What is Quality in government?

A couple of days ago, I started a conversation with Dawn Ringrose on LinkedIn, about the role of Quality in government. Dawn, you may remember, is the founder and principal of Organizational Excellence Specialists. She and her team of experts study and teach a set concrete behaviors that improve business performance, and I have referenced her work in earlier posts, for example here and here.

Anyway, our discussion began when she recommended a book (Democracy in Canada) by Donald J. Savoie highlighting issues in some of Canada's governmental institutions and proposing remedies. At the same time, she referenced an hourlong talk of his, available on YouTube, which summarizes some of the themes in his book. I haven't read the book yet, but I watched the speech. What I found fascinating was the way that Savoie's speech and my subsequent discussion with Dawn kept echoing topics we have already discussed here in other contexts.

One point that Dawn made early on was the following: "In my experience, I have found the most difficult question for people working in government to answer is 'Who Is Your Customer'? To me, this speaks volumes." And of course it is clear that if you don't know who your real customers are, you can't possibly understand what it means to satisfy them. In that case, how can you tell whether you are doing a good job?

But I think it is equally clear why the question might be baffling for someone working in government service. Think of all the different people who might have a legitimate claim to the title of "customer":

• The member of the public standing right in front of you, who has brought you a problem and is asking for help. This might seem to be your "customer" in the sense of service, but he's not the one paying for the service.
• The Taxpaying Public as a collective whole. These are the people paying for the services you offer, but it's hard to ask them all what they actually want from you. What is more, they likely don't agree with each other. (That's part of why we have governments in the first place.)
• The elected government* who are constitutionally presumed to speak on behalf of the Taxpaying Public. This means the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, at any rate until there is a vote of confidence or another general election.
• Your immediate superior in the civil service bureaucracy. This is the one person that you clearly have to satisfy to avoid getting the sack. But then who is your boss's customer?

We've seen this exact problem before, in our discussion whether you can ISO-certify a university. At that time we examined several contenders for the title "customer of the university," including: the students themselves, their parents, their future employers, regional governments (to the extent that they subsidize some or all of the educational process), and society-at-large. All of them get some benefit from universities, but the alignment between "Who gets the benefits?" and "Who pays the costs?" is pretty rough. At the time we concluded that maybe the best solution is to use the language of ISO 9001:2015 and call them all "interested parties" (i.e., stakeholders) without trying to get more precise. And maybe that's the right answer when talking about governments too.

But it doesn't stop there. One point that Savoie makes at some length in his speech is that there have been multiple initiatives** to encourage public institutions to learn from the management of private ones, and that the main consequence of these initiatives have been a proliferation of metrics and reports; but (he goes on) the metrics don't measure anything useful, the reports go unread, and the only practical consequence is a slow degradation of the organization's ability to perform. 

Does this sound familiar? It should. Whenever you implement a system of monitoring and measurement, there is always a risk of measuring the wrong things. And my recent exchange with Scotlyn on parasitic certifications included a discussion of her charge that jobs in monitoring and certification will progressively drive out jobs in production [or service, as the case may be] until Quality eats the world. In theory there is some kind of brake on this behavior in for-profit organizations, because when the Quality overhead gets too large it starts to affect the bottom line; and at that point the organization presumably cuts back. I won't claim that there are no such brakes in government service, because departments are given budgets and expected to adhere to them. But in any event the braking function must look very different.

Can governments benefit from the application of Quality expertise? Of course they can. We in the Quality field—and in Quality-adjacent fields like Excellence—specialize in understanding how organizations can go wrong and what it takes to set them right. In this sense our work applies to any kind of organization whatever. But we have to apply our expertise pragmatically, and we have to be aware of the ways in which public service is different from private enterprise. Next week I'll look at a few of those differences.   

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* Using the word in a parliamentary sense.  

** Savoie is specifically talking about the Canadian federal government, though I have no doubt the same thing has been done elsewhere too.