Traditional hierarchy works a lot like speed bumps. It slows teams down no matter how talented or motivated they are. This article breaks down how flattening structure, shortening approval paths, and giving teams full ownership of outcomes removes friction so they can finally move at the speed leaders expect.
As ‘Govies’ we’ve all lived through it. The dreaded organizational restructure. Change is painful, but organizational restructures can create a whole new kind of ‘pain’. The unknowns, the rumors, the impacts, and the stress are sometimes off the charts. Having been intimately involved on multiple restructuring efforts, I hope that some of these insights canRead… Read more »
Bureaucracy – it’s not a word that inspires a whole lot of positive feelings these days. To the public, it can symbolize government inefficiency and unresponsiveness. To the federal worker, it often represents a rigid structure that stifles their agency’s agility. Bureaucracy can be overwhelming, even painful, but it doesn’t have to be. And forRead… Read more »
I just finished Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back by Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy which details new research in the question of how some systems recover from traumatic events. The concepts behind resilience are familiar to people who have studied complexity and systems theory. Basically, resilient systems have the following characteristics: Tight feedback loopsRead… Read more »
Ever since President Wilson established modern public administration, there have been numerous attempts to restructure and reorganize Federal government agencies so that they operate more efficiently while more effectively delivering services. I was in the Federal government during Gore’s Reinventing Government project and now I am back just in time for the Obama administration’s strategyRead… Read more »