Confessions of a Wayward Academic

by Tom Corbett

  These points may seem like common sense. In many respects, they are. And yet, there are pitfalls all along the way. The reality of effecting change demands that we get outside of the business as usual framework that dominates conventional thinking. Even simple nostrums strain our abilities. For example, we repeatedly talk about the necessity of adopting a customer perspective in thinking through what is wrong with the current system and what might be required in an alternative one. What happens first, what happens second, what happens third, and how will a customer react at each stage. Sounds simple but doing this well, and in a constructive manner, takes considerable talent and sensitivity. This process is the line of sight exercise I fell into out of desperate necessity way back in Kenosha County. Most managers and planners are too top down in their perspectives. They prematurely pronounce what is best, but do not work with those in the trenches to figure it out and get the necessary buy-in.

  By coincidence, Jennifer and I ran into the same Wisconsin county welfare manager who told me the story of the unbelievable caseload decline associated with the implementation of Wisconsin Works. Now, we were there monitoring their efforts at service integration. The county director painted a very eloquent and compelling picture of the vision he had for merging services to provide families with comprehensive, coherent, and effective help. It was quite moving, though I did notice that the welfare manager just sat there with her arms crossed not saying a word. Then she blurted out, “This is the first I have heard of this.” The director kept talking and she again interrupted, “This is all news to me.” Though embarrassing, the real lesson lies elsewhere. It is good to have a vision, but it is much better if everyone shares it.

  The biggest challenge faced by policy entrepreneurs seeking to integrate service systems involves the recognition of that cross-cultural friction can play havoc with the best of plans. Every agency and program functions within an existing culture, one that is often shaped by their core technology or their fundamental purpose. Workers bring professional biases in with them through prior training and a good deal of selection goes into matching the backgrounds and dispositions of prospective employees with the program’s dominant culture. Once on the job, the employee also internalizes a whole set of context-specific biases and norms that become part of their identity and which further shape their behavioral tendencies. They adopt a common language, a common attitude toward their customers, common frames of reference and language, and a common appreciation of what their institutional purpose is along with who is important in their external environment. The acculturation process is typically so seamless that the individual is unaware it is happening.

  When two agencies are brought together, the cultures of each may clash, sometimes violently and sometimes subtly. It is here, in what we call the “under the waterline” arena where so many sharks lurk that result in good intentions going astray. There are steps that can be taken, but first one needs to recognize the character of the challenge. Getting at these “under the waterline” impediments is not always easy, but this is exactly where the customer’s perspective can be very helpful. The problem is particularly acute when you are trying to merge programs drawn from radically different core technologies. As suggested above, the core technology is what an agency does as its primary business. For example, a traditional benefits-issuing system like SNAP employs complex but routine tasks to do its business. A more conventional service agency dealing with family crisis, for example, will employ more professional models in working with customers, often relying upon the expertise of frontline workers to make critical decisions. Workers drawn from these two institutional traditions are likely to evidence distinct norms, operating assumptions, and behavioral patterns. They see their roles in different ways, view their clients according to their own fashion, and express themselves quite uniquely.

  Sometimes it is not until you get staff and workers drawn from different institutional cultures together that the conflicts are manifest. Jennifer and I once met up for a series of meetings with officials in Michigan from the (then) welfare side and the workforce side of things (we flew in from different sites and thus had little time to prepare). Since the get-together was called by the welfare side of things, the workforce people were immediately suspicious that we were their hired guns brought in to somehow help people on the other side intrude on their turf. Eventually, though, we began to focus on substantive issues and real-life case issues. Gradually, we could visibly see officials on both sides begin to see how collaboration could be a good thing. Of course, with my big mouth, I did almost foment a rebellion among several counties against state leadership which required the top person to intervene. But the welfare and workforce people had bonded together for the first time, at least while we were involved.

  We had a similar experience in Indiana. We met with officials from the welfare and workforce development side of things. As the meeting began, the dialogue almost immediately broke down into mutual accusations and recriminations. If there were failures and problems, it was because the morons from the other agency did not get it. For a while, Jennifer and I thought a food fight would break out. My first instinct was to direct all the hostility toward Jennifer, but it occurred to me that she might beat me up if I did that. Somehow, once again, we managed to redirect the hostility that was brought into the room toward discussing hypothetical case situations that they faced daily. Over time, you could see animosities diminish and attitudes evolve as they struggled with more practical ways for helping families they served in common. By the end of the day, they were virtually locked arm-in-arm while singing We Shall Overcome. Get people to focus on substantive problems to be solved, and a constructive dialogue can replace silly disputes about turf.

  Okay, the change was not that dramatic, nor is getting discussions on track easily done; but our Indiana experience was repeated elsewhere to varying degrees. Unfortunately, we never had a chance to carry out the full experiment in the Hoosier State. The new governor, Mitch Daniels, decided to privatize the administration of the welfare functions and signed a multiyear contract with IBM. Talk about culture clash. Within a short time, the feds got involved as the issuance of benefits fell way short of acceptable standards. The feds threatened the state with huge penalties. The experiment ultimately collapsed, and the contract had to be terminated despite the governor’s very public support and backing. Guess what, business models are not always suited for public purposes. Duh!

  Based on a long litany of such real-world experiences, Jennifer and I wrote a few articles on the topic as I noted earlier. People still come across these and call us asking for help. They tell us that no one else gets it like we do. This culture thing is what they are struggling with and they need a lot of help dealing with these real, but obtuse, issues. In two trips to Toronto, Canada, I saw the same issues and challenges as we had observed in the States. One of my last real-life vignettes occurred in Washington State not long before I effectively retired. It was a university-sponsored gathering to discuss how academics could work better with state officials. At an informal evening session, I was chatting with a top Washington State official who brought up how difficult it was to advance service integration. I started to respond with an overview of some of the cultural friction issues we had seen in so many sites. As I talked, her eyes widened. “That’s it,” she exclaimed with excitement. “That is exactly where we are failing.”

  One last lesson for now! Officials at higher levels of the bureaucracy, whether at the local, state, or federal levels, need to adopt a new management style. They need to be less top-down and prescriptive in perspective. Japanese officials and entrepreneurs listened to management guru W. Edwards Deming after World War II while American industrial leaders ignored his advice about quality circles and learning from the bottom up. That has been a hard lesson for managers in this country to learn since it involves letting go of complete control. Giving up even the appearance of power is a courageous act.

  The integration agenda can spread i
f we change attitudes and cultural predispositions at the top. Top officials must experience operations at the ground level. They must encourage boundary-spanning (communicating across agency lines), risk-taking, and lateral (innovative) thinking. They must encourage experimentation and then provide support for venues where the innovators can learn from one another and subsequently become guides to others who are prepared to take similar risks. Ultimately, they must trust those closest to the customers.

  In retirement, I belong to a group of retirees from academia and government who still hope to contribute to public policy. I went on a small rant at one meeting where I moaned and groaned about some mistakes I thought were being made in Wisconsin’s efforts to advance the integration agenda. One of the other members at that time, the retired dean of the University of Wisconsin’s Business School, looked at me and said, “Tom, you have just summarized all the best thinking to come out of business schools over the last decade.” See, I thought, who needs to be educated to make sense.

  The integration agenda will not go away. So many providers rediscover the need for a more coherent and individualized service system because the advantages remain obvious. I sometimes feel that locals trying to do integration are a bit like alcoholics, a topic I know something about. Too many of them are out there struggling to bring some sense to the way they help clients. But they feel alone and misunderstood. They believe that they are confronting challenges and problems that absolutely no one else has dealt with in the past. The reality is that their take on things is dead wrong. Many others have struggled and still are struggling with the same issues every day. We need to articulate an infrastructure to bring them together…an AA for those bitten with the integration bug. The addicted need the counsel of others suffering from the same affliction.

  Ultimately the notion of institutional culture, so critical to doing service integration, is also critical in so many other arenas. I turn to it again in the next chapter where I talk about bridging the gap between knowledge producers and knowledge consumers—the academy and the real world. Now, when talking about cultural conflict, it doesn’t get any better than this.

  CHAPTER 7

  A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE

  A mind, once stretched by an idea, never regains its original state.

  —Oliver Wendell Holmes

  There is a famous line in the iconic movie “Hud” where the grizzled old prison guard says to the Paul Newman character, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” This chapter is about one more rather long counter in my candy store, the one that tackles yet another wicked problem…what I call the “failure to communicate” challenge. It concentrates on the failure of those who are supposed to be producing knowledge to bring what they discover to those who might best use it.

  I will start this story in 1993, back in ASPE, when we yet used those yellow pads to note missed calls. Yes, this chapter also starts with a call out of the blue. I looked at the name of the caller…it said Unmi Song. Well, I knew a Miri Song but not an Unmi. Miri had been a student of mine at UW and interned with me at IRP where she helped with the now famous article called Child Poverty: Progress or Paralysis that everyone seemed to love. Perhaps the receptionist had misinterpreted the first name.

  Miri’s contribution had been to encourage me to publish the thing in the first place. One of my (many, many) faults is that I would develop interesting thoughts in my talks and, if I liked them, reuse them so frequently that I assumed everyone in the Western world had heard them, perhaps more than once. Miri convinced me that the central ideas in this piece would be new and exciting to many others. Despite my public talks, there were legions of folk out there thirsting for my inspirational insights. “No way,” I would argue. “Way,” she would respond. She wore me down and proved correct.

  The short story on this piece is my use of a cute metaphor to capture the welfare population. In pursuing reform, I argued that the heterogeneity within the target population was of paramount importance. All recipients were not alike. Hold the presses, right! Ah, it is never the insight itself, but how one uses it that is the key. Think of these families as falling into layers, as you would find in an onion. Each layer represents a different type of family that is confronting distinct issues and, most critically, which then requires a tailored service strategy. On the outer skin were the issues easiest to address, and the more difficult challenges were located closer to the core. This was not unlike the four tiers I developed in Kenosha that the W-2 planners later stole, which is where I suspect my thinking on this matter likely originated.

  The clever part in my argument was to assert that all sides in the welfare wars were right and all sides were wrong. People tended to look only at selected layers of the onion. They would see the problems and solutions associated with that layer while assuming they were looking at the whole onion. This is what I called the “truncated perception” problem. It is analogous to the “tunnel vision” we see in many professions. If a spouse is murdered, it must be the husband. By the time detectives have spent two years trying to convict the poor sap, who was innocent all along, the real miscreant is long gone. Back to welfare, the consequent screaming at one another inevitably leads to the paralysis we were seeing everywhere. The ‘softs’ in the welfare wars see recipients as victims of a cruel economic and social system. The ‘hards’ see beneficiaries as morally lax and lazy exploiters of the public’s generosity. It is hard to have a civil dialogue when the starting positions are so far apart. The tragedy is that both capture part of reality. Starting from that premise, I developed a matrix that laid out reform proposals by selected welfare icons from across the political spectrum and tried to show how their ideas fit within a comprehensive approach to reform and thus complemented, not competed, with one another.

  From the reaction I was seeing, my basic pitch was selling in both in Peoria and in Washington. For years after, strangers, upon being introduced to me, would say, “Oh, yeah, you are the onion man. I used to keep that article next to the commode.” I always took this to mean that they wanted easy access to it, not that it as suitable as toilet paper. Such accolades, if that is what they were, afforded me with a few easy retorts, “oh, yeah, the onion piece, tears come to my eyes every time I think of it.” After a while it got a bit tiring, and I altered my response. “You think I am that “onion” guy? No, no, I am not him. Didn’t you hear? He died, from an overdose of garlic. Tragic…really!”

  Most of my better thoughts, and I did have some, emerged while giving a talk somewhere. The onion metaphor is no exception. I was registering at a hotel in Vermont where a roundtable discussion was to take place the next day. The organizers had invited all the big players in the state and a few outside “experts” to get everyone focused on where to go with welfare and poverty in the future. It would include both state welfare insiders as well as public power figures such as top judges and legislators who brought very little expertise to the welfare topic.

  A key organizer of the event caught me as I was registering and said, “Tom, can you do the lead off comments in the morning, kind of frame the issues for the group?” As usual, I agreed. This could be a tough task, I thought, given the diversity of the audience. I figured I would need some simple, overarching framework to structure a complex and conflict-prone issue such as what to do about welfare. Hence the origin of the onion! “It seemed to work very well.” I said to myself, Tom, you really are a clever devil. Excessive talking to oneself is yet another sign of serious problems.

  Getting back to the call! Since the person I thought was calling, Miri, had convinced me that not everyone in the Western world had heard of the onion analogy, I owed her a debt. Maybe she was in town, and I could take her to lunch. She had been an unusual Social Work grad student in that she had done her undergraduate work at Harvard. I doubt she could see her future in counseling distressed couples, so she drifted toward policy as possibly being a bit more intellectually challenging. She did her advanced placement in my practicum policy
class and her internship at IRP under my supervision. I was never sure whether that was legal, but my personal policy was never to ask. I cannot recall where she had gone next but years later, after her Ph.D., she was considered for a position in Sociology at UW before ending up in England at the University of York.

  As I started to call back, I realized that it was a Chicago number (probably no lunch then), and then a voice on the other end of the line that did not sound right. After a few awkward moments where I probably said, “How the hell are you?” To be followed up with “Who the hell are you?” I realized I was talking to someone who gives out money. It was a bumpy start to a relationship that would support a good part of my efforts to bridge the chasm that existed between the academy and the policy world. Perhaps I should also have labeled this counter in my policy candy store the holy grail of not constantly embarrassing oneself or some such thing.

  I had always been a bit chagrined by the failure to communicate between two worlds of importance to me…those that thought of themselves as creators of knowledge and those who saw their roles as turning abstract notions into something real and functional. I spent my professional life wandering back and forth between these worlds, so the character of their mutual interaction remained of keen interest to me. I recall a moment way back in my state job days when a consultant had been hired (by the feds, I think) to help various states spruce up their QC operations. The fellow assigned to Wisconsin was perfect for academia…a total technical nerd with few people skills.

  The final verbal report to top state officials was almost too painful to endure. They could not understand him, and he had trouble figuring out what they wanted to hear or at least what they needed to hear. Perhaps he had larger problems. He offered me a job with his company and, as I noted earlier, he offered to hire my wife sight-unseen when I mentioned she did not want to give up her job. I persisted in my refusal despite the sweetened offer. He obviously was not a good judge of talent.