A Place to Stand
This article first appeared in the Minden Times in October, 2023.
I think a lot these days about how social institutions are failing to deliver their products and services. There was a moment during Covid when it looked like institutions remembered how to move quickly and effectively, but now we seem to celebrate the ways in which that action was imperfect, as if speed itself is a bad thing, risk aversion a good thing. (Ironic, when Mark Zuckerman immortalized the value of moving fast and breaking things – forgetting to mention that such abandon tended to cost big bucks, which business must have and government must not.)
I have long thought that institutions, the moment they are born, begin to act in their own interests rather than the purpose for which they were created. Imagine my delight, then, with discovering sociologist Robert Michels’ ‘iron law of oligarchy’ which says ‘Simply put, all complex organizations …ultimately are run by a leadership class.’ And a further delineation by Darcy K. Leach, another sociologist, who says that ‘bureaucracy happens; if bureaucracy happens, power rises; if power rises, power corrupts.’ (From Left to Right, p31-32).
That pretty much leaves us with village square governance as the only sustainable form of democracy or equality. Many of us abhor leaderlessness because we have experienced committee processes that wandered endlessly in the whorls of indecision. We acknowledge that even small groups need leadership and have hierarchy: parents, for example, need to give guidance to their children; bosses need to give direction to their team.
I could go all Marxian – or Indigenous -- here and say that leadership does not imply hierarchy, but rather a circle of expertises and responsibilities. But I want to explore a model of thinking about leadership that is new to me. It’s the Cynefin framework, devised by an IBM manager, Dave Snowdon, borrowing a Welsh word meaning ‘habitat’, similar to a Maori word, turangawaewae, meaning a place to stand, or ‘the ground and place which is your heritage and that you come from.’ It says, at base, how you think about or classify a situation should define how you tackle it.
Skeletally, the Cynefin approach says problems may be simple, complicated or complex. Simple problems have a known cause and an obvious solution: they should be addressed with agreed-upon best practice. Complicated problems are those where there may be multiple solutions but they are not obvious: they are best met by accessing expertise to analyze them and render them simple. Complex problems are those with unknown internal interactions that must be fixed on the fly; they require exploration, experimentation and thoughtful delegation, along with a willingness, even expectation, to learn from failure.
The nature of a complex problem will change as it is being addressed; some bits may be rendered simple and solved, others will morph in unexpected ways, there will be unproductive ventures down rabbit holes, there will be serendipity whose components are hidden. (The theory also includes chaos, in which an action must be taken and hope for the best, and confusion, which, as best I can understand it, calls for a whack-a-mole approach until something clearer arises. I find them real but less helpful to my thinking.)
Complex problems are ‘wicked’ problems. Like the Covid pandemic. Like the housing dilemma. Like the on-the-mat health system. Chris Clearfield, in an article in the Toronto Star Sept 23/23 (which this column uses mightily), drawing on his book Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It, gives Toyota as an example of how to think about a wicked problem, building the best car possible. It went to its line workers, the ones who were most closely and completely involved with the process of building cars, and empowered them to come up with recommendations for how to do it better, which when tested and deemed successful, were scaled up.
There’s nothing much new about breaking a big problem into its composite parts and solving them separately, hopefully collaboratively (ie respecting the intersectoral nature of the problem). What’s noteworthy (not, I think, new) is trusting that the bottom of the hierarchy knows things the top doesn’t, and having the humility to respect and act on that.
Canada largely treated the pandemic as a wicked problem and allowed exploration, experimentation, and delegation (perhaps structural rather than thoughtful). I don’t see the same approach to housing or health. It seems stuck in old ways of thinking, a dedication to top-downness, a denial or dismissal of ground-level expertise and imagination, a stranglehold on the levers of power even as they demonstrably malfunction, a downloading of responsibility without associated authority or resources.
What I wonder is if we as citizens should re-gift ourselves with responsibility for solving the wicked problems by sliding out from under the bureaucracy, doing what we can with what we’ve got, embracing the place in which we stand.
