Pathways to Hybrid Government in Hawai'i

A few days ago I posted a piece on Hybrid Models of Governance on thethirdera.com blog, which centered on why hybrid representative/democratic government models are a believable pathway to political innovation. Anyone that might be momentarily nonplussed by a suggested contrast between representative government and democracy, you can catch up quickly with this post that talks about the definition of democracy. Yesterday's post, though, got me thinking about how such a pathway could unfold in a place like Hawai'i.

To start, let's quickly review the four scenario-types described in the Third Era post:

• Crisis-Driven Change at the Center: a national (in the US case, the Federal) government is driven by some form of crisis or a popular movement reaching critical mass to adopt new structures
• Slow Build to the Center: augmenting structures are experimented with at local and district/province levels over many years, and success and socialization lead eventually to adoption at the national level (as people’s expectations for political norms change)
• Proliferation and Diffusion: augmenting structures are experimented with at the local level and gradually spread as other localities mimic the new, more effective structures; hybrids become the norm at small governance scales (localities), but there is no upward adoption at the national level (one explanation could be strong and coordinated counter-narratives at the national level directed at protecting the national-level status-quo)
• Quirky Outliers: after a period of augmenting structures being fashionable and many local governments experimenting with them, most die off or are shut down as the intellectual movement passes its zenith without achieving broad institutionalization, but a few experiments survive as testaments to the idea

Let us choose Slow Build to the Center, and cast Hawai'i's state government as the "center" and the county governments and neighborhood boards as the localities. For key trends to project forward let us use things like continuing basic demographic/age-cohort transitions, proliferation of mobile technology and ubiquitous mobile internet access in daily life, and tightening budget constraints for local governments.  For key emerging issues, we will use things like "crowdsourcing" efforts and "open data."

So, how would we then expect to see hybrid governance structures emerge according to this scenario-type?

To keep it fairly simple, let us just build a timeline for our scenario:

• A local resident creates a Web app called DisPLACE that combines several public data sets to create information-rich maps of Honolulu neighborhoods
• A well-organized neighborhood board starts to use the DisPLACE data maps in their neighborhood meetings; they also use it to annotate their neighborhood issues and recommendations
• The mayor publicly endorses the Web app; public use of DisPLACE spikes; more neighborhood boards start using it
• A college team creates another application called VoteDis using the DisPLACE data that sorts issues and enables residents to prioritize them
• In a future mayoral race, campaign staffs realize that VoteDis enables them to slice resident data and get at specific constituency interests in a much more powerful way
• A well-endowed nonprofit sets up a tracking service that analyzes county council progress against the priorities showcased on VoteDis; they team with local media to run ongoing political analyses and roundtables; other nonprofits latch on to VoteDis for their own advocacy needs
• The Honolulu city council decides to use the neighborhood priorities from VoteDis to set a portion of their own agenda; resident approval and satisfaction starts to rise
• Over a few years all of the county councils begin incorporating both DisPLACE and VoteDis in their deliberations; many state legislators begin to publicly reference them as well
• Over a few more years there is a growing discussion about adapting VoteDis to create a permanent internet-enabled structure to incorporate some citizen-driven agenda-setting for the legislature
• The question of a constitutional convention is called by the lieutenant governor…

This is just a quick example, but it is illustrative of the type of slow diffusion and incremental change we might expect in a Slow Build to the Center scenario.  Essentially, we are looking at the gradual development of tools or processes that are adopted as add-ons to existing political processes.  The O'ahu neighborhood boards, while not possessed of much authority, do have a purpose of increasing citizen participation and do have a degree of flexibility in how they engage with local residents.  They, therefore, are one logical locus of augmentative political innovation.

I will work on another scenario that incorporates a few more elements to explore how new governance structures could logically arise in Hawai'i.

Notes:

1. we used a linear progression for the scenario overall, versus an exponential pattern of change

2. for simplicity we restricted the introduction of new technologies and multiple parallel developments; in a more robust scenario we would weave in a wider of array of logical developments

3. because of the focus on emerging democratic augmentative structures the scenario followed the evolution of just that type of structure and not other, more e-anarchic or plethocratic structures that could easily emerge from the current ecosystem of political innovation

Futures thought of the day

My futures and foresight thought for the day (yesterday) was simply this:

Intuition and imagination are necessary but insufficient elements of good foresight work.

Great quote about predicting the future

I just finished the book China Airborne: The Test of China's Future, by James Fallows, which is by far the most interesting book about China that I have yet read.  Fallows' narrative is entertaining and engaging, and yet he is able to use the development of a modern commercial airline industry as a very effective proxy for framing and (trying) to grasp the scale of both potentials and challenges in China.

At the very end he has a great line about the challenge in predicting China's future that I just loved:

But I know how much is in flux, and how much is at stake.  It is not an evasion of analysis but a recognition of China's complexity, and the world's, to say that a wide range of outcomes is possible, and that it is worth watching very carefully signals like those I have mentioned to recalibrate our estimates.

That's simply an awesome and elegant quote that I think captures the tentativeness and openness more or us should adopt in our thinking about the futures of complex life.

S-curves, uncertainty, and investment

Figure 1: basic VFS s-curve

Yesterday I had a great conversation with some folks from out of town and at some point our foresight work came up.  In discussing with them some of the industries in which their clients operate, I drew some diagrams to help illustrate some of the foresight-related points that I was trying to make.





Beginning with some s-curve diagrams like Figure 1, I started mapping out where our foresight work leads up to, and overlaps with, things like venture capital and investing in start-up companies.  We talked a bit about where (on the curve) you are likely to find different people focusing, and for what reasons.  Obviously futurists are trained to deal with the stretch that encompasses the Foresight and Innovation zones, even though many clients are asking for help with things that are already into the Reactive zone and the New Normal.

Figure 2: cone of uncertainty

We talked a bit more about the emergence of new technologies and the patterns of exploration and experimentation of business models and new ventures that almost inevitably takes place (the Innovation zone), which led to some talk about uncertainty and the narrowing of possibilities as time progresses.  Here we would normally think about the classic "cone of uncertainty," pictured in Figure 2.  The basic idea in most futures work, as it is in weather forecasting (where they also use cones of uncertainty in forecasting), is that the further into the future one gets the more uncertainty increases.  And I think most people intuitively grasp this, so it's not usually a difficult concept.

During the conversation I started lining up these different concepts, again to illustrate some points in the conversation about how our foresight work typically relates to other business activities.  In doing so, I had to reverse the cone of uncertainty to accurately capture the progression of things and the direction of change in our levels of uncertainty.  What resulted, reproduced in Figure 3, was a layering of three basic charts:

• A reversed cone of uncertainty identifying where core foresight work really operates in relation to the gradual reduction of new possibilities (e.g. new tech, startups, and emerging industries), on top of,
• The s-curve chart I earlier detailed to talk (initially) about "thought leadership" and consulting work, layered over,
• The classic s-curve of issues/tech development that is so common to foresight work

Figure 3: all 3 charts, aligned

A couple of things were of particular interest to me as I connected these charts.

A.  There is something about that dark, dashed lined in the reversed cone on the top.  What I mean is, I think there is something about crossing that line that typically represents a move from a more wide-open futures mind-set (shuffling possibilities, struggling for a useful framing of the many uncertain possibilities) to a more focused concern with driving change and/or beginning to lay real bets (take options, as some would say).  To the left of that line, I think organizations are more likely to be in a scanning/discussion/scenario forecasting type of mode.  To the right, as things begin their slow work of shaking out, individuals feel more confident to begin positioning themselves or use the emerging outlines as a real guide for action.

B. At the risk of delving a little too much into some inside baseball, I think different schools of futures, and certainly different traditions of anticipating change, are more comfortable, or perhaps are better able to have their art flourish, along different stretches of that cone.  I suspect many of the folks trained in the "Manoa" schools are most comfortable and most artistic to the left of that line, while still having a facility as they begin to cross the line.  I think those trained at Houston might gain a bit more momentum in their art as they hit that line.  And I think, if it bears out, it's probably to do with the philosophic and methodological emphases that the two schools have traditionally had.

And again, I personally think that most good foresight practices work better when we move beyond, say, a three year time horizon.  I think that once we are into the Reactive zone real subject matter experts will, generally, have a better sense of the shape of the near-term future, and importantly the nuances of standards, competition, and emerging regulation, than will good futurists (who are not also genuine subject matter expects in that topic).

Figure 4: reversed cone of uncertainty

More technological revolutions

In the last post just before New Year's I included a graphic that combined the three horizons framework from Sharpe and Hodgson with the the cyclical sequence of tech-driven economic change.  As promised, here is an additional graphic (build for upcoming content) that illustrates the various technological revolutions that Perez talks about in her book, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages.

We built the waves using the tech revolution start dates ("big bangs") and end dates that Perez identified and built the projected 5th and 6th waves using mean averages of the previous waves.

What's really interesting to me, and what I would really like to focus on more, is the idea that, if in fact innovation is accelerating globally, then will these waves begin to overlap more as the cycle (the "surges") shorten?  The result, I suspect, would be greater turbulence as the different surges, each at different phases in their life cycle, wreak increasing havoc (just kidding) through culture lag, dislocation, and what not.