What I want to know is where the governance/management paradigm came from,
where is it being effectively challenged, and how does it relate to
"learning organisations" ?
I have been involved in the not-for-profit sectors, public sectors and
co-operative business sectors for many years now. In each case they have
a "board" of some kind, and then "workers" opf some kind. It is not so
much the "structure" that interests me, or the accountabilities. I have
worked that one through a long time ago. What interests me is the
relative responsibilities of these structures. In New Zealand the
relative responsibilities of these two structures has been increasingly
sharply defined. In fact we have the Governance/Management bug is quite a
big way. Actually without too much exaggeration our entire public sector
legislation is based implicitly on the this model. Government's govern
(accountable for outcomes), and the civil service manages (responsible for
outputs). We also have legislation in place that essentially squeezes our
schools into that model (Boards of trustees responsible for governance and
staff responsible for management). Some individuals are present in both
structures (eg school principals and teacher reps).
The reality of course is that life is rather more complex than the model
suggests. Part-time school boards may not have the time, skills and
abilities to govern multi-million dollar, highly complex institutions such
as schools, especially when faced with highly skilled full time "managers"
such as school principals. It is arguable that in some ways "staff" of
organisations have just as much an interest (and probably longer term
commitment) to business outcomes, as board members. This is certainly
true of schools, voluntary bodies and many government institutions. The
question for me is the old dilemma of whether "reality" needs to be
tailored to fit the model, or whether the model needs to be tailored to
match reality.
Most of the effort in New Zealand has been devoted to the "reality fitting
the model" side of the dilemma. I am beginning to wonder whether that has
been wise. This then raises the question in my own mind about why we
separated out "policy" (governance) from "implementation" (management) in
the first place. Where did the concepts come from in the first place ? I
rarely see the paradigm challenged, even in so-called "learning
organisations". Some of the co-operative movements, and consultative
workplaces appear to do this, but it seems to me that this is more about
who gets involved rather than any serious reconsideration of the paradigm.
Some of the work associated with systems theory (and possibly complexity
theory) comes close to challanging the paradigm, but I am not sure how
this translates into practice. What is the history of this paradigm and
are there any effective alternatives ?
I ask all this, because I find myself, as a consultant, increasingly
reluctant to recommend using the governance/management paradigm, but don't
quite know why. I find it increasingly difficult to get people to define
in clear terms where the boundary between policy and implementation (or
governance and management) actually lies. Many of the terms are relative
rather than absolute (eg implementation is the doing of policy), which,
like the famous flaw in the concept of "survival of the fittest", just
sends me around in circles. I find it increasingly difficult to explain
why we actually have the model in the first place. Consequently, I am
getting muddled in my own mind, and thus unable to be clear when helping
other people.
Can anyone give me some pointers where I might look to take my thinking a
stage further ?
Cheers
Bob Williams
bobwill@actrix.gen.nz
P.S. Hi Shankar, welcome aboard.
"Only Connect" - E.M. Forster
--Bob Williams <bobwill@actrix.gen.nz>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>