INSURRECTION: A Nation in Peril

Why Government Employees are Our Best Hope for Saving Our Republic.

January 6, 2021, was a sad day for our country. The images of anger, violence, destruction, violation, fear, and death removed the blinders from our eyes revealing just how fragile our republic is.

While it was a singular historic event, it clearly serves as our canary in the coal mine – a predictor of trouble to come – and a demand for action.

What we know is that we have problems, problems faced by an increasing number of Americans. Among the many fronts are incredibly complex and tenacious issues such as global warming, racial inequality, child maltreatment, teenage suicide, gender identity, poverty, hunger, educational debt, and now the Great Resignation (people are quitting their jobs at an unprecedented rate setting a record in November of 2021).

With all of these issues, a lot of Americans are struggling to thrive. Prior to the pandemic, 22 percent of our population relied on safety net programs in excess of $17,000 a year, not including Social Security and Medicare. The pandemic has only increased both numbers.

Who is best positioned to address the problems we face?

Is it our political leadership? Is it us, as citizens, using our ballot-box power? Is it business or non-governmental organizations or the courts? Or is it the 22.6 million government employees who run our government day in and day out?

While we expect solutions to our problems will come from our political leadership, the reality is Americans don’t believe it. Gallup reports that only 12 percent of Americans have either a “great deal or quite a lot” of confidence in Congress. American’s confidence in their political leadership is at a modern-times low.

If not our national political leaders, then who? In terms of the following key performance attributes, “handle resources responsibly and admit/take responsibility for their mistakes,” when compared to other institutions, local elected officials come in second to last according to a 2019 study conducted by Pew Research. Members of Congress come in last on those two factors as well as last in “provide fair/accurate information to the public.”

Can we as citizens fix the problem by electing different people and/or by switching the party in power? We can have some influence. But the evidence is that no matter who is in power, our world is changing faster and faster while our capability to respond seems slower and slower.

Should we look to business, non-governmental organizations, and the courts to lead change? ?While it is essential, they do influence change in our society. Leading change, however, is outside any of these institutions’ roles.

So, who is best positioned to lead the changes we need to ensure our people and thus our republic thrives?

It’s government employees – appointed/hired government employees. Yes, the dreaded term, bureaucrats, also known as administrators, and public or civil servants.

Why? Because these people actually implement the programs created by the laws that exist and that are added. How they choose to implement determines how effective and efficient our government is. Our public servants have much more power for good than most Americans know.

An expert in ending hunger in America recently made a statement that inspired this writing. He said, “We have the food and we even have the money to end poverty in America.” The problem is purely one of program execution hampered in no small part by the complexity of Federal rules and regulations and the reality that every state does it differently.

Government operations are enormously complex driven by the fact that the United States has produced more laws than any nation in the history of the world. Add to that the reality that our nation adds more laws and regulations every single year than most countries do in a decade.

To deal with all this is no small task. ?It’s a huge job that demands the best management skills in the world. It demands a management revolution in government. ??

While there are clearly pockets of excellence where skilled managers are delivering stellar results, in general, the rules and regulations have caused an incredible amount of wasted activities (process waste), resulting in a very inefficient and ineffective government.

Interestingly enough appointed government officials are the ones who turn law into reality in the form of rules and regulations. What that means is they have a lot of say about how programs work.

In the mid-1970s and 1980s, our nation faced perhaps its greatest economic threat since the end of World War II. Japan began to aggressively gobble up market share in the automotive and electronics sectors and they had their eyes on other sectors. How did they become an economic threat? They developed a new philosophy of management, a philosophy based on engaging every employee in improving the quality of everything they did in such a way that continuously reduced costs. They implemented what in essence was a “death by a thousand cuts strategy” – incremental improvement in everything they did. Ironically an American, Dr. W. Edwards Deming, taught the Japanese these methods in the late 50s and they rebuilt their economy with his philosophy.

The very management tools and methods American business learned from the Japanese in their struggle to hold off Japan’s dominance are the very tools needed in government today to address its challenges.

We need in our government world-class managers using best-in-class management methods and tools in order to untangle the processes and begin solving our most complex problems.

What is the work ahead?

Our government employees have the authority to do all of the following:

1. Be driven by facts; find what works/prove what works.
2. Set stretch goals to cause stretch thinking.
3. Measure performance to know which programs are getting the best results.
4. Engage your people in relentlessly eliminate waste in all its forms.
5. Look nationally to find the most effective and efficient programs.
6. Push back on the belief that “our situation is unique” because most often minor adaptations overcome local challenges.
7. Fight “not invented here” thinking.
8. Stop using pilots – they are an excuse to not commit
9. See what works, and then scale it as broadly as possible.
10. Share results and learn from peers nationally.
11. Think prevention and detection in order to eliminate the need for treatment.
12. Find, learn from, and steal shamelessly from the most effective programs in the country.
13. Set clear expectations for providers, require performance measures and reports, and work with them to get better.
14. Use results to maximize the power you have to control how things are done.

Celebrate every chance you get – it’s hard work.

Many of the challenges we face are being effectively and efficiently addressed somewhere in the country, somewhere in the world. But we resist embracing others’ solutions for some incomprehensible reason. Stop inventing, start copying. Make it a point to reach out to others that you see are solving a problem either in other departments or other states. We can make real progress if not solve our most complex problems through collaboration.

Yes, we are at a key point in the life of our republic and one of the primary reasons it is in peril is that government is not keeping up with the pace of change.

The only people who can fix our government are the people in the trenches, like you, who are working tirelessly to make it better. Change only happens when the usual way of thinking or doing something is replaced by a new and different way. A famous quote from Margaret Mead sums it up perfectly, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens (and as I say, government employees) can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Step out of the status quo and courageously lead the changes our country so desperately needs.

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