Crisis Management

There is a method to the madness.

One defining trait of the career civil service is longevity. With it comes experience, institutional memory and wisdom. There certainly is an abundance of longevity in the federal government. More than half the workers have been on the job for at least 15 years while more than a third have two decades of experience under their belts. During that time, they've seen political bosses come and go, budgets rise and fall and reform proposals introduced, rejected, repackaged and reproposed. Feds have been there, done that and bought the T-shirt.

That's one reason career employees have such an aversion to any management effort that carries even a whiff of passing fad or flavor of the month. Political appointees usually mean well with plans to make their mark and improve the programs they oversee. But when career employees see ideas from the past rise again under a new slogan, and they remember that those ideas didn't work before, it's no surprise that they try to make them go away. They use some tried-and-true tricks of the trade-the formation of an interagency or interoffice committee to study how to implement (read: dissolve) the plan, or the yes-sir-right-away-sir approach followed by no action.

Faced with a skeptical employee base and a public and Congress that is busy with other priorities, many politicians cannot resist using their own trick to drum up support for their plans: the crisis.

To create a crisis, you first must decide what you want to do. What is your solution? The problem comes next. (Remember, you're creating a crisis, not identifying one.) To develop a problem for your solution, the key is data. The government has plenty of it, so it's easy to generate line graphs, pie and bar charts, and statistics that selectively prove there is a problem. Avoid statistics that provide context or suggest countervailing trends. Next, use the data you've carefully chosen to create a nightmare scenario. If your solution isn't adopted, then X will happen, with X equaling some sort of shutdown of society. Then publicize the crisis. If your case is weak, call it a quiet crisis or a pending crisis.

It's a popular strategy these days. According to various sources, America currently faces crises in the economy, education, energy, transportation, homeland security, national security, housing, labor, culture, health care, pensions, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, manufacturing and even fitness, to name a few. Within federal agencies, there are crises in staffing, technology management, financial management, procurement, asset control and, predictably, budgeting.

Of course there are real crises. And sometimes people need a kick in the pants to change the way they've been doing things for a long time. But leaders-especially federal leaders-must be cautious of the crisis strategy when there really isn't one. First, it can divert people's energies to a debate over whether there is a crisis. Second, if employees-particularly experienced or jaded federal workers-don't buy it, then leaders lose credibility and their effectiveness is undermined. Third, it doesn't usually work. Alleged crises have been festering for decades. How quiet can a crisis be?

There's a simple strategy leaders can use when they want to make changes. First, they must realize that the goal is not to make changes. The aim should be to meet the organization's mission. If that isn't being done, then changes are needed. To borrow a phrase from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, "If all you ever do is all you've ever done, then all you're gonna get is all you ever got." Talk to employees. "We're going to meet the goals, and we have to figure out how to do it. What's worked in the past? What hasn't? Why aren't the organization's goals being met?"

The institutional knowledge in federal agencies is waiting to be tapped. Leaders have to remember that their job is not to create crises. It's to prevent them.