How Organizations Plan, and Why It Shouldn't Be Institutionalized Advice

by Kent Aitken

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The last couple posts have been working through a question about how organizations plan. The long story short:

• We've institutionalized oversimplification (a symptom being the "Elevator Pitch")
• Correcting that oversimplification is likely an unrealistic goal
• The solution (according to Charles Lindblom) is letting policy decision-makers throw rational planning out the window and "try stuff"
• To avoid unfairness, policy proposals will be closely watched by an ecosystem of stakeholders: groups responsible for related goals in government, lobbyists, NGOs, and think tanks

On the surface, this sounds like the zeitgeist: experimentation, innovation, and collaboration. However, the "try stuff" here refers to large-scale national policy, not pilots: "trying stuff" on, say, tuition subsidies has a massive impact on people's lives. And the role of that "ecosystem of stakeholders" isn't collaboration: it's recommendation, or advice.

Recommendation-Based Governance

In the last post, I linked to Yves Morieux, who breaks down the economics of multi-stakeholder decision-making: where one person owns the decision, but not the inputs required to make it. He paints a portrait of a car manufacturer, in which the lead designer must satisfy the organizations' experts in noise reduction, fuel efficiency, repairability, safety, and much more. It's easy to imagine how fuel efficiency and safety could be at odds: do you make a car lightweight, or an urban armored personnel carrier? So we have a designer, whose bonus but not core salary depends on performance pay that is based on competing goals decided by 26 different people. Which makes their incentive to care about any individual one of those goals very close to zero.

Recommendation-based systems do nothing to address the asymmetry between the incentives of those involved. Put simply: recommenders don't get paid to contribute to the best outcome. They primarily get paid to promote the variable they represent, as loudly and voraciously as possible. They do not get paid to look for compromises, concede when others make valid arguments, or even to develop long-term relationships and credibility. In the above example, the safety expert's concern is chiefly to understand the optimal outcome from a safety perspective; it's the designer's job to worry about how to square that with fuel efficiency. 

Why is this? It's partially innocent bias: people care about what they know about. I'm sure far more than 50% of the population thinks their expertise is of above-average importance. But more so, it's that the people that hold recommenders to account are a step removed from the decision space themselves, and likewise rely on oversimplified elevator pitches for setting goals. It doesn't help that recommenders rarely receive any feedback about the results of their role in the decision.

Recommendations exist in a partial vacuum, whereas decisions exist in an ecosystem. 

So what's the solution? Morieux proposes six elements (paraphrasing):

1. Ensure that players in the ecosystem understand what the others do
2. Reinforce integrators
3. Remove layers
4. Increase the quantity of power so that you can empower everybody to use their judgment
5. Create feedback loops that expose people to the consequences of their actions
6. Increase reciprocity, by removing the buffers that make [people] self-sufficient

In other words: make people meaningfully responsible for the outcomes of their work, make people responsible for collaboration, and make sure they can see and understand the ecosystem.

No amount of communication or planning can solve this issue entirely - the change has to come in how power is distributed and used.

The Villainy of Talk

by Kent Aitken

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they said my paper on Arts&Culture in Scarboro is planning-heavy. i said so is reality. #planningforarts #placemaking http://t.co/Sq0shxOXFl
— morgenpeers (@mpeers) January 2, 2015

Showing is better than telling. Actions speak louder than words. Or, paraphrasing a much-retweeted line from Twitter today, stop talking about the shit you're going to do and just do it.

It's a great slogan for errands, to-dos, or exercise. I'm less sold on it when applied to work, starting a business, side projects, or in Peers' example above, urban planning.

It's tempting to vilify talk.

We have this tension between springing into action and being methodical. In 2013 a tentative theme for Collaborative Management Day was Borrow and Build: rather than re-inventing the wheel, the idea was to introduce people to all of the currently available wheels, to help them round out their toolkits for problem solving.

Which has its own issues. Building on the work of others, and helping existing projects and organizations, is often the most efficient approach. Yet, so many people start from scratch, rationalize a differentiating ideology, and do their own thing. Why is that?

In many ways, we ought to be able to feel a sense of agency over others' work when we get involved. But that feeling pales in comparison to how we feel about an idea that's uniquely ours. For a while I tried to square that circle, and figure out how to get people emotionally involved in others' missions; to have continuity of projects without continuity of people.

Now, I'm starting to suspect that the alternative - the frequent, theoretically inefficient, starting from scratch - is often better, or at least, okay. If that's what motivates people and gets them working on something? So be it, build from scratch. Get shit done.

But. I think it behooves us to talk about what we're scheming. Otherwise, it's impossible for others to point to similar projects, challenge your ideas, or suggest building on someone else's work instead. 

Sometimes, the feedback will crush the project. If it's a bad idea, or if the problem has been solved elsewhere, great. Many ideas are bad, duplicate, or at least incomplete. Most shouldn't actually happen. Most are not the absolute best use of someone's time. So airing out these ideas should not be seen as a passive act to be frowned upon. It should be seen as a reasonable step towards getting something good done.

So talk about it. Then, do whatever you want: help someone else's idea in motion, accept feedback or help, scrap it and move on to something else, or run with it. Get shit done. Just get the right shit done.

When Parameters Are The Problem

by Kent Aitken

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My post from last week was hurried and unfinished - there are caveats and implications left hanging. I'll get back to it next week (see: Millenials, Lego, and the Perimeter of Ignorance).

I recently ran across a business article about aligning your strategy with your environment. The hook was a cartoon of a man yelling "Why won't this gigantic square peg fit in this round hole?!" 

Standare fare, age-old advice.

Of course we should make sure that our strategies make sense in the context of our organizations' priorities, processes, and environment. Of course.

But maybe? Sometimes the square peg is what's actually needed, and it's really the round hole that needs a change. And altering the peg to fit the nonsensical hole perpetuates and legitimizes a poor system and leaves people in the dark about the fact that they need to rethink things.

The Creative Yes

There's a risk to pitching square pegs. The idea could get shut down completely.

The hybrid position might be highlighting the system's shortcomings through the proposal or business case. Typically, two to three options are on offer. Perhaps the new practice should be providing both round peg options that fit current parameters, and square ones that require changing parameters and redefining - more accurately - the problem.

And slowly, the parameters might change.