MIFO AND OMC: Inventing Transcentralism
One of the most salient manifestations of the Multi-directional Iterative Feedback Organizations (MIFO), in recent years, has been in the practice of Open Method of Coordination (OMC). OMC has been a development of the public sector.
The complications involved in maintaining the accountability and transparency essential to ensure democratic standards, occasioned by the growth of horizontal public governance – with its partnerships, outsourcing and special operating agencies – has resulted in a wide range of instruments and orientations. The orientations I have in mind tend to be on the soft skills side. They’re those related to communications and trust-building: persuasion, negotiation and team work among the more salient. The instruments I have in mind tend to be on the hard skills side with an emphasis on assessing, counting and ranking. Performance measures, benchmarking, results-based outcome parameters are among the most popular. In all of this there is a prevailing commitment, at least in principle, to broader organizational values such as innovation, continuous quality improvement, best practices and organizational learning.
However, since the first great wave of emphasis on such instruments and orientations, arising from the new public management (NPM) agenda of the 80s and 90s – with its emphases on client services and separation of policy-making and policy practice – there has been a distinctly discrete application of these new administrative tools. This is not to say that public managers didn’t aspire to utilize the optimum combination of such instruments and orientations to achieve their aims. Such combinations, though, were perceived as mutually supporting, at most – and on occasion as not much more than sequential. In any event, what was usually lacking was a vision of these instruments and orientations as mere parts of a whole: elements in a comprehensive, integrated totality. Yes, the result for each could be assessed discretely, but the cost of such an analysis (breaking down or taking apart) as opposed to the promise of a synthesis (bringing together into a new whole) was a bifurcation (more accurately, a multifurcation) of the actual opportunity presented by the aggregate of these new tools.
In the 90s, though, we find the initial refocusing of this emphasis: the first rudimentary steps toward grasping the potential here for a kind of quantum leap in governance thinking. In the face of vexing governmental and social challenges that proved chronically unreceptive to either traditional bureaucracy-driven, rules-based solutions or the NPM approaches, the demand for creative, even risky, innovation opened the way to experimentation that revealed the latent potential in a more synthetic approach. The various instruments, orientations and values referenced above, when properly integrated, provided an approach to governance so distinct that it is not mere hyperbole to suggest it may well be regarded as the next generation of the new public governance.
Today, widely codified as either experimentalist governance or “open method of coordination” (OMC), this new synthetic approach has been broadly implemented within the evolving institutions of the European Union. Though they didn’t strictly invent it (for an example of how OMC saved the Chicago public school system from institutional disintegration in the 90s, see Charles Sabel “A Quiet Revolution of Democratic Governance”), but they have certainly taken it on as the pioneering initiative that it is – though not one without controversy.
In a nutshell, and my apologies if I oversimplify, but, the gist of it is that a central body, after extensive comparative research, establishes realistic, basic, outcome goals which are then set up for the subordinate units under its aegis – for instance, a school board and its individual schools in the Sabel article, mentioned above. But then each individual unit is free to pursue those goals by whatever means its members/stakeholders see fit. The central body may continue to play a role in providing advice or even training where necessary, but, in the absence of any threat of harm to members or clients, the units are provided complete latitude in finding their own way toward the designated goals. In the process, then, each individual unit becomes a separate laboratory of organizational innovation.
They will have specific responsibilities, which will include a thorough documentation of what they did, how and why they did it, along with measurements of their performance and results. At the end of a pre-stipulated period, I believe it was three years in the case of the Chicago schools, the central body comes back to the front of the stage: it gathers, audits, evaluates and, most importantly, makes available through a user-friendly medium, the totality of all the information and experience produced from this broad scale series of experiments. The fruition of this process is an ambitious collaborative benchmarking in which all participating units are able to review and assess what worked, where, how, and under what conditions.
As one of the underlying motives for this approach is the understanding that distinct local circumstances mitigate the effectiveness of centrally imposed systems, there is no movement from here to a centrally enforced regime based on the resulting best practices. Rather, each individual unit studies the most successful practices for ideas of how they can improve their own practice. If their circumstances permit a wholesale implementation, all for the best, but, if not, there is still the opportunity to discern what elements of others’ practices – identified as best or not – that they might retrofit to their own local needs. With the learning benefits absorbed, the process resumes. Each individual unit tries to apply lessons learned to improve their performance over the subsequent period, until the assessment and learning phase starts again. And so on.
The result of this is a constantly recurring learning loop, providing ever renewed best practices, contributing to an institutional culture of continuous quality improvement and permanent organizational learning. Take note, as well, that what we have here is an entirely new synthesis of governance’s well established instruments, orientations and values into an elegant model that actually transcends (not merely creates some hybridification of) the age-old debate over the relative merits of centralization (with its claims to superior coordination and universality) and those of decentralization (with its claims to superior access to local knowledge and context sensitivity). In fact of the matter, this approach so thoroughly and rigorously transcends the limits of the centralist-decentralist debate that I want to call this emerging organizational dimension “transcentralism”: an organizational space made possible by OMC in particular and MIFO in general that exists beyond the zero-sum game of the old centralist-decentralist organization space – now counting its days toward obsolescence.
Warranting additional note, this process often has the virtue of engendering dialogical spaces for public participation. For instance, in the Chicago schools example, the local management experiments entailed enhanced participation of the communities in the operation and guidance of their local school. There have been similar results in the rapidly expanded implementation of OMC within the European Union. To repeat, though, this expansion hasn’t arisen without some controversy. There are those who suggest that it gives too much power to unelected public officials and reduces democratic control of public policy and governance, to mention just one example relevant to our context. I’ve found the arguments against such criticism far more convincing, but we’ll have occasion to revisit these issues over the life of this blog.