Embracing External Accountability

Reflecting on change as our clients continue to develop their approaches to transforming their organisations - structures, processes and service quality - for some, the power of external overview and scrutiny can be highly influential in driving improvement in service quality and reshaping external relationships.

In discussing aspects of organisational change, such as 're-engineering' and business process improvement, by embracing external political accountability to build support for change, Mark Moore says in 'Creating Public Value (1995), once their (i.e. organisational leaders) purposes are linked to the expectations and demands of powerful overseers standing behind them, their strategic visions cease being the idiosyncratic views of transient figureheads: they become, instead, a 'reality' to which the organisation has to respond."

Moore also argues that, "once armed with a powerful external constituency demanding the changes they want to make, the task of changing their organisation becomes much easier." He suggests that managers who reject accountability risk subsequent disaster by losing touch with the important values that politicians want expressed through their organisations' operations. "They get too far away from an important kind of 'customer'. Similarly, by resisting accountability, managers lose some of their ability to challenge the organisations they lead...they become vulnerable to their own subordinates' desires to be protected from demands for change...the net effect is to reduce the organisation's responsiveness and value to citizens and (the) overseers."

Moore concludes his section on embracing the external accountability by saying, "if managers seek strategic changes in organisations, embracing accountability seems to be an important tool. Without such an embrace, managers confront their organisations alone. With it, managers can focus the massed force of public expectations for change on the organisation - a far more advantageous position."

All of us working in and around the public sector, and our associated partners and stakeholders, now prepare for the inevitable public sector expenditure reductions, as the Prime Minister will announce tomorrow in a speech and the main opposition party have been gradually testing public responses to. As we do prepare, we might usefully think how best to garner the power of external accountability as one of the drivers of change in our organisations that those cuts (assuming they cannot be resisted) will foster, without somehow damaging irreparably the improvements in performance many have achieved in recent years.