Organizational defects of governments

I cringe every time I read that the government is composing a task force or setting up an inter-agency committee to address an issue, or solve a problem, as this is an indication that the present government organization cannot do the job. These ad-hoc compositions are admissions that the organization is inefficient, ineffective, and short on delivery. A good organization would/should have the coordination/control capability and capacity to address and solve the problems, so there is no need to have another body or agency.

Over the years, as a businessman and as a professional manager, I have worked in organizations with 25 members to as many as 2,000 employees, and organizational effectiveness was always a critical component of success. As a consultant and a business professor, I was also tasked to do studies and lecture on organizational structure and human behavior in organizations, so I am always interested in organizational issues.

The starting point in organizing is to clearly define the objective and purpose. We organize a group of people to do a specific task or organize our time to do the jobs within the timeframe. In a business organization, the broad objective is to increase revenues and make profits, and this is broken down into production and sales targets, increasing market share and productivity, and even into social/ecological responsibility. In politics, the objective is winning elections, party dominance or perpetuation in power. For society, the objective is social order/stability, peace and order. For autocratic governments, limitation of freedom and liberty, suppression/control of the people, elimination of all opposition to be able to stay in power.

Given the clear sets of objectives, we set up an organi

zational structure defining the responsibilities at each level of the organization and the specific tasks of the positions in the organization. For the political structure of the governments, these were supposed to have been done and refined/revised over the years by every government since time immemorial, as the economy and technology progressed over the years. The size and the composition of the organization depends on the size and the complexity of the domain/constituency. Given the advances in IT technologies in increasing the communication capabilities, coordination and control are enhanced and optimized without disproportionately enlarging or bloating the bureaucracy or government organization.

This brings us to the capacity and capability of government organizations. Capacity is the quantity/volume of the output of an organization. In a manufacturing plant, it is the number of products produced in a given time with the equipment, people and other resources in the factory. In the government, it is the ability to deliver the goods and services for the country or the locality, e.g. the volume of garbage that the local government can collect every day, the number of passports/drivers licenses that can be issued every working day.

Capability on the other hand, is the ability and competence of the persons in the government positions. This has always been a problem of government organizations, as nepotism, political patronage, and ulterior motives put unqualified and incompetent persons in many government positions. The civil service law and practice was supposed to address this problem, but there are so many confidential and co-terminus positions filled with incompetents undermining the civil service eligibility. No amount of capacity/capability building programs can correct this, as the voters keep on electing unqualified government officials, as can be seen in our local officials and even our congressmen and senators.

It does not matter if the form of government is presidential, parliamentary or federal, it still needs an effective organization that delivers the promises, projects and programs to the people. Failure of government is due to incompetence or failure of governance, which includes ulterior motives over the public good. Good and noble motives/objectives which are shared and believed by the governed are the critical components. The most successful organizations that delivered did not even have formal organizations. Think the EDSA Revolution, Mahatma Gandhi’s civil disobedience, Mandela’s movement in South Africa, and the French Revolution. People actually organize themselves for a worthy cause whose time has come.

“People actually organize themselves for a worthy cause whose time has come.”