Capability is not an abstract concept. It only has meaning in relation to the priorities and purpose of the organisation. I prefer to use it to the term capacity which is too often misused by practitioners as they have conversations about quantity rather than quality, and propose solutions like ‘we need more of these skills, or these sorts of people’ – and in doing so miss the point about how you create capability in organisations.
Capability is a product (or not) of the interaction between the skills, experience and methods of an individual – and the culture, structures, processes of the organisation they work in.
Capability = skills + context.
Yet too often civil service reformers talk about capability and skills interchangeably. They have tended to focus on attracting new staff from outside the civil service to bring in the ‘missing’ skills. These efforts are often thwarted when those people struggle once inside the civil service. The way things are done in the civil service – decision making, accountability, processes and culture – impedes their effectiveness.
To paraphrase a much-loved management cliché: context would appear to eat skills for breakfast.
How is capability built?
The relatively neglected literature on capability building and organisational learning (Tranfield 2000, Levitt and March 1988) has coined the term 'organisational routines' to explain how capability is developed and retained. In other words:
...repetitive patterns of activity that constitute the ways in which the organisation has learned to co-ordinate its activities.
Behaviours are based on routines; organizations learn these routines by encoding inferences from history into routines that guide behaviour - includes structure of beliefs, culture, codes that reinforce those routines. They are capable of surviving considerable turnover in individual actors.
Tranfield (2000, pp253-4) distinguishes 'standard routines’ which enable the organisation to become a more effective or efficient machine through one-off improvements from ‘enabling routines’. And there are ‘defensive routines’ which perpetuate the status quo.
It is ‘enabling’ routines which create the dynamic capabilities of an organisation which are most important for designers of civil service reform. These include both ‘improvement routines’ and ‘transformational routines’ (Tranfield 2007, p245):
Improvement routines… allow firms to do what they do better and often comprise the basis of continuous improvement initiatives.
Transformational routine… are the least common sets of routines but potentially the most valuable in that they have the potential to enable firms to do something radically different from what they are used to doing.
How do organisations acquire new routines?
Pisano et al (2002) looked at some of the ways in which biopharmaceuticals create organisational knowledge and capabilities. They identified ‘learning by doing’ and ‘learning before doing’ (modelling and simulation) as the main ways in which organizations learn, with the former usually being more important.
‘The seeds of today’s capabilities are sown in yesterday’s experience’, but not all experience produces learning: some experience is more useful than others, and organizational routines play a big part in assimilating that experience into knowledge.
There a substantial body of research into the effectiveness of state aid and donor funded projects seeking to build the capability of government and their civil services in developing countries. There is significant convergence on the view that the more effective interventions are characterised as ‘problem driven, iterative adaptation’ and 'politically smart, locally led' (see for example: Andrews et al 2012, Booth and Unsworth 2014, Rocha Menocal 2014, McCourt 2014).
These researchers may use different language from the 'routines' of the capability literature but they are describing the same process. Andrews et al (2012, p.10, p14) coin the phrase 'bricolage':
[the] process by which internal agents ‘make do’ with resources at hand to foster new (or ‘hybrid’) structures and mechanisms’.
They propose that capability building interventions should:
[Involve] active, ongoing and experiential learning and the iterative feedback of lessons into new solutions...
This kind of experimentation... is about trying a real intervention in a real context, allowing on- the-ground realities to shape content in the process. This is also not about proving that specific ideas or mechanisms universally ‘work’ or do not work. Rather, it is about allowing a process to emerge through which attributes from various ideas can coalesce into new hybrids. This requires seeing lessons learned about potential combinations as the key emerging result. The necessary experimentation processes require mechanisms that capture lessons and ensure these are used to inform future activities.
A context that enables capability building
If capability = skills + context, what are some the critical features of context? And if they are not present how do you create them? It is the organisation’s dynamic capabilities which provide the most conducive context to building enabling routines – which in turn ensure a smart, continuously learning organisation which can ‘keep the change changing’.
An enabling condition for dynamic capabilities is an open, honest culture characterised by mutual respect and a commitment to keeping promises. There should be no gap between what leaders (at all levels) say and what they do.
One feature of such a culture is open dialogue that includes frank challenges to existing ways of working. This includes (Shreyögg at al 2007):
Use of outside challenge
Culture of positive criticism
Acceptance of dissent
Strong customer orientation
Rather than expect rapid, system-wide development of dynamic capabilities through some grand transformation plan Civil Service leaders should pick a small number of high priority issues to act as trailblazers for the wider Civil Service. Those would be used to equip civil servants to adapt, practice and deploy some simple but transformative routines. Developing and supporting the dissemination of these routines would be a key role for the corporate leadership of the civil service and the central teams who support them.
The design and leadership support of these trailblazers would be the engine room of capability building. The trailblazers would:
Specify a particular challenge that is a high priority and has strong ownership from senior leaders – whether politicians or officials;
Establish a way of working that would blend outward looking structured problem-solving tools together with excellent collaborative working methods.
Create teams drawn from different parts of the service and beyond to work together to create a shared understanding of the problem, and to study and learn widely from (either in-house or other ‘live’ organisations, or from the literature). The diversity and lack of hierarchy of the team is critical to its effectiveness.
Provide support and coaching to the project team to help them learn and use these new routines – which must be embedded in how they work on the trailblazers.
Make time to reflect and adapt the trailblazer approach once sufficient progress has been made in the beacon areas.
Celebrate and disseminate. The approach would be rolled out more widely, led by those who worked on trailblazers who overtime form a large group of advocates, champions, and teachers of these new transformative routines.
Reinforce the use and value of these routines by including them in the curriculum for staff and leadership development.
The development of dynamic capabilities requires an uncomfortable ‘lurch into the unknown’ for many senior leaders.
It requires them to open up policy making by engaging others across government and beyond in scoping and shaping the policy from the earliest stages. In turn this requires more permissive leaders that let go of their desire to control ‘the right answer’. Such leaders are comfortable to set broad direction and clarify political imperatives but give maximum space to those working on the policy to explore a range of options and approaches. This may require an iterative approach to framing the challenge or problem and identifying potential solutions.
The mindset of UK policy makers needs avoid the trap of thinking they know best and instead look more outside the civil service to frontline staff, citizens, and practice in other jurisdictions. Leaders need to acknowledge that the civil service does not have a monopoly of insight and expertise.
How to ensure a Civil Service reform succeeds
The likely impact and sustainability of civil service reform interventions depends upon the extent to which:
(1) Interventions are designed explicitly so that multiple civil servants experience and learn new, transformative routines which they adopt as their personal practice such that:
How they think and how they see their role is different – because they have a better understanding of different perspectives in the systems they work in, and see the impact that government has – they know better what works and what doesn’t.
How they work has changed. They are more open, collaborative - going beyond conventional departmental and service boundaries. They have broadened the methods and techniques they use to collaborate, make policy, solve problems and innovate.
(2) There is a sufficiently conducive political and organisational context which:
Defines impact and success of the reform intervention in terms of longer-term priority outcomes that cut across civil service departments, functions and boundaries.
Encourages a diversity of backgrounds and experience amongst civil servants.
Encourages and supports civil servants to learn about what working and what is not.
Provides an open, honest culture that supports and welcomes constructive challenge with a focus on improvement rather than blame.
The most impactful reforms and exemplar projects in the UK have acted as capability building factories.
And as the early adopters of new routines rise through the organisation and take on new roles, they become advocates and teachers of the routines and practice they have acquired.
This is how organisations learn and build the capability they need to succeed.
[This blog is an abridged version of my article published in the January 2021 edition of Public Administration, the Journal of the Institute of Public Administration, Dublin]
References:
Andrews, M., Pritchett, L. & Woolcock, M. (2012). Escaping capability traps through problem-driven iterative adaptation (PDIA). Working Paper 299. Washington, DC: Center for Global Development,
Booth, D. & Unsworth, S. (2014). Politically smart, locally led development. Discussion Paper. London: Overseas Development Institute. p13.
Kidson, M, Civil Service Capabilities: A discussion paper, Institute for Government, June 2013.
McCourt, W. (2014) Public service reform. GSDRC Professional Development Reading Pack no. 1. Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham.
Panchamia, N. & Thomas, P., Civil Service Reform in the Real World. Patterns of success in UK civil service reform, Institute for Government, February 2014.
Gary P. Pisano, In Search of Dynamic Capabilities: The Origins of R&D Competence in Biopharmaceuticals in Dosi, G., R.R. Nelson, S.G. Winter, The Nature and Dynamics of Organizational Capabilities, Oxford, 2002.
Pollitt, C. and Bouckaert, G, Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis, Oxford University Press, 2011.
Rocha Menocal, A. (2014). Getting real about politics: From thinking politically to working differently. London: Overseas Development Institute.
Shreyögg, G., & M. Kliesch-Eberl, ‘How dynamic can organizational capabilities be? Towards a dual process model of capability dynamization’, Strategic Management Journal, Vol.28, No.9 (Sept 2007), pp.913-933
Sunningdale Institute, Take-off or Tail-off? An evaluation of the Capability Reviews Programme, November 2007.
Thomas, P, ‘Building transformative capability through civil service reform’, Administration, Volume 68 (2020): Issue 4 (Dec 2020), pp73-96
Tranfield, D, Duberley, D, Smith, S, Musson, G, Stokes, P, ‘Organisational Learning – it’s just routine’, Management Decision, Vol. 38, Issue 4, 2000, pp. 253 – 260
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