Recognise that most ‘decisions’ by government are political experiments.
…except that with normal experiments – the scientific kind – measurements are taken, changes are monitored, conclusions drawn, theory is adjusted.
Oddly, this is not the case with government decisions: debate is held, rehearsing the full repertoire of grimace, flush, sound and fury; and someone wins, and after that – a hot cup of tea. No connection with implementation. And yet with almost every regulation it is impossible to get a full view of how this adjustment to law or regulation will play out in reality, with the inevitable unintended consequences – so we end up with decision makers who are not fully informed making decisions for people who aren’t aware that anything has changed. Even more jaw-dropping – roughly 150 of these changes occur each week per ministry. That’s about 10,000 per year, year after year, in a kind of nightmare of bureaucracy.
How would it be if, rather than decisions being taken, forgotten, and tossed into the bureaucratic machine, they were seen as designs for action, to be monitored and adjusted as their process unfolds?
In this episode we survey the ghastly scene of current decision-making, and find hope in the impact of the pandemic.
Talking points:
- Decisions: words on a piece of paper, or designs for action
- Wandering from start line to start line without staying to watch the race
- The sheer volume and impossibility of keeping track
- How subsidiarity would alleviate this
- The Tiny Top and the noise
- The end-state fallacy: housing developments post-war, EU and CO2 emmissions
- The whole new-liberal economic system is an experiment
- PAPAIS – the dark truth of how government functions
- Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety: Science and system
- The limitations of government
- Ostrom: “Human societies are constituted by the symulateous operation of various experiments variously linked to one another”
- The government should be setting up the system
- The pandemic has forced experimentation
- The Observatory for Public Sector Innovation
- The Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England
Links:
The Observatory for Public Sector Innovation – for more on this see Series 1 Episode 5, The Sense of Powerlessness at the Heart of Leadership with Dr. Piret Toñurist.
The Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/about/people/monetary-policy-committee
W. Ross Ashby
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Ross_Ashby
Law of Requisite Variety:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)#Law_of_requisite_variety
Vincent Ostrom: “Human societies… are constituted by the simultaneous operation of diverse experiments variously linked to one another.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Ostrom
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