Managing Performance and Knowledge in Government: An Interview with Jon Desenberg

During his career, which includes 19 years of service in the public sector and winning the Presidential Leadership Award in 2000, performance management and strategic planning expert and consultant John Desenberg has worked with clients such as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Forest Service, NASA, the Department of Commerce, and the governments of China, Spain, Italy, and British Columbia in Canada. He is currently policy director for the performance management and human capital management divisions at the Performance Institute.

Desenberg was former managing director of the U.S. General Services Administration's performance management program, and has been awarded several commendations for his federal service. He is also co-author of the textbook, Knowledge Management: A Foundation for E-Government.

This month, Consulting News editor Aparna Nancherla spoke with Desenberg about the ins and outs of performance management consulting within the public sector.

Q: How did you first become interested in performance management?

I've always had a big interest in transparency and government starting with when I was a political science major at the University of Michigan. After that, I was a congressional liaison at the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA). That was my first real job out of college, and I worked on the Clinger-Cohen Act (1996), which was the legislation that Congress passed to bring the government into the modern age, as far as information technology and chief information officers (CIOs). At the GSA, we had an administrator who was a former executive at Apple Computer named Dave Barrum, so not the typical government type. He came to Washington with unusual ideas about transparency and knowledge management, especially transferring knowledge from employee to employee and employee to citizen. I was really lucky to have a chance to work with someone who was just completely off the charts in terms of new methods and philosophies on openness, transparency, and overall effectiveness for government.

I was lucky enough to be asked to help set up the first knowledge management office that had existed in the federal government.

That was a big success. Since then, there have been knowledge management efforts all over government. When Bush came into office, I got another phone call out of the blue asking if I wanted to manage another kind of new, unusual office called a performance management office. It was again something that had never before been thought of as a separate division or office. But GSA was a good place to set it up and pilot it in the federal government. I think the theory was that GSA could benchmark against the private sector. It would be a good place to kind of discover whether or not performance management really could work in the federal government, and it was successful. We put up the first government-wide dashboard. In fact, all 13,000 employees at GSA had it on their desk.

In 2004, the Performance Institute asked me if I was interested in doing similar kinds of performance management work for the entire government, which was a great opportunity. The institute has been around for almost 15 years, and their mission has been to improve transparency and effectiveness in government, so it fit right with my interests. The institute has a really unusual back story - it was formed by a former Congressional staffer who had worked on the Government Performance and Results Act, which was a groundbreaking piece of legislation that was signed by President Clinton in 1993. After the law was passed, he looked around at the state of affairs and said, "You know, the government isn't really ready to execute this law because it doesn't have the skill set or the tools or techniques." So he left Congress and set up the institute in the mid-1990s. So we've been working, not just here in Washington, but with many of the states and local governments around the country as well as internationally over the last 15 years. I've worked with more than 180 government organizations in just five years, and certainly, the area has matured quite a bit.

Q: What is a common misconception that businesses might have about performance management?

Stovepiping, or rather, the separation between planning, measuring, and evaluation. Planning, measuring, and evaluation are still looked at as three separate entities, and the reality, of course, is that they're all part of a real planning cycle. We've got to keep strategic planning connected very tightly with performance measures otherwise it's a vague externally-focused activity with very little usefulness to staff or executives who have to make hard resource decisions.

What we see now is government officials are slowly starting to bring planning, measuring, and evaluation together, but to this day, we still see a lot of frustration in organizations because they're basically doing the wrong things. The wrong things are being measured because they're not connected to a plan and they're not connected to evaluation. This is a big deal. We're trying to make sure this isn't performance measurement to get it out of the way, but people will be able to execute against plan. As it is today, you can't execute against most strategic plans. You can't really measure whether or not you're effective because the measurement and evaluation piece is not designed to work together with the planning part. So we're really working hard to bring those together all over government, as well as in non-profits.

Q: Do you have any memorable experiences that you can share from working with clients such as NASA, the U.S. Forest Service, and the National Institutes of Health?

We have seen so much improvement in the last few years, and it's been very gratifying. Government agencies are honestly thankful that they can execute against strategies and that they can begin shifting activities to where the country and its citizens can really get the most good out of them. We are really seeing an effort to make planning and measurement effective, and the skill sets are definitely higher than they were five or 10 years ago.

What's interesting with the Forest Service is that we brought together some of their most contentious stakeholders in one place for the first time in their history. We brought together the biggest timber companies and the biggest environmental groups in the country to sit down together over a two- to three-day period, and it was just fascinating to see them constructively discuss the future of the nation's forests and resources, and what strategies would be effective to benefit both of them, as well as the entire country. That was an amazing experience, which showed that you might think you're going to have a contentious situation when bringing together both sides of an issue, but in fact you can get some of the best advice and creative ideas by doing it that way. We're continuing to draw other organizations such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to do the same, and we're starting to see some real benefits in doing that. I think people have this feeling that Washington is stuck in gridlock and people don't talk to each other, people don't listen, and people stay in their own rooms and don't come out and work together. We're changing that paradigm slowly.

NASA is unusual because I can't think of another organization that has to deal with strategies and outcome measures that stretch literally decades into the future. If you launch something today, it may not get to where it's going for years. Some of their missions even stretch for 10 to 20 years so you have to deal with long-term thinking. It can be very difficult to do that in a political environment, but they have an outstanding talent management program that we've worked with them on. They're looking at figuring out what kind of science and technology students, talent, and competencies the nation needs five to 25 years from now. We're working with their John Glenn Center in Ohio, and going out to high schools and colleges around the country and developing the next generation of space scientists and all-around technology people.

With NIH, what's interesting is understanding how difficult it is to measure science. You're working in a laboratory for many years trying to cure a disease, and something doesn't work out, but does that mean it's a failure? We're trying to get people to think differently about performance in science. Sometimes scientists and doctors go down dead ends but, all in all, you're really trying to measure your effectiveness. And sometimes, being effective in science can mean exploring things that don't work out, and that's not necessarily failure. So we're working with the White House and with scientific organizations all over government, including NIH, to try to show people that performance in science is a different animal. We're trying to give these scientific and medical researchers the latitude to do what they need to do and be on the cutting edge, and that doesn't mean punishing people if they go down the wrong road. We do work to prevent repeated mistakes. We don't want people to repeat the same experiments that failed somewhere else around the world in the last few years, so we're really trying to create that knowledge management environment button. We're also working with NIH's sister organization, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) down in Atlanta. We're looking at some of the nation's toughest diseases, including cancer, and how we're going to measure success in the war on cancer and other illnesses.

Q: What is one change you'd like to see in companies' approaches toward strategic planning within the next 10 years?

We feel the need to create more of a dynamic and rolling forecasting model to get people to understand that planning is dynamic, you know. One of my favorite quotes came from President Eisenhower, when he was the commanding general in World War II. What he said was that in battle, it's not the plan that is useful to planning. It's thinking through the issues, keeping your thinking fresh and sharp, and continuing to revise your thoughts, expectations, and your environmental concerns as the world changes. Because the world is changing quickly, and planning needs to reflect that constant change. So we're trying to get people to move away from the static plan, and move toward a more dynamic model that brings in performance and evaluation every step of the way. We're using what's called the Logic Model Framework, and it's been very successful. We're lucky enough to have the folks at the Office of Management and the Budget in the White House point it out as one of the more successful tools in government over the last five to 10 years in helping these organizations to continue to build upon what they're doing. Especially as budgets get tighter, we want to see all organizations link planning with budget in a real-time way, and we really think technology can help people. The dashboards and scorecards that people are using are helpful, but we really want to make this more about planning and less about the plan itself. That's one change that I think is incredibly important.

Q: Does your approach to consulting change when you work internationally? If so, what different techniques do you use?

Planning does reflect culture. For example, in the United Kingdom, the British government uses measurement and planning in a much different way, and probably in a way that we need to think about doing it in this country. It's not just looking at how effective any strategy might be, but also diving down into the cost-benefit ratio around certain government activities and expenditures. In this country, we tend to look at planning and measurement around the question of "Does something work?" That's a great start, and we're trying to get people to think through that question seriously. But in England and elsewhere, it's not just if something works, but "How much are we spending on it?" and "Can we put a value on the spending versus the return-on-investment (ROI)?"

There are some tough government issues they look at in that way that we don't in this country. For instance, in healthcare, let's say you start screening people for a certain disease at the age of 40, you may catch 1 in a 1,000 illnesses, but the cost for doing that is very high. If we start screening at age 45 instead of 40, the ROI will be much higher, though I think we're still a little gun-shy and reticent about looking at things in that way. It's going to be a pretty tough cultural change. But when budgets get tight and when the deficit continues to grow, this is something that we're going to have to start looking at.

Working with China was another real eye-opener for us. In the Chinese process for taking a methodology or tool, they really wanted to wait and see what was going on around the world and then adopt the best practice they found. They weren't going to rush into anything; they wanted to sit back, observe, and analyze what was working and what wasn't working. You really do see differences internationally based on where you are and the types of systems and governments that they have.

Q: What are factors you look at when customizing a knowledge management strategy for a company?

Knowledge management is transferring knowledge from employee to employee, and what we've seen is that, in many organizations, the answer to someone's question might be sitting with the person right next to them or across the hall, and people just do not have the tools or the culture to tap into what they already know. There is a lot of intuitive knowledge within any organization, but we don't know how to get to it. Some of the questions we ask are: "Do people interface in a real-time way?" "Are they comfortable using technology, or are they out and about? Can we get them to stand up?" We've even done things such as redesign hallways and stairwells to get people to sit and interface more, get people out of their cubes, get people to run into each other a little bit more. It's not always about the technology; technology helps, but real-time exchange in person can be very useful. What we've seen is that, even if you just get people to meet once or twice a year in person, if they know each other and they've met face-to-face, they're much more willing to share with each other online. It's a real combination of online and real-time practices, and so you have to look at both and how they interact with each other.

Q: What is advice you would give someone looking to go into the field of performance consulting?

We've been told that statistics and being a statistician is going to be one of the hottest jobs in the next 20 to 25 years. Most of the world's knowledge, performance information, and data that is out there is unstructured data. We've worked with places such as Wal-Mart and Nestle, and Wal-Mart is crunching through millions of customer transactions per day, but computers and algorithms can only do so much. A lot of the world's most valuable information on performance data is unstructured, which means that people are going to be the ones that look for the patterns and uncover what this information really means to all of us and really helps organizations move forward. Nestle discovered that a lot of their data was invalid. A lot of their data was suppliers from all around the world, and hundreds of thousands of suppliers for their ingredients, and almost a third of their data was incorrect, and it took a person to uncover this. So I really do think that if you're interested in the field of performance consulting, that the ability to understand patterns and statistics and really decipher what all the gigabytes of data are telling us would be very, very important. It's a lot like finding the clues to anything, and I think it's very exciting.

If more people coming out of undergraduate and graduate programs understood the way data and performance measures are changing society, they would be more interested in this field. It can be a real enjoyable experience to decipher what the data means, and turn strategy into performance. It really connects numbers with something that's much, much bigger. It's an exciting field to be in right now, and it's certainly going to be a high-demand career over the next 20 years.

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Jon Desenberg is the policy director for the performance management and human capital management divisions at The Performance Institute; www.performanceinstitute.org .

Aparna Nancherla is the editor of Consulting News; anancherla@astd.org .