Politics going agile (or not)!

 

As the worldwide vaccination against covid-19 is slowly progressing, I had to reflect on a statement given by the Dutch Minister of Health, Hugo de Jong, back in early January 2021. Due to poor risk management and non-optimal decision-making, the Netherlands kicked off the vaccination campaign a few weeks later than his European neighbors. Mr. de Jong claimed that the country could have started vaccinating people earlier but was not agile enough to take decisions back in November 2020. Agile enough. I am quite positive that he used this term in the sense of someone being able to move quickly and easily rather than referring to the manifesto written 20 years ago. It got me thinking. Can politics be run in an agile manner? Politics differ largely from country to country and are influenced by a large amount of environmental and cultural factors. However, and for the sake of simplification, one can carry out a preliminary assessment by measuring the degree of adherence to the three laws of agile developed by Steve Denning (author of the reference book Age of Agile).

Does it comply with the Law of the Customer?

In other words, is adding value to their customers (citizens) the top priority of politicians? At the end of the day, politicians are responsible for proposing, supporting and creating laws or policies to govern the land and, by extension, its people. The degree of success they achieve may be measured against the actual value delivered to the citizens and the efficiency of resources used to achieve the set goals. Assuming that political programs are developed to serve the citizens in the best possible manner, then the adherence to the law of the customer may be directly linked to the fulfillment of these programs.

Does it comply with the Law of the Small Teams?

This is about descaling complex problems into small pieces, working in small cycles and getting direct feedback from the citizen. A political cycle is defined by the time between two elections, typically four years. Therefore, the most direct feedback can only be given every four years by casting a vote. This is anything but frequent feedback and leaves the customer with a feeling of despair. The pandemic has been an example of how the involvement of too many stakeholders played against a quick and unified response. After the initial discoordination, the Dutch government launched an initiative to create the Outbreak Management Team, a small group of knowledgeable SMEs who report directly to the Ministry of Health. Overall, and despite some baby steps in the good direction, the adherence to this law fares low.

Does it comply with the Law of the Network?

Organizations that fulfill this law function as a fluid network, with communication flowing up, down and sideways. Ideas can come from anywhere. On the contrary, political systems are rather hierarchical with inflexible communication channels and responsibilities, similarly to what occurs in some large corporations. Even though politics are making efforts to increase their accessibility (Twitter has been a game-changer in this aspect), it is still a long way until they become truthfully fluid.

In short: politics are currently not run in a fully agile manner. On the positive side, there is plenty of room and opportunities for further development in this field; on the less positive side, some of the usual dogmas are going to be hard to change.