Peter Bridgman sent me this article on risk management a few weeks ago and obtained permission from the publishers to load it on our web site. This quote gives you a good sense of what it is about.
It is very doubtful that good governance causes good performance — the relationship is probabilistic: a well-governed organisation has a better likelihood of good performance than a poorly governed one. The relationship also has reciprocal elements: good performance is likely to facilitate good governance. Any contest around this idea is fueled by divergent views about the causal relationships between performance and management processesPeter goes on to use the Cynefin model (he cites it but does not use the model explicitly, although it is referenced). It is well worth reading, illustrated from current issues in Queensland. The conclusion is interesting
Policy challenges include reducing the volume of rules; integrating the accountability institutional arrangements; reducing the number of interactions required to address governance issues; allowing budgetary flexibility so that departments can experiment with reduced risk of governance failure.This relates to what I consider one of the most important challenges facing government worldwide, and one to which complex adaptive systems theory provides a means to the answer: How do we do more, with significantly less?
Comments (2)
How do we do more with significantly less?
Maybe the best way to do more with less is quit playing our current game, scrap all the rules and begin anew?
We seem to add more and more rules to compensate for our increasingly litigous society. Look at SarbOx, the parabolic trend of malpractice premiums, warnings that a cup of coffee might be hot and now the subprime mess.
Perhaps adding some personal responsibility might be a good starting point.
(I could just go on and on).
Posted by David | June 13, 2007 1:19 AM
Posted on June 13, 2007 01:19
I was Principal of a Tasmania Primary school of 670 students. In such schools it was typical that 80-85% of the available time of the teaching staff would go to working directly with students. 'Teaching staff' includes the principal and senior staff although it is very rare for principals of such schools to actually teach: principals and senior staff generally have important organizational and administrative tasks to do.
Teaching staff are provided on a formula basis and we were on the cap: proportionally we had less teaching staff than most schools. Despite this, we were able to use 97% of the time of teaching staff in working directly with students. As principal I taught 0.4 full-time equivalent (FTE), the two assistant principals taught 0.8 FTE and everyone else taught full-time.
In short, we were able to do a lot more with what we had (and with less than most similar schools had).
Interestingly, in our approach we adopted a reduced set of 'rules', for example everyone including professional and other staff, students, and visitors had the same simple 'job description':
1. Know what is happening,
2. Work with others to improve what is happening,
3. Make it easier for the next person to do well
The results speak for themselves.
Ivan
Posted by Ivan Webb | June 19, 2007 12:26 AM
Posted on June 19, 2007 00:26