When your boss directs you to do something you consider inconsistent with department goals, or certain to backfire, or even perilously close to illegal, what do you do?

Everyone faces that question now and again, and it’s never easy. But when you are a government employee, and your choice may harm the very public you’re sworn to serve, and the boss is a highly visible appointee or elected official, it’s tougher still.

In The Ethics of Dissent: Managing Guerrilla Government, published in December by CQ Press, Rosemary O’Leary delves into cases where rank-and-file bureaucrats subvert the will of their superiors, usually out of a sense of higher allegiance. O’Leary, a Distinguished Professor of Public Administration and co-director of the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts, has collected dozens of anecdotes (many of them from Maxwell alumni) and added her own thorough analysis of the best possible role for such well-meaning flies in the ointment.

The book provides guidance to potential renegades and to their superiors—especially the latter, who are advised to improve the flow of ideas and opinions within their organizations. O’Leary’s attitude is that, by and large, dissent is healthy if aptly managed.

The book has been well-received. In a laudatory review in the P.A. Times, H. George Frederickson wrote, “O’Leary’s advice is at once simple and profound. . . . I agree with Donald F. Kettl’s observation in the book’s foreword that The Ethics of Dissent: Managing Guerrilla Government ‘stands as one of the most insightful works on the real world of bureaucracy ever written.’”

In a postscript of sorts appearing in the book, O’Leary offers one more anecdote: her own. As a member of NASA’s Return to Flight Task Group, she found herself in a tussle over the committee’s final report—its recommendations for putting the Space Shuttle back in operation. Here is an excerpt from O’Leary’s own “guerrilla government” story:

The weekend before this book was mailed to the publisher, I spent a Sunday at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., working with a group that was finalizing the report of the Return to Flight Task Group (RTF TG). We spent the morning perfecting the Executive Summary and then broke for lunch. At lunch I sat across from Dan Crippen, former director of the Congressional Budget Office. “I’m working on a book on managing dissent in public organizations. How did you manage dissent while director of the CBO?” I asked Crippen. “You’ll see this afternoon,” Crippen said with a strange look on his face.

That afternoon I found myself in a meeting with Crippen and six NASA staff members. Half the staff were career civil servants. The other half were contract employees. Crippen asked the executive secretary of the RTF TG to leave the room. The executive secretary left and never came back that day. The professional editor of our report explained that the two former astronauts who chaired the RTF TG were insisting that only positive insights, analyses and observations about NASA be included in the Task Group’s final report. It wasn’t a question of telling mistruths, but a question of not telling the whole story. A group of task group members and NASA staff, led by Crippen, felt a need to tell the whole story “because it is the right thing to do.” Crippen and others repeatedly asked the Task Group chairs to include dissenting opinions. They were repeatedly rebuffed. The plan was to write a dissenting report, publish it, and launch it on the NASA website. Was I with them or against them?

What ensued was a two hour meeting plotting how to publish a supplemental dissenting report. I went around the room and asked pointed questions:

O’Leary: How can you get such a report published without the co-chairs’ signature?

Editor: I don’t need their signature. The NASA printer will publish anything I bring them and we still have money in the budget.

O’Leary: Why do you want to do this?

Editor: Because it is the right thing to do. The American public deserves to know the whole truth. When I was an editor of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board report, Admiral Gehman, the chair, allowed any and all dissent to be voiced and printed. He asked for people to challenge him. He probed for the hard questions. I learned from him the right way to manage dissent.

O’Leary: You could get in trouble.

Editor: This is the right thing to do. I don’t care if I get in trouble. What can they do to me once it’s printed: yell at me? Besides, I’m a contract employee and I won’t be around for long.

O’Leary: What about the other five staff members?

At this point in time Crippen joined the conversation.

Crippen: We’ll protect the “gold badges,” the civil servants. The contract employees are moving on to other assignments in 10 days. I’ll even go to bat for the gold badges internally if needed. This is the right thing to do. The public deserves the truth. I have repeatedly voiced my objections publicly and privately to our co-chairs. I have met with the new NASA administrator and several other top NASA officials telling them that this is coming. Each has responded that they’d rather have the truth come out than suppress dissent. We don’t want another Columbia or Challenger disaster.

O’Leary to the other staff: Why are you doing this?

The staff then took turns telling stories about the need to bring to light problems with NASA’s management and NASA’s seeming inability to learn from past mistakes. “NASA is in denial,” one staff member said. “The agency needs to be confronted with the truth.”

In stumbled the chief public relations officer, who was briefed on the purpose of our meeting. He obviously was surprised, then ended up coaching the group on the challenges of such an approach, how to avoid the appearance of “sour grapes,” and different avenues we could pursue. “This is an art, not a science,” he said. “Are you sure you’ve exhausted all other appropriate channels? Try again to have these viewpoints allowed in the final report, then if rejected follow through with your plan. But I know nothing about this meeting. Be sure to get the dissent on the record at the public meeting tomorrow so it doesn’t look like sour grapes after the fact. Did I mention that I know nothing about this meeting?”

He refused to launch the dissenting report on the website without appropriate permission, but this did not deter the group. He emphasized that while he could not help us formally, he would help us informally. He closed by saying that if anyone asked, he knew nothing about our meeting.

The group then outlined what would go into the dissenting report, divided up responsibilities, and exchanged personal e-mail addresses. No e-mails were to be sent on or to NASA email accounts. I looked at Crippen. “This is what my book is about,” I said. “I know,” he responded with a grin. “Remember what I said to you at lunch today?”

O’Leary’s book summarizes a number of “guerrilla government” lessons drawn from the RTF TG experience, and then returns to the story:
 

As it turned out, when the NASA RTF TG had its last meeting the day after the secret meeting with Crippen and the staff, several outraged members publicly voiced loud opposition to the idea of a “sanitized,” “whitewashed” report. The dissenting views spilled over into the public meeting and the two co-chairs were forced to change their insistence on a positive report. Yet since only part of the dissenters’ concerns were allowed in the final report, Crippen and the rest of us were still secretly debating whether we would write and publish a smaller dissenting report on the items that remained. Whether it was published or not is for me to know and for you to find out.

This excerpt is reprinted by permission from The Ethics of Dissent: Managing Guerrilla Government, © 2006 by CQ Press, a division of Congressional Quarterly Inc.

This article appeared in the Spring 2006 print edition of Maxwell Perspective; © 2006 Maxwell School of Syracuse University. To request a copy, e-mail dlcooke@maxwell.syr.edu.