Tuesday, September 08, 2015

Mild Irritation Against the Machine - a bureaucrat rebels (a little)

As a bureaucrat, I come with an innate flaw - a nagging scepticism of mechanistic process as a means of governance. Don't get me wrong, process matters, as I've often noted here, but process designed seemingly for the purposes of measuring outputs of dubious value does trouble me.

An awful lot of modern governance is about attempting to set targets, monitoring them and then wondering why things aren't getting any better. Sometimes, it's about setting targets and denying that you've done so. And, because you've set targets, you do have to put in place the means by which they might be measured. That means bureaucracy - the sort that leadens the heart and depresses the spirit.

Often, targets are set by people who have little experience of what it really means to deliver a particular service, in response to others who have even less, but feel the need to demonstrate that they are doing something (the "something must be done, this is something, ergo it must be done" school of thought, if you will). Seldom are the people delivering the service consulted on whether or not the target has value, let alone the tools supplied to measure achievement against it.

Indeed, it often isn't made clear why a target has been set, assuming that the people setting it are clear on the matter. On one occasion, a team I was working in was told that a particular target was core to our work. The catch was that they hadn't actually crystallised what the target was, nor had they concluded how they would determine it. Unfortunate, to say the least, when performance related pay was at stake...

An effective targeting strategy has context, and is most successful when you explain that concept to the people trying to deliver it. Perhaps, one day, someone in the upper echelons of my organisation will try it...

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