Change and Continuity Management in the Public Sector

The DALI Model for Effective Decision Making

Rebecca E. Dalli Gonzi, Simon Grima

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781789731682
• eBook ISBN: 9781789731699
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

The customer problem in the public sector appears when too many processes are in place and staff volumes are too large to adapt to sudden change. As situations evolve and solutions are required, public managers are faced with an overload of information for decision-making, as normal day-to-day policy is overlooked to accommodate management by crisis. Generally, emergency situations call for effective steps to be taken, constrained by short time frames and a dispersed public workforce. 

Managing teams require structure in their response to an evolving crises, which is generally a difficult position to attain when information and resources are limited. Protocol and response plans are only activated in extreme crises, leaving a gap in response when overload has been reached but is not within the stipulated margins. Recognition at this stage is important if successful outcomes are to be achieved. This book proposes an 8-point model, which it labels the DALI Model, for responding to these situations, to simplify and synthesize decision-making processes.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Setting a Standard for Service

Designing a desired future for the public sector was the vision that inspired this work. As citizen demands and expectations increase dramatically, the delivery of services has two routes to take – a cost-cutting approach at the expense of delivery quality or a re-assessment internal process. When theories or methods can no longer facilitate the stimulus that the public sector requires to meet external situational challenges, a call for radical change is made.

This work aims to address a key concern with delivery: how can we efficiently use the resources we have while managing the public sector’s changing needs? Fuelling change requires removing barriers for collaboration, as well as a high degree of cultural change among its teams. Yet, it seems that unless crisis suddenly demands it, bureaucracy prevails stifling the much-needed fluidity and adaptability that we tend to find in the private sector. A bottom-up approach to change can only happen if a dismantling of power circles happens so leaders, then, can facilitate movement into a ‘culture of doing’ rather than a ‘culture of receiving’.

Public sector projects in the future will be required to carry out a situational awareness of evolving scenarios, consult expert techniques and propose solutions in the shortest timeframes. Failure to do so would mean a significant impact in providing adequate resources and service delivery where needed. Decision-making led by the topmost few will be left lacking, if not supported by input from front-line service operators or lower management levels. If such input is neglected, this could lead to large losses of knowledge and ultimately disengagement.

Changes in the environment can cause a threat to any significant public entity, institution or government department. Looking at how government structures have been designed in the past to facilitate change, as the author I question their adaptability in today’s fast-paced environment. In the last 20 years, the increasingly complex delivery of public services required a response to a rapidly changing environment. This means challenging traditional administrative structures by circumstances they face and, the ever-restricted resources. In addition, changes that are re-shaping our political and environmental realities allow little room for error or incompleteness. As a result, the need for public services to reach an adequate output to support the public’s perceived status will be challenged if there is no standard to support that outcome. As the author of this work, my personal response to changing times was never simple or equally the same for each circumstance. But experience has shown that some emergent patterns do exist, which have helped overcome what one might call ‘staying in one’s comfort zone’ rather than accepting what has been handed over as some ‘destined path’. We desire to have ‘great change’ but is it a real change, if carrying it out to completion requires operating with empathy towards self, peers, society or institutions (Bezzina, Grima, & Mamo, 2014; Grima, Seychell, & Bezzina, 2017).

Building situational awareness is key to a responsive change plan. That response can be made possible if directly related to our own personal situational analysis, before any major change jolts its way through. To kick start your thought process, here are a few questions set within eight themes discussed throughout this book:

Connection:	Where am I? Can I connect? Am I aware of what is happening around me?
Capacity:	Can I cope?
Governance:	Do I have what it takes to cope? Do I have a structure in place to get me there?
Network:	Does my network support me or does it hinder me?
Policy:	Can I work within the standard procedures I have? Does the process govern me well?
Training:	Can I train myself to be better? Can I add more skills to myself to cope better?
Process improvement:	Can I see my life improve? Do I want to see it improve? Will steps here help me improve? How committed am I?
Standard / alignment:	Can I measure change? Am I closer to the real self? Am I closer to achieving what or who I really wish to be?

The above themes introduce personal awareness to help people overcome disengagement from lives which are bottlenecked by processes and gatherings that do not generate the required success.

We generally cannot accept that closely built structures can fail us – the ones that we have built or taken for granted or the ones that are closest to the way we work. The ability we have to change a situation is always dependant on factors, some of which are in our control and others that are not. Defining the level of my output to family, customers or colleagues during a time of personal crisis equips me with unprecedented knowledge. Knowledge which can help one grow, affirm and transfer that same knowledge to others in situations like those that have been experienced by self.

If we apply the above questions to a personal business or the running of a department, the process of achieving awareness is very similar. The questions will still apply, built towards different reference points and larger scales. Fig. 1 presents eight themes for strategic direction in maintaining stability through changing times.

Fig. 1: DALI Model Structure. Source: Author.

To simplify this figure, let us relate it to a personal learning situation:

I need to connect with reality to understand myself in the context of environmental or societal change. Based on the capacity I have (friends, family, work connections, social connections and leisure connections) I can further develop that connection, but it is dependent on how much of this I have or encourage myself to pursue. I follow a governance model internal to my own decision-making processes (the one that I have built through my life such as trustworthiness, loyalty, image), or I choose one that I am governed by in my external environment. My pre-existing network is what makes or predefines me: if I feel I belong to a ‘crisis’ it will either restrict me to remain in that situation or make me rebel against it to push me further forward. Based on what I have seen, learnt or experienced as I journey, I realise that I might need to empathise with my personal ‘policy’ or standard that I have created for myself over time. Perhaps adjust to a better way of doing things. Training depends on what I choose to invest in myself and process improvement is what I need to re-adapt if those changes in myself need to be made. That is the hardest part of the story because it is facing all my critics to get to a better process.

Coping means understanding the gap between oneself and the ability to find inner strength to address the uncomfortable changes happening around. It means facing the inner critic, to see the situation as it really is, not as one perceives it to be. Visualisation can happen only if one dismantles the image of a situation as it is being perceived to address its reality through a properly built situational analysis. In the process of this visualisation, comes a formulation of its response. Furthermore, a coping strategy includes selecting those aspects of a service that are must do’s and those of response that can be left safely for the time being. This, together with an assessment of current resources (which could include human teams as well as other tangible resources) can provide a service if the right balance is achieved.

Society Today

The combination of events means society is increasingly faced with a variety of catastrophes that do not fit normal terms of reference, response doctrines or traditional operational scripts (Lagadec, Guihou, & Lagadec, 2006); the London Riots (UK); severe travel disruption – Europe’s cold fall (EU); migrant arrivals: the Libyan Crisis (Malta); severe weather damage, terrorist attacks and political changes that do not reflect societal needs. Each scenario is conditioned by sudden external change that cuts across several strategic areas, requires a rapid response and a push towards creative thinking, including new guidelines and critical decision-taking.

Due to growth in the complexity, scale and nature of change, organisational strategy is required to cope with a broad definition of change. Boundaries between different categories of change are slowly merging as events incorporate different threats within the limits of one cataclysm. Radical organisational change or ‘frame bending’ as it is sometimes evocatively known, involves the busting loose from an existing orientation (Johnson, 1987) and the transformation of the organisation. Problems emerge when a change event impacts in such a way that current methods or procedures are inadequate for the circumstances at hand. Situations faced within the category termed ‘radical’ constitute rapid, uncertain, incorporating elements of threat, affecting a combination of policy areas such as climate change, technology, security, economic interdependence and just-in-time production. Such conditions exhibit fundamental changes to normal organisational activity but begin to address a gap of change that incorporates qualities typical of crisis scenarios, without reaching a scale of criticality that would include large-scale natural disasters, such as tsunamis or earthquakes.

The jump from a ‘radical event’ to a ‘crisis event’ is explained through a most suited definition of crisis: ‘a serious threat to the basic structures or the fundamental values and norms of a social system, which – under time pressure and highly uncertain circumstances – necessitates making critical decisions’ (Rosenthal, Charles, & ‘t Hart, 1989, p.10). The Oxford English Dictionary defines crisis point as a turning point when an important change takes place. Other references in the literature are made to an unstable period, especially one of extreme trouble or danger in politics, economics and other areas. Let us explore what it means to live alongside the crisis.

We must understand the context within which decisions are being taken. We have established that in general we are tasked to respond to a change state. This means a need to handle both change and routine tasks (Broome, 1998). It requires decision-making and functioning within a variety of settings, often followed by having to respond to the unthinkable (Beaudan, 2002). This type of change situation can create initiative overload and organisational chaos (Engelhardt & Simmons, 2002) for decision-makers, with the added challenge of attempting to stay on course (Beaudan, 2002). For example, the result of extreme weather patterns with its impact on global food supplies coupled with heightened fear-driven terror attacks, means political, economic and cultural disturbances together with a multitude of iterative bearings.

When central service functions of an institutional structure experience a relatively strong decline in authority because these functions are impaired or suffer from overload, this can also suggest a state of crisis (Boin, ‘t Hart, Stern, & Sundelius, 2005). Thus, the term ‘crisis’ in this context is best understood not in terms of the calamity moment itself, but as the organisational capacity to respond to that situation (Boin et al., 2005).

Heightened turbulence causes management teams to focus inwards, thus responding with tactics such as cutting costs and re-organising in response. But the cost-cutting exercise or the shuffling of a department is not a response strategy. It is response in a crisis frame of mind which does not a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Setting a Standard for Service
• Chapter 2 Public Sector Responses to Radical Change: An Analysis of Theoretical Models
• Chapter 3 Public Sector Cases: Decision-making and Response
• Chapter 4 The Results
• Chapter 5 Conclusions and Reflections
• Appendix 1 Online Survey
• Appendix 2 Focus Group Discussions: Workshop-based Setting
• Bibliography
• Index