small is beautiful, to begin with

what would you attempt, if you knew you might fail?

I’m sorry for the non-appearance of the Wednesday post; I am so busy that I literally forgot it was Wednesday. Manuscript deadline for “The Problem Factory” is at the end of this month, so naturally I decided the best thing to do was take on a bunch of other commitments. I can’t promise immediate improvement but I will do my best.

Anyway, I was at a seminar this week and, as is my habit, made a silly joke which I now take seriously and think is my actual view. We were addressing the question of “Building Things”, and I proposed the following thought experiment:

What is the largest piece of public sector infrastructure that you could build, right now, if you were restricted to using no more than two contractors, getting permission from no more than two planning bodies and employing no more than two professional services firms?

The idea was to try and get a physical scale and scope for something we were certain we could achieve given the administrative and decision making resources at our disposal. My guess is that the answer might be “something really embarrassingly small, like possibly a bus shelter”. But, infrastructure projects like this have one important advantage over more serious and necessary projects, which is that we can actually do them. There’s only fifteen possible communication channels between six nodes (twenty-one if we imagine there’s a commissioning body that needs to talk to all of them), which ought to be possible for one person to keep track of with an email outbox and a telephone.

So, if we want to get building, let’s not start by being blinded with foolish pride. Declare open season for bus shelters and similar small scale projects. But while we’re building, we need to make sure we’re learning. So let’s also commission a few projects which are a bit bigger than the scale that we know we can manage – we need another thought experiment along the lines of “what’s the smallest thing that you think you couldn’t build if you were restricted to two contractors, two permissioning authorities and two professional services firms?”

Some of those projects will succeed and some will fail, because we’re not going to be able to precisely estimate our own capacity. But we can learn from the ones that fail – this will give us lessons about where the bottlenecks are. And we can learn even more from the ones which don’t exactly fail, but which take much longer than they ought to.

Now we have a, hopefully manageable, “snag list”. This will consist of communication bottlenecks, perceived legal risks and regulatory problems. It will also include some bad faith actors and “blockers” who are opposed to the aim. The first category of problems are the suitable raw material for Malcolm Sparrow’s “problem-oriented governance approach” – you recruit a problem team from all the areas the problem touches, agree on a definition, brainstorm and experiment solutions, then implement and communicate.

The builders and blockers are a slightly different issue, because they’re intrinsically political rather than technical. They either need to be treated as problems to be solved with the same approach as other bottlenecks, or taken seriously as political stakeholders. And asking that question is the same thing as asking “has the decision to build this thing actually been taken yet?” In my view, a lot of the problems on the Abundance Agenda might have a negative answer to this as their root.

And then you iterate; if the problem teams have concluded, communicated and wound up successfully, then the largest object that you can build within your administrative capacity is now a bit bigger. So, build a bunch of those, and then also commission a few more “learning” projects which feel like they’re a bit bigger than you can handle. You’ll be putting high speed trams across the Pennines before you know it.

Readers might notice that I haven’t defined “you” above, which was intentional, because I think this sort of approach can work at different levels from local authorities to departments to central government. The important thing, I think is to start with a realistic and honest assessment of current capacity. As Sun Tsu said, know the enemy and know yourself, and you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.