Rational Planning or Muddling Through

by Kent Aitken

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Last week's post was about how organizational language, culture, and processes encourage the oversimplification of both problems and solutions (see: Boundaryless Problems and the End of the Elevator Pitch). It makes it easy to ignore the context of problems, and hard to appreciate the indirect or long-term benefits of any action.

(I've written in the past about how this hampers innovation and restricts collaboration, and proposed strategies to overcome it. Further back, I wrote a deeper dive about its adverse effects. I'll stop hammering on this theme soon.)

But after writing the post, I kept wondering if the idea was remotely useful to on-the-ground public servants. So, we tend to oversimplify things. Is that a necessary shortcut? Especially given the competing demands on our time? Or a lens that can help improve our planning? I'm not sure.

There are a few possible scenarios for this "ecosystem of problems and solutions" lens:

1. It's false
2. It's true, but useless
3. It's true, but only useful in some situations
4. It's true, but requires a particular response to be useful

No plan survives contact with the enemy

I want to dig into 2 and 4, starting with 2. It's true, but useless. Yes, there's an ideal state, in which we tackle a given problem exactly the way we should. But day-to-day, there are multiple problems, approaches, and solutions competing for our time and attention (see: Idealism and Pragmatism for Organizations). Maybe an 80% effort is less than ideal for a given problem, but best for the portfolio of problems we're facing.

Paul Wells led us to an interesting possibility for 4. It's true, but requires a particular response to be useful in his book The Longer I'm Prime Minister. He pointed to Charles Lindblom's The Science of Muddling Through, the long story short of which is that yes, public policy is impossibly complex (zero hyperbole), so the only way of understanding one's own preferences is actually to choose a direction and run with it. It's ten pages long, and I highly, highly recommend reading it - first for the above, and second to note that the verbiage of "complex public policy problems" is not a new phenomenon based on modern global finance, terrorism, or digital interconnectedness. It fits as easily in this 1959 paper.

Lindblom's take would be that there's much merit in experiential knowledge and large-scale experiments in the form of jurisdiction-wide policy changes. Skip the theories, frameworks, and mutually-agreed upon goals. If you think big enough, everything can be an experiment (e.g., the 10-year tax breaks in the US).

Oversight and Results

However, I think that Lindblom's solution is insufficient. One, governments have a certain responsibility towards fairness, even at the cost of efficiency. The human impacts of experiments cannot be ignored. For instance, in both the UK and Greece, social scientists have linked austerity policies with increased suicide rates (see: this post on the importance of good public policy). And in the age of transparency, governments cannot just make backroom trades of fairness for effectiveness (see: The Social Contract). 

Two, Lindblom suggests oversight in the form of multiple actors with competing interests: watchdog groups, lobbyists, and other responsibility centres within government. However, as Yves Morieux has pointed out, when someone has multiple people lobbying them, the marginal cost of ignoring any particular one of them is pretty low. Worse, none of those lobbying are paid to lobby for good systems overall; they're paid to adamantly recommend the solution that maximizes the variable they represent.

So where does this leave us? If I'm to be believed, both rational planning and experimentation and oversight are flawed approaches to public policy, which is not particularly inspiring. But I'll  let it hang for today and pick it up again shortly.

In Defence of Bureaucratic Language (and Meaning)

by Kent Aitken

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Top of the billboard charts right now is the album Mandatory Fun by Weird Al Yankovic (file under: sentences, comma, ones I didn't see myself writing in 2014). It includes the song Mission Statement, which skewers the language of business.

A language that happens to intersect significantly with the language of the bureaucracy. Two years ago our particular Government of Canada flavour of verbiage was taken to task by Sh*t Bureaucrats Say.

But I'd like to mount a defence of this bureaucratic language, or at least, a specific subset of it. Of course, there are arenas in which bureaucratic language is legitimately terrible: where it is used to deliberately obfuscate meaning, or to sound knowledgeable or important (the true meaning of bureaucratese), or where it is used without consideration of whether or not the audience speaks that language.

And there are arenas in which it is legit - like the jargon of any field - in which it represents meaningful shorthand for a complex concept. To a citizen, the name (or acronym) for a sub-division of a government department could be completely meaningless. To a different audience, three letters can immediately convey history, mandate, scope of authority, leadership, and key figures.

But there's another arena, in which the meaningfulness or lack thereof is on a case-by-case basis. The terms that jump to mind are things like:

mission statement

strategic plan

year-end review

performance management

Whether these terms represent a meaningful concept or not is dependent on us. For example:

At its best, a mission statement is a powerful vision of an organization's goals and aspirations, that employees can rally behind. One example is Sony in the 1950s, declaring that it would change the worldwide perception of Japanese products. For such a mission statement to work, a leader must demonstrate why it was articulated as it was, ensure that the values are congruent with people's experience in the organization, and convince people that they are taking it seriously.

At its worst, a mission statement is a line on a website, absent of promise, divorced from reality.

At its best, a strategic plan can be an opportunity to test assumptions, explore the environment, reposition an organization, and set meaningful goals for people. To make sure that everyone is rowing in the same direction, and to provide a baseline to assess success against and launch future improvements.

At its worst, a strategic plan is a document that consumes time. A list of disparate plans, all prefixed with the word "strategic".

There are good reasons why these concepts are staples of our organizations. Their practice and adherence keeps organizations alive. But they don't have meaning in a vacuum; it is our job to create meaning for ourselves and others.

The language we use gets a bad rap - rightfully - when we fail at that.

Tune in, Turn on, Drop out - Planning and Idea Generation in Government

by Tariq Piracha

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In response to my last post, a friend commented about the risk involved in trying to generate the best merit-based ideas: “best ideas according to whom and why? What is best?”

Clear and measurable objectives are crucial to success when tasked with idea generation in government. I think her question is well worth consideration. But if we’re looking for an objective or static measurement for what constitutes the “best idea”, I think we’ll be disappointed with the results.

It is the essential nature of democracy: the ideas that are generated, tweaked and implemented are a matter of choice. We look at the data, the issues, the context, and we make the best recommendations we can. It may not be the most effective or efficient course of action, but once we incorporate the multitude of interests, risks, and limitations, someone must ultimately make an informed choice.

That said, the best choice, that is made within a particular context at a particular point in time, may no longer be the best choice as the environment changes. The question that interests me is not so much “what is best”, or even “what are we going to choose”, but instead “how are we going to adapt?”

To do that, I think we need to address at least three elements: With a nod to our 60’s counterculture, I’d suggest it’s important to know how to tune in, turn on, and drop out.

Tune in: We need to pay close attention to our environment. If our environment is changing, we should know about it now; not in a year when it is time to wrap up a project and evaluate performance.

Turn on: We need to know how to turn on a dime. If we’ve got our finger on the pulse, we are better positioned to pivot and adjust course if necessary.

Drop out: Sometimes, well, we just may need to abandon an approach and start from scratch, or move on.

If we have established clear, measurable goals, and we are evaluating our progress every step along the way (and not just at milestones), we may discover that our ideas need to change. The environment, the data, may show us that it needs to.

I've written in past about the need for agile government and the dangers of focusing on projects instead of iterative process. It’s that iterative approach that can help us be more agile.

Cass Sunstein in Simpler talks about the need to assess and adjust policy after it has been implemented. We can no longer afford to “set it and forget it” when it comes to policy and law as no policy or law will be perfect out of the gate.

This position was also recently expressed by Dana O’Donovan and Noah Rimland Flower from the Monitor Institute with regards to how we assess and implement strategic plans.

The 5-year plan, or even annual strategic plans, are no longer providing the flexibility and effectiveness in a world that is changing so rapidly, where citizens are needing responsive and responsible government support.

“Best” may be a misleading word - it is certainly not some objective measurement when it comes to how the government works. It is contextual relative to the various pressures that any developing policy may face.

However, if we can set clear, measurable objectives, scan the environment frequently, measure our progress early and often, and adjust appropriately to changes in the environment, then I think we'll be well on our way to seeing useful progress. And useful ideas.