Excellent post, learned many useful techniques I did not know about!
One interrogation I have -it would seem that most of these decisions seek to reduce variance / promote convergence towards outcomes broadly seen as reasonable. Accordingly, they seem to be highly bureaucratic, often adding new layers of processes before any decision is made. The overriding principle seems to be to avoid any major foreseeable mistake for which the institution could be blamed.
However, as evidenced by the success of startups in competitive markets dominated by large actors, there are also areas in which you want to instead increase variance, action, and iniative. Some best practices in this space include various forms of individual empowerment and accountability (putting just one individual in charge of a particular area and tracking their performance through OKRs) and a tolerance for experimentation.
The reason this works is that, in practice, the best action you could take may not make it past a committee—especially if it involves innovation—whereas an average, reasonable sounding action will.
It is not just a question of missing out on positive opportunities, however. By only ever taking average and reasonable sounding actions, bureaucracies atrophy and lose their ability to respond to changing threats quickly and decisively enough. For years, Putin, a destructive—but nimble—actor was able to run circles around slow moving institutions like the EU and its member states by taking advantage of this weakness. Slowness in approving effective vaccines against a raging pandemic killing millions is another recent example of this.
Meanwhile, we know a culture of experimentation can arise in the public sector. This gets very Progress Studies-y and I am sure many are familiar with works such as The Entrepreneurial State by Mariana Mazzucato and so on, but there is something to this literature. Some of the biggest successes of the United States government in modern times have been achieved through this—the New Deal (“it is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails, try another”), DARPA, putting humans on the moon, Operation Warp Speed…
This is not to say all institutions should work like this all the time. There seem to be very good reasons to build consensus and raise the threshold of evidence before certain decisions are made—perhaps when you claim to be acting on behald of the community and/or the risk of your own action (VS risk of inaction) is high.
My question rather is which types of institutions/decisions would benefit from more from a culture of caution and consensus VS experimentation and accountability. Perhaps there is literature on this topic I’m not aware of—if so I would love to know about it, if not it would be a promising area to explore.
Thank you for writing this. This is a really useful insight that I’ll be thinking more about as I engage more with IIDM — I have definitely focused disproportionately more on adding good processes than eliminating bad ones. This could be because I’m not very familiar in general with common processes within institutions, as my studies have really only focused on individual decision-making/rationality so far.
Below are a few quick thoughts on that.
Following your Putin-EU example, I wonder how much of Russia’s nimbleness is enabled by one man having so much decision-making power, which might both enable quick decision-making as well as democratic backsliding.
Although you could argue that quicker experimentation might pay off in the long run, I would worry that modern states having too few checks and balances might increase the risk of solo actors making catastrophically bad decisions. At the same time, I worry about vast bureaucracies failing to make important decisions, and that being equally catastrophic.
I agree, as you say, that the need for “caution and consensus vs. experimentation and accountability” depends on the institution and the decision to be made. I’m also not aware of attempts to describe when exactly you would want more of the former vs. the latter.
If you (or others) have good resources on eliminating bad processes/bureaucracy, I’d love to see them.
Excellent post, learned many useful techniques I did not know about!
One interrogation I have -it would seem that most of these decisions seek to reduce variance / promote convergence towards outcomes broadly seen as reasonable. Accordingly, they seem to be highly bureaucratic, often adding new layers of processes before any decision is made. The overriding principle seems to be to avoid any major foreseeable mistake for which the institution could be blamed.
However, as evidenced by the success of startups in competitive markets dominated by large actors, there are also areas in which you want to instead increase variance, action, and iniative. Some best practices in this space include various forms of individual empowerment and accountability (putting just one individual in charge of a particular area and tracking their performance through OKRs) and a tolerance for experimentation.
The reason this works is that, in practice, the best action you could take may not make it past a committee—especially if it involves innovation—whereas an average, reasonable sounding action will.
It is not just a question of missing out on positive opportunities, however. By only ever taking average and reasonable sounding actions, bureaucracies atrophy and lose their ability to respond to changing threats quickly and decisively enough. For years, Putin, a destructive—but nimble—actor was able to run circles around slow moving institutions like the EU and its member states by taking advantage of this weakness. Slowness in approving effective vaccines against a raging pandemic killing millions is another recent example of this.
Meanwhile, we know a culture of experimentation can arise in the public sector. This gets very Progress Studies-y and I am sure many are familiar with works such as The Entrepreneurial State by Mariana Mazzucato and so on, but there is something to this literature. Some of the biggest successes of the United States government in modern times have been achieved through this—the New Deal (“it is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails, try another”), DARPA, putting humans on the moon, Operation Warp Speed…
This is not to say all institutions should work like this all the time. There seem to be very good reasons to build consensus and raise the threshold of evidence before certain decisions are made—perhaps when you claim to be acting on behald of the community and/or the risk of your own action (VS risk of inaction) is high.
My question rather is which types of institutions/decisions would benefit from more from a culture of caution and consensus VS experimentation and accountability. Perhaps there is literature on this topic I’m not aware of—if so I would love to know about it, if not it would be a promising area to explore.
Thank you for writing this. This is a really useful insight that I’ll be thinking more about as I engage more with IIDM — I have definitely focused disproportionately more on adding good processes than eliminating bad ones. This could be because I’m not very familiar in general with common processes within institutions, as my studies have really only focused on individual decision-making/rationality so far.
Below are a few quick thoughts on that.
Following your Putin-EU example, I wonder how much of Russia’s nimbleness is enabled by one man having so much decision-making power, which might both enable quick decision-making as well as democratic backsliding.
Although you could argue that quicker experimentation might pay off in the long run, I would worry that modern states having too few checks and balances might increase the risk of solo actors making catastrophically bad decisions. At the same time, I worry about vast bureaucracies failing to make important decisions, and that being equally catastrophic.
I agree, as you say, that the need for “caution and consensus vs. experimentation and accountability” depends on the institution and the decision to be made. I’m also not aware of attempts to describe when exactly you would want more of the former vs. the latter.
If you (or others) have good resources on eliminating bad processes/bureaucracy, I’d love to see them.