The Purpose of Government
In Goldratt’s classic The Goal, there is a scene where the hero, Alex Rogo, is sitting in his car on the hill overlooking his factory. He is eating pizza and drinking beer while thinking about the question his mentor, Jonah, posed. What is the goal of your company? Alex considers the question and eventually concludes that the goal is to make money.
One of the features of the chapter is that his internal dialog forms the initial thinking of what eventually becomes a quantitative and qualitative framework for measuring and improving the performance of the factory. The frameworks are Theory of Constraints and Throughput Accounting.s
Over the last generation, many have tried to lift and shift management practices from manufacturing and corporate contexts to government. Those who have worked in government for some time have seen ISO9000, TQM, Business Process Reengineering, Management by Objectives, Lean, Six Sigma, ITIL, Objectives & Key Results, and more come and go. They were tried and found lacking. I would argue that these practices fail for two reasons. Managers apply them beyond the bounds of their applicability, and they ignore the fundamental contexts of government.
If we are going to improve how we manage the public sector, we need to first explore the purpose of government. If it helps, get some beer and pizza.
What is Government?
First, we need to understand what we are considering. What is government? It is multi-level. We have international, national, regional, provincial, state, county, and city governments. It does many things. It runs elections, legislates, governs, educates, regulates, delivers services. It uses its immense power to levy taxes, send people to war, prosecute and incarcerate. That is a lot of disparate responsibilities, but there must be a common thread.
We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. [Preamble to US Constitution]
The United States Constitution lays out a list of reasons the U.S. Government was formed. They too seem like a broad set of aspirations, but there is one thing that is common in both lists.
The Goal is Managing Risk
He’d [Max Stier] explain that the federal government provided services that the private sector couldn’t or wouldn’t: medical care for veterans, air traffic control, national highways, food safety guidelines. He’d explain that the federal government was an engine of opportunity: millions of American children, for instance, would have found it even harder than they did to make the most of their lives without the basic nutrition supplied by the federal government. When all else failed, he’d explain the many places the U.S. government stood between Americans and the things that might kill them. “The basic role of government is to keep us safe,” he’d say. [The Fifth Risk, Michael Lewis]
If the basic role of government is to keep us safe, the obvious question is safe from what?
There are, of course, the primary dangers early governments addressed: attack by other nations, anarchy and mob rule, crime, and violent behavior. Over time, the responsibilities have grown. Consider everything government does and you start to see it is to protect us from something:
- Social Security and economic assistance programs protect us from poverty.
- Medicaid, Medicare, public health, veterans health services, water and waste management protect us from disease.
- Dams and levees protect communities from flooding.
- Road building and maintenance, driver and vehicle licensing, and traffic police protect us from the harmful downsides of traveling in fast-moving metal boxes on wheels.
- Child protection services, childcare licensing, and daycare regulations protect children from harm.
- Agriculture, food, and restaurant regulations protect us from being poisoned.
- Market, labor, and housing regulation protect us from extortion.
The types of risks that government manage or mitigate are societal. They range from existential, like nuclear threats, to infrastructure, to personal risks that affect large or vulnerable groups.
We can now see that what government does is managing or mitigating societal risk. Politicians campaign and debate what risks government should manage and by how much. Legislation lays out the risk mitigation policy goals, policies and rules. Government agencies and commissions do the risk mitigation.
The Problems With This Argument
While this argument seems compelling, there are a couple of issues with it.
Firstly, libraries and education are hard to justify as risk mitigation. Justifying roads as a safety issue alone is hardly complete or satisfying. The highway system is also a platform for commerce, which could not be called a risk. Roads, libraries and education are opportunities that benefits society.
Part of the intention of this exercise is to build an epistemological framework around which we can create strategies and measurements. The current lingua franca in government is money, which is problematic because it compels managers and policy-makers to cut costs. Such tactics are both restrictive and demoralizing.
Mitigating and managing societal risk is more positive and aspirational. The ability to justify investment is more apparent. However, it is still a justification to reduce something rather than grow it.
Risk is difficult to measure and hard to normalize across the many disciplines. Some areas already do this, like modeling the cost to life and property if a levee were to break. Other programs have never considered how to measure the risk they manage. If we could identify, quantify, and normalize the performance and potential of risk mitigation, then we have a new framework for managing government.
Originally published at http://shoutatwork.wordpress.com on October 26, 2021
