[Mr. Fix-it struggling with culture change[ (https://commonwealthmagazine.org/opinion/mr-fix-it-struggling-with-culture-change/)

IT’S THE CULTURE of state government versus the Baker administration and the winner, by a knockout in the fifth round, is state government culture.

Think of the MBTA and the Registry of Motor Vehicles with their deeply rooted cultures of self-protection and risk avoidance.

Gov. Charlie Baker has staked a good measure of his credibility on fixing those two agencies which, unlike most state agencies, interact with a broad swath of the population in visible and critical ways.

Five years into his governorship, it is abundantly clear that the administration has seriously underestimated the task of implementing needed changes without simultaneously changing the culture of these agencies. Culture is hard to define but anyone who has worked in an organization of any size knows that culture drives the behavior of that organization and that changing that culture requires an enormous effort. At both the T and the Registry, Baker has made laudable efforts to fix longstanding problems, but those efforts, in largely ignoring the underlying cultures of those organizations, have compromised a broader public vision.

It’s not just that the shortcomings of these agencies are on public display (at the T on an almost daily basis), but in both cases recent independent reports have highlighted how the administration’s focus on certain priorities at each agency has had serious unintended consequences including, most alarmingly, for public safety.