Guardians in a Connected World: Pace Matters
Of all the conceptualizations of public service, perhaps the most enduring is the notion that the public service as an institution, broadly understood, is a guardian. Indeed this conceptualization of the public service, while not a perfect analogue, precedes the very creation of modern states, and travels back in time all the way to the very roots of western philosophy, where Socrates and Plato speak of a class in society that is geared to the protection of society. To the protection and continuation of the polity.
The very word guardian is linguistically and emotively rich and evocative. To be a guardian is to be a protector. To be a custodian. To be a defender.
But it is more still. To be a guardian entails some notion of nobility of intent — to be a steward or a trustee of the vulnerable. To protect those that cannot, for whatever reason, do so themselves. To be a guardian in popular culture is to be a guardian angel, to help, without recompense of any kind, in times of personal crisis. To be a guardian in law is even more powerful: it is to undertake a profound responsibility — to undertake a trust that you will act in interests that are not your own. Being a poor guardian is a double failure — you have not just failed at discharging a responsibility. But you have also, through that failure, inflicted harm to those that were entrusted to your care.
I. The State Guardian Through Time
Throughout the history of the western state, the state guardian instrumentally has been a defender. That is, the defender is overtly geared to protect against bad things happening.
The state guardian historically has thus inhabited and utilized and built entities that are classically protective in nature — moats and walls and rivers and forests and mountains and oceans. And then more overtly, the state guardian has built institutions like armies and police who can, and have, been used to attack, but which most fundamentally have their origins in the notion of defense.
The state guardian — which Hobbes famously called Leviathan — through time has been tasked first and foremost with securing safety and order. Things we take for granted as the role of the state today generally came forth from society successively expanding its definition of safety and order. Thus the creation of public fire departments or hospitals or food inspectors. These are more modern manifestations of state guardians providing moats and walls to protect our safety and our order. This is what Harvard’s Malcolm Sparrow brilliantly calls the state’s role in harm prevention.
Tying the two together, it is not exaggeration to argue that harm prevention is the most fundamental role of the state guardian. Harm prevention is thus sui generis for the actions and intellectual framework of the public servant.
But note that something interesting has happened to our state guardian. At its origin, the state guardian is profoundly defensive. Protection against. Like the old joke, the state guardian is the hockey team that ices six goalies. It is far more important for the state guardian to defend against a goal being scored than it is to actually score a goal. The state guardian, across time, has often played for the tie. The game that ends in a scoreless tie is a success, because that allows the state survive and thus to play again.
The state guardian at some point, however, moves to building and sustaining institutions that accord with a successively expanded understanding of safety and order — the police, the firefighter, the hospital, the school, the traffic light, public sanitation, potable water, the bylaw. These are all created as our understanding of harm prevention becomes more expansive and sophisticated. But all these institutions and more arose relatively slowly and only often much dialogue and study. The state guardian does indeed act to create — eventually. But the state guardian rarely acts swiftly, by tradition at least, if not by its very design.
But what if acting slowly and deliberately and methodically and with great care — qualities that have allowed the public servant to be a responsible and effective guardian for societies for centuries — what if these very qualities designed to prevent harm throughout time actually increase harm today? What if acting thoughtfully but slowly means you can longer discharge your contemporary responsibilities as a guardian?
II. The State Guardian in a Connected World
Modern life is many things. But one of the hallmark features of modern existence against that which came before is that we live connected lives in ways our predecessors never did. We are connected across space by a multiplicity of transportation systems. We are connected by dozens of communication systems. We are, most especially, connected across borders in ways that make historical distinctions between “domestic” and “international” far less salient than was the case throughout the vast duration of state existence. While we did have connections in the past — trade routes, communication systems — these entailed transaction and time costs and lags that are difficult to appreciate today. In a mere generation or two, we have created a world of near-instant and near-costless connectivity. We are already there in terms of information flow connectivity, which travels the globe, for all intents and purposes, instantly. We are approaching this near frictionless status in other realms as well.
Living in a connected world means many things. It means that what happens in one locality is not necessarily limited in impact to that locality, as was the case for most things across most of human history. Connectivity also means that consequences manifest much faster than they did in the past. And indeed, as already noted, some things — flows of information, capital — do not just manifest quickly any more. They manifest nearly instantaneously. Finally, connectivity means that things — things both good and bad — cascade. Things impact on each other in a connected world in ways that they simply do not in a world that consists of discrete isolations. In a connected world, pulling a lever triggers many consequences, not all of which are known at the time the lever is pulled.
What, then, does it mean to be a guardian in a connected world? At the core, the ends have not changed at all. To be a guardian in a connected world is to share the same goal as all guardians have played across all time and space — protection. Prevention. Harm prevention.
But though the ends are the same, the tempo and the pace of action have changed dramatically. Harm prevention in a connected world means rapid diagnosis and rapid action. Harm prevention in a connected world means to move, not as the popular saying suggests, at the speed of business. Rather, harm prevention in a connected world demands that guardians move at the speed of need. And as things both good and bad approach near-instant and near-costless motion, so too must guardian action approach the near-instant and the near-costless state over time.
III. The Speed of Need.
The connected world has brought many benefits to society. It has — through connected trade — raised hundreds of millions of people out of crushing poverty. It has — through efficient transportation systems — opened cultures and continents to exploration. It has — through connected communication systems — democratized information. But it has also challenged the capacity of the state to continue to be a guardian against harm within its domestic borders, because connectivity — by definition — reduces the relative salience of domestic borders. The metaphorical moat of the state is diminished in a connected world, and even eliminated entirely — by treaty or technology — in some areas.
The public service of the western state is trained by custom and convention to be deliberative and methodical. To act only after great deliberation. To act only after careful and solemn study. To act only after consensus. And this has served western societies brilliantly for hundreds of years. After all, when the state makes a mistake, its impact can be profound and widespread in ways that few private actions can match. Therefore it can be said that the state guardian has developed a strong bias to inaction. To act only after inaction is largely unavoidable. And to act with relative tentativeness, lest state actions create rather than prevent harms.
Could it be, though, that the very nature of the slow and thoughtful state guardian will render the state guardian increasingly ineffective in a connected world?
The guardian state has mobilized quickly in the past to great acclaim, most especially during war, occasionally during financial crisis, and often (but not always) during public health emergencies. With a clear enemy in sight, the guardian can often mobilize the resources of the state — the lumbering Leviathan — to relative rapid action. To the speed of need.
But absent a clear threat, absent a clear enemy, absent a clear declaration of war, Leviathan generally lumbers. As the speed of threats to safety and order both proliferate and intensify, can Leviathan continue to be a guardian of safety and order while continuing in a general lumbering — albeit thoughtful — manner? Can you be slow and thoughtful and yet still be an effective guardian in a connected and cascading world?
Concluding Thoughts
The best institutions are those that constantly interact with their environments in ways that allow them to adapt organically on an ongoing basis to changing circumstances. The worst institutions are those that operate as if they exist in an environmental vacuum, immune from realities in their midst.
We are living in an age where protective institutions are changing at a far slower pace than is the environment in which those institutions operate. Institutional lag is inevitable — institutions will never change and adapt as quickly as the environment around them. But there is a threshold where institutional lag can become an unbridgeable gulf — where the institution can longer in any meaningful sense act effectively in the environment within which it finds itself. Institutional lag is real and inevitable. Institutional paralysis need not be.
As a guardian institution, the public service has served the western world brilliantly throughout most of its existence. It has helped create not only safety and order, but also relative prosperity. But the public service is now fundamentally challenged by connectivity, because connectivity demands a pace and a speed and a tempo and a constant sustained focus of effort and action that is often, outside of wartime and crisis, absent from the ethos of the western public service.
The best public service institutions in the world going forward will be those that embrace speed of deliberative and thoughtful and anticipatory action. To remain true guardians, the public service of the future will have to shift from merely playing defense. It will have to play for more than the 0–0 tie. It will have to anticipate the harm prevention needs of society and act upon them rather than react to them. The public service will have to be what it has always been at its best — our collective guardian. But in a connected world, it will have to do this with a pace and a purpose that it has rarely had to show outside of war time. And more: it will have to do this routinely and constantly — always being on a crisis footing, always anticipating and always pre-emptying the next threat to order and safety.
The state guardian in a connected world will be no easy thing. But those countries that get this more right than wrong will better navigate the many global storms ahead in ways guardians using old tools and old mental frameworks will not. Societies in no small part will thrive or falter on this pivot.
Our guardians have historically risen to the challenges of their times. Current and future guardians can do no less.
