The living and the dead: government’s arteries and capillaries have lost symbiosis

Virtually all this is driven from the top - that top consisting of politicians and their courtiers seeking to differentiate and promote their 'brand', senior bureaucrats showing their 'can do' credentials by crafting and rolling out Grand Plans while the media breathlessly report these announceables before repairing to panel shows on which they display their punditry by discussing how these announcements will go over with the public. How things are travelling out in the field isn't news unless there's the taste of scandal in the air.

Scale, power and prestige and skill development in the field

If what matters is the gradual building of capability and performance in the field, and increasingly that seems to be the case - for instance in education, health, in regional and social policy including policies to address Aboriginal disadvantage - these are pretty ominous developments. If you're being restructured every few years, if you can't rely on your boss because they'll be moved soon enough, or their job or influence could change at any time, then what incentives do you have to build your capabilities and perform rather than join the careerist game-playing?

A concluding story from the Australian Centre for Social Innovation, from its consulting work with one state government. The government and/or its bureaucracy had, some years previously, sought to increase reunifications between children and families they'd previously been removed from to protect the children's' welfare. Doing this is a high skill activity. And those skills can't be learned without careful, deliberate attempts to do so in the field. How did the initiative work out? Well there's the good news and the bad. For the most part, the policy simply wrought further damage on already very damaged lives. Around 70% of the reunifications failed. But one unit turned this around to an 85% success rate - saving the state many millions of dollars in future liabilities and alleviating much suffering. But that good news went unnoticed by those at the top who subsequently disbanded the high performing unit - which presumably contained the seeds of a potentially successful state-wide reunification program - to meet new priorities.

To be continued …