Comment: Late last year, Public Service Commissioner Brian Roche published his briefing on the state of the public sector. It painted quite a dire picture, highlighting all too familiar problems: silos, slow digital adoption, slow response to “customer” needs, and financial inefficiency.
The same problems have been flagged for years in numerous reports and reviews on public sector institutions. When it came to setting out what needs to be done to improve this sorry state, one sentence in Roche’s briefing made my heart sink. It read: “We need to shift our operating model.”
As part of my PhD research, I studied restructuring in the public sector between 2018 and 2021 and analysed 356 cases across more than 50 organisations. Overwhelmingly, these cases used the same generic, abstracted language: diagnoses of silos and inefficiencies, and prescriptions for more agility, customer-focus, different ways of working, a culture shift, and a new operating model.
The public sector tends to pursue change by rolling out new frameworks and models, followed by restructures to “give effect” to them. Don’t get me wrong—these are essential tools in the organisational change handbook. But they only work when paired with other approaches that link structural change with system-wide change across governance, internal process, training, and quality control.
In my research, I show this pairing generally does not happen. Sixty percent of the restructure cases I analysed used a “black box” logic: they set out ambitious strategic goals and guiding principles, then simply presented a new structure as the “enabler”, with little mention of any other means of change.
When silos were identified as the problem, teams were merged. When customer satisfaction was lacking, new roles appeared with the word “customer” in the title. What followed once these changes were in place was left up to the individuals with the revamped job titles.
Perhaps more significantly, there was next to no follow-up on whether the structural changes had the intended effects or not.
Only seven of the several hundred restructure cases had some type of formal assessment of the post-restructure effects. While these assessments found steps in the right direction, they also described newly created silos, confusion, bottlenecks, and capacity collapse even years after the event.
This echoes decades of research into organisational change that shows the negative impacts of restructuring on culture, organisational capability, agility, and the wellbeing of staff and managers alike. Evidence is hard to find that restructuring works in the sense that efficiencies are gained, or new ways of working are adopted.
Some researchers use terms such as “hyper innovation” and “organised hypocrisy” to describe the cycle of constant restructuring. The terms capture the problem that it’s easier to signal commitment to change by making radical, visible cuts and declaring new operating models, than to go through the hard slog of sustained, measured reform.
Breaking the cycle
The barrier to improving our public service and its efficiency does not lie in a lack of ideas, models, or strategies. Rather, we lack concrete and robust methods to make change happen. It’s like we keep trying to change our diet, so we rip out our kitchen every year and replace it with a new one.
When we focus on the structural elements of the public service—the institutions, the functions, the roles and responsibilities—we look at how things “ought” to work. But, in practice, organisations are messy places in which ingrained behaviours, unintended incentives, and internal politics muddy how things play out.
This messiness means that when we rearrange structures, merge or split functions, it’s like playing chess where each figure on the board has a set of invisible rules that can make or break the success of each move.
I found rare instances of restructures that seem to take this into account. They work with staff to narrow down where and how a different way of doing things may be possible. Structural changes are also carried out alongside reviews of process, tools, and practice.
Although these examples are few and far between, they show there is an alternative way to do things.
Yes, we need to invest in our leaders and check the models and frameworks that inform our public institutions. But if we want to break the self-reinforcing cycles of restructuring, we need to take an honest look at the mechanisms we need to link intent and action.
This article was originally published on Newsroom.
Annika Naschitzki is a PhD candidate in the School of Government at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.