I’ve been in Belgium and Luxembourg for the last two days delivering two half day seminars for the EU. All journeys by train which allowed me to catch up a lot of work, although I will confess that on the journey from Brussels to Luxembourg I dozed and watched the unfolding scenery remembering past trips to the Grand Duchy. Many moons ago when I was setting up a logistics software business one of our important early clients was NAMSA, the supply agency of NATO. We handled stock forecasting and inventory management for weapons systems; an interesting bit of Operational Research there, we had to create a whole new category of Lumpy Lumpy to handle some of their slow moving parts. There is a whole story about the trip there to close that contract which involves myself and team ending up perfectly parked on the hard shoulder of the M25 approaching the Guildford exit at around 0200 in the morning; sounds ordinary until I tell you that we were upside down and the facing the oncoming traffic, but (thank god) not on fire and with everyone alive. That’s a story for another day however (the roof rails saved us).
What I want to talk about today (and tomorrow). Is my concern, nay passion for governments of whatever ilk to adopt complexity theory and new research/reporting approaches such as our work on impact based measurement, citizen consultation and policy formation.
There is a very simple reason for this which is in part ideological. I think we face a real set of choices in the world at the moment, between carrying on within the current paradigm and radical change. The consequence of not changing will be an increasing inability to provide the basic public services on which any civilised society depends for its existence. For me that is free at the point of entry, access to health services and education for all, together with a safety net of basic housing and income (especially where children are involved). I am less doctrinaire about what political system delivers that, and many of the polarities of my student radical days are no longer with us or even appropriate. I am also realistic enough to know that we will never fully achieve that goal. I am also old enough to know that doctrinaire and/or utopian political movements will not achieve anything approaching that result. But its equally true that if we don’t do something then we will fall into the pit that the acolytes of Ayn Rand find so desirable, namely the tyranny of self interest. I know I need to write a blog on that evil woman (so described by Chomsky from the left and Buckley from the right) but I need to cleanse my soul before and after and that will require some time.
The trouble at the moment is that we moving away from that goal rather than towards it. For every step forward we take at least two strides backwards. We face the challenge of meeting increasing legitimate demands for social services with decreasing real time resources. That brings with it questions of rationing, control and measurement which, however well intentioned, conspire to make the problem worse rather than better. For me this all comes back to one fundamental error, namely we are treating all the processes of government as if they were tasks for engineers rather than a complex problem of co-evolution at multiple levels (individuals, the community, the environment etc.). This was compounded for me over the last two days with the discovery that the invidious tentacles of sick stigma are starting their poisonous intrusion into the body politic of the European Union. While there are aspects of government which would benefit from process based control, there is nothing that you can legitimately do with sick stigma that you can’t do as well with a much cheaper BPR tool and some common sense. There is no need to create a high priesthood of black belts to enforce the occult insignificance of meaningless numbers.
Ok rant over, but I’m not withdrawing anything! The above mentioned fundamental error needs some elaboration in the context of the difference between an ordered and complex system. In an ordered system, the level of constraint makes agent interaction predictable, The system can be modelled and desirable outcomes defined. So where you are dealing with processing student loan forms, car tax renewal or counting the swabs out of a patient at the end of an operation you can use engineering type approaches. Nothing wrong there, in fact such approaches are to be desired in those contexts. On the other hand where you are dealing with a complex adaptive system such an approach is a living breathing disaster. A complex system is one in which the co-evolutionary process between agents and system (people and government being one manifestation of that) is such that any future state is inherently uncertain, cannot be modelled and defining outcome based targets produced perverted behaviour.
So what is wrong? I’m sure this is incomplete but here are my seven errors:
OK so that’s a set of examples of what is wrong, what is the alternative? Well I can’t tackle all of that, but complexity gives us a good shift in the right direction on how to make decisions and how to organise, while narrative based research allows us to move from targeting outcomes to impact based measurement. I’ll start work on outlining those tomorrow if I get the time.
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[…] energy and increases vulnerability to the risk of ideological imposition of a pet hypothesis (policy determined evidence), despair, perverse incentives in targets and a host of other all too common errors. The […]