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David Osborne
January 2007
The views expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the United Nations or its Member States.
Reinventing public institutions is Herculean work. To succeed, you must find strategies that set off chain reactions in your organization or system, dominoes that will set all others falling. In a phrase, you must be strategic. By strategy, I do not mean detailed plans. There is no recipe you can follow to reinvent government, no step-by-step progression to which you must slavishly adhere. The process is not linear, and it is certainly not orderly. Things rarely go as planned; reinventors must constantly adjust their approaches in response to the resistance and opportunities they encounter. Rather, by strategy, I mean the use of key leverage points to make fundamental changes that ripple throughout the bureaucracy, changing everything else. Reinvention is large-scale combat. It requires intense, prolonged struggle in the political arena, in the institutions of government, and in the community and society. Given the enormity of the task and the resistance that must be overcome, the reinventor's challenge is to leverage small resources into big changes. Being strategic means using the levers available to you to change the underlying dynamics in a system, in a way that changes everyone's behavior. To use but one example, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did not start out with a full-blown strategy to reinvent the British state. She came into office in 1979 determined to make it smaller, privatize many functions, and force the bureaucrats to be more efficient. But unlike her American counterpart, Ronald Reagan, she learned from the failure of her "jam the bureaucrats" approach. She also had more time in office. In her third term, she began to apply a consistent philosophy of extending choice and competition to public services and decentralizing authority so providers had the flexibility to respond to their customers' needs. Thatcher put together a team of trusted civil servantsher Efficiency Unitwho came to understand the real problems that lay behind public sector performance. In her ninth year in office they articulated a set of systemic changes that applied her philosophy to core government functions. It took them a long time to get there, and they made many mistakes along the way, but they managed to find a series of key levers: