Motivation and Purpose in the Public Sector

Salimah Samji Welcome, everyone. Those of you here in the room and those of you joining us virtually through Zoom, my name is Salimah Samji, and I am the executive director for Building State Capability. We’re delighted to be able to co-host this event with the People Lab and Elizabeth Linos is here, our faculty director for the People Lab. At BSC, we believe in resolving public problems with purpose. We train public sector teams around the world to work iteratively to solve their own nominated problems. This involves teaching teams how to build psychological safety, felt accountability, trust, to be curious, to ask questions, and also actively listen to the answers and how to take action. Taking small steps, turning moments into momentum. So it’s a great joy today that we have Dan Honig with us today to talk to us about motivation and purpose in the public sector, because it really is extremely important in getting what we want done. Dan is BSC associate. He is also an associate professor at Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy and the University College London. Dan will begin with a short presentation and then and then Elizabeth Linos will have a conversation with him. And then we’ll open it up for Q&A. For Q&A, we have a mic that will be here, so you can just come and line up to ask your questions. We just ask that you end your question with a question mark and that’s how we will roll with that. Welcome, Dan, let’s give him a round of applause.

Dan Honig Thank you. Thank you so much all for being here. It is just an honor to be back here. You know, I got my Ph.D. here, which shows that, you know, some Ph.D. graduates here don’t amount to much, but, you know, it’s still a warm and welcoming place to have you back. So and thank you, in particular to the People Lab and Elizabeth Linos and to the Building State Capability program and Salimah Samji for for putting this together. So let me talk for just, I don’t know, 15 minutes or so about about this book. And I guess what I what I think we might need to think more about if we want to make the world of public management better. So basic framework of the book, right? So stylized ways we can approach trying to manage but not quite blocking. I’ll go here. So, you know, in blue at the top of the screen is a kind of stylized empowerment managerial route, right? And in red at the bottom is a compliance route. So most management practice, I think we see in the world today has a kind of logic of compliance, right? So that is to say we’ve got someone who’s not going to do the right thing. We’re going to force them to do the right thing by using monitoring and incentives and penalties to point them, to force them in the right direction so they act in consonance with the mission. And so we get better performance. But what if, in fact, folks kind of want to do good stuff, right? What if they are interested already in fulfilling the mission of the organization? We might want to take a different approach, right? And so we might want what I call supportive management practices, practices that allow autonomy, cultivate competence and create connection to peers and purpose. So that’s not to suggest that this is binary, right? So, you know, like most things in the world, management, most management is going to be a mix. So this is kind of if you think of it as a ratio of empowerment to compliance, we can imagine worlds in which an organization functions best not at the extremes, right? But that the size of the shape of this graph depends on the nature of what you’re trying to do. If you’re trying to do stuff where it’s really easy to monitor and measure what’s going on, you know, collecting rubbish, collecting the trash, right? Then probably the peak performance comes more on the compliance side of the house, right? If instead we’re trying to do something where we can’t see all the things we want to get done, well then probably peak performance is more on the empowerment side of the House. And let’s think about kind of the differences between those tasks. So lots of evidence in the book. I’m just going to touch on a few things in the next few minutes just to flag. This is not a book only about my own work, but that draws in all the existing research that I think speaks in any way to the topic theory, including that of a number of people in the room. So five things I think I learned doing this work that I hope might be useful. The first management changes I’m sorry, motivation changes in response to management, right. It’s not that there are good folks and bad folks. You know, as Dolly Parton memorably said, somebody who comes up often, I’m sure at the Kennedy School, you know, she memorably said, some of us are saints and some of us are sinners. And for all the rest of us, it sure does depend. Right. And one of the things I think it depends on is, in fact, management. People respond. People change in response to management. So one kind of illustration of this, a profile from the book from a woman named Judy Parfitt. So Judy was the head of human resources for the South Africa Revenue Service just after the end of the apartheid era. Right. So faced with, as she put it, a national front aligned. You know, employees with a workforce that was not was associated with kind of the old regime and indeed was quite low performing. You might think she needed to get rid of everyone to turn the organization around. But that’s not what happened at all. Instead, what happened was the workforce came to buy in to the idea of a new South Africa to believe in and identify with this purpose and what was required to do that? The experience of feeling a gentle, a feeling that their actions made a difference and had a meaningful, positive contribution to the work the agency was doing. So this echoes what I find in my own work in Thailand. These are in fact four different buildings, four different district offices, extremely hierarchical, looks exactly the same from the outside. But when you go inside these buildings, you find managers who are managing differently. And the more these managers are managing for empowerment, the more they are able to deliver on welfare to citizens, the more satisfied they are as employees, the more they want to stay in the job and stay in the place and feel driven driven to serve the public. This makes South Africa and Thailand just like everywhere else, right? So looking at I put together the world’s largest data set of sort of civil service surveys. Right. So we’re talking about over 4 million observations, over 2000 agency observations, five countries, dozen plus years. And we find indeed that the higher the level of a supportive management project, a supportive management practice within an agency, the higher is the level of motivation in that same agency. And as management changes, so does motivation. Right? So here is what I just showed you as a line. And it is just simply the case that as managers, as managerial practices rise, as support, managerial practices rise. So, too does the motivation of the same agency versus what it felt like last year. Right. Management, of course, though, is not just about today’s personnel. It’s also about tomorrow’s. Because management attracts or repels the already mission motivated. And here I’ll turn to my hometown of Detroit. Depicted in this picture is the English translation of Detroit’s motto, which is We hope for better things. It shall rise from the ashes. And it is, you know, was written after a historic physical fire. But I think anyone who knows much of the Detroit story knows that is a place where we have had hope for better things for a long time. But from a relatively low base. And one of those is the care given to Detroit’s most vulnerable children. So working with people with Wayne State University’s School of Social Work faculty, that’s the City University of Detroit. Essentially, we look at people who joined the Child Protective Services workforce, and we find that the people who care the most, people who go in saying, you know what, I want to help these children thrive, they leave the fastest. The more you care, the faster you go. Right. Why is that happening? Well, it’s happening because they enter this job and they find out that this is not a job where they can, in fact, feel a genetic about helping kids. This is a job where there are mountains of paperwork and every incentive is to take children out of the home as quickly as possible, because the only real risk from an accountability standpoint is the risk of leaving a child in an hour too long and something bad happening to that child, which is absolutely tragic. I’m not saying it is not it’s not the only thing that is tragic. It is also tragic to pit children who may not need it away from their families and into an underresourced foster care system. And, you know, if we end this again, kind of like the story I told you before, makes Detroit just like everywhere else. Right? So, again, going back to that data, this is kind of a stylized depiction of what we see in the data. The more you care, the more mission motivated you are, the more responsive you are to management practice. Right? So if I go in because I really care about the job and I find that I can’t actually get the job done, I like those child Protective Services officers in Detroit leave the fastest. But if I go in and I really care about the job and I find that this job is one where I really can have some impact, well then I’m even more likely to stay then than it is somebody else. Right? So we need to manage not just for today’s personnel but for tomorrow. Three whenever we have a kind of clear well identified as those of you who are students here will know, like, you know, kind of we have a rigorous comparison of two different way of going about reforming a system. And we have something that looks like a compliance oriented reform, something that looks like an empowerment oriented reform. Over and over again, the empowerment reform seems to work better, so much so that there are like quite convoluted explanations in some of these papers as to how that how that might have happened. And this is, I should say it’s something we need a lot more work on. But let me focus on just one of them. Right. So this last case, so in Pakistan, looking at procurement in in Punjab, some some leading economists look at giving people more autonomy for communities with more autonomy. Right. So that’s an empowerment-oriented reform. And in the other arm, they look at paying for performance, right? So you save the government money, you’re going to make some of that money back into your own pocket. Right. And I’ll be honest, when I first heard about the study, I was like, well, you know, I think the pay for performance is going to work better because, you know, just giving people autonomy is not empowering them. You need to take an active managerial process to empower. And also like 10% of salary is a lot of a lot of salary. And these are really simple, honorable things. Paper pens write things that should be really tractable to clients. But even here it’s the autonomy treatment that ends up having the remarkable and sustainable results that ends up saving more money. And why is that? You know, it’s kind of problematic for my theory. Actually, empowerment is working better than I think it should be working right based on what I told you before is because even for those jobs where a lot of compliance is optimal. It seems to me we often find ourselves having even more than that optimal point. So shift back towards more empowerment is helping because we’re on that far right side of the image I showed you before, and thus we’re coming back up the curve as we move in an empowering direction. And you know, I guess one of the central messages for me that I hope folks take away from the book is that compliance oriented accountability can and often does undermine performance. And it’s not it’s not, you know, neutral. It’s not just the transaction cost of having to file the reports. It’s actually making things worse. The things that we’re pretending are making things better. Let me take one U.S. example. So Hurricane Sandy, you know, struck the east coast of America about a decade ago, dozen years ago. And the US Department of Housing and Urban Development was given an appropriation to do so. Housing reconstruction in the earthquake zone. Right. The Office of the Inspector General was given an identical sum. Right. So first we might ask ourselves, do we really wanna spend half the money checking on the use of the other half or actually, more than half the money? Because in fact, even the HUD part of the money, some of it’s going to be used for administration and compliance and things like that. Right. So is that an efficient use of funds? One question we could ask ourselves, even if we ignore that question, what happens as a result? Well, if I know that the auditor general is going to have the inspector general is going to have people who can check every detail, every i dotted, every t crossed, I’m going to need to require that of citizens so I can show it to the inspector general. Right. And if I’m going to show it to citizens, I have to go to these people who’ve just lost their homes and say, Prove to me that you own the home and how much your stuff is worth. And you say, well, you know, mate, I would love to do that. But, you know, I just lost my home. All my stuff was in the house. You know, I don’t have the proof that I would have had a week ago because of the thing that’s bringing you here. Right. And I’m frustrated. Even if I then can pull up my phone, Dropbox, or go to the safe deposit box and prove it to you. Right. But I’m even more frustrated when I can’t prove it to you. Who do you think Can’t prove it. Is it people who are richer or poorer in the community who are less likely to be able to reach that to access this documentation? Right. So and that’s exactly what happens. So this is the then serving senior advisor for disaster recovery at HUD. And he, you know, is saying like, look, the poor the family is, the less likely they have this stuff. This is an equity problem. It is also taking a lot of our time on reporting, which means we have less time to spend on actually delivering the citizens. We ask why are people frustrated even when they get benefits? You know the state is giving out so much. Why aren’t people happy about it? Why are we not seeing a dividend? Well, to me, this is part of the answer. And, you know, it is wonderful that their mission driven bureaucrats like Trey are willing to stick through and fight the system. But imagine if we had a system they didn’t have to fight. Imagine how much better system could be. This status quo is all over the world. This is my friend Erin McDonnell in a wonderful book. I highly recommend saying like, look, the idea that we need to pull power up to the top is what we see everywhere. Yeah. And it is wrong. We know it’s wrong. Right. And work joint with Elizabeth Lee notes, in fact, and others. We survey people around the world and we find that the same pattern kind of everywhere, right? People feel that they are engaging in much more compliant. The majority of people feel that they are being managed in a way that is compliance oriented. Right. So you are seeing a graph of kind of the distribution of people. Right. And as you will note, many more people are on the compliance side, despite the fact that most of the things government does are things for which that level of compliance is likely inefficient and inappropriate if what we want is the best possible performance. Luckily, another way is possible and we can get to that way. Often even without reducing our current compliance monitoring system. So it may sound confusing. I’ve been making this sound like a 1 to 1 trade off for a little while, and at some to some extent they are right. So you’re at a point like D on this graph, you’re only going to be able to get more empowerment if you get less compliance. Right? So but most agencies in my experience and actually I would love to hear the wisdom in the room on this, are not just mismanaged, they’re under managed. Right? There’s room to go in the sense that we could do more things before we hit that threshold, before we hit that tradeoff. Most agencies are a place like A or B on this graph. Right? And that means we can get to the frontier any which way we want, which doesn’t mean it’s easy. It doesn’t mean it can happen. And there are just so many ways we can do it right. So. Last bit of the book collects those strategies. I’m not going to go through them in detail here. But just to say, you know, some of them are as simple as getting people together and saying, well, what are we here for? And you know, why? What drew us to the job? What is going to bring us together? Of course, we can also think about changing the formal rules and think about how accountability is leading us astray. And we should probably do that, too, if and where we can. But not being able to, you know, sort of revolution revolutionize the system is no excuse for not getting started. There are so many ways to get started. For managers to think about individuals, for them to think about teams, for senior leaders, to empower agencies as a whole different ways of recruiting, thinking about motivation in that recruitment process. ET cetera, etc.. There are many, many, many roads up the mountain. Yes, my friend Dolly helped me make this. There’s so many roads up the mountain, you know, to the summit of sort of empowered people who feel their jobs be meaningful. And in fact, that is also what is very frequently going to be better for the public performance we all seek. You know, this gentleman let me close with where the book opens, which is with this gentleman named Joseph Roberts. I took this picture myself. I took this picture while we were being evacuated from Senegal at the very beginning of the pandemic. Right. So a group of me and my fellow citizens sitting on a plane feeling scared about where we were going to go. Senegal had closed its borders. Right. So we had to take a US State Department flight out. And a remarkable thing happened. Just a group of people on a plane started applauding a bureaucrat for doing his job right. I was incredibly thankful that he was here that day, that he was there that day. So were my fellow citizens. And when I went back after getting many bureaucratic permissions from the US Department of State, when I went back and spoke to him some months later, he told me what you see here, which is fighting for lives, accomplishing anything. I didn’t feel like I was trusted. I probably wouldn’t be along for this job. No wonder what he means. Of course, no one mission motivated. No one who really cares about the job would. And he’s right. And it turns out that makes him just like everyone else. If we want a better public service. The easiest thing to do is to stop getting in our own way. There are so, so, so many people who want to help serve the public. We should let them. Thank you.

Elizabeth Linos There’s a standing ovation of governments everywhere. Hi, everyone. I’m Elizabeth Linos. I’m an associate professor here at the Kennedy School. And Dan is a good friend of mine who I look up to for not just this book, your previous book, too, and all of your research. So thank you for being here.

Dan Honig Such a pleasure to be here. And the feeling is very mutual.

Elizabeth Linos Great. So what I want to start us off where you left off with that quote from Joseph. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about what made you feel the need to write this book at this time?

Dan Honig Yeah. So, I mean, lots of places it started. So but maybe one of them is. So I found myself in Dhaka 6 or 7 years ago at a kind of gathering of ministers and senior bureaucrats organized by IGC, which some of you will know, Right. And, you know, one of the speakers asked for a word cloud, right? So what’s the first thing you think of when you think of public service? Right. And this word cloud. Was full of sort of, you know, authoritarian, you know, unapproachable, you know, uncaring. Right. And I was like, this should be the most positively selected group for thinking, well, of this community, I could imagine. And you all have also bought into the narrative that as soon as I start thinking about the individual, you know, all of a sudden I lose the human right? It’s like, you know, I was at an event with Tony Blair last week and he.

Elizabeth Linos As one does.

Dan Honig No. Well, it wasn’t just me and him, other other a lot of lovely people in the audience. And he was he was saying, you know, I’ve heard him say before offhandedly, like, you know, I worked I just had the most incredible experience. I was lucky to have the best bureaucrats in the world working with me. And I’ve heard plenty of other leaders say similar things. But, I mean, they can’t be right. They can’t all be getting, you know, the best possible draws. It just turns out that if you take people who say, Hey, I want to give my life to making things better, I want that to be my professional identity and to give them a chance to make things better. They get really excited and lots of good stuff happens and we are just leaving value on the table all over the place. And I wanted. And when I went looking for a place to kind of start citing and, you know, give people that message, I found, you know, there are bits and pieces, but I guess I felt that, you know, there was a missing link in putting it together a little bit, sort of skimming.

Elizabeth Linos Yeah, absolutely. And I think it is. It is a book that allows you to kind of see the big picture and give kind of the data and the evidence on individual cases, which is why I think it’s it’s good at helping individualize and humanize the people who do this work, but also tells a bigger story than what we’ve seen elsewhere. You know, one thing that you already reference, which I think is interesting, is that this is scholarship that is really important to the public management community, but it’s also really important to people who are in government right now. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, as you talk to leaders both in the UK and the US, but also globally about this work, what’s the part that feels harder to convince them of or where is that? What are the misconceptions that are coming up for them or pushback that you’re getting about what this would mean if they actually took the learnings from this book and implemented them in their own agencies?

Dan Honig It’s really interesting. That’s a great question. You know, it occurs to me you spend a lot of time talking to leaders about extremely similar things. And I guess I’d be curious what your thoughts are like both about this book, but also from your own experiences.

Elizabeth Linos Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Honig I mean, there’s always a risk, you know, and, you know, get in conversation.

Elizabeth Linos Well, let me let me say this. So one is I want to be handing out your book to two various government agencies that we work with at the People Lab. One thing I think that I’ve learned from from your research. Which I think is a pervasive misconception. And it’s partly because of the way academia is structured, is that there’s like. Countries, entire countries or entire governments where the narrative about public servants is like, how do we reduce corruption? And then other narratives, which is like where we support kind of public service motivation. And I think your research is really clear, and you said it a couple of times. I do want to highlight what Dan was saying, that this is the same everywhere, or at least the differences across countries are smaller than the differences than people imagined. And I think kind of in the in the Western context where we do see people talking about public service motivation, a new divide has emerged, emerged and no, no, I have to finish the sentence. In one video, it emerged in executive education classes I’ve taught where people will say, like kids these days, right? So even in environments where we have a narrative around public service and government, the divide is now, well, we the oldies cared about service. But the younger generation isn’t motivated by these things similar to like we in the US care about motivation, but in the global South we really should be focusing on reducing corruption. So those are kind of misconceptions that I think keep coming up where it feels scary to manage for empowerment in the way that you do. But I don’t know if that’s that’s kind of what you’re saying in your work.

Dan Honig Yeah. I mean, so I’ve said a number of times, maybe not on video, so this might be the first online video that that, you know, poor countries get corruption. Only rich countries get culture. Right. You know, only one of these actors gets gets to have a conversation about what really drives people. Right. But that’s I mean, to another place this book came from, you know, my work with the government of Liberia most substantially, but also in South Sudan and Somalia and a number of other places led me to think this is the same story. You know, does that mean the people are different, the contexts are different? I’m not saying there are no differences between countries, but, you know, these dynamics are the same everywhere. And, you know, I would say the first misconception is that kind of globally for the individual manager, though, I think it’s more this kind of like belief of disempowerment. Right? So like, you know, I you know, if you’re talking to me, you a little bit bought it maybe lots of people aren’t. But you know, if you taking the time to approach me, write me an email and like, you know, we set up a, you know, day and I read the book. I’m really excited. Let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about it. You people tend to think that they have no agency to make this better. And that is true of the kind of individual street level bureaucrat in that language. But it is also true of the minister, right? The minister is like, you know, I got to report to somebody and, you know, a couple of years and I have these other priorities. It’s like, okay, well let’s think about, I mean, we all face constraints, but we also have agency and let’s think about what is in the gift of your agency and the work you can do and the momentum you can build. And, you know, one of the things that I think organizations like The People Lab or at Georgetown, I work with the Better Government lab or the Building State Capability team here, right. Is a way of kind of creating more space for those good things to happen. And I think we have underutilized the Academy’s ability to change the incentive of people inside government or the the prices almost the political economy decision of adoption. And I think there are a lot of people who are, I don’t know, empowerment, curious. And and the question is, how can we convert that to actual meaningful changes and how can we create proof points to show that, you know, another way, another world is possible?

Elizabeth Linos Yeah, I think one of the things that is so striking with with your research is exactly that point, right? So if we go from these like, conceptual ideas that like empowerment is good and compliance might be we might be over indexing on on compliance. For me, it was very striking to see that variation, right? So like when you change management practices, you see this very strong correlation with with levels of motivation and thinking of empowerment as a recruitment and retention tool, I think opens up a whole world of of avenues for government that we haven’t seen. I’m going to ask you in a little bit to come up for questions, but before we do that, what would you say to people and this is a hard question, I think that say like.

Dan Honig Good because the other ones were really easy.

Elizabeth Linos What would you say to people who say, yeah, okay, great. Like all this empowerment mumbo jumbo is wonderful, but you can’t eat autonomy. You can’t pay your rent with authentic purpose. What would happen if we switched government to worrying so much about this type of management that it moved away from kind of the structural ways that we need to improve what it means to be a government worker so that we can recruit and retain people who don’t have the privilege of caring about mission and purpose. And I’m I’m just making like whatever this is that people complain about when they complain about empowerment.

Dan Honig Yeah, I wouldn’t say that. I would say that that person is treating as substitutes things that are compliments. Right? So that is to say we currently do that. What you just said a lot, right? We do not give people the wages that would be concomitant with the skills. Right. So, in fact, and this is also a global phenomenon, there’s some great data from a mutual friend of ours and his team at the World Bank’s bureaucracy lab. Right. Which shows that actually the public sector wage premium for low skilled jobs is positive. Right. In most countries, if you are a janitor, you make more in the public sector than the private sector. But if you have high skills, right, if you’re in leadership management, you have the kind of those kinds of things. You’re the sort of Kennedy School folks, right? Certainly of the system. But even, you know, even folks who are coming in with bachelor’s degrees and above. The public sector wage premium runs the other way. You make less money on average in the public sector. It’s not true in every country, but it’s true in almost every country in which they’ve left. Right. So we currently do exactly what you said and they’re still motivated people, right? My, if we raised the level of pay, we would recruit more motivated people, right? Because indeed, most people the idea that motivation, that’s another kind of misconception I think we have in the world. Not at all from you. I mean, your work demonstrates amply that, but that, like, people either care about purpose or money, right? I guess. I think I care about purpose. Maybe I’m wrong, but if Georgetown came along and said, Look, Dan, you’re so into purpose, we’re just going to cut your salary by 95% and like, you’re going to be fired because there’s values and then you’ll give more back and will distribute will be public. You and I would say, yeah, I think I might find something else to do. I’ll be honest with you. You know, I think we should pay people well, we should change structures, but we should not imagine that work is just a search for money. It is also a search for meaning. But that doesn’t mean it’s only a search for meaning. And incorporating both those things is what’s going to get us to a better public service.

Elizabeth Linos That’s a great answer to the question, you have a bunch of governments that are listening to you right now. Some of them I don’t know how much you can say on record. What’s one thing that you hope people will do tomorrow coming out of reading this book and being inspired by your work?

Dan Honig I hope they’ll make a plan right? So I hope they will think about the concrete steps they can make, they can do to make things better. I hope they will reach out for help, you know, to to me, to you write to Salimah and Matt and the Building State Capability team, you know, to all the folks who are going to be excited to help them do better. And I hope that once things are actually tried, once we actually pilot things that we rigorously focus on figuring out what’s worked and what hasn’t and build a global knowledge base to help show that another way. It’s not just that, another way. It’s possible that it is already happening and we can build on it. And I think that there are, as you say, there are people at various levels of government in a wide range of countries who are excited about this idea. You know, I hope, you know, I hope that this book is one small brick in a foundation of, you know, a larger social change in how we think about how this works. And that improves folks lives. And anyone who wants to think in serious and concrete ways about how to put that infrastructure in place, you know where to find me.

Elizabeth Linos Well, let’s open it up to questions. As you heard from Salimah, if you can line up behind these microphones. Let me say two things as people start lining up. One is, Dan is an excellent example of what it means to do a Ph.D. in public policy here. But I do want to recognize, especially for the students in the room, which is someone who can contribute directly to academic scholarship, but also is contributing directly to real government practice in a way that’s very, very relevant. So thank you for modeling what that can look like for academia as a whole.

Dan Honig What’s your PhD? Again.

Elizabeth Linos My PhD is also in public policy.

Dan Honig Oh I see, it’s wonderful. Yeah, that’s great. So an example that I have learned from.

Elizabeth Linos Great. Let’s take questions.

Student 1 Thank you so much. I really appreciate this forum that builds the capability put together. So I appreciate your work and all that you’re doing. I’m a social worker, a licensed social worker in New York City. Shanequa Moore, MC/MPA student. And it’s interesting because I left government to do mission driven work. I didn’t feel like it accommodated what I wanted to bring, the change that I wanted to bring. And so I ended up leaving state government, being a state rep in New York for about eight years to operate my nonprofit full time, which does a lot of mission driven work. But on the other side, I’m also now working with managers and leaders within government, sort of training them how to do mission driven work. And we I hear a lot of these managers talking about feeling burnt out and not feeling like there’s a place to do this kind of work in a government that doesn’t necessarily accommodate it. So closing with a question, Salimah said, How do what is your advice to people like myself that may be training managers and leaders within government? How do we sort of take this framework and start to empower them within it in a government that may not necessarily be ready to adopt this?

Dan Honig Yeah. So, thank you. So thank you for your for your service. I mean, in the way that we talk about in other lines of work, but should talk about this line of work. You know, if you were in touch with a bunch of managers in the system who are feeling burned out. So the first thing I would say and this draws actually a bit on Elizabeth Linos’s is working and the People Lab’s work, you know, connect them, connect them to each other and start to figure out what are the kind of common things that they’re facing. Right. You know, a system is more responsive as a collective. The managers in the system have power that as individuals, they don’t. And your ability to stand between those managers and the system and say, hey, look, here’s what we are anonymously hearing, right. Is a way of making legible the problem. First step to any solution is recognizing you have a problem. Right? So, you know, it’s the first step of Alcoholics Anonymous for a reason, right? You know, recognize the disease, recognize the issue. And, you know, I think that those connections will be a form of support for those managers. But also you have the ability and the real power and opportunity to help the system, see what it’s doing wrong and find ways to make it. Thank you.

Student 2  Thank you, then, for your interesting presentation. My name is Arif from Indonesia. I’m a visiting scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. And yeah, I have a question about the empowerment reform that you have talked about before. Could you elaborate more on this concept and how, when this concept puts into the weak states institution, like, for instance, in my country, in Indonesia, so.

Dan Honig Where in Indonesia?

Student 2 Indonesia?

Dan Honig What part?

Student 2 In Java. Yeah.

Dan Honig What city?

Student 2 Bandung. So, you know, that.

Elizabeth Linos Dan knows Indonesia.

Student 2 Okay. Great. In other words, what might the what are the challenges that government may face to shift from the empowerment based reform from the compliance based reform to empowerment based reform? Thank you very much.

Dan Honig Thank you. So you asked a question as if it was Indonesia or perhaps developing country specific. But I think actually the central challenges are common, which doesn’t mean they’re identical. Which is, you know, when I give up control, I, I now am empowering, you know, a number of people. And if it if there is some number of people I empower more than, say the 30 people I trust the most in the world maybe the 300 I trust the most in the world, somebody is going to do something wrong. Right. You know, if somebody is going to do something wrong, hopefully that’s well intentioned. Right. But in fact, if we empower enough people, someone’s going to do something wrong that’s not well intentioned. And so, you know, one thing I suspect you as well, Elizabeth, I’m very frequently asked to speak these days about, you know, how can government learn from failure? Right. And I have lots of thoughts about that question. But before I answer it, I always say first, we need government to be able to learn from success. And currently we have a system where, you know, if we empowered 100 school principals in Bandung, right. And 96 of them used that empowerment to make things better. And two of them acted within the rules but had no net effect. And two of them stole, you know, ₹10,000. Right. We would find that we would call that a failure because that would show up on the front page of the paper. Right. And we would say and, you know, on average, the minister in charge, the deputy minister in charge would say, you’re right. We should never have let this happen. We’re going to make sure it’s never going to happen again. And the only way to make sure it never happens again is to remove the empowerment that allowed this to happen. Right. That allowed the success to happen. So, you know, I would say that that risk is not is totally known to the people at the top of the system and they see it ahead of time. Right. I’m not I’m not providing them new information. You know what? I. And and that kind of shadow of accountability risk means that I don’t want to take the bet. Right. We should be extremely, you know, in the background here, I hear a kind of like in weaker systems, people will act with fewer controls first. I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence for that. You know, I think people without control, some of them act wrongly in all systems. Right. But most of them act well. And so we want to be careful. We want to think about how what we do when and what the sports are and how we check on how things are going on when we find those two principles. Right. We should treat them, you know, as the criminals they are. I’m not saying we should tolerate waste, fraud and abuse. Not at all. Right. But that is different than saying that the only acceptable level of waste, fraud and abuse is zero. We know that driving cars leads to accidents. We even know that sometimes people drink and drive cars. The existence of drunk driving does not lead us to not allow people to drive cars. But the basic equivalent of that is how we treat the public sector. And as a result, no one goes anywhere. Thank you.

Elizabeth Linos I think one thing that you said in your Hurricane Sandy example that really resonated with me is something that we saw during Covid as well, right? Which is at some point we allowed for less documentation in the interests of speed. But it was this like very brief moment in U.S. government kind of values alignment. That said, we need to get people help on the social safety net or other programs. We’re not going to ask for the same level of documentation because we don’t have time for that. And then as soon as there was a fraud case, a lot of states flipped back. So there’s a question about how do we maintain that sense of measuring success as opposed to just worrying about failure? I don’t have an answer, but other people will have questions. But I think it is an important thing that we’re seeing this this idea of the shadow of accountability is going to is going to stick with me.

Dan Honig  And it seems to me. Well, just a second. But it seems to me there’s something in kind of rebuilding social contracts there to, you know, in the relationship between government and citizens. We’ve taught citizens to expect that what government does is, you know, deliver and hold accountable in a kind of, you know, command and control way. You know, I would be curious if in your work you find, you know, in your work with governance, what do you see is like seeds for hope in them.

Elizabeth Linos I think there’s there’s a lot of people who are starting to think about. The question of trust that kind of underlies that and what it means for a government to tell its residents that you’re part of the solution. We’re going to co-create or co-produce the services that you want. And depending on where you are on the political spectrum, that’s going to take different forms. But in some places where we work, we see, you know, what does it mean to actually scale up participatory governance in other places? We hear from leaders that say we’re going to put the power back in the hands of residents to decide how they want their government to act, but also that comes with responsibility. And and underlying that, it is these these underlying questions of trust and mistrust not only in the government, but also in each other. Right. So like in places where you think people who benefit from government programs are inherently not trustworthy, you might create a whole different system than if you inherently believe the people who benefit from…

Student 3 Yeah. Yes. I’m actually really glad you took that turn, because my question’s in a similar vein. And great book. Big fan would recommend purchase.

Dan Honig Wise man, I can tell. Listen to this guy.

Student 3 I think one of the paradoxes for me is that while there is a general sentiment among bureaucrats that the compliance approach is stifling and really difficult, to a certain extent, the compliance approach is the result of the democratic process and voters preferences say to crack down on waste, fraud and abuse or to avoid corruption. And so to a certain extent, we as the public managing the bureaucracy expect compliance, even though we wouldn’t love working under our compliance system. So I’m wondering if you can both speak to why you think there is that mismatch. And B, how can public managers also manage the expectations of the public when they’re transforming systems and perhaps communicate what this model can do better? Yeah, that is the great question. That is like a book length question that I will not I will not do justice.

Elizabeth Linos The next two minutes Dan?

Dan Honig Yeah, I mean to four minutes right now. Like 100 points. Yeah. I think let me start in a place that I think might be a little controversial in this room, which is where do voters preferences come from? Right. So since you mentioned that specifically. Right. So if you go back to like the political science literature, there’s consensus that voters preferences come in large part from what they are taught are the things over which they should have preferences. And, you know, when parties change without any specific regard to any specific party and any country, when when party’s leadership changes, we see a remarkable change in the views of the people who support that party. Right. That seems to be driven by the leaders, not by leaders responding to the citizens. Right. We have a narrative about about elites responding to preferences. And of course, they do. I’m not saying there’s no responsive preferences, but I think we should not take as given that because this is what voters expect. This is what voters need to expect. And there are plenty of countries which it does not work this way. Right. I think we need to change the expectations of citizens over what leads to the outcomes they want. Right. And as soon as we change that mental model, we will find that there is support for a lot of the things that we do not. We cannot leave citizens out of them. It’s not like it isn’t a separate group. And we just need to talk to at the end. And you know, my work actually. So my next set of projects is around. I’m fortunate enough to have a large grant from the European Union to look at things like what I’m calling relational state capacity. The idea here is like the capacity of a state is not just, you know, how many hospital beds you have, how many doctors you have, and whether you get a CDC. So the relationships that trust, you know, between citizens and the state. And that trust is born of the interactions you’ve got you’ve had before. And those interactions, they are somewhat about the outcomes. Right? If I can’t serve you, that’s not going to be good for relational state capacity. That’s about the respect I am able to show and about how much you feel you’re talking to a human being. And that is, I mean, you know, social work right. And you know, those I think we need to rebuild from the micro to get there. And this is part of why at the city level, at the local level, we see so much more opportunity this growth because there are enough people that I can reach them all, that I can change their world. And I think we just need to take the truths we already know and serve, raise them and make them more state or federal, more, you know, national imagery.

Student 4 Thank you, Professor. My name is John. I’m a former mission driven bureaucrat.

Dan Honig Reformed. You gave up. You gave up the mission part or you gave up the bureaucrat part.

Student 4 I used to be with the State Department in the management track, and I left for the reasons that you wrote in your book without knowing it at the time. Then I joined higher education and functionally doing very similar work. But I was really surprised when I started. I’m like, Wow. Like nobody’s checking what I’m doing for this. Like, I could use my purchase card to do this. Like, it was very surprising to me.

Dan Honig  John now drives a Ferrari.

Student 4 But it helped me to realize that it wasn’t the mission part so much, but as the compliance part. And so I’m now with having built better agency within myself through my studies and my work here, I feel ready to go back into government. The question I had was I’m choosing organization, sorry, structural organizations such as Peace Corps or the Department of Commerce as an alternative, because I find that them, relatively speaking, to be relatively less compliance oriented as well as more mission specific. So I’m looking for that alignment. So my question to you is, at what point do you make the judgment call where instead of trying to empower your team within where the organization structurally. Maybe just overly compliant. And is it better to kind of adapt to that and make it keep going or allow that to fail and align yourself with one that is more empowering? And how do you make that sort of decision?

Dan Honig Yeah. So you could mean… Thank you, John. And thank you for the candor and clarity. That was a great, great account. And so we can make failures two ways. So, one, we can imagine the agency failing and saying, this agency isn’t doing any good, we need to do something else, right? I would suggest that history shows us very few acknowledged agency failures in that regard. Right. That you can fail or be failing, but persist. And in part, that’s because I can set a measure and I can meet those quantifiable measures and I can do that. The compliance actually helps me do that. So now what are you talking about? I’m failing. I you know, I made the most widgets of any quarter on record, you know, And so I must be doing well. And so.

Elizabeth Linos Fewest failed widgets…

Dan Honig Fewest failed widgets. Exactly. Exactly. No widgets were returned in our proces that does not allow returns. And so I and so I would suggest that I would think of that failure or that like, you know. One thing you really illustrated here is that a labor market has two players in it. It has somebody hiring, so it’s somebody applying, entering, exiting, reentering. And so and I agree entirely with with Elizabeth, it’s very hard for me not just to call you Linos. It’s very it’s very hard. It’s I agree entirely with Elizabeth that the that the kind of the kids today aren’t motivated is ridiculous, right? Absolutely. But I do think that there is a kind of a need for generational updating regarding how people think about careers. I think there’s a real difference there. And you know what you’re just describing, which is entry, exit and very hopefully reentry is going to become much more the norm. Right. People aren’t going to stay for 25 years in one job. Right. And that means that all the things we’re talking about, about making it attractive, about building the world you want right in your agency are all the more important. So, you know, I would say that different mission driven bureaucrats are going to have different approaches to what they most prioritize. Clarity of mission doesn’t need to be at the organization level, doesn’t need to be at the team level. Right. You know, I say to everyone who asks me, like, the best indicator is a boss who you admire, right? A boss who you say this person believes the things I believe, and I want to work for her. You know, I want to work for them. I want to contribute to this. And I can see where that leads. And sometimes that’s going to be at the organization level and sometimes it isn’t. You know, Commerce versus Peace Corps versus something else. You know, the mission that is attractive to you in the place that gives you the ability to contribute to that mission is what I would hold on to and what those. Yes. And how exactly would you sort that I think is going to be very individually specific, but also the way you’re thinking about it, which is you are the asset. Not just because you have the Ferrari to give people rides in, but for other reasons too. You know, I think that is the key. Like you, you have value. You’re not just looking for a job. You’re looking for a place where you can make meaning and contribute to a kind of collective effort to do that. And the place that’s excited about that perspective is the place where I would predict you most likely to thrive. Thank you for the question. Thank you for your service.

Elizabeth Linos And there’s one thing I think that we’ve now heard from two speakers, which we’re seeing in this kind of generational divide. People are interpreting the fact that young people don’t want to work in government is they don’t care enough about mission. But actually, I think the real interpretation is what we’re hearing here, which is if you care about making a difference in the world and you want to make a difference, do you see government as a place to do that as opposed to other things? And we’re seeing, at least in our surveys, that everybody wants to make a difference. Everybody wants service. They just don’t necessarily see government as the place to do that. People who do. End up having other challenges with burnout later on, but actually might very much align with your research. But that’s a different form of mission driven bureaucrats than how we usually talk about it. Yeah.

Student 5 Thank you Dan, Elizabeth, and BSC for the session.  I’m doing my SYPA on state capability in India along those lines. And I work for the Indian Administrative Service in India, I’m a bureaucrat. I don’t know a mission driven one, but yes. So my question is, has two parts. First, like we know like autonomy helps. We know like enough work already on it. And like this apart from like the current work, in past 20 years there has… Bureaucrats know from secretary to it down to director and at every level. They know that autonomy is good, but why? Like this system is in such equilibrium where it doesn’t like provide this autonomy to stakeholders and small agents. And further, that agent is also principal to some other agent. And second part is like if we talk about people, are we like seeing it as a proxy? Like when I worked in the government, sometimes what happens is we see the finances like the ability to tax capabilitie is so less, that funds are meager compared to the problem we have. And is that affecting the morale of the bureaucrat also? And then that we are seeing this as an indicator, as the indicator might be something is and that might be a binding constraint and be focusing on the wrong problem. So two points.

Dan Honig Figuring out where the binding constraint is can be different in different systems. Absolutely. I would say that, you know, in broad strokes, my the general reason I think we see too much compliance is because they feel like the only tools available to those at the top. Right. And we were talking about trust between citizens and bureaucrats before. There’s also trust inside the system. You know how many you know, how many IAS have I sat with, you know, talking about the folks lower in the system who might not you know, they might not have the same level of trust regarding their behavior. Right. And that’s true. That ramifies up and down and sideways and every which way. Right. Well, one of the great things about being at the IAS is that you start as a D.C., right. As a district collector and you get to actually meet the folks on the ground. Right. But by the time you’re 20 years in, you know, and you’re, you know, sitting in an office in a state capitol, you know, I can hear, you know, what’s happening. You’re passionate about how the system is broken. You know, all of a sudden you’ve lost that connection. People on the ground. And I think I think that’s part of the answer to that. So I’m very excited to hear that you’re working on this. And I think there’s lots to be done in India specifically thinking about how systems work.

Student 6 Thank you, Dan. I’m  presently doing my PAE second-year. Again a bureaucrat from India kind of experience. Not the same service. Different service. Revenue service. But my question is based on something that I’ve experienced. You talk about the equilibrium between compliance and enforcement. And because every agency, every institution and every organization is built different. A speed to reach that clear even the possibility to reach that equilibrium be across organizations. In your experience, what would you think are the preconditions and the factors that allow for faster discovery  of this equilibrium and even make it possible? And I’m pretty sure you might have alluded that to your book or your previous books. But I’m asking you, this is because of a single reason. Someone asked me the same question. It’ll be in line with what you’re seeing, because I’ve seen it unfold as head of anti-smuggling team at Mumbai. Wherever there’s this follow up question, it’s what you were asserting. It works in all scenarios.

Dan Honig I love it. I. I’m tempted. So anti-smuggling move by the American Civil Service and the Pendleton Act in some ways grow out of concerns that the New York Customs House and there’s a lot about the history of civil service reform that I could imagine could be relevant here rather than go in that kind of abstruse academic direction. I’ll try to answer the question, which is what makes it easier to figure out, figure out that we should manage in a different way. Is recognition that we have a problem. So when I talk to Pinnacle, Pinnacle bureaucrats and ministers, usually I say, let’s start with what you already think isn’t working. Right. So, you know, what’s the worst that could happen? The thing that’s not working will continue not to work. You know, so let’s let’s let’s start there and think about think about it. I think information about I think equilibrium, understanding we’re in a bad equilibrium also happens faster when we have systems in place to gather information from the people doing the work right, rather than only the kind of like data and reporting systems. Right. So that is, you know, sort of the, you know, the first the first discussion about about social workers in New York State. Right? So, you know, if we can get more of that information, we’re going to see it faster. I also think it is easier to find these equilibria in services where you can see performance. You can see a two sided performance problem. Right. So revenue is interesting. Revenue services are really interesting in part because there is the risk of under collection. There’s also kind of a risk of over collection, right? So, you know, that is to say, you know, we want appropriate collection, but what is that? And how we set up a system to see that. And if our compliance management systems are driving us to kind of break the relationship with citizens because of what we’re incentivizing. Right. We maybe need to set up systems that think about that. And, you know, Tamil Nadu has done some work specifically. I know about this. So. Yes. And so, yeah, great question.

Elizabeth Linos There’s some interesting research in the US context with tax collection about how compliance driven systems have have. And I don’t think they talk about in these terms, but have have created the incentives to over inspect low income households on tax evasion, much more so than what would be the actual, more appropriate performance metric, which would be related to like the potential savings or potential revenue that would come from affecting higher income individuals. So it has these.

Dan Honig That’s because higher income individuals require more skill to examine.

Elizabeth Linos It’s easier. Exactly. It’s easier to inspect and audit for the bureaucrats. I think as part of the argument before you you give your final question. Let me just apologize. I have to go to an event that is for people who are thinking about how to do recruitment and retention of public sector workers in state and local government, where we’re going to talk about how we don’t have any good research on this.

Dan Honig I was invited to the same event. Send them my best.

Elizabeth Linos So I will talk about your book like this. So I need to run to that. So I’m going to invite Salimah to help finish off the Q&A and then and then close us off.

Dan Honig Thank you.

BSC Team And I’m just going to voice the questions from Zoom. So we have two questions. One is around what would you say to a federal agency that is heavy on the compliance factor for recipients of programs and those that administer them, administer them? What would you tell them in an effort to encourage motivation? I know you’ve covered some of this. And then the second question was around how could an outcomes-based framework meld with the approach you suggest?

Dan Honig Yeah. So so the first question, what do you tell a place steeped in compliance? You know, first, if you’re telling a place where there’s no one interested in listening, you know, I would say let’s talk elsewhere, right? You know, so that is to say, you know, systems don’t change because pointy headed academic sitting on high chairs, you know, tell them, you know, which I appreciate, I’m not the tallest human. And so I’m glad glad to have the lift here. I told them they were doing it wrong. Right. Like you have to actually have reformers or people who care inside the system. So. But where do you start? If you have them? You start wherever you find yourself. You know, you start by looking at where you are and saying what what are the steps that can build momentum in this direction, that can show progress without risking my job from day one? You know, maybe maybe I want to do that eventually, But like, let’s try to work inside the system first because that’s where I am. I’m in that system and maybe I’ll exit and have even more impact. But, you know, let me let me try the inside strategy first and to outcomes. That’s a great place. Assuming that’s where we’re ending. Yeah, that’s a wonderful place to end, which is, you know, I, I was tempted when Linos, when Elizabeth asked me earlier for the misconceptions to go on like a slight rant about the many things I think people, people miss about this argument sometimes from time to time. And one of them is absolutely the idea that either we care about empowerment or we care about outcomes, right? I think we should care about empowerment because we care about outcomes that. So if the best way to get outcomes is not to monitor every step of the process and focus entirely on compliance, we should not do that right? We should do the thing that leads to the best outcomes. And so let’s figure out the outcomes we want and let’s figure out where the process is actually undermining our ability to achieve those outcomes and let’s act accordingly. And so, you know, in some ways academically, this work is sometimes set up as against new public management, which was a, you know, a philosophy of sort of, you know, rigorous measurement and compliance in some ways. But the original dream of new public management was that we were going to focus on the outcomes and we were going to let up on everything before then, on all the process controls, right? What happened in practice is that we added lots of measurement of outcomes and also lots more measurement of the process and we layer that on top of the existing compliance system and turned out that didn’t make things better, right? But the original idea, let’s focus rigorously on the outcomes and figure out how we get there. I’ve not only do I have no complaints, you know, I think there’s a lot to be said for it. And I think that managing for empowerment should be in service of actually improving people’s lives. That’s the point. That’s why we should do it.

Salimah Samji Thank you. Great. Thank you very much. I’d like to thank let’s give. Thanks, Dan. And I really hope that those who are empowerment curious can realize I love that word, can realize that they do have agency and that your book has ideas of how they can try. Even if it’s in small steps. I also want to just echo how beautiful it was to just watch you and Linos. I’m going to call her Linos in conversation. You know, these are two HKS PhD alums who are doing incredible work, and I hope it’s been an inspiration for the students here for what you could do. You can go out there and make real great things happen. So welcome back home and thanks again, Dan. Let’s give them another round of applause.