Survival of What Fits

Sometimes the best way to manage change is to resist it.

If you're a tuned-in manager, you'll recognize this phrase: change management. You've heard it around the office when people talk about the "transformation initiative." You've heard it uttered by the consultants who wrote the initiative. You've seen it in Bush administration guidance about how to implement the initiative. And you've read "change management" in audits, maybe appended to the phrase "agency needs to do a better job of."

But do you know what change management is? What a change manager is? "I always thought they were the people who work in tollbooths," an executive quips. That caustic response betrays widespread frustration with the topic. Some managers have required employees to read their favorite change management texts. Perhaps the most revered of them all, Spencer Johnson's Who Moved My Cheese? (Penguin Putnam, 1998) reduces the management of change to a tale of two mice and two men who spend 50 pages coping physically and emotionally after an unseen force absconds with their precious food source.

Ask three change management advocates what the term means and you'll get three vaguely similar but still different definitions, for example:"anticipating, planning, implementing and evaluating changes in an organization," or "contingency analysis," or "getting people to agree to new ways of doing things." Put the term into Google, which ranks documents based on how useful others find them. First of about 136 million entries is a paper titled "Change Management 101: A Primer" by Fred Nickols, a prolific author and retired Navy chief petty officer who worked for a quarter century as a management consultant.

Nickols' attempt at clarity is admirable, but his conclusion is unsettling: "It is not clear whether this area of professional practice should be termed a profession, a discipline, an art, a set of techniques or a technology. For now, suffice it to say that there is a large, reasonably cohesive albeit somewhat eclectic body of knowledge underlying the practice and on which most practitioners would agree-even if their application of it does exhibit a high degree of variance."

Satisfied? If you say no, keep reading. If you say yes, definitely keep reading.

Change management, whatever it is, surfaced in the private sector as a problem-solving device. How do I get employees to use the new electronic payroll system? How do we stop making light bulbs and start making artificial hips? Change management presumes that disruption of the status quo is inevitable: Advances in technology cause computers to replace punch cards. As the population ages, arthroscopy becomes more valuable than lighting. Change, therefore, is something that happens to you. You, or your organization, must adapt.

This logic was applied to government in the 1990s, as agencies purchased modern business technologies that required employees to learn new skills and routines. But change management's success record in government is spotty. Maybe that's because agencies don't work like companies. Companies change to avoid losing business when their competitors invent a product or service and steal their customers.

But change usually is forced upon government agencies, often by Congress or an administration. Change management backers agree that agencies don't generally have competitors. Their strength is measured not by revenue or market share, but by size of budget, breadth of power, and ability to influence people and events. Change management gurus insist the concept applies equally to the public sector, but they say government has little incentive to change.

What if the experts have it backward? Government managers know that bright ideas, like presidential administrations, come and go. Is it possible they also know which changes are best for the agencies they run? Or, if we measure power by how well an agency controls its destiny, as we do with corporations, maybe government's record needs a second look. Perhaps the agencies that have been reviled as obstinate, turf-protecting bureaucracies actually have figured out how to most effectively manage change: Resist it.

Change Kills

Outsiders have tried dozens of times to change the CIA and the FBI, proposing to curtail their powers or eliminate them. For decades, "intelligence failures" and official abuse have produced calls for reform. But almost always, the budgets and powers of the CIA and the FBI expanded. The agencies beat back reformers, even after Sept. 11, when the chorus for change crescendoed, and they accrued new legal authorities that made them stronger.

Following the attacks, FBI director Robert Mueller promised to move 518 agents to counterterrorism duty. In 2001, the bureau had 1,013 intelligence employees. But by the first-quarter of 2004, there were only 1,164. The number of linguists increased modestly and the ranks of cryptanalysts-code makers and breakers-shrank.

At the CIA, congressional inquiries and testimonials from former employees show that the agency has continued to devote less attention and resources to counter-terrorism than many critics want. Some officials have mounted rare public attacks on change. In July 2004, as Congress debated creating a director of national intelligence, which might dilute the CIA's clout, then acting director John McLaughlin, a career official, dismissed the idea on television. "It doesn't particularly relate to the world I live in," McLaughlin told Fox News Sunday.

The DNI was established, but the CIA has yet to be brought under its yoke, despite some high-level jockeying. For example, although the agency lost the privilege of preparing the president's daily intelligence briefing, which CIA Director Porter Goss said consumed most of his working hours, the agency resisted an attempt to move human intelligence gathering operations to the Defense Department. The CIA thus retained its position as the government's chief spying arm. The FBI has only recently pooled its intelligence units into the new National Security Service, which the DNI will help manage. But it's yet unclear how the DNI will fare if his plans for the new service conflict with the broader goals of FBI leaders.

How did the FBI and the CIA resist outside change for so long? One scholar points to managers. "In the face of criticism, the [CIA's] primary goal was to control change," writes Patrick Roberts, a Ph.D. candidate in government at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, who conducted a detailed historical analysis of the FBI's and the CIA's success with the status quo. The CIA "opposed major legislation that would reduce its authority or overhaul its management structure," he writes. "During the 1980s and 1990s, intelligence officials worked behind the scenes to oppose reforms they thought unwise."

After 9/11, Roberts says, FBI leaders saw terrorism encroaching on other missions. "The FBI realized that it is responsible for many crimes that occur with a greater probability than terrorism [such as drug trafficking] and, rationally, it refused to abandon its old missions."

As secretive agencies, the FBI and the CIA are autonomous from the people trying to change them, Roberts says. "Scholars of administration, management gurus and would-be reformers tout 'adaptability' or 'adaptive flexibility' as the 'summum bonum' of agency development. Businesses in the private market respond to changing needs, the argument goes, and federal agencies would do well to strive for similarly nimble structures by gaining more autonomy."

But these agencies used their autonomy to make changes that they wanted, "on their own terms," Roberts writes. These changes were limited, but were more successful when they were incremental and local, rather than broad and outside the realm of their traditional missions. For instance, the FBI set up terrorism task forces in its 56 field offices nationwide, Roberts says. Both agencies resisted and were less effective when told "to reorganize to address the threat of international terrorism, which was far different than the threats faced during the Cold War." Obstinance doesn't adequately explain their resistance. The FBI and the CIA had little experience in international counterterrorism, in large part because they were never asked to develop it into a central occupation.

Of course, some agencies do change and improve their performance. When this happens, are they focused on an animating idea germane to their mission, and is change undertaken on their own terms? The experience of two of government's most celebrated change success stories would argue, yes.

Don't Change, Tweak

Like the FBI and the CIA, lovers of change loved to hate the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Veterans Health Administration. Condemnation of the agencies was as pronounced as their poor management. Throughout the late 1980s, FEMA's response to natural disasters was so feckless that then-Congressman Norman Mineta declared that the agency "could screw up a two-car parade." VHA fared no better. Horror stories of dilapidated, rat-infested veterans' hospitals and of patients gone missing or dying, or both, shocked the public. VHA became a lightning rod for opposition to government-administered health care.

But in short order, and under new management, FEMA and VHA so improved the quality and efficacy of their work that they became poster children for good change management. The former earned accolades for responding rapidly in hurricane- or earthquake-damaged cities. VHA, whose turnaround is studied at Harvard Business School, improved patient care and introduced case-tracking technologies, which helped keep tabs on patients and ensured they didn't get the wrong drugs or procedures.

In a 2003 study by the New England Journal of Medicine, the agency outscored fee-based facilities under the Medicare program in every one of 11 quality measures. This year, VHA hospitals placed higher than the top-ranked private hospitals in a survey by the prestigious National Committee for Quality Assurance.

Change management adherents will say FEMA and VHA followed all the rules. A charismatic leader with a clear vision for change communicated his plans to every level of the workforce. Workers supported the ideas. Goals were set, and performance was measured. And it's true that all this happened.

James Lee Witt, the FEMA administrator from 1993 to 2000, remembers that his employees were so demoralized that on his first day, he stood at the elevators and greeted every one. He took his top managers on retreats to mine their ideas. When Dr. Kenneth Kizer took over as VHA's undersecretary for health in 1994, he had a clear goal in mind-get money for new patient care technology and clear bureaucratic processes out of caregivers' way.

But there was more going on at these agencies than employee buy-in and strong leadership. FEMA employees, while fumbling in response to natural disasters, did know how to write and execute disaster- response plans. They were just focused on the wrong disaster-World War III. FEMA was designed to relocate government leaders and civilians into shelters following a nuclear attack. When Witt asked his employees how they would adjust their roles, they spoke up, availing themselves of Witt's open-door policy. By 1995, the agency had closed many field offices it no longer needed, and cut back on internal regulations that Witt says stymied the agency. At every point he sought employees' advice. "If you don't take the advice of the career civil servants in the agency, then you're making one huge mistake," Witt says.

As for VHA, its quality of care had dramatically declined, but it had a capable workforce that wanted to improve. Initially, there was skepticism. "You're just another talking head, another politico," Kizer says. "The rank and file, they've seen the talking heads come and go." But when Kizer got more money for technology and changed outmoded procedures, employees responded. "In many things we did, it was obvious there was no political agenda. It was simply to make patient care better."

FEMA and VHA didn't so much change their missions as recalibrate. Each agency already had the expertise it needed. Employees weren't asked to perform entirely new jobs. Witt didn't tell them to predict hurricanes; he said to respond to them. Kizer didn't want VHA nurses to become database experts. He wanted them to use computers to keep track of patients. The employees were ready for the changes.

Change management pushers say people fear change, and that might be true. But they also say they're not very good at it. Two million years of human evolution, however, argue otherwise.

Record of Change

Biologically speaking, humans change better than any species on the planet. In our brief existence-a mere four-ten-thousandths of the Earth's age-humans have learned to walk upright, use tools, build shelters, and have invented agriculture, language and management strategy. Evolution is a process of continuous change, from a lower or simpler state to a more complex and often better one.

People are naturally inclined toward change. In fact, they thrive on it, says Robert Wheelersburg. An associate professor of anthropology at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, Wheelersburg teaches human evolution. He says bureaucracies exhibit the same propensity to evolve. They're always moving toward higher, more complicated states. "Increasing bureaucratization does not stop," he says.

Wheelersburg's views are informed partly by science, and also by 25 years in the Army, mostly as a military intelligence officer. Before retiring last November, Wheelersburg served five years as a Defense Department liaison to FEMA in its Philadelphia office. "When a good, successful manager takes over an agency, his job is not to close it down," Wheelersburg says. "His job is to increase the funding, increase the staffing, if he can, and survive." By that measure, the FBI and the CIA have managed change quite well, Wheelersburg says.

The hardest concept for his evolution students to grasp, he says, is that change is not caused by the environment. Rather, the propensity to change already is present in an organism. Anthropologists call this "variability," and it doesn't always produce beneficial results. Mutations occur, often randomly, and most are deleterious, Wheelersburg says. But sometimes they work out. Some animals, such as humans, evolve into omnivores and can live on either a broad or narrow diet so they can survive when food sources change. Other organisms depend on a single source of food, and when it dies, so do they. Organisms change for the better when their variability matches up with new demands in their environment. This is what happened at FEMA, Wheelersburg says. Employees had the inborn variability-disaster management expertise-and they changed. The environment, in the form of Witt and new management, pushed and accepted them.

For the FBI and the CIA to become primarily counterterrorism agencies, as some want, might not be smart adaptation. Their other missions would be neglected. Budget dollars would be siphoned off, and the more narrowly focused agencies would see their powers diminished. FBI and CIA managers know this. They even fought against transferring some personnel and activities into the Homeland Security Department, which would have gotten counterterrorism out of their hair, but also would have stripped away people and money. The more natural evolution, it seems, has been to establish a National Counterterrorism Center, where representatives from many agencies are trained in that mission and focus on it exclusively.

For FEMA to remain focused on nuclear winter when the likelihood of it occurring had become very low likewise was not evolutionary. The better adaptation was to stay in the disaster management business, but to refocus on more likely disasters. At VHA, variability was present-good doctors and nurses-and so with new direction and help from better tools and procedures, the agency's performance improved. It's not surprising that Kizer refers to the agency's turnaround not as a change, but as "an evolution."

If change management pushers in the private sector haven't done a stellar job of articulating their concepts and if, as they claim, change so rarely succeeds, then why should government managers listen to them? "I'm continually amazed by how little appreciation people in the private sector have for public sector change," Kizer says. He adds, however, that government hasn't spent a lot of time and money understanding the particular ways it changes, either.

Kizer calls himself a true believer in change management. But unlike many of its strongest advocates, he can tell you what he thinks change management is and how to do it well. He can offer clear and concise explanations of how he solved problems. Kizer can tell you how to talk to your employees and how to listen to them. His language is free of jargon, liberated from overly simplistic anecdotes. And, in the end, one realizes that Kizer and others like him have probably come up with the best definition for change management. It's called management.