I thought I would write a little more this week about the contrast between a culture of compliance and a culture of performance. Last week I talked about the concept of “enabling bureaucracy,” and how an enabling bureaucracy can create a culture of performance, even in a highly regulated setting. For those of you who are interested in the idea, here’s a link to a scholarly article that summarizes how coercive bureaucracies differ from enabling bureaucracies in public agencies:
www.ocfs.state.ny.us/ohrd/swec/pubs/Enabling%20Bureaucracy.pdf
There are several books I really like that talk about how you can live in a very rule-intensive world and still have a strong culture of performance. In Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity, authors Weick and Sutcliffe studied “high reliability organizations,” such as nuclear reactor operators and aircraft carrier crews—essentially, organizations that cannot afford to mess up. The organizations they examined were very bureaucratic in many respects, with formal hierarchies and strict rules, regulations, and procedures. They identified five processes that all these bureaucratic organizations relied on to drive high performance:
· Preoccupation with failures rather than successes (constant brainstorming about what could go wrong and intense examination of breakdowns)
· Reluctance to simplify interpretations (rejecting simple answers; recognizing the complexity of the environment and consistently digging for deep understanding)
· Sensitivity to operations (understanding that every step in implementation had to be completely thought through, committing talent and resources to excellent operational systems, and listening to operational experts)
· Commitment to resilience (building backup systems and developing personal and team resilience in the face of daunting challenges)
· Deference to expertise (seeking out experts for solutions no matter where they resided in the hierarchy)
They called these five processes, taken as a whole, mindfulness, which they defined as “an underlying style of mental functioning . . . distinguished by continuous updating and deepening of increasingly plausible interpretations of what the context is, what problems define it, and what remedies it contains.” I think this is fabulous, and easy to apply to the kinds of things that we are up to at the DOE—which is probably no less complex in many ways than your average aircraft carrier.
A completely different approach to developing a culture of performance can be found in one of my favorite leadership books: The Art of Possibility, by Benjamin and Rosamund Zander. Ben Zander is the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, an all-volunteer orchestra. For 25 years, he has motivated a group of volunteer musicians to make extraordinary music, and to perform at the level of the greatest professional orchestras in the country. It’s hard for me to imagine a stricter and more confining set of rules than an orchestral score. Yet Zander’s orchestra is known for its impassioned and surprising performances. In The Art of Possibility, Zander describes how he discovered the importance of encouraging every single member of the orchestra to “lead from every chair.” Zander believes that each musician has the capability to be a leader, no matter how small the part they play. He asks each musician to see him or herself as leading from whatever chair they occupy during the performance. He also allows each musician, at each rehearsal, to contribute insights on how the piece and the conducting can be improved. Zander’s musical advisor describes his rehearsals as “impassioned quests, in which each player in the orchestra joins him in his attempt to find the most truthful and direct path to the meaning of every moment of the music.” I can see why people want to play for him, and why they produce great music. Imagine if we could all approach our jobs with that sort of intensity and focus on extraordinary outcomes. Everyone I recommend this book to loves it, by the way.
Check out the Chancellor’s letter to the editor today in the New York Sun, in which he says, yet again, “I reject the notion that program-driven, incremental reform will ever get us where we need to be.”
http://www.nysun.com/article/48196
You might be able to regulate your way to incremental reform. I’m pretty sure that you can only inspire your way to breakthrough results.