Any thoughts or meta-level lessons after VaccinateCA about how to improve competence in our institutions, particularly in government? So many problems (not just in the US) come down to corruption in government, or institutionalized incompetence, or a cultural expectation of slowness and low productivity, etc. How do we get underneath these problems to structural issues of organization and incentives, and fix the root causes?
From seeing parts of the official effort that vastly outperformed the median entry in the official effort, some ideas:
Continued experimentation with approaches like the U.S. Digital Service which attempt to create pockets of high-functioning competence and make them available at-need to people in the rest of the system who desire to consume e.g. engineering competence but cannot avail themselves of it locally due to institutional constraints. Stop trying to boil the ocean; start embracing boiling a pot of drinking water and then creating a factory to do that at scale.
This would have been against my beliefs for most of my life, but I think I am in favor of less people in strategic decisionmaking and more accountability for them versus having strategic decision being delegated to hundreds of thousands of people across tens of thousands of orgs, none of them feeling responsible for the final outcome. It may be a true statement that no individual anywhere thinks that they were ultimately responsible for vaccine administration policy or accountable for vaccination rates or other metrics of interest. That… is an insane result.
I think people outside the government need to become radically more familiar with how it operates, not as described in civics class but how it actually functions in the real world. The details of e.g. org charts, reporting lines, incentives, etc matter an awful lot, and to the extent those details are unknown outside of local communities of practice, they are unlikely to reflect our true values. (Or, in some cases, any values at all.) I think many mechanisms for transparency in government (public records laws, FOIA, etc) are positive, but it seems like we have a great deal of low-hanging fruit.
Is there a compelling reason why the state doesn’t publish an org chart, for example? I can imagine many; for one, I doubt the state actually is capable of publishing an org chart. That seems like a capability that we should demand from it as a condition of giving it unique authority to do certain things.
See the VaccinateCA piece, but there are many institutions which were not optimizing for “The US should attempt to maximize the number of lives saved during the pandemic” and we should be scandalized by that.
What sort of oversight can prevent a headless (or “committee”) venture from being launched, and what explains the existence of the other kind of oversight, that lets it happen?
I’ve worked at some tech companies which had a very effective answer to that question. At those companies here’s a strong cultural expectation that anything you want to get done should have a known Directly Responsible Individual. As the name suggests, the DRI is exactly one person who is responsible for making sure the thing gets done, and has the authority to make relevant decisions as an individual. (This sometimes goes by other names, but the concept is more or less the same.) If this person is doing poorly they can be replaced with someone else, but there needs to be one person who is ultimately individually responsible and has the corresponding individual authority.
This was probably a formal rule, but the real enforcement was cultural. Everybody Knew that there had to be someone in charge of doing the thing; otherwise how could they possibly expect the thing to get done? Putting a committee in charge instead of a person would have just felt bizarre, as unexpected and transgressive as dropping one’s trousers in a meeting.
This kind of culture can perpetuate itself easily once it exists, but I don’t know how to change an existing organizational culture to be this way, short of having someone at the top with a lot of power and the willingness to use it on this.
Any thoughts or meta-level lessons after VaccinateCA about how to improve competence in our institutions, particularly in government? So many problems (not just in the US) come down to corruption in government, or institutionalized incompetence, or a cultural expectation of slowness and low productivity, etc. How do we get underneath these problems to structural issues of organization and incentives, and fix the root causes?
From seeing parts of the official effort that vastly outperformed the median entry in the official effort, some ideas:
Continued experimentation with approaches like the U.S. Digital Service which attempt to create pockets of high-functioning competence and make them available at-need to people in the rest of the system who desire to consume e.g. engineering competence but cannot avail themselves of it locally due to institutional constraints. Stop trying to boil the ocean; start embracing boiling a pot of drinking water and then creating a factory to do that at scale.
This would have been against my beliefs for most of my life, but I think I am in favor of less people in strategic decisionmaking and more accountability for them versus having strategic decision being delegated to hundreds of thousands of people across tens of thousands of orgs, none of them feeling responsible for the final outcome. It may be a true statement that no individual anywhere thinks that they were ultimately responsible for vaccine administration policy or accountable for vaccination rates or other metrics of interest. That… is an insane result.
I think people outside the government need to become radically more familiar with how it operates, not as described in civics class but how it actually functions in the real world. The details of e.g. org charts, reporting lines, incentives, etc matter an awful lot, and to the extent those details are unknown outside of local communities of practice, they are unlikely to reflect our true values. (Or, in some cases, any values at all.) I think many mechanisms for transparency in government (public records laws, FOIA, etc) are positive, but it seems like we have a great deal of low-hanging fruit.
Is there a compelling reason why the state doesn’t publish an org chart, for example? I can imagine many; for one, I doubt the state actually is capable of publishing an org chart. That seems like a capability that we should demand from it as a condition of giving it unique authority to do certain things.
I feel like this answers my question quite well!
Are there interests that would have wanted the U.S. pandemic response to be low-efficacy, or is that not a productive line of thinking?
See the VaccinateCA piece, but there are many institutions which were not optimizing for “The US should attempt to maximize the number of lives saved during the pandemic” and we should be scandalized by that.
What sort of oversight can prevent a headless (or “committee”) venture from being launched, and what explains the existence of the other kind of oversight, that lets it happen?
I’ve worked at some tech companies which had a very effective answer to that question. At those companies here’s a strong cultural expectation that anything you want to get done should have a known Directly Responsible Individual. As the name suggests, the DRI is exactly one person who is responsible for making sure the thing gets done, and has the authority to make relevant decisions as an individual. (This sometimes goes by other names, but the concept is more or less the same.) If this person is doing poorly they can be replaced with someone else, but there needs to be one person who is ultimately individually responsible and has the corresponding individual authority.
This was probably a formal rule, but the real enforcement was cultural. Everybody Knew that there had to be someone in charge of doing the thing; otherwise how could they possibly expect the thing to get done? Putting a committee in charge instead of a person would have just felt bizarre, as unexpected and transgressive as dropping one’s trousers in a meeting.
This kind of culture can perpetuate itself easily once it exists, but I don’t know how to change an existing organizational culture to be this way, short of having someone at the top with a lot of power and the willingness to use it on this.
I upvoted this but would also like to explicitly endorse it, as it saves me from redundantly typing a worse version of the same answer.