By Douglas Kruger
PERMIT me to engage in a moment of heresy. I’d like to propose that our government needs to take way more risks, not fewer.
Hear me out…
I’m hardly the first to argue that a government should be run like a business. And preferably by those with deep corporate experience. It’s easy to see the case for a wizened chief executive at the helm, rather than a career politician.
But if we accept that premise, we quickly run up against an interesting problem. The most successful businesses today are described as “agile”. And they become this way by incentivising creative risk-taking. These are bodies that actively encourage their talent to experiment, to pioneer, to “fail forward” by trying new things.
Google’s internal mantra is “fail fast, succeed sooner”. Amazon trains its staff with an emphasis on “bold ideas and tolerating failures for innovation”. At Tesla, Musk reckons “failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
All true.
The more big ideas and experimentation are tolerated, the more innovative the culture becomes. That makes the entire company more productive. Entities transform into dynamic learning organisms, radically multiplying the number of ideas, and therefore options, available to them.
All this keeps industry leaders competitive. It’s no small part of why Space-X was initially able to out-perform Nasa, a government bureaucracy, by an order of magnitude, getting rockets into space ten times faster, and ten times cheaper. Musk wanted to bring “start-up thinking” to an industry that had become a dinosaur.
But isn’t business fundamentally different?
Well, no.
If agile thinking can make processes ten times cheaper, then governments should do it too… because it makes processes ten times cheaper. And it’s not just the savings. Think in terms of positive growth for the economy. An agile government would be leaner, meaner, harder punching. Less bloated, more effective.
But it doesn’t happen by default. There is a “spirit of the thing” that you must promote.
How do you do that within a government? How do you de-dinosaur yourself? Which is to say, how do we actively incentivise this sort of behaviour in the States Assembly?
It’s a serious question, because just about everything in politics works the other way and, honestly, I feel for those who try.
Right now, our best people are incentivised to keep their heads below the parapet. Failure is met with scorching mockery. It’s safer just to do things the way they’ve always been done. The slightest misstep, and you may become the personal target of a media curmudgeon’s bitterest ire. How does anyone take chances, share ideas, do bold new things, under such conditions?
As a small island, we should be teeming with rapid experimentation. We should be trying out every cool new idea, in order to implement what works and quickly discard what doesn’t. We should be positioning ourselves as world leading, punching way above our weight, by the sheer resourcefulness of our thinking and the audacious spirit of our makers and growers. We should not be scouting for missteps to mock.
We need a switch to fundamental optimism.
Businessman Deputy David Warr is on the right track with this one, with his wonderful campaign for “meanwhile use”. Don’t let the Island’s assets sit for years awaiting decisions.
Experiment. Try a meanwhile use. If it doesn’t work, scrap it, move on. That’s exactly the kind of thinking we need. Oh, and of course, Deputy Warr is not a career politician, but, no surprise, the owner of a successful business.
One option is for ministers to simply develop Teflon skin, which a handful of top politicians eventually do. But these people are prospering despite the culture around them, not because of it. Why should it be so difficult? Don’t we want the best from them?
If we’re dreaming out loud, which we can afford to do in a small island, how might we provide a positive culture for government employees who display a little inner oomph? A culture that incentivises trying new things, so that talented people actually want to throw their hat in the ring? Can you imagine how wonderful it would be if our States Assembly raged with energised debates about the exciting new initiatives they might roll out in Jersey?
Do they currently compliment one another on “trying and failing”? I hope so. That’s what the world’s most dynamic businesses do. And they do it publicly. The top leadership finds ways to actively reward those who dared. What might such an incentive scheme look like for us?
Perhaps one small step forward would be for our leading ministers to simply share an insight from Jeff Bezos.
Bezos taught the importance of distinguishing between what he called Type 1 and Type 2 decisions. Type 1 decisions are high-stakes. They are irreversible. These decisions require careful analysis and deliberate planning.
However, Type 2 decisions do not. These are low-stakes, reversible, and can be adjusted along the way, exactly as Deputy Warr describes. These are best approached with experimentation and agility.
Bezos advocates for categorising most decisions as Type 2, encouraging a culture of quick experimentation and learning. He says we fool ourselves into thinking that most decisions are Type 1.
Are our government ministers trying to treat everything as Type 1? Maybe. And maybe they do that because they fear the pushback. What if they didn’t? What if their environment were re-engineered to be eminently more creative, more supportive, more…modern?
Freedom. Fundamental optimism. A spirit of constant encouragement, promoting the swirl of new ideas. How much might Jersey achieve with such a culture embedded at the helm? I, for one, would love to see it.
Douglas Kruger is bestselling business author and keynote speaker. He lives in
St Helier, but speaks all around the world. Meet him at douglaskruger.com.
