My friend and colleague, Alex Aikman, published a book last year entitled the Art and Practice of Court Administration in which he draws correlations between court organizations (more accurately, court organizational readiness) to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow opined that humans strive to achieve higher purposes in life in direct relation to how their other basic needs are met.

Those of us who serve as consultants in court (including court administrative office staff acting as operational review auditors) perform a similar assessment when we work with individual courts … high performing courts are given lofty recommendations, while lower performing courts are given recommendations that best suit their ability to actually implement the suggestions.

I am fortunate to serve as senior faculty for the Institute for Court Management, and perform a fair amount of teaching on my own with judges and court managers on a variety of topics, including caseflow management. In these courses, I often get the participants engaged in developing project plans to implement various calendar changes in their courts. While the curriculum often includes tips on managing change, it is refreshing to see added attention to the issue of organizational readiness and culture.

In several of my projects, I have been doubly fortunate to engage the participants in an exercise to review several prospective projects and perform an assessment of two variables … how beneficial this change would be to the court and how difficult it would be to actually implement the change. The resulting rank is a risk/benefit analysis, and participants are then advised to develop implementation plans on those projects that have the highest potential for benefit and the lowest risk.

While some may label this quick wins, or even picking low hanging fruit, I think it is closer to the Clint Eastwood admonition as Dirty Harry in Magnum Force, that a man’s got to know his limitations.

Photo credit = Wikipedia

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 8th, 2008 at 4:18 pm and is filed under Caseflow, Court Management, Court Performance.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.