Making the Most of Mess

MAKING THE MOST OF MESS Making the Most of Mess Reliability and Policy in Today’s Management Challenges EMERY ROE DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS DURHAM AND LONDON 2013 © 2013 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ! Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Chaparral Pro with Univers display by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. To LOUISE PALMER FORTMANN and in memory of PAT CRECINE and AARON WILDVASKY, who were in at the beginning CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix ONE. Introducing Policy Messes, Management, and Their Managers 1 TWO. When Reliability Is Mess Management 16 THREE. The Wider Framework for Managing Mess Reliably: Hubs, Skills, and the Domain of Competence 32 FOUR. Bad Mess Management 56 FIVE. Good Mess Management 78 SIX. Societal Challenges 106 SEVEN. Professional Challenges 128 EIGHT. How We Know That the Policy Mess Is Managed Better 144 Notes 155 Bibliography 175 Index 201 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In 1970, a PhD candidate submitted his dissertation to the Economics Department at the University of Houston. The thesis, ‘‘The Measure- ment of the Timing of the Economic Impact of Defense Procurement Activity: An Analysis of the Vietnam Buildup,’’ set out how defense contractors and procurement policies of the U.S. Department of De- fense worked to undermine economic stability: It is the purpose of this dissertation to demonstrate that sufficiently accurate information about the timing of the impact on economic output of defense procurement activity did not exist during the Vietnam buildup. As a result, national stabilization policies were inadequately restrictive to com- pensate for the increases in defense production and, hence, contributed to the unstable economic conditions of the late 1960’s. The model which is developed in this dissertation would have provided more accurate information about the timing of this impact and would have improved national stabilization policies. (1970, 2–3) Unfortunately, models that show how to improve economic stability through better information can be flipped into a road map to create more instability and market power by withholding that information. This economist was Ken Lay, later head of Enron. If economic theory tells us that monopoly power, asymmetric information, public goods, and negative externalities reflect market failure, what more do we need to know by way of a starting point if we want markets to fail our way? Their mess is our profit. Yes, those novel financial models and instruments that Enron pioneered led to its col- lapse. But matters didn’t stop there. The same innovations resurfaced as major causes of the 2008 financial meltdown, as if Enron had not happened. We will see that the very same innovations are involved as well in some of the more dangerous messes we are in today. ‘‘It’s not the tragedies that kill us,’’ the American wit Dorothy Parker insisted, ‘‘it’s the messes’’ (quoted in Miller 2004). But that’s not quite right, is it? Not all messes are bad, be they in our personal or our professional lives. Even in policy, some messes are good from the start. There are some that can be managed for the better, and it is clear that others are made much worse from mis- x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS management. This book is about how to manage messes in policy more reliably and avoid managing them less reliably. Nothing induces mess quite like Theory on its own, but small-c concepts and small-a approaches for mess management, I hope to show, have their practical uses. A book about mess risks becoming a mess. My book turned into a decade-long project, during which it felt as if I talked to a small town of people at conferences, workshops, panels, seminars, courses, classes, and more gemütliche occasions. To each person, I am grateful. If I have succeeded in keeping this work on point, it is through the good offices of Anitra Grisales, Evert Lindquist, Lloyd Linford, Paul ‘t Hart, and the reviewers. Arjen Boin wrestled to the mat several of the book’s incarna- tions, not always winning but always scoring points. I am grateful to Valerie Millholland, Gisela Fosado, Jeanne Ferris, Eileen Quam, and Christine Dahlin with Duke University Press. My special thanks go to my friend and research colleague Paul R. Schulman. Only when I started working with Paul did I realize I had a book in the making. He witnessed its evolution and references throughout signify my debt to him. None of these individuals are responsible for any errors that remain. Finally, I’d like to express my gratitude to those presses, publishers, and jour- nals that gave me the opportunity to publish initial versions of material that have been substantially reworked here: Oxford University Press (van Eeten and Roe 2002), crc Press/Taylor and Francis (Roe 2007), Stanford University Press (Roe and Schulman 2008), and the Policy Studies Organization/Wiley (Roe 2009). Professional policy analysts, myself included, would be hobbled in long-term projects if we didn’t have these early opportunities to formulate positions that later on mutate along different lines of argument. ONE INTRODUCING POLICY MESSES, MANAGEMENT, AND THEIR MANAGERS My first and most important point: Policymakers in government and policy analysts in the public and private sectors have a great deal to learn about management from a special class of professionals little discussed in the literature or media: namely, those control room operators who manage large technical systems for water supplies, electricity, telecommunications, and other critical infrastructures that societies have come to depend on for reliable health, safety, and energy services. This book is about applying what has been learned from managing more reliably in one domain (critical infrastructures) to the broader domains of policy and management that have their own political or legal mandates to be reliable, yet increasingly fall short of meeting those mandates. When we think of policymakers, as we often must these days, we may have in mind leaders, legislators, and officials who govern our political institutions. When many of us think of control rooms and the operators in large-scale energy or telecommunications systems—if we think of them at all—it is during major emergencies. Among the better- known examples are the frantic actions of control room operators at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, or in the lower Manhattan telecommunications hub as the World Trade Center fell around it on 9/11. Why should we expect that policymakers, analysts, and political elites have anything to learn from real-time infrastructure managers? Be- cause these operators manage every day to prevent all manner of major accidents and failures from happening, which would occur if the operators had not managed the way they do. We see politicians, policymakers, and their support staff operating at their performance edges; what we don’t see is that critical infrastructure managers have to do the same every day, but more successfully, by managing the way they do. My second line of argument: What exactly is this ‘‘managing the way they do’’? To answer succinctly, control room operators are often bril- liant mess managers, and what is blazingly obvious is we need better 2 CHAPTER ONE mess managers when it comes to what seem to be intractable problems in policies and politics. When asked why I call these apparent intractabilities ‘‘messes,’’ my answer is that this is precisely what they are called by those responsible for managing them. There is no metaphor or argument by analogy here. The healthcare mess, Social Security mess, financial mess, euro- zone mess—those are the terms used by the public, analysts, and elites to sum up the issues and tasks before them. What is less recognized— and the book’s aim is to fill this gap—is that the same messes can be managed more reliably and professionally than the public or the policy establishment acknowledge. The image that the public may have of control rooms—men and women undertaking command and control in darkened venues, sitting in front of computer screens and with grid maps on the walls—cap- tures none of the daily, if not minute-by-minute, adaptations required of operators to meet all kinds of contingencies that arise unexpectedly or uncontrollably and that have to be dealt with if the critical service is to be provided reliably. I argue that these skills and this perspective offer a more realistic template for success than do current policy ana- lytical and decisionmaking approaches, many of which I show are faith-based in the extreme. My third line of argument: Just look at the sheer number of different policy messes for which we need more realistic managers! After I de- scribe what control room operators do in managing the variety of bad and good messes that come their way, I spend most of the book showing how those in and around the policy establishment can be their own networks of mess and reliability managers. As networks of professionals, I argue, they are better able to avoid bad or worse messes, take more advantage of the good messes there are, and more effectively address the societal and professional challenges ahead in managing policy messes more reliably. For some readers these arguments are crystal-clear and in no need of elaboration before moving directly to the next chapters. Most readers will require a fuller description of why and how the points matter, as I intend the readership to be drawn from many fields and concerns. My examples are drawn from the United States and internationally; they include policy messes in the arenas of the environment, education, climate change, social welfare, health, and international development.

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