REINVENTING ORGANIZATIONS
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"Voters are being told a lie. There is no need to cut public services"

3/21/2015

 
So begins a great article in the Guardian (http://bit.ly/1DlL6rT). The journalist picked up the story of Buurtzorg from the book “Reinventing Organizations” and wonders if it heralds a fundamental alternative to the story that we are doomed to reduce public services to reduce costs. I hadn’t quite looked at it that way, but I find it a very powerful thought. 

Buurtzorg’s case shows that sometimes we look for saving in the wrong place entirely. The real savings in home care comes not from shaving of 1 minute of changing a compression stocking. It comes from giving such great care that patients heal faster or become more autonomous, and so come out of care much more quickly, reducing care by hours, weeks or years, not minutes. And that the key to that is small, autonomous teams that aren’t prevented to give good care by well-meaning but flawed centrally-designed procedures, policies, bureaucracies… I’m convinced this applies to all of health care (think hospitals!), not just home care. 
This morning, there was a 10 minute piece on this in the BBC’s flagship Today program, for which both Jos de Blok and me are interviewed (how cool is that? :)). Jos impressed me again with his simple common sense - he has a knack for making anything other that self-management sound gently absurd. (http://bbc.in/1FSCudX, starting minute 33). 

The guardian article stimulated me to think about it more broadly, beyond home care and health care. The more I think about it, the more I’m excited by the prospect that new forms of thinking will bring the same kind of breakthroughs to many domains. Take teaching. The real savings don’t come from reducing costs for teachers. It will come from children no longer dropping out, from children feeling so whole, so valuable, so powerful (as they do in the ESBZ in Berlin I speak about in the book and many other innovative school that are popping up) that they don’t drop out, don’t fall on the wayside, don’t turn to crime to make a living or feel powerful.  

Or take our flawed justice system. We know from experiences everywhere in the world that restorative justice systems work better for victims and for perpetrators. And they are radically cheaper to run, as the rates of incarceration go down dramatically as do the rate of reoffending. Imagine what we could do with all the money saved by closing prisons, and how much richer the lives of our communities would be. 

Perhaps it will take a few more years for these ideas to be acceptable in a broader public discourse. I’m curious when a political will pick up on these ideas. In any case, I think Mark Thompson, who wrote the piece in the guardian, is onto a very powerful idea: what if we could increase public services rather than cut them, but adopting a different perspective on purpose and different management practices? He’s got me thinking about this a lot. I think indeed we are told a lie. Not lied to on purpose. But there is another way to deal with budget cuts that could, paradoxically, help us shift to better times.
Olivier
3/22/2015 09:27:38 am

Merci Frederic!

You clearly wrote and demonstrated in your book the mandatory prerequisite for any organisation (new or existing) to move and thrive into a Teal-based way: to have both CEO and executive board as strong believers in the Teal model too. I have been wondering since reading your book how this could work out for any public/state-based service up to the very own way a nation is organised.
In another Facebook discussion, you mentioned the start of a small change with one Belgium public department (-> http://www.workplaceinnovation.org/nl/kennis/kennisbank/the-colleagues-are-working-at-home--fod-social-security-be---eng-/1080?q=&p=32)

I would be curious to understand how in 2015 this has evolved, and whether such positive changes can especially sustain moving to something closer to a Teal model, from one government to another, one political crisis/policy to another.
And this is a bit of chicken-egg situation, because even if competitive pressure (like the non-profit Buurtzorg in the Netherlands) is positively eating significant service share, there are public services like the justice department, the police department, and several others, which won't have their "Jos de Blok" come with non-profit equivalent to challenge the traditional approach (because they would have no state political mandate to do so...).

This led me to ponder in other words, whether we would need first to have our own governments and political systems to be transformed by us into something closer to Teal model, before we can hope and influence to have more and more public services to follow suit.

In our current technocracies / oligarchies, would this require the power to go back to the people (aka a real democracy, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBAg5Qb_DeU) first, instead of the current media and financial hold(-up) ?

David Pecotic link
4/5/2015 12:17:33 am

Frederic - I was wondering when the intersection of government and digital transformation would rear its head in your ongoing work. Bureaucracy isn't known as the last bastion of, well, bureaucracy for nothing. I'd love to see you comment on non-private sector attempts: holarchy in the US local government, public sector mutualisations in the UK and numerous experiments in social innovation and enterprises.

Mikael Reichel link
9/24/2015 02:50:13 am

Hi, the one who assumes the right to formulate the "problem" also has an upper hand in the resolution of it. This is something we should all be more aware of and what your blog in essence is about when you say we have been told a lie. Some call this out-of-the-box thinking whereas it is actually about re-formulating the problem. Sadly, New Public Management theory promotes a mindset that tends to formulate problems that this theory can solve.

Victor Vorski link
2/11/2016 08:13:21 am

I think that the learning system is a particularly great area where we will see huge changes going forward. The free-to-learn movement appears as highly congruent with the Teal organisations movement.

I highly recommend the book "Free to Learn" by Peter Gray as a starting point in examining the assumptions about education we have, understanding the science and alternatives to the existing system. For me it is as seminal for education as RO is for companies.


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