Leadership & Organization Development Journal

Leadership and innovation in the public sector

Sandford Borins
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 Leadership and innovation in the public sector
Keywords
Innovation, Leadership,
Bottom up decision making, Crisis
Downloaded by University of Washington At 11:02 30 November 2014 (PT)
Abstract
This article considers the nature
and role of leadership in three ideal
types of public management
innovation: politically-led
responses to crises, organizational
turnarounds engineered by newly-
appointed agency heads, and
bottom-up innovations initiated by
front-line public servants and
middle managers. Quantitative
results from public sector
innovation awards indicate that
bottom-up innovation occurs much
more frequently than conventional
wisdom would indicate. Effective
political leadership in a crisis
requires decision making that
employs a wide search for
information, broad consultation,
and skeptical examination of a
wide range of options. Successful
leadership of a turnaround requires
an agency head to regain political
confidence, reach out to
stakeholders and clients, and to
convince dispirited staff that
change is possible and that their
efforts to do better will be
supported. Political leaders and
agency heads can create a
supportive climate for bottom-up
innovation by consulting staff,
instituting formal awards and
informal recognition for innovators,
promoting innovators, protecting
innovators from control-oriented
central agencies, and publicly
championing bottom-up
innovations that have proven
successful and have popular appeal.
Leadership & Organization
Development Journal
23/8 [2002] 467±476
# MCB UP Limited
[ISSN 0143-7739]
[DOI 10.1108/01437730210449357]
Sandford Borins
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Introduction
Innovation has become a topic of great
interest to managers in both the public and
private sectors[1]. In the private sector, the
rapid development of technology has
provided opportunities for firms to launch
new products, transform their production
processes, and do business in new ways. The
Schumpeterian process of creative
destruction has become particularly intense,
and in many industries, the choice faced by
managers is innovate or die.
The conventional wisdom regarding the
public sector is that public sector innovation
is a virtual oxymoron. A number of
explanations have been put forward as to
why this would be the case. Public choice
theory argues that public sector agencies are
usually monopolies, with no competitive
pressure to innovate. Political scientists have
observed that the media's and opposition
parties' interest in exposing public sector
failures (management in a fishbowl) forms a
powerful impediment to innovation.
Furthermore, stringent central agency
constraints ± to minimize corruption and
ensure due process ± raise barriers to
innovation. Organizational sociologists have
noted that public sector organizations are
usually large bureaucracies structured to
perform their core tasks with stability and
consistency, and resist change or disruption
of these tasks (Wilson, 1989, pp. 218-26).
In recent years this conventional wisdom
has been questioned. The public sector has
faced challenges ± such as driving down costs
to reduce the debt burden ± and opportunities
± such as applying information technology ±
that have forced it to innovate. Non-
governmental organizations in a number of
countries have attempted to catalyze public
sector innovation by establishing public
The research register for this journal is available at
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregisters
management innovation awards. These
awards shared two key objectives:
countering public criticism or hostility to the
public service, in part because it is perceived
as not being innovative, and encouraging the
development and dissemination of
innovations and best practices within the
public sector.
Public management innovation has
become a subject of considerable academic
interest. One line of research involves
detailed, and sometimes comparative, case
studies. In some instances, the innovations
were originally identified because they were
among the winners of innovation awards.
Case studies have dealt with innovations in
particular policy areas, such as community
policing (Sparrow, 1994), educational choice
(Roberts and King, 1996), or civic
environmentalism (John, 1994). Other case
studies of innovation have dealt with
overarching themes such as alternative
service delivery (Goldsmith, 2001), the
application of information technology
(Fountain, 2001), and organizational
transformation (Barzelay, 1992; Osborne and
Plastrik, 2000). Another approach has
involved using large samples of innovations
identified by innovation awards to generate
and test hypotheses about the process of
innovation (Borins, 1998, 2001).
The objective of this paper is to use the
results of both case studies and quantitative
analysis to explore the relationship between
leadership and innovation in the public
sector. That relationship can be probed by
asking a number of questions. Who leads
innovations? Do innovations create
leadership capacity for the public sector?
How do leaders exercising formal authority
react to innovations? What climate do they
create for potential innovators? This paper
starts with a fundamental distinction
between bottom-up and top-down
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
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[ 467 ]
 Sandford Borins
Leadership and innovation in
the public sector
Leadership & Organization
Development Journal
23/8 [2002] 467±476
Downloaded by University of Washington At 11:02 30 November 2014 (PT)
[ 468 ]
innovations, and then examines the role that
leadership plays in each.
Three ideal types of public sector
innovation
While students of business have found that
strategic decisions regarding the adoption of
innovations are often taken by CEOs and
boards of directors, they have also discovered
that many innovations emerge from the
bottom up (Kanter, 1988, 2001). In technology-
based firms in particular, many innovations
result from scientists or other staff with
technical expertise following their own
research interests to develop new products or
processes. Many firms have instituted the
practice of giving their researchers one day
per week, plus commensurate resources, to
work on their own projects. Peters and
Waterman (1982) took the argument further,
pointing to innovations undertaken by
mavericks working at ``skunkworks'' far
from central offices, often operating without
a clear mandate from above and using
bootlegged resources. Hamel (2000) presented
case studies showing that the inspiration for
IBM's involvement with the Internet came
from two middle managers, one a
programmer and the other a marketer, that
the idea for the development of Sony's
PlayStation video game console came from a
mid-level researcher, and that the impetus
for Shell to become involved in the
production of renewable energy came from a
mid-level planner. Hesselbein et al. (2001), in
a recent collection of articles, showed that
there is a consensus among private sector
researchers and practitioners about the
importance of such bottom-up innovations
and provide suggestions for how
organizations can support them.
In contrast, the conventional wisdom in
the public sector is that whatever innovation
occurs comes almost exclusively from the top
(Wilson, 1989, pp. 227-32). In both
parliamentary and presidential democracies,
voters elect politicians to enact policies.
While the USA makes a greater proportion of
senior executive appointments on a political
basis, in many parliamentary democracies
the most senior appointments in the public
service are made by the politicians. This
would seem to place the responsibility ± and
motivation ± for innovation outside the
public service itself. (The rationale for the
system, of course, is to make the bureaucracy
indirectly responsive to the public through
the politicians they elect.) Similarly, some
public management academics have argued
that innovation from within the public
service could conflict with traditional values
such as due process and accountability
(Gawthrop, 1999; Goodsell, 1993; Terry, 1998).
Furthermore, stability-seeking public sector
organizations having strong central controls
and operating in hostile environments can be
expected to have personnel systems that do
not reward career public servants for
successful innovation but that punish them
for unsuccessful attempts. These asymmetric
incentives may well lead to adverse selection,
namely the avoidance by innovative
individuals of public service.
That is the received wisdom. The results of
extensive research using applications to
several innovation awards tell a different
story (Borins, 2001, pp. 27-9)[2]. In the USA,
approximately 50 percent of the innovations
originate from middle managers or front-line
staff, 25 percent from agency heads, 21
percent from politicians, 13 percent from
interest groups, and 10 percent from
individuals outside government. In the
sample from the economically advanced
countries of the Commonwealth (Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, UK), the
proportion from middle managers or front-
line staff (82 percent) and agency heads (39
percent) was higher, while that of politicians
(11 percent), interest groups (2 percent), and
individuals outside government (5 percent)
was lower. For the developing countries in
the sample (Bangladesh, Ghana, India,
Jamaica, Malaysia, Seychelles, South Africa,
Zimbabwe), the results are also similar. Since
some respondents gave multiple answers,
these numbers sum to more than 100 percent
(see Table I).
In both Commonwealth samples and the
1995-1998 US data, middle managers were
separated from front-line staff. It was found
that, in the US sample, middle managers
were involved in the initiation of 43 percent
of the innovations, while front-line staff were
involved in 27 percent, the same frequency as
politicians (27 percent) and agency heads (28
percent). The Commonwealth sample showed
that in the economically advanced countries
middle managers were involved in 75 percent
of the innovations and front-line staff in 39
percent. In the developing countries, middle
managers were involved in initiating 44
percent of the innovations, a figure
comparable to the 43 percent in the USA, but
front-line workers initiated only 7 percent of
the innovations. The latter figure is
attributable to the disinclination of
developing countries to empower their front-
line staff. This may result from pay that is too
low to be a motivator, an unwillingness or
inability to provide training, a lack of
resources necessary to test innovations, and/
 Sandford Borins or rigid hierarchy. All told, these data
Leadership and innovation in confirm, in a wide variety of national
the public sector contexts, that a substantial proportion of
Leadership & Organization public-sector innovation comes from middle
Development Journal
23/8 [2002] 467±476 management and the front lines. Similarly,
Walters (2001, p. 9), based on a more
qualitative look at the applications to the
Innovations in American Government
awards, concludes that ``innovative ideas
spring up from all over the place ± both inside
and outside of organizations, and from the
middle, bottom, and top layers of an
organization. Innovation, it turns out, has
little regard for title.'' Light (1998, p. 45)
studied a sample of 18 particularly
innovative non-profit and eight small
governmental organizations in Minnesota
Downloaded by University of Washington At 11:02 30 November 2014 (PT)
and found that ``almost all of them harvested
ideas up and down the organization
regardless of who had the idea.''
While the largest number of innovations
are initiated by middle managers and front-
line staff, substantial percentages of
innovations are initiated by politicians ± 10
to 20 percent ± and by agency heads ± over 25
percent (Borins, 1998, 2001). Because
organizations are pyramidal in shape, there
are many more front-line staff and middle
managers than agency heads and politicians,
so that the propensity to innovate (that is,
innovations per capita) on the part of
politicians and agency heads is greater than
on the part of middle managers and front-line
staff. Borins (1998, pp. 48-9) explored for
systematic differences in the circumstances
of innovations initiated by politicians,
agency heads, and middle managers and
front-line staff (the latter two groups being
pooled). Statistically, politicians tended to be
Table I
Initiators of innovation (percent)
Commonwealth, Commonwealth,
Initiator USA, 1999-1998 advanced developing
Politician 21 11 15
Agency head 25 39 37
Middle manager 43a 75 44
Front line staff 27a 39 7 exploring the role of leadership in it.
Middle manager or front-line staff 51 82 48
Interest group 13 2 11
Citizen 7 0 11
Program client 3 5 0
Other 6 9 11
Total (percent) 126 148 133
n 321 56 27
Notes: n = number of innovations. a indicates that the breakdown between innovations
initiated by middle managers and innovations initiated by front-line staff for the US data
was based on the 104 cases from 1995 to 1998. In the 217 cases from 1990 to 1994,
these groups were coded together.
Source: Borins (2001, p. 28)
the initiators when the innovation was a
response to a crisis. Crisis was defined
broadly as publicly visible failure, whether
current or anticipated. This has an intuitive
appeal because when there is a crisis in the
public sector, citizens expect politicians to
lead the response. Agency heads tended to be
the initiators when they took over as the new
leader. When a public sector agency is
performing poorly and its poor performance
becomes publicly visible, citizens expect
politicians to appoint a new agency head to
lead a turnaround. Finally, middle managers
and front-line staff tended to initiate
innovations that responded proactively to
internal problems or took advantage of
opportunities created by new technology.
These can be thought of as three ideal types
or polar cases.
Subsequent research regarding the process
of gathering support for an innovation also
showed that the three groups employed
different strategies for building support.
Applicants were asked who were the
strongest supporters of their innovation.
Innovations initiated by public servants had
a positive correlation with strongest support
from immediate supervisors and a negative
correlation with strongest support from the
president or governor, the legislature,
business lobbies, and the general public.
Innovations initiated by agency heads had a
positive correlation with strongest support
from the political head of the agency and
business lobbies. Innovations initiated by
politicians had a positive correlation with
strongest support from the president or
governor, the legislature, business lobbies,
the media, and the general public. Public
servants worked through bureaucratic
channels, rather than going over the heads of
their colleagues to appeal directly for
political support, while politicians went
through political channels and mobilized
public support (Borins, 2000a, pp. 503-4)[3].
We will consider each of the three ideal
types of public sector innovation in more
detail, providing several examples and
Bottom-up innovation
What is the relationship between bottom-up
innovation and leadership? To begin with,
bottom-up innovations require and create
leadership. The innovative process is not
simply a matter of someone coming up with a
good idea, putting it in a suggestion box, and
the organization implementing it through its
normal channels. Innovations require
advocates and often become the subject of
[ 469 ]
 Sandford Borins
Leadership and innovation in
the public sector
Leadership & Organization
Development Journal
23/8 [2002] 467±476
Downloaded by University of Washington At 11:02 30 November 2014 (PT)
[ 470 ]
debate within an organization. They are
sometimes introduced as pilot programs
which must be evaluated before being
applied in the entire organization.
Innovations also lead to new structures
within a given organization. For example,
innovations frequently involve inter-
organizational collaboration (Bardach, 1998;
Borins, 1998, pp. 19-23, 2001, pp. 11-13) and this
collaboration is governed by creating
coordinating structures, such as
interdepartmental committees (Borins, 1998,
pp. 96-101). The initiators of the innovation
are likely to play a role in several of these
aspects of the innovative process, such as
advocacy or leading a pilot project. Because
they are on the front lines or in middle
management, they are creating an informal
or alternative leadership structure. In one
case the award applicant noted that ```rebels,'
idea people, and employees involved in a
leadership capacity outside came to the fore''
(Borins, 2000b, p. 55). Innovation awards
provide publicity for the winners, and
initiators may develop visibility beyond their
own organization, as they become involved
in educating potential replicators.
Individuals at lower ranks who distinguish
themselves by initiating innovations are
likely to be put on the fast track to senior
positions.
A recent example supports these
observations. A group of young officers in the
Ontario public service had the idea of
holding a national conference looking at
human resource issues from their own
perspective. They formed a planning
committee, approached the federal and
several provincial governments for funding,
and invited practitioners and academics as
speakers. This advocacy process put them in
touch with a variety of people they would not
normally have encountered in their daily
work, such as senior public servants
(including several cabinet secretaries and
permanent secretaries) and senior
academics. The conference, entitled ``New
professionals driving a new public service,''
turned out to be a great success, attracting
350 participants from all over Canada. After
the downsizing of the last decade, public
services are facing a need for renewal,
particularly at the entry level, and this
conference spoke to that concern. The
conference organizers are maintaining their
Web site (www.newpublicservice.ca),
accepting speaking invitations, and planning
to create a permanent organization.
A second aspect of the relationship
between leadership and bottom-up
innovation is the stance that the public
sector's top leadership ± ministers,
permanent secretaries, and senior public
servants ± take toward these initiatives. It
could range from negative, to neutral, to
highly supportive. A negative stance could
come from a permanent secretary and senior
public servants whose approach to
management is strictly hierarchical, or from
a minister who, possibly for ideological
reasons, has an antipathy to her department.
An American instance of the latter is
Republican administrations that are
unsympathetic to the mandates of the
Department of Labor and the Environmental
Protection Agency and that choose political
appointees who want these departments to do
as little as possible, certainly not to develop
new programs. We can expect some
permanent staff to leave and those who
remain to keep their heads down. The
Republican appointees might be receptive to
initiatives that improve efficiency, thereby
reducing the cost of existing operations. The
appointees would want to see savings
employed in other public sector priorities or
used to reduce taxes. Because there is no
possibility that any of the savings would be
returned to the department, permanent staff
would be unlikely to come forward with ideas
to improve efficiency.
A supportive stance requires politicians
and senior managers creating a climate
favourable for innovation. Robert Reich,
Secretary of Labor in the Clinton
Administration from 1993 to 1997, excelled at
this. First, he made clear the department's
priorities, which included initiatives to
improve wages and working conditions for
America's lowest paid and most vulnerable
workers. Second, he made a habit of
consulting career civil servants, for example
in quarterly departmental town hall
meetings. Third, he took every possible
opportunity to recognize staff initiatives
(Glynn, 1999). Some forms of recognition
included establishing a departmental
innovation award, bringing his career public
servants to meetings with politicians and
political appointees, and inviting careerists
whose ideas had been incorporated into
legislation to White House signing
ceremonies to meet President Clinton (Reich,
1997, pp. 129-34). The department's roof is an
ideal vantage point to watch the fourth of
July fireworks. Previous secretaries always
invited political appointees and friends;
Reich used these coveted invitations to
reward innovative careerists (Glynn, 1999).
Reich's support helped put in place a
number of innovations initiated by front-line
staff or middle managers that were
subsequently recognized as finalists and
winners of the Innovations in American
 Sandford Borins
Leadership and innovation in
the public sector
Leadership & Organization
Development Journal
23/8 [2002] 467±476
Downloaded by University of Washington At 11:02 30 November 2014 (PT)
Government Award. These included an
initiative to eradicate sweatshops by putting
pressure on retailers to ensure that the
products they were selling were not made in
sweatshops (Donahue, 1999, pp. 47-58), the
Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation's
early warning program for large corporate
pension plans at risk of default (Donahue,
1999, pp. 187-204), and a program in the
Occupational Safety and Health
Administration to identify pro-actively
workplace health hazards among large
employers (Donahue, 1999, pp. 114-27).
William Bratton, New York City's Chief of
Police during the mid-1990s, led his
department in the implementation of
programs that led to a marked decline in the
city's crime rate. He espouses a similar
philosophy:
I know perfectly well that most police
departments don't encourage or value
innovation, cultivating instead conformity,
complacency, and even timidity among police
managers. But I also have met countless
police officers and managers in my career
who are bold, inventive, decisive, and eager
for the big challenges of restoring order and
safety to urban communities. My job as a
police executive was to bring these people to
the fore and let them run. . . . Every
organization has a core group of people with
original ideas and untapped talents. Some are
in leadership positions, and some are not. A
successful leader reaches deeply into the
organization to find these people . . .. To propel
a large organization forward, the leader has
to enlist literally hundreds of coleaders at
every level. . . . When people show initiative,
perseverance, and competence in the field,
reward them. I found my best managers in the
middle and bottom of the vast management
cadre at the NYPD. Their promotions sent a
signal of opportunity to their fellow managers
(Bratton and Andrews, 2001, pp. 252-7).
The Clinton administration's reinvention
labs are another case of political support for
innovation. These were pilot projects, many
proposed by front-line staff and middle
managers; Vice President Gore, who was in
charge of the reinvention effort, tried to
ensure that these projects would be granted
waivers from regulations to facilitate
experimentation, and let it be known that his
office would advocate on behalf of the labs
within their own departments or in their
relationships with central agencies (Osborne
and Plastrik, 2000, pp. 444-50, 564, 569).
To turn to a Canadian example: the Export
Development Corporation (EDC) is a federal
state-owned enterprise which finances
purchasers of Canadian exports. In the late
1980s it established a capital markets group
with the responsibility for finding new ways
to raise money, rather than attempting to
borrow under the aegis of the federal
government which itself had to finance huge
deficits. The EDC capital markets group
developed several sophisticated derivative-
based financial instruments that were
marketed to both large and small lenders.
Staff in the federal Department of Finance
were concerned and wanted to oversee the
capital markets group closely. The deputy
minister of finance at the time took the view
that the group should be given autonomy; he
also felt that if his department tried to rein
them in, they would leave for lucrative
private sector jobs (Gorbet, 2001). His support
gave the group the freedom it needed.
Not only can bottom-up innovations
advance the goals set by politicians and
senior public servants, but they can be the
genesis of initiatives that politicians are
willing to embrace as their own. Canada's
SchoolNet program (www.schoolnet.ca)
demonstrates this. In the early 1990s, one
particularly innovative middle manager in
Industry Canada was thinking about how the
federal government could gain a presence on
the rapidly evolving Internet. An
undergraduate student on a work term in the
government proposed an interactive Web site
to which primary and secondary school
educators would send educational materials,
and SchoolNet was launched (Dubeau, 2002;
Hull, 2002). The program led to a federal-
provincial initiative to connect all 16,500
Canadian elementary and secondary schools
to the Internet by 2000. Federal and
provincial politicians have become
enthusiastic and highly visible supporters of
these programs and have launched other
initiatives to increase Internet access
throughout Canada.
To summarize: this section illustrates a
number of types of high-level support for
innovation. These include establishing clear
organizational goals that encourage staff to
achieve in innovative ways, consultation
with staff, establishing innovation awards
and providing informal recognition for
innovators, relaxing constraints upon
innovators, protecting innovators by
ensuring that their projects have a fair
chance to demonstrate whether they work,
and providing resources for innovators. The
last, providing resources, is implicit in many
of the above examples. The main resources
include giving the initiators time to work on
their projects, which might involve a
reduction in their other responsibilities, and
giving them the budget to pay for the running
costs of their projects. While some
organizations have formally established
funds to support innovations (Borins, 2001,
p. 32), the more likely case is that innovations
[ 471 ]
 Sandford Borins
Leadership and innovation in
the public sector
Leadership & Organization
Development Journal
23/8 [2002] 467±476
Downloaded by University of Washington At 11:02 30 November 2014 (PT)
[ 472 ]
are funded out of organizational slack that
senior managers can identify. Finally,
innovation is a two-way street, in that
successful innovations provide opportunities
for politicians to take public credit for wise
policies and effective programs.
Politically-directed innovation in
response to crisis
The most clear-cut crises, and those that have
received the most academic attention,
involve the physical security of a nation. An
immediate example is the terrorist attack on
the USA on September 11, 2001. Leading the
response has consumed most of the time and
attention of President Bush, his cabinet, and
their most senior advisers. The following
crises, of varying magnitudes, have in
common politically-led and innovative
responses:
. City of Seattle Recycling Program. The
City's two landfills reached capacity in
1983 and 1986, and ceased operation. The
federal government then designated these
landfills as Superfund sites, thus raising
closure costs to about $100 million. The
city's reliance on more distant landfills,
together with closure costs, had already
doubled disposal assessment rates. The
mayor and city council responded to the
crisis by directing the city's solid waste
utility to undertake an in-depth study of a
wide range of options, including
recycling, landfill, and incineration. The
politicians also put in place a thorough
process of public consultation. The
ultimate outcome was a greatly expanded
recycling program, reinforced by pricing
incentives and public attitudes, that
became a global leader (Borins, 1998; pp.
196, 201, 204).
. Environment Canada Ultraviolet Index
Program. The program was initiated in
response to NASA's February 1992
prediction of a severe thinning of the
ozone layer over North America that
spring. Environment Minister Jean
Charest gave his department four months
to implement a program to inform the
public of ultra-violet risk. They developed
a daily index of the intensity of ultraviolet
exposure that has been adopted
internationally (Borins, 2000a, pp. 55, 68).
. Cuban Missile Crisis. In response to the
secretive placement of Russian missiles in
Cuba, the Kennedy administration
implemented a naval blockade of Cuba
that put sufficient pressure on the
Russians to remove the missiles, without
resorting to war (Allison, 1971).
. Six-Day War. In response to an Egyptian
naval blockage of the Red Sea and
invasion by Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, the
Israeli cabinet initiated a war by directing
its air force to launch a surprise attack
that destroyed the entire Egyptian air
force on the ground, clearing the way for a
quick and massive victory over the Arab
alliance (Brecher and Geist, 1980).
As a set, these four examples present a
paradox. The first two are not well-known
outside of their particular policy
communities, but have been recognised by
innovation awards in their respective
countries. The last two are very well known
historically, but have not been thought of in
terms of innovation. Detailed historical
study, however, makes clear that the
American and Israeli responses were both
effective and innovative. In the American
case, the alternative to a naval blockade was
an air strike and/or an invasion, both of
which were strongly favoured by the
military, but would likely have led to nuclear
war between the USA and USSR. The
blockade signaled the seriousness of
American intentions, but gave the Russians
time to make an orderly retreat. In the Israeli
case, the air force attack relied on
intelligence information that the Egyptian
planes sat wingtip-to-wingtip at their bases.
Since then, no combat-ready air force would
ever again expose itself in a similar way.
The two famous crises have been of
particular interest to students of decision
making and crisis management. In his study
of Israeli decisions in the Six-Day and Yom
Kippur Wars, Brecher concluded that as
tensions mounted, the Israeli Cabinet's
search for information and receptivity to it
increased, the Cabinet broadened its
consultative circle, and increased its search
for, and care in the evaluation of,
alternatives (Brecher and Geist, 1980,
pp. 403-4). The decision-making process
followed by the Excom (the ad hoc group
chosen to advise President Kennedy) has
been characterized as one based on inquiry,
rather than advocacy (Garvin and Roberto,
2001). A wide range of options was proposed
and studied carefully. Assumptions were
tested, and participants acted as skeptical
generalists. Experts outside the group were
also consulted. The American process was
characterized by the same hunger for
information, creative generation and testing
of alternatives, and widespread consultation
(at least subject to the constraints of secrecy)
as the Israeli. These processes have been set
forth as best practice for collective decision
 Sandford Borins
Leadership and innovation in
the public sector
Leadership & Organization
Development Journal
23/8 [2002] 467±476
Downloaded by University of Washington At 11:02 30 November 2014 (PT)
making under the high stakes and time
pressures that typify crises.
These cases also demonstrate two patterns
of political-bureaucratic interaction. In each
case, politicians defined the problem and
took responsibility for choosing the solution.
They instructed the bureaucracy to provide
information to inform their choices among
alternatives and then to implement their
decisions. In three of the four cases, the
politicians were confident in the analytic and
implementation capability of the
bureaucracy. Seattle's politicians were sure
the waste utility managers could analyze the
disposal alternatives in terms of economic
and environmental impacts; Environment
Minister Charest relied upon his scientists to
develop quickly a valid way of measuring
ultraviolet exposure; the Israeli Cabinet
trusted the air force to work out procedures
for a sudden attack (time of day, altitude,
route, etc.).
The exception was the Cuban Missile
Crisis. As Allison (1971) made clear, and the
recent movie Thirteen Days illustrates, there
was considerable antipathy between the
Kennedy administration and the armed
forces, manifested at both the analysis and
implementation stages. The politicians felt
the generals were trigger-happy, and the
generals thought the politicians (especially
after refusing air support for the abortive
Bay of Pigs invasion a year previously) were
cowards. One political-bureaucratic
confrontation described in Allison (1971,
pp. 127-32) and depicted in Thirteen Days
involved Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara giving explicit directions to
captains of ships involved in the blockade,
rather than going through the normal chain
of command. The discussion of bottom-up
innovation noted the difference between
situations where politicians trust the
bureaucracy and those where they are
suspicious of its objectives. In a crisis
context, suspicion gives rise to politicians
seeking alternative sources of information at
the analysis stage, and monitoring closely at
the implementation stage. In the instance
where politicians were suspicious of the
bureaucracy, the politicians took full credit
for the innovation. In the other cases, while
the crisis response was politically initiated,
credit for the innovation was shared with
public servants.
Organizational turnarounds led by
agency heads
The genesis of organizational turnarounds is
quite different from that of crises. Crises are
a result of factors that are unprecedented,
unpredictable, external, or environmental. In
contrast, a turnaround is a response to a
public sector organization that is simply not
meeting normal expectations for service
delivery. For example, some of the
turnaround cases mentioned below involve
failures to pick up garbage, provide swift
emergency assistance to victims of natural
disasters, regulate parking, pay workers'
compensation claims in a timely manner,
and maintain safety in public housing. Each
involves an implicit comparison with normal
practice in other jurisdictions, and each was
found to be failing to meet minimum
standards. The similarity between crises and
organizational performance failures is that
both are publicly visible, leading to public
demands on politicians for quick and
effective action.
The first step in a turnaround is invariably
the appointment by politicians of a new
agency head (Borins, 1998, p. 157). The agency
head who presided over the failing
organization is fired or reassigned, and often
other members of the senior management
team who identified closely with the
discredited agency head, or who are unable
to adapt to the new head, are also let go.
Turnaround leaders are generally energetic,
dynamic, and relatively young for the post.
They come from outside the organization, but
are not neophytes. They know the type of
operation well and/or are well acquainted
with one or more of the major stakeholders.
Knowing the operation is important because
immediate action is necessary, and the
turnaround leader cannot spend the first six
months learning on the job. Knowing the
stakeholders is also important because
gaining their support is often a critical early
step in the reform process. Turnaround
leaders are not classic charismatic leaders,
who can inspire their followers in any
setting. Much of their success comes from
their expertise about the operation and their
knowledge of key stakeholders.
Agency turnarounds are not seen very
frequently among the applications to
innovation awards. Less than 5 percent of the
applications to the innovation awards
studied were classified as turnarounds. In a
typical government, there are very few
agencies that are total disasters. Most are
performing relatively closely to the mean
across jurisdictions, while a few may be best
in their class. Most innovations are,
therefore, attempts to move adequate
performers to best in class, or initiatives by
the best performers to push the frontiers
forward (Borins, 1998, p. 154).
[ 473 ]
 Sandford Borins
Leadership and innovation in
the public sector
Leadership & Organization
Development Journal
23/8 [2002] 467±476
Downloaded by University of Washington At 11:02 30 November 2014 (PT)
[ 474 ]
Agency heads attempting turnarounds face
two leadership challenges, one involving the
politicians to whom they are responsible, and
the other involving their staff. The challenge
at the political level is to regain confidence.
Tactics for doing this include emphasizing
political accountability to raise performance
expectations of the organization,
undertaking new initiatives that will
demonstrate the organization's new vision
and priorities, and using initial successes to
convince politicians to provide additional
resources for the organization (Borins, 1998,
p. 156). A recent case that illustrates the
importance of political support is the
turnaround of the Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA) led by James
Lee Witt during the Clinton administration
(Daniels and Clark-Daniels, 2000). After
FEMA experienced some dramatic failures
during the (George) Bush administration,
Clinton appointed Witt, who had served him
previously as director of the Arkansas Office
of Emergency Services. Clinton supported
Witt in several ways, including designating
FEMA as the lead federal disaster agency and
elevating Witt's position to Cabinet status
(Daniels and Clark-Daniels, 2000, p. 8).
The leadership challenge involving staff is
to convince dispirited people that change is
possible and that their efforts to do better will
be supported. One essential tactic is
scapegoating, namely, arguing that the
agency's problems are not the fault of the
staff who remain, but rather the fault of the
discredited leadership. With the failed and
discredited leaders removed, anything is
possible. Many turnarounds involve
reengineering the basic processes of the
organization, for example replacing a
centralized functional structure with
geographically decentralized structures that
give front-line workers more autonomy but
also demand accountability for results. This
can be facilitated through the increased use
of information technology. In addition, the
agencies will reach out to their clients and
stakeholders, getting them more involved in
both policy-setting and operations (Borins,
1998, pp. 156-8).
It might be asked whether turnarounds are
necessarily innovative. Is it especially
innovative if an organization moves from
being worst in class to average in class or
even better than average, if what it is doing is
simply replicating those that are best in
class? Turnarounds may become innovative
because the process of scapegoating the
discredited leadership, reorganizing, and
providing more autonomy for front-line staff
makes it clear that the organization is truly
open to new ideas and new ways of doing
things. It is legitimate to question all the old
ways and propose better alternatives. An
organization in the process of a turnaround
may therefore take advantage of the
receptiveness to new ideas that its new
leaders display to go from being worst in
class to best, thus producing many
innovations.
Even though turnarounds are relatively
infrequent, there is no shortage of
turnaround cases in the literature, in part
because the actions of the turnaround leaders
are often heroic ± at least among bureaucrats
± and in part because turnaround stories
share the same mythic structure as biblical
or literary tales of redemption or deliverance
(Frye, 1982). Some recent examples include
Witt's turnaround at FEMA and two
turnaround cases presented in fine-grained
detail in Mark Moore's (1995) well-known
book Creating Public Value: Strategic
Management in Government, one involving
the Boston Housing Authority and the other
the Houston Police Department. The
discussion of turnarounds in Borins (1998,
pp. 153-64) was based on four cases: New York
City's child health care clinics and vehicle
(sanitation and snow removal fleets)
maintenance facility, the City of Chicago's
parking enforcement program, and
Washington State's workers' compensation
system.
Conclusion
This article has made the case that there
exists a strong link between innovation and
leadership in the public sector. The two ideal
types of top-down innovation, responses to
crises and agency turnarounds, are led by
politicians and agency heads respectively.
Politicians determine the strategic shape of
responses to crises and agency heads the new
vision and priorities for the organizations
they are attempting to turn around. The best
advice one could give to politicians
responding to crises is to search widely for
information, consult widely, and investigate
a comprehensive set of options. Assumptions
must be tested, and politicians and their
advisers should act as skeptical generalists
in evaluating information and options. Based
on a substantial number of case studies,
proven advice for agency heads leading
turnarounds is to work simultaneously at
regaining confidence at the political level and
convincing dispirited staff that change is
possible and their efforts to do better will be
supported. Tactics to regain political
confidence include emphasizing political
accountability to raise performance
 Sandford Borins
Leadership and innovation in
the public sector
Leadership & Organization
Development Journal
23/8 [2002] 467±476
Downloaded by University of Washington At 11:02 30 November 2014 (PT)
expectations, undertaking new initiatives
that will demonstrate a new vision and
priorities, reaching out to clients and
stakeholders, and using initial successes to
leverage additional resources. At the staff
level, tactics involve scapegoating previous
discredited leaders and reengineering basic
work processes, often through information
technology.
The quantitative evidence shows that
bottom-up innovations occur more
frequently in the public sector than received
wisdom would have us believe. The
individuals who initiate and drive these
innovations are acting as informal leaders.
The visibility these individuals gain and the
results they achieve lead them to be
promoted rapidly to positions of formal
leadership. Politicians and senior public
servants create organizational climates that
will either support or stifle innovations from
below. Creating a supportive climate would
entail consulting staff, instituting formal
awards and informal recognition for
innovators, promoting innovators, protecting
innovators from control-oriented central
agencies, and publicly championing bottom-
up innovations that have proven successful
and have popular appeal.
A key thread running through this
analysis is that the nature of the relationship
between the political leadership, on the one
hand, and the bureaucracy, on the other, has
an impact on the nature and extent of
innovation. If the political leadership
distrusts the bureaucracy, it will attempt to
stifle bottom-up innovation, micro-manage
the response to crises, and use widespread
replacement of staff as a turnaround tool. If
the political leadership has a better
relationship with the bureaucracy, it will
both encourage bottom-up innovation and
make the bureaucracy a partner in both
crisis response and agency turnarounds.
Politicians have a sense of the magnitude of
the tasks they face and the capability of the
public service that supports them, and it is
this sense that would drive their stance
toward the bureaucracy. The public good
requires a bureaucracy that is loyal and
professional, and that can be a willing and
capable partner in innovation.
Notes
1 The standard definition of innovation in the
academic literature is the adoption of an
existing idea for the first time by a given
organization, as distinct from invention, the
creation of a new idea (Rogers, 1995). In
practice, innovation has come to refer to both.
The reason appears to be that, in a period of
rapid change, the line has blurred, and
innovative organizations are both inventing
and adopting. Sometimes adopted technology
(VHS) turns out to be more popular than
invented technology (Beta). Public sector
innovation awards, the source of data for this
article, also blur the distinction and recognize
both inventions and effective adoptions.
2 Applications to three innovation awards have
served as the basis of this research: 321
applications to the Innovations in American
Government award between 1990 and 1998, 37
applications to the Institute of Public
Administration of Canada (IPAC) public
management innovation award between 1990
and 1994, and 83 applications to the
Commonwealth Association for Public
Administration and Management (CAPAM)
international innovations award in 1998 and
2000. The American award was restricted to
state and local government from 1990 to 1994
and broadened to include the federal
government in 1995. The American award
required semifinalists to complete a detailed
questionnaire that dealt at length with the
process of innovation and responses were
coded and analyzed. A questionnaire modeled
very closely on the American award
questionnaire was sent to the applicants to the
IPAC and CAPAM awards and responses were
also coded and analysed. For a discussion of
methodological issues see Borins (1998,
pp. 12-18).
3 The next section discusses the importance of
an organization's top leaders creating a
climate favourable to innovation. This can be
done without their being directly involved in
deciding the fate of many, or even any,
particular innovations. Thus, front-line
innovators would work through bureaucratic
channels, rather than appealing directly to the
political level or outside the organization.
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 Sandford Borins
Leadership and innovation in
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Leadership & Organization
Development Journal
23/8 [2002] 467±476
Downloaded by University of Washington At 11:02 30 November 2014 (PT)
Received: January 2002
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