Why Can’t Obama Be More Open?

In his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama promised a government of unprecedented openness. As president, progress towards openness has been less than remarkable, to put it politely.

Openness about Afghanistan

The issue was highlighted this week, when WikiLeaks.org, posted tens of thousands of classified military field reports about the Afghan war. It says its goal in disclosing secret documents is to reveal “unethical behavior” by governments and corporations.

The New York Times reports that WikiLeaks’ critics range from the military, which says it jeopardizes operations, to some open government advocates who say the organization is endangering the privacy rights of others in favor of self promotion: http://nyti.ms/bv0qOC

As it happens, Wikileaks.org withheld some 15,000 documents, because of such concerns. In their judgment, at least, the 91,000 documents that were released were free of those issues.

Is President Obama celebrating the openness that has been thrust upon him? Well, not exactly.

“We don’t know how to react,” one frustrated administration official said on Monday. “This obviously puts Congress and the public in a bad mood.” http://nyti.ms/ahVgdI

Much of the response seems to be to find and punish the leaker.  Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress called for Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to open an investigation into the matter. http://bit.ly/bLNJPF

As author John Hagel wrote, “If Obama really supports transparency in government, he'll applaud efforts of Wikileaks but I'm not holding my breath.”

What would it really take to have an open government?

Ranjay Gulati helpfully distinguishes four levels of organizational openness in (Re)(Organize For Resilience: Putting Customers At The Center Of Your Business (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009)

Level 1: “You take what we make.”

Organizations at this level typically say that customers are at the center of the universe, but in practice continue to view the marketplace entirely through the lens of their own goods and services. The customers are incidental to the enterprise. This was the kind of management described in Frederick Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management. It is still the case in most public sector organizations.

Level 2:  “We believe that our offerings will be useful to you.”

Firms at this level pay attention to and study their customers, but again, they focus on their customers through the lens of the company’s goods and services, while ignoring the larger problems that the customers may be trying to solve. Most established firms today are still at Levels 1 or 2.

Level 3: “We seek to understand and solve your problems with our offerings”

Firms at this level have made the leap from looking at their world from the perspective of their own products and services to looking at the world from the customers’ perspective and solving the customers’ problems. Firms at this level empathize with their customers and are continually evolving their offerings to meet those issues.

An example of this would be P&G’s beinggirl.com community for teenage girls: they are seeking to understand and help solve the problems of these girls, while at the same time pushing P&G’s feminine care products, in the hope of making these girls life-long customers. Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff: Marketing In The Groundswell (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009) pp 70-79

Level 4: “We seek to understand and solve your problems with whatever it takes.”

Firms at this level are no longer concerned whether the inputs it uses to solves customers’ problems are its own or assembled through a network of partners. This involves a intellectual, structural and emotional transition.

An example of this would be Li & Phung, a $15 billion company, headquartered in China and orchestrating 14,000 factories in China and around the world. Li & Fung owns practically nothing. Its role is to figure out a way to orchestrate factories, so that by coming together, they can achieve performance that they could never achieve individually. But all are working on extreme specialization. For example, for a particular garment, Li & Fung might source the yarn from Korea, dye it in Thailand, weave in Taiwan, cut it in Bangladesh, assemble it in Mexico, and bringing zippers in from Japan and come up with something that is better than anyone else in the world can do. The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, pp83-85

Governments and openness

The US Government, like most public sector organizations, particularly the military, are still marooned in level 1.  Essentially: “You take what we make.” Organizations at this level typically say that customers or their stakeholders are at the center of the universe, but in practice they continue to view the customers or stakeholders entirely through the lens of their own goods and services. The customers or stakeholders are incidental to the enterprise.

So it is the openness that Wikileaks.org has generated about the Afghan war. The military is running the war, and the release of the documents makes it more difficult to go on doing what they are planning to do anyway, regardless of what the citizens think. The openness created is perceived as a problem, not a solution.

It would take a intellectual, emotional and organizational revolution for the US Government, especially the military to advance even to level 2, let alone aspire to move to the higher reaches of openness at level 3 or level 4.

Unfortunately, at this time, there are few signs of that revolution happening in this government.

For that to happen, the powers that be would have to understand and embrace radical management.

To learn more about radical management, go to:
http://www.stevedenning.com/Books/radical-management.aspx

Comments

[Ben Verleg]

Thank you Steve. Do you think the question now is also about taking cultural values seriously?

[Steve Denning]

Ben--Yes! This is all about values. For most public sector institutions, the cultural values are: we have a job to do and we are going to do it, regardless. You don't like it? Well, it's up to you, pal: change the law! In effect, it's up to someone else to decide what we do and then we will just do it. Automatons.

Radical management is about everyone taking responsibility for what is being done and asking: who is it being done for? Is it meeting their needs? Can it be done better? Sooner? Cheaper? When people don't ask those questions, you end up with Vietnams, with financial meltdowns, with Gulf oil spills, and so on. It's a radically different set of cultural values.

[Health News]

I can't believe how much of this I just wasn't aware of. Thank you for bringing more information to this topic for me. I'm truly grateful and really impressed.