Effective policy making

There are number of major management miscalculations that reflects fundamental confusion of how it is possible to operate in decentralized institutions:

1. Not making use of the skills of insiders
A competent manager does not have to be an insider to be effective; however, the newcomer cannot expect to understand how the system works immediately, and is best advised to rely in the early years on experienced and trusted insiders to guide them through the system. To have distrust of everyone and bringing all new faces in, can become disadvantageous for effective management. The newcomers do not know how to get things done, and will loose the respect of those who should have been close allies. Soon everyone will be alienated from the circle. The strategy to not appoint insiders due to distrust, or to avoid becoming co-opted by insiders rarely works. Those work with insiders who either share their goals or would at least go along with them have learned their lessons of how to make things work. Their expertise will enable managers to obtain necessary concessions for what they are most committed and wish to pursue, although not in line with the trend. One of the advantages of such insiders is that they know who counts and who does not count. Heads of entities always have high status but at times not much power, and their prominence and their appearances in public should not be mistaken for power. Without previous in-depth experience, and particularly when managers come to their organisation from a different mind set, their understanding of the structure of opinion within the organisation on given matters may be limited. Managers acquire power on particular issues when they are speaking or acting in a way that clearly reflects strongly felt opinions within their own environment; they then have a constituency behind them that empowers them. Consulting insiders, as if they necessarily constitute a powerful group within the organisation, is to miss the point of how power is actually exercised in any given organisation.

2. Not prioritising between policy objectives
In hierarchical structures it is much easier to pursue multiple goals than in decentralized ones. Managers who fail to decide which policy were their most important, will leave their position with much of their major issue left on the shelves. In all institutions there is a danger that not prioritizing will stretch the senior officials too much, such that flaws in a particular policy proposal are not detected. In decentralized institutions there is the added danger that unlikely coalitions of opponents will form - opponents who would not have coalesced had policy been enacted sequentially on a case by case basis.

3. Not working with what is already on the table
Those that can most transform the role of the board, have not worked from some new and grand blue print that has guided their policy initiatives. The successful administration not constructed from an elaborate blue print rather the bringing together of a variety of policy proposals. In decentralized institutions, where there are so many points of veto, radically new policies are always likely to pick up so many enemies in the process of debate that hey fail. It is much easier to work with what has already been around in the policy network for some time, but not enacted, reshape it, and then use it for your own purposes. Again it is all so unnecessary even for an administration that has a radical agenda; there are other ways of enacting its agenda that could have been more effective - with the administration playing the system to its own advantage, rather than trying to overrun it. The point is that those who have no prior experience of decentralized institutions may fail to see how to operate effectively when first confronted with them. The real danger, therefore, is that, should they then be faced with dealing with consequences of events over which they have had little influence, they may have expended already too many political resources and lost the active support of too many potential allies.


Reference: Oxford University Magazine, Michaelmas term, 2005