The Jenga approach carries public services to the edge of collapse

The first instinct of many local authorities to cuts has been to adopt the Jenga Principle to reduce costs.   The problem is this is not a sustainable solution.

Many people will be familiar with the game of Jenga ®.   Fifty or so wooden blocks are stacked into a tower and the idea is to withdraw the blocks one at a time without the tower falling over. It sounds simple, but it is surprisingly compelling.   The game works because wooden blocks, even if they are engineered to be the same size, are all slightly different, so when they are built into a tower there are always some that are loose, and others that bear the weight of the tower.   

The critical thing is that as the game progresses the centre of gravity of the tower changes, so a block that was loose a couple of turns ago, and was consequently withdrawn, might later turn out to have been crucial to maintaining the integrity of the tower as it’s weight shifts and ….whoops! Game over.  

And in case the boys and girls at Jenga get cross with me for using their registered trademark to make a point, let me just say that the game is enormous fun for players of all ages.

There is a useful analogy here for the way organisations behave when cutting costs.   The temptation is to go for the easy targets- the loose bricks.   In our latest round of public sector cuts, deleting the posts of senior and middle managers has been a common recourse, as has doing away with temporary workers and cutting back office functions in general.     Voluntary redundancy is another Jenga Principle stalwart, especially in the public sector where we tend to pride ourselves on workforce-friendly employment practices and don't like telling people they are not needed. 

There is nothing wrong with this approach up to a point, but there are clearly limits to the extent to which it can work.  In the real world situation, just as in Jenga, it isn’t possible to say with certainty when the tower is going to collapse for want of a crucial piece. At times, an external influence can precipitate a collapse; say, when someone puts their drink down heavily on the table. 

As time goes by, however, it does become increasingly evident that the organisation/ tower is not as resilient as it once was.   As the game progresses, players become more risk averse, taking much longer over their moves,  prodding the tower gently to see what happens, desperately looking for the next ‘easy win’.  These tactics are fine in Jenga but it is exactly the wrong thing to be doing inside an organisation, because in times of change risk management is called for not risk aversion, innovation not more of the same.

Authorities that have done the Jenga Principle to death need to identify the risk and move on.   The mistake, of course, in carrying the Jenga approach too far is to assume that the organisation needs to stay the same shape but with fewer blocks in it.  The alternative approach is to rebuild the tower using fewer bricks.    In practice this means rethinking the way we delivering services and redesigning  service delivery and customer interfaces around more efficient models.  This can either be done as you go along or in one go, although the scope and complexity of local authority services I think tends to favour the incremental approach.   

This might be called the ‘Tower of Hanoi’ principle after the puzzle that requires the player to move the tower from one point to another in the fewest possible moves without putting a larger block on top of a smaller one.

One thing is certain. Whether organisations adopt the Jenga approach or the Tower of Hanoi principle, the next phase will be harder and more towers will be in danger of collapse.  It will take all the skill of public sector managers to prevent that happening.