Doables, deliverables and results - change habitual mental models for more sustainable results

When the Bloor Viaduct in Toronto was being designed, the designer apparently had the prescience to include enough in the design to allow for future subway trains, even though at the time no such trains existed in Toronto.

In today's world of narrow targets and measurable deliverables, we obscure the broader horizon of potential, making us less resilient.The impulse to make things manageable by analyzing them into discrete components, picking two or three to "do" and finding easy "measures" for them means we lose context and enjoy the illusory sense of safety provided by a narrowed horizon. We may be able to check things off the list, but are they meaningful contributions? Planning that engenders tidy, comfortable conceptual grids is not the path to resiliency but of "a foolish consistency." Today, our planning models render us more machine-like than organic and responsive to real needs. Therefore they break more easily, littering and cluttering our mindscape. That's why we're so grey and tired at the end of the day.

So the question for all us is:  How we can insert possibility and breadth into our mindspace and workspaces?

The Relationship between Objectivity and Bureaucracy

In 2009, I posted a short blog entry, How Organizations Remain Bureaucratic. Here, I'd like to delve a bit further into what is pejoratively known as "bureaucracy" and tie the discussion to a broader cultural theme, one I'll call Fetishizing the Heuristic. The terminology is a bit academic, but apt, so I'll explain.

Heuristics are flexible guidelines, generally sane models, not meant to account for every contingency, but a pencilling in of a plan or set of criteria based on experience. (Maslow's Hierarchy, for example, was intended to be considered a flexible heuristic, but rarely is.)

To fetishize something means to idolize it...

So when a heuristic is idolized, the criteria embodied in a flexible guideline magically come to have a life of their own, alienated from the creative and reasonable minds that set them out. They become viewed as if they issue from a higher order of existence.

So, for example, a preliminary plan is developed that covers a time span, or evaluative criteria are set out provisionally. As soon as dates and scoring methods are assigned, it's as if these plans or criteria issued directly from an eternal source of objectivity, not from the minds of those composing them. (They become reified in processes, detached from the aim that inspired their development.)

The problem that arises is that once the guideline has been drawn up and numbers assigned to what started off as a provisional guideline, no counter-evidence from the actual world of objective reality will change the guideline. Where there is deviation, it will considered as a way of illustrating how things and people have failed to meet the criteria, not as evidence that the model needs adjusting.

Jack Martin of Simon Fraser University wrote in 1996 (in a no longer available newsletter of the American Psychological Association) lamenting how assessment criteria, never intended to be more than reasonable, flexible, useful guidelines, become irrationally narrowed and fixed once they are operationalized (assigned a numerical scale). This causes the quality and relevance of research in empirical psychology to degenerate.

Then, of course, these guidelines become embodied in institutional procedures - further alienated from the agents, the creative and reasonable minds of people in the organization, who would otherwise use their minds to question them, adjust them, and maintain their usefulness.

In practice, understanding how we can fetishize the heuristic should lead us to be more active in questioning and revising plans and criteria as necessary, understanding they issue from human needs and objectives.

The broader, more philosophical understanding is that a lot of the conceptual packaging we use to identify something as objective is faulty and needs to be revisited. We need to re-insert the awareness of our responsibility as agents into our plans and to adjust in an ongoing way to what is happening, rather than mechanizing thought in bureaucratic processes or bracketing ourselves out of existence while we follow an eternal diagram (our role in conceiving it, forgotten).

In a nutshell, don't treat a working hypothesis, guideline, process or model as if it issued from the heavens. After all, it's your model and you should have every right to correct it as more evidence becomes available - and there will always be more evidence, unless you are omniscient. 

The Logic of Quantophrenia

Here's a crash course on the reasonable and unreasonable (quantophrenic) use of indicators (business metrics):

Reasonable:

Given a reliable indicator (sign) of a concrete problem, there is a concrete problem.
If the problem is resolved concretely, the indicators should represent (track/signal) that.

I>P (If I then P)
Therefore,
~P > ~I (If not P then not I)

This is a logically valid form of reasoning. It spurs committed people to remedy the concrete problem.

A simple example for illustrative purposes: Imagine that an unexpectedly high number of employees have been on long term acting assignments in different parts of your organization. What does that indicate? Let's say you do some research and your investigation reveals that, although there are a number of bona fide developmental activities occurring, the problem is due to cumbersome staffing processes and a weakness in integrating business and HR planning, making assignments a quick remedy. So what do you do? You reason that if you streamline staffing and pay more attention to resourcing with respect to projected business requirements, over time, your numbers should diminish to levels that would be expected given developmental activities.

Quantophrenic version:

Given some accurate indicator (sign) of a concrete problem, there is a concrete problem.
If the indicators have changed for the better, the problem has been concretely resolved.

I>P
Therefore,
~I > ~P

IS NOT a valid form of reasoning (it commits what logicians call "the fallacy of denying the antecedent"), and in itself a sign of a problem; i.e., tick box management.

To illustrate, using the previous example, an unexpectedly high number of employees on long term acting assignments indicates problems with cumbersome staffing processes and a weakness in integrating business and HR planning. So what do you do? To meet your indicator target, you remove everyone from their acting assignments. Obviously, you have met your indicator target 100%, but you have not solved the concrete problem, in fact you have quite clearly exacerbated it.

This is a very simplistic example, but it illustrates the potential dangers of metrics as business drivers.

Question: what drives quantophrenia?

Perverse Effects of Business Metrics

Please think about this:

[T]here is a tendency to fall back on what is easiest to measure and to count, i.e. outputs, even if they are less important than outcomes. The danger of this, however, is to negate the major purpose of results-based reform, which is to refocus efforts on what citizens and society ultimately gain from government.

From OECD article http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/4/10/2497163.pdf paragraph 25.

How Organizations Remain Bureaucratic

When people mistake efficiency for effectiveness (means for ends), there is a pointless adherence to the administrative rules (i.e., bureaucracy in its pejorative sense.) To avoid making this mistake, what has to happen in organizations is a cultural change around the reporting requirements, because people will do (and generally restrict their attention to) what they are measured on.

If the measurements are all about either efficient transactions (e.g., in purchasing, staffing) without reference to context and objectives, or an assessment of the value of the objectives, then nothing has been measured. How can you measure efficiency without some reference to a strategic, big picture, generally not-easily-measured end, especially in public sector and non-profit organizations?

When bureaucratic controls slide from being necessary evils to being just plain counterproductive , something is dreadfully wrong. Controls need to be aligned with goals.

A very crucial element in remedying such a situation is to help people understand that reports are not results, they are just means of getting information, which might be more or less (but is quite often less), helpful to broader planning and information sharing.

A report is information subset covering some aspects of what happened. It is not identical to the concrete events that actually happen. Neverthlesss, some people seem to spend more time bean  counting  than doing, following procedures, rather than innovating, challenging, and leading change. Their efforts need to be undertaken with a view to deep, quality results. Quality and depth of results is important, and that does not mean pulling out an army of accountants immured in a quantophrenic vision of quality control. It means having inspiration, courage, and support to use one's own judgement and discretion in assessing how to best align one's activities with the organization's goals, or even to question the broader social value of the ends being sought.

So it's not just a web of institutional regulations, it's the stifling amount of reportage that is not aligned to anything other than short term means and efficiencies that makes an institution overly bureaucratic (and therefore less efficient). And this adminstrative kind of bureaucracy eventually becomes an entire focus, even a way of life, providing some (i.e., the uninspired and officious) expediencies and a sense of power and accomplishment, having done everything "by the book".

The rest just wither away, eventually.

And thus bureaucracy sustains itself.

Putting the B in Bureaucracy

How to get tangled in a "web of rules":

1. Make sure that the point for which the rules and administrative procedures are implemented is obscure. (This is made that much easier by the prevailing assumption that the desired result is simply whatever is produced by fastidious adherence to a process, methodology or technique.)
   
   
2. Maintain a strict hierarchy and ensure that people blindly follow the rules even though doing so in certain instances runs counter to the objective that they were supposed to ensure.
   
   
3. Rather than solving administrative problems with a systemic view, make enough ad hoc adjustments in the system to appear to to have a sincere interest in remedying flow problems. That way, the very logic of the system in relation to the objective is completely lost and there is no way a reasoning person can determine why the rules exist in the first place.
   
   
4. When it reaches the point that no one knows where the rules came from or why they’re following the rules, develop business metrics to prove compliance (here creativity is a bonus, but only here) and carefully post them framing them as achievements of results and outcomes, thus ensuring "transparency"). Then make heavy investments in technical systems to ensure that compliance (a.k.a. achievement of results) is easy to monitor (in principle, anyway).  

In today's complex environment, to possess the foresight necessary to map out administrative and reporting processes so that they never run counter to the strategic objectives would need more genius and ingenuity than any person alive on the planet today. While perfection is not in the cards, there have to be ways of identifying and remedying the administrative blockages and obfuscations that lead to loss of meaning and employee disengagement, let alone inefficiencies. Learning should be ongoing.
The solution is to make sure that the policy objectives are always clear (and meaningful) to people and that bureaucratic processes are always up for examination. The administrative rules should not be absolute but treated as heuristics used judiciously by intelligent and ethical managers and leaders.
Today, it is said that a relevant public service is a flexible public service.

Those who are firm and inflexible
are in harmony with dying.
Those who are yielding and receptive
are in harmony with living.*

*From verse 76 of the Tao te Ching, translated in the book, The Tao of Power by R.L. Wing.

Irony of the Audit

Do public organizations overspend in the effort to demonstrate that they don't overspend?

A lot of time and work goes into reporting, but what is being reported? Is it the money spent, services provided, or the needed social change accomplished?

I wonder why people are so interested in things like expense accounts and less worried about how their money is working to provide services and enhance society. Perhaps what the Minister spent on lunch is just much easier to measure and report on. Or maybe roads, garbage and wastewater management are not that big in terms of the media-sexy factor and don't interest the politicians. It's equally likely that the narrow focus is because the work of the public service is too varied and complex to be summed up in any kind of number, but numbers are what people think is objective, even though they're only meaningful when what is being counted really counts.

It would make a lot more sense, in terms of what gets demonstrated, and may increase public engagement, to emphasize more strategic goals, showing what the public service actually does, rather than what it spends.

The public service is not a business and does not exist in order to make a profit, or even to be "fiscally responsible." The correlate of private sector profits for the public sector is the the public good. Fiscal responsibility is not a goal, but a means.

There is usually an inverse relationship between what is worthwhile and what is easy to measure.

Concrete Deliverables: Watch out for Goal Displacement

Burt Perrin, in a report entitled, Implementing the Vision: Addressing Challenges to Results-Focused Management and Budgeting writes,

Goal displacement occurs when indicators become the objective, where the focus is on “meeting the numbers” rather than doing what the program was created to do or improving actual outcomes. Thus it represents the distortion of program activities.

In fact it is conceivable that working to meet number targets may even produce "perverse effects" such as serving those easiest to serve rather than those in most need, or focusing on procedural efficiencies to increase numbers (of transactions, say) rather than improving system efficiencies, which might decrease them. This occurs for two reasons.

First, efficiencies, which numbers measure (more or less accurately), are not goals, but ways of achieving goals. Numbers are not targets, but for tracking. Second, as Perrin notes, "It does not always make sense to attempt to represent a complex initiative by just a very small number of quantitative indicators. There typically is an inverse relationship between what is important and what is easiest to count and to measure."

So as people focus on meeting the numbers and confuse the report for the result, they close off to the complexity of the situation, and actions become skewed to achieving "concrete deliverables" which could be anything but. What do we take to be objective today? Is it the evidence of the senses, all the flux and change that happens in real time? Well, not really! It is rather what can be measured, quantified and counted.

Getting the numbers right is not an easy matter. To count measure and something, you need to have a category or definition, which is a static mental compartment and sorting device. For example, in order to count employees, you first have to establish a category or definition of "employee" for your organization. If your definition of employee changes, your numbers will change, even if nothing "concrete" changes.

So now, the question about what constitutes objectivity moves up a level. How many of the categories and definitions we use are given and natural like mammal and bird and how many are social and historical like person or fiscal year? Many categories may seem self-evident but to what extent is our confidence in our categories due to social and historical factors, including learning, rather than natural ones? Have we arrived at the end of learning? Of course not.

When it comes to precision measurements and results, physics is the archetype. To discover physical laws, physicists have to establish that their results are reproducible. They need to determine what factors need to be controlled and what properties are internal to the phenomena under investigation. When developing tests they carefully articulate operational definitions, which define phenomena in mathematical terms. There is no algorithm or checklist procedure for these activities, and it takes a great deal of skill, knowledge and insight. You might say, there is an “art” to ensuring objectivity.

Scientists in areas such as biology and geology and even some areas of physics, are investigating things where there are innumerable factors that cannot be isolated and controlled. Scientists are beginning to question whether we have been acting as if something is real because it is measurable, rather than the reverse. (See for instance, Robert Laughlin's A Different Universe.) They emphasize the need to think of nature more as a dynamic complex system. This moves the question of what constitutes objectivity up yet another level because it means considering not just how we define something for the purposes of counting instances of it, but how we frame and contextualize it to distinguish relevant from irrelevant factors in understanding how it behaves and changes over time as a part of a system.

If anything is complex, human organizations, and especially public service organizations, are complex. How closely do the auditor's and comptroller's categories ally with those of the organizational or program strategist's? In the public service, how do you know when you have contributed to the public good? rather than burdened your employees with administrivialities and set them on the straight and narrow road to pursuing "concrete deliverables" that are anything but. Is being quantifiable a necessary quality of all worthwhile goals? How realistic is that?