The Difficulty of Reorganizations

Sen. Richard Lugar's concerns about how a potential reorganization of the State Department would impact its arms control offices, which he says are functioning well in their current arrangement, highlights one of the key problems of shaking up a big agency or department. And that is that no matter how poorly an organization is functioning overall, there's probably an office or division somewhere that is doing quite well, perhaps in ways that are directly related to its present situation within the larger organization. The challenge is to figure out how to preserve that functionality and the benefits that office is accruing from its positioning while everything else changes around it. And to figure out if the larger goals of the reorganization outweigh some temporary discomfort or readjustment for folks who are comfortable, happy, and functional already.

When the Office of Personnel Management announced its reorganization early this year, one of the key goals was for the agency's organizational chart to be easily comprehensible to outside observers. I haven't heard any complaints about the reorganization, but if there were, it would be interesting to weigh that pain against the value of comprehensibility, which after all, is also about convincing outsiders of the agency's usefulness and functionality.