When Hurricane Katrina engulfed New Orleans in the summer of 2005, the deaths, injuries, and damage to property that resulted were stark reminders of the cost to all of us when government at any level—federal, state, or local—does not perform as well as it should. The year before, the 9/11 Commission found that government’s failures to anticipate and respond to the terrorist attacks on that date were “symptoms of the government’s broader inability to adapt how it manages problems to the new challenges of the twenty-first century.” Although many public servants performed heroically, these horrific events and their aftermaths dramatize the need for high performance from government agencies both in dealing with life-and-death situations and in preventing crises from ever reaching that point.
Change Management in Government
Reprint: R0605J
Since the days of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, the American public’s regard for the competence of public agencies and the value of the services they perform has steadily declined. During that time, innovations in management practice and thinking have mostly originated and been tested in the private sector. But recent events, such as the attacks on the World Trade Center and the engulfment of New Orleans, have demonstrated how essential it is for public agencies to be well run, too. Unfortunately, few public administrators have a background in change management, and a variety of factors—such as civil service rules, political considerations, and the limited tenures of agency heads—have combined to make true reform a rare event. These facts of public life may never go away. But some agency leaders have figured out how to court important stakeholders, rededicate staffers to an agency’s true mission, undertake reform so comprehensively that resistant elements are unable to subvert it, and lay the groundwork for next steps clearly and systematically.
Consultant Frank Ostroff has studied turnarounds at the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Government Accountability Office, and Special Operations Forces—the fast-response, clandestine arm of the military. From these examples and others, he has distilled five principles that underlie successful change efforts: Improve performance against agency mission; win over external and internal stakeholders; establish a road map; recognize the connections among all the organizational elements; and be a leader, not a bureaucrat. Change programs that follow these principles are more likely to survive when leadership changes hands.
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