Early in my Forest Service career, Herbert Kaufman's The Forest Ranger (1960) found a place alongside Jeanne Nienaber Clarke and Daniel McCool's Staking Out the Terrain (1985) in many Forest Service offices. Both books were a source of pride for the agency. Clarke and McCool referred to the Forest Service and the Army Corps of Engineers as "bureaucratic superstars". Kaufman's praise was sufficient to blunt inquiry into the deeper criticisms of the agency that were embedded in the book. The Forest Service, not much of book-learning bunch in any case, basked in the praise.
But as Kaufman predicted, and Doug MacCleery echoed in Reinventing the United States Forest Service (2006), the praise was to be short-lived. By 1980 the once-proud agency found its reputation in tatters. It has to date not recovered, and may not unless somehow the agency finds a niche that society is willing to defend and also reinvents FS management/leadership to work in the 21st century. MacCleery concludes:
[Note: Maybe, instead of just finding means to "share the land", "we the people" are just as well off in fighting for over our public lands, our res publica (public thing). Maybe during our various fights we can periodically rediscover who we are and why, as Dick Behan and Dan Kemmis are fond of pointing out. Pehaps that is the true worth of the an era that I have called the era of sustained conflict. Incidentally, I believe that we are right now transitioning, painfully, from an era of "sustained conflict" to one of "collaborative stewardship".]"It still remains to be seen whether Chief McGuire's 'grand experiment' wherein diverse interests consent to 'share the land' is a viable approach for multipurpose public land in an era of representative democracy characterized by diverse and fiercely competing special interest groups."
Here is MacCleery's version of the decline and fall of the Forest Service:
After its first 50 years, the Forest Service generally was looked upon as a stunning success — an agency known for high morale, a strong sense of purpose and administrative excellence. A [June 2] 1952 Newsweek magazine article stated, amongst other factors, that due to its sterling reputation, "The Forest Service is one Washington agency that doesn't have to worry about next fall’s election. Nor will the next administration have to worry about the Forest Service. In 47 years, the foresters have been untouched by scandal”. Because of this, "Most Congressmen would as soon abuse their own mothers as be unkind to the Forest Service"
A 1960 book on public administration, The forest ranger, documented the Forest Service as a case study example of an efficient and effective public institution (Kaufman 1960). Kaufman attributed the Forest Service's success to a sense of shared purpose, values and a common culture. Ironically, however, two decades later, the reputation of the Forest Service would be in tatters.
Kaufman's predictions of a rough patch for Forest Service organizational management are not well known in the Forest Service. MacCleery gets it, however: "the same characteristics that had made the agency effective when demands on it were relatively modest and rural-based, made it rigid and difficult for it to change when those demands became more intense, diverse and complex (Kaufman 1994)."
Here is the essence of Kaufman's 1994 "The Paradox of Excellence":Every organization must therefore have to overcome its members' tendencies to go off in directions of their own. As I studied the district rangers, I realized that they were subject to a host of pressures to do so, some common to all organizations, some unique to the Forest Service. All together, these pressures constituted quite a formidable array of centrifugal forces.
To override them, the Forest Service instituted a set of procedures that predetermined what their field officers were to do in almost every foreseeable situation, that tracked their behavior to make sure they remained within the guidelines, and that corrected and discouraged departures from the prescribed norms. There are limits, however, to what can be accomplished by external controls on people. You can't specify and police everything; without further measures, the centrifugal forces will begin to chip away at any organization's unity.
Hence, in its earliest days, the Forest Service introduced another set of techniques to elicit compliance. It instituted a set of measures that instilled in its members the will to conform. That is, it not only got its officers to do what the agency leaders directed, but got them to want to do what the leaders wanted. In this fashion, the leaders could be confident that their wishes would be carried out by field officers without close, continuous supervision and with minimal feelings of compulsion. Compliance in the field was not merely imposed on subordinates; appropriate behavior was, in a manner of speaking, implanted in them, so that when they, in their professional capacity, exercised their independent wills, they freely chose courses of action that conformed to the agency's policies. They were of course aware of alternatives; to state the case in extreme terms for emphasis, they simply could not conceive of following them.
The result of all these practices was remarkable success producing conforming behavior on the part of the agency's staff. (Admittedly, the evidence of this success was circumstantial, but it was convincing.) In this regard, the Forest Service was indeed a model organization, and its reputation for superior performance in molding its personnel into a cohesive and loyal body was well-deserved.
The Down Side of Cohesion
It came at a price. The system functioned as well as it did because internal and external influences on behavior worked in tandem. Ingraining the will to conform and a common set of outlooks in members not only engendered voluntary compliance; it also intensified the effectiveness of external controls by broadening receptivity to them. External controls, in turn, reinforced the internalized ones by making obedience, even when not entirely voluntary, habitual. But while both sets of influences were crucial, the internalized ones carried greater eventual risks. While welding the organization into an effective, unified entity, these influences tended to lock members--especially leaders who had come up through the system--into a prescribed set of ideas and behaviors formed in a particular context, and thus were likely to impede formation of new patterns for which changes in the context might one day call. [Later on (Kaufman, 1971), in an exercise of poetic license, I would refer to this mechanism as the imposition of "mental blinders."] In other words, the better the organization got at using techniques of mental manipulation to improve its performance, the more uncertain its future became. This ingredient of managerial success seemed to contain the seeds of its own ultimate undoing.
I expected the Forest Service to be outraged by this characterization of its managerial style; who in America wants to be portrayed as engaged in a type of brainwashing, no matter how administratively effective such a strategy proves to be? I also anticipated that the public administration community, and social scientists in general, would seize on this finding as the major conclusion of the study. I was wrong on both counts. The Forest Service, students of public administration, and the social scientists who paid attention to my book, focused on the acknowledged cohesion, high morale, and outstanding performance of the agency, and on the contribution of its methods to those attainments. For a long time, hardly anybody took note of the long-range implications I considered disturbing.
Lingering question: Is is just by oversight that Kaufman's "Paradox" isn't part of FS collective memory and definitely not part of the official record? Or maybe I'm mistaken and it is a part of the offical record. If so, find me a better hyperlink.
[Note: The hyperlink to Kaufman's Paradox of Excellence in MacCleery's paper does not work, except as given new life here. When I discovered that Kaufman's paper had vanished from the FS electronic records some years ago, I got a copy of the paper and loaded it into my personal archives. I feared that it would eventually be lost forever. Someday I expect someone will put it back into public archives. Or maybe not.]
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