Making the Most of Mess

Reliability and Policy in Today’s Management Challenges

By EMERY ROE

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2013 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5307-2

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………ixONE. Introducing Policy Messes, Management, and Their Managers………….1TWO. When Reliability Is Mess Management……………………………..16THREE. The Wider Framework for Managing Mess Reliably: Hubs, Skills, and
the Domain of Competence……………………………………………32FOUR. Bad Mess Management…………………………………………..56FIVE. Good Mess Management………………………………………….78SIX. Societal Challenges……………………………………………106SEVEN. Professional Challenges………………………………………128EIGHT. How We Know That the Policy Mess Is Managed Better………………144Notes…………………………………………………………….155Bibliography………………………………………………………175Index…………………………………………………………….201

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCING POLICY MESSES,MANAGEMENT, AND THEIR MANAGERS

My first and most important point: Policymakers in government andpolicy analysts in the public and private sectors have a great deal tolearn about management from a special class of professionals littlediscussed in the literature or media: namely, those control room operatorswho manage large technical systems for water supplies, electricity,telecommunications, and other critical infrastructures that societieshave come to depend on for reliable health, safety, and energy services.

This book is about applying what has been learned from managingmore reliably in one domain (critical infrastructures) to the broaderdomains of policy and management that have their own political orlegal mandates to be reliable, yet increasingly fall short of meetingthose mandates.

When we think of policymakers, as we often must these days, we mayhave in mind leaders, legislators, and officials who govern our politicalinstitutions. When many of us think of control rooms and the operatorsin large-scale energy or telecommunications systems—if we thinkof them at all—it is during major emergencies. Among the better-knownexamples are the frantic actions of control room operators atthe Fukushima nuclear power plant, on the Deepwater Horizon drillingrig, or in the lower Manhattan telecommunications hub as the WorldTrade Center fell around it on 9/11.

Why should we expect that policymakers, analysts, and political eliteshave anything to learn from real-time infrastructure managers? Becausethese operators manage every day to prevent all manner of majoraccidents and failures from happening, which would occur if the operatorshad not managed the way they do. We see politicians, policymakers,and their support staff operating at their performance edges; whatwe don’t see is that critical infrastructure managers have to do the sameevery day, but more successfully, by managing the way they do.

My second line of argument: What exactly is this “managing the waythey do”? To answer succinctly, control room operators are often brilliantmess managers, and what is blazingly obvious is we need bettermess managers when it comes to what seem to be intractable problemsin policies and politics.

When asked why I call these apparent intractabilities “messes,” myanswer is that this is precisely what they are called by those responsiblefor managing them. There is no metaphor or argument by analogyhere. The healthcare mess, Social Security mess, financial mess, eurozonemess—those are the terms used by the public, analysts, and elitesto sum up the issues and tasks before them. What is less recognized—andthe book’s aim is to fill this gap—is that the same messes can bemanaged more reliably and professionally than the public or the policyestablishment acknowledge.

The image that the public may have of control rooms—men andwomen undertaking command and control in darkened venues, sittingin front of computer screens and with grid maps on the walls—capturesnone of the daily, if not minute-by-minute, adaptations requiredof operators to meet all kinds of contingencies that arise unexpectedlyor uncontrollably and that have to be dealt with if the critical service isto be provided reliably. I argue that these skills and this perspectiveoffer a more realistic template for success than do current policy analyticaland decisionmaking approaches, many of which I show arefaith-based in the extreme.

My third line of argument: Just look at the sheer number of differentpolicy messes for which we need more realistic managers! After I describewhat control room operators do in managing the variety of badand good messes that come their way, I spend most of the book showinghow those in and around the policy establishment can be their ownnetworks of mess and reliability managers. As networks of professionals,I argue, they are better able to avoid bad or worse messes, takemore advantage of the good messes there are, and more effectivelyaddress the societal and professional challenges ahead in managingpolicy messes more reliably.

For some readers these arguments are crystal-clear and in no need ofelaboration before moving directly to the next chapters. Most readerswill require a fuller description of why and how the points matter, as Iintend the readership to be drawn from many fields and concerns. Myexamples are drawn from the United States and internationally; theyinclude policy messes in the arenas of the environment, education,climate change, social welfare, health, and international development.I focus in all chapters on one connecting policy mess that enables meto illustrate the major points in my argument as I develop them. This isthe global financial mess that came to the fore in 2008 and afterward. Idescribe and follow that mess as it has morphed into the multiplemuddles over unfunded pensions, underfunded Social Security andmedical obligations, sovereign debt, banking reform, and currency stabilityin the eurozone and elsewhere. I turn now to an expanded discussionof my three lines of argument.

This Argument in More Detail

Now step back and consider the world around you. It’s a mess, and weknow it. But if almost everything is a mess, is each mess being managedfor the mess that it is? It is one thing to say that messes start outbad; it is something else to say that they are bad because we managethem poorly. A little bit of both is happening, you say. But that “little”matters considerably when capitalizing on the role of mess in policy,management, and politics. Good messes are to be had, and we canmanage a major mess well rather than poorly.

For the moment, think of a policy mess as a public issue so uncertain,complex, interrupted, and disputed that it can’t be avoided. It has to bemanaged; the problem is how. The ideal aim would be to prevent themess, or clear it up once and for all, but that is easier to say than do. Yetevery day, professionals reliably manage to produce critical services,including water, electricity, and even financial services. They do this notby getting rid of messes as much as by continuously sorting them out,especially when those services are needed most. How do these professionalsdo that, and what can they tell us about how to better managemesses or avoid the truly bad ones in our society? This book illustratesimportant lessons for those who need to be mess managers in policy,management, and the political economy we find ourselves in. My argumentis that those in health, social welfare, development, business, andthe environment, among other arenas, should become much more likethose professionals.

The approach in this book builds on my work with Paul Schulman onreliability professionals. In High Reliability Management: Operating onthe Edge (2008), we undertook a case study and detailed key conceptsin the way control room operators and managers keep large technicalsystems reliable under highly volatile situations, when options aresometimes few, and success is never guaranteed. This book recaststhose professionals and their networks as exemplary mess managersand extends the original framework into the wider reconsideration ofpolitical economies not just in the United States but abroad as well. Myearlier book, Narrative Policy Analysis (Roe 1994; see also Roe 2007),showed how the disputed stories that drive much of public policy andmanagement could be better analyzed. But stories have their beginning,middle, and end, and the nub of a policy mess is that those in themidst of it do not know how their policy and management efforts willor could end. After a point, decisionmakers may even wonder how themess began or evolved. In contrast, mess managers are very good atanswering the question “What happens next?” We will see how theunique narratives of mess managers play a major role in managementand policy.

Much of this should not be new. It is a truth universally acknowledgedthat each generation discovers on its own just how complex anduncertain their surroundings are. As the nineteenth-century essayistThomas De Quincey put it in his Logic of Political Economy, “upon whatis known in Economy there is perpetual uncertainty, and for any inroadsinto what is yet unknown; perpetual insecurity” (1849, 35). For acontemporary example, the debt levels of U.S. states are so substantial,according to Felix Rohatyn, an expert in this area, that he can’t “seewhere the end of this is” (quoted in M. Cooper and Walsh 2010).Professionals who find themselves in such a tide race of affairs and aresearching for what happens next should read this book.

Specifically, policy analysts, managers, businesspeople, and public administratorswill find the approach helpful in understanding whatmakes for the successful managing of policy messes in the sectors inwhich they operate. Business schools and programs as well as providersof health and social services should find much of use here. The approachalso offers insights and instruction to a wider audience, including economistsinterested in the institutional design of governance structures;engineers committed to better design and risk analysis of large technicalsystems; organization theorists analyzing technological accidentsand organizational reliability; social scientists studying major technologytransformations; and planners for the long term who confrontdemands for better management in their arenas.

Some messes, to repeat, start out and stay bad; they may be beyondthe grasp of management. Others are managed poorly or effectively,and it is essential to determine which is the case and what the resultsare. The following pages parse and explain good and bad messes; moreimportant, they describe good and bad mess management. Many examplesare discussed along the way, not just the 2008 financial meltdownand its repercussions. For the latter, I rely to a considerableextent on contemporaneous reports from the press and elsewhere togive a flavor of the immediacy of grappling with events in real time. Wehave been told that “the public finances of most advanced countriesare in a greater mess than at any point in peacetime history” (Plender2010b). If so, how do those managing it measure up against professionalswho see to it that the messes they face are managed, notcleared away?

Were messes no different than problems, we could rely on conventionalpolicy analysis and management to get out of them. No suchluck. As I show in the first chapters, a policy mess involves changeableindividual actions and local contexts confronting unstable principlesand policies. Principles and policies, moreover, diverge significantlyfrom the fast-moving trends and patterns they are meant to address.Yet all this slipping and sliding takes place under mandates to managea critical good or service reliably—that is, safely and continuously—throughtime, no matter what rude surprise crops up. All this occurs insystems that are not just technical or organizational, but in the sameinstant rooted deep in political economy and culture. You can see whysome call this constellation a potent source of “wicked” policy problems,in which cause and effect are tangled together and next to impossibleto sort out.

Mess has never been far away in my own profession of policy analysisand public management, which is full of wicked policy problems,muddling through, incrementalism, groping along, suboptimization,bounded rationality, garbage can processes, second-best solutions,mixed scanning, policy fiascos, relentless paradoxes, fatal remedies,rotten compromises, managing the unexpected, coping agencies, normalaccidents, crisis management, groupthink, adhocracy, and thatdeep wellspring of miserabilism, implementation. As these notionscircle around the same prey, this book takes a closer look at the animalitself: the policy and management messes we find ourselves in, especiallywhen it comes to important services like water, energy, transportation,telecommunications, health, finance, development, and the environment.In focusing on policy messes and their management, I donot critique conventional analysis and management as much as rethinkmy profession from a different direction. As I go along, I signalmy debt to those who have thought through these issues ahead of me.

It’s easier to belittle messes than avoid them, and the first thinggood mess managers show us is that we manage messes we can’t avoid,we don’t “clean them up.” Many people believe or insist that the way toclear up policy messes is by reducing uncertainty, simplifying complexity,resolving conflict, and completing unfinished business. A fair numberof decisionmakers seem to think: This mess needs cleaning up, andsince God isn’t doing it—nor, for that matter, is anyone else—it’s up tome to do the job. Such assumptions are why there are so many intractablemuddles in policy and management.

What should they do instead? We can learn from those professionalswhose job it is to manage mess all the time. There is nothing novel aboutthe need for learning. What is new is shifting the focus to identifying,studying, and learning from a unique group of mess managers who arereliable in terms of the outputs and outcomes of their management.For them, managing well rather than managing poorly means theymanage messes reliably or reliability messily: They manage the needfulunder always-dynamic circumstances. From them we learn that messmanagement requires three skills: pattern recognition, scenario formulation,and the ability to translate pattern and scenario into a reliable service,now when it matters. These professional managers do not achieve reliabilitydirectly by designing broad systems to govern all discrete operations.To be reliable, they and the networks in which they operateinterpret what system patterns mean for the locally specific scenariosthey face now and in the next step ahead. Why the need for translation?Because designs—be they policies, principles, or laws—have to bemodified both in light of local features and in light of the broaderpatterns that emerge across a run of individual operations. Both haveto be accounted for in order to achieve reliable services. This sorting-outprocess of recognizing systemwide patterns, formulating local scenarios,and modifying scenarios in light of those patterns is complicated,but it is the core of good mess management and what this bookis dedicated to detailing. Put directly, this book aims to renovate thegood name of mess.

To start with, it is important to understand the respective conceptsof mess and reliability, which I introduce in the remainder of thischapter and discuss more fully in chapter 2. Chapter 3 identifies anddescribes those professionals who are officially charged with providingservices reliably, but who unofficially have to do so by continuallymanaging the messes that arise in that provision. By the end of chapter3, the reader will have the framework to determine and evaluatewhat makes a mess and its management good or bad when it comes tothe reliable provision of a service. The first step in making the most ofpolicy and management messes is to minimize bad ones, and chapter 4presents examples of bad messes and poor mess management in policy.Chapter 5, the longest in the book, devotes considerable attentionto what makes for good and even better mess management. Thesechapters illustrate how to be good mess managers, protect such managers,avoid bad messes, and manage more reliably all those othermesses in policy, management, and politics that have yet to go bad orare otherwise primed to go from bad to worse.
(Continues…)Excerpted from Making the Most of Mess by EMERY ROE. Copyright © 2013 by DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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