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Taming “Wild Problems”: Measure Everything That Matters

Every problem is not solvable, but every problem is measurable. This assertion is the key to tackling problems in public services including courts, business, and life in general. Surprising to me is that even astute scholars take exception to this, among them  is Russ Roberts, the John and Jean De Nault Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, the president of Shalem College in Jerusalem, and host of the award-winning podcast EconTalk: Conversation for the Curious. The belief that certain things, dubbed “wild problems” by Professor Roberts, cannot be measured does a disservice to courts and other public and private organizations. There are many benefits to measuring everything that matters. It allows organizations to   focus on and to operationalize the most important problems and issues facing them,   to track progress over time and identify areas of improvement,   to compare their performance to that of other organizations and learn from the differences, and, fi
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Managers’ Gobbledygook Turns Off Employees

  This is the fourth in a series of blog posts on employee engagement defined in the Global Measures of Court Performance as the percent of employees who, as measured by a court-wide survey, are passionate about their job, committed to the mission of the court and, as a result, put discretionary effort into their work. In the first post in the series on March 24th, I reviewed the findings in Gallup’s 2019 pioneering book, It’s the Manager, by Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, and Jim Harter, Chief Scientist. Based on a decade of study of tens of millions of interviews of employees and managers across 160 countries, their study revealed “the most profound, distinct,  and clarifying finding” in Gallup’s 80-year history of studying the workplace: Managers who develop engaged employees did not merely influence the results of their teams, including higher productivity, lower turnover, greater safety, better profitability, and higher quality – they accounted for an astounding 70% of
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Don’t Neglect Unexpected Success: Look for Bright Spots, Champions, and Heroes

U nexpected successes -- positive deviations from our preconceived expectations, assumptions, and certainties about the performance of organizations, groups, individuals, even justice systems and countries – are “bright spots,” ripe opportunities for management excellence. The lesson of paying close attention to these bright spots is deceptively  simple: Don’t try to solve problems, copy successes . Unexpected successes are the best opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship counselled Peter F. Drucker many years ago in his 1990 book, Management Challenges for the 21 st Century (HarperCollins, 82-83). We should starve problems and feed the opportunities of unexpected success, he wrote. Unexpected successes should be exploited, not ignored, or actively rejected. They are bright spots for improvements, less risky and arduous to pursue than unexpected failures. We should identify and learn from these unexpected successes as valuable data points. Unfortunately, we tend to overlo
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A Shift to Hybrid Remote In-Person Work Post-Pandemic Will Increase Managers' Employee Engagement

This is the third in a series of posts on employee engagement defined in the  Global Measures of Court Performance  as the percent of employees who, as measured by a court-wide survey, are passionate about their job, committed to the mission of the court and, as a result, put discretionary effort into their work. In the first post on March 24th, I reviewed the findings in Gallup’s 2019 pioneering book,  It’s the Manager, , by Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, and Jim Harter, Chief Scientist. Based on a decade of study of tens of millions of interviews of employees and managers across 160 countries, their study revealed “the most profound, distinct,  and clarifying finding” in Gallup’s 80-year history of studying the workplace: Managers who develop engaged employees did not merely influence the results of their teams, including higher productivity, lower turnover, greater safety, better profitability, and higher quality – they accounted for an astounding 70% of this  success. No
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The Measurement and Management of Employee Engagement

  This is the second in a series of posts on employee engagement defined in the Global Measures of Court Performance as the percent of employees who, as measured by a court-wide survey, are passionate about their job, committed to the mission of the court and, as a result, put discretionary effort into their work. In the first post on March 24th, I reviewed the findings in Gallup’s 2019 pioneering book, It’s the Manager: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know , by Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, and Jim Harter, Chief Scientist. Based on a decade of study of tens of millions of interviews of employees and managers across 160 countries, their study revealed “the most profound, distinct,  and clarifying finding” in Gallup’s 80-year history of studying the workplace: Managers who develop engaged employees did not merely influence the results of their teams, including higher productivity, lower turnover, greater safety, better profitability, and higher quality – they accounted
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Out with the Old and in with the New Model of Court Management: The Engaging Manager and Leader

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  This is the first of a series of posts on employee engagement defined in the Global Measures of Court Performance as the percent of employees of a court who, as measured by a court-wide survey, are passionate about their job, committed to the mission of the court and, as a result, put discretionary effort into their work. In Gallup’s 2019 pioneering book , It’s the Manager, authors Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, and Jim Harter, Chief Scientist, lament that while both the science of management and   how people today work, live, and want to experience their lives has advanced, the practice of management has been stuck in time for more than 30 years. Based on a decade of study of tens of millions of interviews of employees and managers across 160 countries, their study revealed “the most profound, distinct,   and clarifying finding” in Gallup’s 80-year history of studying the workplace: Managers who develop engaged employees   did not merely influence the results of their
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A Call to Action to Courts: Responding to the Coronavirus Pandemic and Racism

How should courts and partner justice institutions respond to the existential crises facing our society today? Peter F. Drucker, the dean of this country’s management philosophers, would give us this advice:  The important thing is to identify  the future that has already happened. Every hundred years or so, we experience a sharp transformation. We come to an inflection point and must cross a divide, writes Peter Drucker in  The New Realities , originally published in 1989.  “Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself – its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structure, its arts, its key institutions. Fifty years later, there is a new world. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born.” We are today at such a transformation: at the  confluence of existential crises that reinforce each other  – the coronavirus pandemic, economic collapse, structural racism, social u
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