Ele Ludemann: Roche diagnoses public service problems

Sir Brian Roche has diagnosed the problems with the public service:

There are too many meetings in the public service, too many layers of management, too much duplication, not enough clarity about its role and not enough focus on outcomes, new Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche told chief executives in a letter ahead of their first meeting.

He said improvements in efficiency, decision-making, and responsiveness were needed. . .

 I spent a few years on a committee which used to have presentations from public servants.

Sometimes there were as many as eight from the same organisation. One did the speaking and one took notes. The presence of the other six appeared to be superfluous.

No private business would waste employees’ time like that and while the public service isn’t a business is would benefit from a much more business-like approach.

Roche expected changes to be aimed at operating systems rather than structural changes.

The system was not fundamentally broken but it was no longer fit for purpose.

“I’m still mindful of the Roger Douglas experience where you throw everything up and you hope something lands well,” he told the Herald this week.

“Society and business need the public administration system to work all the time. You don’t a get a year or two off while you reinvent it.

“Let’s optimise what we’ve got while we think about maybe something different.” . .

Too many meetings isn’t peculiar to the public service.

A workshop entitled Meetings Bloody Meetings I went to years ago said people wanting meetings should start by asking is this meeting really necessary?

Sometimes it is, but sometimes it could be replaced by emails or phone calls and sometimes the people contemplating calling a meeting could take responsibility, make a decision and act on it without the need for contribution from others.

“We do seem to live in a very high-touch model — lots of meetings, lots of consultation. The question is ‘Do we need to do all this, are we improving the quality and timeliness of our decision-making and support to the Government, question mark.”

In his letter to about 40 chief executives in December, Roche said the existing model no longer served its needs in the context of a rapidly changing operating environment, the fiscal position, the required focus on growth, and the need to improve the quality and timeliness of decision-making.

The system was overly complicated and needed to be simplified. It was not reflective of modern business models.

Among the problems he cited were a lack of data use in decision-making, and assumptions being made about the Treaty of Waitangi.

“We are not using enough data to improve the quality and timeliness of decision-making,” the letter said.

“A lot of what we try in terms of policy is impeded by assumptions (rather than analysis) that ‘this will breach the Treaty.’”

The Treaty has been inserted into a lot of policy and decisions where it has no place.

The public sector also needed to be more responsive.

“There is a perception we are not listening to what ministers need [or] want.”

There is also a perception the public servants aren’t listening to what the public want.

There was a lack of innovation and/or real-time modification for better delivery and outcomes.

“It is increasingly clear to me that something is getting lost in translation between ministers and the system and we ignore that at our collective peril — we need to address it.” . . .

Roche’s letter to chief executives outlined public service inefficiencies:

“There is a lack of clarity on what our core business is,” he wrote.

“There is fragmented decision-making and investment (eg technology) because we think we are special [or] unique, which impedes productivity and alignment.

“There are too many layers of management and too many meetings, resulting in inefficiencies, confused accountabilities and high transaction costs.”

He said there was too much focus on doing business with one another and not enough on outcomes.

There was duplication between agencies in terms of consultation “and we are captured by the slowest participant”.

From the outside, operations in the public service too often appear to be like swimming through syrup in gumboots, a very difficult, slow and sticky process.

Asked by the Herald to expand on concerns about the Treaty of Waitangi, he said conclusions that certain actions would be a breach of the Treaty needed to be “well-founded on legal principles and precedent; it’s not just some as it were low-level official saying ‘Oh this looks like a Treaty breach’.’”

He formed his view after speaking to many chief executives, ministers and people responsible for public service delivery in visits to Dunedin, Auckland and Hawke’s Bay.

Every time something needed to be done, there was a strong emphasis on the Treaty — “as there should be because that is the nature of the public sector work.”

“But there was an emerging sense that officials were using the Treaty breach as a mechanism to not actually necessarily take everything forward that should be taken forward.

“It’s being seen by some as one of the first flags that goes up without necessarily having considered it to the extent that you would expect before you could make that statement [a Treaty breach] with authority.”

Roche said with advances in technology and AI, capturing and using information would become a real asset of the public sector “and we need to think laterally about how we use that information”.

“We are one system. We are funded by one source of money — and that is the taxpayer — and we should use it as one system… we need to try to simplify and streamline, not fragment and complicate.”

Public servants ought to have the ability to simplify and streamline, they must also have the will to do it.

Ele Ludemann is a North Otago farmer and journalist, who blogs HERE - where this article was sourced.