The shutdown: Here, Australia, & your organization

There’s been a lot posted on social media and different news outlets regarding this government shutdown. One of the really interesting articles I came across was one that talked about Australia and what happened in the event of their own government shutdown. When their legislative body wasn’t able to pass a budget they put all of them out of their jobs and reelected new people to start over from scratch. I thought it was pretty interesting and it definitely creates a spirit of compromise around budget time but it also made me think beyond the fact that I’d love to see something like that in this case.

If people don’t have to suffer any consequences from their decisions, they are often empowered to make decisions that don’t necessarily take into account the impact that those decisions have on the people they do effect. This is sort of similar to the idea of software companies eating their own dog food so to speak. If your process or technology isn’t good enough to use within your own organization, then how good could it possibly be? Will it ever be that great? You’ll never have experienced the same hurdles that your customers are experiencing.

I think there’s definitely a misalignment of the interests in this case and certainly a misalignment of the impacts that has contributed to the path that we’re headed down. It’s something you should think about in your own organization. While the current government shutdown is a very high profile example of this, I know that I’ve been guilty of making decisions that impact others more than myself maybe without thinking enough about what the consequences are for folks and getting them engaged in the process. So I think that there is a real benefit in your organization to setting up a system that encourages people to participate in the processes that they create. I think you end up with something that’s stronger in the end and while that’s best practice it’s not something that is always followed. As you can see in the current example, the results can be pretty bad for the people that have to live with the implications of decisions made for them by people who won’t be affected.