THE PUBLIC SECTOR TOWER OF BABEL

We were involved in a meeting the other day, in which a couple of participants were talking about agile government. We hear that term with frequency these days but admit to being a bit foggy on the meaning. We thought we were the only ones, but then someone asked for a definition (which made us happy) and it turned out that there were at least a few acceptable definitions.

That set us to thinking about the many words that gain currency in the public sector but are understood differently, depending on the speaker and circumstances.

Some years ago, for example, when we were working on projects with the Pew Charitable Trusts, there was a huge amount of talk about “big data,” and how it could be used by the states. We got approval to do a series of interviews with smart people asking simply what “big data” meant.

It turned out that in about a dozen interviews, we came up with at least four separate meanings. We couldn’t help but wonder about the potential for miscommunication when people with varying definitions worked together without knowing they were talking about different things.

The list goes on. Just the other day we were having a conversation with a well-known expert in human resources, and we made mention of performance management. The conversation that followed was a little confusing until we realized that we meant the broad area of measuring and managing performance in the public sector, while he was referring specifically to the performance evaluations for employees that are commonplace in HR.

This reminded us of a nightmarish story from deep in our past when a high-ranking official with the now defunct publication, Financial World, was a guest on a radio program, talking about an early effort of ours to evaluate management capacity in the cities and states. We had written in the piece that one state was weak in performance management, but in the interview the magazine’s representative complained about how badly the state was evaluating its workers.  That wasn’t what we meant and wasn’t true. A representative of the state took umbrage at the interview, and it was all quite a mess, which required a few apologies.

Then there’s the confusion about what’s meant by “merit” and “merit systems” in compensation. To some, merit pay implies that employees who exceed performance goals get bigger than typical raises.

But we’ve come across plenty of places in which nearly everyone gets a merit pay increase as long as they’ve done enough to avoid being fired. In fact, when we conjured up a B&G Report list of  “Twelve Big Lies About State and Local Government, we included this one: “Merit pay is based on merit.”

We don’t think these distinctions are trivial.  Words matter. As George Orwell wrote, “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

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