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Net Governance
By
Camille Cates Barnett, Ph. D.
Citistates Group Associate and
Partner, Public Strategies Group
Some moments hold
eternity. Such a moment for me came in a jail. What
we call “Corrections” was part of my new
responsibilities as the Chief Management Officer
of the District of Columbia. On this evening, I
had eaten the jail food, seen the crumbling ceilings
and walls, walked through the “community”
area where the recent inmate killing had occurred
and talked with people with their arms draped over
the bars that held them in their cells. My last
stop was the youth unit. There I met a group of
teenagers — some waiting their turn to talk
on the one pay phone, others practicing their latest
rap songs, others reading, and others staring into
the space of their own thoughts. Their eyes. I remember
their eyes. There was a sadness there too deep for
the young. All of these teenagers were African American.
They were all in jail for murder.
As I left, I noticed
that I had begun to cry. In that moment, I knew
that something is terribly wrong.
In that moment, I
saw and felt the truth we public officials avoid.
We have failed. Governments are not governing. Whatever
we are doing, it is not enough.
We are failing with
governmental structures that are federal, state
and local — when the issues we must address
are global, regional and in neighborhoods.
We are failing even
though we are trying. We are failing despite some
successes. We are failing despite our good management.
My early public management
was “scientific management,” an emphasis
on efficiency and productivity. City managers
were expected to “run government like a business.”
Of course, businesses were also command and control
bureaucracies. They became non-competitive in the
new global economy and non-responsive to a changing
workforce and changing customers.
Governments, like
ailing businesses, then discovered the power of
focusing on the customer. Governments experimented
with new ways of involving citizens and new ways
of improving services.
Many of our experiments
coalesced in the “reinventing government”
movement of the 1990’s. We embraced customer
focus, entrepreneurial government, steering not
rowing, anticipation not reaction. We focused on
improving organizational systems. It was not enough.
As David Osborne,
co-author of Reinventing Government and Banishing
Bureaucracy, says
“In government,
most organizations exist within fairly dysfunctional
systems. ...Hence, the most important strategic
levers in the public sector lie within the larger
system, not within the organization. Civic entrepreneurs
must change these larger systems — education
systems, welfare systems, regulatory systems,
federal-state-local systems, budget systems, personnel
systems, and the like.”
(Banishing
Bureaucracy, p. 12)
Too often we are
“reinventing” the same old system. We
are doing the same things and expecting different
results.
Do we really believe
that a better criminal justice system will prevent
crimes? The problem is bigger than that, more complicated
than that, more connected than that. Having
an impact requires action in many areas, connected
to action in many other areas. We do need a better
criminal justice system — and we need a better
educational system, more boys and girls clubs and
other social support, better early childhood education,
more affordable housing, better economic opportunities
and many other things. Mostly, we need a better
vision. We need real and practical ways to make
and nurture the connections between one policy or
program and another.
As Einstein said,
“No problem
can be solved from the same consciousness which
created it.”
Our mental model
is still hierarchical. Kevin Kelly in his book Out
of Control (p. 8.) says our mental model is
the atom:
“The popular
symbol of the Atom is stark: a black dot encircled
by the hairline orbits of several other dots.
The Atom whirls alone, the epitome of singleness.
It is the metaphor for individuality: atomic.
...The Atom stand for power and knowledge and
certainty.” (p. 25)
Kelly says the icon
for the 21st century is the Net.
“The Net
icon has no center – it is a bunch of dots
connected to other dots..., the restless image
fading at indeterminate edges. The Net is...all
intelligence, all interdependence, all things
economic and social and ecological, all communications,
all democracy, all groups, all large systems.”
(p. 25)
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Our mental model
of governance is still one of central control.
Likewise, the mental
model of many cities is the Atom: a central city
surrounded by other jurisdictions in its orbit.
We lament the decline of the central city and blame
the suburbs. We are desperately trying to put the
Atom together again.
Yet the things we
really care about in cities cannot be resolved without
looking beyond the arbitrary political jurisdictions
we call cities. We want the five E’s
of sustainable cities: a strong Economy, a clean
Environment, social Equity, quality Education, and
civic Engagement. None of these issues stop at borders.
We are all connected. A city today is actually a
complex system of overlapping, interrelating jurisdictions
— a Net.
How do you govern
a Net? Focus on flows — of resources, ideas,
power. Facilitate flows.
Net Governance is
more facilitation and less control. Net Governance
means bringing together disparate parts and repairing
broken connections. Net Governance means crossing
boundaries and including diversity. Net Governance
is constant openness to experimentation and the
search for better outcomes. Net Governance
is distributed governance.
Can you imagine net
governance of a metropolitan region? What if we
focused on repairing broken connections between
cities, suburbs and farmland? What if we strengthen
our interdependencies through revenue sharing and
joint projects? What if we were able to see our
collective self-interest in economic development
and environmental protection strategies? What if
we were able to cooperate without a central authority
requiring it? What if we focused on results by using
sustainability indicators?
What if we used virtual
reality technology to model land use and transportation
decisions of our region? What if the citizens
of a region could see these land use decisions on
their computer or television screens?
What if governments
consistently highlighted the relationships, the
consequences and the unintended consequences
of various public policies in land use, transportation,
economic development, environment, education, health,
housing, social services and public safety? What
if governance encouraged sharing of ideas between
diverse cultures? What if governance could leverage
the creativity and intelligence of more and more
individuals?
What if we governed
our regions as if they were nets, not atoms?
New organizational
forms are emerging that follow these Net principles
of distributed power, diversity and ingenuity. The
most familiar of these new organizations is the
Internet. Used creatively, it allows every person
connected to contribute to the thought process.
It can be especially effective in connecting metropolitan
regions where common interests abound.
Like the Internet,
all of these organizations are highly decentralized
and highly collaborative. Some have actually been
around for a while, like Alcoholics Anonymous and
the VISA Corporation. Others are using these principles
in newer organizations, like the Appleseed Foundation
and the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance. These
organizations collaborate to achieve results.
Dee Hock, Visa’s
creator and first CEO said:
“The better
an organization is, the less obvious it is. In
Visa, we tried to create an invisible organization
and keep it that way. It’s the results, not
the structure or management that should be apparent.”
(Fast Company,
November 1996, p. 76)
Dee Hock created
the trillion-dollar Visa enterprise by focusing
on a few principles. He created Visa as a
“chaordic” organization, a word he uses
to combine chaos and order. The organizing principles
are:
- “It must
be equitably owned by all the participants.
- Power and function
must be distributive to the maximum degree.
- Governance
must be distributive.
- It must be
infinitely malleable yet extremely durable.
- It must embrace
diversity and change.”
(“The
Chaordic Organization: Out of Control and into
Order,” World Business Academy Perspectives,
Vol. 9 No. 1, 1995)
The chaordic organization
is a networked organization. The key to distributive
governance is agreement on the principles of organization.
What if we were able
to use a collaborative process to agree on the principles?
What if we connected thought leaders focused on
specific problems and opportunities of our metropolitan
regions? What if every specialist in every government
— from education to town planning, economic
development to human services — thought across
boundaries, about how his or her program affects
all others in both the public and private sectors?
What, then, if leaders
collaboratively produced ideas and recommendations
that fueled other collaborative processes of experimenting
with those ideas and recommendations? What if the
knowledge generated in solving real problems could
then be distributed to a larger audience? What if
innovation, intelligence, leadership and control
could be distributed throughout an essentially invisible
organization?
What if this process
brought us to fresh, mutually embraced approaches?
What, for example, if it led us to create new solutions
to problems of racism and youth violence?
What if we tried
Net Governance?
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Last updated October
29, 2000
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