Fixing local gov't sclerosis
Woman Helping a Sick Person to Drink, Between 1824 and 1828, Francisco Goya, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
James Plunkett notes that the problem with gov't runs deep; it’s not enough to try harder, or to run things better, because at least part of the problem relates to the logic by which bureaucracy functions. He provides useful systemic steps to break the bonds of bureaucracy.
I’m struck by how common it is these days to hear people working in government say some version of ‘bureaucracy is broken’, ranging from senior civil servants to political appointees.
These are thoughtful people, so their point isn’t that everything in government is broken.
If that’s right, what do we do about it?
A principle I find helpful is the idea from systems theory that when a system fails we need to work at the level of the problem.
The point is that we rarely go deep enough. We use almost all of our collective capacity trying to run the system better, or at best trying to ‘reform’ the system, by which we tend to mean moving its parts around via changes to the ‘machinery of government’. Meanwhile the deeper mentalities, dynamics, and incentives that determine how the system functions go on largely as before.
In this post I thought I’d name some practical examples of what it looks like to work on the system, as opposed to in it.
Four ways to save bureaucracy from itself
1. Create legitimating environments for reformers
There are already thousands of people trying to modernise our governing institutions from within, but they get squashed by the system around them. We can therefore help the system adapt by carving out space for reformers. We can create escalation routes to help people bypass old-fashioned managers.
2. Help change spread via professions
History tells us that public institutions often adapt when a new profession emerges and spreads, so another good way to help a system adapt is to support new methods and disciplines.
In a recent post I named a host of more nascent disciplines — from participatory governance to techniques for fostering community agency to deliberative methods — that are at an earlier stage of this process. We could help public institutions adapt by backing these new disciplines, for example by creating Centres of Excellence; and by codifying them into professions, as we did with digital roles; and by supporting new disciplines with Research Council funding.
3. Modernise some important outmoded processes
One reason bureaucracies get stuck is that old-fashioned proccesses at the top of the system inhibit change across the whole system, keeping people locked into outmoded ways of doing things.
The two blockers that come up most often when I talk with people trying to modernise government are processes relating to (a) budgets/business cases and (b) accountability.
The business case process also inhibits innovation because it insists on narrow evidential criteria. In essence, the bureaucracy says it will only fund work in its own sclerotic image. This is a good example of a control mechanism backfiring, because it stops the system from discovering and spreading new ways of doing things.
As well as urgency, politicians feel a particular pressure to announce solutions. This again encourages old-fashioned leadership in which answers come the top, far away from the problem, and are sent to the edges to deliver. The alternative is to empower people to work close to the problem, innovating and testing ideas in quick feedback loops.
4. Kill old institutions and grow new ones
The public sector is brittle partly because it’s bad at killing old institutions and scaling new ones. There’s no equivalent to the cycle of creative destruction that happens in the private sector, which acts as a source of renewal and drives the diffusion of new practices.
Some people conclude that we need more competition in the public sector, but this only works under certain narrow conditions. The more general insight is that we need a more dynamic cycle of birth and death, and there are many ways to achieve this.
One way to do this is with regular pruning, like cutting back deadwood when gardening. We can periodically shut down old, underperforming institutions in what is sometimes called a bonfire of the quangos.
We should have standing mechanisms to assist the death of old institutions, and to seed and scale new ones, and we should put a lot of effort into this process. We should hone the craft of starting a new version of an old institution, systematically transferring over the functions of the old institution, and then shutting down the old institution.
Read the whole thing here.
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