Everyone is accountable for their promises — why can’t we hold our public institutions to the same standards?
When a business’s value proposition, corporate values, or business model are misaligned with the environment that it operates in, consumers cast their ballots for alternatives. Companies that fail to recognize this are out-competed, obsoleted, and replaced by successors that do. But companies that understand who their constituents are, what their needs are, and how to better serve them, undergo transformations to realign themselves with the customer. Even as children, we are taught to hold ourselves accountable; only when we hold ourselves accountable for our actions and their consequences, can we strive to change for the better. But on the other side of the spectrum, somewhere along the ever-winding and opaque chain of bureaucracy, the accountability for our public institutions has been lost. Election cycle after election cycle, we watch politicians perform the same song and dance — rhetoric of social and economic promises that would re-unite disenfranchised American citizens who are fatigued by the political system. But grandiose promises for drastic change aren’t what we need — we need sustained, measurable progress that we can hold our public institutions accountable for. And we achieve that the same way everywhere else — demonstrating that there are competitive alternatives and casting our ballots to compel change.
Governments and public institutions play an enormous role in our everyday lives. They provide us with public safety, education, healthcare, infrastructure, and many more countless services that we depend on for our basic survival needs. These tax funded services are non-negotiable and the majority of society do not have the financial resources to pursue alternatives (e.g., private schools, private security, toll roads, etc.). Despite the criticality of these services and their impact on our daily lives, we rarely have any influence to address the quality, reliability, and efficiency of these services. The only true monopoly that exists is our government, and when we don’t have the opportunity to exercise the power of our consumer choices on the most important service provider in our society, we are left with unmitigable erosion of the quality and affordability, a phenomenon that is unravelling before our very eyes.
The private sector operates under a very different set of rules and parameters — much more unforgiving than the seemingly never-ending string of second chances in the public sector. Businesses remain competitively viable because a minimum number of customers consider them important enough in their portfolio of consumption choices. To achieve this, businesses make decisions on a continuous basis on how to allocate resources to improve their products and services, not just for the current customer but the future customer. Whether it is a restaurant revamping its interior design and menu items, or a multinational automotive manufacturer making its foray into the electric vehicle market, successful businesses constantly challenge their status quo and undergo cycles of transformations. Private sector organizations are accountable to their customers, or they have none at all. So how do we apply the principles of the private sector to create more accountability in the public sector, arguably the most important business of all?
There are three key enablers to cultivate accountability: transparency, measurement, and change-driven culture. Transparency is the first step to building a process that reinforces accountability. If we don’t know what the organization does, how can we know what it is accountable to deliver? Creating total transparency of what the purpose of this organization is and how it operates (e.g., where and how it is spending its money, how it is governed, who governs it) sets the baseline for us to evaluate its effectiveness. The next step is measurement — now that we know what the organization does and how it does it, how do we know whether it is doing a good, mediocre, or terrible job? We can only know by defining the criteria of success and establishing performance measurement indicators that support those outcomes. These indicators should be objective metrics that we all agree upon, rooted on unbiased and high quality data. Further, it is not enough simply to establish metrics that measure a specific outcome (e.g., crime rates, literacy rates) — we need to establish metrics that measure and drive corrective actions and behavioural change before the outcomes occur (e.g., student attendance rates, average incidence response time). Finally, once we’ve understood the organization’s operations and the measurement of success, the organization and all of its stakeholders need to foster a culture of continuous change. If the data is conveying that there is a problem, let us make sure that there is a resolution process and alignment for execution. Because only then, will there be real, measurable progress.
This year, “Defund the Police Campaign” took the country by storm. Many thought of it as a punitive, draconian, and unproductive approach in addressing systemic, behavioural / cultural issues plaguing the police force. While the slogan that may suggest a hostile approach, the purpose of the campaign was not to punitively downsize the police force, but rather to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of our spend across all public safety institutions / programs. By demonstrating that there are viable and competitive alternatives to the incumbent, it incentivizes the police force to conduct a sobering review of its internal practices and genuinely reform towards a better organization. When the status quo is not working, corporations re-allocate budgets, divest in products and assets, restructure their organizations, and adopt new processes and cultures — they do this all by first getting back to the basics, understanding the needs of the customer and how to serve them better. If we, the consumers and shareholders, are holding corporations accountable for their actions and results, there’s no reason why we can’t respectfully demand the same for all of our public institutions. We begin that by requesting for organizational transparency, collective measurement of their performance, and internal alignment for continuous change — not just during a national election, but relentlessly during governance.
Just as increasing incarceration rates combined with continued incidences of police brutality are demonstrating that our current approach to public safety isn’t working, education is becoming less and less affordable due to bloated operating and administrative budgets. Hospitals running at sub-optimal efficiency may be denying critical healthcare to patients or unnecessarily expanding their capacity and driving up overall cost of healthcare. Militaries buying and maintaining defence assets, enabled by enlarging federal defence budgets, without contemplating the need and purpose for these expenditures are occupying critical resources that can be deployed to address more urgent and pressing issues in our societies. These are a few examples of the ineffectiveness and inefficiencies of our public sector. While inequality may be a pervasive consequence of free markets and capitalism, the ineptitude of the public sector is not only failing to mitigate the effects, but potentially exacerbating them.
Election cycles and tenant rotations in the White House are not enough — we need systematic reform of our public institutions that extends beyond partisan government control. The objective of the reform is to implement widespread accountability across the public sector, starting with the democratization of information and instituting full transparency of their operations. Not only should information be available, they should be easily accessible. Same way that a public company releases annual reports of their financial and operational performance, public institutions should announce their operating budgets, strategic plans, and performance reports every year. Only then, can we begin to progress towards a continuous improvement and sustained upwards trajectory. The two most powerful tools we have as consumers and citizens to hold our institutions accountable are our capital and our vote — let’s make sure we deploy them with every opportunity our government and free market has afforded us, to help them better serve us.
