Discussion of Principle 1
From Theconnectedrepublic
1) A less Hierarchical Public Sector: Government 2.0 will have moved away from command and control, devolving much more decision-making to local units and frontline staff.
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General Comments
Not Radical Enough The current principle does not go quite far enough. Government 2.0 will, with increasing frequency --Russell Craig 07:09, 20 May 2008 (BST) adopt a servant leader approach, recognising that citizens are more likely to make the right decision in many (but not all) circumstances--Russell Craig 07:09, 20 May 2008 (BST). Government will devolve decision making to the lowest possible level. It will accept that the only effective way for the organisation to cope with ‘variety’ is to delegate as much autonomy as possible to the staff dealing directly with the clients and customers. The delegation has to be carefully circumscribed, with the specification of boundaries that must not be crossed, the scope for innovation clearly defined and clearly negotiated means of evaluation and resource requirements. Government should provide an environment where systems can operate; it cannot create policy in the 21 century. The old approach may have applied to the UK civil service in 1857, but the world is different now.
Comment: Obviously it is partly a matter of timescale - by 2015 progress in this direction is likely to be less extensive and less radical than by 2050 and (without wishing to sound too Marxist) it is certainly right to push as radical an agenda as possible, since resistance (including our own limitations) is likely to mean that the scope for change is consistently under-estimated. However, the sceptics will want to see specific examples and will ask - will we have a benefit system where the citizen's entitlement depends on what his/her advisor thinks is an appropriate solution to that person's requirements? How do you ensure fairness in that sort of environment? How do you give certainty to the citizen needs to make choices based on what they will be entitled to if...? And in the policy area won't there still be plenty of areas (actually almost all of them) where there are different views and preferences in society and there has to be some process that makes and enforces a decision? Personally, I think the best way of taking the discussion forward in this area is to give real-life examples (or detailed realistic descriptions of potential scenarios) of how a once hierarchical process was transformed by taking a new approach (see the In Control example below).
--Russell Craig 07:09, 20 May 2008 (BST)In my view, it is only possible to concieve of a "both/and", not an "either/or" world - some (many) decisions should be pushed as far down the line as possible (this is the idea of subsidiarity isn't it?), but others have to be left at the top - e.g. choices between tradeoffs where the outcome is zero sum (someone wins, someone loses e.g. overall allocation of the annual remuneration budget, opening/closing of physical facilities, establishment/disestablishment of functions and roles etc.) or major issues are at stake (e.g. the continuation or otherwise of major programmes, processes of formal accountability, compliance with legal obligations etc.). I don't agree with the idea of radical devolution as the only eay to cope with the variety. There are two systemic responses to variety (variety matching), namely amplification (increase your internal capacity to deal with variety in your external environment) or attenuation (reduce the variety found in the environment). Devolution is a form of amplification (which paradoxically can increase internal variety and thus management overhead), whereas descoping policies or privatising functions is a form of attenuation.
Government can still create policy in the 21st century - it just has to do it differently. Government is legitimate, whereas citizens are not. Will citizens directly decide foreign policy, justice policy, national health strategies etc? I think not - government will still need to mediate the process between the citizen and the State. There are many reasons for this e.g. the sum of all citizens views will not always (or even often?) end up being the right thing to do - especially again when the outcome is not a win/win (and how often is it ever in reality?
Finally, discussion of this principle seems to have drifted off track insofar as it is focused on the role of citizens, not public employees.
Comment: not sure it has gone off track so much as stumbled into the issues that will define how far we can take this process. The two stumbling blocks I hear in the discussion are (a) fairness and (b) trade-offs. The idea of fairness being the same as horizontal equity (everyone in the same circumstances gets the same treatment) and preditability (people need to know what they are entitled to)is at the heart of the discussion. Are there alternative ways to characterise 'fairness' in policy terms? The related debate is about whether government (ie public employees and politicians) is the only or the best instrument to mediate difficult trade-of decisions? There was a time when we confronted many of these 'public' challanges using other instiutional tools, largely using civil society structures and associations eg the mutuals. Presumably we now live in an age where that option would be seen as a littl twee and incompatible with the large-scale complexity that attends most of the policy issues we're trying to resolve?
Potential Benefits
Responsiveness - an ability to match policy to the contours of the lives of those whose interests is will most directly affect.
Variety and diversity - a move away from a 'one size fits all' approach to policy making, recognising that good policy will increasingly bear the hallmarks of 'fit' and flexibility
More direct feedback - perhaps policy making that is more distributed and closer to the people and communities it affects will generate more powerful feedback loops so that those who make policy will learn more quickly and more directly what real impacts it has, both intended and unintended. Maybe it will make policy making, in that respect, a more honest and accountable process?
Speed of response - this links to the above points. So a more tailored solution faster and more capable of being changed in (virtual) real time.
Potential Barriers
Fracturing - too much diversity perhaps ends up with a patchwork approach that can lead to incoherence and unfairness as local, distributed and responsive policy making creates new and largely unintended inequities and clashes.
Scale and scope - we live often in a world whose problems or opportunities are large and don't respect the borders and definitions we might want to use to chunk the policy process into easily digestible and smaller pieces. Think especially of environmental or transport policy say in a large city of 14 million people, like Shanghai or Mumbai. Surely we need a city-wide policy architecture to make sure that one part of the city doesn't 'do' policy at the expense of another, to whom it might want to offload a pollution problem it wants to be rid of.
Monitoring and evaluation - potential barrier will be the absence of tools and capabilities to do the requisite evaluating to make sure the potential for tighter and more accountable feedback loops is being fed by good data and good analysis.
Real-life Examples
The UK In Control initiative (http://www.in-control.org.uk/ is a good example of how a previously highly controlled process (allocation of support and assistance to people with long term disabilities) was transformed by putting the budget directly in the hands of the intended beneficiary.
