A “Macro” Argument – The Paradigm Shift happening
The era of so-called New Public Management is slowly shifting. NPM has seen a significant, worldwide trend in public sector governance, has held the current paradigm since at least 1991, and arguably has survived, or absorbed several emerging movements in public management. Yet I see no academic agreement on what comes next. Recent developments in public management have included sectoral innovation (e.g. De Vries, et al., 2018) and relational public services (Complexity Outcomes, 2023), and these might evolve toward the practices we are calling, for now, complexity management. Yet digital governance, collaborative leadership, and e-governance are more frequently represented in the literature. Yet these are more techniques with new management, not management innovation. We are looking for the adoption of new structural forms of management, or innovations that address the purposes of strategic leadership. Digital governance changes the interface between stakeholders and government, it does little to change the style of governing for effective decisions making for long-run outcomes.
We are seeing active debate on the difference in purpose, value and business models for innovation adoption in public sector organizations as opposed to innovation in demand-based consumer markets. ese contexts are so different that we can start to argue that the application of the venerable Everett Rogers and Moore’s Chasm models are not only insufficient, but are part of the problem – the market-based business model of innovation colludes with the neoliberal market-centric orientation of NPM. They reinforce each other. So to withdraw our allegiance to neoliberal management in public value, I would propose that a new theory of public value innovation adoption would inspire transformation in governance. Almost any new theory might do.
A question we might ask here is “innovation of what, to what ends?”
Innovation for Complexity Management
Innovation, collaboration, and digital transformation are all programs derived from corporate re-engineering, and as typical we might expect a delay of up to a decade from leading corporate to leading public sector management trends. New public management can also be seen as the transplantation of leading corporate trends into municipal and national governance, tailoring the management by objective, metrics-driven process improvement, and a service provision mandate.
The Covid-19 crisis and response has exposed the vulnerabilities of service-oriented public management. Organizational strategies designed to resolve regional growth and resource issues become problematic legacies when both political and corporate city leaders are faced with multiple intersecting crises of immediate impact and expensive outlook. Within the most recent five year period, North American communities have been dealing with the pandemic response, social uprising from multiple causes, economic and safety breakdowns, and political divisiveness. While many cities have developed well-intentioned climate change action plans in this same period, these plans are already outdated given the increasing social complexity technological and demographic changes.
Digital governance strategies (Lindquist, 2018) are insufficient to address the conflicts of social complexity, and while digitization practices are also necessary, they might only extend the efficiency-orientation of NPM. An era of increasing complexity and uncertain direction calls for a mandate of effective action, not efficiency, and effectiveness is not possible to assess in the short term when addressing long-term issues such as these.
Research in Municipal Management of Complexity
As the world continues to change at an accelerating rate and is becoming increasingly complex, business as usual is being disrupted, and conventional management practices are falling short. From the Covid-19 pandemic to social justice issues, increasingly unaffordable housing, digital transformation, Indigenous land rights, and long-term climate adaptation, leaders are being forced to respond to the growing impact of a widening range of external conditions. As a result, municipal leaders are finding it more challenging to match past performance results while adapting to accelerating change, and recognizing their existing strategic management capability may no longer be sufficient in a VUCA environment. There is an increasing need to more systematically understand how municipalities adapt to better deal with these increased complexities and share best practices of successful approaches.
The Flourishing Enterprise Institute with VERiS and REFOCUS are engaged in a SSHRC-funded study with the City of Kitchener to study their learning and adaptation of changes to strategic management and planning to anticipate and encounter increasing complexity. The study partnered with Kitchener’s Corporate Leadership Team (CLT) and management staff, who had retained REFOCUS, a Canadian cooperative innovation practice, to train and implement a systemic change methodology. Enterprise Evolution (EE) was designed by Randy Sa’d, with support from FEI co-founders, to facilitate corporate learning for managing in high complexity environments. EE was employed for the first time in a municipality organization for this study, after having been used in private sector corporations.
Enterprise Evolution co-creatively works with organizational leaders to build their system leadership capacity with innovative methods for managing for complexity. The first step in the EE programming is a series of workshops intended to lead to a mindset change among leaders by developing a more holistic understanding of emergent forces of change and appreciating the risks associated with maintaining the status quo. The EE theory of change defines this as an important step before engaging in a longer-term coproduction process of adapting strategic management practices. The focus of this study was to understand this initial process, its effectiveness within the specific context of the City of Kitchener, and its impact with the corporate leadership team. While there has been much theorizing about the need for a mindset change for deep and meaningful system change, empirical research reveals few successful, practical approaches that facilitate mindset change.
