Dr. Urban Liebel

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EU Systems Fail: Applying Drucker’s Effectiveness Principle to Fix Institutions (Germany as the…

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EU Systems Fail: Applying Drucker’s Effectiveness Principle to Fix Institutions (Germany as the…

Explore how applying Peter Drucker’s effectiveness principle can transform EU institutions by fostering a culture of organized abandonment, ultimately enhancing efficiency and accountability amidst bureaucratic complexity.

Key takeaways

  • Article applies Peter Drucker's effectiveness principle to institutional reform in Germany and the EU.
  • It advocates organized abandonment to remove outdated functions within complex bureaucratic systems.
  • Proposed outcome is greater efficiency and accountability across European public institutions.

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Peter Drucker’s line **“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all”**explains a lot of what citizens experience as “EU bureaucracy.” The cure is not another reform slogan; it’s a repeatable discipline: measure outcomes, then abandon work that doesn’t produce them.

Drucker’s effectiveness test

Public institutions rarely collapse from incompetence; they drift into “non-results” because yesterday’s mandates, controls, and reporting survive by default. Drucker’s practical move is organized abandonment: a routine, leadership-owned process for stopping activities whose purpose no longer matches today’s reality.

Try this weekly question as an institutional forcing function:

If we weren’t already doing this, would we start it now — at the current cost, with the current staff, under today’s conditions?​

EU institutions: where effectiveness breaks

The European Court of Auditors’ 2023 “EU audit in brief” is a concrete, system-level signal that the EU is doing a lot of work while still struggling to control complexity. The ECA estimated the level of error in EU budget spending at 5.6% for 2023 (up from 4.2% in 2022) and issued an adverse opinion on EU budget expenditure. It also reported significant errors in “Cohesion, resilience and values,” reaching 9.3% in 2023 (6.4% in 2022; 3.6% in 2021).​

These aren’t abstract accounting quibbles; the ECA points to recurring categories like ineligible projects/costs and public procurement issues as the most common error types. It also describes a structural pressure pattern: error spikes often occur during Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) closure periods, when “pressure to spend intensifies,” straining administrative resources. That pressure is further compounded when national administrations simultaneously absorb multiple, competing EU funds (including the RRF).

The Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) is an especially useful Drucker case because it aims to be performance-like (milestones and targets), yet still risks drifting into “implementation theatre.” The ECA issued a qualified opinion on RRF expenditure and notes it identified weaknesses such as “weak design of milestones and targets” and weaknesses in member states’ reporting and control systems. Crucially, the ECA notes that RRF payments are not based on actual costs, final recipients’ actual expenditure is not reported, and compliance with EU and national rules is not a condition for payment under the RRF.

When a system can’t reliably answer “what did this cost?” it becomes hard to answer Drucker’s core question: “what results did we buy?”

In that environment, institutions predictably fall back on what they can measure — process steps, reporting completeness, and formal compliance — because outcomes are harder to pin down across 27 member states and multiple layers of implementation.

The European Commission knows this problem and has built an explicit machinery around “Better Regulation.” On paper, the Commission commits to reducing existing administrative burdens by at least 25% (and 35% for SMEs) and to using a “one in, one out” approach to offset newly introduced burdens in the same policy area. It also describes a governance toolchain — evaluations, fitness checks, and impact assessments — designed to ensure EU actions remain effective and “fit for purpose.”​

But Better Regulation can itself become a Drucker trap if the system measures participation and throughput more than real-world simplification.

For example, the Commission highlights activity/engagement statistics for its “Have your say” portal (e.g., 7,000,000 visits and 400,000 feedback items), which are useful signals of openness but do not, by themselves, prove that rules got simpler or outcomes improved. Drucker’s warning applies here too: you can run consultation and impact-assessment processes extremely efficiently while still failing to remove the low-value work that burdens citizens, SMEs, and administrations.

Germany: a close-up of EU-style complexity

Germany is a high-capacity state with strong institutions, which makes it a revealing case when delivery falls short:

The failure is rarely lack of intelligence — it’s system design.

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Germany’s Federal Court of Auditors (Bundesrechnungshof) states that under the Online Access Act (OZG), federal and state governments were supposed to offer administrative services online by end-2022, but “clearly missed this target.” The audit states that only 19% of digitizable services were available online, and only 4% were available in accordance with OZG specifications.

The audit also connects the missed target to classic multi-owner dysfunction: the Interior Ministry took nearly half of the statutory period just to identify the services to be digitized and the technical requirements came too late. Germany provided €3.5 billion for OZG implementation, yet the audit notes that half of this amount was not used by end-2022.

It further warns that the IT landscape faced “double and multiple developments” because central solutions were not provided in time.

At the municipal level, Berlin offers a vivid “non-results” snapshot that readers immediately understand. An internal Berlin government report found that 189 of 731 state services could still only be applied for via fax in 2023. The same reporting says Berlin administrative offices were still using 5,333 fax machines to process applications in 2023.

In Drucker terms, this is what happens when institutions keep legacy channels alive as default infrastructure rather than managing them as temporary exceptions. And once old pathways persist, they generate their own shadow workload: duplicate data entry, manual verification, and endless “status clarification” traffic between offices.

An effectiveness-first reform agenda (what to stop doing)

If EU institutions want to get serious about effectiveness, they need a governance habit that is as strong as the habit of rule-making: a formal, recurring abandonment cycle. Here is a playbook that maps directly onto the EU’s observed failure patterns:

  • Replace “progress dashboards” with outcome dashboards: when funding claims are complex and error-prone, tracking outcomes forces simplification pressure upstream (fewer schemes, clearer eligibility, fewer edge cases).
  • Make “cost visibility” non-negotiable for performance-like instruments: if a programme isn’t cost-based, publish a credible cost proxy (unit costs, reference costs, or statistically valid samples) so “value for money” can be assessed.
  • Turn burden reduction into a delete-list: treat the Commission’s 25%/35% burden targets as an operational backlog where each DG must remove a defined set of reporting or documentation requirements each quarter.
  • Prevent duplicate builds by default: Germany’s OZG experience shows that without timely central IT solutions, parallel development becomes inevitable and expensive.
  • Define “legacy channels” as exceptions with an expiry date: Berlin’s fax-only services are a reminder that “fallback” pathways tend to become permanent unless they are explicitly sunsetted.

Drucker’s point isn’t that controls are bad; it’s that controls without abandonment produce systems that are brilliantly managed — and poorly effective. The EU (and Germany within it) doesn’t need less ambition; it needs the institutional courage to stop doing what no longer works, so capacity can move to what does.

References