I'm preparing some posts analyzing the Veterans Administration scandal.
The posts will be unsolicited advice for the new Secretary of Veterans Affairs as he strives to reform the department.
My practice as a management consultant often includes the role of organizational diagnostician. This requires that I look at systems and practices as well as individuals and explore how the culture may contain rewards and punishments which foster problems.
It does little good to change executives and managers at the helm if the organization's ship has a built-in tendency to hit icebergs.
Given the widespread nature of the problems, the Veterans Administration is obviously dysfunctional.
Res ipsa loquitur. ["The thing speaks for itself."]
If we listen carefully we should be able to decipher all that it is saying.
2 comments:
I understand the 'turning around' analogy likened the VA to a ship, but the iceberg may be an even better choice.
It's huge with massive inertia. It's rudderless and moves with the current. It defies Titanic efforts to affect it. And you don't realize how much of your problem is out of sight.
About the only thing that separates it from the reality is that icebergs get smaller over time. Government bureaucracies never do.
Enjoy the Gedanken experiment.
Good point about the iceberg hitting. Equally true though, I have found, is that changing the organizational design doesn't matter if the players stay the same, and the leader is intent on hitting icebergs.
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