The bureaucracy that controls everything except results

Shockingly, fourteen newborn babies died in a fire at PIMS Islamabad on August 26. They had entered perhaps the most protected space society can offer a human being: a hospital nursery. Yet the place meant to preserve their fragile lives became a deathtrap. There will now be an inquiry. Reports will be written. Someone may be suspended and perhaps dismissed. Committees will recommend improvements. Files will move from one office to another. Pakistan has seen this ritual before.

The deeper question is not merely what caused the fire. It is how a bureaucratic system capable of regulating almost everything can repeatedly fail at the one thing that ultimately matters: delivering results. Our public sector is obsessed with control. There are rules for procurement, maintenance, attendance, expenditure, recruitment and approval. Yet when a hospital must ensure that its fire systems work, emergency exits are usable, electrical equipment is safe and vulnerable patients can be evacuated, the impressive machinery of administrative control can suddenly prove astonishingly ineffective.

That is Pakistan's bureaucratic paradox: we control processes more rigorously than we manage outcomes. The PIMS tragedy should therefore force us to ask what good management actually means. It begins with accountability, but accountability is not the same as finding someone to punish after a deadly tragedy has struck. Real accountability exists before a disaster. Someone owns the risk. Someone checks whether safety systems work. Someone has the authority to correct a problem - and knows there will be consequences for ignoring it.

Instead, our institutions often centralise authority while dispersing responsibility. Everyone has the power to stop something; remarkably few have the responsibility to make sure it works. Good managers do the opposite. They delegate responsibility, trust professionals to perform their jobs and establish clear mechanisms for monitoring outcomes. Trust should reduce unnecessary control, not eliminate accountability. Public management must also become more evidence-driven.

In too many institutions, appointments, postings, contracts, promotions and opportunities are vulnerable to personal connections, political influence, favouritism and bureaucratic convenience. When merit becomes negotiable, institutional competence slowly disappears. A hospital may possess impressive buildings and sophisticated equipment, but systems are only as reliable as the people responsible for operating, maintaining and supervising them.

Public organisations must constantly scan their environment, identify emerging risks and adapt. Electrical systems age. Buildings deteriorate. Technologies change. New equipment creates new hazards.

Pakistan desperately needs a culture in which officers ask not merely, "Have we followed the rules?" but, "Does the system actually work?" That distinction is profound. A system is more than the sum of its parts; the parts must work together in harmony to produce an effect!

A fire-safety certificate may exist on paper. The relevant question is whether the alarm works at 6:45 in the morning. An emergency plan may sit inside a file. The relevant question is whether staff know what to do when smoke fills a nursery. Maintenance expenditures may have been approved. The relevant question is whether dangerous equipment was actually maintained. Pakistan has perfected the inquiry committee but not institutional learning. After every tragedy, recommendations are produced; after public attention fades, institutional memory often fades with it. An organisation that does not learn condemns itself to repeat its failures.

Good management therefore rests on five disciplines: balancing institutional and employee interests; combining trust with accountability; continuously adapting to changing risks; making decisions on merit and evidence; and learning seriously from both failure and success. None sounds revolutionary. That is precisely what makes Pakistan's repeated failures so disturbing. The babies who died at PIMS do not need another policy document. They need systems that work. If this tragedy teaches us anything, it should be that public administration cannot be judged by the number of rules it writes, but by what it delivers!