Dan Banik and Dan Honig explore the concept of mission-driven bureaucrats, emphasizing the importance of empowerment, trust, and autonomy over strict compliance and control in improving government performance and public service delivery.
Season finale!  It is my great pleasure to welcome back a person I have very much enjoyed speaking with earlier— Dan Honig, an Associate Professor of Public Policy at University College London and Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy (@rambletastic). His latest book is Mission Driven Bureaucrats: Empowering People To Help Government Do Better. Mission-driven bureaucrats, according to Dan, are individuals who work within the bureaucracy with a genuine desire to serve their organization's mission of helping citizens. They perform their jobs out of a strong belief in their purpose, rather than being driven by a set of rules or incentives that compel them to act in specific ways. But what are the historical roots of the term "mission," and how can mission-driven bureaucrats thrive? The book argues that the key to better government lies in empowerment and trust, rather than stricter controls and more rigorous oversight.Â
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Key highlights
[Dan Banik]
Lovely to see you, Dan.
Welcome back to the show.
[Dan Honig]
Thank you so, so much.
It is just such an honor and a joy to be here and honored to be the ultimate guest, the final guest of season five here, which I've listened to with great interest. Lots of great conversations.
[Dan Banik]
I love having you on the show, my namesake.
And I was also telling you earlier that I was actually thinking of a cunning plan of featuring myself, you know, in the season finale.
And then I realized when I got your email that you have this brilliant book.
And so I couldn't think of anybody better than you.
You've been working on bureaucrats and the bureaucracy for a long time.
And you have this wonderful book called something about bureaucrats going on mission.
being driven by mission.
So tell my listeners, what is a mission-driven bureaucrat, Dan?
[Dan Honig]
Yeah, thank you so much.
And I'm not sure that it's a Dan upgrade to have me rather than yourself featured here, but I appreciate, very much appreciate the chance to chat.
So what is a mission-driven bureaucrat?
Mission-driven bureaucrat is somebody who cares about what they do.
And that could be what I sometimes call a grand mission, you know, so eliminating poverty, you know, climate resilience, things that are sort of broad sweeping policy claims.
Or it could be a kind of everyday mission, right?
So I'm a social worker who serves clients, and I really care about helping those clients succeed.
And I think one of the sort of things I came to realize in my prior research and also my work with governments in different countries around the world is that
You know, a lot of the people in the system really want to do good things.
They have the job because they wanted to have the job, because they cared about what the organization or the agency or the team does.
And, you know, we don't often start our reasoning about how to kind of manage bureaucrats or get the best possible performance with the notion that they might well, in fact, many of them do want to do good.
And that's what a mission driven bureaucrat is.
[Dan Banik]
Over the years, I've been interacting with a lot of people in the UN and the World Bank.
I used to head a trust fund in the World Bank for the Norwegian and Finnish governments.
And there was a time when I was, you know, corresponding quite a lot with these bank officials.
And every now and then I would get this automatic email message from them when they were traveling.
And the word they used was they were on mission.
At that time, there was quite a lot of criticism, particularly in parts of the African continent, that these people were, you know, just flying in and preaching and not really understanding the stuff, the context, and then flying out again.
So I began to associate the term mission with the short-term travel preaching advice that
And not necessarily in the context that you write about, this mission, this zeal, this passion, this idealism.
[Dan Honig]
So totally.
And for what it's worth, I share those criticisms of the use of the word mission in kind of, you know, World Bank, IMF, international organizations speak.
You know, I guess it probably has the same root, which is at some point I started to ask myself the same question, right?
Where does this word come from?
you know uh how did it evolve and you know as far as i can tell the roots of the word mission actually come from missionary right they come from people who were sent on long journeys originally it seems to me it appears to be by the jesuit faith right so people who were sent to preach right and to convert and you know there's actually there's a little bit of a conversation about this in the book look i'm i'm jewish myself i'm from a faith that does not really believe in
proselytizing and conversion i'm not endorsing kind of the ends of the mission but if you think about the kind of you know the kind of accountability structures that you need to run an organization where you're putting people on boats and sending them places you're never going to be able to observe what they're doing you're going to have no idea whether they're doing the best thing or the worst thing you're only going to get little letters back you know with long delays
How are you going to manage that kind of system?
Well, you know, the way the Jesuits did it is they did it first by selecting people who really cared, who were in the way I mean it, mission driven, in that zeal and passion way you just talked about.
And then setting up a system where they felt supported.
There was actually this really complicated system of anonymous letters, right?
So like you were stationed as a missionary somewhere and you would write a letter back to headquarters saying,
It would get anonymized and sent out to other missionaries who would respond and help you think through the problems that you were facing.
Right.
So it was a kind of supportive accountability structure where the assumption was that you wanted to do good things.
You wanted to fulfill the mission of the organization.
And I think probably from this sending, the international organizations took the kind of travel.
But I think everything you said about it, which I think is right in typifying it, right, the short-termness, the preachiness in the sense that, like, I know, right, you don't.
I'm not going to figure out what's really going on.
I'm just going to tell you what international best practice is.
is really contra the spirit of what those first missionaries, how they engaged in their activities.
And I'm glad we're moving away from the term for what it's worth.
[Dan Banik]
Yeah.
And, you know, it also actually touches upon the fact that some bureaucrats, or many, in fact, you know, the traditional understanding of the bureaucrat, particularly in, let's say, developing countries, is that
They can be a bit arrogant.
You know, they're like know-it-all.
They're the experts.
And they're basically telling people, this is what you should do.
This is how you should lead your life.
But getting back to your concept, and I have the book in front of me, you say that mission-driven bureaucrats are individuals who work in the bureaucracy and you want to serve their organization's laudable mission of helping citizens.
That's one.
And then they do their jobs because they believe in them.
So I think belief is a key word here, not because a bunch of rules or incentives force them to act in ways that they otherwise would not.
I'm thinking about our previous conversation and your previous book about how bureaucrats actually ought to be using judgments.
their own views to navigate, navigation by judgment to achieve a good outcome.
This latest work about a mission-driven bureaucrat who is motivated, believes in something.
In fact, this belief, this idea maybe is something that comes before navigating by judgment.
You have to believe in yourself.
You need to believe in the organization.
You need to take risks.
You need to take controversial decisions, maybe go against the grain, go against the advice of your boss, the politician.
So you have to believe and you have to have the confidence.
And then it would help to be empowered by the organization, by your manager, in order to be able to use your judgment to the best possible effect.
[Dan Honig]
Yeah, I love it.
So I think you're right, absolutely, to point out the connection between these two ideas.
I mean, I guess the way I see it is not so much you have to believe and then you start exercising judgment, but rather that these things often co-evolve, right?
They don't necessarily need to be contrary.
They can be contrary to what a politician wants, right?
So I talk about, you know, we often have the assumption of principal-agent theory, which I know gets discussed on your podcast on frequency, right?
We often assume the principal wants the right thing, and the question is the bad agent.
It doesn't have to be that way.
The politician, the manager, the person at the top can also be the one who...
has some issues.
I listened to your wonderful podcast earlier this season with Samin Mohsen Ali, and I think she highlights that very nicely in that episode, which I highly recommend.
I guess I think the process of navigating by judgment, the process of learning to exercise your faculty of judgment,
can also help you think, can help a bureaucrat come to believe in the mission.
So it's not that people are fixed types, they're believers and non-believers, and they come into the organization.
What you want, how you were motivated, how you were socialized, right, is also changed by the environment that you encounter.
And so, you know, the way I put it is that managing for empowerment, as you rightly highlight, is about allowing autonomy, right?
cultivating competence and creating connection to peers and purpose, right?
So judgment absolutely requires autonomy.
I think what mission-driven bureaucrats adds is the sense that it's not just about having the space to make decisions about what happens inside that space and who you are, who the bureaucrat is and what they want.
and what they can come to want and the sort of broader environment that they're in.
Also, the other thing I'd say is that it's not the case that managing for empowerment is always going to lead to better results.
So my interest ultimately is in what makes public services work better.
And I think compliance, which is what I contrast empowerment with,
Sometimes it's going to be the right way to get certain kinds of things done.
But a lot of the time it isn't going to be.
And where compliance isn't going to work, I think we need to do a lot more work figuring out how exactly we're going to manage and motivate people to get the best possible performance.
[Dan Banik]
I want to still pursue this element of risk taking as an individual bureaucrat, because you write in the book that mission driven bureaucrats will seek to promote the public interest even when their managers or politicians might not.
Here, of course, then we're talking about people, as I was referring to earlier, with a lot of self-confidence who don't mind jeopardizing their careers.
How do you see a bureaucrat who, by the way, is often complaining about political interference, is worried about being sent to a punishment post somewhere, being sidelined and marginalized?
It has a lot of family pressure saying, you know, come on, I've been shunted around, you know, five times in the last year.
The kids are getting upset.
They're changing schools.
And so you're actually asking quite a lot of a bureaucrat to take this kind of risk, wouldn't you say?
[Dan Honig]
Yes.
So I and I think I don't mean to ask that.
So, you know, I think.
Okay.
So it's the case that a mission-driven bureaucrat in the extreme will pursue what they want, even when politicians want something else.
And I think we see that all the time in ways that oft go unremarked.
So in the book, I illustrate the example of the US post office delivering ballots when the Trump administration wanted to delay them.
So they're
lots of forms of bureaucratic resistance that are very hard to sanction by superiors, very hard to transfer on.
So, of course, I don't want to piss off my direct boss.
You know, I think when you're talking, I think you probably have in mind
things like the IAS, the Indian Administrative Service, or the Pakistani Civil Service.
They're not alone.
There are lots of civil services where a kind of rotation effect means that you want to avoid angering your supervisor.
But I guess I think
You know, there are a whole bunch of things that usually are in the purview of bureaucrats that their bosses are ultimately fine with, that are neither supported nor objected to by those higher up the hierarchy.
And, you know, I hear you highlighting the, in my view, somewhat rare case where to serve the public interest means actively contradicting one's superiors.
And I think there are those cases, but I think most of the time you can be mission driven, right?
I think most of the time there are ways of pursuing the goals of the agency, if not with the support of those superiors, then at least without coming into direct conflict with them.
[Dan Banik]
Yeah, I think, you know, there's another way of actually understanding this, and that is a bureaucrat can go against the grain and can do certain things that his or her boss, a politician, doesn't want him or her to do by not explicitly formulating it as being against the wishes of the higher ups.
And this is where the bureaucracy is very good, right?
You could say, yes, sir, yes, ma'am, but do something entirely different.
And as long as you're keeping up appearances of following the chain of command, it doesn't really matter.
The bosses are not really checking the nitty gritties, right?
[Dan Honig]
Well, and just that last point, and they can't check the nitty gritties, or at least they couldn't for everything for everyone.
Right.
So could they come in and figure out what you did in this particular case?
Sure, they could.
But they could do that, I don't know, 50 times a month.
And they supervised 5000 people.
Right.
So, you know, that's right.
So, you know, there are lots of ways, you know, so Samin in the same podcast I just alluded to, you know, your earlier chat.
She talks about the district collector who, you know, writes down on a piece of paper what they're being asked to do.
And if the person is powerful enough, they then go ahead and do it, turn it into action.
And if they aren't, I believe her language was they crumple up that piece of paper and throw it in the bin, right?
And the reason that works is because, you know, only...
Most bureaucratic action, most things people do, even when we're talking about, we have in mind here kind of like mid-level bureaucrats in the way we're talking here.
But this is also true for the client facing, the person in the office dealing with, I don't know, driver's licenses or social services or police complaints or something like that.
Ultimately, even though we seek to constrain and write down and control bureaucrats in a whole bunch of ways, ultimately, most of their actions are unmonitorable, right?
And are not monitored.
And that means that we can create more spaces.
for judgment.
We can create more spaces for sort of positive action to occur.
But what we can't do, we are lying to ourselves if we think we have ever or could ever eliminate all those spaces.
And, you know, in some ways that's the fiction I think we've been telling ourselves about how we're making bureaucracy work, which is a fiction that's hurting us because it leads us to the wrong conclusions about what's going to make things even better.
[Dan Banik]
When I was reading your book, I was thinking about the role, not just of bosses or managers in the bureaucracy.
I was thinking about other people, other positions that inspire and motivate people.
It could be coaches, could be religious leaders, you know, by the sheer force of their personalities, the gift of the gab, their people skills.
And this is where my wife and I finally got around to watching Ted Lasso.
[Dan Honig]
Fantastic.
[Dan Banik]
Yeah, I can't believe that I waited so long.
We're still in season one.
No, we just finished season one.
This is the guy.
I mean, I don't know if my listeners know about Ted Lasso.
He is this American coach.
[Dan Honig]
If they don't, maybe they should stop listening to us and go watch Ted Lasso.
Indeed, indeed.
That might be.
[Dan Banik]
But it's a fascinating story.
By the way, my son, who is very much into soccer, he plays it.
He thinks it's a fun series, but nothing about football or soccer.
Anyway, so you have this American coach, a football coach coming to coach a British Premier League team.
Anyway, the point of the story, which I found quite fascinating, is that Ted Lasso is actually doing quite a lot of what you write about.
He is empowering people under him.
So there's a kit manager called Nate Lasso.
who has been observing the team for a long time, but he is way down in the hierarchy.
And so traditionally, a coach wouldn't want to consult somebody way down there.
And at least from the end of season one, I noticed that Nate then gets promoted and his views are
factored into the coaching kind of manual or team meetings.
So here you have a guy like Ted Lasso with people skills.
Basically, he's open to ideas, but he also has this confidence to listen to others, right?
So we actually then talking about managers who also have that confidence, who are not afraid of delegating power, who are not afraid of giving credit where it's due,
Which is sometimes the opposite, Dan, of what I notice in some of the countries I study, where there's a tendency to concentrate that kind of power.
You don't want others, your juniors, to outshine you.
This is when I want us to talk a little bit about this management for empowerment that you talk about versus management for compliance.
Tell us a little bit about the differences and maybe also some of the similarities.
[Dan Honig]
Love the Ted Lasso reference.
Totally, totally buy it.
And I think, you know, so managing for empowerment is, as you say, it's about thinking about what your team or your agency, depending on what level of leadership you're at, can accomplish rather than, you know, making sure that everyone below you follows your instructions, right?
And, you know, I think this idea that we're going to move things forward with command and control
We've been trying command and control.
We've been trying what I call the levers of compliance, by which I mean rules and targets and rewards and punishments as pretty much the only way we're trying to improve performance for quite some time.
And a bunch of things have gotten better in the world, and a lot of things haven't.
And the things that haven't, I think that's probably because that's not a tool set that's going to work.
So what does it look like in practice?
You know, Ted Lasso is a great example, as is, I would say, the broader evolution of football tactics.
So at the risk of totally losing any listeners who do not care about the beautiful game, I, you know, one of the best recent books on kind of the evolution of football tactics is called Inverting the Pyramid, right?
And so, and the idea of Inverting the Pyramid is it used to be the case that really the
strategy and sort of tactics were being run by the people in the back of the formation, right?
The defensemen followed by the midfielders.
And ultimately the job of the striker was just to convert.
and now what modern football has evolved into is a system where the people at the front of the formation so the equivalent of the frontline workers right who have that information the nate the kit managers who are there every day and observe what's going on they're the ones who kind of in some sense are in control and the job of the rest of the formation is to support them is to feed them and so thinking about what an organization does if it has a structure
When we think about a hierarchy, we usually talk about, you know, the top of the hierarchy being in charge, of course, and the bottom of the hierarchy responding.
The question is, how can it come to be the case that you can get all that information, all that insight, all of that earnest desire to help to do good things that often lives at that bottom of the paradigm, right?
So at that front line, you know, how do you get that energy pointed in the right direction?
I think...
Similar to our conversation before, I think I agree totally with your description.
I don't want to make it quite as binary, which is to say I don't think that they're like rare good managers from Keller, and most of the rest focus on compliance, right?
I think everyone can get a little bit better from wherever they're starting, whether they're at the relative top or the relative bottom of the distribution.
Yeah.
And, you know, one piece of research, which is not my own, but, you know, there's a paper by Michael Azoulay, Dan Roger, Imran Rasool, and Martin Williams in Ghana, where basically they described almost exactly a kind of environment that you were talking about, where, you know, sort of the people at the, where we have bosses who are resistant to suggestions from below.
And what they do is they add a module to the civil service training college on kind of making suggestions and proposing innovative things and that sort of thing.
And to their initial surprise, just empowering the mid-level bureaucrats, just encouraging this kind of behavior, right?
leads to more suggestions, leads managers to actually be more receptive, even though the intervention is not at the manager's level, and leads to better performance, substantially increased project completion rates in the Canadian civil service.
And so my takeaway from this is that often the bark is worse than the bite.
So when we see a system where it looks like managers are deeply resistant to suggestion, often at least some, but probably maybe a lot of those managers,
are willing to try new things, at least at the margin, at least if they can take credit for them, perhaps, right?
As long as we start orienting people in that direction.
And so, you know, but as you say, changing your management style, making more of a team effort.
Bringing in the information that lives below is an important part of this.
And when I work with governments thinking about what it might mean to actually change organizations, this is a lot of what we're talking about, how to make the system more receptive to the wisdom and insights everyone has and how to put people in the best position and all of us as a team.
[Dan Banik]
Which means that compliance isn't a bad thing, right?
I mean, you sometimes need to comply.
There is obviously a lot of thinking behind these checklists and guidelines that organizations have developed, right?
because of past experience.
Maybe they're learning from failure.
Maybe, you know, they've said this is the best practice.
You've got to check off.
You've got to tick off these boxes.
And if you don't, then you as your manager, your future is at stake.
In China, it is about making sure that regional bureaucrats get investments.
I mean, you have to make sure that maybe the process does not have to be perfect, but the outcome has.
So
You're like in this mode of thinking, I have to get all the boxes right.
Obviously, empowering your subordinates is important as a manager.
But I want to point something else out, Dan, which is maybe an element of contradiction.
Because when we want to encourage people to speak their minds, our subordinates, we may end up encouraging a thousand flowers to blossom.
And these can go in very different directions than the kind of organizational structure, hierarchy, the checklist that you have to work with.
And so I just feel that maybe in this quest for managing empowerment or facilitating empowerment,
One could risk creating a bit of disorder.
There may be jealousy, maybe people pulling in different directions, different people in the organization doing different things that may not necessarily promote the organization's interest.
That's one thing.
The other thing would be hierarchy and the extent to which you think
That is important because empowerment could also mean reduced hierarchy.
And then maybe again, you have to be a particular type of personality to be able to work in an organization where it's more of a flat structure than a very sort of hierarchical structure.
[Dan Honig]
Yeah, so OK, so a lot there.
So OK, let me take it from relatively the beginning of that totally interesting, provocative set of things.
So first, absolutely, there is a place for compliance.
And the book does not argue we should give up on compliance, but rather move at the margin towards more empowerment a lot of the time.
So think of it as a 0 to 100.
Rather than a 1-0.
If it's 0-100 and the average organization is at 95 compliance, 5 empowerment, maybe we need to up that level of empowerment.
Not entirely get rid of compliance.
So to the China investment model, I would point to the work of Yuan Yuan Ang on how China escaped the poverty trap.
And, you know, that's a system of kind of, as she describes it, red lights, yellow lights, green lights, right?
There are some things you should never do, some things you're always okay with doing, and then like a middle where we're sort of experimenting and tentatively trying things out.
And, you know, I think the goal, get investment, might be a clear goal, right?
How we go about, as you pointed to as well, how we go about accomplishing that can involve
and indeed i think the stylized you know case of china suggests does involve a lot of empowerment right a lot of a lot of navigating a lot of exercise of judgment um a lot of space to make one's own decisions rightly or wrong so you know to the question
how do we sort of keep the organization on track, right?
So I think it's helpful to get maybe a little bit more specific about particular organizations, right?
So let's imagine that we are looking at, you know, I'm here in the UK today.
Of course, labor has just won.
We're recording the day after the labor election.
I should say the general election, that labor that perhaps will be historically remembered as the labor election.
And, you know, when I look at some of the most successful local councils in the UK,
They are very frequently run by labor.
And if I look at Camden, which is the council that my university UCL sits in, they have a system for thinking about children, vulnerable children, children who might not go into care.
that they call family group counseling, right?
So where social workers maintain long-term relationships with families well before intervention is needed and really work with the entire family to think about what's best for the child and how the family can get on their feet, et cetera.
And this requires a kind of empowerment of that social worker who's making judgments about what's appropriate for that family.
What we're not doing is looking at a kind of
checklist of what are the things we're seeing in the household and what does that dictate for whether that child should remain with the family for what kind of support they need, et cetera.
You know, in that kind of situation, I guess I don't see a lot of concern regarding the organization going in lots of directions, right?
We're dealing with individual families and we're all clearly associated, you know, we're all clearly oriented towards the goal of helping those families.
I mean, similarly, you know, so the more you empower people, the more important it is to align them with the kind of mission of the agency and team.
And it's also important, you know, giving up on sort of compliance as one sole tool does not mean giving up on accountability.
Right.
So if indeed what we as an agency want to accomplish is A.
And what giving what empowering some of the people who we've been empowering are pulling towards be, which is the opposite of a, we either need those folks to change their behaviors or maybe they're not appropriate for this role.
Right.
We need to think a lot more about who people are and what they want in a kind of managing for empowerment world.
But if we do, and if we do think about that managerial style, I think we're often going to get, especially for tests where we can't contract, where we can't observe everything, we're going to get much better performance than we have today.
[Dan Banik]
Let's talk a little bit about motivation and demotivation.
Yeah.
As we were talking about this earlier, there are various ways in which me, I as a bureaucrat will be unmotivated or demotivated.
One is salaries.
I'm not getting enough.
I'm jealous.
I wanted to get a job in the private sector, but could not get it.
got a job in the public sector.
I'm always complaining about salaries.
In fact, I've never met a bureaucrat who hasn't complained about his or her salaries, right?
Even though in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa where I study, it seems that bureaucrats are actually well-paid compared to other groups in the population, and yet they keep wondering more.
So salary is one thing, then political interference is another, organizational culture.
There are all kinds of pressures on
In Southern Africa, there's also the pressure to hire people from your particular group, your particular area.
You've made it.
You have to then shower gifts on others and there will be pressure.
Why aren't you hiring somebody from your clan?
Because the previous guy did.
So there are many ways in which you're trying to resist this pressure and it's getting to you.
You know, you can't really, you know, do the kind of job that you thought you would.
You could also be penalized because, you know, a change in government, a new president, a minister has come, wants a totally new group of people.
So the transition is difficult.
You can't really speak your mind.
It's a political system, right?
That does not encourage freedom of expression.
So all of that.
And then you're being shunted around, transfers, et cetera.
But what I particularly liked, one of the many things I liked in your book is also, you know, your reflection on your experience in Liberia.
When you were there as a senior advisor to a minister and you talk about the difference between being demotivated versus being unmotivated.
Here you are mentioning something to the effect of lack of effort versus lack of interest.
Could you explain that to my listeners, Dan?
[Dan Honig]
Yeah, sure.
So, you know, so when I was in Liberia, so I worked for Antoinette Saé, who was the Minister of Finance then and now is the Deputy Managing Director of the IMF.
She inherited, the government of Liberia inherited a civil service
almost entirely comprised of people who had come to the civil service under Charles Taylor's government.
We don't have to wonder if these folks were appointed because of their earnest commitment to the public interest.
It's pretty clear they weren't.
So it's pretty clear they came to the public service because they had particularistic interests.
And what we found, what I found working with and for her is that often even these folks who we had every reason to suspect the least of
wanted to come to work and do things that felt to them valuable, but they hadn't had the opportunity to do that for a very long time.
And so that doesn't mean the answer is taking someone who used to, I don't know, run an area of the operation Charles Taylor, giving them a bag of cash and saying, go do whatever you want, right?
That's not what I'm suggesting.
But within kind of the bounds of the task, right, saying to folks, you've referred to Ted Lasso before, right, saying to folks like, what do you think is the right thing to do here, right?
So, you know, where do you think we should go?
And, you know, what I came to realize over and over again is that for many people, this is the first time anyone had ever asked them that question.
This is the first time they ever felt they had any ability to kind of contribute with ideas that their ideas were valuable and that,
It just so happened that after they suggested them, some of them might come to pass.
We might incorporate that kind of wisdom that they were bringing to the table.
And when I work with managers around the world thinking about how to improve their teams, very frequently folks, not just in Liberia, folks everywhere in the world,
tend to think that if somebody's not working hard, it's because of them, right?
It's because they're the kind of person who isn't going to work hard, who isn't going to put forward effort, who has no interest in it.
But you know what?
People stop working hard if they think that the work they do isn't going to turn into something.
[Dan Banik]
Here you have a series of portrayals of so-called mission-driven bureaucrats.
And there was this one lady from southern India, I think Uma Mahadevan, who talks about the importance of communication, to keep telling her staff, this is what we're trying to do.
So to communicate and to sort of instill this sense of purpose seems to be key.
[Dan Honig]
A hundred percent.
And, you know, you can instill that sense of purpose.
Uma is a wonderful example of that.
And, you know, before when you were talking about how you keep people aligned in an empowerment world, that's part of it, right?
You make clear what our mission is and how we're all contributing to it.
And, you know, you were saying before, it doesn't have to be a football team, doesn't have to be a public sector.
I think this is a sense in which I think the corporate world is way ahead of the public sector, right?
There's a lot of talk about kind of mission alignment and motivation and how to instill a sense of purpose.
And in some ways, one of the central points of the book, so this is, I'm stealing here from Lant Pritchett, an observation he made about the book when we were chatting.
He said something like, you know, Dan, it seems to me you want people to think at least as much about public servants' motivation
as we do about the motivation of people who are trying to market soap.
Because maybe public services matter as much or more as getting the best sales numbers for Dove soap or whatever.
And I think that's right.
All kinds of organizations can do this.
And communication is a big part of it.
What are you doing when you come to work?
Are you laying bricks or are you building a cathedral?
And if you think you're doing the latter, there are a whole set of implications for that.
And you feel like part of a common project.
[Dan Banik]
There are so many wonderful case studies you refer to in the book, India, South Africa, Ghana, Bangladesh, but also Thailand, which I found particularly interesting because I would not have thought the Thai bureaucracy was very efficient.
But one of the key things I learned reading that chapter is that, and this is again a bit similar to the kind of impression I have in China, is in China, everything is Beijing-centric in many ways.
The central party controls everything.
And the further you are away from Beijing, the more freedom you have, which is the story here in Thailand too, Bangkok-centric.
A lot of the rules and checklists and guidelines are decided in Bangkok.
And these have to be followed, but managers in the faraway districts have a lot of leeway.
Is that the story?
Is there any other way, Dan, that managers in Thailand and rural districts are actually able to motivate their subordinates, their staff, their colleagues?
[Dan Honig]
Yeah.
So so what's really, to me, interesting about the setup of the Thai state is that the managers in districts.
So Thailand has, you know, 700 plus districts.
They're the kind of fundamental unit of service delivery.
And the person who supposedly runs this district is an appointee of the Ministry of the Interior.
But the people they're supposed to supervise work for lots of different ministries, right?
So you have a district health officer and a district education officer and district agricultural officer.
And because of this, so Thailand has sort of accidentally created a district environment
in which there are not a lot of tools of sanction and reward that managers can turn to, right?
Because they are not the supervisors of the people that supposedly they're managing.
And so what this does is it creates this space for those district managers.
They really have no other option
then to manage for important right then to kind of try to create a a voluntary desire to work collectively on the collective project of you know delivering services and you know basically what happens is you get this what uh what a sociologist would call decoupling
Right.
You get this decoupling between Bangkok and the district where the district's largely running its own affairs.
And, you know, there's some some really.
So at the beginning.
So I do speak Thai.
Right.
I've been Thai for many years.
But at the beginning, when people would tell me they were adapting orders.
Right.
I started thinking like, OK.
So adaptation, you know, you were meant to do X and you do like X star.
You move things over just a little bit.
And then when I started asking for examples of adaptation, you know, some of them were like, well, you know, they gave us money to educate this group of people from Bangkok.
But that didn't seem useful because we don't have that group of people here.
So instead, I just said we educated this group of people.
And instead, I used the money to educate this other group of people in this other thing.
Right.
And I think to myself, OK.
That is quite a substantial degree of adaptation.
Maybe not the word I would have used for that kind of change.
And, you know, you get these like highly autonomous bureaucrats who are not very career concerned.
They don't have the fears we were talking about before.
[Dan Banik]
Is it because monitoring is weak in those contexts?
Monitoring in Bangkok?
[Dan Honig]
Yeah.
So it's basically because the monitoring, so the only people from whom you can get information are the other people in the district, right?
So in some sense.
[Dan Banik]
If they're in your team, if you've convinced them that this is the right thing to do, so it's almost like you're ganging up against the bosses in Bangkok.
[Dan Honig]
That's right.
So I'm the education bureaucrat and you're the agriculture bureaucrat.
And we know if we work together to do what seems right for us, we are going to be able to tell both of our bosses what's going on in a way that is going to be consistent.
And they're not going to find out.
And basically...
I don't want to get promoted.
You know, there are 700 some district jobs and only a couple in Bangkok at the level above and the level above.
Also, now I would be like surrounded by bosses.
Right.
I would be the most junior senior person as opposed to the most senior person in the district.
And, you know, I think another thing to highlight here is that, you know, Thailand, so if you go to the World Bank's page for Thailand, right?
So the top of that page, the banner is like, Thailand is one of the world's greatest development success stories.
And it has these incredibly consistent
you know, sort of performance graphs, you know, so that is to say, you know, growth is positive and consistent, you know, human development index is growing at a, at an impressive and consistent rate, you know, maternal mortality falling, all these kinds of things.
And, you know, this is a country that's had a dozen coups and radical changes of government.
And, you know, there have been there's been a lot of turmoil at the top.
And it seems to me that this system is what has kind of insulated the Thai state from that turmoil at the top is the reason that the welfare of Thais has continued to improve.
You know, I don't mean to sound like I, if one were given a blank piece of paper and said, create the perfect administrative system, I would not propose this.
I'm not suggesting that.
But given the context Thailand finds itself in, I think it's pretty hard not to see this as a feature rather than a bug, right?
So this kind of independence is why Thai citizens are thriving.
[Dan Banik]
There are similar stories from all across the world.
And this is where, you know, I feel that sometimes public admin stuff, when we talk about it, we often give the impression that nothing works in these parts of the world, these exotic parts of the world.
In fact, there are lots of success stories.
There may be even pockets of effectiveness, you know, islands of excellence.
And the key is how do we actually streamline and make these more sustainable in the longer term, right?
Not just short-lived.
We're getting to the end of our conversation.
I wanted to raise a couple of things.
One has to do with new public management and your thoughts on that, the centrality of citizens, consulting with citizens.
In your framework, you also talk about, it's not just empowering colleagues or people working with you, but also making sure you facilitate a dialogue, not just peer learning, but also with the so-called beneficiaries.
And your thoughts on new public management, which gets a lot of bad publicity in many parts of the world that we do work in, where it is seen to be very technocratic and taking all of this judgment aspect and empowerment aspect out.
It has become much more of the checklist.
Is that your view?
That's one thing.
And the final thing I wanted to ask you is also, you know, in terms of research, in terms of the global survey of public servants and some of the work coming out from that body of literature, they say that, you know, depoliticizing the civil service is very key because that is the typical complaint.
It's all politicized, that you have favorites and you get a position because you belong to the ruling party or a sympathetic party.
to them.
Nepotism and curbing nepotism is crucial, ensuring that performance matters in terms of who gets promoted, punished, and also paying more to retain civil service.
So these are some of the sort of key recommendations from this survey.
So I wonder if you could please reflect on that, some of these things going forward to make the civil service more effective, but also your thoughts on new public management.
[Dan Honig]
New public management.
So I kind of think new public management is like, as promised, the kind of value proposition of new public management was going to be, they're going to be targets.
They're going to be goals.
How you get to the goals is up to you, right?
So we are going to empower people, but align them to performance.
So if you look at really early new public management stuff, that's what it purported to do.
That's not what it actually did.
So I agree with you entirely that it has become a kind of word associated, rightly associated, with a kind of technocratic, we're going to fix it from the top, we're going to engineer everything way of getting things done.
And where that's what it means, yes, I think it has not done us well.
I think because ultimately it is...
You know, it is attractive.
It's seductive to think that we can solve problems simply in a boardroom with the best experts.
Right.
And that, you know, it's just design.
And after that, it's just implementation.
Right.
So another phrase I really like is the implementation gap.
Right.
I'm making air quotes for those listening.
Right.
And the reason I love it is because it implies that, like, we've got this perfect policy.
We've figured out the answer.
It's just this stupid last implementation step.
Whereas part of my argument is that, and I think yours and your work, is that implementation is, I don't know exactly what percentage, but 80% of the challenge.
And in fact, if what we care about is what really happens, the world we're calling implementation is in fact where policy is being made formally or informally.
[Dan Banik]
And sometimes policies are the problem.
They're the absolutely wrong policies for that context.
This is where the criticism of donors is, Dan, right?
I mean, donors are coming in with something that works somewhere else and saying, implement it.
And if it doesn't work, it's an implementation problem.
[Dan Honig]
I totally agree.
Totally agree.
And so, you know, turning to the Global Survey of Public Servants, so I should say a number of the people
leave the survey are my friends and people I respect deeply.
I was involved in the early formulation of what the survey might be a bit in a few conferences, though I'm not an active part of the survey.
I guess I think that, I think in general, paying people better, depoliticizing the civil service, you know, these sound like good recommendations to
Right.
So I guess I am less concerned with how people get into the civil service in terms of my personal focus than what happens once they're there.
And that's not because I don't think how they get in is important.
I think it's very important.
I just think it's a little bit less tractable to intervention.
It seems to me we've spent a lot of time thinking about.
So the civil service is politicized.
You know, it's not like no one ever came up with the idea of depoliticizing the civil service before.
right?
So, you know, the civil service is politicized because they're real political economy reasons.
We're in, you know, what Mushtaq Khan, who I know is another former guest of yours, would talk about as a kind of equilibrium, right?
So there's an equilibrium of what the civil service represents for folks.
And
I guess I would rather we spend our time and attention not on ways to change that equilibrium, even where I agree with the way to change the equilibrium, but rather inside the existing political settlement, inside the current equilibrium, what can we do to make things better?
And I think the civil service, the GSM,
PS, I have some trouble with the acronym.
Sorry about that.
The GSPS, I think, provides excellent context on countries.
I use it a lot in my work and teaching.
Once we know that context, how are we going to make things better in that particular case?
Well, it also shows us that inside every country,
there is huge variation amongst agencies, amongst ministries in a single country in terms of how much people believe that things are meritocratic inside their agency, inside how motivated they are, inside, you know, with regards to how much they have, they feel that performance matters in the agency and that they're rewarded for it.
And, you know, when we talk about how to change those things,
So there's a whole chapter of the book, which is kind of suggestions of ways of moving towards empowerment if you think it's appropriate.
And off the back of the book,
working to do a kind of like, you know, advisory services, right, that helps agencies and organizations who are seeking to move in that direction think about how to do so.
And, you know, it can start from the very, very top.
It can start from changes in national policy and leadership, but it doesn't have to.
It can also start at the team level or even the, you know, sort of individual bureaucrat level in terms of moving things in a positive direction.
Yeah.
[Dan Banik]
A mission driven bureaucrat is somebody who has been doing this empowerment induced work for a considerable amount of time, I would imagine.
It's not a one-off thing.
It's not something that is short term, right?
So to identify a person who is mission driven is something that you need to do for quite a while, a long enough period, right?
So
How would we know if we've met and interacted with a mission-driven bureaucrat?
[Dan Honig]
I guess I'm less concerned.
So I was going to turn to your bit on citizens, and I'd like to come back to that.
But, you know, I think...
Almost everyone can become sufficiently mission driven to be able to do good things without sort of tight monitoring and control.
Not quite everyone, but lots and lots of people.
And so, you know, I want to make the category mission driven.
So the profiles which you highlighted before are of extreme mission driven bureaucrats.
And there are lots and lots of them.
But I agree they are rare globally.
Right.
But when I talk about mission driven bureaucrats, I don't want that to be a scarce category.
I want that to be a common category.
I think most people can be sufficiently aligned to the mission of the organization to be considered mission driven.
And that is about, they do care.
So that is about caring about the kind of long-term goals of the organization or of the citizen they're interacting with.
And turning to that citizen, a bureaucrat who has to report up on targets has to show up at your door and only collect that information, right?
A bureaucrat who is empowered to some degree
is one who has the opportunity, not the certainty, but the opportunity of treating you differently and of learning from you differently.
And, you know, when I, in terms of where I'm going next, it is very much that direction and the citizens that you framed in before, you know, so I'm starting a set of work with the support of a European Research Council grant on what I'm calling relational state capacity.
And the idea there is that
The capacity of the state is not just about the kind of technical stuff that the state has, the hospital beds, the technical expertise.
It's also about the relationships between the state and its citizens.
in India, but also in Indiana, right, and everywhere in between, we are seeing a kind of fraying of the social fabric.
And I think that is in part because of the sort of technocratic top down delivery, a state that's about, you know, taking information and giving you stuff that's trying to make itself Amazon, right, that we've created.
And creating space inside the public service for public servants to form different kinds of relationships with citizens to understand and learn from and interact with citizens in different ways is, I believe, a potentially substantial part of solving those social ills we face.
And I think mission-driven bureaucrats are an important part of it.
[Dan Banik]
Dan, congrats again on a wonderful book, yet another wonderful book.
Thank you very much for coming on my show today.
[Dan Honig]
The pleasure is mine.
Thank you so much for the public good this podcast represents and really just a joy to be here with you today.
Thank you so much.
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