Managing Complexity in the Public Services

Philip Haynes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317811633
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The application of complexity theory to management and the social sciences has been a key development in theory and practice over the last decade. This approach questions the possibility of finding universal methods of practice, and proposes a pragmatic and humanistic management style that evolves out of a reflective method. The focus is on practitioners observing patterns of similarity and being adaptable in decision-making.

Bringing complexity theory into management reveals the importance of organizational culture and effective communication because people, their values and their objectives are at the heart of this method. Information technology provides a framework for complex communication and knowledge use, but it cannot replace highly developed professional negotiations and cooperation.

This book argues that the complexity of the public service world limits the usefulness of classical and rational scientific management approaches such as New Public Management. Excessive marketization threatens a collaborative approach and overly rigid approaches to performance management and strategic management can be dysfunctional.

Managing Complexity in the Public Services 2nd Edition advances a method of management practice that copes with the stark realities of the complex and unpredictable public policy world. It develops pragmatic management practices from action research that will be valuable to both academics and practitioners. The result is a new value-based practice for the post-crisis public service world.

1 Management, professions and the public service context

DOI: 10.4324/9781315816777-1

Introduction

This first chapter examines the definition of management and how managerialism became increasingly used in the public sector in the last 40 years. Managerial approaches superseded more passive administrative practices. The relevance of a model of general management to the public service environment is explored in the context of the changing political and economic climate of the early twenty-first century. This leads to an evaluation of the term new public management (NPM) and some of the key literature that has been written about this phenomenon. It is argued that the general management model now used in public services and developed from imported ideas in business and the private sector is of limited relevance to the public services of the twenty-first century. A key aspect of this argument is the need to understand better the major tensions in public service work, such as the contradictions between professional and managerial agendas and the differing strengths and weaknesses of public, private and non-governmental provision. The chapter finishes by proposing an alternative approach to public service management that is able to embrace the complexity of the social and public world and appreciates both the similarities and differences between the public, private and non-governmental sectors. This alternative approach to public management puts public values and public service at the core of its practice and attempts to understand the complexity of modern societies and how best to intervene in the public interest.

What is management?

Classical definitions of general management can be divided between those that put the emphasis on the role of the individual as a manager (and the general part that the manager plays in the coordination of an organization) as contrasted with those definitions that focus on work outputs, and the related activities and tasks that managers perform to achieve these outputs. There is considerable overlap between these two approaches. In the past it has been argued that the public sector was more role focused and the private sector more task focused (Handy 1990), but this has changed in recent decades, given the arrival of a business management culture in public services. Concurrent with these changes in the public services, the business sector has evolved so that it has become more involved in human services and the creation of knowledge and ideas, rather than focusing primarily on manufacturing production. This makes the output task focus of business less clear at a time when public services are increasingly being asked to focus on outputs.

Henry Mintzberg (1973), one of the best known management writers, proposed in his book The Nature of Managerial Work that the management role comprised of three main areas of work: interpersonal skills, information processing and decision-making. Mintzberg suggested that managers need good interpersonal skills because other workers look up to them as figures of authority. They need to be good leaders, but also diplomatic. Diplomacy is important when liaising across the various departments and divisions of a large organization, or between horizontal networks of collaborating organizations, because in such situations managers cannot assume authority and respect. Such diplomacy requires personal integrity, good negotiation skills and characteristics of patience and tolerance.

Managers also need to be able to process information, to monitor qualitative and quantitative data, to disseminate important points to others and to act as a spokesperson or advocate of key information. This implies the need to be a presenter, teacher and researcher in some situations. It also requires the ability to be confident with financial data and budgets.

Finally, and perhaps most important of all, Mintzberg recognized that managers must make decisions. These decisions can be in different contexts: to resolve and handle conflict, to innovate and move forward in new directions, to allocate limited resources where they will be most effective, and to progress further negotiations with other parties.

The practice of management therefore requires a wide scope of aptitudes and the judgment of knowing what skills and actions to prioritize in a given context and situation. This indicates a blend of skills being applied with confidence and sensitivity. It requires a multitasked approach and someone with a range of abilities, rather than one specialist proficiency. The personal confidence and human skills of the manager are of the uttermost importance. They must supervise and communicate with a diverse range of individuals in order to match staff needs and aspirations with the survival, performance and improvement of the organization. The focus on the collective aspirations of the host organization is vital because the manager is not a psychotherapist or counsellor who can put the needs of an individual employee uniquely above the combined needs of the public service organization and those who require its services.

Mintzberg’s classic study places emphasis on the role of the manager and the personal qualities and skills that the person has to enable them to perform the role. Although this approach has received recognition in public services, the dominant narrative of public service management in the last 40 years has focused on the management task, that is, what public managers need to do, rather than the personal qualities needed to do the work. However, increasing interest in the role of leadership in public services, rather than a dominant focus on management activities, has been one attempt to redress that imbalance towards the interpersonal and relational approach.

The task-based approach is illustrated by a large American study carried out by Luthans, Hodgetts and Rosenkrantz (1988). The research examined what tasks managers undertook and how much time they spent on key activities. They found the key tasks being performed included: managing information, paper based record keeping, planning, decision taking, controlling work processes, communicating with external contacts, networking and engaging in organizational politics, motivating and encouraging, disciplining and sanctioning, recruitment and training. It is immediately clear that some of these tasks are dependent upon personal skills and the personal resourcefulness of the individual. It is also apparent that managers undertake a wide range of tasks, whereas the Mintzberg study put the emphasis on the wide range of roles.

Luthans et al. went on to examine and judge how effective managers were at getting tasks done. They found that those who were effective at resolving tasks were not always the ones to be promoted. It was argued that the managers who were promoted to senior positions were more likely to be the individuals, who put networking and organizational politics high on their personal agenda, and this made them well known in the organization and they knew what the key political and personal agendas were. This implied that how the individual adapted and evolved to the personal role of being a manager was more important to their career development than being too focused on individual tasks and getting things done.

The task-based approach has led to a desire to define core management competencies. These are judged on evidence recorded in practice. Examples are: an ability to present financial figures, and the ability to chair a meeting and facilitate time-managed discussion and decision taking. There is clearly an overlap between task and role. The correct understanding of the role of being a meeting chair is a vital component in securing effective and clear decisions at meetings. There is some concern that the competency-based approach to management has produced “identikit managers”, who are inflexible in difficult and unusual situations. A more personalized and individualistic ability to be creative and flexible in the face of changing situations is needed. Whiddet and Kandola (2000: 30), two organizational psychologists, conclude: “recruitment and performance management processes that rely purely on competencies are flawed.”

Management is about role and task, about competencies and skills. It is also about creative individual judgment. Public service managers are people who have to take a lead and coordinate in complex environments. They will find strong similarities in the daily situations that they face, but no two situations will be identical and each challenge should be approached with a combination of prior knowledge, experience, sensitivity and individual creativity.

Management Practice and Public Services

In the 1970s, governments in developed countries like the USA, Australia and UK began to attempt to introduce some business thinking into the public sector. This was driven by a concern that the federal, state, central and local governments were too concerned with the administrative detail of their organization and their public role, rather than a task focus of getting things done and service outputs provided. Programme Analysis and Review (PAR) was one such method applied in government (Campbell 1993: 315). Attempts to use such rationalistic tools found resistance in government administrative organizations which were not always supportive, and ideas like PAR failed to make a clear impact.

For the remainder of the twentieth century there were attempts to get public services to focus more on the tasks and outputs achieved, rather than on the complexities of administrative process, and public service ethos. Politicians, practitioners and academics looked to the private sector for ideas about what methods could be used to achieve a change of direction and a more task orientated approach. This agenda is still alive in the new millennium following the financial crisis of 2007–08 and the popularity with governments of so-called “austerity” policies. These policies apply large-scale cuts to government expenditure and assert that government debt was a major element of the crisis. They are accompanied by a narrative that public sector organizations are somehow uniformly more inefficient and ineffective than private businesses and therefore that public services still have much to learn from the business and market environment.

Many writers and academics have challenged this assessment of the causes and consequences of the international financial crisis (Haynes 2012). It is true that the majority of OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) nations saw their government debt levels increase after the crisis occurred, but household debt and corporate debt levels are also high in many OECD countries and these should be more of an economic and social concern than government debt. Therefore, the financial crisis was caused by the relaxation of credit, and lack of regulation of credit, the misappropriation of credit, and resulting severe debts across many sectors. This implies the solution is not the demise of government expenditure and debt in isolation from other parts of the economy, but rather a fundamental re-evaluation of international banking and finance, credit lending and debt management (Ryan-Collins et al. 2012). Similarly, this book questions the assumption that private business is uniformly better managed than public organizations. The two sectors are diverse, increasingly overlap, and the reality is that there are examples of badly managed organizations in both sectors. Likewise, the book questions whether the management of production in the private sector is similar to activities of coordination and leadership in the public sphere (Osborne et al. 2014).

Is management different in the public sector?

One study (Conway 1993) sought to understand the relevance of the general management model described by Mintzberg and Luthans to the modern public service environment. This found that local government social services managers in the UK were different. They spent a higher proportion of their time handling paper work and communicating information to their staff. Very little time was spent making key decisions or planning for future activities. A large amount of time was spent supervising pressurized professional staff, with front line decisions being made, after consultation, by those specialist staff. There was less of a focus on task-based activities, and more of a need to undertake a professional support role, so that professionals were positively engaged in their difficult and complex working environment. This type of study suggests that the attempt to make the public sector and its services more task focused is far from straightforward. An immediate tension and difference is that the public service environment often has indeterminate tasks, or abstract tasks, where a single and measurable outcome is not readily available. In these situations, highly trained professionals attempt to define and deliver front line tasks so they are relevant to the context of individual differences. No two police beats or school classes are the same. Nevertheless, the same argument about indeterminate outcomes can increasingly be made about the private sector given the growth of the service sector and knowledge based industries in OECD countries.

A familiar approach to this sort of debate cites bipolar examples. For example, a comparison of a manufacturing plant with the work of a school to educate children. The manufacturing plant must increase the efficiency and profitability of production, to produce more, at the same quality, for less input. It must then sell all its products quickly, to maximize its cash flow and profits. Sales figures will automatically be one key source of output data.

A school must educate children, but there is debate about what a good education is. Should it include a complex range of subjects that reflect the diversity of the modern world? Should it allow choice of what is studied—to encourage the diversity of children with a diverse culture? Alternatively, should education concentrate on only core skills that are needed most in society, for example reading, writing and mathematics? The personal communication skills of children, their ability to form appropriate relationships and to understand social relations and moral obligations to others, are also important developmental tasks. Schools should assist parents in developing these interpersonal skills in their children. The ability of children to enjoy and participate in sport, music and art is also important. Many governments and school services will believe that the education system also has a duty to promote cultural aspirations and social skills.

The manufacturing plant is deliberately producing standardized outputs where the market needs to be assured of a common standard if there is to be widespread trust in the brand. A school will not want to produce standardized children, but children who have adequate core skills and the ability to respond in flexible and creative ways to wherever their future life takes them. The school will want to encourage different children to find their own specialist skills, in areas like sport, music and art. Educating is a different role to manufacturing. There are a few similarities between the manufacturing plant and the school, but there are many differences.

What is new public management?

New public management (NPM) has been defined by a number of writers in differing ways (Pollitt 1990; Hood 1991; Osborne and Gaebler 1992) but a point of congruence in the definitions is the implementation of management ideas from the business and private sector into the public services. Governments never explicitly articulated NPM as an ideological or political program to implement management into public organizations, it is rather better understood as an academic critique of the public management reforms of the last 40 years. In the second edition of his leading textbook Public Management and Adminis...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Management, professions and the public service context
• 2 What is complexity?
• 3 Strategy and planning in an unstable world
• 4 Complexity and the performance of public services
• 5 Information management
• 6 People in public organizations
• 7 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index