Abstract
This paper presents a framework for better managing policy messes and draws implications for bad and good mess management in policy analysis and management. The framework has three foci: (1) the cognitive space in which policy messes develop, particularly in terms of gaps between macro-designers and micro-operators; (2) the unique domain of competence within that space where professionals manage the resulting messes by virtue of their skills in recognizing system-wide patterns, formulating locally specific contingency scenarios and translating both patterns and scenarios in highly reliable services; and (3) the ability of those mess and reliability professionals to be reliable in their domain and with these skills by maneuvering across different performance modes as conditions dictate—just-in-case, just-on-time, just-for-now or just-this-way.
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Notes
For more on wicked and unruly problems, see respectively Rittel and Webber (1973) and Ansell and Bartenberger (2016). While indebted to the literature on decision-making under uncertainty and in the face of complexity, I highlight that issue conflict and incompleteness are core to policy and management messes as well. To be clear, issues are complex when more numerous, varied, and interdependent than before. Issues are incomplete when efforts to address them are left interrupted, unfinished, or partially fulfilled. Issues are disputed when individuals take different positions on them because of their uncertainty, complexity, and incompleteness. As a first pass, think of policy messes as having all four properties. The recent work of Andy Stirling is especially illuminating as a starting point in thinking through these differences (Stirling 2010; Chapter 5 in Roe and Schulman 2016).
I thank Paul R. Schulman for the basic framework and its formulation, though he is not responsible for my adaptations. This section’s discussion of the framework builds on earlier research work in (Roe and Schulman 2008), which also reviews research by others on infrastructures as diverse as air traffic control, nuclear aircraft carriers and nuclear reactors.
In case it needs saying, pattern recognition and anticipation are not neutral or unmediated activities. We are witnessing species, be they protected whales and sharks or unprotected humans, equipped with transmitters so that they can be monitored in real time. Such efforts, however, individuate animals that often act collectively.
My thanks to Martin Krieger for this latter point.
In high reliability organizations, it is said professionals are as reliable as their last case. So too in this forensic science example. ‘This is a business where you’re as good as your last case’, one of the past presidents of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences said about his profession (quoted in Hamill 2008: A12; for a book-length review of the issues, see Fisher 2008).
As we have seen, confusion can also go the other way when local scenario formulation is conflated with system-wide pattern recognition. A number of touted ‘‘best practices’’ confuse a scenario or protocol that works well in one case for the better practices that emerge across a run of cases and that then have to be customized, site by site.
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Acknowledgments
A shorter, different version of this article is to appear as Chapter 12 in C. Ansell, J. Trondal and M. Ogard (eds.) Governance in Turbulent Times. Oxford: Oxford University Press (forthcoming 2016). My thanks go to Duke University Press for permission to republish material from Making the Most of Mess: Reliability and Policy in Today’s Management Challenges (Roe 2013). Because of space limitations, this article focuses on the core management approach, with readers referred to the book for detailed applications and references, including literature review and elaboration of the interaction of cultures, politics and organizations in mess and its management. In addition to those acknowledged in the book and the short chapter version, I wish to thank Paul R. Schulman for his contribution to the framework, Martin Krieger for his suggestions and encouragement, and the comments of two reviewers and the editor of Policy Sciences.
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Roe, E. Policy messes and their management. Policy Sci 49, 351–372 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-016-9258-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-016-9258-9