Throughout this effort to establish new community paradigms, the case has been made for greater direct community governance as opposed to the standard representative institutional form of governance, i.e. City Council/City Manager, one typically finds. This means enhancing community empowerment beyond city hall and establishing a form of governance that is not only of, for and by the people but that works through the people. Community governance is seen as arising not through the permission of institutions but through the set of community relations making up civil society. It should also consider what mechanisms are required to ensure community prosperity is enhanced through governance by the community.
It still needs to be demonstrated how this is to be fully established. It requires breaking the hold of the existing institutions of local community government and engaging the community to establish viable systems of direct democratic community governance.
It also means devising a system of addressing complex challenges facing a community which fully uses all the resources of that community in coming up with innovative, sustainable solutions and avoiding unintended detrimental consequences. Simply putting the community in power is not enough to ensure the effective establishment of new community paradigms.
Fortunately, a community-based system of direct deliberative governance is by its nature a more collaborative system than the usual city council form of a government institution. Standard local government institutions are, as are many of our institutions, based on adversarial competition. For local communities, this means elections in which candidates oppose each other and this adversarial relationship is often continued in day-to-day governance until the next election. Groups or cliques form around candidates and too often energy is spent in trying to stop the opposition rather than coming up with solutions more beneficial to all.
The argument has been made elsewhere to how institutional local government, ostensibly seen as expressions of the democratic will of a community, are examples of entrenched political power serving only the interests of the few. Even when there is some attempt to work together it is very difficult to get a clear picture of what the challenges actually are because information must too often go through a maze of supposed expertise created by staff professionals in support of the politically self-interested prism of city council members.
The personal or political preferences of individual city council members or the council as a whole take precedences over what may be a different perspective by a majority of the community. The community, to the extent that it hasn’t become disengaged, is often given limited and slanted information then being persuaded to take sides too often based on emotional likes or dislikes created through unsubstantial but persuasive arguments rather than reason. Community members become cheerleading spectators in the political process rather than truly empowered participants.
What though if a method or means could be established by which the community collaboratively dealt with decisions of resource allocation in a more objective manner? Instead of first choosing sides then having that side put forward an idea to compete with an opposing side, the community used one of the forums available through the Governance Through Community wiki-page and then defined the challenge together so that all perspectives were considered.
This does not mean that there would always have to be agreement, only that other perspectives would have to be considered up front. The objective would not be to beat the competition but to make sure that a complete model of the challenge was created so that all aspects were thoroughly addressed.
One means of doing this is establishing a Systems Thinking approach to community governance. A wiki-page, Systems Thinking Approaches, has been created to explore this area further under the wiki-section Community Management and Technology.
In addition, insights learned from a system thinking related course on Model Thinking from the University of Michigan taught by Professor Scott E. Page through Coursea will be applied.
According to Professor Scott, models are important because they help us to be Intelligent Citizens of the World being able to not only recognize relevant factors but when those factors do and do not apply. System Thinking Models are successfully used in economics, biology, sociology, political science, linguistics, law and game theory.
Professor Page makes a strong argument throughout the course for the usefulness of models in addressing challenges facing us as individuals and as community members. One benefit is that models, properly used, can help communities to reason, decide, strategize and design different approaches to community challenges. They can serve as decision aids, provide comparative statistics and counterfactuals, help create experimental designs and help convert those experimental designs into institutional designs. Finally, they can assist in choosing among multiple policies and the institutional means of implementing those policies.
That is if they are used properly. Institutional forms of city government often use models put forward by professional staff and consultants. The problem is that they too often pick and choose the methodology to come up with the politically desired answer and discourage further questioning or debate by giving the proposed strategy a veneer of approval through supposed expertise. Not that staff professionals and consultants don’t know what they are doing, it is that they often do not use their expertise to its fullest extent because of imposed self-serving limitations set by city councils and city management. Nor does this mean that this is always done explicitly, in many instances a long-term process of enculturation takes place by which it becomes the way things have always been done without question.
A good model not only endeavors to predict points or outcomes but also to produce bounds or ranges of outcomes. It can seek to test itself through retrodiction by looking at past results to see if they fit a particular model. It can be used to predict other related issues and help define or inform future Data Collection. Proper use of models also makes it possible to calibrate for better measurement in the future and to estimate hidden parameters.
This means, however, taking a radically different approach to problem-solving than what is often found in city halls. It requires participants in this process to be clear, reasonable thinkers rather than getting their way by being the most likable or loudest. Professor Scott puts forward a process, similar to that put forward by other resources found at Systems Thinking Approaches, to achieve this.
- Name The Parts
- Identify Relationships
- Work Through Logic
- Inductively Explore
- Understand Class of Outcome
Rather than being based on persuasion which is then subsequently supported by selected data, System Thinking Models start with the goal to understand through reason, using data then seeking to understand patterns found in that data. This is where professional staff and consultants could be of assistance, in working directly with the community, through the facilitation of this process.
What is more important is that we are more successful in coming up with answers to problems when we use models than we are when we address them on our own. Phil Tetlock demonstrated that people who use models, particularly formal models, or use multiple models and perspectives (foxes) were better in making predictions than those using single models or perspectives (hedgehogs) or no models (Why Foxes Are Better Forecasters Than Hedgehogs). The logic of modeling can often help to show us where our intuition fails us.
This may all sound great (then again it may be so different to what we are used to that it still requires further means of convincing) but there are still inherent challenges to convincing others of implementing such a system. First is a basic truth of thinking with models put forward by George E. P. Box that, "Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.” This requires being able to handle some degree of ambiguity but it can remain far too easy to be persuaded by voices professing to be absolutely certain that they are right.
Another issue is the nature of outcomes. The challenge that the increasing complexity of the world poses to our institutions has been discussed before. People are more comfortable with a system that creates outcomes that have seemingly obtained some form of equilibrium or are cyclic in nature but have a far harder time dealing with issues or outcomes that are random or complex in nature. This makes this endeavor a necessary but extremely complex undertaking. Political persuasion would still exist and community leaders would still be needed but this would fundamentally change the relationships of governance within a community between the community with professional staff and consultants, between the community and its leaders, and between the community and its members.
Related Past Blog Posts
Community Empowerment
Systems Thinking
Complexity