1. The language of risk is now so naturalized that it seems the obvious anchor point of analysis, as in: “Ok, the first thing we have to do is assess the risks of flooding here. . .”
No. The first thing you do is to identify the boundaries of the flood system you are talking about as it is actually managed and then the standards of reliability to which it is being managed (namely, the events must be precluded or avoided by way of management) and from which follow the specific risks to be managed to meet that standard. (Note a standard doesn’t eliminate risks but instead identifies the risks that have to be managed in order to meet the standard.)
2. Economists, engineers and system modelers with whom I’m familiar tend to conceptualize interconnected critical infrastructure systems (ICISs) along the lines that Garret Hardin did 50 years ago for what he called the Tragedy of the Commons (“imagine a pasture open to all”).
In our case, imagine an ICIS open to all manner of vulnerability and complex interconnectivity. Our research insists that this too is precisely what you cannot assume empirically or conceptually. Rather, another anchor point is that these systems are far more differentiated than they are alike when it comes to “interconnectivities” by virtue of their different configurations and shifts from one configuration to another.
3. Just as a major work of art is always in excess of a single interpretation, the major management of a critical infrastructure is in excess of its technology. And “excess” is exactly the word, as its use here is antithetical to any claim that “excess capacity undermines technological and economic efficiency.”
4. Real-time infrastructure management requires very, very smart people, and ones who are decidedly not automated ciphers that need only know the difference between two prices in order to act rationally. What is irrational are those leaps from macro-design to micro-operations or back that ignore, when not altogether dismissing, the unique knowledge bases and learning of the reliability professionals that anchor operations in between.
If the US Civil War over southern separatism is our guide to any forthcoming break-up, most state constitutions will remain in place as governing documents, while any interstate confederation would most probably be modeled on parts of the current US Constitution—though with the significant changes.
Constitution-making in the Confederacy witnessed not just further entrenchment of unconscionable chattel slavery, but also the first Department of Justice, a national citizenship requirement for voting, no functioning supreme court, a six-year term limit for president, civil service reform, strictures against protective tariffs, a district court structure, disavowal of the Monroe Doctrine, and provisions for a presidential item veto, executive budget, and no recess appointments.
Am I recommending all that? No.
What I am doing is asking this question: How else are we to get a parallel version of this range of substantive change without breaking up the country? (And those appalled by any reference to the Confederacy might want to remember that four states—Vermont, Texas, California and Hawaii—opted to give up their sovereignty to join the Union. So why is the reverse out of the question?)
The immediate decline in security and economic growth that comes with the break-up means priority would have to be to keeping the control rooms of our critical infrastructures in hospitals, energy, water, telecommunications, transportation, and public safety operating as reliably as possible. These systems frequently cross current state borders, and the challenge will be to continue inter-regional collaboration for their operation until alternatives—if needed and on the fly—are devised.
Principal sources
My Confederacy material draws from: (1) W.B. Yearns (1960), The Confederate Congress, University of Georgia Press: Athens, GA; R. Bensel (1990), Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK: Chapter 3; P. Van Riper and H. Scheiber (1959), “The Confederate Civil Service,” The Journal of Southern History, 25(4): 448-470; C.R. Lee (1963), The Confederate Constitutions, Greenwood Press Publishers: Westport, CN; and E. Thomas (1979), The Confederate Nation: 1861-1865, Harper & Row: New York, NY.
–Yes, earthquakes with unimaginable impacts are predicted all the time. So too are other disasters and doing so is no more oxymoronic than “thinking the unthinkable.”
There is also the predictably unimaginable that comes with the open faucet of new categories and concepts. Think of “violent crime” as a legal category in the US that didn’t by and large exist prior to the 1970s (Sklansky 2021). “Talking about ‘political prisoners’ had become such an important political criticism that it was no longer possible to imagine it as a legal category,” concludes another (Hermann 2020).
So too hitherto-unthought-of analogies are always being used to redescribe current policy problems. Not only was Green New Deal, in its fleeting notoriety, likened to Roosevelt’s New Deal; it was also compared to the Civil Rights Movement, 19th century abolitionism, and the war economy of the Bolshevik Revolution. There should be no doubt that the Climate Emergency and responses will be compared to many other events you and I won’t imagine until those comparisons have been made.
–So what? In answer, turn to an insight of literary critic, Christopher Ricks, drawn from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED):
‘Many adjectives in -ABLE suffix have negative counterparts in UN- prefix, and some of these are attested much earlier than their positive counterparts, the chronological difference being especially great in the case of UNTHINKABLE.’ The OED at this point withholds the dates, but here they are: unthinkable, c. 1430; thinkable, 1805.
Christopher Ricks (2021). Along Heroic Lines. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 240
The notion that some humans started with “unthinkable” is suggestive: We first confront unthinkable disasters and then think our way to making them more or less imaginable.
Current practice is we start with the worse-ever floods and earthquakes in the US and then argue that the Magnitude 9 earthquake off of the Pacific Northwest will be unimaginably worse. In this way, we end up with disproportionate contingencies and aftermaths about which we have no real causal understanding.
Let’s suppose, however, we started with disasters so indescribably catastrophic that we need to narrow our focus to something like a M9 earthquake in order even to think about the worse-ever floods and earthquakes that have happened. Here we can end up with possibilities, instead of contingencies, and impacts instead of aftermaths, about which we have some knowledge even if little causal understanding. Possibilities and impacts aren’t equivalent to risks and uncertainties, but closer nevertheless.
–Again, so what?
It’s one thing to say a catastrophe today is “the unimaginability of an alternative to the neoliberal status quo.” It is quite another thing to say this complex tangle called neoliberalism generates such contingency and side-effect as to undermine any status quo. If we are meant to suppose the absence of a status quo or status quo ante is dangerous or even catastrophic, then to paraphrase the international relations theorist, Hans Morgenthau: Excuse me, but just what status quo have the people committed themselves to?
Assume that evidence can be generalized as follows: Unionized firms as compared to nonunionized firms have lower rates of productivity, employment creation and investment, other things equal. Even putting aside all the contrary evidence, we still ask: So what?
These are generalizations only. Localized scenarios in which the opposite holds are possible and counter-cases available. Considerable evidence suggests that the ‘‘union/nonunion’’ dichotomy masks great variability in collective bargaining laws and wage arrangements across countries and regions.
That variability, in turn, suggests taking a deeper look at the macro-design standpoints with respect to unions or not. What human rights, for instance, are at issue when one talks about unionization? In reviewing the literature, one quickly realizes that the rights concerned relate less to any ‘‘right to unionization’’ and more to traditional rights of collective bargaining and freedom of association.
Focusing on different rights, in turn, means the earlier starting focus on empirical generalizations about unionization and economic growth is too narrow. We should also be looking at the evidence related to economic growth and collective bargaining arrangements, both generally and specifically. We would then better understand why local conditions are so variable with respect to unions.
–Take a peek at the track record of advisers to their leaders:
Plato and Dionysius II;
Aristotle and Alexander the Great;
Seneca and Nero;
Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf;
Petrarch and Emperor Charles IV;
Montaigne and Henri IV;
Descartes and Sweden’s Queen Christina;
Leibnitz and the Dukes of Hanover;
Voltaire and Frederick the Great;
Diderot and Catherine the Great; and
in case you want to add to the list, Adam Smith and the Duke of Buccleuch or Goethe and Prince Carl August, and so on through the centuries. . .
Or if you really want to cringe, consider André Gide recommending against publishing Marcel Proust, Edward Garnett against publishing James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot against publishing George Orwell. . . .
I mean, get real: If these guys didn’t advise effectively, who are we to think we can do better? (And, puhleeese, don’t throw up Kissinger and Nixon as a working template!)
–So what? Two things. It’s hard to imagine two words scarier in English than “designing leadership.” And we should take to heart the extensions of, “It was beyond our mental capabilities to predict Bob Dylan winning the Nobel in 2016.”
We don’t need more justification for raising taxes. The reasons have been evident for some time. You might expect me to follow with, “What’s been missing is the political will to raise these taxes.” No, it’s better to say that we’ve had too much political will insisting this, that and everything else and not enough of the details for doing so.
–Political historian, F.S. Oliver, pointed out the crux decades ago:
One of the discomforts of living in a progressive society is that new fiscal methods are constantly required in order to cover the rising expenditure. . .What weigh most, however, with Treasury officials, when they are seeking to balance a budget, are not so much considerations of abstract justice, as the knowledge that old sources [of tax revenue] will dry up if an attempt is made to draw too much from them. (my bold)
To adapt the point, what is missing are scenarios granular enough to evaluate fiscal instruments for shifting government expenditures across old and new budget categories.
–One clear mechanism for new revenues and reallocation are reductions in tax evasion and use of tax havens. Contrary to public choice theory, tax avoidance is not free-riding on those of us who pay taxes. The defect lies with those whose institutional duty is to prevent tax evasion: government and the regulators.
Principal sources
Oliver, F.S. (1930, 1931, 1935). The Endless Adventure. 3 Vols., Macmillan and Company: London
Strang, C. (1970). “What if Everyone Did That?” in Baruch Brody (ed.), Moral Rules and Particular Consequences, Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs, NJ
For me, it’s not good enough to say power is primarily about A making B do something instead. Nor is it good enough to say power is about controlling the decision agenda or determining peoples’ interests without them knowing it. More, when it comes to the policy and management issues with which I am familiar, power isn’t concentrated in or dispersed through interests, full stop.
The power I am talking about lies in surprise and, since surprise is that chief feature of complexity, surprise and its power should be thought of as complex from the get-go. Better then to say the power I am talking about is the power of surprising connections.
It is thinking through the reverberations that, in my mind, connect Adorno starting an opera on Tom Sawyer, Picasso painting Buffalo Bill Cody, Sartre preparing a screenplay on Freud, Benjamin Britten facing the prospect of becoming a bandmaster (or Samuel Beckett a commercial airplane pilot), Coleridge and fellow poet Robert Southey planning an egalitarian community on shores of the Susquehanna, Goethe’s plan to clean up the streets of Venice, Kafka drafting rules for a socialist workers’ cooperative, and Abraham Lincoln and Hedy Lamarr securing their respective patents. More than “w” (as in “war”) links Walt Whitman the medical orderly, Max Weber the hospital orderly, and Ludwig Wittgenstein the dispensary porter.
The objective correlative of contingency is this power to connect differently. Where so, the great threat to addressing power is to think there is an outside to contingency: as if asking, “What is more important, power or contingency?”, and being told, “But that’s like asking which chopstick is the fork…”
Start with a question asked of a workshop’s invitees:
What are the challenges, practices and strategies of governing infrastructure reliability and safety in organizational networks?
In my mind, the questioning and answering take place in this way and order: What are the system boundaries of the operating infrastructure? What are the standards of reliability and safety being managed to for system-level operations? What are system risks and uncertainties that follow from managing to that standard for that system?
In the process of answering the three, I would specifically probe for the changing interconnectivity between and among latent and manifest boundaries, standards, and risks/uncertainties.
II
So what? Yes, definition and clarification of terms are needed, but not with respect to the initial ones of safety and reliability. In my recasting, it is case-specific system, boundaries, standards, risks/uncertainties and interconnections that are gasping for the same air now sucked away by struggles in better defining “reliability, safety and networks.”
Or to shift the analogy. For centuries, ancient Greek architecture has been praised for its pure forms and perfect proportions. Then came along those who did more site research, suggesting that the bare stone we see today could have been covered by all manner of rough stucco and garish paint. What too then of those forms we—myself included—have abstracted as reliability, safety and networks?
Out of the blue, got a call from Ray R. Haven’t heard from him since he took my class—when? He’s Director of Planning, County Welfare Agency, and wants me to help write the Agency’s five-year action plan. Haven’t dealt with such issues since I fled the social-work track here and five-year district development plans there.
***
Ray briefed me today. Got a briefcase of material. Now for the cast of characters in this melodrama:
David M., Agency Director, on probation by Board of Trustees of politicos and micro-managers.
Agency has four departments:
Welfare to Work (Doris P, head),
Child Youth & Family Services (Rachel F),
Adult & Aging Services (Betty W), and
Workforce & Resource Development (Pedro X)
Amanda T. is Deputy Director, to whom Ray–remember, the Director of Planning–reports. You’ll meet Tomas Y, Family Services’ chief consultant, in a moment.
David forced by Board of Trustees to have a long-term action plan. Who can be against action planning? That means, no one is for it, except Ray and Amanda. Agency is one of largest in the Bay Area: Half a billion dollar annual budget, over 2000 employees.
***
Agency waiting room looks like a bus depot in a bad part of town. Private security guard opens doors around 8:30 am. Mostly Blacks, Hispanics and Asians hang around in front. Building is next to probation and courts, all Stalinist construction.
Walls look like they’ve been eaten off where not pissed on. We queue, eventually get up to functionaries behind bullet-proof windows. Mine decides to buzz the outer door open. I sign in. I’ve interrupted the security guy chatting up one of the females. He buzzes the inside door open, and I’m free.
***
Ray introduces me at today’s Executive Committee meeting. Rachel and Betty are burned out. David says not a word. Amanda waits until the others have had their say, and then wades in. Ray’s the only one who smiles. I don’t know what they’re talking about, it’s mostly acronyms, but this part of a learning curve I like. Ray and I arrange interviews with each department head, plus David and Amanda.
***
Went to my first meeting with the Interdepartmental Planning Workgroup charged to work with Ray on the Action Plan. (Thinking in CAPS now.) We’re grim. Ray tells me later of another meeting, when they were trying to figure out what to call welfare recipients. Clients? Customers? Consumers? Hell, they’re all suspects, said the head of Welfare Fraud.
***
I just interviewed a guard at a death camp. You can’t imagine how cruel this system is to children, says Rachel about her Child Youth & Family Services department. 20,000 calls to the child abuse hotline a year, only 1200-1500 leading to children being removed from the home. We’re missing lots of kids. We don’t know what bottom is, she says.
Her department’s to reunite children with their families. Reality is that the family’s the problem. She tells me the single best predictor of a foster kid ending up in the juvenile justice system is being reunited with the family.
Some kids have been moved 40 or more times before they graduate from the system at 16 years old. Most families trained as foster care parents drop out early. Every foster kid in the county should get life-long psychiatric therapy, she tells me. Oh, and don’t forget they have more medical and dental problems than do average kids. Most violence done to kids is kid-on-kid violence. An 8-year old kid sexually abuses a younger one. What do you think happened to the 9-year old who committed an armed robbery? He was sent home. You can’t imagine how cruel this system is, she repeats.
Foster care graduates should be guaranteed county jobs, she presses, since they’re the creation of the county and have no other employment possibilities. Number of kids exiting foster care who are prepared to take care of themselves is negligible. She’s really worried about what’s going to happen once parents are time-limited off of welfare assistance. The Action Plan goal is: “Promote healthy development of children and families and healthy aging of elders that emphasize home and community-based services.” I’ll be long retired before the end of that Plan period! For one second, she’s young.
***
Had trouble getting past security. Another meeting with the Interdepartmental Planning Workgroup. One thing clear so far: Agency staff know what needs to be done, but they don’t know their clients. Contradictory?
If you have 20,000 calls to a hotline, but respond to 1 out 20, you know what needs to be done—more calls have to be taken seriously—even if you know nothing about who is being abused or doing the abuse. Plus who needs to know the clients, when all trends are getting worse. Next year there’ll be even more calls. The gap between implementation and results is so big, you can’t worry about results (i.e., the impact on the client), until you do something to address implementation (i.e., answer those hotlines).
***
Interviewed Tomas Y today. He’s Rachel’s hired gun to inject new energy into Child Youth & Family Services. He said alot about walking the talk. Interview neatly summarizes the Agency’s problems and proposed solutions:
In brief, the Agency is too
´ fragmented and departmental
´ centralized and headquarters-oriented
´ specialized and narrowly focused
´ focused on needs and immediate crisis response
´ client-centered
´ rooted to desks and offices far from the real problems
´ constrained by categorical funding; and
´ hamstrung by the employee’s union.
Therefore, the Agency should
´ provide integrated services
´ be decentralized and located in the neighborhoods
´ be more generalist and multidisciplinary
´ focused on people’s strengths and longer term prevention and recovery strategies
´ be centered around the whole family
´ have mobile units that go to where the problems are
´ have much more flexible funding; and
´ be working with community-based organizations under performance-based contracts.
Tomas has no—repeat: no—examples of where integrated, decentralized, multidisciplinary, preventative, strengths-oriented, whole-family, mobile, flexibly funded place-based organizations have worked.
In short: All the problems, but none of the solutions, are found in the Agency, while the solutions, all outside the Agency, haven’t been identified by those responsible for finding them. Such is walking the talk.
In the last decade, the Agency has injected into the county economy nearly $2.5 billion in cash assistance alone (excluding staff salaries).
***
The Executive Committee loved my first draft of the roadmap. Convinced them that the Action Plan should have two parts—a roadmap for the future and then the Plan itself. That way, even if the Board of Trustees or the Agency’s critics don’t like specifics of the Plan—what’s this on page 57, line 3?—they still can sign off on the Plan as a whole because they bought into to the short roadmap earlier.
BTW, remember the security guard? He’s been fired. Caught being sucked off. Ray and I speculate about this.
***
We met with Doris, head of the Agency’s largest department, Welfare to Work. Is upset with Rachel re: What happens to kids of parent who are time-limited off welfare?
What are we doing worrying about a problem that hasn’t come up yet and may not even be a problem? We haven’t seen any evidence of this. The whole point of Welfare Reform is that those on the rolls can’t depend indefinitely on the Agency. They have to fall back on their “families” and “communities” at some point. The government safety net is gone. The last resort is the safe haven (no scare quotes!) of community organizations. We no longer provide cash, but match people to jobs. How are the job groups working? I ask. Some 35% of those on the rolls don’t even show up for them. Maybe they’re already employed, she hazards.
Or maybe she hopes I start a rumor to that effect.
***
Executive Committee had meeting to discuss Chapters 1 – 3 (includes “Goals, Strategies and Policies”). I’m again struck by how meetings rehearse one more time who the departments are, what are their problems, and why they can’t do what needs to be done. It’s Agency auto-suggestion enabling it to reconstitute itself daily. Result: There’s always twice as much ground for the meeting to cover.
***
I’m directed to reduce the Plan to a sentence that the Broad of Trustees can understand. One sentence. Okey-dokey:
The Action Plan’s eight goals promote, increase or improve the stability, health and well-being, security and learning, capacity building and access, independence and self-sufficiency, and, equally important, the participation and accountability of County families, neighborhoods, and individuals (including children, elders and persons with disabilities) in the planning, delivery and evaluation of services offered by the Agency and its providers.
***
Interviewed Betty, head of Adult & Aging. Department seems to have its act together, i.e., relies on community-based organizations (CBOs), contractors, encourages local capacity building, has new ideas about public/private partnerships. Feels its approach could be extended Agency-wide to the other departments. Two trends strike her: fastest growing segment of the population is the old-old, the over 85’s. Second, dramatic increase in services required for veterans, with younger veterans than in recent past.
***
Met again with the Interdepartmental Planning Workgroup. Went through the draft Plan, goal by goal, focusing on the new policies and strategies for implementing the eight goals. They blew me out of the water with comments. From top to bottom and with apologies to Gregory Corso’s “Bomb”:
***
Ray presented the revised proposals to the Executive Committee. Decided not to submit the full text of each, but to introduce ideas for buy-in. The next meeting we’d submit the full text, with their changes incorporated.
The proposals weren’t savaged as much as I thought by the department heads. This worries me.
Key proposal is the cross-departmental Family Intervention Team (FIT). Rachel felt that the FIT members would have to be new hires. We just don’t have enough staff. Doris dittoed the same for welfare-for-work. I’ll have to change the reference to “Job Group Leader.” I tell her I got the info from her people in the Interdepartmental Planning Workgroup. Sometimes I wonder if my staff know anything, she said.
Oh, oh. She’s seen the proposal’s implications, i.e., more scrutiny of her staff and its outputs. DOES NOT LIKE IT. We need random assignment of referrals to the Team, she says abruptly. Tomas says Team should be working on referrals made in light of assessments, as proposed. I’d rather have the support of Doris than Tomas. Doris clams up. This is not good.
Too late, we see that our overheads backfired in one big way. Only after meeting did that become clear. Doris thinks the FIT will be her department’s responsibility, notwithstanding the Agency-wide scope. Clearly not so in the text, but not clear from the overheads. Bulleted by bullets.
***
By the way, the Executive Committee went word-by-word—WORD-BY-WORD—through Chapter 3’s goals, strategies and policies. Doris had a field day. “Authoritative”? Please, let’s stick with simple English! Improved communications? 20 years ago we said we would improve communications, and haven’t done it yet. Rachel beams, she’s retiring.
***
Ray has given up on the benchmarks and indicators of Plan performance. First, he had them in Chapter 3, where the new policies and strategies are discussed. The Executive Committee didn’t like them there, and frankly they broke the flow of the text. Then Ray put them away in an appendix. Then he tried inserting them in the Chapter 4’s Management Plan and that didn’t fit either. So a section on specific indicators has been dropped altogether.
***
Had final meeting with David today. He’s back and jet-lagged. We go through the draft chapters, hitting the new recommendations concerning policies, strategies and the innovation units. He again pushes his idea about the Agency facilitating creation and operation of different networks of providers that vary in terms of subject area, e.g., one network for providers working on substance abuse, another for mental health, and so on.
Doris has been maneuvering behind the scenes. David tells us she saw him in the morning and said, Yes, she supports FIT, but she can’t possibly agree to fund it until her own staffing problems are solved. David sees this as reasonable. Ray doesn’t say much. I say it’s blackmail. I tell David she’s holding ransom a fifteen-person unit by demanding that her 60+ vacancies be filled first. The punishment she’s exacting isn’t proportional to our “crime.” David equivocates, but says he supports the key proposals and “will make them happen.”
I leave, feeling irrationally hopeful that David’s meeting tomorrow with the Executive Committee on the four chapters will end the right way. As for my involvement, it stops here.
***
Called Ray after I got back from my conference. How did the Executive Committee meeting go?
Terrible, he says. Worse meeting he’s ever had. In fact, told Amanda he was back on the job market. What happened?! Seems Doris had made a side deal with the other department heads that would effectively nudge Ray out of monitoring implementation of the Action Plan, leaving it to the separate departments.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 