Managing for Results
January 21, 2002

Getting Results When No One Is In Charge
By John Kamensky

Americans expect their government to tackle important challenges such as eliminating poverty, homelessness, poor water quality, the lack of healthcare, gun violence, and countering drug abuse. In a federal system, no one level of government or agency can succeed in tackling these challenges alone.

Our federal government, however, is hierarchically organized around agencies. And in the case of federal agencies, Congress oftentimes gives them lofty goals that they can't possibly meet on their own. For example, in 1994 Congress set several challenging education goals for the Department of Education-- that, by 2000, all students will start school ready to learn and that 90 percent of all students that year will graduate from high school. Needless to say, this did not happen.

Having lofty goals and not meeting them has never been seen as a problem until the passage of the Government Performance and Results Act in 1993. The Results Act requires agencies to define their goals in measurable terms, set targets, and show what they've done each year to meet the targets. This process began to highlight real disparities between reality and results.

For example, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) initially tried to define its success under the Results Act goals in terms of the safety of the workplaces OSHA inspectors actually visited. But they inspect less than two percent of the nation's workplaces each year, and the General Accounting Office pointed out that the Occupational Safety and Health Act says that OHSA is responsible for ensuring the safety of all workplaces. Given OSHA's approach in the mid-1990's, it knew it couldn't do this. So it had to change its approach. It started by creating networks - with states, with unions, with businesses - that would collaborate in reaching common goals around workplace safety.

What Do We Mean By Networks?

Networks are comprised of interconnected units or activities organized to achieve a common purpose. They may be temporary, such as a political campaign, or more permanent. Public administration academics find networks fascinating to study, especially in contract to hierarchies. Dr. Laurence O'Toole says "networks can vary greatly, of course, for instance in terms of structural complexity." They introduce instability and uncertainty - but also additional resources and capacity to act.

Dr. Myrna Mandell, who also studies intergovernmental networks, says networks evolve when all members recognize that their purposes cannot be achieved independently. Most networks have no hierarchy and there is no one "in charge." She found that most tend to exist as a "mind-set" or commitment to the whole network community, and that mind set is what holds them together. Dr. Mandell observes that: "Network structures may require separate actions on the part of the individual members, but the participants are transformed into a new whole, taking on broad tasks that reach beyond the simultaneous actions of independently operating organizations."

This, of course, creates challenges to the culture of traditional hierarchical organizations and concerns about accountability in governments centered around "rule of law" and representative democracy. Yet, the reliance on networks is growing in both the private and public sectors. Much of this increase is being facilitated by technology.

In the private sector, networks are filling the gap between the traditional organizing paradigms - hierarchy and markets. Collaboration through networks is relatively new in the private sector, but is seen as a key strategy for successful high-performing businesses. For example, traditionally highly competitive U.S. auto makers have collaborated to create a joint electronic network of parts suppliers, COVISINT.

In contrast, cooperation and coordination in the public sector is not new. Federal, state, and local agencies have long cooperated and coordinated in a number of way, for example via regional councils for transportation, economic development and workforce planning. But networks go beyond cooperation and coordination, as Dr. Mandell notes, and involve a different set of dynamics.

What Are Some Examples of Public Sector Networks?

Network concepts in the public sector are still evolving and there is no overarching description of the different approaches. However, this has not stopped practitioners from using various forms of networks. I have seen three different types in practice - those with clear ownership by one entity, those based on a performance partnership (as a substitute for regulation) approach, and those where all members are co-owners.

Several examples of networks with clear ownership by a single entity include:

• The Social Exclusions Unit, located in the Cabinet Office of the United Kingdom. This unit is charged by the Prime Minister with creating cross-agency collaborations to address specific social problems - homelessness, high school dropouts, teen pregnancy, etc.

• COMPSTAT, an acclaimed approach to crime reduction that was developed over the past decade by the New York City Police Department. This approach helped reduce the city's murder rate by two-thirds. It is now being applied in a number of other policy areas and Baltimore City is using it as a city-wide approach to manage for results.

• Oregon Option Benchmarks, where the State of Oregon collaborated with citizens and localities to create statewide goals, with specific measures and targets that county and local governments agreed to meet, around workforce, family stability, and healthy children.

Performance partnerships evolve in cases where there is a central authority, but the members collaborate out of a common desire to avoid being regulated by that central authority. This serves as an alternative to the more traditional use of regulatory enforcement. The OSHA example mentioned earlier is such an example. Others include:

• Tillamook County, Oregon, which is engaged in a local level collaborative effort to improve the water quality in local rivers. It created a performance partnership with EPA, state agencies, lumber mills, paper plants, and farmers to develop common water quality goals. They jointly monitor water quality and hold each other accountable. A federal agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, serves as a third-party monitor by collecting and reporting data.

• The Safe Construction network, sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is a network that collaborates around the creation and enforcement of disaster-resistant building codes. Its members include the insurance and building industries.

A third form of networks was piloted in 1998 under the sponsorship of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government. These networks focused on achieving specific outcomes related to increasing child health insurance coverage and reducing gun violence. These networks were designed to provide a more co-equal status among their members, with the "center" serving more as a facilitator than a leader. These federal-state-local-nonprofit networks focused on common outcomes but each participating local community set its own goals and reported its own results publicly. These networks focused on three sets of activities- learning (by sharing best practices); working together on common initiatives (such as after school programs and preventing youth violence); and measuring results (such as gun tracing and crime mapping).

• The Boost for Kids network, which was organized to help ensure children start school ready to learn. One strategy was to ensure all children were covered by health insurance. It covers 14 cities or regions and included several states as well as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the General Services Administration, and the Department of Agriculture.

• The Safe Cities network's goal is to reduce gun violence. It is comprised of the Department of Justice, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of the Treasury, 11 cities or regions, and the US Conference of Mayors.

What Are Some of the Lessons Learned in Building Successful Networks?

Private sector network experts Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamp, who have authored a half dozen books on the topic, describe five characteristics of successful networks -- shared vision and trust, independent members, voluntary links, multiple leaders, and clearly defined roles. How do you know when you're there? When members don't act without considering the bigger picture. These seem to be reflected in successful public sector networks as well.

What do governments need to do differently to operate successfully in a network environment than they do now? They will need to have:

• Different kinds of organizational dynamics -- the main challenge they will face is having to build trust, be a co-equal partner instead of trying to be in charge, be willing to operate with open decision-making processes, and to engage in collaborative problem-solving. These are often time-consuming and frustrating, but generally lead to greater commitment to solutions.

• Different styles of leaders - where personal connections are the glue that hold the network together. Key skills will include good communication, energy, and passion for the job. Being rewarded for having large staffs will be less important than being recognized as a "can-do" problem-solver by their network partners.

• Different types of measures - which will be jointly developed by network members and collected and analyzed by a third party. Data would be live, real-time, geo-spatial data, and available to all members of the network.

• Different uses of technology - which is not only developing and reporting measures, but also how members interact. One can't under-estimate the importance of the dynamics of technology, even though technology is probably only 10 percent of the overall role in a network.

• Different approaches to accountability - where members of a network hold each other mutually accountable for results. A 1996 assessment of the Oregon Option explores some of the issues and the different approaches to creating accountability.

The use of networks in the public sector will grow, in part, because of the increasing complexity of the challenges government is addressing; in part, because technology now makes it possible; and in part, because the public increasingly demands their government center around results, not hierarchy.