Being accountable to two parties rather than four parties

From Culture eats policy by Jennifer Pahlka.  

Our elected leaders are frustrated. Yes, they’re working in a highly divisive environment which makes it hard to get anything done, or even to have a reasonable conversation across the aisle. But it’s not just that. They’re frustrated because they’re supposed to be steering the ship of our country through changing times, but the tiller they have their hands on doesn’t seem all that well connected to the rudder. When they can agree enough to get a bill passed or policy changed, their intention is to change speed or direction, but when they turn the wheel or try to speed up or slow down, it’s anyone’s guess what will actually happen.

[snip]

How does this happen? When there are big, visible delivery failures, like HealthCare.gov or the unemployment insurance crisis, public servants are trapped between two distinct systems of accountability. In the first, politicians will hold the public servants accountable for outcomes: whether the website works to enroll people or whether benefits are actually getting to claimants. In this system there will be hearings. (Congressional committees held 10 separate hearings on HealthCare.gov in a single month in 2013, all as the people being called to testify were otherwise working night and day to get the site back up.)  Angry politicians will summon bureaucrats to the Hill, or the state capitol, or city council chambers, and their staffs will help them prepare incisive questions that show that they are paying close attention to the problem. These hearings will likely be televised or webcast, and a few sound bites might appear on the evening news or circulate on social media.

In the second system of accountability, various parts of the administrative state—the agency itself, the inspector general, the Government Accountability Office—will hold these same public servants accountable to process. Procurement and planning documents will be reviewed for any gaps, any skipped or partially skipped steps, any deviance from standard protocol, even if that deviance is legal, just nonstandard. If an ESB is thought to be “best practice”—even if it is not at all best practice—why wasn’t it used? If anti-fraud practices had been previously established, why weren’t all of them deployed? If the vendor has been hired under an Other Transaction Authority (a streamlined path for procurement that Congress approved to give agencies flexibility to exercise judgment), why was this exception allowed and a more thorough and standard process not followed? And who signed off on all these decisions? Angry politicians will sometimes ask such questions too, but they are less familiar with the many administrative rules and requirements. They tend to focus more on the issue their constituents care about: Why isn’t the thing working?

The accountability trap is a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation. The first system is extremely uncomfortable for the public servants subjected to it. No one wants to be called up to testify in a televised hearing. No one wants to be in the video clip as a stone-faced bureaucrat with no good answers, being yelled at by a righteous—or self-righteous—politician fighting the good fight on behalf of the aggrieved public. In front of the cameras, you can’t say things like “it doesn’t work because we were forced to use an ESB.” You would look like you were trying to throw someone else under the bus, and the legislators wouldn’t understand what you were talking about anyway. Your job is simply to endure the hearing, produce as few viral sound bites as possible, and not incriminate others.

As painful and sometimes humiliating as these hearings are, if you’re a career civil servant, it is the second system of accountability that matters more to you. The legislature can’t fire or officially reprimand you, no matter how bad a job they think you did (although they can put political pressure on the administration to do so). They can’t make you ineligible for promotions and raises. On the other hand, violations of policy, process, and procedure—real or perceived—can do all of that, even if there is no hearing. It is the job of many other public servants to make sure that happens. The people under scrutiny want to avoid these repercussions for the obvious reason that being fired or demoted affects their livelihoods, but many also simply want to continue doing their jobs. They believe in what they do, and they believe that they are still the best shot the agency has at fulfilling its mission. They are often right. So they follow policy, process, and procedure even when it is at odds with achieving the desired outcomes. 

An excellent point but I am not sure it is all that different in the private sector.  Indeed, I suspect for most private sector enterprises, there is yet a third party judging.  

In Pahlka's schema, civil servants have to answer to both politicians on outcomes and to their agency on process adherence.

In the private sector there are four horns upon which you can be impaled.  You have to answer to the customer for outcomes, to the executive leadership for mission adherence and to your business unit leader for product/service quality compliance and to your direct supervisor for adherence to policy and process.  The actions necessary to delight the customer are not coherent with the actions to ensure executive satisfaction which in turn are not coherent with the actions necessary to ensure adherence to process and policy.

The issues is a variant of the Principal-Agent problem in economics.

The principal–agent problem refers to the conflict in interests and priorities that arises when one person or entity (the "agent") takes actions on behalf of another person or entity (the "principal"). The problem worsens when there is a greater discrepancy of interests and information between the principal and agent, as well as when the principal lacks the means to punish the agent. The deviation from the principal's interest by the agent is called "agency costs".

Common examples of this relationship include corporate management (agent) and shareholders (principal), elected officials (agent) and citizens (principal), or brokers (agent) and markets (buyers and sellers, principals). In all these cases, the principal has to be concerned with whether the agent is acting in the best interest of the principal. The concepts of moral hazard and conflict of interest relate to the principal-agent problem.

The leadership of Businesses and Corporations go a long way to bringing the interests of customers, enterprise strategy, and operation execution into alignment.  It is not enough to have good products, good customers, good strategies, and good operational excellence.  You will still fail if the four elements are not actively aligned with one another in a conscientious fashion.

Because the public sector schema is simpler (politicians and agency leaders), it makes the mismatch seem more stark and more unjust but in fact it is a simpler challenge than those in the private sector where the complexity is greater and where that complexity masks the inherent unfairness.