Some talk about what politics and government can learn from business. In business, they’re always looking at “best practices”. Politics in particular, is mired in tradition and seniority. Best practices are missing in politics.

In a sense, this isn’t true. Political campaigns are constantly trading people and brainstorming about how to work better. But in the halls of Congress, mired in gridlock, squabbling, party struggles for power, and poor performance, there’s no reaching out for better practices.

I’ve worked at a lot of companies, some fairly large. Some companies regularly reorganize. The two usual organizations are by product, and by function. So a company will organize by product for a few years, where each product group will contain all its own marketing, engineering, testing, sales and documentation. Then it’ll reorganize by function. All the marketing people will be together and divide into subgroups to work on the various products. Similarly for the other groups.

What this does is shake up the system, and get people to interact with new people, a new hierarchy, a new power structure.

The reason for this is that people tend to develop strong relationships and start using those relationships for everything. They get into ruts. Office politics and power structures evolve. They start dealing with their knowledge about the power structure instead of being focused on their commitment to service and results. It brings a freshness to the organization so it can grow and find new ways of working even as it temporarily disturbs productivity.

Congress never does this. It’s shaken up a little when the dominant party changes, but both parties organize themselves by seniority.

PeopleCount.org will change this, too. We’ll have a fresh orientation. Lots of things will change and lots of problems that exist today, hidden in the bowels of tradition, will bubble to the surface. And we’ll be able to bring fresh solutions to them. Some of the benefits of the old system will be lost, but with the focus on serving the people, new benefits will emerge more aligned with the results we want.