I recently visited “Home Affairs” in our mother city where they deal with passport and citizenship issues.
There was no directory or query desk so I found the right queue by waiting in the wrong queue to ask someone.
As I waited, I read the poster on the wall:  Our Vision and Mission.

The Mission:  To determine and confirm status of persons by providing enabling documents in the interest of promoting and protecting the national integrity

OK, I could understand that, after deciphering the workshop-gobbledygook.  I wondered if standing in line to recieve a form (that could have been in a tray in the waiting room) which required information that should have been available from a computer system qualified as “providing enabling documents”.

The Vision:  Rendering a world class service 

  • My first thought was “hey that is really generic!”
  • After which I thought, “why are they telling us this, especially with such gusto?”  The posters were everywhere.
  • My next thought was “where is the outworking of this vision?”.

One of the clerks left for tea at 10:00 and did not return for two hours.  The remaining clerk worked through our queue in the distracted, officious manner we have come to expect from this environment.  When I put my case to her she gave no indication that she had heard but scribbled on my form and made changes which she refused to explain or justify.  I wondered about the process that produced these statements and whether the disinterested clerk was driven by a desire to “render a world-class service”.  I wondered if “world class service” meant keeping as many people as possible from access to the enabling documents, in the interest of promoting and protecting the national integrity.

  • How does this happen?
  • How do teams get lumped with mission and vision statements that are so far from reality?
  • Was this the product of someone sitting alone in an office or (worse still) was this the product of a facilitated workshop?

Perhaps you have been in those workshops where the facilitator gets the team to word-smith a visionary phrase without consideration for reality and a healthy stretch. As I waited in line, hoping our last assistant would not disappear for lunch, I made a mental note about how careful I have to be, as a facilitator in the process of defining mission and vision statements.

I think it would have been way more meaningful to put a poster up that said “Have I rendered a world class service to you?”
This could follow with criteria from a scorecard:

  • Did you receive courteous treatment?
  • Do you know exactly where you stand and what to do?
  • Was it easy to find the right person to assist you?
  • If the person who helped was a typical South African would you want to live here?
  • How can we improve our service?

I like the work of Lewis Carbone.  Imagine if the Department were to ask questions to establish how we as “customers” experienced the service.

In fact if they were really serious they could have an SMS reply form.

A postscript to this note:

A few nights ago there was a news item on local TV that the Auditor General has posted a general disclaimer against the Department of Home-Affairs.
Staff were all required to write a competency test and 80% were found incompetent to carry out their tasks.

This in spite of a turnaround team being paid R900 million over three years to sort the place out.
R900 000 000 – is a LOT of money. It would be interesting to know if this is the source of the posters.