I read chapter four of Open Government (O’Reilly, 2010) titled The Single Point of Failure authored by Beth Simone Noveck this afternoon and it got me thinking about how government currently works and what we’ll lose by moving to a collaborative democracy.
I’ve been involved with several panels, steering committees, working groups both internal and external over the last ten years of my career and such groups are typically carefully crafted and managed beasts where the emphasis is more about relationships and politics than content and getting on with the job. It sounds like a terribly inefficient way to work and at first glance I’m all for seeing such bureaucracy torn down and replaced by openness, transparency, external participation and a focus on outcomes. However as with anything there’s more to it than can be told at first glance.
For example, environmentalists typically focus on one factor without considering economical impact and big business will make decisions without considering the environmental impact. It’s all a balancing act that requires the consideration of multiple perspectives.
We’ve already seen successful examples of collaborative democracy but it’s far from pervasive amongst any of the leading Gov 2.0 nations. What will happen as pressure from leaders and citizens forces government agencies to undergo the cultural and procedural change to collaborative and fully-integrated consultation?
What aspects of bureaucracy that at first glance we dismiss as absurd might actually be beneficial? What of all the politics and careful relationship management that goes on even within single agencies … because such careful manipulation is done either rightly or wrongly for more strategic reasons than achieving immediate outcomes and decisions and whilst such chess-playing might impede movement at an operational level perhaps it’s greasing wheels at a more strategic level that in the end actually help at the lower level.
If one person is running at 15 km/h and the other person is walking at 3 km/h but is doing so on a train that’s travelling 120 km/h then the person who’s walking is travelling faster than the runner even though he’s merely walking.
As I said, I think all bureaucracy is an impediment to progress and needs to be replaced with agile, collaborative government that involves the relevant expertise wherever it is to inform policy development and service design and to level the playing field between citizens and government because the public has a lot of value to add to the process and with the right tools and frameworks in place can together do a far better job than the public service is doing currently and save time and money, develop more useful and sustainable solutions and be more responsive.
But nonetheless the question still has to be asked – what flowers will be ripped out with the weeds?
Is the bureaucracy and politics around the formation and grooming of such committees just a stupid game or is there some good in it that we should analyse, learn from and integrate into the uptake of collaborative democracy?
// purecaffeine.com: user experience design, social experience design, social media, Gov 2.0, design thinking and service design blog by designer Nathanael Boehm, Canberra, Australia. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
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Nat, we’re stuck with the bureaucracy. It has ever been thus.
Over a very long time, not quite evolutionary scale, but close, we’ll manage to reduce that bureaucracy as culture shifts and generations of public servants who accept the current model move on. But in 20 years, we’ll still have these problems. They aren’t going anywhere soon.
The viable answer is to learn to work within the system. Gentle, tolerable subversion where you can. Minor revolution on occasion. Mostly, just getting on and doing good work so your views are well-regarded.