by msweeks
Sydney-based IBSG Director, heading up the IBSG public sector team in Asia Pacific for Cisco. Co-author of the Connected Republic 2.0 More about msweeks
Yes, but what about accountability?
We've been fortunate in the past couple of months to enjoy a double dose of David Weinberger. At the Nobel Public Services Summit in Stockholm and at the recent Cisco meeting in Orlando, the author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and more recently "Everything is Miscellaneous" shared his views about the possibilities and pitfalls of the social web.
My big interest in David's thesis of the semantic web is the impact on public policy and public management, of course. It strikes me we are witnessing a titanic struggle over power, control and authority between those currently camped on the commanding heights of public policy and those who are busily undermining them with the new capabilities of what we might describe as radical collaboration.
Now I have plenty of friends and contacts, many of them very senior in the political and bureaucratic worlds, who accuse me of terminal romanticism and who reassure me, somewhat patronisingly I think at times, that “these things too will pass” and their world will chug on, largely unaffected except perhaps at the margin…a nice website here, a fun blog there.
Whether or not I am too romantic or hopeful or whether or not their complacency is warranted, there is one dimension of this debate that we don't talk about enough, and that is accountability. The old world of politics has erected a very convoluted scaffold of checks and balances to keep the people who have the power more or less accountable to the people on whose behalf they are meant to be exercising it. The new world of the ‘semantic web’ and social networking seems to be busy dismantling much of that scaffold, or at least posing some pretty tough questions about its continuing relevance and usefulness.
While some will use this anxiety about accountability as a smokescreen for their inertia or outright hostility to the whole idea of the new participative web and its democratic potential, it is true I think that failure to explain how you hold people properly accountable, in a world in which mash-up collaborations of increasingly complex varieties are creating outcomes and opportunities (and inevitably on occasions some mistakes as well) is a barrier to a more rapid and widespread embrace of these new capabilities by the public policy/management process.
The nice thing about hierarchies is that, by and large, you know who to blame when things go wrong. You know who to sack, discipline or vote out of office. In the wonderful world of radical collaboration, these neat black lines get smudged and it's pretty hard to figure out quite who is in charge and who gets to be responsible for what happens. Until we work out an accountability regime that works in this new environment, we're going to make slower progress than we might hope.
Comments
David Weinberger said: Martin, great point. But why exactly do the public policy/management types want accountability? Because that's the way the world has always worked? Because it is a moral requirement? Or for pragmatic reasons?
I ask because one could argue -- in fact, I would argue -- that much of the amazing progress we've made in the new connected world has been due to a relaxing of the requirement that participants be accountable. There's a huge cost to making systems highly accountable -- and not just a monetary cost. So, we have allowed systems to create their own types of accountability, usually minimally addressing specific needs; eBay has one set of needs and one type of accountability while Amazon reviews have a different sort, etc.
So, I'd like to know what practical problems the policy/mgt folks need to address and whether accountability is the best way to address them. undoubtedly, sometimes it will. But, highly likely, many times it won't be.
I think.
David W.
posted over 3 years ago
Martin Stewart-Weeks said: It's a useful question to ask why we need accountablity and what it is supposed to achieve. I suspect much of the accountability scaffolding with which public policy is encumbered has lost sight of the reasons it was erected in the first place. A bit of 'zero-based budgeting' aimed at a fundamental review of acountability structures wouldn't go astray.
But your point, David, is an important one. What is accountability meant to achieve? I think in the public policy realm there are two main outcomes. One is to know whether or not the intended results of a policy intervention or action have been achieved and, if not, why. That allows us to make sensible decisions, in theory, about whether or not we want to persist with that action, change it or stop it.
The second outcome is deeper and more pervasive. The accountability mechanisms we want are there to keep those with power in the system answerable for their actions. In that sense, accountabiity is the indispensable tool of any half-way respectable democratic system, giving us some tools and levers we can use to find out if the people with all the power are wielding it in ways we approve. And, if they are not, we need to be able to get rid of them and put someone else in charge.
I was struck by your other comment, that the world of radical collaboration in the connected world was evolving only by somehow discounting the level and complextiy of accountability with which it was surrounded. Building something this complex, you seem to be suggesting, needs to have a kind of "accountability holiday" to give people the room to play, to experiment, to innovate and to take risks. Is that the point?
I"m drawn by that idea and also partly worried by it. Seems to me we can't accept any diminution of accountability when it comes to the world of public policy and management because, at base, it's all about power. And the one thing we know about power is that it will be misused if it is not held to account. Actually, we also know it gets misued even if we DO hold it to account, but that's a whole other story!
What interests me is the question of whether we need to be inventing new forms of accountability to suit the connected world. Like the eBay example you raise (and I know the risks of that example, but it's still a good one), maybe we need to discover how the network itself, which enabled this dense, complex conectedness and consequent transparency, is itself one of the best hopes we have of keeping this new world not just accountable in the old terms, but in some ways even more acocuntable than before.
So my challange is to embark on some systematic search for new ways to harness the very tools and capabilities that the conncted world is inventing to (a) craft new accountability methods and processes and (b) create those tools in ways that do not, as you suggest in your comment, get in the way of the kind of serial risk-taking and 'play' that is the engine of discovery in this new world in the first place.
Maybe the key is the idea, inherent in your comment, that we might need to discover different types of levels of accountability for different purposes. An accountability regime that is more nuanced and subtle wouldbn't be a bad outcome to aim for, as well as being 'fit for purpose'.
Does that make sense?
posted over 3 years ago
David Weinberger said: Brilliant.
I think the lesson of the Net is not that accountability is bad but that it needs to be more supple, more accountable (so to speak) to the goals it's trying to achieve and the organizational structure that can best achieve those goals.
Systems do tend to grow static, at which point accountability can get mixed up with other social aims that may not advance the actual agenda, namely, accountability gets mixed up with power for its own sake. As you point out, this is particularly a danger in the world of public policy.
We don't yet know whether the Net culture (as if that word could ever really be singular!) is going to reify into patterns of authority that get in the way of innovation and the achievement of social ends. Maybe. But reinventing accountability might be one way to work against that reification.
posted over 3 years ago