Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Dr Dan Honig, Associate Professor of Public Policy at UCL and Georgetown University, explores with Dr Michael Spence how organisational systems can empower or frustrate people trying to do good work. Even mission driven organisations can fall into a regulations trap.
It can feel like we're drowning in regulations, yet we keep creating more. The same people complaining about red tape often suggest adding new policies when problems arise. Could it be that the solution isn't eliminating rules and bureaucracy – it's recognising their hidden costs: eroded trust, wasted time, and reduced autonomy?
And how much underperformance should organisations tolerate to preserve creativity? Dan's research shows that when you give people more autonomy, the middle group – neither stars nor slackers – often improves because they feel trusted and empowered. Dan shares inspiring examples: Pakistan's first female revenue collector proving employees’ capabilities, South Sudan's census director who believed "even God used statistics," and civil servants in Liberia finding purpose in their work. He says most people want to contribute meaningfully, not just collect their salary. The question is whether management systems unlock or suppress that motivation.
And context and culture are everything. What works in one country won’t transplant directly to another. However, Dan finds that almost everywhere, organisations have too much compliance relative to their optimal level, and so most should move toward greater autonomy.
The key is making sure employees, especially in an organisation like a university, understand the discretion and autonomy they already have. We should celebrate those using it well, then have broader conversations about which rules need changing. As one bureaucrat told Dan: "What I want is a place where my existence matters." That's the key to thriving organisations.
Credits:
Presenter: Dr Michael Spence, UCL President & Provost
Guest: Dr Dan Honig, Associate Professor of Public Policy at UCL and Georgetown University
Produced by UCL Communications and UCL Educational Media
Creators and Guests
Host
Dr Michael Spence
Dr Michael Spence has been UCL’s President and Provost since January 2021. He is a long-standing champion of universities as crucibles for debate and dialogue, and an established voice on fostering constructive discussion around challenging issues. Recognised internationally as a leader in the field of intellectual property theory, he holds a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Oxford and has a BA with first-class honours in English, Italian and Law from the University of Sydney.
What is Faces of UCL?
Welcome to Faces of UCL, the podcast that uncovers the stories and people making an impact at University College London, with reflections from across its global community.
In each episode, guests share what UCL has meant to them. What have they contributed? What have they gained? And what role do they believe UCL can play as it enters its third century?
Presented by Dr Michael Spence, UCL’s President and Provost.
[00:00:07]
Michael Spence: Welcome to Faces of UCL, where we uncover many stories from around University College London. I'm Michael Spence, UCL's President and Provost. I'm excited to bring you conversations with some of the remarkable people who contribute to our vibrant university community. This podcast is a window into the people and the stories that make UCL the special place it is. Today I have the great privilege of talking with Dr. Dan Honig, Professor of Public Policy here at UCL, and also at Georgetown. Tell us a bit about how that works, Dan.
[00:00:42]
Dan Honig: How does it work? Well, the way it works is I'm pulled in too many directions, too much of the time. But I have the joy of being part of two wonderful places.
[00:00:51]
Michael Spence: What an interesting time to be both in the UK and the US and to see how the world is unfolding and not unfolding in those different places. People often read the UK through a US cultural and political lens. Do you think that's fair?
[00:01:11]
Dan Honig: I think it's fair that people do it. I think it's an accurate statement that people do it. I don't think it's fair that they do in that sense. But I would say that, for all that's different in this moment and all that might give us help on one side of the Atlantic and not the other at the moment. I would say what really strikes me is the commonality in the two polities. I see social fabrics, fraying in a variety of ways. I see lots of people wanting to do good, but feeling constrained by systems. I see a moment where we have an opportunity, which maybe we could do more to leverage to really rethink how we govern and how we think about what it is to be a society.
[00:01:57]
Michael Spence: Of course, while in some ways, that's all slightly terrifying for the world, it's great for you, because it touches exactly on your areas of academic interest. I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about what you do academically.
[00:02:15]
Dan Honig: I think about how organisational systems help or get in the way of folks who want to do good things, doing good things at the simplest level. My last book is called Mission Driven Bureaucrats, and that's very much about how the wonderful folks who are so often drawn in find themselves thwarted by the managerial systems and reporting and rules and regulations that keep those who might not want to do good for the public from doing bad, but at the cost of adding transaction costs and frictions and red tape, regulatory thickets, I believe, you'd like to say, that push people away. Now I'm thinking about similar things with regards to state citizen relationships under a frame that I'm calling relational state capacity.
[00:03:06]
Michael Spence: How do you get that right? How do you get it right both as a state? But taking the university as an example. If you talk to anybody at a modern university in their day-to-day life, they'll say we're drowning in regulation of one kind or another. We've got all this compulsory training. We've got these thousands of forms to fill out. There are rules and policies about everything. Then you talk to those very same people in a meeting, and you're trying to address a particular issue in the life of the institution. People say, well, let's just put on a bit of compulsory training. Let's have a policy. Let's have a new rule about this. The very same people who feel victim of the weight of that regulatory thicket are also often the ones who add to the regulatory thicket in one way or another. I imagine the same is true in government. How do you release people, institutions, from that dilemma? How do you ask the question about what the right level of regulation looks like?
[00:04:13]
Dan Honig: That's a great way to put it. Let me just endorse the conclusion that, the right answer is never going to be no regulation. Letting folks just do what they want is not an effective way to run an organisation or anything, really. How do you get the level right? I would say the first step is to broaden the aperture. We see the downside, not just the upside of that new rule we've put in. Normally, the way we think about the results – that meeting where that new bit of compulsory behaviour gets suggested, either at the government or at UCL. Normally that gets suggested, and then we say "Oh good! The problem that it was designed to keep from happening has stopped happening or has lessened". Right? So we see the upside of that new compulsory regulation. Well, what we don't see is the downside, the added transaction costs, the added time. The person who feels just a little bit more like the institution doesn't trust them because it's making them go through a set of compulsory processes. So it's about getting this balance right. While I was waiting to come on here, Michael, I asked ChatGPT what you and I would agree on. [LAUGHTER] I decided to see what ChatGPT thought about it. It pulled your going away address from University of Sydney, where you talk about the balance between a university that needs to craft strategic direction and the knowledge that the best possible way to make the university run and to unleash the energy and talents of the faces, since this is the Faces of UCL, right? Of the faces who are going to drive progress is to give those people autonomy, power, etc. I think that's letting the top set direction, but understanding that we are not, those at the top of an organisation rarely have the right information or are in the right place to actually solve the problems they seek to solve on the ground. Thus the question is, how do you set up an environment that enables, that empowers people to drive toward those solutions rather than how do you solve them directly? Because we'd all love to just solve all the problems directly. But unfortunately, we can't. We're not best placed. In some ways, the least best placed people to solve directly, are those at the top of an institution.
[00:06:44]
Michael Spence: I'm interested in two things. One is, you talk about the corrosive effect on people's sense of being trusted that overregulation has. But of course, often regulation is, Oliver Wendell Holmes and all of that, directed at the bad actor. What do you do about bad actors if you loosen the bonds?
[00:07:09]
Dan Honig: When you identify bad actors, you absolutely get rid of them. It's not the case that I think we should have tolerance for bad behaviour. But I guess the question is, how much bad action are we willing to tolerate for how much good behaviour. Last week, I was in Ottawa, working with the Federal Government of Canada. As you may know, there's a large pay reform, pay implementation system problem there. I was working with a procurement team. These are folks who are very rule and compliance oriented and should be. As I put the question to them, what degree of fraud should we tolerate for what level of value add. Clearly, we would love to take a zero tolerance approach to fraud. But do we want to allow 10,000 Canadian dollars a year of fraud in exchange for $3 million of gain? What about $6 million of gain? How do we think about it? We imagine as if the problem is only how do we eliminate all bad actors? First, it's unclear to me that compliance systems in fact succeed in doing that. But even if they did, the question I think should be: What leads to the best possible performance, not the lowest level of bad behaviour?
[00:08:35]
Michael Spence: It's really hard to get that right. If you think about a creative organisation like a university, it's really important that people have a strong sense of freedom and of job security, because we're asking people to experiment. We're asking people to take risks. We're asking people to attempt to think and to write and to say things that are original in some way, which is inherently a high risk activity. Therefore, if people feel they're being constantly under the gun in relation to productivity metrics and all the rest of it, you're not going to get the best work. You're just not because they're not going to be able to take the risk. On the other hand, it's really discouraging in an academic environment if it turns out that a certain percentage of the people in your department do absolutely sod all. The interesting question is, how many people doing sod all are a necessary precondition to creativity? How many people doing sod all is a problem? Is it that you should have five percent sod all people or 10% or 15%? That's a really hard question to answer because it really has a lot to do with the nature of the local academic community. To answer that at an institutional level is kind of hard. What do you do about that?
[00:10:05]
Dan Honig: I guess I would say... So first, I think you're right. There's a really interesting empirical question, which is, what is the tolerable sod all percentage? What is the level of fraud to go back to the Canadian government standpoint that undermines general faith in the system? It's not going to be, to my 10,000, $10,000 in fraud is probably not worth $12,000 in value gain. It's got to be a bigger margin than that because there are systematic effects of bad behaviour for sure. But I guess I would push back gently on the notion that performance management has to be done in a way that is at odds with autonomy, trust, empowerment, which I think is implicit in what you just said. That is to say, if the manager... So I've just gone through the new UCL appraisal system for the first time. That appraisal system asks me to talk about my performance, talk about what I'm interested in, talk about my goals in a way that then facilitates a conversation with my appraiser. It doesn't tell me I'm right or wrong because of the things I've entered. It does ask about my mandatory training, which I've completed all of. Let me be clear.
[00:11:19]
Michael Spence: Right'o!
[00:11:20]
Dan Honig: Thank you, thank you very much. But, you know, it doesn't focus on compliance as what performance is. If you can get performance management technologies that are aligned with people feeling like they are flourishing, with people feeling like they're being asked to pursue the things they already want to pursue. We might still have a percentage of people doing sod all, but we don't have to tolerate that in exchange for better performance in some way...
[00:11:51]
Michael Spence: I suppose there, in sort of, HR speak, the differences between – ours is a development focused appraisal tool. It's not a performance management tool in the negative sense. If the focus is on career development, performance development, I think that's really the function of an appraisal system. But it doesn't deal then with the issue of how you make the decision of how much under performance or even non-performance is a necessary part of the life of an academic community.
[00:12:32]
Dan Honig: We should tolerate as little "sod allness" in the university and in government, as we can, consistent with not lessening the performance of everyone else. I think that the way we do that is we build information gathering frames that let us understand those trade offs a little bit. Let us understand as we change. When I'm working with governments, but if I was working with universities, I'd say the same thing, which is, as you change the managerial levers, let's examine both things. Let's see what happens both to performance and to "sod allness". In governments, at least, I can't speak to UCL. But in governments over and over again, I find that, in fact, people markedly overestimate the amount of increase in "sod allness". In fact, "sod allness" often decreases because there are wonderful people who are going to do wonderful things their ways. There are people who don't want to do anything. Then there's a whole group in the middle whose behaviours are actually a function of how they're managed. As they feel trusted, empowered, supported, those folks reduce their "sod allness", even as it is possible that the very small fraction, who in fact, want to do sod all have more power to do so. But if we think about those as countervailing forces, we can think about this as an open question. Let's try and see.
[00:14:05]
Michael Spence: It is a really important thing, because I do think compliance cultures focus so heavily on that tiny group that whose behaviours are probably not going to be caught anyway. But you've thought a lot about the psychology of the people who are, as it were a part of the system rather than the people who are running the system in one way or another. What motivates people in vocational, if you like, for want of a better term, professions? Things that aren't maybe that there are people who have a calling to being a financial trader, things where the score card is something other than money. Things like being an academic or being a social worker or whatever. How does that work?
[00:14:59]
Dan Honig: All over the world, I see people in government and outside of government, who, as you say, are driven by something other than reward and sanction, by the promotion, by the next paycheck, by the greater paycheck, etc. I think of all of those other forms of motivation as forms of what I call mission motivation, because these are people devoted to accomplishing something, their mission point, because of some intrinsic or even extrinsic factor that isn't controlled by bosses in the system. One example. In Mission Driven Bureaucrats, I talk about a revenue collector in rural Balochistan in Pakistan, first female revenue collector in the history of her province. What Batool Assadi is motivated by is the sense that she wants to be an example to her community and to her society, that women can do this kind of work. Because of that, she is going to act in a way that shows that women can in fact do this job three times as well as men can, rather than only just as well. In South Sudan, I had the pleasure of meeting a woman named Labanya Margaret, first director of the Census of South Sudan. When I asked her how she managed to take such an accurate census, I was working in South Sudan at the time. How she managed to take such an accurate census in a country the size of France that had no baseline, supervising a tonne of staff, the answer was inculcating them in them a sense that the numbers really, really mattered. I believe the exact quote is, "Even when God was creating, he must have used statistics. Numbers change people's lives." I'm not sure about that. You're the pastor. But I would say that... [OVERLAPPING]
[00:17:01]
Michael Spence: It's a great lie.
[00:17:03]
Dan Honig: Yeah and the fact that she believes it is what matters. The fact that she is going to inculcate that in her staff. I saw it myself. When I was the assistant and then advisor to the Minister of Finance in Liberia, supervising a ministry full of people who had been largely Charles Taylor appointees, I saw that even people who might have come to the ministry for reasons other than the kind of vocation you're talking about, could feel a sense of self, a sense of accomplishment, a sense of ownership, by being given an opportunity to feel they were contributing to the work that they do. I think the bond trader also — most people are heroes in their own story. Most people believe that they are doing well, almost all people in the world. Tapping into that is to me one of the key components of a better, thriving, more human society, and in addition to better performance, and in that sense, I think it has some resonance with the [OVERLAPPING]
[00:18:11]
Michael Spence: It could also be really cynical and exploitative. I think people in British universities are underpaid, and I think the system has traded on the fact that they have a particular vocational motivation for a very long time. Do you see, in your work, governments and others exploiting that poor census worker who thinks she's doing something really important and is willing to take a bit of a pay cut for that purpose?
[00:18:46]
Dan Honig: Occasionally, I'm asked the question. Does this mean we shouldn't pay people more? I say, no, you should. Forgive me, were you after this podcast to say, I really don't like that guy anymore, I'm going to cut his salary by 98%. [LAUGHTER] Despite what I believe to be my own mission motivation, it might not be long for UCL. Everyone has a preference for higher wages, conditional on being able to serve the mission that they care about, and I think you're exactly right. We end up with equilibrium wages, as Trump has gone after bureaucrats in the US government. Many of them are having trouble finding jobs because so many are needing to look for them at the same time. But in general, these are folks who have a higher wage that they can earn outside the public sector, not a lower one. One of the big misnomers, and data from the World Bank, from the global survey of public servants, backs this up. In general, at higher skill levels in particular, people who work in government suffer a negative, not a positive, wage differential, conditional on their skills. Based on what they can do, they're taking a pay cut to work in the public sector. They are maybe getting security, and a different lifestyle, and other things too, but the idea of the highly paid fat cat government worker who could not make it outside. The idea of the highly paid academic, who society is subsidising because, with their talents, they couldn't do anything else, these are largely fallacies.
[00:20:24]
Michael Spence: A lot of your work has been in government and other for-purpose organisations. Does it work differently in the private sector?
[00:20:32]
Dan Honig: Well, I think it works differently, but I think it's a difference of degree rather than kind. I point to the work of scholars like Adam Grant at the University of Pennsylvania, Teresa Amabile, who I had the pleasure of learning from when I was a PhD student at Harvard. These are people who work in very private sector corporate jobs and find that, on the margin, giving people more of a sense of purpose, having people connect to what brings them to the job, and why they should care, is motivating them. In fact, in some ways, we see much more management for empowerment, much more focus on mission as an orientation, in general, in the private sector than in the public sector.
[00:21:13]
Michael Spence: We like binaries, and the Gemeinschaft - Gesellschaft thing is so easy, but what you're saying is, unless Gesellschaft an awful lot of Gemeinschafts, it's unlikely to be successful. It's unlikely that an organisation has to be a community to achieve its purpose. IS there anyone who does this really well in both the public and private sectors that you've worked with?
[00:21:44]
Dan Honig: Lots of great examples that I've worked with. I highlight the wonderful mission-driven management of Thai districts in my book. I speak Thai, I lived in Thailand for a while, and I talk about the autonomy and empowerment we see there. I would say that at their best, some of the innovative firms with different structures, I mentioned Netflix before, I think they do this really well in terms of centering purpose. I think there's a whole industry right now in the private sector of consultants who will help you think through these things. In the public sector, I do have a fair bit of hope for things like mission-driven government, where it becomes more than rhetoric. I think Finnish schools, schools in Finland, that is to say, and in general, the Singaporean government, do a great job of centering purpose, autonomy, empowerment. In the UK, I think the work led by Georgia Gould and Nick Kimber out of the Cabinet Office, focusing on test and learn, then having come over, of course, from the Borough of Camden, in which UCL sits, I think, is a really great opportunity to create space for people inside the UK, local government, and national government.
[00:23:01]
Michael Spence: Does it make a difference whether you're operating in an organisation in a society that has strong social bonds and implicit codes, or a society that is highly contractarian? Does it make a difference in terms of the way management presents itself, but also, does it make a difference in terms of what's effective?
[00:23:29]
Dan Honig: I would say absolutely, it makes a difference. It makes a difference in terms of level and starting point, not the basic framework for analysis. Let me talk out what I mean. You mentioned Fukuyama, and I've had the pleasure of knowing Frank for many years now, and one of his famous papers on this, the example given of a place where we probably, because of a lack of social trust, don't want to give out more autonomy, is Nigeria. It's his example case in the hypothetical, as he talks about good enough government. This is in work where he's talking about getting to Denmark, Denmark being the best possible society. Of course, it matters whether you're in Denmark or not. The last time I was in Copenhagen, giving a talk there, I was walking down the path, and there's a swimming pool in the middle of the river, which they've done just by laying the floating things for the swimming pool, because the water's already clean enough. We have high enough social trust, no one's going to jump in. We just need to lay down the – I don't know what to call the floating things in the swimming pool – but the floating things. Obviously, if we're in Liberia, we can lay down the floaties. What we can't do is have that be a swimming pool that people can now use. The same governance innovation is going to have very different effects in different settings, but coming back to Nigeria, some of the best work we have looking at the differences in management practices is by Imran Rasul from UCL Economics, along with a co-author named Dan Rogger. What they find is that in Nigeria, for infrastructure projects, which are things that are highly visible, and we should expect likely are going to be the kinds of things where we can engage in more compliance. The more we manage for compliance, the worse the projects do, the more we give people some ability to exercise autonomy, exercise discretion, etc, the better these projects do. The less blueprinty the project, the less simple and obvious it is from the outset, what we're going to do, the more that effect takes place. Coming back to your question, giving a perhaps academically long-winded answer to it. I think, of course, Nigeria and Denmark are in different places, but in both Nigeria and Denmark, we can ask the question, what's the current managerial equilibrium? In what way should we move? If we try to just replicate the thing we've done in Denmark, just lay those floaties in the river in Nigeria or Liberia, it definitely will not work. If we engage in the same analysis we should do in Denmark, which is to say, where are we as a managerial environment? What would happen if we shift in what direction? Well, that analysis we can do lots of places, and the reason I'm giving you examples from lots of places of an empowering mission forward management practice working is because over and over again, what I see is a system where whatever the optimal level of compliance, which absolutely differs, that optimal level is being exceeded. We have too much against different standards of what the right amount would be. Thus, the direction of travel we need to go is often less of it, even if it is certainly not to take what we do in, I don't know, Nigerian education systems, and say, let us just impose the rules and processes of Danish or Finnish education systems.
[00:27:04]
Michael Spence: One of the characteristics of universities is they're actually institutions where people have a pretty high degree of autonomy. You know that they have a pretty high degree of autonomy because of the number of workarounds for university systems, local arrangements, adaptations of university practices, compliance with university rules, or whatever, it's relatively low. Yet they're also places where people feel highly regulated. Partly because of that kind of – more regulations are always being laid down to deal with the fact that people and that the environment can seem a little chaotic. How as a leader, do you call a truce and say, we're going to do things differently?
[00:28:01]
Dan Honig: Yeah, a big question. How do you call a truce? First, I think you have to start by calling one. Then I think you need to accept that most people aren't going to believe you. It's just true, it's true whenever we talk about reforming managerial practices, too, that government or anywhere else. Most people have seen reforms, they've seen, you know, strategic plans, they've seen new language, they're going to believe it when things actually start behaving differently, start looking differently in process and outcome terms. How do you do that? It seems to me that UCL has done a wonderful job in the last few years of trying to signal a new strategic direction. What does it take to deliver on that direction? Well, I guess I would say two things. First, you have to show people where they have autonomy and discretion in the system that they don't think they have. One of the things my experience at UCL, which is my experience in all organisations I study and have worked in, is that whatever the formal rules say, people are much more conservative again than even those rules and so show the space. One of the things that frankly brings me the most joy at UCL is that I'm the mentor to SHSs, the Social and Historical Sciences divisions, vice dean of education, Cathy Elliott. One of the things Cathy has taught me in our many conversations is that the rules, for example, on second marking and on what kind of assessments I can use to bring judgement into the classroom, the conventional wisdom of what's allowed is nowhere near what is actually allowed. It takes a little bit more work, takes a bit more process on the front end, but there are a lot of things you can do. The first thing I would do is highlight in a bunch of different areas what, in fact, can be done and say, not only is this secretly allowed, we are excited that this is happening, and we hope you do more of it. That's what's already existing inside the system. Then, once you've got a sufficient number of people who are saying, we actually are meant to do these things, we're not just allowed to do them by mistake, because the folks at the very top didn't notice that we're still allowed to do them. Then you say, let's have a broader conversation about the trade-offs here. There are real concerns on both sides of these managerial decisions. What needs to be changed? What are the five things that are most frustrating to you? Let's figure out which of these matter and what they're buying us. Let's have a conversation about whether we're taking those trade-offs on or not. In that way, let's make it feel like more of a community, because I agree with you. There's a lot of what sociologists call pluralistic ignorance. There's a lot of people who believe that others don't feel like them and believe the rules and leadership say and believe things that I do not believe they do. Where you can solve a problem with information and communication that way, that's almost always the easiest starting point. Only then turn to those formal processes of instruction.
[00:31:19]
Michael Spence: Yeah, I'd like a dollar for every time in my career somebody has said, the Vice Chancellor or the Provost or whatever says, you can't, X, Y, or Z. You think, well, I'm supposed to be that person, and I'm not even sure I have an opinion about it. Look Dan, as ever, it's been a great pleasure to talk to you. I think it is the real issue for modern government, for organisations of all kinds, how you set people free to do what they do well, and in particular, in mission-driven organisations, how you let people realise the mission that brought them here in the first place. Thank you very much for taking the time with me, I really appreciate it.
[00:32:02]
Dan Honig: Pleasure is really mine. Let me just say and close that, one other quote from an Mission Driven Bureaucrat that I love to quote is a social auditor in Karnataka, named Preetam Ponnappa, who said to me, what I want is a place where my existence matters, and I think that's true for all of us. I know it's true for me, and the more we can set up systems, universities, and others to allow people to feel that their existence matters, which it certainly does, the better, the more thriving society we're going to end up with. Really a pleasure that we've had the opportunity to chat and thank you for your time.
[00:32:39]
Michael Spence: Thanks, Dan. That was really interesting. That wraps up our first season of Faces of UCL. I've loved getting to know the stories, more of some of the incredible people in our community, and I hope you have too. You'll be hearing more from us next year as we celebrate our Bicentennial in 2026 by introducing the world to the many more Faces of UCL.