Actionable granularity: What is it? Why does it matter? What to do about it? How does it differ from the earlier implementation-is-difficult literature?

What is it?

First and foremost for our purposes here, it is actionable granularity with respect to a policy or management scenario. I focus more on major crisis scenarios involving infrastructures and climate change, but as will be seen, I could be talking as well about any scenario focusing the success or failure of a policy or management strategy.

It’s tempting to equate actionable granularity with “sufficient” details for the implementation and operation of said policy and management. But I have something more specific in mind. I have in view the range of policy analysis and management that exists between the adaptation of policy and management designs to local circumstances and the recognition that systemwide patterns across a diverse set of associated cases inevitably contrast with official and context-specific policy and management designs.

Think here of adapting your systemwide definition of poverty reduction to local circumstances and being cognizant that patterns may well emerge across how really-existing people identify poverty reduction and how these patterns differ from not only system poverty formulae but also localized scenarios based in these formulae. It’s this domain of knowledge of how to translate system patterns and local contingency scenarios—without any guarantees that reliable poverty alleviation will take place—that interests me.

The obvious implication is that cases that are not framed by emerging patterns and, on the other side, by localized design scenarios are rightfully called “unique.” Unique cases of poverty reduction cannot be abstracted, just as some concepts of poverty are, in my view, too abstract (more in a moment). Unique cases stand outside the actionable granularity of interest here for policy and management.

Why does this actionable granularity matter?

It matters because a methodological problem arises when cases are treated as unique or stand-alone albeit no prior effort has been made to ascertain (1) systemwide patterns and local contingency scenarios in which the case are embedded along with (2) the practices of adaptation and modification that also emerge along the way with in scenario formulation and pattern recognition. From a policy and management perspective, you can say these pseudo-unique cases have been over-complexified.

For example, a now-famous joint statement in the form of one sentence was issued by the Center for AI Safety: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” It was signed by more than 350 AI experts and public figures. Of course, we cannot dismiss the actual and potential harms of artificial intelligence. But these 350 people must be among the last people on Earth you’d turn to for pandemic and nuclear war scenarios of sufficient granularity against which to appraise their AI crisis scenarios. In so doing, they leave us to translate—that is, (re-)complexify—these scenarios anyway we wish.

I stress this point if only because of the exceptionalism assigned to “wicked policy problems”. Where the methodological problem of premature complexification isn’t addressed beforehand, then by definition the so-called wicked policy problem ends up prematurely translated as “wickedly unique.” Nor should we forget that how abstractions can also be wickedly unique, e.g., when political possibilities are foreclosed by abstracting the world into complexities everywhere colonized by the Climate Emergency (or capitalism, or inequalities, or. . .).

So what? Just what are we to do with respect to actionable granularity of scenarios?

Return to that word, “translate.” I am writing about the two senses of “translation:” scenarios translated from one language or worldview into another and scenarios translating a messy reality into stories with beginnings, middle and ends (even if the ends is an untidy in medias res). I’m sure that terms like Climate Emergency do not translate well across worldviews, and I am sure that current scenarios about the Climate Emergency are too often insufficiently granular to be actionable by way of highly variable infrastructural implementation and operational.

If it is true—and I have no doubt it is—that governments are failing to meet their own biodiversity targets, then are the targets granular enough to account for what constitutes saving this biodiversity and the steps needed to do that? Or better yet, are the steps detailed by way of adaptive equifinality, i.e., multiple ways to save, say, these species here and now? For that matter, why is there just-one-way-only in meeting a target? Why moreover is “biodiversity” species-orientated and not, say, “ecosystems” in this shared way of life versus “surroundings” in that other one?

More to the point, it is not possible to expect that same authorial voice translated across all accounts of “saving biodiversity.” Gone is any hope for what others have called the overarching “objective style of discourse,” that is, “a certain measured style that comprises perspicacious structuring of arguments, clear signposting, definite conclusions, systematic presentation of evidence, elimination of the author’s distinct voice and autobiography, lack of flourishes and digressions, avoidance of ambiguity, and other such stylistic properties” (https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article/61/4/559/6402993).

Gone in other words is the assumption that the levels of actionable granularity reside in the objective style of discourse used in so much of contemporary scenario planning (note this is much more than an issue of a discourse being “scientific”). Rather that granularity lies, if at all I argue, in peoples’ really-existing practices based in their really-existing experiences and perceptions.

Again, so what?

For example, consider the practice of improvisation witnessed during the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant crisis on 11 March 2011:

In order to try to mitigate the effects of the accident, the plant’s operators working in Reactor 1 engaged in multiple acts of bricolage, diverting the functions of whatever was at hand to address the situation. For instance, as their monitoring system had ceased to function, they diagnosed the state of the reactor using sounds, and the colour of steam, as this was their only option. Likewise, as the water pipes inside the nuclear plant were no longer working, they had to change the function of a diesel pump so that it would pump water directly into the reactor.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/10892680241256312

Here there was no workaround or alternative for the improvisational at the level of granularity confronted.

One policy and management implication of the latter particularity is insufficiently acknowledged: Our really-existing critical infrastructures, as criticized as they are, will be full of second chances. With or without Stop-Oil, infrastructures will remain central to energy provision and interconnectivity; with or without Sustainability, reliability and safety will be demanded across that interconnected provision. Technologies and system configurations will change, but even the keywords of radical versions of the Energy Transition—transformative, emancipatory—are redolent with the promise of second chances along the way.

What makes the second chances so important? For one thing the Climate Emergency portends all manner of illiquidity, not least of which are today’s infrastructures being tomorrow’s stranded assets. But “stranded” underscores the place-based character of the infrastructure. Stranded also implies the possibility of its other use(s), second chances in other words. One must also wonder if current Energy Transition scenarios are granular enough to take them seriously.

How do such findings differ from the what has already been found in the literature on implementation difficulties?

The notion that there is a knowledge domain of professionals who privilege systemwide pattern recognition for better practices and the ability to modify official macro-policies in light of local contingencies does not match well the micro-operations of individualistic street-level officials, change agents, policy entrepreneurs and progressive farmers in the implementation literature with which I am familiar.

In my reading of that literature–and I stand to be corrected!–the locus of implementation was and continues to on micro-operators—the fabled street-level worker, including the cop on the beat, the teacher in the classroom, and the caseworker on a home visit–who may not even see themselves as implementing (undermining, changing) official policy. For the street-level worker, the individual constitutes the center of gravity of service provision. Numbers and trends, so important to knowledge domain discussed above, are really not a major point; the worker’s relationship with the client is. ‘‘Indeed, the worker’s decision of when to conform to rules and procedures and when to break them and when to cooperate with authority and when to act independently is the essence of street-level judgment’’ (Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003, 68). “Street-level workers do not see citizen-clients as abstractions—‘the disabled,’ ‘the poor,’ ‘the criminal’—but as individuals with flaws and strengths who rarely fit within the one-size-fits-all approach of policies and laws’’ (Ibid, 94).

Or to put the point in more positive terms, the notion of networked reliability professionals with special skills not necessarily prized or valued by micro-operators helps shift the locus of site-specific implementation to implementation systemwide.

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Other sources.

Maynard-Moody, S., and M. Musheno. 2003. Cops, Teachers, Counselors: Stories from the Front Lines of Public Service. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.