“How to make democracy faster and smarter” published by Simon Kuper in this WE’s edition of the Financial Times reinforced some of my thinking on how we need to craft more complex organizations, mimicking neural networks, to manage 21st century systemic and polycrises.
The reality is that – at the State level – we continue to manage such crises with organizational structures and thinking that date back to the 20th century.
In discussing how democracies can act faster and smarter Kuper points to the response to Covid-19. “Crucially,” he writes, “politicians allowed experts to lead the debate from the start (…). Experts aren’t always right, but they are right more often than ignoramuses. They are the cleverest elements in a stupid system”.
“Of course elected politicians rather than experts still had to make decisions, but they weren’t acting in ignorance. (…) To institutionalize this kind of rapid response, we need to foreground expertise in political debate. (…) And we’ll need better mechanisms for experts to steer government thinking”.
The reality is that addressing systemic and polycrises of the 21st century increasingly involves in-depth technical expertise well beyond the knowledge of our average politician or Minister. And though Margaret Thatcher once said “Advisers advise, ministers decide” we do need to figure out ex-ante how to integrate such expertise in crisis management organizations to accelerate rapid thinking, for sometime Patrick Lagadec has been advocating the need to have “rapid reflection cells”, and swift action.
Complex crises can only be piloted by establishing and training complex organizations. Long gone are the days of simple hierarchical crisis management structures.
And this also applies to companies.
#crisismanagement