Posts Tagged: organizational structure

Strive to Make Organizational Restructuring as Painless as Possible

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 »

Making Bureaucracy Better

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 »

Transformer Agencies: Using the New Science of Resilience to Reform Government Agencies

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 »

Using the Constructal Law to Redesign Government Agencies

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 »