WE LOVE THE NITTY GRITTY STUFF
- greenebarrett
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
Late last year, Bill Eggers, executive director of Deloitte's Center for Government Insights, wrote on LinkedIn that "Over my decades working on government reform, my one major complaint has always been that think tanks have focused so much time and resources on policy and too little on policy execution and the nitty-gritty of government operations
He was playing our song, and we’d like to add that we find the same unfortunate phenomenon doesn’t just exist in think tanks but also among many elected officials who are entirely concentrated on developing new policies but give too little thought to how they are going to be implemented.
As for us, though we’ve spent a great deal of time and effort researching and writing about policy (especially during the period of time we spent working as consultants to the Pew Charitable Trusts), our true love has always been exploring management issues in a whole host of fields including information technology, human resources, budgeting and so on. However good a policy is, we’ve found, when the management and implementation is bungled, the great new idea can turn out to be a failure.
We reached out to a few smart people to see what they had to say about this, and Mike Pagano, Dean Emeritus, of the University of Illinois Chicago, College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, thoroughly agreed, telling us that “Although policy issues/concerns seem to dominate the airwaves, it's the implementation and management that make a difference in our lives.”
Added Don Kettl, the well-known professor emeritus at the University of Maryland (and co-author with us of The Little Guide to Writing for Impact), “there's a strong case that one of the big drivers of distress in government is the worry among citizens that government programs either don't work, don't work well, or don't benefit them, and it's hard for people to trust things when promises are made and promises aren't kept. Typically, that’s because of a failure to either think through implementation problems from the beginning or fumbling the ball once implementation starts.”
John Bartle, president of the American Society for Public Administration, agreed and added that “While policy is initially made in developing the proposal and on the floor of the legislature, most of the key decisions are made in its implementation. Appointed officials have dozens, maybe hundreds, of decisions to interpret a policy and how it applies in unexpected or borderline cases.
“Most citizens care less about the ideology of a policy than making it work and getting value for their tax dollar. Clean water, good schools, safe streets, and thriving neighborhoods are not partisan or ideological issues, they are part of a prosperous and progressive community. Politics is flashy and grabs our attention. While determining who is in power is important, it is a prelude to governance. Street-level bureaucrats make it happen.”
We didn’t want to stop our outreach with academics, and so we contacted a few practitioners including Brooks Williams, who is the city manager of Ferris, Texas, and he explained that “The longer I do this work, the more convinced I am that the most important debates in public life are not won in the policy arena. They are won, or lost, in the machinery that has to carry the decision into a Tuesday morning when nobody is watching. A council can adopt a new priority in one night. A governor can sign a bill in one afternoon. A think tank can publish a report and move on to the next one.
“But those are not the moments the public experiences government. People experience government at the permitting counter, the dispatch console, the utility crew schedule, the court docket, the procurement rules, the legacy software that still runs half the organization, and the employee who is trying to do the right thing with six interruptions and a phone that will not stop ringing. If you want to understand why trust frays, start there. It is not because people are reading policies and rejecting them. It is because they are running into a system that cannot consistently do what it promised, and over time they learn that the words were easier than the work.”
We can’t deny that bad policies, well implemented may be the worst variation of all, But assuming that the policies have potential, why has the emphasis on them over management and implementation prevailed?
The answer isn’t difficult to see from the elected officials’ point of view. After all, people get elected to office when they pass new laws and announce new programs. There’s nothing like a good old-fashioned ribbon-cutting to get attention from the media. Public announcements of the opening of a new infrastructure or economic development project provide the kinds of sound bites that attract attention from the media (and the official hopes, praise from the general public).
But when was the last time you heard a city councilmember, mayor, state legislator or governor even mention the procurement office that made a new infrastructure development possible or bring up the careful thought in the human resources office that allowed an entity to bring in the kind of staff that made it a better place to live.
Yet the connections are abundantly clear if you just look behind the scenes of governmental progress. Last year we wrote and contributed to UKG research (along with Polco), a study that provided credible evidence that supported the hypothesis that effective workforce practices have a positive impact on resident satisfaction with both the quality of the services and the customer service they receive from their local government; their overall confidence in their municipal government and the quality of life in their community.
So, even though these so-called bureaucrats (a term that we’re frustrated has turned into a pejorative) may not get accolades, they most certainly deserve them. And we’ll continue to give appropriate credit to them in the future and hope that people notice.
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