A message in the bottle from George Bernard Shaw

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Some policy analysts have been cast up onto the Island of Yes-But. They’ve managed–so far–to survive its tricky cross-currents that enclose it. On one side is the tide-race about how no one wants to hear policy and management issues are more complex. Yes, but then again analysts have a duty of care to ensure decisionmakers understand the issues aren’t as simple as the latter would like.

On the other side is the tide-race about why analysts never really know what to advise until they make a story or argument for it. Yes, but then again analysts know there’s been a dumbing from the five-page memo into a fifteen-minute PowerPoint presentation into the three-minute elevator speech and now the tweet. What next: Telepathy? “The knowing look” in 10 seconds or less? And yet—it remains true that analysts have to be able to sum up what’s going on and what can be done.

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More, the island isn’t secure from cross-cutting faults and tremors. Analysts feel the centripetal pressures of closing in on what they think they know (or can know) and at the same time centrifugal pressures of having to open up so as to rethink what has been taken as unknowable or for granted.

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Another problem is that those decisionmakers who don’t know they live and work on this same island. They act as if they were anywhere else but there with their advisors. Not for the deciders these yes-but’s or and-yet’s. Terra firma means firm and those who don’t understand are out there, shipwrecked or about to be. Of course, these very same decisionmakers are castaways from shipwrecks, but they deny any such origins.

The deniers include decisionmakers who believe there is not any major policy, law, or regulation that cannot be corrected once it has been implemented. Hot News Flash: They’re wrong.

IV

So, what to do? What are analysts to do when politicians are suffocating in their own fat of “stop thinking about the uncertainties and just get on with it!” “We really do know where to start,” they insist. “Leave the complications to academics.”

Well, one thing island analysts can do is recognize they need help from elsewhere off-island. Nothing is going to change for the better on its own here. So maybe it is time to rethink?

For example, George Bernard Shaw, in one of his polemics against the U.S. Constitution, counseled Americans to farm out the important stuff to Europeans: “Some years ago I suggested as a remedy that the American cities should be managed from Europe by committees of capable Europeans trained in municipal affairs in London, Berlin, Paris, etc. San Francisco rejected my advice and tried an earthquake instead. . .” Barcelona and San Francisco, for example?

Of course, European decisionmakers can be just as delusional and in denial as their American counterparts. But that point about municipalism. . . . After all, municipalities in the US have very different origins than those in Europe. . .Not as tongue-in-cheek is GBS as one might first suppose.