Public managers should be goal oriented, purposeful, active and responsible for outcomes. This is the mantra of the drivers of modernisation. To this chant they have intentionally broken up many of the formal structures and processes of government that had come to dominate the 20th Century in UK, deconstructing into agencies, splitting policy from provision, provision from supply as well as supply from regulation; introducing market principles and forces all over the place; shot-gunning people into partnerships; sometimes making appeal to community values into the bargain. The same deconstruction has happened in many other parts of the world though often as a result of failure rather than policy. There, formal structures have fallen into disrepute or disintegrated altogether and reform agendas have to be sought through which they can be replaced.
This note is concerned with one aspect of this. What happens when known ways of doing things are replaced with unknown or uncertain; when what institutional economists term path dependency is replaced by a plurality of possible paths? Are the prized goals of efficiency and effectiveness lost in a labyrinth of possible routes to implementation – multiplying the transaction costs of administration?
The crude fact would seem to be, though it is not easy to document, that the administration element of public services in the UK has expanded throughout the modernisation era, after Thatcher’s initial economy drive. In the health services, so it is claimed, there are now more administrators than nurses. As early as 1995, the late Professor Kieron Walsh was pointing out that Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT) in UK local government could only be considered to be an economising measure if the costs of contract monitoring were ignored (Walsh 1995). Something seems to be wrong here. The argument in this note, to be supported by my currently favourite analogy, is that choice in administrative means, as in many other things, is no doubt good, but hesitation in front of the signposts has a high cost. In other words, it is better to make a choice and get on with it than to constantly revisit (or be obliged to revisit) the options.
England’s canals are not perhaps the first or most obvious sources of analogy in a discussion of predetermined routes or choice of journey. Apart from a fairly dense network in the West Midlands, canals go where coal, or clay, or crocks, or iron was needed in the 18th/19th Centuries when they were built. To travel them now is to be obliged to take an interest in the splendours of decayed industrialism. Yet choices face the traffickers of the cut which are in fact the same kinds of choice as public managers are obliged to face. They are not so much about where they should be going, as about the means of interacting with others in the process. These choices are the less obvious because they are routinised. What would happen if routine were abandoned in favour of choice; this is the analogy.
Negotiating the passage of the cut
Canals are curious environments. Somehow the slow movement of the barges - somewhere between the walking pace and the running pace of pedestrians on the towpath; much slower than my bicycle – sets the pace for thought. Slow thought, I find, allows room for contemplation of the less obvious. Sometimes the less obvious can turn out to be significant. Let me try one on you.
Novices at the helm, as I observe from a vantage point above the lock gates, can make heavy weather of the business of manoeuvring their barges along the cut or into the locks that will convey them from one level to another through England’s rolling landscape. Some boats are very long. There can be curious ‘canal effects’ that suck a moving boat towards the bank. But, by and large, much of the movement in this environment is predetermined and much of the rest can be learned within a few hours, allowing for relaxing passage.
Time was when public management had the same predictability. Its critics would protest; it had the same slow pace. This may have been a mythical time but let us try to pin the notion onto an era – between the wars perhaps – sufficiently far back to be able to bear the strain (between factual reality and mental image). A time certainly, before the modernisers got to work or ‘The Third Way’ was invented.
Predictability in administration
Predictability in our mythical era was achieved through the establishment of a limited set of rules. Officials were appointed to fulfil a role, to which attached a job description. The relation of that job to other jobs would also be specified. It would be clear who is boss and who is subordinate. Authority would be formalised through a set of responsibilities and delegations. How decisions should be taken and enforced was also specified, along with formal procedures for dealing with derelictions of duty or misdemeanours. OK, not so limited perhaps, certainly when compared with the rule of the road for canals – ‘keep right’ would appear to be sufficient there – but nevertheless predictable. A person launching themselves into a public service career anywhere in the UK in those days, knew their position and knew what to expect. In principle this was an ordered existence. It was a system for which Max Weber [1864-1920] was both analyst and luminary. Once inducted, a novice would find that the set of rules and practices, learned at the beginning of employment, could be expected to apply for life; leaving him or her to get on with the job. Or so it would have seemed.
Of course nothing would have been quite as static as this model implies. New demands upon the public service would have required new responses and adjustments to standard procedures, just as the contemporary changeover from horse drawn to motorised barges would have changed the practice if not the rules on the cut. In fact, one of the complaints about ‘traditional administration’ was that it was always easier to add new rules than to get rid of old ones. Crozier (1964) studying French administration, found that accretions of rules inhibited adaptability and paralysed performance. He famously re-labelled bureaucracy – praised by Weber for its “Precision, speed, unambiguity, …..” (Gerth and Mills, 1952, p214) – as “an organisation that fails to learn from its own mistakes”.
But the norms of hierarchical administration persisted, not seriously challenged until the modern assault. Many studies however demonstrated that the hierarchical, linear structures and process of administration had increasingly to be got around by informal processes that did not necessarily contravene the rules but found ways around them. Crozier himself found that sophisticated individuals could work the system, deal with its contradictions and complexities; becoming ‘political leaders’ (Crozier quoted in Etzioni 1961, p359) rather than allowing the logic of rationalization to reduce them to cogs in the machine.
In spite of such accommodations, the hierarchy of rules provided a predictable environment in which an official could operate and expect others to operate. It remained a known environment.
Safe passage
It is so with transactions on the waterway. A guidance note called ‘Safe and Friendly Cruising’ (SFC), helpfully presented on the internet, expands upon the simple ‘keep right’ rule of passage. The discussion is couched in terms of etiquette. It is good manners to communicate intentions to other users. While a ‘first come first served’ principle governs passage through bridges and other narrow places, it is courteous to judge this precedence generously, not accelerating in order to get there first, for instance. In many circumstances, even the formal rule of the road may need to be negated;
Whilst the general rule is pass 'port to port' (i.e. to the right), there may be situations where it is safer not to do this - e.g. passing in a lock pound when one boat has got seriously out of position, where the lock or bridge is at a difficult angle, or where one boat is preparing to moor. Watch out for situations to pass 'wrong side' and indicated your intention by using the recognised sound signal (two blasts on the horn). Many experienced boaters are not familiar with sound signals, and it would do no harm if they were to learn! If you do overtake, generally do so on the left.
Remember to allow for larger craft. The wider or longer a boat is the more room and time it needs to manoeuvre, especially at bridges, on sharp bends and at locks or moorings.
In other words, smooth passage in the narrow confines of the cut is facilitated by responsible action from the helm, in some cases requiring contravention of the formal rules, always governed by courtesy and by a shared knowledge of the proper procedure that is being circumvented.
A colleague provides me with an example of the same accommodation from his experience as a project officer in government; in post colonial Zambia in this instance[1]
“I learned the hard way in the Ministry in Zambia. At the time it was close enough to independence for the old [way of doing things] to hold.. sway. I needed to buy some cement for a project – 200 100lb bags to be precise. They were purchased by LPO from a supplier and I set about making arrangements for transport. Notice was then served on me that cement should not be bought from suppliers but from the Government Stores Organisation and I should now give reason why I should not be surcharged for it (that is, pay for it) according to the relevant sections of the Financial Orders, etc., etc.. My boss, who was learned in these matters, heard me out. He then gave me …. a helping hand… he would certify to the audit people that the exigencies of the service – which never need to be specified – made it imperative to obtain cement from an external supplier. With one bound I was off the hook but a sadder and wiser being.”
(personal communication)
Such accommodation, on land as on water, is quite different from absence of rules or multiplicity of options. If, facing an oncoming vessel, there was no shared understanding of the ‘pass port side to port side’ priority, the result would be a lot of hesitancy; much shouting, hooting of horns, waving of hands and the odd head on collision. This; in a situation in which the options are only two; ‘pass to port side to port side’ or ‘starboard to starboard’. How much greater the hesitancy in today’s public administration where the options are now several.
Multiple options in public management
In rapid succession public managers in UK local authorities have been required to open up the options as to how they go about providing public services, such as transport, housing or social services. In the ‘good old days’ they owned the busses and employed the drivers, built the houses and acted as landlord to large numbers of tenants. Social Services built buildings, employed staff and catered for their old, young (and often difficult) clients. Then came privatisation, contracting out, Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT), Best Value, PFI and recently, Comprehensive Spending Reviews, in which the outcomes of multiple choices are held up for central scrutiny. Along the way the notion of partnership working has been added. Now UK local authorities are expected to work with different agencies and other stakeholders, so that all can in principle have a voice in the decisions as to how services can be best provided.
Here is a piece of guidance from New Zealand which, I suggest signals a similar labyrinth of options, although purportedly doing the opposite. Claire Austin, Chief Executive, RNZCGP posts a statement on the internet under the title ‘The Public / Private Interface’ that presumably is an attempt to establish a clear position for public managers to follow in the primary health care sector there;
Where to from here?
In order to stabilise the primary care workforce, and achieve the intended outcomes of the Primary Care Strategy, it is essential that the interface between the private and public sector be more robustly and explicitly addressed. Primary Health
Organisations, whilst retaining their not-for-profit status, have the potential to provide a legitimate interface between public and private sector provision and resourcing of care.
Explicit principles of engagement are an important beginning point. There are
international examples of principles of engagement between public and private actors
at a development and international aid levels. There is no reason why such an
approach could not be applied at a more local level.
For instance, principles of engagement could require all crown agencies to pay
particular attention to both policy development and contracting.
In the area of policy the questions that should be routinely addressed could include:
• How is this policy to be implemented?
• Which stakeholders are to be involved?
• Who is responsible for the administration, measurement and reporting of the
process? What is the potential impact upon the sector?
• What resources and infrastructure will be required?
• Who will meet the cost of these resources and infrastructure? – In the short,
medium and long term?
• What are the different visions, intentions and drivers of the parties involved?
And how can these be reconciled?
• What is the impact upon employment and professional relationships? How are
these to be addressed?
• What outcomes are to be expected to be achieved and within what
timeframes?
• Who carries risk? What is the nature of this risk? How is the risk managed?
In the implementation and service delivery, funding is channelled through PHOs, which would then have an agreed framework that addresses these same areas. This
provides a framework that explicitly identifies provider accountability, risk, cost visibility and cost sharing, services types and sites, and recognises both private and public provision.
It is questionable whether New Zealand has the resources to provide full public
services. The foundations of primary health care have been firmly planted in the
private sector. We have however, moved to a mixed model of delivery. By
recognising, resourcing and supporting such a framework, we would be far more likely to be able to address underlying tensions and the risks that create barriers to
successful implementation of the Primary Care Strategy. It is therefore critical that
such a framework is developed as soon as possible and explicit models of
engagement become an essential part of any Government policy development, or
contracting process with non-government providers.
This also has the potential to validate different approaches to service provision,
provide more transparency, develop explicit quality frameworks and promote greater
collaboration. Finally negotiated, explicit private/public partnerships in the delivery of
primary health care have the potential to depoliticise the process and provide
sustainable relationships and positive health outcomes.
(Austin 2004 – original emphasis)
So, New Zealand health managers, like their UK counterparts have plenty to think about; no doubt justifying the salaries of plenty of middle level managers. Reading between the lines, the thrust of public policy in New Zealand, where primary care is “firmly planted in the private sector”, would appear to be the opposite of that in the UK, where provision of primary health care remains firmly in the public sector, but subject to innumerable changes in contractual arrangements. The “mixed mode” notion in New Zealand would seem to me to open the door to precisely the “underlying tensions and ..risks” that Ms Austin assumes will be removed. Her emphasis (italicised) on the need to develop a new framework would appear to be an acknowledgement of this fact. Whether all the bulleted ‘routine questions’ could conceivably be addressed in a simple framework is another matter. They may simply be itemised as an agenda that will, by intention or default, leave the ultimate power in the hands of centrally imposed inspectors. Implementers will be left to struggle with the mixture.
Of course, cooperation between agencies of different kinds should not in theory be a problem and – apart from the options being wrapped in modernisation speak – to decide between direct employment and buying services from someone else should also be straightforward, though each choice would still need to be planned and discussed before it becomes embedded is a agreed known way. The commonsensical tone of the canal user guide to cooperation (or partnership) would however be difficult to capture. Note the guidance on sharing a wide lock.
Always try to share wide locks between two (or even more!) narrow beam boats - it makes less work for a start![2] If one crew seems to be less proficient, use the opportunity to share your experience productively. There are no rules about who goes in first - you can't close the gates until you are both in! Some thoughts are - full length boat first and get behind gate, boat with bow thrusts first - it may have more control over bows whilst the second boat comes in; longest boat first; steel boat before fibreglass etc. Discuss your options with each other and have a plan, especially for a flight of locks. Then you'll be efficient, safe and have fun!
‘And adjourn to the pub afterwards’ it might have added.
The transaction costs of public management
For public managers life is not so straightforward:
What needs to be done in any public sector is seldom simple.
The options for doing it (contracting out, etc.) remain several; the problem we are discussing here.
The partners are usually many
(As alluded to above) Whitehall (or its equivalent) is usually monitoring (adding the costs of this monitoring to agent budgets in two ways, though the bill its inspectorate sends to the agent and the bill the agency runs up in assembling the data required by the inspector (Hood et all 1998)[3]).
Stages in strategic public management Navigation
A. What is the problem / where do we need to go? Destination
· Central prescription
· Public consultation
· Stakeholders in the political field
· Political decision
B. What needs to be done to get there? Route
· Technical design
· Economic appraisal
· Social assessment
C. How does it need to be done? Rules of the road
· In-house supply
· Contract out
· Partnership
· PFI
· Etc
D. How to give account? Courtesy and good manners
· Political accountability
· Public ballot
· Central audit and/or
inspection
The administrative load experienced in respect of any public undertaking consists in the actions and interactions – the transactions - that need to be undertaken at each stage in its achievement. These transactions are cumulative so an objective assessment of costs would have to add A to B to C to D.
However; at each stage of the journey the parties to the interaction or the stages may be several, requiring several interactions to achieve the stage. So, A, B, C and D are each compound factors, interacting through a complex algorithm – which it is quite beyond me to work out. In our step C, for instance, (ignoring the ‘etc.’) there are four stated options, each of which would require investigation of an unknowable number of agents before the comparison is complete; requiring 16 comparisons – enough to keep several middle level managers on the pay role.
Furthermore, the apparent rationality of any public decision-making process overlays the fact that competing values and logics bear upon the decisions involved (Curtis 2002). The primary function of the formal decision making model adopted by an authority is in fact to serve as a high level ‘known way’ through which the authority reduces the chances of a particular decision becoming subject to possibly irreconcilable disputes – a failure of agreement at this level having potentially catastrophic consequences[4].
Life would have been easier for the public manager if, for any one kind of deliverable;
Any one of the implementation approaches or initiatives had displaced what went before it, rather than adding to the options
AND if the parties involved had been free to work out which single, agreed, mutually convenient approach should prevail.
AND if pace of change had been slow enough to allow the new to be accommodated and the old to fade away[5].
This would have still leave the authorities with the problem of knowing what is the best solution to their ‘seldom simple’ public service quandary. The journey for a public authority is not just up or down the cut after all. But then, public authorities are granted authority status and powers precisely for that purpose. If there are going to be costs in decision making – as there will be - this is where they should lie, not in deciding, from first principles or against centrally established guidelines, as to whether to pass ‘port side to port side’ or the other way.
Known procedure and the costs of uncertainty in public management
What Max Weber saw and sought – to continue the above quote on bureaucracy - was “reduction of friction and of material and personal costs” (ibid 214). We may all agree that friction, such as resort to fisticuffs, is a bad thing, to be avoided in the office as much as on the cut. If we include endless meetings, emails, text messages, discussion papers,…. , press releases,….., consultant reports…., academic journal articles[6], as evidence of personal costs, and piles of paper as the material waste to which he objected; then modernisation has probably made worse.
This discussion should not be read as a plea for return to ‘the old ways’ of simple hierarchy and line administration. Even with appropriate accommodations to meet the exigencies of the service, this old formula had its limitations. However, it did have known ways. When a pothole needed filling the Chief Engineer told the Deputy Chief, who told the Assistant Deputy and so on until someone with a wheelbarrow went to fill it (lampooned as this procedure may have been by A.A. Milne, as early as the 1920s: ‘The Kings Breakfast’[7]). There are other known or knowable ways and there is no reason why the public/private partnership or another arrangement cannot become the new known way. No one way will be perfect. Any one way will require appropriate, equally known, accommodations, which have to be lodged in wise heads that can then instruct the inexperienced. But the fact that one way is not perfect should not be used as a pretext for opening up innumerable options. While the person at the wheel remains uncertain as to whether to go left or right there will be delay, anxiety, and the need for innumerable support persons to give advice, assess risk and other time consuming and middle rank expanding activities. That does not make for a passage that is easy or ‘fun’ for anyone.
References
Austin C, 2004, ‘The public and private interface in New Zeeland’s Primary Health Care’ http://www.rnzcgp.org.nz/PDF/Public_private_0504.pdf.
Crozier M, 1964 The Bureaucratic Phenomenon Chicago, The University of Chicago Press
Curtis D, 2002 ‘What Kind of Imperfection Gives you Best Value?’ Local Governance, Vol. 28 No 4 287-297
Etzioni A, ed, 1969, A Reader in Complex Organisations (2nd ed), NY, Holt Rinehart and Winston
Gerth HH and Mills CW, 1948 From Max Weber London Routledge and Kegan Paul
Hood C, James O, Jones G, Scott C & Travers T, 1998, ‘Regulation Inside Government: Where New Public Management Meets the Audit Explosion’ Public Money and Management Vol. 18, 2, p61ff.
Ostrom E, Gardner R, and Walker J, 1994, Rules, Games and Common Property Resources, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press
Ostrom E. 1992 Crafting Institutions for Self Governing Irrigation Systems ICS Press, Institute for Contemporary Studies San Francisco, California.
SFC ‘Safe and Friendly Cruising’ http://www.ownerships.co.uk/owners/saftey.htm
Walsh K, 1995, Public Services and Market Mechanisms, Basingstoke, Macmillan
[1] I am avoiding direct UK reference in this note to allow readers who are better acquainted than I with the realities in the office to adopt an ‘if the cap fits wear it’ position.
[2] The canal authority – on behalf of the public users as a whole - also benefits from this cooperation in that when two boats use the lock together less water is released from the upper levels.
[3] Professors Hood, James, Jones, Scott and Travers in a seminal and well placed article see the expansion of central audit and inspection (stage D) as contrary to the logic of modernisation in public management and a cause of increased load. My argument is that uncertainty is generated within earlier stages in the cycle and is only exacerbated by inspection.
[4] Professor Elinor Ostrom sees the necessity of a hierarchy of rules as the basis of coordination in any institution – sets of rules about constitutions and ‘collective choices’, being the higher level rules that have to be agreed and embedded before the operational rules of day to day business can have a secure foundation (Ostrom 1992).
[5] Perhaps this is the key lesson from games theory (Ostrom, Gardner and Walker 1994).
[6] The dearth of academic discussions of the obvious uncertainty / transaction cost / growth of administration relationships may have to do with the fact that academics are interested parties: the number of professors of governance studies also expands in proportion to the increase in uncertainty.
[7] Which begins, if you remember..
The King's Breakfast The King asked / The Queen, and / The Queen asked / The Dairymaid: / "Could we have some butter for / The Royal slice of bread?" / The Dairymaid / Said, "Certainly, / I'll go and tell the cow / Now / Before she goes to bed. / "The Dairymaid / She curtsied, / And went and told / The Alderney: / "Don't forget the butter for / The Royal slice of bread. / "The Alderney / Said sleepily: / "You'd better tell / His Majesty / That many people nowadays / Like marmaladeInstead."
This note is concerned with one aspect of this. What happens when known ways of doing things are replaced with unknown or uncertain; when what institutional economists term path dependency is replaced by a plurality of possible paths? Are the prized goals of efficiency and effectiveness lost in a labyrinth of possible routes to implementation – multiplying the transaction costs of administration?
The crude fact would seem to be, though it is not easy to document, that the administration element of public services in the UK has expanded throughout the modernisation era, after Thatcher’s initial economy drive. In the health services, so it is claimed, there are now more administrators than nurses. As early as 1995, the late Professor Kieron Walsh was pointing out that Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT) in UK local government could only be considered to be an economising measure if the costs of contract monitoring were ignored (Walsh 1995). Something seems to be wrong here. The argument in this note, to be supported by my currently favourite analogy, is that choice in administrative means, as in many other things, is no doubt good, but hesitation in front of the signposts has a high cost. In other words, it is better to make a choice and get on with it than to constantly revisit (or be obliged to revisit) the options.
England’s canals are not perhaps the first or most obvious sources of analogy in a discussion of predetermined routes or choice of journey. Apart from a fairly dense network in the West Midlands, canals go where coal, or clay, or crocks, or iron was needed in the 18th/19th Centuries when they were built. To travel them now is to be obliged to take an interest in the splendours of decayed industrialism. Yet choices face the traffickers of the cut which are in fact the same kinds of choice as public managers are obliged to face. They are not so much about where they should be going, as about the means of interacting with others in the process. These choices are the less obvious because they are routinised. What would happen if routine were abandoned in favour of choice; this is the analogy.
Negotiating the passage of the cut
Canals are curious environments. Somehow the slow movement of the barges - somewhere between the walking pace and the running pace of pedestrians on the towpath; much slower than my bicycle – sets the pace for thought. Slow thought, I find, allows room for contemplation of the less obvious. Sometimes the less obvious can turn out to be significant. Let me try one on you.
Novices at the helm, as I observe from a vantage point above the lock gates, can make heavy weather of the business of manoeuvring their barges along the cut or into the locks that will convey them from one level to another through England’s rolling landscape. Some boats are very long. There can be curious ‘canal effects’ that suck a moving boat towards the bank. But, by and large, much of the movement in this environment is predetermined and much of the rest can be learned within a few hours, allowing for relaxing passage.
Time was when public management had the same predictability. Its critics would protest; it had the same slow pace. This may have been a mythical time but let us try to pin the notion onto an era – between the wars perhaps – sufficiently far back to be able to bear the strain (between factual reality and mental image). A time certainly, before the modernisers got to work or ‘The Third Way’ was invented.
Predictability in administration
Predictability in our mythical era was achieved through the establishment of a limited set of rules. Officials were appointed to fulfil a role, to which attached a job description. The relation of that job to other jobs would also be specified. It would be clear who is boss and who is subordinate. Authority would be formalised through a set of responsibilities and delegations. How decisions should be taken and enforced was also specified, along with formal procedures for dealing with derelictions of duty or misdemeanours. OK, not so limited perhaps, certainly when compared with the rule of the road for canals – ‘keep right’ would appear to be sufficient there – but nevertheless predictable. A person launching themselves into a public service career anywhere in the UK in those days, knew their position and knew what to expect. In principle this was an ordered existence. It was a system for which Max Weber [1864-1920] was both analyst and luminary. Once inducted, a novice would find that the set of rules and practices, learned at the beginning of employment, could be expected to apply for life; leaving him or her to get on with the job. Or so it would have seemed.
Of course nothing would have been quite as static as this model implies. New demands upon the public service would have required new responses and adjustments to standard procedures, just as the contemporary changeover from horse drawn to motorised barges would have changed the practice if not the rules on the cut. In fact, one of the complaints about ‘traditional administration’ was that it was always easier to add new rules than to get rid of old ones. Crozier (1964) studying French administration, found that accretions of rules inhibited adaptability and paralysed performance. He famously re-labelled bureaucracy – praised by Weber for its “Precision, speed, unambiguity, …..” (Gerth and Mills, 1952, p214) – as “an organisation that fails to learn from its own mistakes”.
But the norms of hierarchical administration persisted, not seriously challenged until the modern assault. Many studies however demonstrated that the hierarchical, linear structures and process of administration had increasingly to be got around by informal processes that did not necessarily contravene the rules but found ways around them. Crozier himself found that sophisticated individuals could work the system, deal with its contradictions and complexities; becoming ‘political leaders’ (Crozier quoted in Etzioni 1961, p359) rather than allowing the logic of rationalization to reduce them to cogs in the machine.
In spite of such accommodations, the hierarchy of rules provided a predictable environment in which an official could operate and expect others to operate. It remained a known environment.
Safe passage
It is so with transactions on the waterway. A guidance note called ‘Safe and Friendly Cruising’ (SFC), helpfully presented on the internet, expands upon the simple ‘keep right’ rule of passage. The discussion is couched in terms of etiquette. It is good manners to communicate intentions to other users. While a ‘first come first served’ principle governs passage through bridges and other narrow places, it is courteous to judge this precedence generously, not accelerating in order to get there first, for instance. In many circumstances, even the formal rule of the road may need to be negated;
Whilst the general rule is pass 'port to port' (i.e. to the right), there may be situations where it is safer not to do this - e.g. passing in a lock pound when one boat has got seriously out of position, where the lock or bridge is at a difficult angle, or where one boat is preparing to moor. Watch out for situations to pass 'wrong side' and indicated your intention by using the recognised sound signal (two blasts on the horn). Many experienced boaters are not familiar with sound signals, and it would do no harm if they were to learn! If you do overtake, generally do so on the left.
Remember to allow for larger craft. The wider or longer a boat is the more room and time it needs to manoeuvre, especially at bridges, on sharp bends and at locks or moorings.
In other words, smooth passage in the narrow confines of the cut is facilitated by responsible action from the helm, in some cases requiring contravention of the formal rules, always governed by courtesy and by a shared knowledge of the proper procedure that is being circumvented.
A colleague provides me with an example of the same accommodation from his experience as a project officer in government; in post colonial Zambia in this instance[1]
“I learned the hard way in the Ministry in Zambia. At the time it was close enough to independence for the old [way of doing things] to hold.. sway. I needed to buy some cement for a project – 200 100lb bags to be precise. They were purchased by LPO from a supplier and I set about making arrangements for transport. Notice was then served on me that cement should not be bought from suppliers but from the Government Stores Organisation and I should now give reason why I should not be surcharged for it (that is, pay for it) according to the relevant sections of the Financial Orders, etc., etc.. My boss, who was learned in these matters, heard me out. He then gave me …. a helping hand… he would certify to the audit people that the exigencies of the service – which never need to be specified – made it imperative to obtain cement from an external supplier. With one bound I was off the hook but a sadder and wiser being.”
(personal communication)
Such accommodation, on land as on water, is quite different from absence of rules or multiplicity of options. If, facing an oncoming vessel, there was no shared understanding of the ‘pass port side to port side’ priority, the result would be a lot of hesitancy; much shouting, hooting of horns, waving of hands and the odd head on collision. This; in a situation in which the options are only two; ‘pass to port side to port side’ or ‘starboard to starboard’. How much greater the hesitancy in today’s public administration where the options are now several.
Multiple options in public management
In rapid succession public managers in UK local authorities have been required to open up the options as to how they go about providing public services, such as transport, housing or social services. In the ‘good old days’ they owned the busses and employed the drivers, built the houses and acted as landlord to large numbers of tenants. Social Services built buildings, employed staff and catered for their old, young (and often difficult) clients. Then came privatisation, contracting out, Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT), Best Value, PFI and recently, Comprehensive Spending Reviews, in which the outcomes of multiple choices are held up for central scrutiny. Along the way the notion of partnership working has been added. Now UK local authorities are expected to work with different agencies and other stakeholders, so that all can in principle have a voice in the decisions as to how services can be best provided.
Here is a piece of guidance from New Zealand which, I suggest signals a similar labyrinth of options, although purportedly doing the opposite. Claire Austin, Chief Executive, RNZCGP posts a statement on the internet under the title ‘The Public / Private Interface’ that presumably is an attempt to establish a clear position for public managers to follow in the primary health care sector there;
Where to from here?
In order to stabilise the primary care workforce, and achieve the intended outcomes of the Primary Care Strategy, it is essential that the interface between the private and public sector be more robustly and explicitly addressed. Primary Health
Organisations, whilst retaining their not-for-profit status, have the potential to provide a legitimate interface between public and private sector provision and resourcing of care.
Explicit principles of engagement are an important beginning point. There are
international examples of principles of engagement between public and private actors
at a development and international aid levels. There is no reason why such an
approach could not be applied at a more local level.
For instance, principles of engagement could require all crown agencies to pay
particular attention to both policy development and contracting.
In the area of policy the questions that should be routinely addressed could include:
• How is this policy to be implemented?
• Which stakeholders are to be involved?
• Who is responsible for the administration, measurement and reporting of the
process? What is the potential impact upon the sector?
• What resources and infrastructure will be required?
• Who will meet the cost of these resources and infrastructure? – In the short,
medium and long term?
• What are the different visions, intentions and drivers of the parties involved?
And how can these be reconciled?
• What is the impact upon employment and professional relationships? How are
these to be addressed?
• What outcomes are to be expected to be achieved and within what
timeframes?
• Who carries risk? What is the nature of this risk? How is the risk managed?
In the implementation and service delivery, funding is channelled through PHOs, which would then have an agreed framework that addresses these same areas. This
provides a framework that explicitly identifies provider accountability, risk, cost visibility and cost sharing, services types and sites, and recognises both private and public provision.
It is questionable whether New Zealand has the resources to provide full public
services. The foundations of primary health care have been firmly planted in the
private sector. We have however, moved to a mixed model of delivery. By
recognising, resourcing and supporting such a framework, we would be far more likely to be able to address underlying tensions and the risks that create barriers to
successful implementation of the Primary Care Strategy. It is therefore critical that
such a framework is developed as soon as possible and explicit models of
engagement become an essential part of any Government policy development, or
contracting process with non-government providers.
This also has the potential to validate different approaches to service provision,
provide more transparency, develop explicit quality frameworks and promote greater
collaboration. Finally negotiated, explicit private/public partnerships in the delivery of
primary health care have the potential to depoliticise the process and provide
sustainable relationships and positive health outcomes.
(Austin 2004 – original emphasis)
So, New Zealand health managers, like their UK counterparts have plenty to think about; no doubt justifying the salaries of plenty of middle level managers. Reading between the lines, the thrust of public policy in New Zealand, where primary care is “firmly planted in the private sector”, would appear to be the opposite of that in the UK, where provision of primary health care remains firmly in the public sector, but subject to innumerable changes in contractual arrangements. The “mixed mode” notion in New Zealand would seem to me to open the door to precisely the “underlying tensions and ..risks” that Ms Austin assumes will be removed. Her emphasis (italicised) on the need to develop a new framework would appear to be an acknowledgement of this fact. Whether all the bulleted ‘routine questions’ could conceivably be addressed in a simple framework is another matter. They may simply be itemised as an agenda that will, by intention or default, leave the ultimate power in the hands of centrally imposed inspectors. Implementers will be left to struggle with the mixture.
Of course, cooperation between agencies of different kinds should not in theory be a problem and – apart from the options being wrapped in modernisation speak – to decide between direct employment and buying services from someone else should also be straightforward, though each choice would still need to be planned and discussed before it becomes embedded is a agreed known way. The commonsensical tone of the canal user guide to cooperation (or partnership) would however be difficult to capture. Note the guidance on sharing a wide lock.
Always try to share wide locks between two (or even more!) narrow beam boats - it makes less work for a start![2] If one crew seems to be less proficient, use the opportunity to share your experience productively. There are no rules about who goes in first - you can't close the gates until you are both in! Some thoughts are - full length boat first and get behind gate, boat with bow thrusts first - it may have more control over bows whilst the second boat comes in; longest boat first; steel boat before fibreglass etc. Discuss your options with each other and have a plan, especially for a flight of locks. Then you'll be efficient, safe and have fun!
‘And adjourn to the pub afterwards’ it might have added.
The transaction costs of public management
For public managers life is not so straightforward:
What needs to be done in any public sector is seldom simple.
The options for doing it (contracting out, etc.) remain several; the problem we are discussing here.
The partners are usually many
(As alluded to above) Whitehall (or its equivalent) is usually monitoring (adding the costs of this monitoring to agent budgets in two ways, though the bill its inspectorate sends to the agent and the bill the agency runs up in assembling the data required by the inspector (Hood et all 1998)[3]).
Stages in strategic public management Navigation
A. What is the problem / where do we need to go? Destination
· Central prescription
· Public consultation
· Stakeholders in the political field
· Political decision
B. What needs to be done to get there? Route
· Technical design
· Economic appraisal
· Social assessment
C. How does it need to be done? Rules of the road
· In-house supply
· Contract out
· Partnership
· PFI
· Etc
D. How to give account? Courtesy and good manners
· Political accountability
· Public ballot
· Central audit and/or
inspection
The administrative load experienced in respect of any public undertaking consists in the actions and interactions – the transactions - that need to be undertaken at each stage in its achievement. These transactions are cumulative so an objective assessment of costs would have to add A to B to C to D.
However; at each stage of the journey the parties to the interaction or the stages may be several, requiring several interactions to achieve the stage. So, A, B, C and D are each compound factors, interacting through a complex algorithm – which it is quite beyond me to work out. In our step C, for instance, (ignoring the ‘etc.’) there are four stated options, each of which would require investigation of an unknowable number of agents before the comparison is complete; requiring 16 comparisons – enough to keep several middle level managers on the pay role.
Furthermore, the apparent rationality of any public decision-making process overlays the fact that competing values and logics bear upon the decisions involved (Curtis 2002). The primary function of the formal decision making model adopted by an authority is in fact to serve as a high level ‘known way’ through which the authority reduces the chances of a particular decision becoming subject to possibly irreconcilable disputes – a failure of agreement at this level having potentially catastrophic consequences[4].
Life would have been easier for the public manager if, for any one kind of deliverable;
Any one of the implementation approaches or initiatives had displaced what went before it, rather than adding to the options
AND if the parties involved had been free to work out which single, agreed, mutually convenient approach should prevail.
AND if pace of change had been slow enough to allow the new to be accommodated and the old to fade away[5].
This would have still leave the authorities with the problem of knowing what is the best solution to their ‘seldom simple’ public service quandary. The journey for a public authority is not just up or down the cut after all. But then, public authorities are granted authority status and powers precisely for that purpose. If there are going to be costs in decision making – as there will be - this is where they should lie, not in deciding, from first principles or against centrally established guidelines, as to whether to pass ‘port side to port side’ or the other way.
Known procedure and the costs of uncertainty in public management
What Max Weber saw and sought – to continue the above quote on bureaucracy - was “reduction of friction and of material and personal costs” (ibid 214). We may all agree that friction, such as resort to fisticuffs, is a bad thing, to be avoided in the office as much as on the cut. If we include endless meetings, emails, text messages, discussion papers,…. , press releases,….., consultant reports…., academic journal articles[6], as evidence of personal costs, and piles of paper as the material waste to which he objected; then modernisation has probably made worse.
This discussion should not be read as a plea for return to ‘the old ways’ of simple hierarchy and line administration. Even with appropriate accommodations to meet the exigencies of the service, this old formula had its limitations. However, it did have known ways. When a pothole needed filling the Chief Engineer told the Deputy Chief, who told the Assistant Deputy and so on until someone with a wheelbarrow went to fill it (lampooned as this procedure may have been by A.A. Milne, as early as the 1920s: ‘The Kings Breakfast’[7]). There are other known or knowable ways and there is no reason why the public/private partnership or another arrangement cannot become the new known way. No one way will be perfect. Any one way will require appropriate, equally known, accommodations, which have to be lodged in wise heads that can then instruct the inexperienced. But the fact that one way is not perfect should not be used as a pretext for opening up innumerable options. While the person at the wheel remains uncertain as to whether to go left or right there will be delay, anxiety, and the need for innumerable support persons to give advice, assess risk and other time consuming and middle rank expanding activities. That does not make for a passage that is easy or ‘fun’ for anyone.
References
Austin C, 2004, ‘The public and private interface in New Zeeland’s Primary Health Care’ http://www.rnzcgp.org.nz/PDF/Public_private_0504.pdf.
Crozier M, 1964 The Bureaucratic Phenomenon Chicago, The University of Chicago Press
Curtis D, 2002 ‘What Kind of Imperfection Gives you Best Value?’ Local Governance, Vol. 28 No 4 287-297
Etzioni A, ed, 1969, A Reader in Complex Organisations (2nd ed), NY, Holt Rinehart and Winston
Gerth HH and Mills CW, 1948 From Max Weber London Routledge and Kegan Paul
Hood C, James O, Jones G, Scott C & Travers T, 1998, ‘Regulation Inside Government: Where New Public Management Meets the Audit Explosion’ Public Money and Management Vol. 18, 2, p61ff.
Ostrom E, Gardner R, and Walker J, 1994, Rules, Games and Common Property Resources, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press
Ostrom E. 1992 Crafting Institutions for Self Governing Irrigation Systems ICS Press, Institute for Contemporary Studies San Francisco, California.
SFC ‘Safe and Friendly Cruising’ http://www.ownerships.co.uk/owners/saftey.htm
Walsh K, 1995, Public Services and Market Mechanisms, Basingstoke, Macmillan
[1] I am avoiding direct UK reference in this note to allow readers who are better acquainted than I with the realities in the office to adopt an ‘if the cap fits wear it’ position.
[2] The canal authority – on behalf of the public users as a whole - also benefits from this cooperation in that when two boats use the lock together less water is released from the upper levels.
[3] Professors Hood, James, Jones, Scott and Travers in a seminal and well placed article see the expansion of central audit and inspection (stage D) as contrary to the logic of modernisation in public management and a cause of increased load. My argument is that uncertainty is generated within earlier stages in the cycle and is only exacerbated by inspection.
[4] Professor Elinor Ostrom sees the necessity of a hierarchy of rules as the basis of coordination in any institution – sets of rules about constitutions and ‘collective choices’, being the higher level rules that have to be agreed and embedded before the operational rules of day to day business can have a secure foundation (Ostrom 1992).
[5] Perhaps this is the key lesson from games theory (Ostrom, Gardner and Walker 1994).
[6] The dearth of academic discussions of the obvious uncertainty / transaction cost / growth of administration relationships may have to do with the fact that academics are interested parties: the number of professors of governance studies also expands in proportion to the increase in uncertainty.
[7] Which begins, if you remember..
The King's Breakfast The King asked / The Queen, and / The Queen asked / The Dairymaid: / "Could we have some butter for / The Royal slice of bread?" / The Dairymaid / Said, "Certainly, / I'll go and tell the cow / Now / Before she goes to bed. / "The Dairymaid / She curtsied, / And went and told / The Alderney: / "Don't forget the butter for / The Royal slice of bread. / "The Alderney / Said sleepily: / "You'd better tell / His Majesty / That many people nowadays / Like marmaladeInstead."
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