Newsletter – February 2013
The fight against bureaucracy is a theme which surfaces in the press and public debate at regular intervals. This bureaucratic phenomenon affects numerous different organizations but it is in the public sector that it appears most prominently.
The most recent and significant efforts to combat bureaucracy developed around the concept of “New Public Management” an important theoretical corpus which led to various attempts at revamping the framework in which the public sector operates. The practices varied; certain countries opted for complex contracts to strictly supervise the service providers concerned, while others preferred to put the accent on strictly defined objectives leaving the concerned providers to their choice of method.
These different methods have resulted in some success and also in some dead-ends, as divulged by the recent scandal within the NHS (British National Health System). With the persistent economic crisis and dwindling tax revenues the need to be more and more efficient is strongly felt. The people in charge are unanimous; higher efficiency is being blocked by an overload of pure bureaucracy.
At this time there isn’t a new “fashionable” concept to latch onto for glimpsing at solutions, no “New Public Management” on the horizon. So, how to go forward? Our approach consists of tossing the concepts of the NPM avatars which aim to supervise an entity from the outside and, on the contrary, concentrate on the phenomenal amount of bureaucracy itself.
By adopting this point of view the central preoccupation then becomes that of understanding why an organization will reply to evolution in its environment by producing bureaucracy. It’s by avoiding at this stage the cut and dried “cliché” answers that glimpses of sketchy solutions will appear. Indeed, and even if, the causes of this bureaucratic phenomenon are inseparable from the activities of the public service sector (its origin and feeling of permanence) and thereby impossible to counter, there are other causes more open to efficient intervention. The fragmentation, typical in bureaucratic organizations comes to mind here as well as the imbalance between autonomy and responsibility characteristic of their role definitions.
Therefore, some angles of attack exist. The issue at stake here is to set up an approach which maximizes the potential. That, in our experience, begins by avoiding the blocks over which it is so easy to stumble. For instance there is the one which consists in being diverted by the search of someone to blame. This particular drift is very harmful in that each person contributes to the expansion of the bureaucracy in the organization and if the solutions are not found and developed together then all that will be accomplished is a sterile witch hunt. Another often observed stumbling block is that which addresses only the technical aspects of the problem thereby transforming a measure intended to combat bureaucracy into a bureaucratic initiative.
It is obvious that this type of initiative will inevitably uncover useless practices and thus lead to a technical job by nature; it is the means by which we reach this stage that will make all the difference. It is inconceivable to be able to work effectively on causes such as; “Silo” mentalities, the multiplication of “little bosses” and the balance between autonomy and responsibility without centering the initiative on the personal transitions underlying the whole.
Become aware of a shared responsibility, decide that it is possible to do things differently, question the management trends and take the risk of returning to the essential. These are the indispensable steps of an approach that, as you will have gathered by now, can only succeed in our opinion if the balance between its formal and emotional dimension is maintained.
Edgar Brandt Advisory
The fight against bureaucracy is a theme which surfaces in the press and public debate at regular intervals. This bureaucratic phenomenon affects numerous different organizations but it is in the public sector that it appears most prominently.
The most recent and significant efforts to combat bureaucracy developed around the concept of “New Public Management” an important theoretical corpus which led to various attempts at revamping the framework in which the public sector operates. The practices varied; certain countries opted for complex contracts to strictly supervise the service providers concerned, while others preferred to put the accent on strictly defined objectives leaving the concerned providers to their choice of method.
These different methods have resulted in some success and also in some dead-ends, as divulged by the recent scandal within the NHS (British National Health System). With the persistent economic crisis and dwindling tax revenues the need to be more and more efficient is strongly felt. The people in charge are unanimous; higher efficiency is being blocked by an overload of pure bureaucracy.
At this time there isn’t a new “fashionable” concept to latch onto for glimpsing at solutions, no “New Public Management” on the horizon. So, how to go forward? Our approach consists of tossing the concepts of the NPM avatars which aim to supervise an entity from the outside and, on the contrary, concentrate on the phenomenal amount of bureaucracy itself.
By adopting this point of view the central preoccupation then becomes that of understanding why an organization will reply to evolution in its environment by producing bureaucracy. It’s by avoiding at this stage the cut and dried “cliché” answers that glimpses of sketchy solutions will appear. Indeed, and even if, the causes of this bureaucratic phenomenon are inseparable from the activities of the public service sector (its origin and feeling of permanence) and thereby impossible to counter, there are other causes more open to efficient intervention. The fragmentation, typical in bureaucratic organizations comes to mind here as well as the imbalance between autonomy and responsibility characteristic of their role definitions.
Therefore, some angles of attack exist. The issue at stake here is to set up an approach which maximizes the potential. That, in our experience, begins by avoiding the blocks over which it is so easy to stumble. For instance there is the one which consists in being diverted by the search of someone to blame. This particular drift is very harmful in that each person contributes to the expansion of the bureaucracy in the organization and if the solutions are not found and developed together then all that will be accomplished is a sterile witch hunt. Another often observed stumbling block is that which addresses only the technical aspects of the problem thereby transforming a measure intended to combat bureaucracy into a bureaucratic initiative.
It is obvious that this type of initiative will inevitably uncover useless practices and thus lead to a technical job by nature; it is the means by which we reach this stage that will make all the difference. It is inconceivable to be able to work effectively on causes such as; “Silo” mentalities, the multiplication of “little bosses” and the balance between autonomy and responsibility without centering the initiative on the personal transitions underlying the whole.
Become aware of a shared responsibility, decide that it is possible to do things differently, question the management trends and take the risk of returning to the essential. These are the indispensable steps of an approach that, as you will have gathered by now, can only succeed in our opinion if the balance between its formal and emotional dimension is maintained.
Edgar Brandt Advisory