I’ve mentioned the name of Malcolm Sparrow before in this newsletter and will again; I think he’s extremely important and to the extent that you can call someone “underrated” when they’re a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, he is. His books on regulation (informed by a previous career as a Detective Chief Inspector in England, as well as in-depth consultancy with things like the Florida Department of Environmental Protection) are not just very interesting studies of the regulatory craft – there is, in my view, a lot of more general insights applicable to all aspects of management and economics. He’s also the source for one of my favourite factoids (that up to one third of Medicare expenditures in the 1990s were fraudulent, and the elegant description of the “shotgun, then rifle” strategy by which the fraudsters achieved this feat).
So we’ll be coming back to Sparrow-thought quite a bit in the future. To start with, one of his case studies relates to “port-running” on the Southern border of the USA. This was a practice whereby a drug smuggling gang would put half a tonne of merchandise into a fast truck with a brave driver. If he got stopped at the border control, the driver would just floor it, smash other cars out of the way (and pedestrians, and border guards) and make his escape. It worked best at border crossings near urban areas where the port-runner could get lost in the streets and shake off pursuit.
It was a difficult problem to solve, given the constraints of reasonable cost, the tendency of crackdowns at one crossing to drive traffic to others, and not wanting to do something that would end up with a gun battle in an area crowded with civilians. In the end, the solution turned out to be to address the essential feature of a quick getaway, by putting “Jersey barriers” (those concrete things they put up at highway construction sites) to create a series of chicanes in the exit from the port, slowing the cars down and making it possible to separate a port-runner from anywhere you wouldn’t want to be stopping them. If you want to read about it, it’s on p14 of this extract from The Character Of Harms.
What interests me right now, though, is what happened next …
The Jersey barrier solution had been invented by a small task force of 15 customs officers, covering the two regions where port-running was a problem (Texas and California), and including representatives from enforcement, inspection and intelligence. It was set up to consider the problem from all of these angles. (Before hitting on the concrete chicanes, they had previously suggested solutions involving bollards, which were too dangerous, Blackhawk helicopters, which were expensive and couldn’t be concealed, and sniffer dogs, who couldn’t work in extreme heat on tarmac and surrounded by exhaust fumes). The task force’s work was an example of Sparrow’s “problem oriented” strategy – they had identified a specific important problem to solve, and decided beforehand on the measures that they would use to indicate success or failure.
These measures were problem-specific – a key one for the port-running taskforce was that they decided to gather intelligence on the fee paid to port-runners, and on the number of identified “returns to Mexico” (occasions when an identified drug cargo gave up before reaching the border). They predicted that if things were working, the price would rise, and that RTMs would spike upward, then drop back down again, as gangs started giving up on a strategy that wasn’t working any more. And so it proved. Hurray.
But then what did happen next?
What happened next was that a senior customs executive told Malcolm Sparrow that it was such a great project that they were going to set up small multiregional, multifunctional teams like this all over the country. Which was nice, but Sparrow then asked the question – “what other problems do you have which are roughly of that particular size and scope, then?”. The answer was that the executive wasn’t aware of any, but he was sure they would find some if they looked for them.
But would they? This is one of a number of case studies meant to illustrate “the problem with problem-orientation”, so to speak. Over the course of a number of engagements with public authorities, Sparrow tended to find that people really liked the idea of his philosophy of “identify important problems, solve them, then tell everyone what you did” (a number of interesting concepts tied up in that one, which we’ll come back to later). They even commissioned pilot projects which were often very successful, but then a year or so later they tended to not only give up on the idea of problem-orientation, but to conclude that it was literally impossible to implement.
The thing is (as Will Butler-Adams of Brompton Bicycle told me in another context), you have to start from a position of respecting the problem. That means tackling it in its own terms and looking at the unique and particular characteristics which make it a big problem. Generic solutions and things which have worked somewhere else are very good for improving routine processes and making efficiency improvements in operations. But they don’t work anything like as well for problem-solving; that’s more or less definitionally the nature of what it is to be a problem.
More to come on this subject, and its application to evidence-based policy, “doing what works” and so on, as well as on Sparrow’s alternative model.