Misc ways to improve public services : Reverse Pilot and Ministry of Silly Ideas
Next: New Models for Funding
We’ve been going through ideas how to make public services more adaptive to user needs and gather ideas from the ground up with concepts like Automation Budgets and Open Ministry/Municipality.
Let’s end the segment with two more ways to find and test ideas .
Reverse Pilot
Ministry of Silly Ideas
You can view this post as a collection of miscellaneous ideas that did not fit anywhere else.
Reverse Pilot
The idea with reverse pilot is to turn the concept of quick trials and experimentation with new ideas around its head - to trial not-doing.
What if we stop doing something, will anyone notice? Examples:
For example, in a private company all kinds of presentations and reports are made. What if some report was never made and sent to people, would anyone notice (or if you started sending the old report over and over…)?
Or is management needed at all? Could teams act independently within well define boundaries, could profitable units be given freedom to decide where to invest share of their profit etc.?
On state level, states tend to take more and more responsibility but never stop any activities. Are we solving yesteryear’s problems taking away money to solve today’s issues and preventing to think about problems of future? What if some activities were stopped, what could we do instead? What would spring cleaning for state be like?
Such ideas can of course be used to settle political scores and stop activities that are near and dear our political opponents.
Exercise to gentle reader: think of balancing mechanisms that would stop this and still allow for experimenting in the art of less.
Ministry of Silly Ideas
A common fallacy is to believe that facts and logical argumentation is needed in convincing others. Not quite so. For herd animals status inside the pack is of vital importance and a person who can argue convincingly and get others to follow, has the upper hand. Best is slightly wonky logic that sounds good and allows even the speaker to start believing in their own tales even they know that the original facts are only so-so. Evolution does not select for truth after all, but for fitness.
There is a saying from advertisement world that people do not think what they feel, they do not say what they think and they do not do what they say. This makes it harder to predict people’s preferences and needs via consumer research. (There may even be strong evolutionary reasons for this. When prey try to escape from predators and run in totally random zig-zag manner jumping from side to side, it is better when not even the escaping animal knows what it is going to do next. If it knew, evolution would lead the predator to make better predictions. And we are as a physical construction fairly weak animals from the savannah subject to predation from carnivores like hyenas, lions, cheetahs. Not understanding ourselves is an evolutionary success factor.)
This means that we are programmed to prioritise adaptation to the heard, not to strict facts and logic and to not understand our inner motives. Convincing narratives win arguments but nothing guarantees that they work in real life. Good stories do not change realities or they change realities but not in the direction that was advertised. Then new stories are again created to explain that whatever happened, was inevitable.
Everything you hear or see today is governed by plausible sounding reverse logic. Something happens in politics or markets and analyst explain it with perfectly logical stories. But none could tell this beforehand. This is a strong indirect indicator that stories are there to soothe, make the presenter look smart and worthy of followership.
The idea in Ministry of Silly Ideas is to use small allocation for trying out counterintuitive ideas to see if they would work. If they work, the best spin doctors will surely emerge to explain how this was self-evident from the beginning and everyone can be satisfied.
A few examples:.
Why would anyone volunteer to pay extra taxes? This could work if we viewed taxes as an investment. Today they most often are not, but what if we made them? Like: invest 1% extra in taxes to automation of public services, give investors 70% of that saving for the first 5 years. End result is lower overall costs for the society, faster service and happy investors. This is in effect the Automation Budget idea but with voluntary contribution
Exercise for the gentle reader: could public decisions be made by a random number generator in some circumstances? (in fact they are even today used if a vote falls even: sometimes the vote of the chair counts, sometimes it is raffled). We’ll return to this topic shortly later.
Next: New Models for Funding