Gary Wong

MuniSquare on Substack

Elevating Public Service, Expanding Possibilities... a collaborative hub for those who lead, manage, teach, research, write, consult, and host conversations about local government.

Transcript:

[Gary] So let me start by saying, if people ask me, and I do get asked, particularly by my grandkids and my own kids, what do you do?

What are you working on?? I try to make sense of a complex real world. By applying experiences, people share with stories. my kids get that.

What interests me right now about MuniSquare and working with local governments is observing how these governments operate as complex adaptive systems. in terms of muni we can traditionally think of muni as functional departments aligned in a vertical hierarchical structure. Executives and managers have formal power and authority, allowing some sort of a chain of command. In fact, most organization charts are [00:01:00] drawn this way.

quite often in my conversations with people, I talk about the three basic systems in the real world.

We're all very familiar with the ordered system. This is what we've been practicing in most of our careers. in my case, I didn't discover another system called the complex system until about 2007.

This is what I want to do with people on Muni Square share what I've learned and explore with them. What does a complex system mean to you? really what I'm talking about is more than just a complex system. It's a complex adaptive system. So what's the difference?

Well, a complex system in nature is like a tornado. A tornado has a lot of energy and can cause a lot of chaotic damage. But eventually the energy dissipates, and it dies out, and life returns to normal. In a [00:02:00] complex adaptive system, the actors in that, be it humans or nature, they have this desire to survive.

In order to survive, they adapt their behavior, and perhaps pivot and go different directions. Just to stay alive. We use the term resilience to describe that.

Let me give you a big aha for me, . So emergence. We seem to be stuck if you look at the evolution of business practices, we started in the manufacturing factory mode, assembly lines and everything else.

Essentially, what is that model? We feed known inputs into a process. to produce an expected output.

Inputs as opposed to unknown or unknowable. We know what we got. Now these are materials, this is labor, this is [00:03:00] vehicles, trucks, assets.

We throw them into some sort of assembly line or process and out comes some expected output. It's a widget, let's say, it's interesting how we've taken this manufacturing model and applied it to a lot of our social systems. Just think about our school system, our K 12 school system.

It's designed like a factory. that's caused a lot of people in the education world to rethink. This is what the whole idea is to put young kids in at the beginning and turn out graduates at the end, and put them into the working world or higher education, whatever it is, that's what we do in a factory model.

The thing that I get involved with, and particularly safety, is culture. Now, we can talk culture in the grander sense for local governments, because everybody has a culture. if you hear someone talk about creating a culture, it's because the order system [00:04:00] factor models behind it. if we do this, if we add this, we do this here, then we'll get this expected thing called culture.

I'm suggesting that we can encourage people to think differently from a complexity point of view and think of what are those systemic conditions. By that, I mean, all the things that we input into local government. It could be policies, standards, processes.

All these conditions. In a complex adaptive system, they enable a culture to emerge. culture isn't something you create, it's an outcome based on all these inputs. If we do that, it really changes our thinking about production. it's about focusing on the systemic conditions.

In safety, we talked about the [00:05:00] same things, what are the things that we do in safety, be it hazard protection, wearing protective equipment, all that sort of stuff that we input in so that safety emerges. On the other hand, if we have too many rules, And we overload people, we get something else, danger that emerges.

So we have to be very mindful about what are all these inputs, all these conditions that we're creating.

I guess the question I'd like to leave, is, What's in your toolkit as a professional manager in a local government? Do you work harder to get back on track when your system plan falls apart? Or do you work smarter and pivot to something we call, an adjacent possible?

Shifting to an adjacent possible is much easier, less risky, and [00:06:00] usually less costly than trying to swim upstream. the complexity strategy I like to advocate involves generating a map from the stories people tell that reveals the emergence of these pivot choices you can make.

Is it different? Yes, it's different. is it catching on? I don't know. so maybe under Muni Square, if we do find some of our, participants that want to give it a shot, we may find out.[00:07:00]