Robust Governance of Societal Turbulence
Implications for Practitioners
By: Chris Ansell, Eva Sørensen and Jacob Torfing
Our special issue in Public Administration argues that turbulence and robustness are closely linked concepts that help public administration scholars and practitioners to understand and act in a world where unpredictable dynamics have gone from an exceptional to a normal state of affairs. The concept of turbulence enables us to understand the highly disruptive challenges to public governance that we are currently facing, and the concept of robustness provides us with a new type of response that stresses the need to adapt and innovate the current pattern of operations of the public sector in order to maintain some of its core public functions, goals and values, or organizational architectures, in the midst of turbulence. The special issue thus embraces the idea that some forms of change are necessary to preserve a measure of stability.
Our scholarly account of how heightened societal turbulence can be met by robust governance responses has some important consequences for practitioners.
The first consequence is that public governors must accept that turbulence is the new normal and give up the dream of long stretches of stable governance where new political goals are defined and new policies are formulated and implemented with little or no disruption. Turbulence cannot be dismissed as a passing nuisance that will go away and allow public governors to return to business as usual. Spells of heightened turbulence have become a near-chronic condition for public governance, and this means that public governors must ask themselves how they can continue to uphold key public functions, achieve important policy goals and respect the normative foundation of the public sector. It is likely that they must give up the one-sided focus on compliance and efficiency and pursue adaptability and innovation, the two key ingredients of robust governance.
The pursuit of robust governance requires the development of a new mindset. Hence, public governors must develop a robust mindset, i.e., a mindset that allows them to face turbulence without wavering, flexibly adapt policy, regulation, and services, and proactively innovate solutions to match the unpredictable dynamics in their organization and its external environment.
Adapting existing solutions to new conditions in a volatile environment requires a flexible mindset. A fixed mindset avoids challenges and refuses to deviate from the set path. A flexible mindset calmly observes sudden changes, considers the available room of maneuvering for adaptation, and is unafraid to suggest changes in existing mechanisms, routines, and services in response to unpredictable dynamics. A flexible mindset is akin to what is often referred to as a ‘growth mindset’, guided by the belief that one’s skills and competences are malleable and can and will change in tandem with changes in governance and external factors.
A robust mindset must not only be flexible but also innovative in the sense of welcoming innovation. An innovative mindset will tend to have a focus on the creation of value for citizens and society at large, even in situations of crisis and social, political and economic constraints. It will be open to inputs that can help to better understand the problems and challenges at hand and inspire the development of new solutions. It puts a premium on creativity and the ability to imagine that there is more than one way of achieving a particular function, goal or value. It accepts that failure is frequent but aims to fail fast and inexpensively by developing and testing prototypes on a small scale before scaling up. It supports learning based on experience and dialogue. Finally, an innovative mindset is visionary in the sense of pursuing grand visions while knowing that the road may be long and winding and full of sudden problems that call for invention of new solutions on the fly.
An additional set of qualities of a robust mindset can be gleaned from the different robustness strategies that are presented and discussed in our special issue. The new and important qualities inherent to a robust mindset can be condensed into seven principles:
1. Think of slack and redundancies as valuable resources rather than waste
2. Value strategic openness that expands future options
3. Think in futures and be prepared for surprise
4. Praise exceptional rules and requisite variety
5. Think in modules and repurposing
6. Look for resources that can be mobilized if necessary
7. Improvise instead of panicking
8. Value and cultivate trust-based relations
Public governors responsible for robust governance must regularly evaluate what works, when and why. Experiential learning is key to improving robust governance, but learning retention is challenging when the pressure from one spell of crisis-induced turbulence lifts. Nevertheless, learning and retention is crucial since it will only take a split second before the next wave of turbulence may arrive from unpredictable directions. Learning retention is most effective when lessons learned are institutionalized as new practices or, even better, into institutional reforms that improve the systemic, organizational and actor-related conditions for robust governance.
Perhaps, the most important reform that public governors can pursue is the formation of organizational platforms that make it easy to form task forces, networks and partnerships involving relevant and affected actors in diagnosing turbulent problems and designing and implementing robust solutions. In addition, barriers to adaptation and innovation must be removed and organizational and leadership capacities for adaptation and innovation must be enhanced. Finally, early warning systems, hybrid forms of governance and interactive forms of multilevel governance must be strengthened to support robust governance responses.
