Transparency is like wiki-consensus, getting enough eyeballs on something will eventually get us to a consensus truth that we can all live with.
But the title of this post is Organizational Conflict. When this new transparency-oriented government worker has to interact with the old style brand of government worker, that is where we see friction as an organization. The government is in the process of transitioning from the bureaucratic directive-oriented, "I say an order and you carry it out" style, to the more transparent consensus building one. When these two parts of the organization collide, there is sure to be a conflict.
Personally, there are lots of things that are frustrating about government work, but I do love it. However this one point has continually frustrated me over the years. And please understand that the directive-style is not necessarily perpetuated but people who have been in the government for decades. In fact, a lot of the people I am seeing with this mindset have less than 5 years under their belt.
The thing that is supremely frustrating for me is the fact that I know that their decision-making process is flawed. The problem is that they don't realize that. They don't know what they don't know, and therein lies the problem. I see the bad decisions, and I have to live with those bad decisions, but I feel powerless to fix it. I wish that I could finish this post with the idea that there is some kind of potion, or magic trick that fixes the problem. There isn't. This is an issue of culture.
Interesting post! There's actually a clinical condition for "not knowing what we don't know" called anosognosia. Errol Morris wrote an awesome piece about how it's more prevalent in society than we all know, and even if we aren't suffering from it on a clinical level, we should be cognizant of how easy it is to fall into that state of complacency:
ReplyDeletehttp://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-anosognosics-dilemma-1/