Europeian Amnesia
Written by hyanygo
I think we will look back on April 2, 2017 positively. On that day Vorhallah, a citizen since November 2016, states a widely accepted attribute of the President. He said that "A president needs to represent and have knowledge of every important section of the government, in a basic sense." This startling because Vorhallah is seven years the junior to the candidate Common-Sense Politics. For all the experience and time, a relative newcomer sees an immensely older veteran as lacking in knowledge.
The phrase "institutional memory" has come up more frequently in recent years and in less and less positive terms. The largest failure of the Civil Service is that is has so clearly under-equipped a veteran running for one of the most complex volunteer roles in NationStates today.
Although Cool Spring issued the seminal article on institutional memory in 2015 with A Matter of Succession precious little has been done to tackle this problem with the full violence that only Europeian thought and bureaucracy can. Drecq's conceptualisation of institutional memory as "a collective set of facts, concepts, experiences and know-how held by a group of people" is powerful and emancipatory. The sharp definition lets us create policy and structure to preserve institutional memory. It also illuminates the threats to it.
In Discord is Hell, HEM laments that the fragmentation of thought across an unknown number of discord channels and servers only serve to make government "more difficult, with fast-paced conversations on private Discord servers replacing long-form discussion from years past that still provide our leaders with a framework of how to govern."
But Discord is only part of the problem. As such a recent phenomena it cannot, for example, explain the creation of the EAAC. As the brainchild of Rach and NES, the EAAC sought to end the constant policy changes that occurred at every presidential transition. The EAAC shows us that the problem of preserving and cultivating institutional memory is not new, as Sopo explains
[flash=300,300]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k85Jbyn4iTE[/flash]
If the EAAC, a collection of semi-permanent advisors, could transform how our foreign affairs agenda works, could a similar institution work for the Civil Service as a whole? Ron Ashkenas wrote in the Harvard Business Review that three things needed to be done:
1) build an explicit strategy;
2) identify the few key things that you want every member of your team to know or be able to do — and figure out how to turn this from an implicit assumption to an explicit expectation; and
3) use technology to create a process by which your team continually captures and curates institutional knowledge — to make it a living and evolving body of useful information that is accessible to people as they come into the organization.
In the recent ENN poll discussion by EBC Radio Malashaan makes the case for a re-conceptualization of the Civil Service as a place to genuinely train, educate and inform future ministers as to preserve institutional memory (35-37 mins).
[flash=300,300]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QE0TZqeiII[/flash]
As a region, we've clearly placed the preservation and cultivation of institutional memory as one of our election defining topics this cycle. This is at least one area where our political parties should formulate and push for innovative policy.
The regional conversation now turns to answering the following questions:
1) What is our presidential candidate's explicit strategy?
2) What is the proper structure of the Civil Service?
3) What is the role of the Civil Service?
Let's start this conversation in articles and radio shows --- let it be here in the EBC to...well...preserve institutional memory!
Answer the poll and respond!
