the real possibility of making such change work is breathtaking.

- Jeffrey H. Epstein

A Dozen Lessons for Leaders of Cultural Transition

1. Don't control employees - involve them.

2. Model the behavior you want.

3. Make yourself visible.

4. Make a clear break with the past.

5. Unleash - but harness - the pioneers.

6. Get a quick shot of new blood - and a slow transfusion.

7. Drive out fear - but don't tolerate resistance.

8. Sell success - but don't make the new culture closed to different ideas.

9. Communicate, communicate, communicate.

10. Bridge the fault lines in the organization.

11. Change administrative systems that reinforce bureaucratic culture.

12. Commit for the long haul.

- From Banishing Bureaucracy

Source: Banishing Bureaucracy by David Osborne and Peter Plastrik. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. 1997. 397 pages. Available from the Futurist Bookstore for $25 ($22.95 for Society members), cat. no. B-2098.