TY - JOUR
AU1 - Frederickson, H George
AB - Abstract This is the last of four Last Lectures delivered by George Frederickson before his death in 2020. In “Public Management and Authentic Innovation,” Frederickson draws on key studies to demythologize the claims around the origins and diffusion of innovation in the private and nonprofit sectors. He compares and contrasts the managed innovation model with a sustaining innovation model and provides provocative insights into the relevant contributions and limitations of rankings, awards and report cards; strategic planning; and the iron cage. INNOVATION These days when it is said that something is original it usually means that it is actually new and unique. The word original, however, is based on the word ancestry; therefore, the dictionary definition of original is “something from which a copy, reproduction, or translation is made.” When the director of the Globe Theatre asked William Shakespeare for a new play, he wanted something original—that is, a work with themes, characters, and settings familiar to the audience. In Shakespeare’s case, this meant stealing from the ancient Greek plays, adapting their themes to fit English society in the Elizabethan era. Royal intrigue, jealousy, murder, political machinations, blood feuds, and romantic ideals had long before been presented by the Greek playwrights. Much of what is regarded as creative in art, literature, and the humanities is predicated on earlier works. And so it is in the modern worlds of business and government. Original works of creativity are actually adapted versions of preexisting ideas, modified to meet changing needs and tastes. Genuine creativity need not be really new, but it is almost always original, the computer from the comptrometer, the desk top computer from the main frame, and so forth. Innovation comes from novus or new and is understood to be the introduction of something new, a novelty, a changed way of doing things. The questions I wish to take up today are these: can innovation be managed? Can management cause or even encourage creativity? Can management cause or even encourage innovation? In the corporate world, the widely shared belief that innovation, like all else, is manageable has become part of the general business ethos with its attendant narratives and myths. As always that general business ethos has migrated to the public and nonprofit sector with governmental leaders, nonprofit and philanthropy board members, and especially management consultants who colonize these places and presume thereby, to bring them not only better management but also innovation and creativity. This lecture is an exploration of the logic of managed innovation and the colonization of the public and nonprofit sectors by the modern business ethos. I shall describe how attempts to manage innovation have combined with organizational rankings and other expressions of status, to enter an iron cage which reduces rather than enhances prospects for either individual or institutional innovation. It is our good fortune that there are three richly documented studies of corporate innovation and creativity. The first, Breakthroughs! by P. Rangamath Nayak and John P. Ketteringham (1994), is a study of 14 commercial innovations so significant and lasting as to constitute breakthroughs. Their studies included significant innovations in products, services and industrial processes including the compact disc, the VCR, the ulcer drug Tagamet, the CAT scan, the hollow corporation (Nike), overnight airmail package service (Fed Express) and, of all things, Club Med. They represent a broad spectrum of products, services and industries, and for this reason, their findings are important to those interested in innovation and creativity—not only in the private sector, but also in the public and nonprofit sectors. They found that breakthroughs grow mostly from rich soil, but also from barren soil, rocky soil, or no soil at all. Breakthroughs come from organizations that foster creativity as well as those with poor records of innovation—from creative teams that are joined by their management, ignored by their management, supported only belatedly by their management, misunderstood by their management, and castigated by their management. Breakthroughs can emerge just as readily from no organization at all. Breakthroughs are not organizational creations, although they may be helped or hindered by organizations. Once an innovation is successful, it is eagerly claimed by the organization and often by management consultants. Innovations are more like works of art than works of commerce. Teams of people who accomplish breakthroughs behave more like disciples emerging from the tutelage of a great visionary than like the graduates of a prestigious management curriculum. What seems new is something that others have thought of before—as in ancient Greek drama—but is newly applied or described or made newly useful. The owners of the Globe Theater were right in asking Shakespeare to write an original play, but not so original that it could not be understood and appreciated in Elizabethan England. And Shakespeare’s work still serves as the standard (the benchmark) against which all later English drama is measured. Innovations are seldom entirely new ideas but are, instead, iterative adaptations of the received wisdom (or the received nonsense). There are many forms of innovation, including direct creativity, big ideas, ideas built on earlier ideas, the teamwork of many creative types in an organization, the work of enabling managers who encourage and guide creativity, and innovators who are not original but are, instead, fine tuners of ideas. Certain innovations, especially those that require a relatively small investment of capital but a large commitment of individual labor, tend to come from independent entrepreneurs. But innovations that require substantial financial investment and teamwork often emerge within big organizations, in the now widely practical R&D format. Some innovations are direct responses to obvious needs. But just as many innovations are ideas for which there is as yet no obvious need. It turns out that garbage can theory is right. In the decision soup churning about in the garbage can, there will be problems looking for solutions and solutions looking for problems, questions looking for answers and answers looking for questions. Creativity and innovation are not linear, they are circular. The Breakthrough! research shows that happier workers are more generally productive. But a happy and productive environment does not necessarily nurture latent creativity. The idea that corporate culture can be managed or created so as to either support or stifle creativity or the innovative spirit has no evidence to support it. The astute Lawrence Lynn once wrote that the manager who claims to be creating a culture of creativity will almost certainly be regarded as a pompous ass by those in the organization who are genuinely creative (Lynn 1997). There are barriers to innovation. When risk taking and failure are punished, creativity is less likely. Discouraging experimentation probably discourages innovation. Initial statements of creative ideas are seldom fully formed and well defended. Managers who wish to look smart will attack such ideas as unfamiliar, unproven, risky. Every organization has people who know all the reasons new things cannot be done. Organizations need to be led by courageous people who know when to say yes, even at the risk of failure. It helps the creative process to put managers, researchers and others in the upper levels of the hierarchy with clients, customers, and citizens and to then try to get the managers and researchers to shut up and listen. Innovations often come from individuals and groups with a track record of innovation. Finally, it is helpful to keep the process of innovation and creativity at arms-length from the legal staff, lest they imagine some law or regulation against it! Organizational originality is nonlinear, unpredictable, untidy, lumpy, and it tends to resist being managed. This information should be disappointing to management consultants selling prescriptions for organizational innovation and CEOs looking for easy innovation because such prescriptions mostly run counter to what we know about real organizational innovation. James C. Collins and Jerry L. Porras in Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies(2005), is a report on a 6-year study of 18 companies including IBM, Sony, Wal-Mart, and Walt Disney. What did these companies have in common? Charismatic and visionary leadership? Complex strategic planning processes? Brilliant or elegant mission statements? An overriding commitment to maximizing profits? None of the above. The authors’ findings contradicted their own preconceptions about what makes for truly exceptional businesses. They first found one common element among those businesses, “a core ideology—core values and a sense of purpose beyond just making money.” Collins and Porras are quick to point out that such core values are not the same from company to company, nor are they necessarily those that we would regard as enlightened or humanistic—although sometimes they are. Nevertheless, great and enduring business institutions are organized around a “cult-like” devotion to a set of values that give those companies their reason for being and command the dedication of their employees. Adherence to core values does not mean that visionary companies resist change or are strategically conservative. Indeed, such companies use what the authors call “big hairy audacious goals” to stay energized and challenged. The best moves in advancing those goals do not necessarily follow from systematic planning. Visionary companies accommodate lots of inefficiency in the pursuit of excellence. They encourage experimentation, seize opportunities even when they do not fit into the strategic plan, and take advantage of the accidental. What, in retrospect, looks like the result of prescient planning is sometimes the happy outcome of a policy of, as the authors put it, “Let’s just try a lot of stuff and keep what works.” Clayton M. Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail(2000) studies innovation in leading and surviving companies. His first and most provocative finding is that customer responsiveness does not lead to innovation because customers seldom know or can even imagine what they do not now need. The internet and e-commerce had its origins in the minds of information technology and computer folks who imagined internet capability and only worried later about how it might be made commercially viable. While the power of the internet is everywhere evident, its commercial applications are being sorted out and some firms will survive and flourish, but others will not. Christensen calls their innovations a form of “disruptive technology.” Disruptive technology is often rejected by an institutional culture, which is built on decades of profitability based on known and understood markets. Therefore, as a company manages better and better to respond to those markets it is less and less able to invest in risky and unproven disruptive technology. Highly successful organizations tend, Christensen found, to be particularly intolerant of failure and risk born out of experimentation which can lead to failure. Finally, Christensen gives the edge to smaller emergent firms because they are responding to inchoate emerging markets, something that seldom makes sense to established corporate leaders. Despite their endowments in technology, brand names, manufacturing prowess, management experience, distribution muscle, and just plain cash, successful companies led by good managers have a genuinely hard time doing what does not fit their model for how to make money. Because disruptive technologies rarely make sense during the years when investing in them is most important, conventional managerial wisdom at established firms constitutes an entry and mobility barrier that small firm entrepreneurs and investors can bank on. It is powerful and pervasive. Easily the best study of innovation in the public and nonprofit sector is Paul C. Light’s Sustaining Innovation(1998). He defines innovation in public and nonprofit settings as “an act that challenges the prevailing wisdom as it creates public values,” and an innovative organization as “one that is structural and led to making innovation more natural and frequent.” After a 5-year search, 26 Minnesota institutions were culled from a much longer list based on a history of sustained innovation. Each institution was studied in depth, including site visits and interviews. The sample included 8 governmental and 18 nonprofit nongovernmental institutions ranging from large state agencies to tiny nonprofits to county governments, young and old agencies, the well-endowed and the grant dependent. Many of the surviving innovation organizations got away with a staggering amount of confusion about reporting chains, unity of command and spans of control between supervisors and subordinates. Although there are preferred states of being regarding an innovating organization’s internal structure, absolute clarity about just who is the boss is not one of the prescriptions. Surviving innovations in nonprofit and public organizations found relatively low returns from structural reforms. While the conventional wisdom is that organizations should reorganize to flatten their hierarchies, rewire their organization charts, and generally make things fit, most of the surviving innovation organizations did quite well without such restructuring. Those who led the 26 organizations were hardly naive about human nature. Most had stories of employees gone wrong and ideas lost to jealousy and bitterness. But they chose to see the positive potential in each employee rather than the negative. They designed for innovation, even as they made sure their organizations had the systems to limit damage. Paul Light calls it a rigorous optimism. Innovating organizations need not be perfect. An innovating organization can do many things imperfectly and still succeed. It can get by with too many job classifications or too few; it can survive with a state-of-the-art computer system or none at all. What it cannot survive is poor financial management systems and a lack of concern for outcomes. The former is essential both for preventing financial disaster and for creating room for investment, and the latter is an absolute requirement for changing from compliance-based to performance-based accountability. Light found that there are no gimmicks or shortcuts to innovation. Instead, real innovative surviving institutions get there by practicing good old fashioned democratic organization and management. His conclusions, like those of the previously described studies of corporate innovation, make no mention of ranking, strategic planning, or other parts of the logic of managed innovation. Continuing innovation success is based on four core values that sound like a combined Sunday School lesson and management consultant’s manual. He found the core values shared by surviving innovative institutions were trust in employees, clients, and partners; honesty about the organization’s mission and about who decides; rigor in internal management and outcome evaluation; and faith in the purposes of the organization and in its possibilities. Innovation, according to Light, is more likely a result of good democratic administration than a result of attempts to directly manage innovation. THE DIFFUSION OF INNOVATION The empirically reliable knowledge of institutional innovation and creativity is complemented by a robust understanding of the diffusion of innovation. Public management is not so much the management of innovation as it is the management of the diffusion of innovation. Innovation diffusion exhibits a common pattern—the S curve. At first, the adoption of innovation is slow, with experimentation, trial and error, and the challenges of being the guinea pig. First successful innovators have a big advantage. Once a few others adopt an innovation successfully there tends to be a steep climb in adoption, followed by a leveling off. When an innovation reaches the leveling-off stage (it may include most other similar institutions or fewer, but innovations are seldom judged to have been successfully spread if they involve fewer than half of the cases), further investments in seeking additional adopters are usually wasted (Rogers 1962). All three of the empirical of business innovation and Light’s study of government and nonprofit innovation, as well as many studies of the diffusion of organizational innovation, form a pattern. The pattern of organizational innovation and its diffusion shows that innovation can occur in organized and managed settings but that there is a disconnect between the logic of managed innovation and, as Light puts it, sustained innovation (1998). Both approaches share an emphasis on the organization’s mission; on encouraging some risk taking and forgiving failed risks; on outcomes and performance; on a call for ideas or a marketplace of ideas; and on customers or clients. The disconnect has to do with the emphasis in managed innovations on traditional strategic planning, on the formalized importing of the innovations of others, on goal clarification, on order, on the visions of leaders, and on the advice of consultants found in the logic of managed innovation. The evidence for sustained innovation, on the other hand, describes relatively untidy, even chaotic work environments. Such creative places avoid an overemphasis on planning and emphasize doing and experimenting. While there is an emphasis on performance, it falls far short of a preoccupation with measuring it. Such creative places practice high decentralization, employee ownership of the processes of work, and leadership, which is at once able to decide and highly democratic and communicative. Put simply, one approach assumes that innovation can be managed, and the other assumes that the organization must be managed, and if it is rightly managed, it will innovate. MANAGED INNOVATION AND SUSTAINABLE INNOVATION For purposes of comparison, first consider the managed innovation model. Next consider research findings on innovation in the public and nonprofit sectors to be the sustaining innovations model (Light 1998). How do these models differ regarding the primary characteristics of organizations of all types—organization and reorganization; leadership; responsibility; goals; criteria for performance; goals, norms and values; the propensity to take risks; and, most important, the propensity to innovate? Table 1 presents a simplified comparison of managed innovation and sustaining innovation paradigmatic assumptions and the results of the application of those assumptions. The comparative emphasis has in part to do with differences between the use of the logic of managed innovation in business and corporate settings and the logic of sustaining innovation found in business as well as governmental, nonprofits, and philanthropic settings. Table 1 Comparing Managed Innovation and Sustaining Innovation Models . Managed Innovation Model . Sustaining Innovation Model . Organization Designed, orderly, hierarchical Loosely coupled, untidy Reorganization Designed and planned The formalization of developments that are already taking place A leader is The architect The gardener The change agent The visionary Responsibility For results To the group and in the group To stockholders To the institution and in the institution To customers, citizens, clients To external stakeholders, present and future Planning Traditional strategic management goal-setting and measuring results against those goals Innovating in a generally agreed-upon direction Goals Seek clarity, prioritize, focus on core mission Some purposeful ambiguity, solutions search for problems just as often as problem search for solutions Set goals then implement them Questions search for answers, answers search for questions Linear Goals lead to action, action leads to goals Curvilinear Criteria for performance  Time Shorter Longer  Precision Greater Lesser  Results Measuring efficiency, the bottom line Instrumental effectiveness  Outcomes Measured precisely Estimated, debated  Process Means-ends chain A garbage can Values Managed, guided, vision Historical, emergent, natural, shared Propensity to risk Lesser Greater Propensity to innovate Short, rapid, shallow, cycles of innovation Long, slow, deep cycles of innovations . Managed Innovation Model . Sustaining Innovation Model . Organization Designed, orderly, hierarchical Loosely coupled, untidy Reorganization Designed and planned The formalization of developments that are already taking place A leader is The architect The gardener The change agent The visionary Responsibility For results To the group and in the group To stockholders To the institution and in the institution To customers, citizens, clients To external stakeholders, present and future Planning Traditional strategic management goal-setting and measuring results against those goals Innovating in a generally agreed-upon direction Goals Seek clarity, prioritize, focus on core mission Some purposeful ambiguity, solutions search for problems just as often as problem search for solutions Set goals then implement them Questions search for answers, answers search for questions Linear Goals lead to action, action leads to goals Curvilinear Criteria for performance  Time Shorter Longer  Precision Greater Lesser  Results Measuring efficiency, the bottom line Instrumental effectiveness  Outcomes Measured precisely Estimated, debated  Process Means-ends chain A garbage can Values Managed, guided, vision Historical, emergent, natural, shared Propensity to risk Lesser Greater Propensity to innovate Short, rapid, shallow, cycles of innovation Long, slow, deep cycles of innovations Open in new tab Table 1 Comparing Managed Innovation and Sustaining Innovation Models . Managed Innovation Model . Sustaining Innovation Model . Organization Designed, orderly, hierarchical Loosely coupled, untidy Reorganization Designed and planned The formalization of developments that are already taking place A leader is The architect The gardener The change agent The visionary Responsibility For results To the group and in the group To stockholders To the institution and in the institution To customers, citizens, clients To external stakeholders, present and future Planning Traditional strategic management goal-setting and measuring results against those goals Innovating in a generally agreed-upon direction Goals Seek clarity, prioritize, focus on core mission Some purposeful ambiguity, solutions search for problems just as often as problem search for solutions Set goals then implement them Questions search for answers, answers search for questions Linear Goals lead to action, action leads to goals Curvilinear Criteria for performance  Time Shorter Longer  Precision Greater Lesser  Results Measuring efficiency, the bottom line Instrumental effectiveness  Outcomes Measured precisely Estimated, debated  Process Means-ends chain A garbage can Values Managed, guided, vision Historical, emergent, natural, shared Propensity to risk Lesser Greater Propensity to innovate Short, rapid, shallow, cycles of innovation Long, slow, deep cycles of innovations . Managed Innovation Model . Sustaining Innovation Model . Organization Designed, orderly, hierarchical Loosely coupled, untidy Reorganization Designed and planned The formalization of developments that are already taking place A leader is The architect The gardener The change agent The visionary Responsibility For results To the group and in the group To stockholders To the institution and in the institution To customers, citizens, clients To external stakeholders, present and future Planning Traditional strategic management goal-setting and measuring results against those goals Innovating in a generally agreed-upon direction Goals Seek clarity, prioritize, focus on core mission Some purposeful ambiguity, solutions search for problems just as often as problem search for solutions Set goals then implement them Questions search for answers, answers search for questions Linear Goals lead to action, action leads to goals Curvilinear Criteria for performance  Time Shorter Longer  Precision Greater Lesser  Results Measuring efficiency, the bottom line Instrumental effectiveness  Outcomes Measured precisely Estimated, debated  Process Means-ends chain A garbage can Values Managed, guided, vision Historical, emergent, natural, shared Propensity to risk Lesser Greater Propensity to innovate Short, rapid, shallow, cycles of innovation Long, slow, deep cycles of innovations Open in new tab Organization and Reorganization Innovation research indicates that innovations are more likely in flexible, loosely coupled institutional (or noninstitutional) settings. There is little evidence of the application of managed innovation logic resulting in decentralization and greater work group autonomy. There are differing perspectives on reorganization generally. Managed innovation enthusiasts are likely to describe, advocate, and carry out reorganization to attempt to achieve either innovation or the diffusion of innovation. Research on institutional behavior describes successful and enduring reorganization as an iterative process of organizational adaption only thought to be a reorganization after it is well along (March and Olsen 1976). Sustaining innovation assumes that form follows function. Leadership The research on the diffusion of innovation describes the linkage between leaders or elites, management consultants, policy advocates, and interest groups. Managed innovation simply assumes strong, centralized, heroic leadership. It is often the case that particularly creative persons with breakthrough ideas start organizations—Steve Jobs at Apple, Bill Gates at Microsoft—and become the heroic leaders in organization narratives. The problem, of course, is sustaining momentum, not only in the production of the innovative product, but also in the development of new innovative products. Organizations in the public and nonprofit sectors almost always receive a new leader into an ongoing institutional culture. While new businesses result from the creative energy of a leader, the Department of Agriculture, the State of Kansas, or the Ford Foundation are not phased out to be replaced by new organizations led by creative leaders. So, as we say in politics and public management, “ya dance with who brung ya.” Research on sustaining innovation, on the other hand, describes leadership thus: [T]he institution is a political and moral order, a collection of long-lasting standard operating procedures—reflecting values, principles, and beliefs that are shared. The primary task of the leader is to guarantee enough order and autonomy to enable the pursuit of collective purposes. Leaders are “gardeners”—they support rather than direct. They are obligated to defend uniform and collective standards of appropriateness, with reference to what is best for the institution” (Johan P. Olsen, quoted in Paul Light 1998). The metaphor of the leader as gardener simply would not do in the corporate world of managed innovation (Frederickson and Matkin 2007). As the logic of managed innovation migrates to governments, nonprofits, and philanthropies, assumptions about leadership take on greater importance. Nonbusiness institutions are inclined to multiple and contrasting leaders and loose power structures that dissipate centralized power, rendering heroic leadership assumptions of little use. It should not be imagined, however, that there are no great leaders in government and nonprofit institutions because there are (Cooper and Wright 1992). These great leaders, however, as the best research on public leadership finds, are more like gardeners than high-profile visionary heroes. Goals and Strategic Planning Diffusion research shows that institutional participants resist purported innovations they have not participated in creating. And institutions will ultimately reject purported innovations that run counter to institutional culture and norms. There is, in the sustained innovations model, a deep commitment to institutional performance, but that performance grows out of a shared sense of responsibility in the work group, from the institution to the individual and from the individual to the institution. Innovation happens in a steady iterative trial-and-error fashion, but it does happen. Once such innovation happens it becomes a collectively owned and enduring part of the institution. Traditional strategic planning logic—clarify goals, choose the most important among them, settle on one or two goals that best represent the institution’s core purpose, set up measures of how the institution will know how well it is achieving these goals, look at other institutions to find their best practices and import the best, and use benchmarks—is at the heart of the managed innovation model. It is an organizational adaptation of stimulus-response, means and ends, and logical positivist rationality. Based on empirical observation, scholars and researchers long ago modified and softened this model with the logic of Simon’s buffered rationality and Lindbloom’s “muddling through.” The common, empirically tested model is described in formal terms as “successive limited comparisons” and is compared with the “rational-comprehensive model,” which now has virtually no empirical warrant. The best of modern strategic planning literature reads very much like successive limited comparisons and the sustaining innovations model (Bryson 1995). Managed innovation enthusiasts and salespersons have mostly ignored such dull academic findings and press on with the rhetoric of more-or-less pure rational-comprehensive strategic planning. Two ghosts rest in the logic of strategic planning and managed innovation. First is the assumption that goals are knowable in the existential sense. On the one hand, leadership theorists see goals emerging in the institutional visions of leaders, but the ghost of megalomania haunts institutional purposes (not to mention the public interest) with personal ambition and hubris. Total Quality Management (TQM) theorists find goals in customer opinions and preferences, the second ghost. The original customer focus group ideas in TQM were designed to deal with that ghost, but TQM assumes that customers already know and understand their needs and interests and have thought through all the possibilities. The internet and e-mail, for example, are not so much responses to customer suggestions for product improvement as they are innovations that, when presented to possible customers, were in time found to be useful. It was not customer response or strategic planning or management that resulted in these innovations; it was creative people in flexible institutional settings seeing the possibilities. Innovation often takes the form of discovering answers for as yet unasked questions, services for which there is not yet a demand or a market, solutions searching for problems, arrows seeking bullseyes, and bullseyes waiting for arrows. Collective institutional deliberation and agreement on sensible organizational actions are more likely to put goals into perspective and make them useful than are formalistic strategic planning goal clarification exercises. Goals that are too precise may by the enemy of innovation, thus turning the logic of managed innovation on its head. Research also indicates that a certain level of goal ambiguity leaves wiggle room, invites possibilities, and generally opens things up. Techniques for the effective management and navigation of ambiguity are part of virtually all management textbook and courses. It is useful to reflect on Frederickson’s rule: Goals are deceptive—the unaimed arrow never misses. Criteria for Performance How shall institutions know how well they are doing? At one level, this is a temporal question—how well are we doing today, today compared to yesterday, today compared to a year ago, today projected a month, a year, a decade ahead? The managed innovation model is impatient and the whole logic of performance measurement and now performance management is in a hurry. Sustaining innovation assumptions are, it must be admitted, luxurious with time. Deliberation takes time. Finding consensus takes time. Training takes time. Gardening takes time. Nevertheless, institutions that practice widespread open deliberation, moving only after genuine consensus, investing in their people through training and particularly through job security, are at least as likely to enable innovation as are institutions that presume to manage innovations. And innovations thus enabled are much more likely to last. All versions of managed innovation call for greater precision in the measurement of results. In technology this makes great sense because we want software, medicine, and machines to do what they are supposed to do. The problem is exporting this logic to the murky world of human behavior and collective action. Virtually all research on the subject indicates that the challenges of precise measurement of performance in the public and nonprofit sectors are legion. On this point, I am partial to the wisdom of Sir Josiah Stamp in 1887: Public agencies are very keen on amassing statistics—they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube roots, and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you must never forget is that every one of those figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases” (Stamp 1929, 258–9). All effective organizations must have precise revenues, expenditures, budgets, and some ways to know how well they are accomplishing their purposes. But, following managed innovation assumptions, it is understood that performance measures are exactly that—measures—and that they only represent reality. They are subject to scrutiny, to debate, and even to dismissal if they are nonsense. Performance measures seldom answer questions; they are questions. Under conditions of institutional innovation, it is far better to approximate an answer to the important question, which is often vague, than to search for in exact answer to an unimportant question because precise measurement is possible. Such answers can always be made more precise; they are still answers to the unimportant question. Values No difference between the logic of managed innovation and sustained innovation is greater than their contrasting assumptions regarding values. Sustained innovation values are understood to be historical, natural, shared, and enduring. Individuals, it is assumed, are attracted to the institution at least in part because of the values they see in its purposes. There is, for example, ample evidence that individuals, if given an open choice, will choose to associate with institutions that appeal to their beliefs and characteristics. Persons who go into social work, teaching, accounting, law, business management, the ministry, and public service differ. Long-standing assumptions about institutions understand them to be not only places where people work together and share values, but also systems of shared meanings, a common language, and strongly reciprocal individual–institutional linkages by which institutional values influence the individual and vice versa. Institutional systems of shared meanings are layered, historical, evolving, autonomous work cultures that take on a natural organic quality. Such systems carry the institution’s values and generally reflect the values of those who make up the institution. Such organizations are sometimes described as strong culture institutions. Most research indicates that the effective management of strong culture institutions is usually home grown and tends in the direction of gardening (March and Olsen 1976). The gardener must be very familiar with all parts of the gardening process, work with what is at hand in the appropriate seasons, anticipate drought and insects, and, at the harvest, be prepared for the next season. The gardener tends to the values of the garden by managing the garden. Leaders, following managed innovation assumptions, assume not only to manage the garden but also to set its values. Strong culture institutions do change and can enable innovation, but they will resist attempts to manage the processes of change and innovation. Great strong culture institutional leaders are both in the institution and of the institution, unquestioned adherents to its shared meanings. Such leaders can carefully and patiently nurture the processes of change and keep open the prospects for innovation. Propensity to Risk and to Innovate Results are never neutral, and all solutions have some negative side effects. Organizations in the modern marketplace, particularly in high technology, lean strongly in the direction of rapid change, strong leadership, a transient work force, and the logic of managed innovation. They trade worker loyalty, brand identification, and long-term institution building for rapid response and high flexibility. Management consultants and strong leaders in such settings may claim that they can do it without these tradeoffs, but the evidence is not with them. Government institutions are, by definition, more stable and permanent, obviously giving away some rapid response, some malleability, and, because of the separation of powers, some strong singular leadership, in return for order and predictability. For our purposes, we must ask if one institutional type is more inclined to creativity, originality, and innovation than the other. The answer is that the two types are differently original and innovative. The threat of competition does appear to stimulate innovation, in short, rapid cycles, particularly in the high-technology marketplace. But it also results in the iron cage of isomorphism. Innovations in the public sector tend to be slower, take longer, and last longer. Governments build their own iron cages, but it simply cannot be assumed that governments are not creative or innovative. Just like businesses, some are and some are not. Innovation is both feasible and necessary. But serious organizational innovation is neither easy nor cheap. The primary work of the public and nonprofit sectors is to achieve the public interest and to serve the people. Innovation in the service of the public interest should not be cheated. RANKING, AWARDS, AND REPORT CARDS In the past 25 years, the ranking business has soared. A week does not pass without a newspaper headline about the most dangerous cities, the best hospitals, the worst airline on-time records, the best companies to work for, and which local schools are best and worst. Magazine covers hold out the promise that one will learn which are the best colleges, best graduate schools, best retirement places, safest cities, and other forms of “news you can use.” Our work world is filled with measures of performance, outcomes, results, quality, and descriptions of best, as distinct from worst, practices. Using the logic of organizational performance evaluations, school districts are being disaccredited; deans are being replaced because their schools slipped in ranking; mayors, hospital administrators, university presidents, and school superintendents are crowing about being number one or in the top ten. Or they are on the defensive, describing what must be done in the future to improve rankings. Rankings are the fashion of the day. They are everywhere. Rankings are powerful. It seems that everything can be ranked. Consumer products have been ranked for a long time. Cars, refrigerators, toothpaste, and breadmakers are tangible, easily tested, and easy to compare. Consumer product measurement is nuanced, providing not just an overall ranking but measures of reliability, appearance, convenience, safety, and cost. Who among us does not delight in a best buy? In response to corporate power and advertising, the Consumers Union was born in 1936 and is still the best known and most respected consumer product evaluation outfit. There is no question that firms producing tangible consumer products are influenced by the evaluation and ranking of their products, inasmuch as their success in the marketplace may turn on how the ranking of their products influence consumer choices. Awards, prizes, and honors are a form of measurement, evaluation, and comparison, following the assumption that such awards recognize the best of something. The Nobel Prizes in literature, sciences, health, economics, and peace are loose forms of measurement, setting the bar for standards and accomplishment. Consider the Pulitzer Prize in journalism, the Academy Awards in motion pictures, the Grammy’s in recorded music, the Newbery Award for children’s literature, the National League of Cities All America Cities Awards, the Harvard Government Innovation Awards, the Kennedy Honors, and the McArthur genius grants. In virtually every field of human endeavor, there is now at least one prize, award, or honor. These awards are very popular and often influential to those who compete (usually rather subtly) for them. James D. Watson’s wonderful little book The Double Helix (1991) is at one level a treatment of the first description of DNA by himself and Francis Crick, but at another level, it is a description of a race with other scientists, and particularly Linus Pauling, to get there first, knowing a Nobel Prize was waiting. Systems of accreditation are used in virtually every professional field as measures of organizational adherence, or failure to measure-up to agreed-upon standards. Certification and licensing serve as measures of individual competence in these same fields. If a hospital or a school is disaccredited or an individual is disbarred or has his or her license revoked, it is a measure of having fallen below standards of acceptable professional competence. Tests are the coin of the realm for those who seek university and graduate school admissions and those who seek to enter the professions—law, medicine, accounting, teaching, and so forth. Testing, including test preparation, is now a very big business. Tests are not only individual, they are aggregated to determine the assumed quality of an entire public school or public school district, or the quality of an entering law or business school class compared to the aggregate test scores of those admitted to other law or business schools. Universities and testing organizations are giant gate keepers not just to the professions, but as arbiters of a student’s future prospects. Without doubt the most controversial example of high stakes testing linked to institutional performance and ranking is the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001. Proposed by President George W. Bush and famously led through Congress by Senator Ted Kennedy, NCLB is a federal government reform of state and local public schools based on the premise of setting high standards and establishing measurable goals for the purpose of improving educational outcomes. The operative word in the No Child Left Behind education reform is accountability, as in “improving school accountability,” an explicit connection between high level targets, high stakes testing (outcomes), and a remarkably punitive sorting out good and bad schools and good and bad teachers. After more than a decade, what can be made of NCLB-driven public school reforms. First, in terms of student test results (outcomes), suburban schools are better than inner-city schools. Poverty is a far better predictor of school performance than is teacher quality (Ravitch 2010). So, to a considerable extent, the subject of NCLB has changed from school “quality” to school “equality.” Second, NCLB has resulted in a continuing trail of cheating and attempting to game the target-testing system to compete or to survive as any understanding of behavioral economics would predict (Ariely 2009; Hood 2006). Third, there is overwhelming evidence that “teaching to the test” is now a dominant public school pedagogy (Ravitch 2010). Fourth, school subjects outside the NCLB emphasis on reading, math, and science, such as civics and the social sciences, have been deemphasized. William T. Gormley Jr. and David Weimer’s Organizational Report Cards(1999) is the most thorough consideration of those aspects of the measurement business that are distinctly organizational. They review organizations that do performance measurement in childcare, air travel, higher education, economic development, employment and training, hospitals, health insurance companies, nursing homes, and public schools. They evaluate the ranking and performance measurement movement—what they call organizational report cards—generally positively and conclude that “organizational report cards are here to stay. Demands for systematic performance data from policy makers, citizens, managers, and consumers will guarantee that. The content, format, and impact of report cards however, will generate considerable debate” (p. 233). Rankings and performance evaluations are made by many organizations. Universities measure student performance and keep the admissions gate and thereby the gate to the professions. Professional associations such as the Bar Association, the American Medical Association, and many others act as self-governing peers, setting the standards and keeping the gates, as well as participating in and controlling accreditation. Private firms have moved vigorously into the ranking and performance evaluation business, particularly magazine companies. Interest groups (which are usually nonprofit organizations) also engage in rankings, albeit for less objective purposes. The Sierra Club ranks legislators one way while forest, mineral, and hunting groups rank them another. The pro- and anti-gun control groups engage in the war of the rankings. Less becoming is the evidence that the commercial package carriers (UPS, FedEx, etc.) do annual and always negative evaluations of the U.S. Postal Service, and they use these evaluations on Capitol Hill to attempt to diminish the credibility of the Postal Service. This is done in relentless attempts to force the Postal Service out of the overnight package delivery business. The commercially owned electric utilities use rankings and performance evaluations to discredit the publicly owned electric utilities, always claiming they do poorly (they don’t) and should be privatized, which would, of course, make them easy prey for large commercial electric utilities. There is even some evidence that the relatively new private education industry has, at times, been associated with negative evaluations of public schools, and particularly inner-city public schools (Ravitch 2010). Finally, in the more subjective fields of rankings, forms of peer review are widely used. Awards, prizes, and honors almost always use peer evaluations. The choices of articles to be accepted or rejected for publication in leading scholarly journals, a form of ranking, are always made by qualified peers. Tenure may be in the balance for the young professor. The choice of government grant recipients is always peer reviewed, endowing peers in each discipline with the power to measure quality. Assumptions made on the part of those who do the rankings and give the awards determine the results. In much the same way that the audience must accept the straight line in order for the joke to be funny, the salience of rankings rest on the assumptions made by the rankers. Ranking assumptions are, of course, the issue with respect to the alleged cultural bias of student testing as well as the issue in virtually all criticism of rankings. To deal with challenges to assumptions, ranking organizations use prestigious universities to set the assumptions and make the rankings or choose the winners. The Ford Foundation’s prestigious annual Innovations in American Government Awards are administered by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, a mutually beneficial arrangement for sharing reflected status. The assumptions of rankers are seldom challenged. It may be that the assumptions of rankers and award givers are so valid on their face that they defy open challenges. But some ranking assumptions are more open to criticism, such as the continuing claim that research is more important than teaching in giving faculty tenure, or the elevating of student test scores over grade point average for university and professional school admissions. Ranking assumptions can be the battleground for policy debates. But more often rankings and the assumptions behind them are simply assumed to be valid. Claims of objectivity notwithstanding, all rankings are based on assumptions and no rankings are neutral. Ranking can be perilous to careers and to public perceptions of institutions. The remarkable James Fellows, from 1995 to 1998 the editor of U.S. News and World Report, is one of the strongest national advocates of the so-called civic journalism and “news you can use.” He argues that rankings are just such news. And as anyone who has walked by a magazine rack in the last 5 years would conclude, ranking is very good journalism business. Fellows said that their annual issue that ranks schools and colleges is, to U.S. News and World Report, what the annual swimsuit issue is to Sports Illustrated. A sniggling comparison, but it makes the postmodern point. We do not know and may never know what effect ranking has on quality, however defined. Such things are tough to measure. Rankings and report cards are, as Gormley and Weimer (1999) rightly claim, a kind of market surrogate in a non-market setting. They also claim that more market-like competition resulting from ranking does stimulate improvement. A poorly ranked city, school district or business logically should try to improve its ranking by improving its quality. And a well-ranked city will feel pressure from below and respond with its own improvement, assuming it has the resources—a very big assumption. Competition of this kind has always been with us, but rankings may sharpen and focus that competition. Rankings may also result in “teaching to the test,” in a desperate attempt to lift “quality.” It is easy, however, to miss the point—many rankings do not really rank quality, they rank impressions of quality. Numbers are not reality, they represent reality. Rankings are, in fact, surrogates for quality, used in the absence of reliable ways to measure quality. Rankings processes pick up not only reflections of quality, but reflections of status, bias, political clout and ignorance. In the era of ranking, we have learned that rankings attract a lot of attention. We may agree that some rankings are casual social science at best, but they are exciting and fun. Rankings can be a postmodern wedding of simplified social science and entertainment. Complicated matters are distilled to simple good, better and best categories and put into sound bites that busy folks can easily digest without being conceptually overburdened. Rankings can also be genuine objective comparisons of the effectiveness of institutions assuming there are reliable data and assuming the assumptions built into ranking criteria are reasonable. Ranking, like most things, can be well or poorly done. It is now commonplace for schools, cities, nonprofits, businesses, and universities to set out specific ranking objectives in their strategic plans, to marry rankings and objectives. A business or law school will, for example, list among its strategic objectives the achievement of a ranking in the top 20 or top 10. Businesses will set market share and profit goals—a kind of ranking objective. Because of the power of rankings, they have stimulated the logic that institutions can, in the short run (rankings are always in the short run) improve their standing by better management and particularly by attempting to directly manage the processes of organizational innovation. Rankings punish outliers. Rankings are often a formidable pressure to conform to modal assumptions. Rankings are not friendly to innovation, creativity, risk taking, or doing things in new ways. When rankings get tightly linked to efforts to further organizational innovation, as is now everywhere evident, the results are usually less rather than more innovation. Ranking things, comparing things, and measuring things is a search for reason and understanding that grew out of Enlightenment notions of science and the scientific basis of useful knowledge. Measuring is embedded in modernist assumptions of the human capacity to demystify and thereby to know in objective ways (English 2009). STRATEGIC PLANNING Performance measurement and rankings are all broadly a part of the family of strategic planning. The strategic planning approach to guiding organizational change is, without question, a useful organizational tool. It may be that the processes of strategic planning, when compared with the strategic plan itself, have the most lasting effect on the organization particularly if the strategic planning process is highly participative and mostly bottom-up (Bryson 1995). The capacity of a well-designed strategic planning process to encourage interaction between departments, to enhance levels of commitment to shared objectives, to help make organizational goals more congruent, to sort out more important goals, and to challenge goal displacement is generally established. These generalizations are especially true for organizations with relatively unambiguous purposes, little goal conflict among principals, technical or mechanical work processes, clear control over resources and staff, and predictable outcomes. Formal strategic planning loses salience in organizational settings that lack these characteristics. For example, government purposes are richly ambiguous, and government organizations are filled with political, regional, philosophical, and other conflicts among elected legislators and executives, and they are often bereft of bureaucratic capacity to control work processes and outcomes. Strategic planning is, therefore, difficult to apply in the world of government management. Nevertheless, virtually all approaches to innovation in the public sector begin with the logic of strategic planning. One of the purposes of the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) and the 2010 GPRA Modernization Act, for example, obliges all federal agencies to develop a strategic plan, which seeks to bring precision to ambiguous law, reconciles competing objectives, and sets out formulae by which goal progress will be measured. The success of the Federal strategic planning processes mandated by GPRA and GPRAMA is mixed, but public managers are making creative efforts to carry out the law (Radin 2000; Frederickson and Frederickson 2006). Managers cannot resist instincts to have the institutional visions formulated primarily at the top and then to sell those visions to the rank-and-file through strategic planning (Bryson 1995). Ranking, report carding, and performance measurement are all systems of comparison and evaluation. In the non-market world of public affairs—governments, nonprofits and nongovernmental institutions, universities, and philanthropies—these comparative systems are modern market surrogates. We may not buy cities or universities, or judge the United Way or the MacArthur Foundation in the same way we decide to buy a Ford. It is reasonable to know how to differentiate among them and make informed choices in the absence of a market. Systems of ranking, report carding, best practices, and benchmarking presume to help us do that. And the institutions that wish to serve us look to these systems for differentiation and innovation clues. THE IRON CAGE What explains the connections between performance measurement, ranking, awards, and strategic planning on one hand and the drive for organizational innovation on the other? The answer is the iron cage. Max Weber, the first and greatest student of complex organizations and of organizational behavior, described such organizations as iron cages, so efficient and powerful in their capacity to control men and women that, once established, the momentum of bureaucratization is irreversible (Weber 1952). Generations of organization theorists have verified and elaborated the iron cage hypothesis, explaining why organizational innovation is less rather than more likely because of performance measurement, ranking, and strategic planning. One would logically assume that organizational change is driven by competition and by the need for efficiency. Instead, organizational change in the iron cage simply makes organizations more similar without necessarily making them more efficient or effective (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). This is why: isomorphism, the concept that best captures the iron cage and the process of organizational homogenization. Isomorphism describes a pattern of increasing similarity, homogeneity, and congruence between and among organizations in similar fields—all research universities, all armies, all software companies, all hospitals, and so forth. Isomorphism in fields of similar organizations leads to homogeneity among those organizations in their structure, technology, culture, and outputs. The adoption of civil service reform in the United States illustrates this process. Early adoption of civil service reforms was related to internal government needs and was strongly influenced by such city characteristics as the size of immigrant population, political reform movements, socioeconomic composition, and city size (Zucker and Tolbert 1981). Later adoption, however, was not predicted by city characteristics, but was instead related to broadly held assumptions of the legitimate structural form for municipal administration. This is because cities have copied each other in a diffusion of innovation and have converged, homogenized, and become increasingly alike. As institutions copy and mimic, they cease to innovate in significant ways and enter the iron cage of bureaucracy. The same isomorphic process is found in virtually all organizational fields. What forces cause this isomorphism? There are three isometric forces: coercive, mimicking, and contextual. Coercive isomorphism is caused by pressure exerted on an organization by another organization upon which the first is dependent and by the force of cultural expectations in the society within which organization functions. In some circumstances, organizational change is a direct response to government mandate: manufacturers adopt new pollution control technologies to conform to environmental regulations; nonprofits maintain accounts and hire accountants in order to meet tax law requirements; and organizations employ diversity specialists to fend off allegations of discrimination. Schools mainstream special students and hire special education teachers to conform to state and federal standards. The existence of a common legal environment affects many aspects of an organization’s behavior and structure. The United States has a complex, rationalized system of contract law that requires organizational controls to honor legal commitments. Other legal and technical requirements of the state—the budget cycle, the fiscal year, annual reports, and financial reporting requirements that ensure eligibility for the receipt of federal contracts or funds—all cause organizations to behave in similar ways. A lot of organizational similarity can be traced to the forces of coercive isomorphism. When organizational technologies are poorly understood, when goals are ambiguous, or when the environment is uncertain, organizations tend to model themselves on other organizations (March and Olsen 1976). The advantages of mimicking behavior are considerable; when an organization faces goal ambiguity or unclear connections between means and ends, it is cheaper and quicker to model other organizations facing similar circumstances. Finding more fundamental organizational approaches is expensive and takes time (Cyert and March 1963). Homogeneity in organizational structures and behavior is also a function of the limited choices available. “Large organizations choose from a relatively small set of major consulting firms, which, like Johnny Appleseeds, spread a few organizational models throughout the land. Such models are powerful because structural changes are observable, whereas changes in policy and strategy are less easily noticed. The history of management reform in American government agencies, which are noted for their goal ambiguity, is almost a textbook case of isomorphic modeling, from the PPPB of the McNamara era to the zero-based budgeting of the Carter administration,” to contracting out in the Reagan era, then to reinventing government in the early Clinton years, and now to measuring performance and results and searching for innovation (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). Organizations tend to model themselves after similar organizations in their field that they perceive to be more legitimate or successful. Mimicking other organizations that are prestigious or perceived to be successful appears to have less to do with innovation and more to do with a search for improved reputation or standing (English 2009). A third feature of the iron cage of isomorphism is normative and stems primarily from professionalization. Two aspects of professionalization are important sources of isomorphism. One is the formal education of professionals and the other is the growth of professional networks that span organizations and act as agents of the diffusion of ideas. Universities and professional training institutions are important centers for the development of organizational norms among professional managers and their staff. Professional and trade associations define and promulgate normative rules about organizational and professional behavior. They certify, accredit, and legitimate. Such processes fill a reservoir with rather similar individuals who occupy similar positions across a range of organizations. This similarity in professional orientation and disposition will often trump unique organizational traditions and controls (Perrow 1974). Many professional career tracks are so closely guarded, both at entry and throughout career progression, that individuals who make it to the top are virtually indistinguishable. There is, for example, an absence of variation among Fortune 500 board members (Hirsch and Whisler 1982). Individuals in similar organizations are socialized to common expectations about their personal behavior, appropriate style of dress, organizational vocabularies (Williamson 1975) and standard methods of speaking, joking, or addressing others (Ouchi 1980). To the extent managers and key staff are drawn from the same universities and filtered on a common set of attributes, they will tend to view problems in a similar fashion; see the same policies, procedures, and structures as normatively sanctioned and legitimated; and approach decisions in much the same way. Together they build the iron cage of isomorphism. The exchange of information among professionals helps contribute to a commonly recognized hierarchy of status (DiMaggio 1983). Upwardly mobile mangers and staff seek to secure positions in central organizations in order to further their own careers. Aspiring managers undergo socialization into the norms and mores of the organizations they hope to join. Organizational fields that include a large professionally trained labor force will be driven primarily by status competition. Organizational prestige and resources are key elements in attracting professionals. This process encourages homogenization as organizations seek to ensure that they can provide the same benefits and services as their competitors. In the iron cage, these isomorphic processes proceed in the absence of evidence that they increase organizational efficiency (DiMaggio 1983; DiMaggio and Powell 1983). To the extent that organizational effectiveness is enhanced, the reason is often that organizations are rewarded for their similarity to other organizations in their fields. This similarity can make it easier for organizations to transact with other organizations, to attract career-minded staff, to be acknowledged as legitimate and reputable, and to fit into categories that define eligibility for public and private grants and contracts. None of this, however, ensures that conformist organizations are more efficient than their more deviant peers. And worse, there is no evidence that isomorphic processes enhance prospects for organizational innovation and creativity; indeed, logic suggests the opposite because isomorphic processes punish deviation. Here are some key hypotheses drawn from the research on institutional isomorphism: – The more uncertain the relationship between means and ends, the greater the extent to which organizations will model after organizations perceived to be successful. – The more ambiguous the goals of an organization, the greater the extent to which it will model itself after organizations that it perceives are successful. – The greater the reliance on academic credentials in choosing managerial and staff personnel, the greater the extent to which an organization will become like other organizations in its field. – The greater the participation of organizational managers in trade and professional associations, the more likely the in organization will be, or will become, like other organizations in its field. – The greater the extent to which an organizational field is dependent upon a single (or several similar) source(s) of support for vital resources, the higher the level of isomorphism. Prizes, awards, rankings, and test scores are representations of status and legitimacy—bars in the iron cage of isomorphism. The iron cage of isomorphism explains the cycles of management fads and the instincts of executives in prestige organizations to be attracted to consultants who claim a leading edge innovation, a new concept, or an answer to a vexing question. The paradox of the iron cage is this: In their pursuit of breakthroughs, or creativity or innovations, organizations usually converge into an essentially indistinguishable lump. In this lump, they compete for the slightest differentiation—which is ranked first, second, and third—when in fact the distinctions between them are very slight—distinctions without differences. Isomorphism is actually furthered by the combination of managed innovation and ranking, a perverse result exactly the opposite of a search or authentic innovation. The potent mixture of rankings, performance measurement, and the logic of managed innovation cheats real, lasting innovation. In the same way that the overemphasis on testing and the linking of testing to ranking and status has caused schools and colleges to cheat and to teach to the test, the assumptions of institutional rankings and prizes combined with the logic of managed innovation reduces the probability of innovation and especially lasting innovation (Lehman 1999; Sacks 2000). To weaken the iron cage, it is essential to break the weld, which links the instinct for organizational innovation to rankings, prizes, status, and legitimacy. Once that weld is broken, the organization can worry less about legitimacy and prestige and more about genuine creativity. Only then can it break out of the iron cage. 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TI - Public Management and Authentic Innovation
JF - Perspectives on Public Management and Governance
DO - 10.1093/ppmgov/gvab018
DA - 2021-09-03
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/public-management-and-authentic-innovation-fgujWWKa0n
SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -