The New Wealth of Nations: Chapter 19
From eoswiki.co.uk
From: Raven, J. (1995). The New Wealth of Nations: A New Enquiry into the Nature and Origins of the Wealth of Nations and the Societal Learning Arrangements Needed for a Sustainable Society (pp.224244). Unionville, New York: Royal Fireworks Press; Sudbury, Suffolk: Bloomfield Books.
Raven, J. (1995). The New Wealth of Nations: A New Enquiry into the Nature and Origins of the Wealth of Nations and the Societal Learning Arrangements Needed for a Sustainable Society. Unionville, New York: Royal Fireworks Press; Sudbury, Suffolk: Bloomfield Books. (Chapters 1 [which summarises the whole book], 4 [“Some Observations on Money”], and 17 [Summary of Parts I to III and overview of Part IV: The Way Forward] are available www.npsnet.com/cdd/nwn.html).
Running Modern Society Effectively: An Overview
We have seen that our society faces enormous problems. We have seen that most proposed solutions to these problems recognise neither how serious they are, their deeper origins in the way society is organised, nor their interconnectedness. It follows that most people do not recognise how extensive are the changes that are actually required if our society - or even the planet in its present form - is to survive.
We have also seen that, contrary to popular belief, we live in a managed economy and that
this managed economy has come into being at least in part for the best of reasons. We have
seen that our public service is not vigorously tackling the most important problems that
confront us, that it has persistently failed to orchestrate communal action in the public
interest, and that it has neglected the hidden forces which prevent the vast areas of the
economy that are already within the public domain functioning very effectively. These
shortcomings have many causes, but they lead to a lack of appreciation of the need to invest
heavily in fundamental research to identify the deep-seated
connections which result in the
causes of problems being far removed from their symptoms, to understand the processes
through which the way things are done comes to be supported by a network of mythologies,
and to develop the tools and administrative arrangements which are actually required to run
public provision effectively.
We have seen that the market mechanism which
was justified as a means of handling and
coordinating diffuse, incomplete, interdependent, and contradictory information has
failed
to provide, and cannot possibly provide, effective societal management. The attempt to
reduce mismanagement
of the economy by privatisation is utterly misguided. By privatising,
we are not turning the management of our society over to some benign invisible hand, but to
the managers of our gigantic, managed, Transnational Corporations. It is not a question of
whether we will live in a managed economy or not. The questions are: “Who is going to do
the managing?” and “In whose interests will society be managed?”
Finally, we have seen that those proposed solutions to our problems which do acknowledge
their seriousness are unlikely to have much effect because they do not recognise their depth
and ramifications. They do not, in particular, recognise the extent to which our problems are
embedded in a system which reacts in ways which cancel the effects of piecemeal
interventions. It is these systems processes which it is most important to influence. It is
ironical that, although, as Deming 19.1 and the author 19.2 have shown, influencing such systems
processes is crucial to the effective performance of most people’s jobs if evaluated against
their job descriptions, those job descriptions almost never highlight the need to engage in
systems analysis. Systems processes are hard to identify and still harder to influence. Worse
still, examining them is liable to incur denigration as a crank because it involves challenging
the “obvious” truths which
actually turn out to be myths which operate to perpetuate the
system, particularly by offering a rationale for the “reasonable and realistic” actions of most
well-meaning people.
We will now set down what we have been able to discern of the developments that are
required to overcome the problems which have been described. Our proposals will be based
on two propositions which conflict sharply with the most vociferously advocated economic
theories. The first is that it is vital to better utilise, and to refine, the public management
structures and processes we already have. The second is that what happens in a society is
primarily determined by widely shared values and not by such things as the arrangements
made to administer financial rewards for “appropriate” behaviour. The way forward will be
found by many people striving hard to find new ways of translating the “new values” into
effect in their own domains of activity. We will only succeed if many people put a lot of
effort into thinking out how an alternative society is to be run, finding new ways of doing
things, introducing changes grounded in tentative understandings of systems processes,
monitoring and learning from their effects, and introducing the modifications that are
indicated.
Effective Management
At the same time as advocating more, and better, societal management, it is vital to underline that what is needed differs sharply from the image most often conjured up by that term.
As has been established in a series of studies 19.3 , effective management within organisations
involves:
- Managing organisational arrangements in such a way as to release the energy, competence, and enthusiasm of all concerned. This involves guiding action by varying organisational arrangements, processes, and climates not by issuing orders and instructions. The notion that managers can have such superior knowledge of every detail of every necessary action to be able to issue detailed instructions is an illusion.
- Creating learning systems 19.4 in which people and organisations monitor the effects of their actions in order to learn more about the operation of the systems with which they are dealing, the problems they are trying to tackle, and the effectiveness of their strategies, and then initiate appropriate further action in the light of what they have learnt, monitor its effects, learn more about the problem and the solution, and take corrective action. Once again it is important to be clear that what is envisaged is something very different from what people generally imagine when they hear the word “learning”. As used here, the term “learning society” or “learning organisation” does not imply the traditional educational activities which those who advocate such things as “lifelong learning” and “education for life” tend to envisage. Rather, the term is intended to evoke an image of formal arrangements to learn from experience and find new ways of doing things.
- Holding managers accountable for the quality of the discretionary judgments they make on the basis of incomplete and tentative information. It is the task of a manager to canvass opinion among those above and below him (or her), to decide what shall be done, and to initiate appropriate action. It is on the quality of such managerial decision taking that the future of the organisation depends. Responsibility for it cannot be delegated to committees for then no one is responsible for ensuring that the activities which have been initiated work.
In terms of effective public management, our task is to evolve new structures whereby the public can supervise the management of society and ensure that its managers act in the public interest. This applies whether those managers are officially public sector managers or managers of so-called “private” organisations (the costs of which are mostly borne directly by the general public [and not just their “customers”] and which make most of their money by selling, directly or indirectly, to the public sector). In other words, our central task must be none other than to evolve new concepts of, and structures and procedures for, democratic management.
The practices and procedures that are to be introduced if we are to create a learning society
must:
- Contribute to the clarification of policy goals. This means introducing better means of stimulating explication of alternatives, collecting information on the consequences of each, feeding that information into public debate, and bringing such debates to meaningful conclusions. Since, in coming to a meaningful conclusion it will be necessary to give due weight to such things as what is in the long-term public interest (as distinct from the short-term benefit of vested interests), the priorities and needs of minorities, and those who are most affected by the policies, it will be necessary to develop alternatives to the majority vote. It is not a question of laying down policy goals for all time: such goals can only be tentative, dependent on the arrival of further information and especially information on the effects of the policies that are introduced. To get the necessary further information it will be necessary to: (i) ask how a number of mavericks can be involved in policy development and evaluation so that attention will be paid to processes and outcomes which would otherwise have been overlooked, (ii) initiate experiments grounded in a tentative understanding of systems processes and which aim to do things which no one had previously thought it might be possible to do, (iii) subject those experiments to comprehensive evaluation procedures which examine outcomes which few people had thought it was even possible, never mind important, to consider, and (iv) initiate a further round of more general discussion. This is no tidy, single-targeted approach. Many contradictory experiments with conflicting criteria of evaluation need to be tried. A messy, evolutionary, approach is needed.
- Facilitate: (i) collection of information on the effects and effectiveness of policies currently in operation and on the forces including systems constraints perhaps supported by widely accepted mythology which prevent them functioning as effectively as they might; (ii) sifting the information so obtained for insights and good ideas; (iii) initiating action on the basis of the information collected; and (iv) monitoring the effects of that action in order to learn more about the operation of the system and restarting the cycle of innovation.
- Facilitate widespread public participation in the process of defining problems, seeking solutions, translating the results into action, evaluating experiments and developments, and redefining the issues.
- Make it possible to monitor the activities of the public service in a professional way and reduce the conspicuous overload of government by arranging for the responsibility for monitoring the quality of provision and the actions of public servants to be exercised by interest groups and a wider cross-section of the public 19.5 .
- Establish network-based working arrangements both within the public service and outside it so that cells dealing with single issues can share their learning, make observations about the working of the overall system, and tackle worldwide, interconnected problems.
- Lead managers (and, in particular, public servants) to behave in ways which are appropriate to the running of and the stimulation of innovation in the vast organisations they control. Required behaviours include the release of energy and enthusiasm in subordinates, sifting information for good ideas and initiating appropriately monitored experiments.
- Lead public servants, managers, employees, and citizens to develop the competencies, expectations, and understandings which are required if they are to play their part in running modern society effectively.
- Incorporate ways of promoting adequate accountability, on both an individual and group basis, for both personal and organisational effectiveness.
The need is, above all, to create a pervasive climate of innovation. What happens in a society
is not determined by the actions of one or two political leaders or researchers. It depends on a
network of parallel and interlinked developments in areas which often seem to have little to
do with each other. A design for a steam-engine
would be of little value without parallel
developments in steel making, financial services, and means of collecting the fares needed to
recover the capital.
The above specifications for the developments which are needed if we are to have a learning
society interact. It is therefore not possible to understand the developments needed in one
area without simultaneously understanding the developments needed in the others. To
introduce an understanding of them it will therefore be necessary to adopt a cyclical, or
iterative, course. In the next few paragraphs we will briefly sketch out the developments that
are needed in each area. We will then enlarge and
to some extent coalesce the
discussion
of each area. Having, in this way, built up an understanding of the interrelated
whole, the
developments needed in each area will be discussed separately, but at greater length.
1. Generating better information about, a wider range of perspectives on, and more creative
solutions to, the problems which confront us.
It is said that ours is an information society. But we are still surprisingly ignorant about the
complex, social and biological processes with which modern development is interfacing so
drastically. Among other things, we need much better information on the human and
biophysical, short and long-term,
consequences of alternative courses of action. As we have
seen, what is in individuals short-term
interest often conflicts with what is in their own and
the communities long-term
interests. To run society more effectively public servants need to
explicitly set out to create and separately evaluate multiple options with a view to meeting the
divergent needs and priorities of a cross-section
of the public and disseminate that
information to the public so that they can make more informed choices between them.
Although the need to develop better ways of thinking about our problems and the compilation
of better information is fundamental to finding a way forward, we will defer discussion of the
arrangements needed to advance understanding until last. Instead priority will be given to the question of how it might be possible to ensure that information which is likely to open up new understandings and vistas is first collected and sifted, and then acted upon in an appropriately innovative, forward-looking, way.
2. Creating a climate of innovation in society as a whole, and in the public service in
particular.
As noted above, pervasive change that will lead to radical transformation of society is
required. Everyone needs to be involved in noticing necessary developments and in working
with others to translate them into effect. The creation of a pervasive climate of innovation
means allocating part of everyone’s day-to-day
activities of the kind Kanter grouped under
the heading of “parallel organisation activity concerned with innovation” that
is, to finding
better ways of thinking about and doing things. Equally importantly, however, it means
recognising the importance of a wider range of roles in the workplace and reallocating
responsibilities so that people who can contribute importantly in one of the many ways
necessary to innovation can devote their time more wholeheartedly to doing so.
While the observations we have just made apply to everyone in their diverse jobs and various
types of citizenship activity, it is on the innovativeness and ingenuity of our public servants
that our future is most dependent. Public servants have a double responsibility: Their task is
not merely to display high levels of innovation and ingenuity themselves but also to release
energy and creativity in others. If public servants are to do these things, it will be necessary to
change our expectations of them, the structures in which they work, and the criteria which are
applied when evaluating their work. Their task is to create an innovative, learning society.
3. Mechanisms to increase public participation in defining problems and seeking and testing
solutions.
We need ways of enabling many more people to participate in “the planning process” and
“public management”. One aspect of this process which needs to be singled out for special
attention has to do with clarifying the nature of possible experiments grounded in a tentative
and incomplete understanding of systems processes, initiating such experiments, and
monitoring them in a comprehensive way in order to learn more about the problem and the
strategies required to tackle it, its implications for the goals of policy and the long-term
public interest, and the systems processes which it will be necessary to make greater efforts to
influence.
To find a way forward we need to systematically involve those often
marginalised people
with unusual definitions of “the problem” in the process of defining and tackling our
problems. The planning process has, in the past, tended to admit the “informed” public but to
exclude those with plebian, unusual, or “radical” ideas 19.6 . It has tended to focus on what
Thompson 19.7 has called “gainly” institutions and tidy, single-criteria
and single-issue,
problems and solutions. It has tended to exclude even
dismiss as ill-informed
and ignorant the
views of many of those on whom the policies actually impinge.
4. Mechanisms which ensure that public servants seek out, sift, and act on information in an
innovative way in the long-term
public interest.
The first thing to be done if we are to induce our public servants to seek out and act on
information in a more innovative way is to change the criteria and tools adopted in staff
appraisal exercises. If this is to be done it will be necessary to disseminate what we have
learnt about the importance of public servants performing a managerial role (defining that in
terms of the activities which have emerged from research as being important) and acting in an
innovative way. It will also be necessary to disseminate the idea that the way to promote
innovation is by creating a climate conducive to innovation. Also essential is more
widespread recognition of the role which public visibility could play in inducing public
servants to act on information in the public interest. If any of these mechanisms are to be
introduced it will need to be more widely recognised that we need much more citizen
participation in the process of supervising the activities of the public service.
5. Ways of initiating worldwide action.
Worldwide intervention is to be achieved by extending the network-based
working
arrangements that are required, both within the public service itself and in its interface with
the public, to solve “local” problems.
The solution is not “world government”. Powerful governments have a tendency to act in
their own interests (or at least of those who are behind them). The heavy-handed
enforcement
of sanctions tends to misfire. People should be made part of the kind of network of
relationships which leads to responsible behaviour. They are typically deterred from crime,
not so much by the threat of imprisonment as by the thought of neighbours and friends
finding out. Public servants and politicians are most likely to be induced to act in the public
interest if their behaviour is exposed to the public gaze. We do not have to wait for legislation
and central decree to begin this process.
We will, in the remainder of this chapter, merge some of these topics and discuss them a little
more fully. Although the central problem we face remains Adam Smith’s and Fred Hayek’s
one of finding a way of collating and giving effect to diffuse information, it has proved easier
to come at the task of clarifying the way forward by starting with a discussion of the
arrangements needed to create an innovative public service, move on to a discussion of public
participation, and leave the discussion of the crucial (but rather boring) business of clarifying
the nature of the information needed, how it is to be collected, and how it is to be translated
into effect, until last.
Creating A Pervasive Climate of Innovation
If we are to stimulate more experimentation with ways of running society, we will have to set aside time for such activity and create a structure, and a set of expectations, which promote it.
Not only do we try to run our existing public provision as “efficiently” as possible by cutting
any surplus money not required for the execution of already-defined
activities, but our
existing hierarchical administrative structures tend to stifle innovation. The process of
passing information upward and downward through many bureaucratic levels filters out new
and risky ideas the value of which is often only apparent to those who, as a result of their
position and temperament, are (i) aware of particular problems (ii) aware of new possibilities,
and (iii) have access to idiosyncratic combinations of new knowledge. Messages get distorted
to fit what it is thought the recipient wants to hear. Job descriptions rarely highlight the need
for innovative activity and staff appraisal systems rarely record staff competence to contribute in one of the wide variety of ways that are necessary if innovation is to occur.
Research into the process of innovation 19.8 shows that, for it actually to succeed, one needs
both someone with “fire in their belly” and a supportive context. Successful innovation
usually comes from small “teams” of people. These typically include someone who has
become aware from his or her day-to-day
activities of the possibility of doing, or the need to
do, something new, or of a new way of doing something. They include someone who has
learnt (usually through a network of contacts with people involved in related developments)
of new information and new ways of doing things. They include someone who is able to
persuade others to fund a trial of the idea on a pilot basis. They include someone who knows
how to use his or her feelings or hunches to embark on a course of activity without being very
clear how it is to be done or what the outcome will be, monitor the effects of that action to
learn more about the problem and the effectiveness of the strategy, and take appropriate
corrective action. They include someone who knows how to persuade other people to assist.
They include someone who knows how to mount a crusade to get the idea adopted: Better
ways of doing things do not automatically sell themselves. They include someone who can
translate abstract ideas into a practical prototype. They include someone who can pour oil on
troubled waters and get people to work together effectively. Staff appraisal systems need to
be able to recognise this wide variety of different types of contribution to “team” activity.
Instead of nurturing such network-based
“teams”, there is, in our society, a tendency to wish
for, and depend on, “champions” of innovation who individually possess many of the
qualities mentioned above. Unfortunately, many of these qualities are psychologically
incompatible. People who are good at finding new ways of thinking about things are not
usually good at generating proposals which will attract funds. People who are good at acting
on their hunches to initiate new courses of action are unlikely to be good at “setting up”
politicians and bureaucrats in such a way to release money into the activities. As a result,
there is a need for structures of working groups containing people with a number of such
talents who will persist for the time that is needed to accomplish something worthwhile, and
then disband. The membership of such groups needs to be flexible so that different people
with different talents are involved at different stages. That is to say, the people who generate
ideas may not in the end be the people who implement them: The innovators may move on to
other things, leaving others who have different priorities and motives to translate them into
effect and still others to sell the product. The activity cannot be funded from paper plans, but
only on the basis of assessments of such things as who is able to notice important, practical,
new things to do, find ways of getting important things done, and able to turn “chance”
observations and discoveries to advantage, and whether a group as a whole is likely to be
able to venture into the unknown and accomplish something worthwhile. The “teams”
required to pull off innovation need different balances of talents to those required to carry out
the day-to-day
operations of the organisation.
If we are to create a climate of innovation, it will be necessary to set aside part of everyone’s
day to work in what Kanter 19.9 has termed “parallel organisation activity concerned with
innovation”. During this time the goals, pattern of activities, and working relationships are all
very different from those required for routine day-to-day
tasks. Nevertheless, it is important
to note that is is the same people who need to be involved: Innovation is not a task for some
separate cadre of innovators and managers, although there is a need for at least some of those
concerned to have links with specialists in information-generation
and research, and for all
concerned to have access to researchers who may be able to help them with their problems.
During this time a number of things previously spelt out are necessary. Chief among them are (a) different patterns of working relationships and, especially, deliberate strategies for the recognition and utilisation of multiple talents, and (b) network working.
To illustrate the idea of network working, let us consider what is needed for innovation in the
educational system. Each school needs to have some teachers who contribute to the
development of new curriculum theories, some who work on the development of the tools
required to administer individualised, competency-oriented
programmes of education and
monitor their effects, some who generate apparatus, some who contribute to the evolution of
new administrative arrangements within the school, some who set out to influence the
systems constraints (such as the tests which are used to evaluate performance) on what the
school can do, and some who contribute to the development of a new interface with, and new
expectations from, parents. None of these teachers can be expected to work on their own.
They need to be part of a network of teachers dealing with similar issues in other schools.
Within each of these networks, different teachers will need to function as fundraiser,
ideas-person,
technician, link-person,
publicist, etc.
It is obvious that the criteria used to evaluate teachers’ performance in these activities need to
be very different from those applied to their performance in classroom teaching (although the
evaluation of the latter, like the evaluation of the performance of most public servants and
employees, is in itself highly problematic). The task they are to be expected to perform needs
to evolve. One cannot specify the job to be performed or its outcome in advance.
The external supervisory structure to which the teaching profession needs to be accountable i.
e. to whom the results of personnel and organisational appraisal exercises needs to be
reported needs
to parallel that required for carrying out innovation: Not only do the current
clients of the service need to be involved, so do other people who are providing other aspects
of the service from other Departments and
perhaps from other parts of the world and
the
media.
Having seen something of the structure and process that is required to create a climate of
innovation, the next problem is one of realisation. The first task must, of course, be to create
a value for innovation. At the present time, this is very much lacking in the UK: Only 10 or
12% of those we interviewed 19.10 thought it was important to do such things as find better
ways of thinking about things, better ways of doing things, or new things to do compared
with about 40% in Japan. Simply disseminating and debating these results, especially in the
context the research we reviewed earlier that showed that the UK has one of the highest
proportions wishing to live in what amounts to a new social and economic order which would
give effect to the “new values”, and a discussion of the probable consequences of these
values, might in itself contribute to the necessary change in value priorities.
A second task is to bring both the public and the public service itself to recognise that the first
duty of a public servant is to contribute to the management of society. We have shown that
this viewpoint receives scant endorsement. As a result, very few public servants asked
themselves whether their organisations were contributing as effectively as they might to
society or how the value of that contribution might be enhanced.
But public servants are not only more responsible than anyone else for the quality of life in
our society as a whole, they are also responsible for the quality of life of individual clients of
their services. Thus, although they do not usually recognise it, they have a responsibility for
inventing better ways of meeting individual client’s requirements. If they are to exercise such responsibilities effectively, they need to be expected to exercise discretion to relate provision to individual needs. Again, we found very few members of the public who thought that public servants should vary what they offered to suit the needs of their clients. They believed that public service clients should get equal treatment. The public’s expectations of public servants corresponded to public servants’ view of their own role.
As we have shown earlier very few of the public servants interviewed by Day and Klein or
ourselves were inclined to ask what they could do to enhance the value of their services to
those they were serving. Fewer were prepared to take on themselves responsibility for doing
something about improving the quality of those services. Fewer still were prepared to take
responsibility for individual discretionary decisions about what was in the best interests of
their clients in particular circumstances. And fewer still set about studying, and trying to
influence, the systems processes which so heavily determined what they could do.
To overcome these problems it will be necessary to first redefine the roles of government,
public servant, and citizen and then monitor what happens to see if the staff concerned are
applying themselves to all of the new tasks. Not only will new staff appraisal systems be
required, new organisational structures will be required to give teeth to the results of the
appraisals. These will reject the traditional notion that public servants are responsible through
a long hierarchy of command to distant elected representatives. Instead staff-appraisal
and
organisational-appraisal
information should be fed directly to the public through open,
network-based,
structures of the kind discussed above i.
e. networks made up of colleagues,
members of the public, researchers, and media personnel.
However, it is not just individual appraisal that is needed. As we have seen, innovation is a
cultural process rather than an individualistic activity. An individual innovator can achieve
little in a culture which does not provide support or encourage parallel developments on
which he or she can build. To take stock of the quality of such climates for innovation,
individual organisations, communities, and society as a whole will need to undertake
“climate” surveys. These lead to the assessment of such things as collective possession of the
qualities mentioned above plus such things as levels of dedication to innovation, commitment
to monitoring and learning from the effects of any changes which are introduced, and their
emphasis on high standards and finding ways of meeting clients’ needs. The results of
surveys allow the members of an organisation or community to, in a sense, look at
themselves in a mirror, ask themselves whether they like what they see, and, if not, decide to
change their beliefs or behaviour and subsequently to monitor the effects. By feeding data of
this sort to monitoring groups composed of colleagues, the general public, researchers, and
the media, Howard 19.11 , Walberg 19.12 and others have shown that it is possible to provoke
discussions which lead to actions which greatly enhance the quality of the climates of the
organisations concerned.
Public Participation
Several kinds of public participation must be discussed: Participation in value-clarification; in the definition and solution of societal problems; and in monitoring the activities of the public service.
Participation in Value-Clarification
10 What happens in a society is very much determined by the extent to which there is general agreement about three sets of values: end values; life-style values; and the importance of (or value for) applying high-level competencies to undertaking personally valued activities effectively 19.13 . An example of an “end value” would be thinking it is important to create a sustainable society. An example of a lifestyle value might be the desire for a comfortable, non-demanding lifestyle. Examples of competencies to which people may be committed as a means of translating values of either kind into effect are creativity and initiative.
If the members of a society in general are not personally plagued by value conflicts within or
between these domains, and if there are few value conflicts between the members of a
society, a variety of different kinds of development may occur. Examples include
technological progress, progress toward a society characterised by warm, supportive, human
relationships, or progress toward domination of other people or nations. If the members of a
society, individually or collectively, suffer from serious value conflicts as
is the case in UK
the
distribution of values and competencies in these areas still determines what happens, but
the outcome is liable to suit no one.
Fundamental disagreement about the end goals that are to be achieved obviously has serious
implications. Less obvious is the possibility that there can be as
there is in the UK general
agreement about the kinds of development that are required in society but little valuation,
motivation, or desire to undertake the kinds of activity that would be required to bring the
wished for developments into being. While recognising the need for urgent change and
acknowledging the importance of many of the features which need to be possessed by an
alternative society, people may personally value activities such
as an easy life, or authority
over others, or spending their time socialising which
are unlikely to lead to the desired end.
To generalise: the pursuit of personally valued activities which are not appropriately coupled
to end goals may result in the development of a society in which no one is able to do the
things they would like to do. This can easily occur even though everyone concerned can
foresee it.
Although values are important, what people will do is also determined by institutional
arrangements. These may prevent people doing things they would like to do or make them
choose the options which are anything but the most desirable. For example, many academics
would like to advance fundamental understanding, but the fact that doing so is a difficult and
frustrating activity is not usually the only deterrent to relevant activity. The institutional
framework in which they work not only provides little support and encouragement to engage
in such activities, it also makes it very much easier for them to obtain satisfactions which
they actually value much less highly such
as promotion into an administrative position with
a higher salary.
It follows from this discussion that we need to promote public participation, not only in
activities which result in clarification of end goals and personal values and
forging greater
coherence between the two, but also in activities which will lead to the clarification and
introduction of institutional arrangements which will allow those values to be realised.
A serious research question we face is, therefore, how best to institutionalise this
participation on an ongoing
basis? Once again, we immediately see the need for the kind of
experimentation and evaluation we have so often advocated in this book.
Beyond that lies a need for research to promote the clarification of values in the three
domains we have discussed. How best are we to think about these domains? What are the
short and longterm,
personal, social, and planetary consequences of alternatives? How are
relevant experiments to be initiated and evaluated? How is public debate best to be
promoted?
The question of how relevant research is to be initiated, conducted, evaluated, and debated is
vitally important. Among other things, it will be necessary for us to, in a sense, find ways of
funding mavericks who draw attention to issues which have not previously been considered
and unconventional researchers who can invent ways of exploring and documenting those
issues. The initiation and conduct of the required experiments requires network-based
activity
in which a large number of people contribute in very different ways to getting the
experiments off the ground and making them work. These experiments will need to engage
with systems processes of a kind which it is currently not even respectable to mention. It will
involve trying to do things which no one has ever considered trying to do because only one or
two people had any idea that it could be done and which no committee would ever support.
Debate of the results requires a network of action-learning
groups with good linkages to the
media.
The orchestration of such a cyclical ferment of innovation and information-based
goal and
institutional clarification is clearly a task for the public service. But that only points to a
serious “chicken and egg” problem. Without a widespread change in priorities, beliefs,
expectations, and institutional arrangements, the public service will not initiate the required
participation, experimentation, documentation, and debate. Yet without them, there will be no
agreement on new priorities and institutional arrangements for the public service.
Participation in Defining and Solving Problems
We have seen that there has, in the past, been a tendency to oversimplify societal problems and to apply simplistic solutions. In reality, we are not confronted by isolated problems with single solutions, but multiple, interrelated, complex problems the solutions to which are often in conflict with the solutions to other problems. Frequently the problems have a systems basis involving both hidden connections and deeper causes in sociological, economic, biological, and physical processes. Equally seriously, there may be important myths which legitimise and maintain the system. Unless these myths are exposed for what they are, most people will dismiss relevant information and valuable suggestions for reform.
Yet, while it is obvious that we need to find ways of bringing to the fore multiple, alternative,
definitions of problems, how are we then to make progress? The answer to that question
involves insisting that the fundamental task of the public servant is to act as a manager and
that this involves sifting diffuse information for good ideas and acting on them in an
innovative way in the longterm
public interest. That is, their role involves initiating, and
learning from, further experiments (defining the word “experiment” in a much broader way
than usual). Getting public servants to perform that role involves finding some way of
holding them accountable for doing so. This in turn means finding some way of exposing
their behaviour to the public gaze. And this means inventing new forms of public
participation in the management of society.
Participation in Monitoring the Public Service
One way to reduce bureaucratic inertia is, as philosophers from Aristotle, through Mill, to MacMurray have argued, to extend the concept of open government. Public servants are more likely to act in the public interest if their behaviour is exposed to the public gaze. For public surveillance to work, people other than elected representatives need to be able to monitor what is going on and relay their observations to a wider audience. This monitoring system might consist of a network of groups having overlapping membership and with links to the mass media. But it is not (mainly) the actual day-to-day work of individual public servants or public service departments which needs to be exposed to the public gaze. What needs to be exposed is professionally-collected evaluation data relating to such questions as whether individual public servants have been behaving in ways which are likely to create a ferment of innovation and result in actions which are in the longterm public interest, and whether they have made serious attempts to identify the needs of their individual clients and society more generally and invent ways of achieving them. Also needed are a range of professional evaluations of the ways in which the policies they are pursuing are working and not working.
The need for better arrangements to monitor the work of the public service can also be
underlined by approaching the topic from another direction. We have seen that most of the
policies to be implemented by the public service have some goals and objectives which are
universal. But they will also have to meet the needs of differing subgroups
of the population.
Besides, since current information on the longterm
consequences of pursuing certain policies
is limited, and since the effects will change as other developments are introduced, the goals
cannot be laid down once and for all, but must emerge and change as a result of a cyclical
process of debate, experimentation, and evaluation. It follows from these observations that
most goals and policies cannot be determined by majority vote. Instead, public servants must
shoulder responsibility for generating variety, evaluating the options, feeding that information
to the public, creating the ferment of innovation which is required to find a way forward a
ferment of innovation in which everyone is involved both within their jobs and in their lives
out of work and
deciding what to do to better meet the needs and priorities of particular subgroups
within the population as well as the overall longterm
public interest.
In addition to promoting network-based
structures of participative democracy, much more
attention will have to be paid to the structures and procedures which are used to encourage
and inform media-based
public debate. We need to find ways of making it easier for citizens
with unusual views to make their voices heard. To do this, it will be necessary to provide
them with the structures which enable them, as of right, to commission research which will
investigate those issues from their point of view and on the basis of their assumptions.
Properly organised, however, this collection of developments holds out the potential to ensure
that everyone’s views (and not just those of the vocal few) are taken into account when
coming to decisions. It also offers an important way of subjecting the effects of those
decisions to public scrutiny from a much wider range of informed points of view than is the
case at present.
We have described the way in which Japan has used information-technology
to collect and
coordinate
information from all round the world, to conduct extensive discussions through a
network of discussion groups linked to the mass media and a wider public debate to sift it for
good ideas, and to initiate action on the basis of the conclusions emerging from that debate.
This process has been applied to everything from clarifying the industrial goals which the
country came to espouse, finding out about and adopting new industrial techniques based on
incipient developments throughout the world, identifying, sifting and acting on research
dealing with new management and staff development arrangements which might be utilised
within companies, studying the workings of, and adapting, economic management techniques like the adoption of nontariff barriers to protect home markets, and studying the workings of every political economy on the globe and inventing nonmarket based ways of penetrating them. It was a comprehensive, information-based, management system utilising every available means to clarify goals and achieve them. (That the range of potentially pursuable values and the information on the probable consequences of pursuing each was limited only serves to underline many of the points made elsewhere in this book about the activities that are required if the information on which we base our decisions is to be as comprehensive as possible and if we are to have genuinely broadly based debate.)
Equality, Equity, and Diversity
There are many important reasons for emphasising diversity than those already discussed. Diversity is not only necessary if the needs of different sectors of the population are to be met: Is also an essential prerequisite to developing the diverse talents which people possess and to harnessing those talents. Most importantly, it is needed to provide a basis for finding a way forward. We need to encourage diversity so that forward-looking people can try out things which no one else thinks it will be possible to do. We need it if we are to be able to initiate multiple experiments and collect the information on the consequences of the different options that is required to clarify which activities are in the overall public interest and in the interests of the publics of which it is composed.
It is not simply a question of bringing the public to accept the need for equity in diversity.
Jaques 19.14 has shown that certain patterns of inequality in incomes are felt to be fair.
Klein 19.15 has shown that the most important factor determining levels of support for public
provision is not the overall quality of the provision, but whether it is felt to have been fairly
distributed. And, as we have seen, Lane 19.16 has shown that one of the triumphs of market
mythology is that it results in many people feeling that the vast inequalities which are
produced are fair. In this connection Rawls 19.17 has argued that inequalities are arbitrary
unless it is reasonable to expect that they will result in activities which are to everyone’s
advantage. Certain types of inequality like
the profits of businesses in America are
felt to
increase the overall quality of life. The question which needs to be addressed is then: “What
kinds of diversity and inequality are, in what circumstances, felt to be acceptable, equitable,
fair, and desirable?” Clearly there is a need for a public debate linked to the work of a cluster
of researchers with different orientations investigating in the area.
Information-Generation
We come now to the question of how the required information, ideas, and ways of thinking are to be generated.
We should look at some of the reasons why policy research has not delivered the hoped-for
benefits in the past. Despite the periodically encountered belief that “there is a whole research
industry out there”, expectations for the outcomes of social research have typically, as
Rothschild 19.18 noted, been wildly unrealistic. Whereas, in sciences like chemistry and
physics, there are thousands of well-funded
public and private research and development
institutes, the tendency in the social sciences has been to expect a single researcher, often
working in an academic setting making other demands, to produce, in a short period,
solutions to complex, social problems which hundreds of administrators have been unable to
solve in half a century.
Although unrealistic funding has been a problem, more fundamental barriers to the delivery
of the desired outcomes stem from inappropriate beliefs about how research and development
are to be conducted, and, more specifically, how the universities are to be organised and held
accountable.
We need to consider the following: (i) some of the developments which research is needed to
bring about; (ii) policy research units that need to analyse and evaluate the goals of policy as
well as the delivery mechanisms; (iii) the importance of scientists going well beyond their
data to make inferences which illuminate hidden sociological and systems processes; and (iv)
how the necessary enquiries are to be initiated, how the debate that is required to advance
understanding is to be conducted, and how that debate is to be linked to the planning process.
Boring though it is, this discussion is of the greatest importance.
The Tools and Procedures to be Developed Through Social Research.
Looking at some specific needs first, we need research to:
- Develop tools to assess quality of life so that progress and its opposite can be measured in a more appropriate and differentiated way than through GNP. We need social accounting tools so that human and biological costs can be set against benefits so that, for example, the isolation, stress, disease, and atmospheric pollution caused by centralised production units can be set against their advantages.
- Develop the tools needed to run the skills exchanges and local currencies that are required to disengage local wealth-creating activity from international markets and thus enable people to find ways of genuinely helping to improve the quality of life.
- Develop the means to evaluate and administer diversity in public provision e. g. housing, education, health care, etc. As we have seen, most people can have little effective choice of these things. We need to provide in each geographical area a range of options suited to people with different needs and priorities. Information on the short and longterm consequences of each option must be made available so that people can make meaningful choices between them. And, since it is not possible for people to have the most desirable and most costly provision in all areas of life, we need tools which will enable us to administer the system in a way which forces people as would a perfect marketplace to prioritise their desires and consider the costs. ( As has been indicated, in connection with education, the latter are not about choice between different options. They are, at best, about choice between alternative providers offering a greatly restricted range of programmes. To create genuine choice and variety it would be necessary to undertake research into curricula, alternative arrangements for selecting and deploying human resources in society, and the consequences of alternatives. Yet governments have been conspicuously unwilling to initiate such research.)
- Develop staff appraisal systems so that public servants who have engaged in any of the difficult and demanding activities that are necessary to the effective operation and improvement of modern society can get credit for their contributions.
- Develop the structures of public debate needed to generate alternative perspectives and implement and monitor a variety of pilot programmes with an eye on the overall operation of the system qua system.
The Need to Develop Understanding
At present we have little understanding of what the main characteristics of a sustainable society would look like, how problems of equity could or would be handled in a diversified, information-based, management system, or what arrangements it would be necessary to make to facilitate stepwise, systems-oriented (but not system-wide), experimentation, evaluation, and improvement.
There is still less understanding of how to achieve systemic change that
is to say, overall
change in systems which operate in such a way as to cancel changes introduced in a piecemeal
way into only one or two parts of the system, but in which attempts at system-wide
change are also doomed because our understanding of the operation of the overall system is
inadequate.
To illustrate why it is so important to have policy evaluation units whose function is to
advance understanding, we may return to the example of education. As we have seen, a great
deal of the money spent on “education” is wasted so far as the development of human
resources is concerned. But the reasons for this have not in the past been at all explicit, and
the steps which would need to be taken to overcome the problems have been still less clear.
One of the things which emerges from our work is that the reasons why politicians and
parents want more money to be spent on “education” stem from the sociological, not the
educational, functions of the system. In the 1950s and 1960s politicians argued that more
money should be spent on education on three grounds. First, it was said that, if we invested
more money in education, it would result in economic and social development which would
enable us to solve some of our conspicuous economic and social problems. Second, if
everyone got a good education, everyone would get a good job. And, third, if everyone had
more education it would contribute to the creation of a more equal, less divided, society.
Parents wanted more money to be spent on education because of the incontrovertible fact
that, if their children did not stay on at school and do well in the system, they were much less
likely to get good jobs.
Only the first of the politicians’ arguments had much to do with education per se (and even it
can now be seen to be false). Their other arguments overlook the fact that we are dealing with
a norm-referenced
system. In the end, everyone has to work harder to get the jobs they would
have had before.
The results of research suggest that the causes of the conspicuous failures of the educational
system are quite other than what seem to be. By “the conspicuous failures of the system” is
meant pupils’ “lack of motivation”, the failure of the projected economic and social
development to materialise, schools’ failure to help pupils to identify, develop, and get
recognition for their talents, schools’ failure to help most people develop the qualities needed
to lead their lives effectively, do their jobs effectively, and contribute as they would like to
society, and the failure of many pupils to get jobs any
jobs, never mind good ones. The
causes of these problems include the lack of understanding of how to nurture high-level
competencies, the absence of the tools needed to do so, and the absence of means of giving
pupils credit for such outcomes in the certification and placement process. But, more
fundamentally, they include an unwillingness to address the values problems inherent in
catering for variety.
It emerges that solution of the problems of the educational system requires us to develop, not
only an understanding of the hidden reality behind the observable defects of the system, but
also:
- An understanding of the educational processes necessary to nurture the qualities pupils actually need and how progress toward them is to be assessed.
- The tools teachers require to administer multiple-talent, educational programmes and assess the outcomes.
- Means of giving teachers credit for having contributed to the development of new ways of thinking about educational processes, new curricula, new ways of assessing progress toward the goals of the educational system, and participating in new ways in new arrangements for managing educational institutions.
- Ways of harnessing sociological forces (like need to legitimise the allocation of privilege) in such a way that they push all concerned toward the goals of the educational system rather than away from them. (This actually means including measures of a wider range of outcomes among those that are employed in the certification process. However, handling the moral dilemmas this poses requires yet another set of developments.)
- Changed public beliefs about the role of public servants and how public institutions should operate ... indeed, in the end, the introduction of new forms of democracy and bureaucracy.
Our objective in introducing this brief summary of material the presentation of which occupies several other books 19.19 has been to illustrate that the process of clarifying of the goals of public policy, assessing its effectiveness, identifying why it is not working properly, and finding out what to do about it is (i) heavily dependent on professional research of a more adventurous and problem-oriented nature than that to which we have grown accustomed and (ii) leads to very surprising conclusions which highlight crucially important voids in understanding.
Thinking is not only unacceptable, it is also difficult. So people are inclined to create
structures in which they can beat appraisal systems and pass off non-thought
as thought. But
perhaps more importantly, the human mind cannot cope with too many variables. They also
have limited energy. As Etzioni 19.20 put it: “rationality is anti-entropic
... that is, the normal
(or baseline)
state of human behaviour is ... non-rational;
for behaviour to be rational, even
in part, forces must be activated to pull it in the rational direction ... The `normal’ state is one
in which behaviour is not purposive, non-calculative,
governed by emotions and values,
potentially inconsistent and conflict-ridden,
indifferent to evidence, and under the influence
of “groupthink”
(i.e. individuals defer in their thinking to group-defined
facts,
interpretations, and conclusions even if they diverge significantly from objective reality).”
Etzioni does not maintain that rationality is rare: only that it is costly. His conclusion that
thinking is anti-entropic
and costly is confirmed in the work of psychological researchers like
Spearman 19.21 and Maistriaux 19.22 who have linked mental ability to “mental energy”.
Fortunately, however, a basic feature of life itself is that it is anti-entropic
and costly.
The Structures Required to Promote the Debate Needed to Advance Understanding
We have seen that policy research units need to be encouraged to evaluate the goals of policy not just the effectiveness of delivery mechanisms. In the case of education this would involve
a great deal of work outside the educational system and comprehensive evaluation of the effects of different types of educational programme and experiment.
The importance of comprehensive evaluations cannot be overstressed.
Failure to draw
attention to an important short or longterm
effect of a programme is more important than
accuracy in the assessment of an unimportant outcome. It is therefore essential to get a rough
index of all the short and longterm
effects of a particular activity.
Debate which advances understanding and focuses attention on neglected issues is also very
important. Social researchers have a responsibility to advance the public interest by
promoting public debate and contributing relevant information. The considerations they
include in, or omit from, their studies are of the greatest significance. This raises important
questions about the orientation and conduct of their research and the content, ownership, and
publication of their reports: Such reports are paid for by, and should therefore belong to, the
public, and not (as the government in the UK argued and wrote into law) the government of
the day.
This raises important questions about the definition of “loyalty” which it is appropriate to
apply to public servants should
it be to the public or the government? It also raises questions
about the role of the media in informing, facilitating, and conducting public debates. Only
through public debate can we surface and challenge the mythologies which lead people to
dismiss otherwise sensible suggestions for reform. Nevertheless, challenging mythology is
not thought to be the role of the scientist. Indeed it, like pressing for action on the basis of
results, is one of the surest ways in which a scientist can undermine his or her credibility.
We have seen that the task of facilitating discussion of goals, clarifying options, and
identifying routes to their achievement is no simple matter. The options which can be
envisaged and formulated are heavily dependent on a pervasive climate of innovation which
promotes multiple changes, on the introduction of numerous small-scale,
but carefully
evaluated, experiments based on systems understanding, and on fundamental research which
will make it possible to evolve new ways of thinking about and doing things. And the choice
between alternatives is heavily dependent on the quality and comprehensiveness of the
information available on their consequences.
Two entirely contradictory viewpoints on how these problems should be addressed have been
promoted. On the one hand it has been suggested that, in Thomson’s 19.23 terms, we need
clumsy institutions in which all sorts of people are involved in defining problems and doing
things. On the other hand it has been suggested that it will, in the end, be necessary to charge
public servants with the duty of acting as managers to come to good, discretionary judgments
on the basis of the available information and that a network of supervisory groups is required
to get them to perform this role effectively.
Both sets of developments are in fact essential and the tension between them cannot be
resolved.
Concluding Comment
What has been shown is that there is no shortage of work to be done to improve the quality of life in (i.e. the real wealth of) and the sustainability of modern society: The quality and variety of public provision, and the delivery system need to be improved. Energy-positive 18 agriculture and energy-efficient manufacturing will be much more labour intensive than our current agricultural and manufacturing processes. Community care which meets people’s most important needs will be more labour intensive than drugs based health care and commoditised medicine. More people will be needed to administer public provision effectively, to contribute to the supervision of the public service, and to evaluate and improve the way society is run.
Although the costs of this activity pale into insignificance when compared with the huge
costs of providing and evaluating variety and choice through the marketplace and those of
administering the public service as we do, such observations invariably raise the question of
how all this work is to be paid for. The reformulation of this question in a way which makes
an answer possible is dependent on the evolution of new concepts of political economy and
the evolution of new accounting tools. The need for both has already been emphasised.
However, the core insight required is acceptance that the key problem to be tackled is that of
finding ways of redeploying
the labour available to us to undertake activities which will
improve the chances of our society’s survival and the quality of life of all. Since it has not
been necessary to use the word money to make this statement, it follows that the task is
primarily a managerial not an economic one. One of the key facts we have to hang onto in
the tide of confused thinking around this area is that activities which enhance the quality of
life contribute directly to wealth creation. A society with a high quality of life is a wealthy
society. One does not have to have wealth before one can do the things that are necessary.
Fundamental among the inventions we need is, therefore, new, politico-economic
theory
which recognises this fact and provides us with an appropriate framework for thinking about
the issues.
Notes
19.1 Deming, 1982, 1993
19.2 Raven, 1984
19.3 Deming, 1982, 1993; Dore and Sako, 1989; Graham and Raven, 1987; Jaques, 1989; Kanter, 1985; Klemp, Munger and Spencer, 1977; Raven, 1984, 1990
19.4 For evidence and a fuller discussion see McClelland (1961), Milbrath (1989), and Revans (1980).
19.5 The actual value of such networks in turning round the operation of an irrigation scheme has been documented by Korten and Siy (1989).
19.6 Chubb, 1963; Miller, 1992
19.7 Thompson, 1979
19.8 Kanter, 1985; Roberts, E.B., 1968; Rogers, 1962/83
19.9 Kanter, 1985
19.10 Graham and Raven, 1987; Raven, 1984
19.11 Howard, 1980
19.12 Walberg, 1979
19.13 Raven, 1984; Graham and Raven, 1987; McClelland et al, 1958; McClelland, 1961
19.14 Jaques, 1989
19.15 Klein, 1980
19.16 Lane, 1979, 1986
19.17 Rawls, 1971
19.18 Rothschild, 1982
19.19 Raven, 1977, 1994
19.20 Etzioni, 1985
19.21 Spearman, 1927
19.22 Maistriaux, 1959
19.23 Thompsom, 1979
