This is a long post – take your time or just pass by.

I’m learning a new role and trying to understand how to get things done in an arena that is irrational. Cynics say a lot about government. Some think we deliberately under-resource it so it can’t be effective. Others think it’s all mediocre and suspect.

Government is the most deficit based system I’ve ever encountered. I’m not talking about money here, though that’s true too. I’m talking about decades of cynicism about our democratic systems which have piled constraint upon constraint, barnacles in abundance attached to every significant process so that it takes heroic effect to get anything done.

We make rules to prevent things we don’t want instead of policies to enable what we do want.

A constant culture of preventing stuff based on mistrust. And then when every process is fully loaded down, the hull of every ship-of-effort so encumbered it can barely move, we pile on more criticism of the people still trying. Eager to point out how slow government is.

It’s our government. We made it that way. Since the Reagan era we have preached mistrust. Don’t trust government. They’re inefficient crooks. Install minute controls because people can’t be counted on to do the right thing. Insert more and more control. Tighter and tighter constraints.

Don’t trust individuals either, they’ll just take advantage of systems. Make all forms of “eligibility” forms of denial. We’re not looking to determine how to help, we’re looking to determine how to reject your application for help.

The fraud, waste and abuse witch hunt undermines everything we try to do. Guarantees inefficiencies and tempts everyone to find a workaround just to be able to get something done. All the straightforward paths to delivery or service are gone. So we do it slow and right. And throw more people at the broken processes.

Here’s a side note – when you do get anything done it will not be reported well, nor appreciated, nor understood.  This week we announced a deal for a generator for a community center. A generator that had been long promised now on its way. Over the next year it will be designed, built, installed and working. A step closer to making that center a reliable place of refuge. Of course the question came “why won’t it be sooner?” And what will people do in between?” The less gracious part of me wanted to say “because it’s not the kind of generator that you curbside pickup up at Home Depot and pull out of your truck.  And I am not Samantha on Bewitched, twitching up solutions..”

I wanted the person who asked that question not to praise what we had accomplished – I wanted her to UNDERSTAND. To understand the engineering steps. To understand what it takes to connect a generator to the grid so it serves the community and reduces costs. To install a whole building, natural gas, reliable, well maintained piece of equipment on a platform that addresses the fact that we are doing it in a floodplain. We want it to actually work. I wanted her to understand. Why? Because we need partners and collaborators and joint problem solvers.  The roles for cynics and critics are already overfilled.

The only people who can carry out this work are those without a great need for respect or broad external validation. It’s also a scarcity based system so whatever is achieved in one place will be presumed to have denied or neglected another.

A few years back, in a meeting with German officials, public servants equivalent to our Senators, I was captured by a moment of grief so painful I could hardly swallow. We were talking about workforce policy, trade guilds and training and how to shift policies based upon data indicating the needs of industry, age of the population and the ages of incoming immigrants. It was a fact-based, constructive conversation. About doing things that worked for people and business and families and the economy.

These German officials carefully crafted new polices based on data and patterns and the result was an alignment of opportunities for all of their people to the demands of the economy. Elegant. Based on positive assumptions about people. Assuming people want to learn and earn. In listening to this conversation I realized I hadn’t had that kind of policy discussion with an elected official at home in years. Decades. I wanted to cry.

Even as we pour more and more of our precious resources into deficit based systems of denial in the public sector, we are asked to loosen completely any constraints on business. I’m always entertained when business folks become sanctimonious about government corruption as if it were remotely possible to steal as much or as destructively as private sector bad actors do. Character is character.

In APW, Angela’s Perfect World, that fantasy place I go to when I can’t bear what I’m seeing, that place where I ask “what would this look like if it really worked well for people?”  That place where we remember what’s possible, if we trust one another and approach problems with curiosity and creativity- in that world we can still DO GOOD WORK. I go there every damn day. Determined. And there are many others that go too. Despite your mistrust, bad reporting, criticism and cynicism. We keep going.

I wrote this for me. And all the other dedicated problem solvers.

 
                                                   Love,
                                                  Angela