I just started a book called How Democracies Die. Suddenly it is not an idle question. I am reminded that our governance model is a grand experiment and not a particularly lengthy one as history goes.
In fact, I have been fond of reminding my entrenched peers on lowly town boards that “all policy is an experiment,” meaning we should not accept all ordinances, codes or procedures as best just because a coating of time and dust has confirmed them. I have also worked with folks who impatiently sought to change everything now just because they are suddenly in power. There is a balance. There is a reason we have due process, checks & balances, election cycles.
The federal government should be an aircraft carrier, but local governments can be Zodiacs.
Dan Rather, in his new book, What Unites Us speaks to all the marble in Washington D.C. and says it is only as “permanent as our ideals,” and “the true foundations of those buildings are not brick and stone, but our Constitution, our rule of law, our traditions, our work ethic, our empathy, our pragmatism, and our basic decency.”
While what is going on at a federal level today ought to be uncomfortable, it was without irony that one of the recurrent themes at the Colorado City and County Managers Association (CCCMA) conference in Glenwood Springs this past week had a lot to do with pragmatism and humility. The not-published theme that I gleaned was: accepting failure.
That’s right. Failure.
Nick Kittle, Chief Innovations Officer for Adams County advised that “innovation is creativity implemented.” His emphasis was heavy on implement. Educated in various models of innovation, Kittle espouses “Failing: smart, often, fast, forward and being honest about results.” Then do it again and again. He quoted an elder who once told him, “If Plan A doesn’t work, there are 25 more letters – stay cool.” Sounds like the scientific experiment model, doesn’t it?
Spoiler alert: innovation is the scientific method, hypothesize, experiment, be transparent, share success/failure so all can learn. We each have an opportunity to improve through thoughtful risk, thoughtful failure, reflection, honest assessment. No, this is not happening in Congress, but it can happen in your neighborhood.
Kittle noted, “your ability to succeed is intrinsically linked to your willingness to fail.” His topic, “Sustainavation” was aimed at local government administrators who manage organizations with a spectacularly wide spectrum of discomfort for change. He noted that “government is the largest organization in the world without an R & D department.” Red meat comment, for sure, but unlike campaign slams, what does one do about it?
Message to local governments—be an R & D department. Many localities like Adams County and Denver through its’ Peak Academy have employed analysts, innovation leaders or leaned into training that empowers line-level employees to improve systems. Most importantly, they have support from leadership, from the elected level through top management, through mid-level managers. This can be more challenging to sell, though easier to implement in smaller places—like measuring whether that intersection works better than a four-way stop. As places like Avon and Kremmling have learned, striping of pavement is an easy way to experiment.
Or, bring on a traffic study and a raft of traffic engineers to study, design and rack up the dollars to do an analysis to stand behind, and then choose to do nothing because, well, “we studied it.” I’m not saying that expert opinions are superfluous. Just set up a mechanism to try, measure and adjust.
Patrick Ibarra of “The Mejorando Group” (gettingbetterallthetime.com) said at CCCMA that too often we struggle with “analysis paralysis.” Indeed. “Government deals with stress by making policy.” He doubled down on Kittle with “don’t think outside the box. There is no box.” He made a strong case that “innovation is not a great political risk.”
Depending on the scale, of course. Is that risk foundational to the structures of the institution—elections or separations of duties, rule of law? or just a really fine experiment in practice or policy?
I would argue that if you can look past the smoke (and the many explosions), one of the great lessons of the Trump era will be that Americans hunger for different approaches and that the public has a much greater tolerance for taking risks (innovating) than we think. There is a reason that local governments have been called “laboratories for democracy.” What are you waiting for?
Yes, there will be a whole lot more to unpack about the Trump era when history takes over as the smoke clears. Time will tell about the many risks and norms being broken by this administration, and the effects. There are times when breaking the system is what needs to be done. That is called Revolution.
Our system is designed to adjust, adapt, experiment and change without the need for that kind of foundational change. It was a great idea for a structure that we are testing yet again.
Dan Rather writes about Martin Luther King who he acknowledges many thought was calling for revolution, but, as Rather states, “He wasn’t even arguing that there was something inherently rotten with the protections and provisions under which the United States was founded. Rather, he believed, and justly so, that the translation of those ideals into practice had been lacking,” and “he spoke freely and with the moral backing of our foundational documents.”
I’m referring to thoughtful, deliberate chance-taking, creating a culture that encourages innovation (and embraces failure), if in Western Colorado on a much smaller scale. The market calls this entrepreneurship—governments should embrace it.
Kittle, whom Scott Vargo, Summit County manager confirmed will be brought back to the high country for a longer workshop later this year, spent a great time talking at CCCMA about how irrational our fears are, and how the default too easily becomes “bureaucracide.” Kittle cited the Chapman University Annual Survey of American Fears which if one looks at the change from 2016 to 2017 shows some interesting trends. Look it up.
Top fear of the American public both years, “corrupt government officials.” I’m not advocating that kind of innovation.
One of the interesting fear swings was that in 2016, the 10th greatest fear of Americans was Obamacare. In 2017, at #2… “Trumpcare.” Go figure. Three topics in the Top 10 in both years, which does not bode well for the current “innovations” going on at the EPA; Americans fear pollution of water bodies, of drinking water, and clean air more consistently than just about anything else outside of personal safety and finances. One can, of course, make change without assessing the feedback, at ones’ own risk.
So, indeed, “all policy is an experiment,” local, federal and global. We should not fear earnest attempts to improve upon it. We should do so with humility and pragmatism, perhaps with a hypothesis of thought to begin. Because, as Kittle notes in his last step in the innovation cycle, being “honest about results” –that is what makes failure productive.
