RETHINKING GOVERNANCE

“Governing Tomorrow: Outlining the Long Arc of Governance” is a provocation document just published by Dark Matter Labs. It’s a fascinating document. It looks at governance at a number of levels, but all in the context of the high, societal, level or what it calls the “meta-governance” level. And it’s “not just a call for new governance tools or strategies.” It is “a call for a new mindset – one structurally capable of embracing uncertainty, navigating complexity, and designing infrastructures for ongoing negotiation, sensing, and collective learning.”

In my language, it is an exploration of ways not to change or transform governance, but of ways to transcend governance as we know it, with all its flaws and limitations. (For more on “change, transform or transcend,” see my recent article https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7267983873311924228/? ).

The provocation talks of a “new landscape for governance” that goes beyond the “industrial era theories of governance,” and suggests current attempts to retrofit fit new elements into a system that is “fundamentally designed for predictability and control” won’t be sufficient for a variety of reasons.

The provocation goes on to suggest the future of governance will need to include “five critical capabilities.” The first is “An expansion of agency” towards “collaborative agency – not power over, but power with,” a form of power that Mary Parker Follet was advocating in the early 1900’s. Ut amounts to rethinking agency, relationships, and power structures – and not just between people, but also with our natural environment, other species and our technologies.

This expansion of agency concept may be difficult for some to grasp, but I think the Dignity Theory of Value concept I have been developing may help. It ?boils down to making decisions that are informed by an appreciation of their impact on the inherent worth of those (people, other beings, the environment, or anything) that may be positively or negatively impacted. It takes us beyond the ‘value for money’ mindset that blinds us the real value of things, so we end up understanding “the price of everything and the value of nothing,” to quote Oscar Wilde. (Read “What Do You Mean By Value: Introducing the Dignity Theory of Value").

The mention of power in this provocation is also important. We have many broken systems, or systems that do not serve us well. Governance is one of them, and amounts to what I called a “Global Governance Crisis” long ago. Power explains why broken systems don’t get fixed. Let me share the explanation I gave in an article recently….

Systems Thinker, Stafford Beer, coined the term, “the purpose of a system is what it does” (POSIWID). That begs the questions “does what” and “for who?” Asking of a system “who does it serve?” and “who is it failing?” will be very telling.

If it is failing the powerful it will be changed. If it is failing the powerless it may not change, or not without a fight.

Today many people, and many communities of people rightly believe the system is not working for them, for one reason or another. Some feel powerless to change it, but they are willing to fight.

The problem is “they” are not one group of people. They are many different groups. And there is no consensus among them about the causes, or solutions to, to the problem.

Their views are often extremely and diametrically opposed to each other, even if the reasons they find themselves in the position they are in are the same, or very similar.

When this is the case, the powerful use one of the oldest tricks in the book.

‘Divide and rule,’ sets the powerless against each other. As a result they lack the strength to change the status quo. Sadly, this is the oldest trick in the book, because it seems to work every time.

In this situation it may take a long time to achieve change. It may require a system to truly break, rather than it only being the belief of some groups. Just because it is broken for them does not mean it is broken.

The only alternative is for the powerful for whom the system is not working to realise that losing a fight is going to be serious and or costly. And that their position is not going to be sustainable as a result.

In several countries, and for a long time now, two pillars of society, the market and the state, have become extremely powerful. More importantly they, in collusion with each other, and have systematically weakened the third pillar, Civic Society. This has left many feeling powerless, voiceless, and angry.

In many counties the problem is exacerbated by the fact the powerful have gamed ‘the system’ to generate extreme inequalities of wealth. The vast majority have seen living standards freeze, or decline, over more than a decade. And they are aware that this is largely because they are paying the price for the failures of the systems that is benefiting the extremely wealthy who keep getting richer.

More importantly the problems have continued regardless of the political party they have voted for, so they are prepared to vote for any potential sign of change, rather than the status quo. And they are willing to take big risks in the process.

Are they wrong to do so? No.

They have concluded that the system is rigged against them. They have to break the system. They will express their anger and frustration in any way they can. What else can they do?

Increasingly I am of the view that civic society, i.e. communities, need to come together to restore the power of communities – power to hold the state and markets accountable. The power balance needs to be restored.

The question then becomes, how to restore the power of communities, of civic society. Doing so will be a big challenge given the tension between the groups with radically different opinions. But it is not impossible.

Some individuals and communities already recognise this is the only peaceful solution to the problems we now face. Some individuals and organisations in the markets and in government and politics do to.

It is my belief that in all sectors there are individuals and organisations that accept we need to find new ways of thinking, being and doing if we are to make progress and achieve prosperity – prosperity for all. We need these pioneers to join forces in the search for more enlightened ways forward. This joining of enlightened forces cannot start soon enough, and it is what the Enlightened Enterprise Academy that I founded is advocating for.

From this I suggest the conclusion must be that our existing governance system will perpetuate until pioneers are successful in addressing the power issue, so that those for whom the system is not working have sufficient powers to demand change.

This thinking aligns with a sentence in the provocation that says, the future of governance “asks us to reimagine governance not as a mechanism of domination but as an infrastructure of enablement.”

There is so much more I could say about the provocation, but I will stop here as this article is already lengthy. I urge you to take a look and share your thoughts.