JFDI: tactics, transparency and interactivity

Dave Briggs has a good post up about how organisations introduce technology. He contrasts the ‘JFDI’ approach (which stands for Just Do It) and a more boring sustainable approach.

Tactics: For teams that are scared of losing.

I’ve met Dave and he has very sensible views on Football. Our mutual friend Brian Clough could have contributed to this whole discussion. As he put it (here) …

“…tactics aren’t for me, they’re things that teams dream up because they might lose”

Translating that into Dave’s question, it’s basically about getting organisations to increase their desire and competence in the field of ‘interactivity.’ The rest – the tactical choices of which technology, the timelines and roll-out plan – become somewhat redundant when you are able to deploy a team that know what their jobs are and are happy, competent and confident that they can do them. This question applies to local authorities a good deal.

On the day that David Cameron is majoring on his notion of The Post Bureaucratic Age, there is a lesson here: So much of the division between the boring ‘tactical’ practitioners and the JFDI enthusiasts stems not from a gulf in the understanding of the technology, but in the willingness of individuals within organisations to interact.

I’ve spoken to meetings of councillors and officers at over 100 local authorities over the years, and I’ve watched the body language: When you suggest that it would be a good idea for councillors to use easy-to-use web-tools, the more senior officers in the room start to futz with their biros.

There are all kinds of ‘budget maximising’ bureaucratic reasons for this resistance, and I’m sure that this is partly Mr Cameron’s target here. But I’d suggest that there is a bigger obstacle here.

Demands for ‘transparency’ from public-sector bodies are fundamentally unfair for the reasons I’ve set out here. They are one-sided. Perhaps the biggest underlying theme in modern politics is the question of who gets taxpayers money? Is it the public sector, or their competitors in the private sector?

It’s a profoundly political decision. To demand transparency from one, not the other is to take sides, and I suspect that this is what the Conservatives are doing here.

Given the restrictions of commercial confidentiality, we can’t easily demand transparency from the private sector (though reformers demanding less short-termism in investment decisions may disagree).

One thing we can demand – from all economic actors – is more interactivity. If interactivity, not transparency were the war-cry, it would be a fairer, clearer instruction to give to everyone.