The Sums of Silence

In this spiraling climate of shrinking budgets, downsizing, outsourcing and chronically limited resources, meeting the needs of the public can be overwhelming. Yet the solution might be right under agencies' noses.

Managers are trained to set goals and evaluate where their programs should be in one, two or 10 years. Such yardsticks might include improving efficiency, customer satisfaction, employee morale and public relations, or reducing maintenance costs, fleet management investments and paperwork.

The question of how to achieve these goals with steadily declining resources remains a paradox. Government differs from the private sector, but turning to the business world might provide some insight. Corporate management experts Alan G. Robinson and Dean M. Schroeder studied suggestion systems at 150 companies in 17 countries for their book, Ideas Are Free: How the Idea Revolution Is Liberating People and Transforming Organizations (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004). At the Technicolor Corp., for instance, 80 percent of newly identified cost savings have come from employee ideas. Conversely, that means agencies could be operating at only 20 percent of their capacity for improvement if they don't have a mechanism for gathering, evaluating and sharing employee ideas.