Integrity at Scale Blog

Not a Competent Nation

In politics as in our jobs, we tend to be specialists.  Some specialize in saving wildlife, some in defending the freedom to choose, or the right to life, or the freedom to bear arms, or for restrictions on the sale of arms to those with criminal records.  And so on. 

Our specialties teach us to see the world with blinkers on.   We have some clarity on matters that draw our interest; we may not be conversant with any number of other areas.  Because breadth of view is seldom a priority, it is understandable that we fail to appreciate the pervasiveness of our nation's incompetence. 

Consider just the following:

Does America do a good job of protecting and updating its manufacturing sector?  No.  One recent study compares 40 nations on the amount of vigor with which they promote their manufacturing future.  On that set of metrics, the U.S. finishes dead last.

Does America protect prosperity for all its citizens?  No.  More than half of the nation's income gains over the past thirty years have gone to those in the top ten percent. 

Does America have a financial sector that does its best to protect economic stability and steady growth?  No.

Does America have an energy sector that understands the reality of global warming, its irreversibility, and the urgent need to change course?   No.

Does America have a medical sector that does its best to be affordable?  Or a medical sector that costs $1 trillion a year more than anyone else's medical sector would cost for a population of our size?  We have the world's most overpriced medical industry.

Does America have a real estate industry that's determined to curb stormwater runoff, protect streams, and reverse decades of ghettoization?  No, No, and No.

Does America have an agricultural industry that's determined to halt water pollution and the creation of dead zones in the ocean?  No.

Does America have an agricultural industry that fear the creation of antibiotic resistant pathogens, and therefore avoids nonstop administration of antibiotics?  No.  

Does America have a food industry that's dedicated to the prevention of obesity and diabetes?  No.

Does America have a public school system that engages all children, educates all children, and graduates all children?  No.  Not hardly.

Does America have a strategy for metropolitan area growth that helps commuters get back and forth to work without congestion?  Are you kidding?

Does America have a Congress and a Senate that routinely demonstrate an adult spirit of fiscal responsibility?  No.

Do American states use responsible methods for redistricting themselves after each Census?  No.  They prefer gerrymandering.  And they don't mind electing ideologues on the left and right alike.

Does America have a fiscally sound approach to funding Social Security?  No.

Do America's political parties address the nation's long-range future in a thoughtful and responsible way?  No.

Is America competent enough to thrive in the twenty-first century?  Well.  No. 

Think about it.  On issue after issue after issue, America drops the ball.  This can't be an accident.  Incompetence has become our settled habit.

Something has to change.

Steven Howard Johnson

 

 

 

 

Two Outtakes

I have just added two Outtakes to the blog, chapter drafts that didn't make it into the book manuscript in its (nearly) final version. 

One looks at human nature by asking the simplest question.  How do we square the way we understand atomic particles with what we experience as sensation and consciousness?  We don't, really.  Neuroscience debates consciousness, but at a superficial level.  There's  a deep mystery, here.  Let's acknowledge its presence.

The second opens the question of how government reinvents itself, inside the bureaucracy.  It can be such a slow process.  Virginia's Governor Warner, a few years back, signed a ten year, hundred million dollar contract to modernize the Commonwealth's IT capabilities.  How, one wonders, can it possibly take ten years to rework IT systems, even if ninety-some agencies are involved.  There may be a better answer.  A much better answer.

Outtakes are listed as category 23. 

 

23.1 Rethinking Human Nature

 

The Building Blocks of Civic Wisdom

As a people, we have many different points of view about civic life.  We debate the size of government, the interests it should favor, the agendas it should pursue.  Whatever our views on civic matters, they are colored by our cultural assumptions.  And our views on culture, in turn, are shaped by assumptions about human nature.  Are human beings naturally bad, naturally good, or somewhat unruly with the capacity to improve?  Some of us are optimists about human nature, some of us are pessimists, and some of us are in between. 

I begin this section of the book with a chapter about human nature.  Our civic life as a nation is organized around our ideas about self-government and around the institutions that those ideas have led us to create.  And our ideas about self-government rest in part on notions about human nature.  I have never been satisfied with the haphazard generalizations we use for describing human nature; in this chapter I offer an approach to conceptualizing human nature which I think lays a stronger foundation.  The more thoughtful we can be about human nature, the more thoughtful we can be about our larger civic ideas.

The following chapter addresses Culture.  Culture is an expression of human nature, and it comes in many varieties.  Culture is partly biological; it helps us hang together as families and as tribes.  Tribal survival depended on the strength of  tribal culture, strongly suggesting that our biology inclines us to be cultural creatures.  But Culture is also a choice.  The Culture we choose, for the morrow, does not have to replicate exactly the Culture we receive, from yesterday.  It is a difficult subject.  Culture is a carrier of tribal truths, but “truths” in a cultural sense are at risk of losing validity when exposed to alternative “truths.”  Culture is combustible.  It can generate violence, it can rationalize violence.  It is important, as citizens of a self-governing republic, to think carefully about Culture and how it guides and affects our behavior.  And whether we want to be authors of a higher and better Culture for ourselves.

I start with human nature. 

 

The Riddle of Sensation

There are many ways to think about human nature.  Some religious traditions see human nature as shaped by human sinfulness.  Adam sinned against God and the curse of that original sin is with us still.  Biologists see human nature as rooted in our biological characteristics.  Psychologists and sociologists see human nature as somewhat more plastic, as an expression of culture and cultural conditioning.  Change the culture, in other words, and human nature will change along with it.  Yet no one from any tradition starts from a rigorous appreciation of the inexplicable mystery at the heart of who we are.  This riddle is often posed as “the consciousness question.” 

In recent years, we have seen considerable attention paid to this fascinating riddle.  We humans have a quality that we experience as consciousness.  We know we are conscious beings, but we do not know how to explain consciousness.  Neuroscientists and philosophers and psychologists have taken their turns at bat, but no one has knocked the ball out of the park.

The question is self-evidently important.  Without consciousness, how would we get anything done?  To my way of thinking, the discussion we need to hold does not begin with consciousness, it begins with something more basic.  Why is it that humans, or living creatures of any kind, are capable of experiencing sensations?  As I see it, the “consciousness question” is but a special case of the “experiencing sensations question.”

The experiencing of sensation is so natural that we take it for granted.  And yet, consider this.  We have no mental framework of any kind that explains to us why it is possible for a living creature made up of atoms and molecules and cells to experience sensation.  No one has a satisfactory explanation – no one in science, no one in religion, no one in philosophy, no one in psychology. 

Roll those words on your tongue.  “Experience sensation.”  “Experience sensation.”  What do I mean by that?

I mean everything.  Experience pain.  Pleasure.  Experience vanilla, experience chocolate. Experience sadness.  Or anger.  Or lust.  Experience hunger.  Beauty.  Humor.  Whatever it is we can experience, from internal stimuli as well as external stimuli, all these phenomena belong to the universe of sensations.

This is not just a human capacity – presumably all creatures within the animal kingdom have similar capacities.  I don’t rule out the possibility that plants can experience sensation, but I am most interested in understanding the animal kingdom’s ability to experience sensation.  Experiencing a sensation is a pre-verbal capability, a capacity that is present in a wide range of life forms.  This is where the mystery of life begins, where the touch of the divine is possibly what we feel.

As children we learn a simple mental rule.  The human body has five senses, we are told, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching.  These are a given.  We are equipped by Nature with stimulus detectors.  An odor stimulates the sense of smell.  A sound stimulates the sense of hearing.   We don’t have to understand the senses; they just are what they are.  Yet in classifying the world this way, we bypass the central riddle, the central miracle. 

The mystery of interest lies not in the stimulus itself, but rather in the body’s capacity to experience the sensation that the stimulus evokes.  In some unexplained way, a living creature generates within itself an “experiencing” of sensation. 

Isn’t that remarkable?  Think about what this actually means.  If I am to experience a sensation, the atoms and molecules and cells of my body must be capable of generating an “experiencing” state, and adjusting the quality of that state according to the nature of the stimulus.

But where does the capacity to generate an “experiencing sensation state” come from?  Yesterday I ate squash, perhaps, and rice, and chicken, and lettuce, and tomatoes, and a cookie.  I drank some water.  I breathed, in and out, all day long.  Today, with this air-fuel mixture present in my system, I sit here at my computer pondering an issue.  I experience puzzlement – a sensation.  And I reflect that today’s oxygen and yesterday’s food molecules – mostly hydrocarbons – now contribute to the energy in my body and therefore contribute to the experiencing of sensation.  And the experiencing of consciousness.

Does this mean my squash and rice and chicken and lettuce were themselves “conscious” in any meaningful sense of that term?  Before I ate them?  I doubt it.  But once they had been eaten, did they have the capacity to support the experiencing of sensation?  Obviously yes. 

Like everyone else, I am a bag of molecules hung on a skeleton and wrapped in a sheath of skin.  Everything that I am, today, all the molecules of my being, started out as food, or drink, or air, in the relatively recent past.  These resources flow into my body, flow through my body, and flow out again.  And during all the time that these flows of food and drink and air are present within me, they support my “experiencing of sensation.”

 Let’s ponder the matter  of love, one of humanity’s most treasured sensations.  Without food, without hydrocarbons, without oxygen, the sensation of love would be impossible, would it not?  Of course.  But do we therefore conclude that the sensation of love consists essentially of hydrogen and carbon and oxygen?  Saying that I am capable of “experiencing sensation” merely because I breathe oxygen and eat hydrocarbons and drink water, well, that tells us everything and nothing.

This is a very elusive riddle.  We really don’t know how to explain the leap from biochemical combustion to the experiencing of sensation. 

Let’s think for a moment about why Science has so little to offer.  Part of the explanation surely lies in matters of organization and turf.  Science is, among other things, a collection of disciplines, and as with human organization of all kinds, it promotes a silo mentality.  No single discipline sees itself as charged with explaining how it is that raw matter ingested by a living creature is capable of “experiencing sensation” once it has become part of that creature. 

Such an explanation certainly isn’t the responsibility of the physicist.  Physicists may understand the world of subatomic particles that come together as neutrons and protons and electrons, and they may know something about particle mass and particle energy and particle states.  Show me, though, within the physicist’s modeling of the world an explanation for the collective capacity of atoms to generate the experiencing of sensation.  It isn’t in the physicist’s job description.

Nor does the experiencing of sensation belong within the responsibility domain of the chemist.  Chemists are students of molecules – how they come together, how they change shapes, how they break apart, how they absorb and release energy.  Does chemistry require a theory about the experiencing of sensation?  Well, no. As a scientific discipline, why would chemistry require a theory of experiencing sensation?  Should an offbeat chemist aspire to find such a theory, odds are that he or she would fast hit a wall.

Well, if not physicists or chemists, what about biologists?  Does a biologist require a working theory about experiencing sensation?  Again, the answer is, “Not really.”  Biologists can do perfectly well observing species of plants and species of animals and how they grow and feed and reproduce.  They can collect and observe and categorize; they can dissect and analyze and write up their findings.  All a biologist really needs is a stimulus-response model.  If the creature receives Stimulus X, observation tells us that Response Y will follow.   One can be a biologist without knowing what it is about the physical properties of atomic particles that make possible the experiencing of sensation inside living organisms.

Even the psychopharmacologist doesn’t have to explain the process by which a living being generates the experiencing of a sensation.  It is enough to know that certain chemical compounds can have a useful effect on those whose sensations run toward depression, or toward hyperactivity. 

Some might argue that neuroscientists are on the case and are within reach of knowing how consciousness works.  I have my doubts. Neuroscientists are doing wonderful work to map the geography of the human brain.  A neuroscientist can wire a subject with sensors and ask the subject to imagine a sailboat, or a snake, or a pair of trumpets, or a crying baby.  From previous experience, the neuroscientist will have an educated hypothesis about which part of the subject’s brain will light up as he hears each phrase on the list of images.  Quite often she will be right.  But does this help us understand the experiencing of sensation?  No. 

To grasp the dilemma more clearly, let’s do a thought experiment.  Imagine aliens from outer space arriving on our planet for a visit.  Though advanced in many respects, these aliens have no ears.  Evolution never gave them the ability to hear.  They communicate by other methods.  Yet even though wholly deaf, they do understand that energy waves pass through the air, and as skilled technicians they possess sensors that can detect such energy waves.

Let us imagine further that our charmingly deaf aliens take on the project of analyzing a symphony orchestra.  They draw up a research plan.  Sensors are to be placed throughout the concert hall, and as the orchestra plays, those sensors will gather sound wave measurements and forward them to a central computer room.

The orchestra plays, the research work unfolds, energy profiles dance on their computer screens. and after several rounds of gathering data, these diligent aliens know quite a bit.  They have learned how to correlate sound signatures with the instruments that produce them.  They can map violin sound energy to the violin section, trumpet sound energy to the trumpet section, timpani beats to the timpanist, snare drum riffs to the snare drummer, and so on.

In other words, these hypothetical aliens have mapped the physical geography of the orchestra, much as neuroscientists map the physical geography of the human brain.  Of course, our wholly deaf aliens have no artistic concept of music, no inner ear, no ability to distinguish the compositions of Beethoven and Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky and Philip Glass.  Beethoven may have been deaf, at the end of his life, but in his soul he still heard music. These deaf folks from outer space have no concept of music.  None. 

And this is the predicament of neuroscience.  Neuroscientists know how to map the geography of the brain, but they don’t know how the brain experiences the beauty of music.  The riddle of experiencing sensation remains unsolved.

Let’s take leave of neuroscience and visit the silo belonging to experimental psychologists.  These investigators already assume a capacity to experience sensation.  Given such a capacity, what they like to study is the correlation between stimulus strength and subject perception.  How loud is a noise, how bright is a light, how soft is a touch, how tempting is a bribe?  The experiencing of a sensation is simply assumed.  It doesn’t have to be explained.  Its intensity can be measured; that’s enough.

Isn’t this curious!  For those who inhabit one set of scientific silos, the issue of experiencing sensation is outside the job description; for scientists in another set of silos, the reality of experiencing sensation is simply assumed.  In between the “Don’t Ask” of physicists and the “Assume As Given” of psychologists, where does the experiencing of sensation truly get explained?  Nowhere. 

As practitioners, scientists rely heavily on this mysterious capability, on the experiencing of sensation, the capacity for consciousness, and the processing of thoughts.  Yet as members of a profession, these same scientists have no explanation for how these capacities arise, or even why the latent potential to experience sensation should exist within the universe in any form whatsoever.  Within the thought world of theoreticians no framework exists to explain the capacity of the universe to generate theoreticians.

There are at least four interesting reasons for all of this. 

The first is organizational.  Science is divided into silos, and no one owns the problem.  This has just been discussed at length.

The second is instrumental.  With what instrumentation is a scientist to detect and measure the experiencing of sensation?  If a phenomenon cannot properly be detected, let alone measured, how is it to be understood?

The third is conceptual.  We don’t have a theory that flags this matter for our attention, let alone a theory that accounts for how the capacity to experience sensation might arise in the first place.

And the fourth lies in the very nature of the universe.  It could be that we’re bumping up against one of the ineffable mysteries of who we really are and the deeper nature of the realm we inhabit.

Let’s focus on the conceptual issue.  I have some thoughts about how we might frame a first approximation.

 

Imagining an Explanation

First of all, I imagine that the universe might well have a spiritual plane, a dimension of its existence essential to its functioning, but wholly undetectable by human-made sensors.  No matter how sophisticated we become, we might never have more than the vaguest supposition that such a plane of reality exists at all.

I also posit that one feature of this invisible plane of reality is that it enables every particle of energy/matter to express itself as an “Awareness, Feeling, Action Field.”  These are not fields as physicists currently understand them, instead they are fields that are expressed within the spiritual plane. (And maybe I err in saying “particle.”  Perhaps the core reality is a “field” and a “particle” simply expresses a “field” as of a point in time.)

To be more specific, each particle/field – each electron, each photon – includes as part of its existence an awareness field. Awareness is partly about “knowing” and partly about “feeling” and partly about “acting.”  At any given nanosecond, at any given quantized moment in time, a particle somehow “knows” what its environment is, its electromagnetic and gravitational situation.  It somehow “feels” how it is to react to that environment, to that situation.  And then it expresses its nature by “acting.”  It moves (acts) in accordance with what it knows and feels. 

In other words, as an inherent attribute of every single particle of energy, I posit the presence of a sub-microscopic “capacity to experience sensation.”  Know.  Experience Sensation.  Act.  This capacity, I further posit, was latent in the universe from the first moment of Creation.  And its presence signifies, indirectly, the presence of a spiritual plane that animates the laws and properties by which the universe operates.

What I offer is an anthropomorphic image of individual particle/fields, each one expressing tiny flecks of awareness/sensation at every single moment of its existence.  Let’s build on that.  Combine a trillion atoms into each human cell.  Combine a hundred trillion cells into an entire human organism. 

Now think of this vast assembly as the largest choir anyone has ever seen.  Every particle brings to the choir its own “awareness field.”  Particles blend their awareness fields together into larger awareness fields for molecules, and this blending continues, at higher and higher levels.

Now, imagine as well the following image of what it means to be human.  Think of life as a flow of energy across structure.  The human body is intricately structured, from its organs and its cells to its chemical reactions, its fluid flows and its energy flows.  It draws its life from the ongoing burning of fuel.  It makes sense to call this the flow of energy across structure. 

And think, also, of what it means to experience sensation, or, in the human case, to experience consciousness.  Let’s think of consciousness as the flow of structure across energy.  Just as a piece of music has structure, a structure that flows across the energy of the musicians, so the experiencing of consciousness has structure, and flows across the energy of a zillion molecular reactions, consuming fuel and expressing themselves in their little chorales. 

Life as the flow of energy across structure, consciousness as the flow of structure across energy.  What makes all this possible is the “experiencing sensation” capacity that every particle brings to the party, its “awareness field,” its ability to “know” and to “feel” and to “act.”  These capacities are harnessed into small chorales by molecules, and then into larger chorales by the structure of cells.  Different molecular reactions elicit different “chords” and “harmonies” from their assembled chorales.  A change of stimulus produces a different set of molecular reactions, and, in turn, a different choral signature.  Just as the signature of the opening chord of Beethoven’s Fifth is unmistakable, so the chord produced by the taste of chocolate will be unmistakable.

I paint this as a sweeping image.  I vastly oversimplify and mis-state, I am sure.  And yet . . . try to imagine the reverse.  Imagine a universe in which not a single energy field has any capacity for expressing the experiencing of sensation.  Imagine a living being in which particles of energy have no capacity whatever for “experiencing sensation.”  Wouldn’t the experiencing of sensation be impossible?   Wouldn’t consciousness be impossible?  In some form, it seems to me, one must posit a capacity for “awareness” as an essential capacity of energy fields/particles.  Without such a capacity, inherent in every particle of the universe, how would the experiencing of sensation be possible at any level whatever?

And without a spiritual plane, how would matter/energy have the latent capacity for experiencing sensation?  Without a spiritual plane, the universe might still have a capacity for energy, but it would wholly lack a capacity for producing sensation and awareness. 

Sensation, Passion, and Evolution 

It is the capacity to experience sensation that makes it possible for living creatures to experience passion.

And it is the capacity to experience passion that makes possible the Earth’s long history of evolution.  Without an inherent capacity for passion, the spark of life would never catch fire.  If we are to understand our natures, we have to replay in our imagination the forces that brought us into being. 

Imagine a tiny one-celled creature.  If it eats, it thrives.  If it does not eat, it starves and dies.  How is it to survive?  How is its species to thrive?

Imagine that from its surroundings, our one-celled creature receives a range of cues.  Light cues, possibly, or sound cues, or odor cues, or taste cues.  Imagine also that its interior state also gives it cues – the sensation of hunger, for example.  In other words, imagine that this one-celled creature possesses its own capacity to experience sensation.  These sensations represent vital signals.  “Sensation of hunger, time for food?”  “Sensation of light, food this way?”  “Sensation of taste or smell, food over here?”  And so on.  In very tiny and primitive ways, I think it likely that capacities for experiencing sensation begin at the smallest scales of life.  Why?  Because life forms at all levels, from the simplest to the most complex, depend on the reliability of their signaling systems.  And sooner rather than later, a signaling system performs its function only if the organism it serves already has the capacity for experiencing sensations and differentiating among sensations.

Now, imagine a somewhat larger multi-celled creature – an earthworm, say.  An earthworm may possess billions of distinct cells, and each cell, by itself, is a vast colony of interacting atoms and molecules.  When the earthworm is hungry, all these components have to work in concert.  How can all this possibly happen, unless the earthworm as an overall organism has some capacity for experiencing sensation?  At some level, the earthworm has to “know” where it is and what its situation is.  It has to “feel” what its situation means.  And it has to “act” on what it feels.  It has to have a capacity for experiencing sensation – not just a single sensation but a range of sensations.  No matter what its situation, it has to know, it has to feel, it has to act.  These capabilities must always be present.

Now visualize a bird, an even more complex creature.  How will the bird know when it is supposed to hunt for food if it has no capacity to experience the sensation of hunger?  But the bird does experience sensations, and in fact, among the sensations that shape its being are a series of drives.  The drive to eat.  The drive to mate.  The drive to flee when threatened.  The drive to overcome a rival in the battle for a mate.  To be a bird is to feel the passions that drive one’s behaviors as a bird.

Again, try to imagine the contrary.  What if the stuff of life – the atoms and molecules of the natural world – possessed no capacity for experiencing passion?  Would any of Nature’s little critters ever get around to eating?  Or fleeing from danger?  Or mating?  Never.  Wouldn’t happen.  Passion and drives are essential.  Nothing in the animal kingdom can survive without the assistance of passion.  And without survival, there is no evolution.  Of course, if there is to be passion, the capacity for experiencing sensation must always be at the ready.  Sensation, passion, survival, evolution – they are all connected.  We are who we are, as humans, because the essential traits of matter and energy at the tiniest levels somehow facilitate the experiencing of sensation and the experiencing of passion.  Understand this, and we have a much richer appreciation of the wellsprings of human nature.

 

Wrestling with the Mystery

Now step back.  If there were no spiritual plane present in the universe, would the capacity for life ever have arisen?  To me, we are in the presence of profound miracles.  The miracle that the universe exists.  The miracle that this universe is endowed with the mysterious capacity to support awareness and life.  The miracle that this capacity for life has given rise, over time, to a vast web of species, including the human species.

And because of all this, we have a capacity to appreciate the divine.  It is given to us in the stuff of the universe.  We receive religious revelations from Teachers in many traditions, but our capacity to receive those teachings comes from the blessing of existence.  We humans were given sparks of the Divine long before we were given Teachers to tell us what those sparks might mean. 

Science tells us part of our story.  Yes, our Human Nature comes from the complex web of life we call Mother Nature.  Our natures as humans arise from the larger treasure chest of Nature as a whole.

Religion, too, tells part of our story.  Our priesthoods are many, because humans have experienced glimpses of the Divine in so many different ways.  And our priesthoods bless us with the poetry of divinity.  They teach us gratitude.  When we say “Thank you” to the Divine we attune ourselves to something profound at the heart of the universe.

Our psychologists and our sociologists also tell part of the story.  Yes, our natures are rich with possibilities.  Yes, each culture we live within takes our raw potential and shapes us according to the codes of the culture. 

Each part of the story is a blessing in its own right.  We have the blessings of scientific insight, the blessing of spiritual intuition, the blessings of cultural perspective.  And we have also the blessings of humility.  There are deeper miracles behind all of this, and we shall be fortunate if we learn to understand them even superficially.

It is still a story without an ending.  Intention is part of human nature too.  We set goals for ourselves, and we allow our actions in the present to be guided by our hopes for the future. What is it that we want ourselves to be?  We know ourselves to be creatures of passion who come from the workings of an awesome universe.  Can we handle ourselves appropriately?  Are we ready to tell ourselves a story of integrity at scale?  Are we ready to use our blessings wisely?  Where shall we take the story that is still unwritten?

 

Steven Howard Johnson.  July 22, 2010.

23.2 Working On Government

“Government.” 

Sometimes a swear word, always a reality.  In any stable society, there will be government.  Government is our regulator, our rules committee.  Government is our provider of basic infrastructure and crucial programs that advance the national interest.  Government is sometimes a provider of subsidies.  And government is always a collector of taxes.  We don’t always like it, and we don’t always agree with it, but it is always with us.  A society that lacks government falls into violent anarchy.

Given the inevitability of government, at some level of service, it is a truism that we will want from government much the same thing we want from the private sector.  We will want courteous and effective service.  And we will want affordable prices.  Bureaucracy, we know, can become its own excuse for being, but we are also sophisticated enough to realize that large organizations need not be badly run.  Like organizations of all kinds, government organizations have the potential to be run well.  The better a government agency’s replication templates, the better its performance.  Just as in the private sector.

We are Americans.  We are optimistic pragmatists.  When there’s a better way to do something, we are generally willing to listen.  Is there a better technology?  Let’s give it a try.  Is there a better way to organize a project?  Let’s consider it; why not find ways to work smarter and better?  Society advances when imaginative people find smarter and better ways to do things.

And what is an organization, after all, but a team of people brought together around a mission and a way of accomplishing the mission?  An organization is essentially a choreographed way of accomplishing a task.  Is yesterday’s choreography sacred?  Generally not, and certainly not in the case of government.  The purpose of the law must be fulfilled, but the methods for achieving that purpose are usually flexible.  Choreographers have hundreds of ways to design their dances; people who choreograph organizations have equally broad palates to work with.

So let’s strip away the mystique.  People in organizations have similar strengths and weaknesses everywhere.  Government habits are much like corporate habits, worth nurturing when they serve us well, worth changing when they do not.  The smarter we are about this, the more value we will get for our dollar from government. 

And being smart isn’t nearly as difficult as some people think it is.

 

Workflow Matters

Good workflow design is a pleasure for everyone.  I have already mentioned the step function improvement in the Driver’s License renewal process at the Motor Vehicle Administration offices nearby.  License renewals used to be a huge waste of time.  Go there for a driver’s license renewal and you’d be a very long time getting out.  Stand in line to get a number.  Wait in a large waiting area till your number is called.  See the clerk.  Take her eye test.  Verify your current address.  Pay for the new license.  Get a piece of paper.  Wait in another line to have your picture taken.  Stand before the camera.  Wait in still another line to receive your license, once your photo had been taken.  Took forever, and nobody was trying to be hard on you.  That’s just the way it worked.

Now, with the help of technology, the work flow has been streamlined and the process takes only half the time it used to.  The clerk does everything.  She gives the eye test, takes your money, snaps your picture, and prints out your license.  Boom.  And you’re done.  What a pleasure!

Multiply that savings by tens of thousands of people a year.  A fast, well-designed courteous workflow is a huge favor to a busy public. 

Bad workflow design, though, remains a curse.  One of the Rotarians in our local club is German by birth, but married to an American woman.  About a year and a half ago, he applied for American citizenship.  The process started and stopped for him, over and over.  It took him a year and a half to obtain the citizenship papers he wanted.

Someone in the State Department has a workflow problem.  A very bad workflow problem!

And that is hardly the worst of the horror stories. 

An old friend of ours, Debb Greenwood of Dickenson, North Dakota, owns a pharmacy.  Not all that long ago, she decided it was time to offer diabetes strips, the chemically treated paper that helps a diabetic monitor blood sugar levels.  It’s an inexpensive item, a low margin product.  All she needed was a government document saying her pharmacy was authorized to carry them. Should have been a snap, right?  Wrong.

Welcome to a bureaucratic nightmare that even Franz Kafka might not have imagined possible.  It took Debb roughly two thousand hours of paperwork to get her pharmacy certified. Two thousand hours of government-mandated busy work.  Someone in government has a workflow redesign problem.

You will have guessed my point already.  People dealing with the American government suffer badly when the government is careless about its workflow design.  It is time to become much smarter about the way we choreograph the work that government does. 

 

Let’s Hear from the Users

I have just Googled two phrases, “How to register complaints about government inefficiency,”  and “How to file a complaint about government inefficiency.”  In both instances, Google’s returns the same response: “No results found.”  I find that quite interesting.  It clearly implies that nowhere in the English-speaking world[1] has any level of government seen fit to solicit citizen complaints about inefficient government workflow.  Were the quest for feedback about inefficiency a standard practice, there would have been dozens or even hundreds of direct Google hits for my two searches. 

Yet how is government to identify its inefficiencies properly without a well-publicized system for inviting feedback?  Bad workflow may sometimes arise from an act of Congress, but it is never an act of God; it can always be corrected.

So the first thing to do is simple.  Someone in Washington needs to be the chief workflow fixit person.  Same for our state capitals and our big city governments.  Reach out to the citizens.  Send everyone the same message.  “If you have run into ineffective or inefficient government practices, we want to hear from you.”  Those who have been put through the wringer on citizenship should be offered a process for documenting their experiences and their complaints.  Same for those who have been tied down responding to irrational information requests, especially people in business.  It is the government’s job to create effective and efficient workflow procedures so that citizens and businesses can interact with government easily and effectively.

 

Document the Existing Workflows

There was once a woman who made wonderful pies.  Everyone loved her pies, and she enjoyed making them.  As her reputation spread, even strangers asked her about her pied.  One day she decided to open a pie shop.  It was an immediate hit.  She made all her favorite pies, and customers flocked to her  store.

She became busier and busier.  The more pies she made, the more customers she had.  After a time, she realized she wasn’t having as much fun any more.  She asked one of her friends what to do.  The friend gave her a simple piece of advice.  “You spend all your time working in the pie shop.  But you don’t spend any time working on your pie shop.  If you want to get your life back, you also have to spend time working on the pie shop.  You have to redesign the way the pie shop makes pies, so that you can have more time to yourself.”

And so it is in government.  It isn’t enough to have tens of thousands of Americans working in government.  At some point in time, everyone who works in government also needs to spend a few hours working on government.

Working on government means getting the workflow right, just as it would in a pie shop.  So, for starters, let’s focus on the workflow issue.  How can we know that every government workflow is well designed?  The only way to know that is to have a government that regularly documents and evaluates its key workflows with some regularity.

But this isn’t just a job for experts.  It’s really everyone’s job.  For starters, let’s declare that one day a year will be Workflow Documentation Day.  For every government employee – national, state, local, you name it.  Each agency gets to pick the day it wants.  If I am an agency employee, I list all the workflows I participate in.  I pick the one that takes up the largest amount of my time.  I document each step in that workflow, and do so in a way that a casual observer would be able to study my documentation and understand what it is I do, in what order, and what outcomes the workflow is expected to produce.

Many workflows have more than one participant.  The documentation work isn’t done, of course, until every phase of a major workflow has been diagramed and described.  Suppliers of information and receivers of information participate in the same workflow.  One might have to stitch together workflow descriptions from half a dozen people, or many more, to have an end to end description of a major workflow.

A diagramed and documented workflow belongs on the wall, somewhere, so that colleagues can see it and study it.  Within the limits of security, anyone who interacts with a workflow should be invited to review its steps and offer comments.  Informational comments.  Comments that raise concerns.  Comments that offer ideas for improvement. 

There are many ways to document a workflow.  When I was at Cummins, our fledgling Just In Time Team videotaped operations on the assembly line.  At each work station, we’d videotape the assembly operations for three or four engines in a row.  Once we’d finished, Bob Reed, our manufacturing engineer, would list each of the work steps on a flip chart.  Typically he’d identify ten or twelve separate steps.  He timed each step, took the average from the three or four iterations we’d videotaped, and recorded the time on the flip chart. 

This list of activities became a jumping off point for brainstorming, with the team members, about how the work station might be improved, but I am getting ahead of my story.

Later, at Bell Atlantic, as part of a Gemini Consulting team, I participated in the documentation of the provisioning workflow, the process that begins with a service order from a new customer and ends with dial tone being provided to the customer premises.  There were only five major steps to this process, as I recall, but we must have identified thirty distinct steps in the overall workflow.

Gemini had a taste for the dramatic.  A Gemini workflow diagram was known as a Brown Paper.  It was created on a strip of brown butcher paper, four or five feet wide and as much as thirty feet long.  Step by step, we’d build box-and-wire diagrams to represent the entire workflow.  By the time we were done, the Brown Paper was filled end to end with diagrams and notes.  Employees were invited to Brown Paper Fairs, to observe the diagrams, and annotate them with their own comments about strengths, weaknesses, and concerns. 

Gemini also did DILO’s, “Day In the Life Of.”  In a DILO, a consultant shadows a client employee for a full day, documenting every piece of activity that made up the person’s day.  This, too, captures a perspective on company workflows, and teases out the percentage of time individuals are likely to spend on activities that add genuine value.

About the time our joint Bell Atlantic-Gemini team completed this work, a book was published on the secret life of dogs.  The author had followed dogs and recorded minute by minute what they do, and then psychologically reconstructed all the emotions the dogs must have felt.  We joked about DILO’s for Dogs. 

In one important sense, our Brown Papers were never complete.  Whenever a piece of information had to be received from the Information Technology folks, or provided to one of their databases, we drew a little cloud.  We’d connect it to the main workflow with a dotted line, but we took a pass on tracking down what happened in the guts of the computer software.  The mission of our project was to identify waste that could be removed from the physical workflow.  We were explicitly instructed to avoid improvement opportunities likely to require significant redesign of the IT support system.  IT redesign was said to cost tens of millions of dollars and eat up two or three years as though it were nothing.  We would have to live with whatever shortcomings the IT system imposed on the physical system. 

As one might imagine, there are many ways to carry out a series of workflow documentation mini-projects.  Workflow Documentation Day might produce its own videos, or its own Workflow Fairs, or anything else that gets the point across and properly documents the real life workflow. 

What matters is capturing both the main route and the likely detours.  A good workflow diagram has to explain why an applicant for citizenship might get sent back to the starting line over and over again, or why a pharmacist might have to invest 2000 hours in documentation work.

A workflow diagram also has to identify the role of legislation in shaping agency workflows, for better and for worse.  “I do X because Law 123 tells me I must.”  Every step in a workflow that is thought to be mandated by law should be diagrammed and flagged.  In a properly documented workflow, the impact of law and regulation should be fully visible.  If better law can support a more rational workflow, notations to that effect belong on the workflow.

Will a single Workflow Documentation Day be sufficient to capture all of the major government workflows, especially those that affect customers and suppliers and those whom the government regulates?  The answer has to be No.  But it gets the process started.  It will pay to make a big deal out of the project – a very big deal.  if the old and slow choreographies of yesterday are to be melted away, and replaced with faster and friendlier choreographies, the documentation process needs to be an All Hands project.

 

Redesign Flawed Workflows

Modest amounts of workflow redesign are under way within the Obama Administration.  Obama’s point person on this effort is Chief Performance Officer Jeffrey Zients, from the Office of Management and Budget.  At one agency, Zients discovered a 210 day hiring process.  “You need to shorten that,” he told them.  On his next visit, agency personnel proudly bragged about how they had shortened the process, from 210 days to only one hundred eighty!  Clearly they didn’t get the picture.  Zients took them in hand.  By the time they were really done, they’d scrubbed the hiring process down to eighteen or nineteen days.

Such a triumph is a good start, emblematic of what is needed everywhere, but clearly just a beginning.

What we need, once we have pulled off our first Workflow Documentation Day, is a companion day, a Workflow Redesign Day.  As one recent saying holds, “With enough eyes, all problems are shallow.”  Pick out a Workflow that’s in desperate need of redesign.  Put a lot of eyes on it.  And ask the right questions:

 

Goal?  What is the final goal that the workflow was created to achieve?  Does the goal make sense as defined, or it there a better and smarter way to define the goal?

 

What actually adds value?  Which parts of the workflow add genuine value?  And which points in the workflow simply mark time?  Or waste time?  Or generate unnecessary work?

Adding value is always a vital standard.  In school, when the children in the classroom learn the weekly lesson, the teacher has added value.  In an urban transportation network, cars add value for commuters when they’re moving.  They don’t add value when they are gridlocked and trapped.  In an energy infrastructure, a generating plant adds value if it can create electricity without undermining the global climate.  A generating plant that damages the climate takes away more value than it adds.

Sitting and waiting my turn at the Motor Vehicle Administration doesn’t add value.  Taking the eye test adds value.  Confirming my address adds value.  Having my photo taken adds value.  Printing the drivers license adds value. 

Value can take different forms in the world of government.  A cop on the beat adds value by deterring crime.  Repairing the Statue of Liberty adds value by preserving a precious asset.  A mine inspector adds value by denying a mining permit to an irresponsible and unsafe mine operator.  Whatever form value takes, that’s what we want government to focus on.  Everything else is waste.

 

If we are to eliminate all the waste, how do we have to modify the workflow?  That, of course, is the next question.  Once everyone understands what it means to add value, then the next issue is figuring out how to avoid waste.  An immigrant married to an American citizen wants to obtain his citizenship papers.  The law no doubt requires a series of tests to confirm eligibility.  How long should those tests take?  It is difficult to imagine more than a few hours of genuine value-added work taking place inside government in connection with a citizenship application.  It is difficult to imagine a legitimate reason for waiting periods of more than a month, especially for an applicant who has lived in the United States for years already.

Workflow redesign begins with the distinction between value-added activity and activity that involves pure waste.  It eliminates the waste, preserves the activities that add genuine value, and rewrites the workflow rules accordingly.

Perhaps a wasteful workflow exists in its current form as a result of legislation.  It is an agency’s responsibility to let Congress know about the waste that legislators have mandated, and to give them options for streamlining both the law and the agency workflow.

Two simple elements are always worth adding to the mix.  Bring as many stakeholders into the process as possible.  Ask them all for their ideas:  “What’s the simplest way to get the real job done?”  And, second, make sure that Congress (or the State Legislature, or the City Council) understands where its laws and regulations are overloaded with detail.  If there is an efficient way to accomplish an aim, but an outdated law stands in the way, Workflow Redesign will require help from Capitol Hill or its local counterparts.

Public servants can spend their lives working “in” government without ever being invited to work “on” government as well.  Workflow Documentation Day both symbolizes and launches a new approach to public service.  Workflow Redesign Day begins the rewrite process.  Public servants get to take part in making each workflow as smart and efficient as possible.  It should be something we always do – consciously set aside time to work “on” government. 

 

Create Fast IT Turnaround

Hardly anything is more satisfying than having a good idea and then seeing your idea put into practice.  Not long after we had begun videotaping workstations on the assembly line at the Jamestown Engine Plant, Bob Reed hired two ironworkers, Tony White and Tom Swanson.  When they arrived, they were on a one-month contract.  They were so valuable they stayed four years.  Team members on the assembly line knew them as “Whitey and Tom, the welders.” 

I have already mentioned our videotaping and brainstorming work.  Team members always had good ideas for how their work stations could be improved.  Sometimes there were new flow racks to be built, or special fixtures to be created.  One of the upstream-downstream signaling innovations involved colored ping pong balls.  The color coding signaled the turbo model required.  When the engine arrived at the turbo station, the team member was ready with the right option.

Whitey and Tom almost always knew how to turn a good idea into a workable gadget.  A steady flow of good ideas began to flow across the aisle from the assembly line to the welders’ work area.  A week after being given a clever idea, or two or three, the welders had just the right gadget ready to go.  They created new flow racks to deliver heavy wire crates of parts to the assembly line more smoothly, paired with flow racks that returned the empty wire crates to the aisle for the fork lift driver to remove.  Whitey and Tom produced one valuable gimmick after another, always in response to ideas the team members themselves had originated.

Think of it.  Hourly workers on a diesel engine assembly line, capable and hard-working people, creating their own ideas for smarter and better tools, and getting amazing turnaround.  How many workplaces in America can say the same?

Contrast this experience with IT turnaround in an office environment.  It is a tortuous process.  At a spring 2010 banquet-style event in Washington, DC, I happened to be seated next to Jim Duffey, Virginia’s new Secretary of Technology.  He shared with me the highlights of his new job.  Several years earlier, then Governor Mark Warner had hired a major contractor to modernize the state’s information technology infrasructure.  It was a ten year, hundred million dollar contract.  Secretary Duffey’s assignment?  Resolve the open issues, get the project back on schedule, see that it finishes on time.  “How many state agencies?” I asked.  “Ninety-four.”  Secretary Duffey has his hands full.

Note the contrast.  Three week turnaround from the welders at the Jamestown Engine Plant.  Ten year turnaround for a public sector IT overhaul.  Not that it’s much better in the private sector – IT rework is a multi-year nightmare for large corporations just as it is for government agencies.

Is this really necessary?  It might not be.

Not all that long ago, I got a glimpse of an entirely new way to think about IT redesign.  My employer at the time was Education Resource Strategies (ERS), a nationally prominent consultancy that serves leaders of public school systems.  As its specialty, ERS it analyzes a school district’s key databases – budget databases, teacher seniority databases, class enrollment databases – and educates district leaders about the instructional implications of their traditional spending patterns.  This always leads to a series of “What If” discussions.  Is it better to allocate scarce resources to class size reduction?  To the hiring of pull-out teachers?  To the hiring of mentors for new teachers?  Or any of a number of other options. 

Over the years, ERS founder Dr. Karen Hawley Miles had come to appreciate how difficult it is for school system leaders to develop an intuitive feel for the likely budget impact of the resource decisions that mattered to them.  She wanted to create an internet-based tool by which they could test different decisions and learn almost instantly what the likely cost implications would be.  She lined up a funding package that involved the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the University of Washington, and I was put to work building the initial model in Excel. 

Fast forward to the point where the model is ready to be translated into internet-friendly software code.  Karen Baroody, ERS’ Managing Director, engaged a pair of software wizards to port my Excel model to the internet.  Think Whitey and Tom II.  Guided by the Excel model, the software team built the appropriate interface.  User Inputs here, Budget Consequences there.

So far, so good.  Now for the wizardry.  One of their tools was an Excel-to-Java translator.  This was extraordinary.  They fed it my Excel file, and almost instantly they had the Java code they needed for running the model on the ERS Tools website. 

As one might expect, it took any number of tweaks to refine my initial model.  Each new tweak generated a new Excel file, and a corresponding need for new Java code.  No problem.  The tweaks were converted into Java code just as fast as the original file had been.  I was ordered to observe one rule.  Keep the user input cells exactly where they were before.  Don’t fiddle with their row-and-column locations.  Anything else I was free to change.  New formulas.  New assumptions.  No problem.

Baroody’s two software wizards had given ERS the same swift turnaround that Bob Reed’s welders had given the engine assemblers at Jamestown. 

Just as a single nugget of gold may signal the presence of a nearby vein, this nugget of experience suggests a rich vein of opportunity.  Maybe IT modernization can be done differently, and much more swiftly. 

 

So why not swift IT turnaround in government, in as many areas as possible?  Here’s the procedure I propose.  Evaluate each IT module that supports the work of a government agency.  Ask a simple question.  Could its logic structure be reproduced in Excel? 

Some modules are no doubt beyond the reach of Excel.  I doubt that Excel has the ability to reproduce the government’s weather forecasting software.

But who knows?  Excel is a powerful, high capacity tool.  I suspect that the logic framework of most IT packages could be reproduced in Excel or something comparable.  Let’s take as a working hypothesis the idea that Excel is capable of handling the business logic for most of the IT packages government uses.

Now, let’s imagine a redesigned relationship between an operating government agency and the government IT department that supports it.  The agency has a new role, the IT department has a new role.  The agency is responsible for modeling its own business practices in Excel, or equivalent.  The IT department translates the business model from Excel into software that’s fast and secure. 

Now let’s postulate a successful Workflow Redesign exercise.  Agency X has found a faster and better way to do business, but it cannot implement its new system without appropriate software changes.  Step One:  It revises its Excel model to reflect its new way of doing business.  It runs appropriate quality tests to make sure its new model performs as it should.  Step Two:  The IT department takes the new Excel file and converts it, almost instantly, into new code.  Same capacity for high transaction volumes.  Same database connections.  Same security measures. 

 It probably won’t be an overnight process.  On the other hand, it shouldn’t be a two-year process.  Let’s press for full turnaround within a month.  Preferably faster. 

Note what this rearrangement does for us.  In the old days (i.e. now), one imagines a workflow change, writes a word description of the change, and then asks IT to translate the word description into operating code.  The IT department has to figure out precisely what the operating unit wants, and then create custom-designed code that expresses the business model to the best of its ability.  But it might be wrong.  So the two groups go back and forth, back and forth, till the business model has been defined sufficiently well that further coding can move forward.  It is a long process. 

The redesigned approach changes the dynamics.  Within the operating agency, one imagines a workflow change.  One codifies the workflow change.  One revises the Excel model to bring it into line with the new procedures.  One submits the new Excel model to rigorous quality testing.  And then one hands the new Excel version to the IT department to be translated into the proper code and put into service. 

The turnaround queue shrinks from years or months down to weeks, days, or even hours. 

This won’t be a complete solution to the problem of IT delay.  Software that cannot be represented effectively in Excel will remain out of reach.

That being said, the times favor the change I propose.  The world of IT isn’t so hermetic any more.  Open source programmers delight in creating standard modules capable of solving routine functions.  Invite the open source world to help government take the wait out of IT turnaround.  Throw them the Excel-to-Code scenario I have painted and ask their help. 

Excel literacy continues to grow.  There might have been a time when it wouldn’t be easy to find someone to maintain a formal Excel version of the software service a government agency requires.  That won’t be nearly so difficult today. 

I wish Secretary Duffey well in Virginia.  But I also wish for the day that government agencies and private sector corporations will no longer be tied to multi-year IT projects anytime they want to reinvent the way they do business.  Fast turnaround shouldn’t be the exclusive prerogative of engine assemblers with talented welders at their side.  Fast turnaround should be a way of life for people who work in offices too, and for the executives who support them.

 

Customers, Suppliers, and Stakeholders Deserve No Less

Every President takes office with the promise that Government will work better.  Every Governor does the same.

These promises often wither once the elected executive is overtaken by the pressure of events.  But they don’t have to.  Workflows can be documented.  More to the point, every important workflow should be documented.  Workflows can and should be redesigned, and, where necessary, laws should be revised to support greater effectiveness and greater efficiency.

And IT support can be redone.  Today’s IT workflow might have made sense in an earlier time.  It no longer fits.  Much faster IT turnaround ought to be a high priority. 

Citizens and businesses who interact with government should never feel that governmental procedures are endless and hopeless, as ancient as the manual typewriter if not more so.  Governmental organizations can adapt to the times, just as other organizations do.  If we wish them to.

 

Steven Howard Johnson, Version 2010-07-27

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[1] The United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many others.

Big Challenges, Small Thinking

As with many industrial societies, America faces very large challenges.  The retiree population will soon explode in number, from 40 million to 75 million.  How will their retirement expenses be covered?  Democrats and Republicans have both been in denial.  The nation isn't prepared.

America's medical industry is already more overpriced than any other.  As the population ages, this weakness becomes all the more crippling.

Congress once made a point of practicing fiscal responsibility.  But that tradition vanished in the nineteen-seventies. Irresponsibility in high places has dug the government into a deep fiscal hole.

American capitalism underwent a dramatic change when Reagan became president.  In the days when American Dream Capitalism was our norm, middle class Americans shared in the nation's growing prosperity.  Reagan's team ditched that tradition and gave us Gated Capitalism.  Middle class income growth now lags badly behind. 

For a great many years now, America hasn't had a decent strategy for protecting its manufacturing base.  Manufacturing is an important job generator; America's manufacturing weaknesses hurt all regions, all businesses, all job seekers.

And what about sustainability?  Sustainable practices are an imperative, but we haven't the patience to think ahead and ask ourselves what this means. 

A competent nation would have a vision of success on all these fronts.  We'd understand the sustainability imperative.  We'd commit ourselves to manufacturing strength and a green manufacturing future.  We'd protect middle class earnings.  We'd create affordable medical care.  We'd prepare ourselves for the growth of America's retiree population.  We'd have two major parties who understand solvency. 

Today we are a nation of giant problems and small ideas.  If everyone cheats on America's future, what happens to America? 

It is time to replace small ideas that won't work with large ideas that will. 

Steven Howard Johnson

0.3 Prologue

 

We humans have become extraordinary creatures. 

We invented bronze and iron and steel and aluminum, and vastly increased the strength and size of the human skeleton.

We invented steam engines and gasoline engines and electric motors and jet engines, and vastly magnified the power of human muscle.

We invented horse-drawn carriages and trains and bicycles and automobiles and speedboats and airplanes and space shuttles and vastly accelerated human foot speed.

We invented telegraph lines and radio communications and telephone lines and fiber-optic cables and satellite communication systems and vastly widened the reach of the human nervous system.

We invented microphones and cameras and radar and seismographs and infrared and video and vastly expanded the listening power of the human ear and the seeing power of the human eye.

We invented semiconductors and memory chips and processing chips and circuitry and software and computer networks and the internet and vastly extended the reach and capabilities of the human brain. 

We invented machine guns and warships and ballistic missiles and atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs and vastly enlarged the killing power of human rage.

We invented trade and markets and business organization and government and vastly enlarged the reach and scale of human activity.

We humans began as hunter-gatherers and we have turned ourselves into a race of giants.  We numbered a little over a billion in 1900, we numbered two and a half billion in 1950, and today we are nearly seven billion strong.  Indeed we have gone forth and multiplied.

We humans are now a juggernaut of a species – so formidable that Nature herself has begun to crumple in our grip.  Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, we sometimes find ourselves outrun by the vast swarm of forces we have set in motion. 

We are dangerous indeed. 

One further invention awaits.  We humans must now learn self-mastery.  At scale.  With integrity.

 

Steven Howard Johnson.  0.3 Version 2011-06-27

Chapter 1.

The Challenge of Modern Society

 

A Competent, Self-Governing Republic

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all  men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

When America declared its independence, it made the revolutionary promise to govern itself. 

Eleven years later, America reiterated this promise in the Preamble to the Constitution.  “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”  With a continuing sense of purpose. America declared it would be competent in the art and craft of self-government.

Abraham Lincoln revisited that promise at Gettysburg.  “It is for us the living . . . to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us  . . . that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” 

 The United States of America across its history has embraced self-government, believing all the while that we are competent to protect our ideals and advance our interests.   Yet this promise is never easy.  A rapidly changing world imposes new challenges and calls for us to respond with new skills.  We require new levels of national competence; we require new levels of grassroots competence.

In a competent, twenty-first century republic, citizens wear two hats.  All of us wear the Small Hat.  All of us have special interests that appeal to our emotions and our bank accounts.  And we also accept the responsibilities of Large Hat Citizenship.  When the nation works properly, everyone is better off.

In a competent nation, we learn four significant roles. 

We are loyal to the well-being of America’s core assets.  And we accept the stewardship role.  America is blessed in many ways, and we are stewards of those blessings, protecting them not just for the moment but for future generations.

We are excited by the energy of America’s business sectors, nonprofit sectors, and public sector programs.  As our second role, we are champions of American entrepreneurship.  Industry by industry, area by area, we want to see smart business models in action.  High standards matter.  Competence matters.  Integrity matters. 

We are also fussy about the craftsmanship that goes into public policy.  It is our third role.  Well-drawn laws give wise guidance to each major business sector.  Wise policy plays an important role in the creation of wise and competent business models. 

And, fourth, we are members of a national community.  We understand that America’s sense of purpose stretches across the generations.  We weave together a story of America’s journey that champions our entrepreneurs, protects the blessings of Creation, and draws forth genuine wisdom from our elected representatives and leaders.  We put sustainability first.  By protecting Nature for all future generations, we anchor our priorities well.  We put the tangible economy next.  We expect it to generate prosperity for all Americans.  We affirm the servant role of the financial economy – keep the tangible economy healthy and don’t throw the nation in to crisis.

Four roles.  Understand America’s purpose in a Large Hat, fully responsible way.  Champion entrepreneurship.  Practice stewardship.  Bring the art of wise design to the work of writing laws, operating public programs, and assessing taxes. 

Live our roles well, and we will find ourselves admiring America’s long-term competence.

Today, as we shall see, we don’t understand these roles.  Our stewardship is shaky.  Our entrepreneurship is energetic but often not especially admirable.  Our laws are seldom drawn with genuine wisdom and craftsmanship.  The story we tell ourselves about our national purpose reflects too much Small Hat thinking and too little Large Hat thinking.

And too many of America’s critical sectors misbehave in damaging ways.

The United States of America is still a self-governing republic.  Look at the results, though.  This nation allows itself to be blindsided by events, over and over.  As Americans, our habits leave us ill-equipped to help our nation thrive in the twenty-first century. 

It has been so long that we Americans had a proper civic tune-up that no one remembers the decade or the mileage. 

It is time.  We are due.

 

1.1 Version 2011-06-27

1.2 Modern Society and its Engines of Replication

 

Modern society has been with us for some time now, an ever-expanding force.  Its scale and power have become truly staggering; it harnesses human ingenuity on a vast scale.  Humans have long been skilled as craft workers; now we are skilled as engineers and scientists as well.  We have long known how to run small companies; now our capacities also enable us to run vast corporations, nonprofits, and government agencies. 

Modern society derives its staggering reach primarily from its vast powers of replication, its abilities to make numberless copies of almost anything it wishes.  It is the limitless power of replication that makes today’s edition of modern life so distinctive.  Whatever mass markets will buy, modern society will create.  Like power of any kind, the power of replication is seductive.  It challenges our national competence; it challenges our grassroots competence.

Mass production begins with the creation of a master mold, a template for guiding future replication.  With a single keystroke, a river of template replication can be set in motion.  Copies are produced, by the thousands, the millions, the gazillions.  For better and for worse, today’s engines of replication blanket the world with products and services.

Adam Smith was once enthralled by the technique of mass production in a simple nail factory.[1]  Eli Whitney used the arts of standardization and mass production to multiply the production of cotton gins.  Henry Ford married standardized parts to the assembly line and carried modern society another long step forward.  Today’s digital technologies have raised the game to an even higher level; for marginal costs of almost zero, digital technologies place limitless powers of replication in our hands.

Template replication as a core feature of modern life extends far beyond the manufacturing realm.  Land development practices are shaped by much the same process.  For more than six decades, America’s developers have used strip mall templates and subdivision templates to lock in their vision of America’s suburban and metropolitan future.

Entrepreneurs assemble new businesses from known organizational templates.  Business templates abound for organizing production, marketing products, managing inventory, doing the bookkeeping. 

When citizens in a growing community decide to incorporate, they too draw upon existing templates as they charter their new municipality.  New social clubs organize themselves by drawing on templates created elsewhere.  Template replication permeates modern society; in a very real sense, template replication is the essence of modern society.

Template replication is often a source of strength, ease, and wealth.  Rural America is electrified thanks to the power of template replication.  Electric utility business frameworks were copied, and copied again, and in time all American communities had electricity.  Templates for water and sewer systems produced significant improvements in public health.  Templates for replicating wonder drugs vastly improve medicine’s life-saving potential.  The list of benefits is very nearly endless.  We live longer and better lives thanks to template replication. 

Yet template replication has a dark side, as symbolized in Disney’s 1940 film, Fantasia. Mickey Mouse, as The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, is given the task of refilling the water tank by fetching water from the well.  When the sorcerer steps away, leaving behind his magic hat, Mickey tries it on and is hit with the bright idea of commanding the broom to fetch the water. Mickey summons the broom to life.  It seizes the buckets, marches to the well, fetches the water, empties it into the sorcerer’s water tank, and repeats the journey.  Again.  And again.  Without stopping.  

Initially delighted, Mickey panics when he realizes the tank is now overflowing and the broom cannot be stopped.  In desperation, Mickey seizes a hatchet and chops the broom to pieces.  This unleashes a replication nightmare.  Each splinter morphs into a full-sized marching broom; soon an army of brooms is at work flooding the tank and everything else.  Mickey is saved only when the sorcerer returns and magically sets things right.

In the real world, we are not so easily saved from our own folly.  Society’s engines of replication are powerful enough to cause terrible damage on a vast scale.  Templates for running public schools fail too many of the children they are meant to serve, yet are not set aside in favor of templates that truly succeed.  Templates for suburbanizing America have been both a blessing and a curse, as our cities strangle themselves in rush hour nightmares.  Toxic templates in mortgage financing and lending, replicated at vast scale, brought the global economy to its knees. Templates for shaping the nation’s labor markets shrink the earnings of the Lower Nine Tenths by nearly a trillion dollars a year in order to expand the earnings of those in the Upper One Tenth. Templates for using fossil fuels as the world’s primary energy source have been with us for decades; now the health of the world’s oceans and the world’s climate regions are being damaged at a rising rate. 

Modern society runs on template replication.  Can we enjoy the benefits while averting the evils?  It is the central challenge of our modern era.  A less than competent nation indulges itself in replication behaviors that are poorly, even dangerously chosen.  A competent republic recognizes the risks, gets ahead of the curve, and keeps modern society in bounds.

 

1.2 Version 2011-06-27

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[1] Pin was the Scottish word for nail.  See John Cassidy, How Markets Fail, p 27.

1.3 Personal Integrity, Integrity at Scale

 

The Positive Qualities of the American People

Do Americans as a people have the capacity to get ahead of the curve?  If we set our minds to it, can we muster the competence we need? 

The answer is a provisional Yes.  Americans as individuals and as neighbors bring much to the party.

Americans are Decent, Optimistic, and Helpful.  Let’s start with what we know about our character and our strengths as a people.  Though we are a society that celebrates the individual, we readily extend a helping hand. Here, in Annapolis, Maryland, my church builds houses with Habitat for Humanity, mobilizes volunteers to give after-school reading assistance to school children, welcomes refugees, and serves as a shelter for the homeless.  A local Rotary Club has collected over four million used books and sent them to poor communities, overseas and here in America. Volunteers work with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to nurture oysters and clear contributing waterways.  Our community is not unique. We Americans can be neighbors in the best sense, creatures of great generosity. 

And we are capable citizens.  Most Americans share a pragmatic optimism, a quality of our culture that is basic to who we are.  Our pragmatism leads us to face reality.  Our basic decency leads us to accept responsibility.  Our pragmatism and our optimism, in combination, lead us to favor fine craftsmanship.  We see a problem, we take responsibility, we apply a spirit of fine craftsmanship, and together we solve the problem.  These qualities, taken together, comprise a nice pocket summary of our problem-solving inclinations:  Face reality.  Accept responsibility.  Push for fine craftsmanship.  We understand responsibility and we understand problem-solving.  We have a lot going for us.

Americans Have a Sense of Integrity.  One virtue in particular sheds the light we need.  It is the virtue of integrity.  Within the basic decency of the American people one discerns a moral core.  It comes down through the generations, from adults to children, in many different forms, but always with certain recurring themes.  “I am to take moral responsibility for the consequences of my behaviors.  If I see that I have done something hurtful or wrong, I am to accept moral responsibility.  I am to change my behavior.”  Parents almost always want children to understand the importance of moral responsibility.

Sometimes, in our teenage years, any of us might have disagreed with our parents and protested loudly.  “But my friends say that it’s okay!”  And our parents would have come right back at us.  “I don’t care what your friends say.  What matters is what you do.  If you do something that causes harm, you have to change your behavior.”

Did any of us hear that from our parents when we were teens?  Most of us did.  Have we said that, or will we say that, to our own teens?  Almost surely we will.

When a strong moral code is widely accepted and internalized, it becomes a source of cohesion and strength.  In some parts of rural America it works so well neighbors never lock their doors.  On a personal level, we think of integrity as the consistent practice of moral decency.  It is an important part of our culture.

But for all our strengths as individuals – our generosity, our spirit of personal integrity – all is not well.

Integrity Often Disappears at Scale

What puzzles us, as citizens, is that we no longer sense the vitality of integrity as a moral code when our focus shifts away from individuals – the realm of the personal – to the realm of large institutions. Template replication doesn’t necessarily imply integrity replication. In the realm of the Small, integrity holds our attention; in the realm of the Large, integrity often vanishes.  Does America have an invisible barrier that shields the realms of business and government from the basic principles of integrity that we know as individuals?  There seems to be.  Walk through the doors of large institutions and the decencies of family and neighborhood seem to lose their hold as a living presence.  Special interests quarrel with special interests, sometimes with extraordinary rudeness.  How are we to explain this?  Why is template replication at vast scale seemingly exempt from the code that we are to take moral responsibility for the consequences of our behaviors?

Great distance is part of the reason.  While I can “see” the consequences of my own behaviors, often I cannot “see” the consequences of an institution’s behaviors.  Too far away.  Too indirect.  If a decision taken in New York has harmful consequence in Papua-New Guinea, or in Ecuador, how is anyone in America to see those consequences?

Massive complexity adds to the difficulty.  If hundreds or thousands of organizations take actions that produce consequences in numberless locations worldwide, how are their behaviors and consequences to register with anyone? 

And responsibility is diffuse.  If an organization in one country behaves in ways that cause harm in another, how are the citizens of the first country to know that a wrong has been committed to the citizens of another?  And how are they to give any feedback?  And to whom?  A corporation doesn’t have a stern mother to call it to heel.

Even if damaging consequences are plainly visible, one must still ask what behaviors are to be changed?  And by whom?  To lift a line from a Broadway show, “Is a puzzlement.”  No wonder America’s basic decency gets fractured and sidetracked by activities and behaviors that take place at vast scale.

This line of thinking helps us understand what’s missing from our capacity to function effectively as a self-governing republic.  We have yet to set our sights on integrity at scale.

Integrity at scale is the modern competence we need in our world of template replication.  Integrity at scale is essential to our competence as a self-governing nation, integrity at scale is essential to our competence as grassroots Americans. 

Integrity at scale is the fruit of following a simple rule.  “When we accept moral responsibility for the consequences of our behaviors, we practice integrity.”  But we must take this moral rule to heart, at scale.  So if you will pardon the repetition, add the term “at scale” to each part of this moral rule. “When we accept moral responsibility, at scale, for the consequences, at scale, of our replication behaviors, at scale, we practice integrity.  At scale.”  

When a large institution accepts responsibility for the consequences of its actions, and when it adjusts its behaviors accordingly, it can rightfully claim to be practicing integrity at scale.

What is true for a specific institution is true as well for an entire industry or government agency.  And what is true for industries and agencies is true for the nation.  As Americans, we will know we have mastered the arts of self-governing competence once all our major institutions accept Moral Responsibility for the Consequence of their Behaviors.   We will be a competent people; ours will be a competent self-governing nation.

 

“Integrity at Scale.”  It is a powerful concept, one that asks for our attention at several levels.

Integrity at scale is partly a design standard.  One applies it to the templates that define a single institution or a single industry.  Templates that embody integrity at scale will guide institutions toward behaviors that keep America safe and prosperous.

Viewed from a related angle, integrity at scale is a performance standard as well.  An industry that applies integrity at scale as a design standard will perform more honorably and safely.  Had integrity at scale been both a design standard for the mortgage banking industry, and then its performance standard, the American economy would be in much better shape.

At a still broader level, integrity at scale is a normative standard, an ethical standard, an expectation for modern society as a whole.  It isn’t sufficient just to have one or two industries embrace integrity at scale while other industries engage in damaging misbehavior at scale.  Modern society cannot work properly unless integrity at scale is a broadly accepted normative standard.

Integrity at scale is not simply a standard and a norm; it is a spur to civic competence.  Is modern society powerful and complex?  Driven by engines of replication, often beneficial, but capable of causing great damage at vast scale?  Yes, and yes.  But a competent public responds to these challenges by insisting that integrity isn’t just a matter between parents and their teenagers; integrity is a matter for the American people and the vast institutions that exist to serve our needs.  Modern institutions, like teenagers, need to accept moral responsibility for the consequences of their behaviors.  A competent public knows this, and holds even its largest institutions accountable for the consequences of their behaviors.

Design standard.  Performance standard.  Normative standard.  Spur to civic competence.  Integrity at scale is all of these.  It lights our future.

 

Steven Howard Johnson.  1.3 Version 2011-06-27