Good Governance and Civil Service Reform

Supplementary written evidence submitted by Professor Andrew Kakabadse (GG 15)

Just a few more thoughts, particularly concerning the value of using post bureaucratic age (PBA) as a benchmark for thinking about civil service and government structures.

The original assumption behind bureaucratic was captured by Weber to denote stability in the administration of the state.  Over time that notion morphed into attention to inward looking processes and hence losing touch with the community.  A similar experience was witnessed in the private sector with over complicated ‘bureaucratic structures’ which by the 1960s were being attacked by shareholder/investor interest groups, ironically one of them being public service, the Calpers (Californian pension fund) demand for shareholder value.  Hence by the late 1960s/early 1970s post bureaucratic age (PBA) thinking was predominant in the private sector and the urge for reform for a post bureaucratic age (PBA) type of environment surfaced flexible structures, customer service delivery, unified supportive top teams and an attention on leadership as opposed to organisation structure.  Of course what also emerged was poor leadership, fragmentation, an over-zealous focus on merger and acquisitions and a realisation that more money could be made from repositioning resources for the purpose of merger and acquisition than from actually making profit from service delivery.

The point of my email yesterday was to highlight three core civil service capabilities namely; policy design and development, service delivery excellence, agency relationship management i.e. sourcing/outsourcing and the management of wholly owned government subsidiaries.  A fourth capability seems to be on the horizon from the debate of yesterday and as a result of the general election namely; the formation of powerful community groups to provide service but also be able to effectively interact with the civil service.  This fourth option is interesting because although it is an agency relationship management skill, the principles are different to the ones already being utilised by the civil service.  The current skills are: shareholder value disciplines within a stakeholder philosophy, i.e. business management skills for the sake of efficient delivery service to the community.  The new development, as much captured in the big society debate, is of stakeholder value skills within a stakeholder value philosophy  in effect, the administration of services to the community as done by the Germans.  If what is meant by the post bureaucratic age (PBA) is the four core disciplines of policy design development, direct service deliver, agency transactional management and stakeholder community support, then the phrase the post bureaucratic age (PBA) has some meaning.  Weber never talked about the last two distinct capabilities of completely contrasting ways of managing agency structures. 

However, if the civil service is to adopt all four core skills then one Weberian principle has to remain and that is stability.  And of course, here lies the paradox.  Stability led to inward looking bureaucracy but now stability is needed for servicing for entirely separate skill bases.  On this basis the word ‘bureaucratic’ meaning strength is very important.  Whilst the term ‘post’ refers to four skill clusters of which Weber only really identified two; policy design and community service delivery. 

If such a civil service were to be designed, I have to say, it would be the Rolls Royce of all Rolls Royce civil services.  It would be an outstanding achievement.  From my experience of civil servants, do they have the capacity to integrate all four skill clusters? The answer is yes, given of course the appropriate training and development.  The civil service already is capable of delivering on the first three skill clusters. 

What the civil service cannot do is provide for effective service across all four areas without having appropriate investment in the community to build stakeholder institutional structures able to deliver time type of big society requirements being outlined by the present Government.  More worrying is the current debate on cutting of costs without deliberately focusing on where fat lies and what is lean should be protected.  The best way to damage a sophisticated structure is to have an unthinking across the board cost reduction exercise that takes out the good with the bad.  My experience of what happens under those circumstances is that the core simpler ‘just get it done’ skills survive and the more subtle ‘add value/provide high quality service’ capacity is destroyed. 

So when you say the problem is VAST, I agree, but it is manageable, it can be broken down into component parts but it cannot survive an unthinking political agenda of just reduce costs. 

January 2011