by Paul Johnston
London-based ex-civil servant now working for Cisco as head of the European public sector team within IBSG, Cisco's global strategic consulting arm. Launched and helped shape this site after wri... More about Paul Johnston
Reflections on a Nobel Journey
Usually we see learning as moving from ignorance and uncertainty to knowledge and certainty, but sometimes the movement seems more in the opposite direction. One of the biggest gains for me from the recent Public Services Summit that Cisco hosted in Stockholm and Oslo was to raise questions and re-open issues. I have no doubt that we are at the start of a great period of change, but the difficult part is sorting out hype and dreams from the trends that will bring real change. Just when I thought I had some sense of what Web 2.0 might mean for government, the Summit made me think again.
The starting point was an intervention by Charlie Leadbeater who (as I remember it) highlighted the fact that we were all talking about how technology can change (and improve) government and the public sector when the real issue is how technology is transforming society, so citizens can do more for themselves. Later he talked about moving from a world where government does things for people (which usually feels like and often involves doing things to them) to a world where it is all about doing things with people. Other things at the event pointed in the same direction. Narendra Jadhav talked about how he was transforming Pune University with its 650,000 students, but the way he described it was only partly about improving a service and modernizing an institution, it sounded much more like leading a social movement or a membership-driven campaigning organization.
Another example - a UK delegate told me that he went to the Community-driven Innovation specialist session and after five minutes thought he was in the wrong place. The session talked about how empowering the community (in particular women in the community!) could drive change in emerging countries, so the temptation was to think “interesting but not relevant in advanced countries”. But the UK delegate changed his mind – he realized that what we need to do is get away from a mindset of trying to work out what the public sector can do for citizens and focus on discovering ways in which citizens can co-produce the services they want.
So perhaps I was wrong to suggest that we are not on a road to self-organised government. Maybe in trying to be a feet-on-the-ground realist I was too conservative. I still think it is unhelpful (and a bit ridiculous) to suggest that government is about to disappear, but I do think that co-production is a fantastically powerful idea. The welfare state has drilled into us the idea that government does things for people and, while that approach is an improvement on “dog eat dog”, there is a lot of unlearning we need to do in this area. Government 2.0 should be about creating platforms that inspire and empower people so they take control. What we need to learn from Web 2.0 is the excitement and creativity that emerges from groups that decide things for themselves.
PS The user-generated event site worked quite well and it was interesting how excited some people got about twitter. It should be up for quite a while, so do take a look at http://www.cisco08.com/
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Comments
We shouldn’t be so surprised, perhaps? After all, government of the sort with which we are so familiar and which we all keep agreeing needs to be so radically transformed is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before the era of mass ‘industrialised’ government, people did plenty of co-creating, harnessing the instincts and practices of voluntary association to create often large-scale and powerful public or mutual intuitions that educated, healed and kept insured against at least some measure of risk. The assumption that large-scale, welfare-state style government rescued us from an era of unrestrained dog-eat-dog individualism isn’t accurate I think.
What strikes me about the work of people like Charles Leadbeater and the inspiring leadership of Dr Jadhav in India is how similar it is, at least in instinct and often in some of its practices, to an older tradition of mutual self-help that predated the welfare state.
The real challenge here is scale and equity. The welfare state was primarily a response to a perceived need to solve social problems at scale, something its original architects felt the patchwork world of mutual and voluntary organisations couldn’t achieve. Right now, we find ourselves in an era defined by two apparently contradictory impulses. We want to maintain and, if possible, extend the promise of scale and equity in the search for sustainable solutions to common problems which, if anything, have grown even more immense than those facing the designers of the industrial welfare state.
At the same time, we are growing increasingly frustrated in the face of mounting evidence that many of the institutions of that industrial model of large-scale public service delivery, and the values and systems on which they rely, are dysfunctional in a world rendered radically different by technology-enabled (and accelerated) social, economic and political change.
So we are searching for a best-of-both-worlds, back-to-the-future response that crafts new policy and delivery platforms which can, at one and the same time, give us the ‘work with’ models of responsive, subtle and highly localized solutions and create movements for change that are large enough to match the enormous challenges we are trying to solve. To some extent, we traded local responsiveness for the institutional grunt power of the industrial models of modern government. Now, we want to trade back to those earlier models in an attempt to re-balance a model of governing that has become, in a sense, too big and too clumsy. The promise of the new technologies of collaboration and communication offer us the alluring prospect of being able to combine both large scale and local responsiveness.
We are, in other words, in the midst of one of those wonderful and slightly scary periods when we are forced to go back to the design table, literally and metaphorically, and rethink the basic ideas and structures that will work in this new context. Charles’ wonderful story about the 17-year old Korean guitarist creating a global TV channel with 53 million other willing, but ‘unorganised’ volunteers, and Narendra Jadhav’s social movement approach to regenerating his astonishing community of learners and teachers both give us some hints about what we are trying to design. These are both examples of large scale solutions that didn’t seem to compromise the human scale of the interactions on which they were based. Nor did they create institutional structures that ended up oppressing the very people, and their instincts for connection and common purpose, which they were intended to enable.
Of course government isn’t unnecessary, as Paul rightly points out. But as it works now, at least for may of us in the industrialized west, maybe we are witnessing in a literal sense, the end of government as we know it? Maybe some of that inheritance IS unnecessary and should, rightly, fall by the wayside as we design new institutions, and habits of governance, to replace them.
posted about 1 year ago