Ostrowski's Outlook I
Spring 1999
When I was asked to reflect on my many years as a Public Works Director, the expectation probably was that I'd explain things like why concurrency doesn't work, why government takes so long to accomplish anything and why we won't save any salmon without screwing up something else. I actually can explain all those things but first I'd like to deal with what I've found to be the key issue in government today.
That key issue is trust. Stay with me, I don't mean that if we all had blind faith, everything would be just swell. What I do mean is that at the heart of every public issue there is a level of trust that either makes things work better or worse. The more trust there is the more efficient things can be. The less trust there is the more paperwork and procedures there are.
For example, if I ask you to get me a glass of water, how do I know you didn't spit in the water on the way back? If I want to be sure my water is clean I might have someone else go along and watch you or I might have you sign an affidavit when you get back stipulating your proper handling of my water. Or if I go totally governmental on you, I might actually go along and watch what you did myself. This last option obviously makes the original assignment unnecessary but does anyone care?
You've probably noticed the parallels in your everyday governmental life already. What you should also notice is that the job done with total trust takes one person two minutes. The second option doubles the workforce, the third option takes as much extra time and paper as your imagination will allow and the last option employs one additional senior manager who does no work.
Isn't life hopeless? If we trust everyone all the time, we will get burned big time sooner or later. If we don't trust anyone, we're doomed to an ever-deeper pile of paperwork. Sounds bad but it isn't hopeless. Life is full of risk and even though some people expect government to be risk free, it isn't either. Trust involves risk and can be analyzed. Every frustrating public policy needs a trust analysis (be sure to read this carefully so as not to hire a structural engineer for the wrong kind of analysis).
Such an analysis will tell if trust is buildable and at what cost. It might also tell us that trust isn't justified and some other course of action is. I've found in my career that I have been most successful when I was trusted to do what needed to be done with minimal interference. Most of the major projects or programs that I list on my resume were due to this trust level. We all could save a lot of time and effort if we focused on how to build trust rather than ignoring it and instituting a paper solution to account for the lack of trust. In the spit example above, a signed affidavit didn't guarantee anything. If you were the kind of person who'd spit in my water, you're probably the kind of person who'd lie on an affidavit.
You don't even have to falsify the paperwork. I know of one unnamed city that filed all the appropriate paperwork to haul hazardous waste to a recycler three hours away only to find that the hauler couldn't be located a week later. Where did he go laden with hazardous waste and why? No one knows or cares. Why should they when all the paperwork is right? I hope we haven't replaced real trust with a kind of weird faith that if the forms are filled out correctly, the real world doesn't matter anymore and can't hurt us. I'm sure we haven't but we need to think about it more often.
Next time I'll talk about those other things like concurrency and salmon but if you can't wait, feel free to email me at ostrowj@pacifier.com for a quick fix till then.