“Designing leadership” must be one of the scariest terms in public policy and management

I

How often have we heard versions of the following?

• Studies of actual project and policy implementation ratify the status quo, claiming it is a miracle anything gets done as planned or designed; where
• Policymakers never have had time anyway for social science findings (either the evaluation finds nothing good to say or finds evidence-based hesitations the only thing worth saying); where also it must be assumed that
• Market-based instruments of management—outsourcing, vouchers, service level agreements—determine the design of the public agencies responsible for their implementation, a rather unpromising assumption given the mountain of evidence that bureaucracy frequently determines policy; all of which is said to lead to
• “Therefore,” better policy and management require, by default, better leaders as our last line of defense and we must design for that (back to “design”?); albeit
• Leadership looks more and more to be the unexplained variance after politics, dollars and jerks explain most of what is going on anyway. . .

Such is how the fault-filled save-all of “designing” is shackled to the fault-filled catch-all of “leadership.”

II

A much more practical implication follows, however. It is likely that that policy and regulatory leaders who do not appreciate the requirements of real-time operation of society’s complex infrastructures are apt to confuse their own values and scenarios for those of the real-time operators. Where so, the logical and empirically prior problem is not designing better leadership but correcting for the mis-designs of leaders that arise unintentionally or negatively.

Such is why I argue for the regulatory functions to be dispersed beyond the regulator of record. Real-time operators must and do play an important role in correcting for errors in official regulation, leadership and technologies.