Make Institutions and Leaders More Fallible
Read this on O’Reilly Radar: Andy Oram getting to the Personal Democracy Forum in NYC:
I hooked my friends through the idea of an irreversible political shift. Not a regulatory regime that could be dismantled like the agencies responsible for civil rights, or a mandate that could be defunded like federal housing initiatives–no, in this case a movement integrating the public into government functioning, and that therefore creates an external constituency that helps to perpetuate the system; an ecosystem of non-governmental organizations that will react precipitously and aggressively if the government tries to shut them out.
Every day I’m more convinced that everyone’s first instinct to plan and sell solutions will become one of those thing-of-the-pasts; a century from now historians will pick apart the immodesty of our age. I can imagine them writing
They thought they had the economy under control because they acted quickly not to make the same mistakes that were made at the dawn of the Great Depression. But they were blind to their own mistakes — or rather, that was their mistake…
Our institutions — both in politics and business — are too exposed to the inevitability of human error. It isn’t mistakes we need to be rid of, it’s the notion we can ever be rid of mistakes that needs to be eliminated.
Science is one model to emulate (read on fallibilism). Silicon Valley is another (which I’ve discussed at length).
Those models accommodate mistakes. They have processes for quickly mobilizing to learn and keep moving forward, building on mistakes rather than grudging or sweeping them under the rug.
Oram covered this in his post:
Jeff Jarvis listed, as one of his four key elements of change, the ability for government to fail without risk of recrimination. David Weinberger approached the same theme from a different direction, talking about how all wisdom is provisional, emerging, and scattered. Vivek Kundra and Beth Noveck–who will be speaking tomorrow–have repeatedly made similar statements in the context of bringing the innovation culture of the Silicon Valley to the area around Foggy Bottom.
In my first ramp-up blog for PDF I talked about a four-part cycle for successful public/government collaboration. Perhaps we need to start the cycle earlier, or add some kind of parallel cycle, to recognize that the public has to make the commitment asked by Jarvis: the promise to show forbearance when the government fails and to grant it a mandate to do innovation.
The point is that everybody will fail eventually, organizations and institutions will fail, rules will fail, all plans and designs will fail…
The important thing is to make sure that when people and institutions do finally fail, there will be enough viable alternatives nearby to take over their key roles and resources.
I’m not just talking about “too big to fail” banks and other organizations. I’m also talking about the people in them — in both politics and business.
Too few people have too much much power and attention concentrated around them. When they screw up we should be able to say, “Well let’s try something else for a while,” not “this person’s career is finished and now we’re starting all over again with new leadership.”
Related posts from BrianFrank.ca:
- Cisco and the Internal Economics of Organizations
- Ex Industrialism
- ‘Selfless’ and ‘Selfish’ are Both Myths
- The Silicon Valley Model
- Our Society of Overachievers
More from the archives:
Tags: fallibility, open, open government, pragmatism
[...] and the potential for tremendous harm that can occur when that power is concentrated around too-few decision-makers, we need everyone to be involved in the process of making decisions, and we need it all to be [...]