Six things the APS needs to change..(the APS Review)
Twenty years in any sector is long enough to understand why you stay there and what drives you crazy at the same time. So it was with my career in the Australian Public Service (APS).
The Independent review of the APS provides an opportune time to reflect on my time in the APS and contribute to the many submissions already provided to the review to assist their consideration of the APS’s future capability, culture and operating model.
The APS (and its 152,000 employees) is a significant enabler of Government policy and programs, but its sheer size and complexity also makes it a slow moving behemoth occasionally unwilling or unable to respond effectively to the requirements placed upon it.
What are some of the drivers behind this?
My own personal (and not very scientific) longitudinal experience in the APS brings to mind at least six structural and cultural factors that inhibit the APS from improving and innovating. The ‘staid six’ are explored in this article, which is an extract from my submission to the APS review, which can be found here.
The six things on the ‘don’t do’ list
The diversity of people, ideas and innovation that characterises our society is inadequately reflected in the APS. Instead of the ‘broad church’ of ideas required for evidence based, stakeholder engaged policy or for inclusive leadership, there exists a much narrower construct, reinforced in six ways:
1. a leadership model focused on maintaining power, hierarchies and entitlements
2. process driven culture
3. risk aversion
4. a lack of diversity
5. APS jargon, and
6. recruitment and skills biases.
Power – keeping it
Hierarchies and structures have become a crutch unable to be relinquished by many leaders in the APS, justifying many rusted on patterns of behaviour and stifling collaboration and effective decision making.
This partnership-decision vacuum is reflected in almost every brief, minute, media communication, meeting with a minister’s office, attendance at an Interdepartmental committee or at Senate Estimates. The perceived ‘value add’, which can come down to a personal preference or a mere need to ‘own’ the outcome, is often not worth the extra days taken to get the document up and down an APS building and out the door.
The APS structures, particularly those relating to the Senior Executive Service (SES), strongly support the status quo. In some respects, it resembles a feudal class system between the SES ‘nobility’ and the ELs/APS 1-6 ‘serfs’, entrenched through an operating model and behaviours such as:
· a lack of emphasis on managers being responsible for staff
· SES only entitlements/allowances relating to salary, superannuation, vehicles, travel, lounge memberships and office space
· the lack of specialist or technical skills among the SES based on a belief they can all be ‘generalists’ and remain fully effective in almost any position
· the lack of significant SES movement between agencies, with the only major movements occurring when Secretaries swap agencies and take many of their SES with them (so much for merit process…)
· the effective permanency of SES appointments and their employment entitlements, together with an ongoing failure to manage or discipline poorly performing SES.
These and other characteristics manifest an unhealthy focus on holding decision making and other powers for the sake of it, maintains the view that SES are the ones with ‘the answer’ and that it is unnecessary and weak to be genuinely influenced by the views of others.
Unfortunately, the strength of this culture means that the EL and APS 1-6 staff also accept it as the status quo. Taking the analogy one step further, it resembles aspects of the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment[1], which showed how power, even vested for only a few days, can lead to significant behavioural changes in both the empowered and the powerless.
Although this was an extreme (and now scientifically unrepeatable) experiment, the world of the SES and the staff they manage echoes some of the trappings of power and somewhat similar behaviours. There is palpable pressure to abide by and maintain the organisational and cultural status quo. ‘Rocking the boat’ requires significant and sustained effort to overcome these institutional barriers, and as shown by the Royal Commission into the Home Insulation program, may not occur even in life threatening situations.[2]
Process – the paper shuffle
The APS’s obsession with decision making process suffocates innovation like a strangler fig.
Such behaviour is not limited to the APS. In her book Powerful – Building a culture of freedom and responsibility, Patty McCord, while COO of Netflix, noted that:
To my mind, people across the full spectrum of functions would love nothing more than to be free to tackle projects in the way they think will produce the best results in the shortest possible time. So often, though, they are thwarted by management second-guessing them or by inefficient systems.
…One of my favourite days was when I stood up in front of the company and said, “I’m going to get rid of our expense policy and I’m going to get rid of the travel policy, and I want you to just use good judgment about how you spend the company’s money. If it turns out to be a disaster, like the lawyers tell us it will, we’ll go back to the old system.”
…Again we found that people didn’t abuse the freedom. We saw that we could treat people like adults and that they loved it.
The Netflix travel allowance example has a useful parallel in the APS. Despite many Auditor-General reports about travel allowances and recommendations to streamline payment arrangements, improve transparency and limit fraudulent claims, there is no common system across the Commonwealth and no common understanding of travel entitlements or payment methods, leading to a proliferation of conflicting and unnecessary red tape.
There have been numerous attempts to tackle ‘red tape’ in the APS with The independent Review of Whole-of-Government Internal Regulation (Belcher Red Tape Review)[3]being a more recent report. The Office of Best Practice Regulation also seeks to improve decision making procedures and there are De-regulation units in almost every department. But these steps are processes designed to consider other processes, and do not consider a key driver of process – risk aversion.
Risk aversion – the responsibility side-step
As I have noted previously here in my article about the PGPA Act and PGPA Rule review draft report recommendations, the APS has not fully accepted the need to acknowledge and deal with risk, and commonly seeks to avoid it. Whether it is fear of failure, of being held accountable if things go wrong, or untrained ignorance, the APS hides, defers or transfers responsibility (usually through process) for decision making.
I won’t repeat my comments other than to note that since 2013, there has been an improved dialogue (albeit patchy) within the APS about risks and risk management. Optimism is still too often misplaced in the fact of having a risk framework (policies, guidance, documents with risk heat maps) rather than ensuring that risk controls are effective. Improving risk aversion culture requires substantially increased organisational investment across the APS, not just on a few SES.
Diversity and empowerment
Risk is also about trusting others to be part of decision making, such as enabling and empowering others to comment on, contribute to or control outcomes.
Inclusive leadership and diversity is sorely needed. Simple actions could include explicitly seeking alternative viewpoints from staff and direct reports, delegating real responsibility and encouraging measured risk taking, holding back on opinions or views until others signal their views, avoiding defensiveness when views are challenged, being more aware of biases and seeking input on ways of working and collaborating.[4]
Another way the APS could strongly signal a renewed commitment to diversity and trust would be to withdraw its current policy on APS staff engaging in social media activities.[5]The nine-page guide, which seeks to justify its existence based on the APS Code of Conduct and the need for APS staff to act and be seen to act impartially in relation to social media, is a control overreach. The guide has an unnecessary chilling effect on the ability of APS employees to be part of their community, which is out of proportion to the risk, when a tolerant and trusting approach would be more appropriate.
Pardon the jargon
The social media guideline also exemplifies the need for the APS to be clearer about what it stands for and what it does not. Risk aversion and process obsession is aided by vague and obscure bureaucratese.
The terminology for APS classifications is a case in point, with myriad terms for ELs or the SES. Similarly, while the PGPA Act sought to simplify the references to Commonwealth organisations and their leaders, the unfortunate terms chosen were entity and accountable authority. If the APS is to modernise itself, what is wrong with commonly understood language like CEO or board?
Not only can APS speak be alienating, it has a soporific and deadening effect on human beings.[6]
The more we listen to the public language of our times, the more we are driven to believe that it has been gutted for the specific purpose of denying us that agency, denying consequences, denying control over a living thing. We are left with the system, the shell: ‘a suit of armour… from which the knight departed long ago’
Recruitment – the specialist curse
Currently, there is a tangible perception that APS work is ‘special and different’, which permeates recruitment rounds to prevent talented external applicants, with no prior APS experience, from obtaining positions in the APS between APS5 and EL2.
External applicants replete with real life experience and skills required in the APS, such as project management, policy analysis, stakeholder engagement, facilities management and leadership skills are often unsuccessful due to factors such as not having ‘prior management experience’ in the public sector or not comfortably fitting APS selection criteria pigeon-holes.
This bias particularly applies to technical experts, who rarely, if ever, reach SES, further solidifying a lack of diversity. Those who survive their initiation and cope with an infantilising lack of autonomy also have to contend with the APS under-pricing their technical skills compared to the private market.
Fixing the APS - what next?
The issues identified are deep seated, complex, structural and cultural. They require changes to the employment, performance and reward frameworks, removing current entitlements and the accompanying entitlements mentality, replacing an obsession with process with a positive risk management approach, avoiding jargon, changing recruitment biases and actively embracing collaboration.
These challenges require moving the APS leadership from a hierarchical power-basedmodel to an inclusive-based environment, where leaders are accountable to their teams they manage and foster an inclusive approach which encourages responsibility and trust.
Footnotes
[1] The Lucifer Effect: understanding how good people turn evil, Philip Zimbardo
[2] Professor Peter Shergold AC, Learning from Failure, 12 August 2015.
[3] https://www.finance.gov.au/publications/reducingredtape/
[4] http://www.diversitypartners.com.au/new-blog/2018/7/24/what-do-inclusive-leaders-actually-do>
[5] Making public comment on social media – a guide for APS employees, APSC (https://www.apsc.gov.au/making-public-comment-social-media-guide-employees )
[6] Watson’s Dictionary of weasel words, contemporary clichés, cant and management jargon, Don Watson 2004, p5-6