A Practical Guide to Government Management by Meconi Vince;

Author:Meconi, Vince;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Bernan Associates
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Solving Problems

As every good husband knows, when your wife comes home after a hard day and tells you about her problems with work, coworkers, or anything else, your job is to listen sympathetically, not try to help solve her problem. In management, it is exactly the opposite. When confronted with a problem in your organization, you don’t just listen; your job is to actively manage it. Problems seldom get better or go away on their own.

The best way to solve problems is to prevent them from happening in the first place. In public administration, an ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure. By constantly reviewing your agency’s operations and performance, you can prevent small problems from becoming big ones. The good news is that it is possible to avoid a lot of problems this way. Some of the best work you will ever do will result from nipping problems in the bud. The bad news is that you will receive no credit for any problems you successfully avoid. Nevertheless, it is certainly better to discover your own problems rather than have the press do it for you. As discussed in the next chapter, “Gaining Control of Your Organization,” getting a complete compliance report when you take over the top slot can be very effective in heading off problems.

Unfortunately, you can head off a lot of problems, but you cannot avoid them completely. When confronted with a problem, the first thing to do is to adopt a positive mental attitude. Think of every problem as a challenge, because you can almost always deal with a challenge. Every challenge, in fact, is an opportunity to accomplish something. The next thing to do is, in the words of one of my favorite graduate school professors, “put a structure on the problem.”

The first part of your structure is identifying the type of problem you have: simple, complicated, or complex.[5] With simple problems, generally the best way of doing something is either already known or can readily be identified; what has happened is that your employees are not using that best way. Establishing a standard procedure that encompasses the best practice will result in ending most simple problems fairly quickly, as long as everyone follows the new procedure. The keys to success are developing the correct procedure (or maybe even taking a procedure someone has already developed “off the shelf”) and then ensuring universal compliance with that procedure. But with a complicated problem, there is probably not a straightforward formula available for use. It should be possible to develop a solution, but you will need to determine what the key information is that you need, and whether that information is already available or has to be gathered. You also need to decide who are the key players who can provide information and expertise in developing the solution. And finally, you need a process for finding out what will work and then implementing it.

A complex problem is a very real one, and probably

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