Policy Innovation - What's the Urgency?

A few months back I had written a blog about the ups and downs of policy innovation. Since then may things have happened.

First, Change Camp 2010 has taken place and I was there as one of the on-line scribes that facilitated the 30 break-out groups of this remarkable event. It was an interesting experience that taught our team a lot about facilitating engagements at this scale (240 people).

Then I organized XCAMP, the unconference discussing the XCLINIC project. With the support of several peers from the Design with Dialog (DwD) practitioner group that meets monthly at OCAD's Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) this smaller event was a great crowd-sourced co-design experience pushing the project a big step forward.

The most important time investment over the past few months (the one that took me away from blogging all this time) was put into developing a brand new graduate course "Business Model & Policy Innovation" and teaching the course to the first class of the MDes program in Strategic Foresight & Innovation (SFI) at OCAD. This has been an exhilarating and learning-rich experience, which we're about to wrap up with project presentations and critiques over the next 2 weeks.

Emerging Trends

During the course I hosted a number of guest lecturers including Toronto City Councilor Gordon Perks and Change Camp co-founder Mark Kuznicki. From the lively discussions throughout the course and the guest lectures, I came out with a renewed sense of urgency for policy innovation. Everywhere we looked (enterprises, government, academic institutions, NGOs) the trend swelling from the grass roots up was towards more collaborative and participatory mode of working. And in most instances that trend was clashing with the vertical decision-making hierarchies and structures that characterize the 20th century.

Towards a Solution

I had highlighted the inherent risks of not addressing this gap in my previous blog about policy innovation. What has emerged through these various events is the beginning of a discourse about how to do so. In a conversation with Dr. David Wolf, Royal Bank Chair in Public and Economic Policy at the Munk Centre for International Studies, about how to address this gap, he envisaged governments shifting implementation efforts significantly towards grass-roots organizations and NGOs. Karl Schroeder, a Sci-Fi author, future scenarios writer, and graduate student at the SFI program suggested exploring a sequencing of these two different modes of organizing: horizontal networks and vertical hierarchies. Each of these modes excels at certain aspects and could be used at specific times in the process of policy making for example.

Mark Kuznicki provided real examples of how tremendous engagement and creativity by grass-roots initiatives in Toronto got stifled due to infighting between vertical hierarchies in Ontario. Everybody agreed with Mark, that how we address this fundamental issue is the conversation all who seek positive change must engage in. This could easily become a cornerstone of research in strategic foresight and innovation.

Growth vs. Sustainability

The G20 Summit was held over this weekend. In their declaration the leaders state: "We are determined to enhance our cooperation and work together to restore global growth and achieve needed reforms in the world's financial systems."

I have been thinking lately about this granted assumption that "growth" is the ultimate objective for wealth and prosperity. What is wrong with a year-after-year steady reasonable profit instead of this fixation on ever higher sales, higher profits, higher GDP, even higher growth rate?

It seems to me that the core equation is really very simple: we live on a finite globe with finite resources. If you take into consideration the increasing population, you have to accept dwindling average resources per capita. Defining progress as "growth" can only lead to faster depletion of the resources and more extreme unbalance in wealth distribution.

How we got into this messy economic system is history. The important thing now is how to start changing the fundamental assumptions of the current model without wrecking the boat. I am not talking about the current financial crisis and "bail out" measures. The fundamental issues were there long before the current crisis. I am talking about using people's mass intelligence to find new ways to reward sustainable economic behavior pattern.

The widely used concept of "wholesale" for example is just rewarding more consumption by reducing unit cost. From volume discounts on commodity pricing to "two for one" retail promotions, the same principle applies. What if we reversed that, say by charging an increasing unit price for higher volumes; considered the total volumes purchased over the last 12 months when determining the unit price, and applied higher tax rates with increased unit consumption?

The repercussions of applying such new fundamental principles to all aspects of economic activities would be huge and the resulting structural changes would be deep and painful for almost all layers of the current economic system particularly those that benefit most from the "economies of scale". I wish there was a better alternative; I can think only of much worse ones because history shows that the emergence of new structures is usually extremely violent and destructive of previous structures! Like a jet fighter in a spin fall we'll need to accept high-G exposure to get out of it.