Government reinventors at Tuesday’s gathering: Inslee chief of staff Mary Alice Heuschel, Wendy Korthuis Smith of Results Washington, and Shelley Metzenbaum of the Volcker Alliance.
OLYMPIA, July 18.—Reinventing government must be the easiest thing in the world — Washington state has done it jillions of times. Now the administration of Gov. Jay Inslee is getting set to reinvent it yet again, and as always when these state-government self-improvement projects get started, hopes are high.
At a conference this week in the state’s capital city, an audience of about 200 state-agency managers was treated to a preview of the latest effort – a strategic planning process to be known as Results Washington. Chief of Staff Mary Alice Heuschel outlined a goal-setting effort that has been in the planning stages since Inslee took office in January. It aims to use measurable data to see if the state is getting the job done. Part of that effort, of course, is to figure out what the job is.
“Our journey in the next – now 3 ½ years – hopefully will launch us into making Washington a better place,” Heuschel said.
The basic idea is to make government less about following procedures and more about achieving results, and you might wonder how well it is going to work this time, given the fact that just about every new governor has been talking about pretty much the same thing for the last 50 years. Seems like you can set your watch by these efforts to make government more efficient and effective. Sometimes they start from the top down and sometimes they start from the ground up. This time the Inslee Administration is coming at it from both directions, under the direction of a chief of staff who made management reform a focus during a career in education. The Inslee Administration aims to boldly go where no administration has gone before, creating a plan for the next 20 years or more. Thus it implies it expects the next governor to continue what it starts. That would be a first.
Not Same Thing as Lean Management
The strategic planning process will be formally rolled out next month, and Heuschel’s presentation Tuesday at South Puget Sound Community College offered mainly the broad strokes. It is the same plan she outlined for the first time May 15 at a luncheon of the Washington Business Alliance. But the presentation did offer a bit more of the thinking behind it, both in Heuschel’s remarks and those of Dr. Shelley Metzenbaum, who joined her onstage. Metzenbaum, now president of the Volcker Alliance in Washington, D.C., coordinated a similar strategic planning effort in the Obama Administration under the White House Office of Management and Budget.
The idea essentially brings a business-planning concept to government — an effort to define goals, design programs to achieve them, measure progress, and make course corrections along the way. It’s what business gurus like to call “continuous improvement.” Heuschel, a former Renton School District superintendent, said it is an idea that has taken hold in public education. “It will be a metric-driven, data-driven system for the entire state, for all agencies statewide. We know that if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it, and we are going to be on a continuous improvement journey. So we are developing smart goals.
“It has come from education, but it is used in every aspect of business as well. Specific, measurable, attainable and relevant time-bound measures. You will see measures that go up to 2030, but they will have indicators that measure annually on our progress toward getting to that goal. That will be the structure for Results Washington. We are trying to make sure that the end result is what we want and what we care about, so that we can celebrate success.”
Keeping track of big ideas like these is one of the most difficult tasks in all of state government. It ought to be noted that this is a different initiative than the state’s much-touted lean-management program, launched by former Gov. Christine Gregoire in 2011 and touted by Inslee at every opportunity during the 2012 campaign. That rather different planning effort, also borrowed from business, aims to reduce waste in the programs the state offers. Strategic planning, one might say, looks at things from a higher plane, pondering whether those activities are worth doing in the first place. There is a relationship, to be sure. Metzenbaum explained the difference: “You can be incredibly efficient at getting nothing done. And then you are really inefficient because you are wasting all of your money.”
50 Years of Reform
Washington certainly is no stranger to planning efforts like these. Just about every governor since Dan Evans in the sixties has launched one, and sometimes more than one. Each program usually can point to a success or two, yet the idea of institutionalized revolution never seems to take hold, and issues of bureaucratic resistance and disinterest never seem to change. The efforts come in many flavors, usually representing the latest thinking in business, transplanted to government. Back in the sixties and the seventies, when the hot topic in business was corporate structure, the talk was all about state-government reorganization. Evans launched the Council for the Reorganization of Washington State Government in 1966, then replaced it in 1974 with the Advisory Commission on State Government Productivity.
And after the brief, strange interregnum of Dixy Lee Ray, Republican Gov. John Spellman was at it again, issuing an executive order in 1981 to launch another reorganization of the executive branch. His order declared: “A more coherent and responsive organizational structure will also improve citizen understanding and participation in government.”
“Reinventing government” was the buzzword of the day in 1987 when Gov. Booth Gardner created the State Commission on Efficiency and Accountability, to advise him on how to cut government and increase productivity. Then successor Mike Lowry decided the best way to make government efficient was to get rid of the commission. He had a better idea, the “Performance Partnership.” That one bit the dust two years later. Next came Gov. Gary Locke in 1997, advocating the then-fashionable “total quality management,” creating a governor’s Council on Service Improvement and Performance, and declaring that heads would roll if managers failed to demonstrate improvement. Then when budgets got tight after the 9/11 slowdown, he advocated a new approach to budgeting called Priorities of Government, in which the state emphasized the areas that offered the biggest bang for the buck. That idea withered under Gregoire. As the economy boomed, tax revenue skyrocketed – and suddenly saving money wasn’t such a popular idea.
Yet Gregoire also launched GMAP, short for Government Management Accountability and Performance – a program that required state agency officials to adopt strategic plans with performance and efficiency goals, and allowed the governor to give them a public chewing-out if they didn’t meet them. Though praised nationally as one of the most innovative ideas in state government, the program appeared to become an afterthought in Gregoire’s second, recession-dominated term. As tax revenue plummeted, lawmakers and the executive branch apparently didn’t need an efficiency program to tell them government needed to be leaner and meaner.
And looking back on it all from a modern era when people talk about “silos” and “stovepipes” and other valuable concepts unimagined just a few years ago — several themes emerge. First is that no one seems to know what to do with the Department of Social and Health Services. Cobbled together in the name of government efficiency during that first reorganization drive, governors since then have either struggled to make the giant social-services department functional or start breaking it apart again. One fruit of that is the creation and expansion of the state Health Care Authority, which has assumed some DSHS functions in recent years. At the same time, complaints remain constant about the form and nature of state-government regulation, while ambitious reform plans are announced time and again and always seem to peter out. And there is one other commonality: Every time a new program is launched, someone is certain to declare that this time things will be different. As in the statement of Locke deputy chief of staff Fred Stephens in 1997: “This will be different.”
Things Will be Different
And so it is this time around. As the Inslee Administration prepares its new effort, Heuschel says this too will be different.
The GMAP program, terminated in April in favor of the soon-to-launch Results Washington program, offers a few lessons, she said – but you really don’t want to do things quite the same way. Not every agency participated in the GMAP program, she said. All of state government will be involved in the new one. “I think the biggest difference is that we will do it as a system and get everyone’s buy-in on the journey, to have that focus. And you will see a difference with resources of time, energy, effort and funding.”
Under the new strategic plan, the Inslee administration will align its thinking around five goals – a world-class education system, a prosperous economy, leadership in green energy and a clean environment, healthy and safe communities, and efficient, effective and accountable government. Next task will be finding ways to measure the state’s performance. And the basic idea will be to align state government programs toward those goals, assigning them ambitious targets that will require them to stretch, giving them direction without being punitive.
Sounds like a no-brainer, sure, said Metzenbaum, who worked with 24 of the largest federal agencies in a similar goal-setting process under the Obama Administration. Since 1993 a federal law, the Government Performance and Results Act, has required strategic planning by federal agencies, and just as on the state level, every presidential administration has a bold new way to go about it. But details always are a problem – the measurements, the targets, the rewards or penalties. Meanwhile the public wonders what is taking so long. Metzenbaum now promotes performance management via the newly formed Volcker Alliance. “This is so common sense that if you are talking to someone from the public and you say what do you do for a living – I work with government agencies, I try to get them to set goals and manage performance with measurements – they will look at you and go, you mean we are not already doing that?”
Washington’s effort will establish it as a leader nationwide, Metzenbaum said, just as GMAP did a few years ago. “I think we are all on an exciting adventure together,” she said. “We’re making progress, and a sea change is under way.” Hope springs eternal.
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