Check 17 - Governments - Experiment

The Hidden Power

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 bureaucratic process.

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.

https://oecd-opsi.org

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

---

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.