For an organic worldview of policymaking

This article is written by Alain Ruche, a “contrarian policymaker”…

The problem: Our worldview of policymaking is outdated.
Why it matters: Today’s challenges need radical policy changes.
The solution: An organic worldview better fits our complex world.

Our worldview, the way we see the world, is a major driver of what we value, think, do and make, including policymaking. While the Western narrative of ‘separation from’, ‘power over’ and ‘ownership of’ was an undeniable source of progress for humanity, it also paved the way for a mechanistic, reductionist, auto-centric, binary (mind/body, man/nature) and patriarchal approach. We are obsessed with strategy, goals and indicators, willing to get rid of everything that stands between us and our objectives. We believe that we can manage and control everything that happens between our human will and our intervention. We naively trust that expertise can identify best practices expressing the behaviour of an illusory and bias-free Homo Economicus. We categorise, analyse and map stakeholders focusing on how to scale up, and deal with relationships separated in time and space, managing risks along the way. Sometimes, we incorporate unintended and intertwined effects of policies. I was myself involved in a research project on how to reduce the gap between policies and their implementation, until I understood that this was not a good question. In this problem-solving approach, few questions are asked.

Experiments are not valuable unless there is a legitimate chance of failure.

Our interdependent, interconnected, unpredictable and rapidly changing world requires policymaking adapted to its main characteristic–complexity. While a complexity approach has been advocated for for decades, it has not yet percolated into policymaking. This new framework includes pattern management, multi-experimentation in selected ‘acupuncture points’, not repeatable cause-effect relationships, sensemaking, networks and emergence.

Policymakers have to accept with humility that the time of experts is over. What if what we know did not matter anymore? What if we focus on the most interesting quadrant: ‘what you don’t know you don’t know’? What matters today is how the expertise capability is delivered, where, and to whom. Time and place-based policymaking give new insights on how policy issues are experienced in different locations and times. A challenging aspect of policymaking in a complex environment is that coherence only appears retrospectively. Instead of how to manage risks, the question is how to feel comfortable with the unknown. Policies must have an “open mind”, embrace ambiguity, and challenge assumptions. The issue is not trying to design scenarios predicting the future from the past. Instead, it is about making sense of the immediate and the present, and using them to imagine possible futures.

Nothing influences our ability to cope with current challenges so much as the way we see things, what we call the context. Quantum thinking and management open new avenues, arguing that the observer is the critical element of an experiment and influences what is going to happen. Contrary to Aristotelian logic, the Chinese worldview focuses on connections and accepts paradoxes and contradictions. For the ancient Chinese, it is futile trying to predict the distant future, but we can sense the momentum of the situation so as to be attuned to its direction. This also implies a reflexive dimension of policymaking, with its social benefits.

While abstraction, generalisation, metrics, certification and control are part of a problem-solving approach, they do not fit today’s complexity. Policymaking needs to adopt an organic worldview. The focus on short-term results must be balanced with a focus on the future. A collaboration must be orchestrated in the system. As societal fears are on the rise, policymaking needs to step up on societal issues as a core function of government and business to break the cycle of distrust. This implies that policymaking integrates ethnographic tools to be closer to the citizens. This also implies using complementary data, including ‘warm data’ for complex systems.

Policies are antennae to detect and sense changing political, social and technological signals. They must use the right leverage point in the system, manage conflicting interests between levels of agents (local failures are costly but essential), understand and exploit the link between local behaviours and macro-outcomes, and adapt approaches in response to changing circumstances. Experiments are not valuable unless there is a legitimate chance of failure.

It is about shifting from being the architects of the system we believe, control and manage, to gardeners in a living and changing ecosystem.

A crucial aspect of organic policymaking is the concept of emergence, present everywhere in the living systems. Purpose-based policymaking is not something you create out of the blue and enforce top-down. A purpose is not created externally: it emerges from what is already true in the collective. We need to use emergence to take social innovation up. Networks are not the key by themselves, but through their critical connections. They are the only form of organisation on this planet used by living systems: individuals and species recognise their interdependence and organise to support the diversity and viability of all. Self-organised networks are proliferating in our world, like social activists, terrorist groups and street gangs. Under some conditions, the dynamics of networks creates the conditions for emergence through active and intentional communities of practice. Often,this emergence happens in a sudden and surprising way. This is why improvisation and lateral thinking are necessary.

Emergent phenomena have more power than the sum of their parts and possess distinct capacities from the local conditions and actions that generated them. All living systems are organised networks self-influenced in a complex sense: many events and local interactions generate emergent outcomes that cannot be traced back to any specific management action. Humility has to prevail here. It is about shifting from being the architects of the system we believe, control and manage, to gardeners in a living and changing ecosystem. This is how today’s wicked and complex issues can be managed.

Policymaking doesn’t have to know all the answers to the questions. The willingness to ask the question is what matters. Because those who ask the questions become the ones who figure out the answers. For example, what if the metaverse generates a new kind of digital and immersive policymaking, and how will this impact on the current framework of policymaking… on Earth?

I am indebted to R. Hames, E. Kilpi (+), D. Snowden, J. Lent, S. Levin, M. Reeves, N. Bateson, and Kosmos Journal.

Organic worldview colourful image