Presupposition: all human service delivery is experimental.
Start with the end in mind.
The core strategy defines what an organization is accountable for: the consequence strategy determines how it will be held accountable; the control strategy affect who will be accountable; and the culture strategy helps employees internalize their accountability. But by making organizations accountable to their customers, the customer strategy deals most powerfully with the issue of accountability.
Achieving clarity of purpose, role, and direction does not in itself improve performance; it sets the stage. It creates the conditions for improved performance.
Steering is about setting goals, choosing strategies to achieve them, choosing organizations to carry out those strategies, measuring how well those strategies and organizations do in achieving the goals, and making adjustments. This is what strategic planning is supposed to do.
Define the customer
Defining an organization’s primary customer is a critical step because it helps the organization understand exactly whom it is there to serve and who should define what effective service means.
When the needs of primary and secondary customers [or customers and compilers] are different, organizations must consciously determine what there priorities are and how to balance any conflicting needs.
…-when the goals conflict head-on and the win-win solutions have been exhausted – the agency needs to know who its primary customer is, because that is where its priority must lie.
Create a market test.
Once competition becomes the norm,….employees become self-directed.
It was the competition inherent in a market economy that drove businesses to innovate and improve.
The problem with government monopolies is that they have no real reason to improve performance. They receive no reward for getting better. Because their customers cannot desert them, they risk nothing if they perform badly. And they rarely die. Their fate is independent of their performance. They seldom innovate, because they don’t have to.
Everyone is accountable for meeting or exceeding the client’s outcome expectations.
Creating accountability to the customer increases the pressure on public organizations to improve their results, not just to manage their resources.
The customer strategy requires managers and employees to shift their focus from pleasing their superiors up the chain of command to pleasing their customers. This can be difficult, when customers want something the managers and employees don’t value.
That which gets rewarded gets done.
Leaders should …use positive incentives to reward the kind of behavior they want and protect risk takers by tolerating their mistakes.
The humane solution to resistance …is to make it clear that resistance will not be tolerated, then offer exit routes – transfers, reassignments, early retirement, severance, or outplacement – to those who continue to resist.
The best policy is to give people a chance, then move them out….
Shift the locus of control – discipline is a noun!
Trade control over inputs for control over outputs.
Rather than controlling what people do,…try to influence what people want to accomplish. …Help them understand and embrace the organization’s goals and values. Until this happens, empowerment may lead half your teams to march off boldly in different directions, while the other half remain paralyzed, unsure of what to do with their new freedom.
….Control of events and not of people…
In God we trust, all others must use data.
…Distribute the performance data to all employees
Mindfulness – concentration on our everyday routine
…The development of most acquired forms of automaticity [i.e., skill acquisition] depends on the frequent and consistent pairing of internal responses with external events. Initially, conscious choice and guidance are needed to perform the desired behavior or to generate what one hopes are accurate and useful expectations about what is going to happen next in the situation. But to the extent the same expectations are generated, or the same behavior is enacted, or the same goal and plan are chosen in that situation, conscious choice drops out as it is not needed – it has become a superfluous step in the process. [Baugh & Chartrand, 1999]
…People classify their experience as either good or bad and do so immediately, unintentionally, and without awareness that they are doing it. [Baugh & Chartrand, 1999]
An organization’s culture is a set of behavioral, emotional, and psychological frameworks that are deeply internalized and shared by the organization’s members. It has a tangible, physical dimension: People’s habits and routines; their rituals, customs, and conventions; even the stories they tell. It also has an intangible, hidden dimension; people’s beliefs, assumptions, ideas, hopes and dreams.
As long as you have rules, you have a chance for freedom.
Goals, not needs, determine the outcome expectations.
People are active participants in the world with purposes and goals that they want to attain. Much, if not most, of our responses to the environment are determined not solely by the information available in that environment but rather by how it relates to whatever goal we are currently pursuing. [Baugh & Chartrand, 1999]
One hallmark of an active goal is that the individual will persist on the task, striving to reach the desired goal, in spite of obstacles and interruptions. [Baugh & Chartrand, 1999]
…Business are successful only if they are able to produce what both their customers and their owners want.
Structure is not a fundamental lever of change
If you believe you can or you believe you can’t, you are right! Henry Ford
All organisms have two goals: to achieve a purpose and to survive. When the second becomes the first, you have a bureaucracy.
The consequence strategy requires something far more difficult. It requires elected officials to let public organizations shrink and die. The …strategy also requires that we reward our public employees and organizations for work well done and penalize them for work that is inferior.