Over the last several months, I’ve been doing very little blogging. Part of the reason is that I’ve been distracted with the holidays and with my company finally getting some big projects started. But another big part of the reason is that I’ve been reading and thinking.

I’ve been thinking about why people hate government. Granted, this is a matter of degrees. Some people hate their government because it’s repressive and dictatorial and comes in the middle of the night and kidnaps family members. But others hate their government because it is a nuisance or cumbersome or provides services in a way that is counter to their ethics or defeats the purposes of the particular service in the first place.

And there is no shortage of reasons in-between.

Years ago, my business partner and I started our company to build systems for government that would make it operate more cleanly. This just doesn’t mean save money – no government agency has the money it needs to do its job right. It means to use the information and systems that government already has to provide better services for citizens.

Ultimately, whether you like big, medium, small or tiny government, all can agree on two things:

1. It’s necessary to have a group coordinating certain services that impact all citizens

2. Waste serves no one’s best interest.

Now, as to the finer points there is one overarching truth:

No one agrees on what services government “should” provide and how they should be provided.

This may seem like a deal-breaker, but actually it’s quite liberating. Understanding from the outset that consensus is nearly impossible, we can now build a range of options and weigh those on their merits. Their merits are how they relate directly to the values of the people interested in the issue – whether negatively or positively.

To take the always controversial issue of education, everyone wants a different system. Some want rigorous rote-testing like Asian school systems and no child left behind. Others want a well-rounded and more involved education process. Still others might was a more open child-guided approach. And many (most) want something in between.

Our current methodology (at least in the states), is to have many non-interactive elements each trying (unsuccessfully) to guide education. We have parent-teacher groups, business-school groups, teachers unions, local boards of education, state boards of education, the NEA, congress and the president – all working, fairly independently, on education. The level of coordination isn’t there that’s necessary for understanding of the goals of each group, let alone their successes or great ideas.

So we get uncoordinated efforts like No Child Left Behind and Charter School Initiatives and school capital projects and even the Gates Foundation – all working in schools, but not really working together.

And by working together, I don’t mean a mega-bureaucracy of education, I mean simply – sharing information and understanding that for any of these groups to be effective, they need to know what is going on.

Oddly enough, while my entire career as an urban planner has been aimed at getting groups to coordinate to create better cities, this all didn’t gel for me until I read Killer Customers (LINK). Killer Customers is a book that is as much about government as Kermit the Frog is part of the porn industry. Killer Customers is a book about making your company violently more customer focused so you can kill your competition and become rich as sin. It’s the self-enlightened self-interested self-help book of the 21^st century. It measures everything through your P/E ratio and is entirely geared toward the publicly traded company. It’s Ayn Rand smiling. “Of course I am nice to you, if I am nice you will give me money.”

So, it is nice to know that behaving like Enron or Qwest is not good for business after all.

But, this is what government is supposed to be all about – providing vital services for the population so they can be free to discover great truths like this.

Government, however, is usually condemned for its actions. Often, it is condemned because it is a given that government is fat a bloated. This is not necessarily the case. The Washington State Department of Transportation, for example, is always being criticized for its overpaid bureaucrats and its bloated project budgets. However, this is simply not the case. Most WSDOT employees could make much more as a consultant than they are paid by the state. WSDOT projects are also always very leanly priced.

The cost of providing the services they provide, however, are astronomical. This is a very expensive place to be a Department of Transportation.

Once I was working on a project to improve a freeway in a major metropolitan area with some of the highest land values in America. It is urbanized nearly from one end to the other. In addition, there are areas where it is bordered by water on one side and a high sheer bluff on the other. It runs right through the middle of a major suburb, which has developed very quickly over the last 20 years and whose downtown straddles the highway. There are four major freeway to freeway interchanges to contend with.

During this project, one of the citizens on one of the many oversight committees for this project was the owner of a major shopping mall in a very expensive location. He very much wanted new lanes built so more people could come to his shopping mall. He looked at our cost-per-mile figures for building new lanes and said, “These numbers are too high. The average cost per mile in other cities is much lower.” To which I replied, “You’re right, now, can I buy your shopping mall for the average price of a shopping mall?”

The point of this anecdote isn’t to make him look foolish, but to show that people are predisposed to assume that government wastes money by design. Therefore, people are predisposed to assume that any government program is too expensive and likely ineffective.

I believe that as any organization ages, it creates both positive effects (helping people) and negative effects (bureaucracy). This is true for all human endeavors. Even groups of friends.

In business, corporate culture can often be swayed to cater to the least flexible people. The person in the office who refuses to do a certain thing or demands that something be done a certain way. In a small office, that person ends up guiding, to a large extent, the cultural direction of the office. We still can change how we deal with these people at any time, nothing is codified, everything is negotiable. We have a fledgling bureaucracy.

Now, as business grows, you get more and more of these people. And as they grow, the need to have set policies that either conform to their desires or provide some codified explanation why it is done another way also grows. The codifiers are still all face-to-face and can reorganized these policies at will. We have a meso-bureaucracy.

Then when we get to be a big company, we employ people merely to manage the bureaucracy. To ensure that paperwork is done, rules are followed, etc. Policies also don’t only come from within. Policies now can come from stockholders, the board, internal working groups, C level executives, regulating agencies, lenders, etc. Now we are entrenched. It is easier for members of the company to leave than to change policies. We have a macro-bureaucracy.

Then we have government. Even with the business macro-bureaucracy, there is a certain level of autonomy that participants can enjoy. In modern government, there is precious little decision making authority available to those providing service.

In government bureaucracy, you have layers upon layers of rules. At best they are vague, at worst they outright contradict other rules. The Immigration and Naturalization Service is my favorite example. They have two mandates:

1. Let everyone in – we’re a melting pot!
2. Keep everyone out – they’re a buncha job stealers, communists, terrorists!

With the case the INS above, how would you ever tell your superiors that you did a good job? And your bosses can conceivably change every two years and come in with an entirely different job description. You get a pro-growth congress that is operating in a hot economy, they want you to bring in people fast (Mandate #2). You get a congress interested in stopping the flow of drugs / illegal aliens / rare birds / terrorists in a sluggish economy and they will want all people kept out (Mandate #1).

Now, having gone through the process of importing my wife, I can say that it’s hard to deal with INS. Some of the people there seemed bent on making the process miserable. But most of the people there were helpful, if you assumed that they were there to help and were not giving you all the information you needed.

As we can see, bureaucracy is formed in response to calls for information or formality. Information and formality is vital in large organizations to ensure adequate customer care, quality control and business operations. Bureaucracy can be seen, in this case, as a useful tool to calm people, provide a predictable working environment and allow people to focus on service provision.

Forms are the treads of bureaucratic entrenchment.

Lack of meaningful conversation kills customer service.

Mad citizens create ill-conceived “initiatives” to “fix” the agency.

More rules creates the need for more accountability.

In a paperless society, the need for forms quickly diminishes. All forms require a certain amount of predictable data: who is filling out the form, what’s the date, etc. In every interaction with a form, filling in a few key cells creates more predictable data. Effectively cutting down form use dramatically.

That’s the techno-fix. The solution to the easy question of “efficiency.”

The issues here are of personal or procedural entrenchment that no one would put into a new agency, but are very hard to take from an existing one.

This is really hard to do. As we’ve seen with the wacky behavior of lame-duck presidents, imagine if we had a lame-duck Department of Education or CIA? But, speaking of which, who would have not laughed 10 years ago if you suggested overhauling the CIA? It was needed and everyone knew it, but it was too hard to do. Now it’s underway. … but is there any sunset date for the Department of Homeland Security?