Thoughts on the Future State

One of the authors, Stephanie Pride, tweeted about its release, and encouraged me to read it and give feedback when I retweeted that announcement. I felt that was impressively proactive so here’s my thoughts on the report and the issues it covers.

The report is intended “to identify the longer-term issues that would affect New Zealand in the future” and in particular “to identify the big public policy issues for the next two decades that cut across organisational and other boundaries and determine the ability of the public management system to respond to these issues.”

It has some interesting graphs and figures, such as the one below combining measures from the World Bank and the Bertelsmann management index.

The authors comment that “However critical New Zealanders may be about the state of their state, the country is consistently seen internationally as among a small group of top performers.” (p. 32)

I was intrigued by this aside, in light of a prevailing view that public sector mergers are some kind of magic bullet:

Interestingly, most of the countries with high-performing governments shown in Figure 4 have a relatively ‘fragmented’ public sector with large numbers of organisations. Whether this is a correlation or causation is beyond the remit of this paper. (p. 28)

Similarly, given some of the claims made in recent times, I was also struck by how flat these lines are:

As to the main business of the report, it sets out some of the main challenges the public sector is likely to face and some broad ideas of how it will need to evolve to cope. It sets out the main challenges as (p. 37)

• affordability;
• complicated problems involving many players;
• a more diverse and differentiated population; and
• a world of faster, less-predictable change.

New Zealand’s public management model for formulating and implementing policies is a product of a simpler era, a mechanistic and thermostat-like system for specifying and monitoring outputs and outcomes. Although this approach may have been appropriate for its time, it is best suited to ‘stable contexts, predictable tasks and a government-centric approach’ (Bourgon, 2009b: 11). (p. ix)

I have to say I’m a bit cautious about the way ‘future studies’ analyses of this sort seem to suggest that we’re entering a whole new chapter of human history, where all the old nostrums fall away. There’s a lot of interesting facts and examples given about emerging trends, but I’m wary about the risk of over-recognising novelty and understating points of continuity.

For instance, the report cites a study about Generation Y which claims they see things differently in the workplace: ‘contribution counts for more than credentials’ and ‘power comes from sharing information, not hoarding it’. This reminded me of a section in Jon Johansson’s book (covered in an earlier post) where he was making a case for how distinctive the mindset of Generation X is, and the studies he was citing were over ten years old — when Gen X was in its early 20s and going through its Slacker and Singles phase. Would those finding still hold true today? By the same token, would studies of the Baby Boomer mindset done in the 1960s and 2000s say the same thing?

In other words, to what extent are we looking at life-cycle effects and seeing cohort effects?

In response to the new challenges, the authors see a need for a new style of working:

Many of the policy outcomes that will be front of mind for government (eg,reducing obesity and responding to frailty in an increasingly aged population) cannot be achieved with the provision of public services alone, but require the active contribution of citizens and businesses (co-production). This requires the public sector to develop more trusting relationships so it can better understand how different groups experience the world. (p. 38)

It’s an interesting diagnosis if not entirely new. Labour’s Grant Robertson was making some similar points in a blog post as early as 2007, and he in turn was drawing from a report the UK thinktank Demos did from the PSA. Nevertheless, the IPS report does a useful job of pulling together a lot of work and evidence on this strand of thinking.

Let me, then, finish by adding in two provocations.

Firstly, the idea of ‘co-production’ does spur me to wonder: can the public service get amongst the general public and work with them in an open and honest way — while still being politically-neutral?

Political-neutrality requires (or at least has tended to assume) that public servants will deliver, and stick to, the policy rationales favoured by their political masters when speaking publicly. Their ‘free and frank’ advice is provided for the politicians’ benefit, not the general public’s — you can’t have the departmental chief executive openly disagreeing with the Minister on a course of action. Yet this creates a two-facedness in public servants’ dealing with the publicly that could seem increasingly jarring in this ‘age of authenticity’.

I’ve always been more partial to the professional civil service of the Westminster model than to the alternating political leadership of governmental departments that you find in the US approach. But maybe the latter, where there is genuine commonality of purpose between politician and mandarin, is more suited to the task of co-production with the public.

My second provocation is around organisational form. All around us we see claims that the large corporate behemoths of the mid-20th century are no longer the driving force of the economy, and that lean start-ups are where the action is. Why then do we assume that the large government departments of the 20th century are the right organisational form for the public sector?

There is a significant literature tracking emerging patterns in work internationally, which detects a growing trend away from long periods spent embedded within an organisation and towards a more ‘portfolio-based’ approach to a career, particularly amongst the strata of workers often described as ‘knowledge workers’.

Could it be that recognising and embracing these developments might help us attract some of the brightest and most innovative young minds to public service (if not necessarily ‘the public service’)?

I’d be interested in your views on these ideas, along with your own thoughts about what the ‘future state’ will, or should, look like.