 It is hard to believe that anyone still believes that the
untrammeled market works in the best interest of anyone except the rich
and powerful. Oligopolies gouging the customer and eliminating
innovation and competition. Corporations bullying governments
and regulators to eliminate or not enforce regulations that affect
them, while at the same time prohibiting the customers and public from
suing them for negligence, fraud, theft and disgraceful social and
environmental conduct. Corporations stripping the nutrition out of and
poisoning our food while subjecting farmed animals to unimaginable and
endless cruelty -- because it's profitable. The whole capitalist system is a miserable
failure, and it's only the corporatists' control of the media (and
hence their ability to brainwash us into believing the system actually
works), that has kept us from rising up and dismantling it.
Well, actually that's not the only thing keeping us from overthrowing it: We don't know what to replace it with.
Socialist systems don't seem to work. Totalitarian fascist systems
certainly don't work. So now we're indoctrinated into believing that
there are no other systems, and that we're stuck with the capitalist
(or more accurately, corporatist) system that is destroying our world (and eliminating the middle class in the process).
Not good enough. We have to find a better way.
I have written often about a model I call Natural Enterprise. The major differences between this model and the status quo are:
- Natural Enterprise is a completely flat organizational structure, a
partnership of equals with no hierarchy and collective decision-making.
As a result it doesn't scale well -- it has to stay small, and
if expansion is absolutely needed the Natural Enterprise splits into
two or more small enterprises rather than growing into a big one.
That's a good thing.
- Natural Enterprise is a steady-state, sustainable model. You need
to be innovative to survive, but you don't need to grow. If producing X
amount meets the partners' and customers' needs this year, why should
it ever be necessary to produce more than X?
- Natural Enterprise is beholden to no one. It is organically
financed and virally marketed, so it needs no 'start-up' or 'venture'
capital from outsiders, and it needs and has no 'shareholders'.
- Natural Enterprise recognizes its inherent social and environmental
responsibility as an integral part of a community. There can be no
adversarial interest. If the Natural Enterprise is not contributing
positively to the social and environmental well-being of the community,
it is not doing its job and must change.
- The objectives of a Natural Enterprise are set by its partners in
collaboration with its customers and its community. Those objectives
usually include being a joyful and fulfilling place to work, meeting an
important, unmet social need, and providing enough (a sufficiency,
as Princen would put it) to meet the needs of each of its partners. You
aren't paid according to how much you accomplish, you are paid
according to what you need (e.g. partners who support children or elders will need
more than partners who don't). If you need more than the Natural
Enterprise can afford to sustainably provide to you, your partners will
either help you to become more effective (so it can) or ask you to
leave the enterprise.
There is nothing terribly new about this model. This is how most
'uncivilized' cultures and almost all non-human cultures work. It is
the model that was and is used by guilds and communes and co-ops, and
even some non-government organizations (NGOs). It is a self-limiting,
responsive, resilient model. Its time has come (again).
You're probably wondering what all this has to do with the title
of this article. The answer is that the Natural Enterprise model, with
a bit of tweaking, could also be the model for how government could
work much more effectively than it does today.
Over the last few months, in my contract work for the government, I've learned the following:
- A lot of public sector workers really are committed to public
service, to making the world a better place. They're not doing
government or NFP work for the money, for fame, to assuage guilt or
because they're too lazy or unqualified for 'private sector' work.
- Public sector organizations, like private sector organizations, get
increasingly dysfunctional as they get larger and more centralized.
More and more effort is spent justifying, fighting over and allocating
increasingly large budgets, and less and less is left to actually do
anything.
- Public sector organizations are severely constrained by the
risk-aversion of politicians. If confidential customer information gets
leaked by a private company, an employee gets fired, the company is embarrassed, but life goes on. When public information gets leaked by a
government department, the opposition party makes it into a
scandal and the government falls. So public organizations are
relentlessly discouraged from knowledge-sharing and innovation.
- Privatization of public service work is inherently foolish. As John Ralston Saul (The Unconscious Civilization) has shown in his research, the public sector is generally a little
less expensive than the private sector at accomplishing the same work:
salaries are lower, people are more altruistic, and no profit margin is
tacked onto costs (offset in part by the fact that private sector
people tend to be a little more skilled and hence a little more effective).
Much work has been done over the years to try to find ways to
measure and improve the 'efficiency' (called 'value for money') of
public sector work. This is driven in part by anti-government
propaganda (from those who see profit in dismantling government
completely), in part by big, overly-centralized (and sometimes
understaffed) government bureaucracies, and in part by the presumption
that, in the absence of a profit measure, some other measures and
processes are somehow needed to prevent public sector people from just
spending a fortune and doing nothing (that presumption coming
often from people who need a profit motive to do good work -- or any
work -- and hence project that same need onto everybody else). It's
basically catholic dogma -- we are all inherently lazy and sinful and
need to be coerced, whipped and watched carefully to make us
'productive'.
But before I get to my undogmatic solution, I want to explain what
many governments are doing to try to make themselves more efficient.
They are dismantling (slowly) large departments and replacing them with
a combination of three types of small, semi-autonomous public
organizations:
- Directorates (policy-makers who set standards for both the public and private sector),
- Auditors (who monitor and enforce compliance with laws, standards and regulations), and
- Agencies (with focused, specialized objectives who actually do the
work that the private sector is either incompetent or unwilling to do
-- given the lack of profit).
Many of these new Directorates, Auditors and Agencies are still
muddled about what they should do, or how to do it, but they're
learning, and the model itself is a pretty good one -- mainly because
the resultant entities are small and focused on doing one or two things
very well.
So the challenge then becomes How can we best organize, staff and
measure the performance of Directorates, Auditors and Agencies?
There are two opposing principles underlying the concept of 'value
for money'. The first is the idea of 'critical mass' -- it requires
achieving sufficient scale that people can focus on what they do best
instead of having to do everything, and that there is enough expertise
in the organization to be able to do everything it must essentially do
competently without having to outsource.
The second is the idea of 'diseconomies of scale' -- the 'small is
beautiful' principle that says that beyond a certain size the amount of
bureaucracy, support and lost information increases exponentially as
the size, budget and numbers of staff and locations increase linearly.
Anyone who has worked for a large organization knows this point is
reached quite soon after the point of critical mass.
So there is a sweet spot, illustrated in the diagram above,
between the critical mass point and the point of growing diseconomies,
which represents the optimal 'value for money' on any human collective
endeavour, whether in the public or private sector. That's the spot we
want to find in the Directorates, Auditors and Agencies (and probably
in Natural Enterprises too).
That's the horizontal axis -- the amount of budget and resources
we want to 'invest' in any organization. How about the vertical axis?
In traditional corporations it's profit. In Natural Enterprise it's
achievement of the set of agreed-upon objectives of the partners of the
enterprise, the ones that attain their collective well-being as they've
identified it. For Agencies the vertical axis could be, analogously,
achievement of the collective well-being objectives of the Agency (the
well-being of the Agency's public beneficiaries). For example, in a
university or school this well-being could include the learning
and employment or self-employment success of the students. In a
hospital or public health agency it could include an improvement in
health outcomes (fewer illnesses, shorter wait times, faster and more
complete recovery). In a police or security force it could include
crime and war prevention, success at keeping the peace, and dealing
quickly and effectively with crimes and hostilities when they do occur.
Likewise for Auditors: For environmental Auditors this well-being
could include reduction in pollution levels. For corporate Auditors it
could include reductions in fraud. For hospital Auditors it could
include improvements in health outcomes. In the chart above I've called
these objectives Collective Well-Being Outcomes.
How about policy-making Directorates? Because politicians are
usually focused on what's popular rather than what's practical, they
rely on government policy-makers to actually draft the standards and
regulations (and sometimes even the laws) to reflect the political
intent of the government of the day. I'm not sure we need such entities
anymore. I recently suggested
an Open Source government model that would take the place of such
policy-making and regulation drafting, and open it up to public
imagination and scrutiny. This model could essentially take over the
role of determining, with each Agency and Auditor, what the specific
standards of operation for these entities would be, and what Collective
Well-Being Outcomes they should be striving for.
We the people would then have a say not only in the laws of the
land, but in how the Agencies and Auditors that carry out public
service work and ensure compliance with those laws do their jobs. They
might even help these public organizations assess what the sweet spot
in the diagram above is for each organization, and hence what resources
it needs to best do its job.
The final challenge then becomes how to staff and how to evaluate
performance of those staff. If these organizations are small, they
should be able to self-manage just as Natural Enterprises do, and
collectively select the best group of people, given the resources
available at the 'sweet spot', to achieve their Collective Well-Being
Outcomes. They should be given enough time to achieve those Outcomes --
Rome wasn't built in a day -- but with continuous monitoring it may
become apparent that even with time they are not going to be able to
achieve those Outcomes. Then you send in the Auditor-General organization to figure
out the problem: Are the Outcomes that have been set too onerous, or is
the group just not the right group to achieve them? If it's the latter,
then the foundering Agency or Regulator should be allowed to fail
exactly as a Natural Enterprise does when it repeatedly fails to meet
its Collective Well-Being Outcomes -- it should be dissolved, and
tenders invited for a new group to try. The Auditor-General that pulled
the plug would have the authority to select the winning tender. But as
an Auditor, it, too, would have its own set of Collective Well-Being
Outcomes set for it through the Open Source government model: Its
success as an evaluator of tenders would determine whether it, too, was
doing its job effectively enough to continue as Auditor-General.
Conservatives won't like this model, because it assumes that most
people want to do a good job and can be largely trusted to self-manage.
Liberals may not like it because it makes government entrepreneurial.
But the existing corporatist model (deregulate and privatize
government) has only led to a crippling of public services, an
out-of-control, dysfunctional and unsustainable corpocracy, and the
disengagement of many who might believe in and excel at a life of
public service.
We have to do better. The old models don't work, any of them. It's time to try something new. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 