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There is as much need for paradigm changes in the public sector as in the
private-sector, points out Prof. Peter Pawlowsky of Chemnitz
University of Technology. In the same way that Frederick W. Taylor’s
efficiency-oriented scientific management has proven itself obsolete in
industry, bureaucratic administration is no longer working in government, he
says.
Market forces and profit motives are important triggers for the learning
taking place in business, encouraging effective knowledge management in many
industries. They force individuals and organizations to evolve or risk
extinction. Such mechanisms are not completely missing in the public sector.
If you think of public and private sector managers as being focused on
“outcomes,” political outcomes include results such as election votes and
successful passage of legislative measures. But even the process of
replacing bureaucratic leaders through firings or political leaders through
elections is too slow to have the kind instant feedback advantage found in
the private sector when managers can be sacked on the spot or when financial
performance is immediately reported and reflected in share price.
 Having served two British prime ministers as senior policy advisor in
Downing Street and then as Minister of Agriculture under Tony Blair, Lord
Bernard Donoughue
highlighted mechanisms of learning and knowledge management in the UK
public sector. The institutional knowledge of long-term civil servants
insures continuity, for example, preventing paralysis even during times of
political upheaval. Unfortunately, it also creates tremendous inertia that
anchors the status quo. And when Tony Blair wanted to improve two-way
knowledge flow for more access, more options and “more informed
intervention” based on “knowing more,” policy and statistics units were
established in all ministries, but they were rarely asked for information.
“As minister of agriculture, my experience was that management of knowledge
was erratic and sometimes amateurish,” he says. Donoughue expresses
frustrations at the difficulties he encountered using information to
implement policy or trying to reform the ways in which knowledge was shared
in government. Too often he found either insufficient information or
insufficient access to existing information. Sometimes this was a result of
passive ignorance, but active obstruction also was common, especially when
it came to what he calls unwelcome knowledge.
“The history of past policy failures, especially BSE, produced a massive
psychological defensiveness in the departments’ personality and a tendency
to suppress information and knowledge that might expose more failures.
Information embarrassing to departmental officials was frequently not
provided to ministers,” Donoughue adds. “At a minimum, they saw new
knowledge as inconvenient, because it might lead to change and that
department preferred the short-term comforts of the status quo.”
Such political difficulties are hardly absent in the private sector, yet
some of the most bureaucratic companies survive and thrive, LaPalombara
notes. “What puzzles me is that the private sector has these same
inefficiencies,” he says, “but they still make substantial profit.”
Identifying with Donoughue’s frustrations was Wolfgang Nowak,
Director General of the Department of Political Analysis and Planning for
Germany’s Federal Chancellery. But he points to slow, steady progress from
the days when power meant not having to learn. New programs such as
sabbaticals and transfers for lifetime civil servants to other areas create
internal diversity. To overcome the “closed-shop” mentality of the German
civil service, briefings by invited experts who present and discuss issues
directly with Chancellor Schroeder bring in external knowledge. Programs
exchanging bureaucrats for professionals industry and academia—or with civil
servants in other nations is further accelerating the learning process.
Nowak also described a new problem getting in the way of organizational
learning. Because the German press offers such big money to anyone willing
to leak government documents, they are becoming an oral administration,
which means there is ever less recorded memory of important issues. |
