Escaping Jurassic Government: How to Recover America's Lost Commitment to Competence by Donald F. Kettl

Author:Donald F. Kettl [Kettl, Donald F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Legislative Branch, National, Social Policy, Political Science, American Government
ISBN: 9780815728023
Google: V9eACwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 28561942
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Published: 2016-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

What we think we know is shaped by our interaction with others

We often do not decide what we know from self-reflection and individual study. Knowing is a social process, shaped by our interactions with others, especially with those we tend to agree with. Cutting-edge work by authors like Irving L. Janis, Cass Sunstein, and Reid Hastie point to the dangers of “groupthink,” where social interactions can amplify efforts in judgment and lead to polarizing positions.13 Groupthink can harden evidence into a shared vision of what everyone, of course, knows (at least, according to the group) and blind members of the group to what they need to know but do not.

Sunstein tells a story of his time running the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in Obama’s OMB. He received an anxious late-night e-mail from Nancy-Ann DeParle, who was then the president’s deputy chief of staff for policy. “How’s the regulation coming?” she wrote. Since he did not know which regulation she was referring to, Sunstein cheerily wrote back, “I don’t know which regulation you have in mind, but most of them are coming pretty well, so chances are that this one is coming well too.” DeParle’s quick reply was “hug,” and Sunstein, deeply touched, wrote, “That’s the nicest email of the year.” DeParle shot back that she was referring to “ghg,” short for “greenhouse gas,” and that her phone had auto-corrected the abbreviation.14 The “ghg” regulation was in the middle of fierce debate. Both DeParle and Sunstein caught themselves—but often leaders do not. It is easy not to ask hard questions about what could go wrong, only to discover weeks or months later that the failure to dig traps them in problems they never saw coming.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.