Against Innovation: Why Progress Is What Governments Must Seek
At a lunch with one of our clients, a man responsible for government services in a small country in South-East Asia, I confess that I am doing a research about innovation for governments. The man, seemingly unimpressed by this generic desire of mine, boringly nods.
Then, I specify: “I am against it.”
The man looks at me as if I were a serial killer.
It happens every time my colleagues and I run workshops on improving processes within administrations, or invent new agencies for government knowledge management. Innovation, a sacro-saint concept so intensely intertwined with development, growth, and other idols of process-focused thinking, is a an untouchable deity — so teaching thinking against innovation makes us look like heretics.
My war on innovation, though, is not total. I do not think it is a dangerous phenomenon; quite the opposite — innovating often rhymes with positive dynamics in problem-solving. The problem is: even more often it does not.
Since the beginning of the COVID crisis, Gambit has helped many public administrations sort their stuff out — and, more importantly, we have all learned from so many brilliant, amazing thinkers and doers! And one of the most important lessons learned is that innovation is a side-product of successful governance, not its goal.
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Innovation in government services is not the same as innovation in services. While the latter is an excellent driver of all forms of capitalistic advancements, of which many are not as bad as many would want to believe, the former is often a dangerous mirage.
Governments, indeed, are not companies. At workshops, I often discuss Ben Bernanke’s article from 1983, “‘Irreversibility, uncertainty, and cyclical investment.” In that text, the future Fed chairman and Nobel Prize winner explains that
“investor behaviour in recession is . . . a cautious probing, an avoidance of commitment until the longer run status of both the national economy and the investor’s own fortunes are better known… by waiting, the potential investor can improve his chances of making a correct decision.”
Businesses have the very tempting option of ‘wait and see’ because it has a substantial difference from governments when it comes to the degree of responsibility. Private entities can invest time (and money — through loss of potential benefit and eventual sunk costs) to buy certainty. Governments can not do that. Attempts to buy time and to ignore the ultimate responsibility that falls on public administration in time of crisis asking for fast decision usually — always? — lead to dramatic consequences.
Think of Sri Lanka government refusing to implement financial measures, applying ‘wait and see’ philosophy for months — until there was no fuel in the country, and people burned houses and property of politicians. President had to flee the country, and the dramatic IMF-imposed measures were implemented, but the damage done was as massive as it was avoidable.
Think of England in 1930s or Detroit bankruptcy in 2013 or its earlier crisis in the 1960s. And many, many other cases of socioeconomic and political damage generated by the policymakers’ refusal to acknowledge the responsibility for continuous, adaptive, and resilient government services. Such damage exists in the local and national history of many lands, across all cultures and civilizations.
Because governments can not afford to ‘wait and see’, they can not afford to innovate in the private sector sense. Rolling out results of public or private R&D work is also different compared to the corporate world, because of the sheer population volume and tremendous responsibility to ensure stability.
But here is another side of this coin: under pressure because of their responsibilities, governments and public administrations need to generate responses to the challenges they face. The perceived danger of becoming less competitive in a constantly evolving environment forces them to continually reinvent their policies, often jumping on innovation-bound trains without analyzing whether they travel to the same destination where the citizens of a given locus want to arrive.
Hence, the innovation is a bad measure for the advancement of governments. The most innovative ones might as well be the least efficient in delivering the efficient services.
That is why I suggest a different measure, and a different goal: government progress.
Innovation is bringing something new into existence.
Progress is making things better.
Progress is the ultimate goal for all governments.
While innovation can certainly contribute progress, it is not the only way to achieve it. Progress can also be achieved through policy changes, social programs, infrastructure improvements, and just improving how things work — or outright coming back to less innovating options if they solve a given problem better. Quoting the American writer C.S.Lewis,
“…if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and
walking back to the right road; in that case, the man
who turns back soonest is the most progressive.”
In many cases, innovation may hinder progress. For example, if a government invests heavily in new technology but neglects basic infrastructure needs, progress may be limited. Without adequate roads, bridges, public transportation, and telecom infrastructure citizens may not be able to access the new technology, leading to further inequality and limited progress.
We say to all administrations: double-check if you are walking the right road. If you are not, you are ‘innovating’ into the wrong direction. And the cost of turning back (an inevitable eventuality) gets higher with each step.
What is also good about progress, is that it can be made measurable.
Innovation is measurable too, obviously —but that’s its curse. If a budget is given to innovation, it is easy to show how well it was spent by demonstrating the implemented (designed, suggested, discovered…) original solutions. Whether these solutions actually solve specific problems in real-life conditions— and if they do, whether they do it better than other methods — becomes a secondary issue.
Progress, on the other hand, allows clear, precise measurement on two levels through its very definition.
In our work with governments, we consider progress to take place when two conditions are met:
1. a given objective has been achieved, and
2. the cost of achieving it (combination of time, money, and other resources spent) has been inferior to the cost of maintaining the objective untouched.
This is an important definition, because if your administration has, say, a fraud problem that costs you €100M per year, and you solve it by spending €105M per year, this is not progress at all. The same is true on smaller scale, and this is where innovation really shows its potential weakness, as it does indeed often provide a viable solution, but ut such a cost (not necessarily monetary — it could be, for example, trust of your citizens) that it sort of defies the very concept of solving a problem.
At Gambit, we are working at formulating a Progressive Government Manifesto, a set of structural proposals on how to frame progress for public administrations.
The main idea behind it has been generated at the Government Tomorrow Forum internal workshop in December 2022, where 12 experts from Europe and the USA worked on defining the main workflows for governments for the next few years. The main takeaway regarding government progress from that reflection is that we can divide it into four main lines of work:
Technological progress: use new technologies to get better results, faster, cheaper, and for more people and organizations;
Human progress: reach more people with services, make these services more tailored, more available, and more adaptive;
Economic progress: better allocate ressources, and ensure creating economic value is facilitated for more economic actors;
Organizational progress: make better decisions, ensure better leadership, and smoother processes within administrations.
We continue working on this with some of the world’s brightest minds, and I am happy to discuss any of these ideas. Please do not hesitate to write me, for example on Twitter!
