I'm sorry. Policy what?

I was explaining my dissertation to a friend the other day, and I came up with this analogy. 

Think of the last time you bought something online for yourself. Now pretend the item was a pair of shoes, you bought them from Amazon, and they were the #1 best selling shoe in the world. Next, pretend you bought the pair of shoes because your feet were sore. And pretend your feet were sore because your shoes were a year-old. 

The fact your feet were sore because your shoes were old was why you bought shoes. But this didn't determine which shoes you bought. You like particular colors, designs, and fashions. Maybe you want the shoes for walking, or for hiking, or for running. And before you bought the shoes, you likely read the reviews of other shoes, and maybe you called and asked a friend who bought the same shoes a month ago. 

The fact that you bought the shoes, and the fact that you were one of many who did so, is diffusion.

If you were a policymaker instead of an Amazon customer, and if your decisions regarded public policy instead of shoes, this would be called policy diffusion. 

The fact that you researched which shoes to buy by reading the reviews of others, or by asking a friend, is learning.

If you were a policymaker who drew lessons from the policy experiences of other policymakers, it would be policy learning. 

My dissertation looks at policy learning and diffusion. The major difference, however, is that I'm focused on offshore wind energy, far rarer than the #1 best selling shoes on Amazon. By exploring learning and diffusion in the context of Cape Wind, I'm one of the first to look at learning and diffusion when something is new and innovative. 

Why is this important? Because the world is becoming increasingly complex, and there are often few models to learn from. Decisions must be made amidst great uncertainty. 

It is like living in a world with few, if any, customer reviews. 

Except it's public policy, which is a lot more difficult to return.  

Peter Senge, Blockbuster (again), and House of Cards

In a previous post, I endorsed the Fifth Discipline: the Art & Practice of the Learning Organization by Peter Senge. In this post, I add some nuance to my endorsement.

To practice identifying my own mental models (and to avoid being hypocritical), I will explain my view rather than advocate for it. 

How I Agree with Senge

Senge seeks to improve the learning capacities of organizations. This capacity, he argues, plays a fundamental role in the success (or failure) of an organization. 

Internal introspection and identification of mental models by an organization’s individuals is most critical.  He argues that looking outside of an organization for lessons is a dangerous game because application of “best practices,” without an understanding of contextual differences, can do more harm than good.

I completely agree. 

Senge provides an example from a Toyota plant manager who hosted hundreds of tours for executives from other companies. Regarding the executives, the manager said: "They always say 'oh yes, you have a Kan-Ban system, we do also. You have quality circles, we do also. Your people fill out standard work descriptions, ours do also.'

"They all see the parts and have copied the parts. What they do not see is the way all the parts work together." 

Or to put it another way: they have the candle, the box of thumbtacks, and the book of matches atop a table and next to a wall, but they have no idea how to attach the candle to the wall, light it, and prevent the wax from dripping onto the table

A Disagreement with Senge

Senge does “not believe great organizations have ever been built by trying to emulate another, any more than individual greatness is achieved by trying to copy another “'great person.'”

I believe this is overstated. Or at the very least, counterexamples immediately come to mind.

A few of them:

What about the Founding Fathers' creation of a Constitutional design drawing from Greek democratic principles and English notions of individual rights? 

Or what about Cape Wind—first in the U.S. to seek and receive approval for offshore wind energy development—drawing technical and environmental lessons from European experiences?

In the first example, Americans wanted a balance between democratic principles and individual rights—and the Founding Fathers acted accordingly. And in the second, offshore wind energy developers drew lessons from Europe, but tempered them by understanding important differences between the U.S. and European countries.  

House of Cards

Or to use an example from my last post:

Wasn't this precisely the Blockbuster Problem?

Blockbuster looked internally when they should have looked externally. If they studied Netflix's market sufficiently when it first began chipping away at their customers, they may've learned months earlier that their present course—their existing mental model—was leading them towards bankruptcy. 

Who knows. If they'd identified their erroneous mental model earlier, maybe I'd instead watch an episode of House of Cards on a Blockbuster streaming device. 

In an upcoming post, I will provide another example: energy efficiency, and why many businesses still can't wrap their heads around its benefits to their bottom lines.

UPDATE: Here is that post. 

Getting My Hands Dirty

I really enjoyed teaching. And, I don't mean to brag, I was pretty good at it.* For some of graduate school, I wavered with the idea of becoming a professor, but I ultimately decided to stick with my goal. I want to get into the nitty gritty. Get my hands dirty. I want to pull some levers. 

Who says law school graduates have to be lawyers, or PhDs have to be professors?

Aren't these skills applicable in the real world?

Of course they are.

*Statements that begin "I don't mean to..." always mean "I am about to...," but they somehow make it more socially acceptable. Hence my usage.