Lax and re-lax

It is time for agility. In times of change agility is a priority. Agility refers to the fitness a company or individual has to respond to the changes required. Unfit individuals become a burden on themselves and on others. Unfit organizations become slow, non-responsive and finally unsustainable. In a fast changing environment where technology creates overnight obsolescence and information highways have made awareness levels almost instant, agility is the new norm. While private sector organizations are investing in this area, public sector institutions are barely digesting the meaning of agility. For the public sector 'bureaucracy' is the ideal anti-dote for the "silly" idea of agility.
Take this example of the extent of regulatory, ethical and disciplinary laxness of the highest house, ie., a Senate Committee. It is reprimanding a Public Sector Enterprise for trying to become agile, disciplined and honest. A Senate committee on Aviation called upon the PIA management, which has dismissed 121 employees for possessing fake degrees, to be lenient towards the remaining staff under scrutiny for submitting forged academic records at the time of induction. They said instead of laying them off, PIA has a category of minor punishment which can be handed down to employees possessing fake degrees. What could be more bizarre?
Public Sector enterprises are not enterprising world over. They by their definition connote indifference and indiscipline. In Pakistan they also signify sustainable intrigue and inefficiency. A culture of sheer apathy persists in these organizations. Many of them are headed by political appointees who are in turn going to give key seats to their political loyalists whose only claim to the position is the backdoor channel that they have adopted to get in. The loyalty to the job or their real boss, ie., the public who pay taxes to fund their salaries, is a concept unheard of in their thought box.
Agility comes through stringent performance management. Private companies are answerable to their shareholders every quarter and every year. As the organization performance goes down CEOs and top management also go out. Delays, indiscipline, inability to respond to volatility are treated as criminal and thus penalized. The opposite is true for the public sector. Time value is sniggered at; discipline is derided; and rapid response is ridiculed.
Agility is required to face the 4 major issues facing this century-Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity ie., VUCA. From oil prices to Brexit, external environment has become more difficult to predict, anticipate and precipitate. While private sector companies do intense Scenario Planning and make extensive contingent plans, public sector is almost resistant to long term plans. Their appointments are for a few years and their performance rarely gets them or loses them their job. This lack of accountability makes them lax on their deliverables and live by the motto of "No hurry, just relax".
The public sector official is a master of "rules of business" that give him or her enough hold over the creaky and stale laws that were designed to protect the public servant interest rather than public interest. The public servant is a master crafter of using rules of business to condone under performance, regularizing irregularities and making the wrong right. Public Sector enterprises are bleeding and non-functional, however people working in them keep on getting their share of bread despite not earning it. Any attempt at changing these rules is blocked by entrenched mafias who politically or legally stall such moves.
Most experiments to turnaround public sector organizations and make them nimble and agile have failed. The appointment of political loyalists has been a disaster and the appointment of professionals has not been successful either. Professionals become a victim of ejection lobbies against them. Knowing the "rules of business" better, the bureaucrats create an atmosphere where the professional takes some tough decisions of hiring and layoff only to find himself embroiled in legal battles. Frustrated, he normally resigns.
A typical case in point is PIA. For decades beset with unprofessionalism, politicization and mismanagement it has become an epitome of how to be lax in a crisis where severe financial hemorrhaging has taken place for years. With accumulated losses ballooning to over Rs 400 billion a complete lack of urgency was witnessed right from the time you check in, board and fly. Any attempt to change it would result in the person who is trying to bring change being changed. In the recent change at PIA the direction has been changed with some initial results showing positivity. After years of losses the first quarter of 2019 showed an operational break even. This break even has been achieved due to a focus on making PIA more nimble, agile and fit to compete in a hyper competitive airline industry.
PIA has been bloated with extra costs and extra personnel whose qualifications and justifications were a heavy burden to the crashing revenues of the airline. Just as an example, PIA has saved roughly Rs 1 billion a month since it acquired the new ticket reservation software from Turkey-based firm Hitit in October 2018. The new reservation software is costing half of what PIA was paying to the US-based firm Saber. Over a year this saving will amount to Rs 12 billion.
Despite this improvement, the Senate Committee wants 121 fake degree holders, which also includes pilots, to be given a "relaxed" punishment. Just imagine giving a plane in the hand of a man who does not qualify as a pilot. You are endangering the lives of hundreds of families. In most legal fraternity, since this is against a court order, relaxation would be a contempt of court; in most countries such requests will be considered aiding crime; In many countries the license of such airlines will be in danger; in many societies such behavior will call for a boycott of organizations putting human lives in danger. But in Pakistan, this is "harsh and unfair".
Tolerance for laxness is all time high. Non-performance, ethical deviations, legal violations, integrity digressions, are all part of business as usual and can be condoned under "rules of business" where all you need to do is to appeal against a suspension and termination and get a "stay' from the court. "Stay" is an opposite of "move" which is the first step to agility. The Stay leads to Status Quo which then makes the organizations become those dinosaurs that unfortunately survive and drag the whole industry and sometimes the whole economy down. The yawning gap between 'stay' and 'move" is not just legally but psychologically the biggest challenge in transforming the public sector organisations from bleeding liabilities to productive assets.
(The writer can be reached at [email protected])