From Maps to Metaphors: Governing (In) A World That Doesn’t Exist

originally published in “FutureTense”, a publication of the Ministry of Trade & Industry, Singapore (http://bit.ly/1O2ZXfw)

Before travelling to new places, we instinctively look for maps: either a physical map, charting out relative locations or distances, or a subjective map of friends’ impressions and perspectives.

This need for maps reflects an age-old human yearning for order in an often messy and unpredictable reality. Maps give direction and articulation to the unknown, which they categorise and conceptualise. We often hear talk of “plans” and “blueprints” — essentially attempts to map paths into the future. Even the nowadays instinctive urge to “Google something” is, at its core, an effort to map the contours and boundaries of an issue that we might not know well.

From Maps to Metaphors

The problem with maps is that the order, categorisation and clarity they bring is fundamentally retrospective. They are useful representations of things that someone, somewhere has already experienced. In the language of complexity theory, maps are wonderful tools for the unknown but knowable.

But maps cannot be made for things, issues and places that do not already exist. For the unknown and un-or-not-yet-knowable, we need different tools. I find it useful to take a leaf from creative writers — particularly poets — and mine the insights that come from the world of metaphors. Metaphors are not just about the comparisons we make between unlike things; they also reflect the deep stories we tell of ourselves and the things we care about.

In the case of how we govern a world that does not exist, the tentative beginnings of answers lie in our metaphors for two related concepts:

government — the work of the public sector, involving both political leaders and professional civil services; and
the broader phenomenon of governance — how the different sectors in a polity, economy and society organise themselves to deliver value to people.

Metaphors as Magnifying Glasses

Organisational management scholar Gareth Morgan notes that the “images” or metaphors we adopt for organisations affect how, and how effectively, we manage them and their attendant challenges.

If we view an organisation as a machine, our management approaches tend to focus on the stable, predictable and coordinated interactions among its constituent segments, each comparable to a cog, gear or other mechanical component. The machine metaphor simultaneously de-emphasises the protean, human elements of organisations and their subjective, adaptive interactions, which become more prominent once we view organisations as living organisms or cultures. Interacting power dynamics are highlighted by yet another metaphor — of organisations as political systems.

In each instance, metaphors function as magnifying glasses, highlighting certain aspects of organisations as particularly salient or critical.

The same can be done for government and governance. I suggest that four metaphors are particularly useful when thinking about governing the elements, issues and challenges of a world that doesn’t yet exist.

Complex Cartography

First, we need to jettison the comforting but false idea that there can be a single map of the future. By definition, there can only be multiple futures — a dizzying array of permutations and combinations. Some of these could be more likely, plausible or desired than others, but even if we winnow down the possibilities to these, we could be left with a large number of potential futures to consider.

The metaphor of multiple futures underscores the reality, as the Futures Group and other practitioners of strategic foresight well know, that attempts to predict the future are exercises in futility. Governing a world that doesn’t yet exist can only be done if we anticipate different possibilities now — including those that make us uncomfortable or prick at our prior assumptions, beliefs and biases about the world — and prepare for them. This preparation is not about slavish rehearsals or developing standard operating procedures (SOPs) that must be followed to a ‘t’ if a particularly eventuality materialises. Rather, it is about understanding the range of possible outcomes and ensuring that decisions today help to maximise the range of desirable future options.

This is the principle at the heart of military wargames and contingency planning in internal security, like Singapore’s public exercises to prepare for pandemic outbreaks. Carried out well, these provide important lessons for organisations. Sadly, as examples across the world show, their actual practice can sometimes be unfortunately rigid and inimical to the larger aim of building anticipatory capacity.

Fortress → Ecosystem

Policymakers would benefit from viewing the world they govern as a dynamic ecosystem, constantly evolving in response to external stimuli. Ecosystems are different from fortresses — which, while large and powerful, can be rigid and resistant to change. The fundamental metaphor here is that government and governance are more similar to ecology, with its untidy webs of overlapping relationships, than to static engineering.

This metaphor frees policymakers from an artificial reliance on simple maps — because ecosystems are intrinsically unmap-pable, given their dynamism and perennial evolution. It also serves several other useful purposes, including highlighting

the living and breathing nature of both governing and governed agents, with life narratives and varied human needs that need to be met, even as governments endeavour to be fair and even-handed in policy formulation and delivery;
the interdependencies among the different parts of the ecosystem, with all the possibilities this brings of feedback loops and reinforcing cycles (whether vicious or virtuous);
the need for practitioners of governance to be alert to the changes in their ecosystem, and be willing to adjust earlier decisions in light of emergent information.

The regular iteration of Singapore’s pro-fertility measures is a useful case in point, given that the key players (parents and employers, among others) are part of complex ecosystems, each with human concerns, fears and aspirations that may not be fully reflected in more mechanistic metaphors.

Chess → Soccer

What both earlier metaphors point to is the adaptive nature of governance problems. Dealing with this involves not just the chess player’s ability to analyse and break down a problem into discrete component parts, but also a soccer-star’s skill at synthesising ideas, information and instincts across an entire system. Constant adaptation and agility are also important, since governance will involve the ability to adjust deftly to changes in a fluid operating environment.

Much of this will rely on a constructive attitude to meaningful failure (of the sort that comes after genuine effort in an iterative process; as opposed to failure arising from complacency or carelessness), and space for both the governed and the governing to engage in experimentation and evolutionary learning. Singapore’s current efforts to tackle cybersecurity challenges, become a “Smart Nation” and reap both the economic and social benefits of cutting-edge technology like advanced manufacturing, robotics and big data, are important examples of such adaptive issues, which will call for new metaphors and modes of thinking.

Leviathan → Platform

Fundamentally, we need better metaphors for what government is and does. Perhaps the most famous metaphors for governance are Thomas Hobbes’ “Leviathan”, the large and powerful entity that maintains order through what Max Weber later called the “monopoly on the legitimate use of force”; as well as the economic metaphors of government as either provider of public goods or regulator of economic actors in the public interest.

Both sets of metaphors assume that most salient actions are undertaken by public sector agencies. While maintaining order, provision and regulation are undeniably important roles, the increasing scope and complexity of governance tasks, coupled with the enabling effects of disintermediating technology, suggest that governments can do more as facilitative platforms, as suggested by both media commentator Tim O’ Reilly and Princeton professor Anne Marie Slaughter.

Governance as platform means enabling the like of businesses and civil society groups to perform some acts of governance, rather than having governments play all such roles themselves. Outsourcing is just the most familiar form of such facilitation; co-designing policies with citizens, public-private partnerships and the British government’s experiments with “Citizen Juries” under PM Tony Blair to deliberate on contentious policy issues, are others.

To act as effective and meaningful platforms, governments will need more multi-faceted definitions of power — including the ability to convene, engage and persuade, not just coerce or instruct. Such power will also need to be shared, not monopolised in the Weberian sense, which in turn will require an educated citizenry capable of exercising such power judiciously. “Our Singapore Conversation”, which ran from 2011 to 2012, was one example of government acting as a convenor, platform and facilitator for citizen voices to be heard.

Metaphors as Masks

Metaphors matter, but they are not everything. They clarify, but can also obfuscate. Magnifying attention on certain aspects, by definition, de-emphasises other dimensions.

For instance, focusing too much on anticipation can make us forget that in some cases — demographic or econometric projections, for instance — discerning prediction has heuristic uses, especially if we keep our eyes open to its potential pitfalls. Our governance milieu is indeed an ecosystem, but there are instances where the clarity, stability and predictability of fortress-like structures can be beneficial. Focusing on agility and adaptation need not mean that we jettison analytical approaches entirely — they just cannot be the only parts of our toolkit. And governments acting as platforms will still have duties to maintain public order, provide public goods and regulate.

The world of the future will bring with it challenges of more information, complexity and heavier demands for those who govern. Multiple and mutually complementary metaphors, each playing up different priorities and areas of focus, will be important to ensure that we draw on a commensurately broad range of approaches in response.