Icarus and Apollo
The cause of and solution to Europeia’s management problems
Written by hyanygo
Note: This has been in the making since August 2017. The early reference to EO2 was predictive and it has proved to be correct. Those with access to the Google Document can confirm this.
Op Ed Icarus and Apollo: The cause of and solution to Europeia’s management problems (Part I)
Two events happened in July 1969, one became a symbol of stratospheric competency, the other a symbol of incompetency. On July 3, 1969 the European space project suffered a fourth consecutive failure with the Europa I rocket. Within the month, the Americans landed a man on the Moon. The Europeans lagged behind and they knew it. French journalist Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber lamented in 1967 that
Europe’s lag seems to concern methods of organization above all. The Americans know how to work in our countries better than we do ourselves. This is not a matter of “brain power”...but of organization, education and training.
There are direct isomorphisms between the American and European space programs, and Europeia. In particular, I will argue that our fate is distinctly European if we do not learn the lessons from American history. The central argument and proposal will be for reinvention of the entire executive government.
As Europeia has become larger, the ambition of our reach and projects has runaway from us. Europeian reach exceeds its grasp. Our ambitions now go beyond influencing and enhancing the experience of ~101 people to ~103. Our institutions and executive design have not kept up with our ambition. Our executive was designed to deal with a small number of people in a region (about 30 to 40) and we now find ourselves in a deeply flawed design.
I will first examine our current structure, then I will introduce a model for thinking about personal capacity and lastly, I will present a model for our organisational management.
Current structure
Cabinet government in its current form relies on a few people with unusual levels of intellectual capacity to make significant headway in the sorts of projects that become interesting to a large region. Furthermore, cabinet government is designed around a singular ministerial leader working in what can only be described as debilitating isolation. Projects are undertaken within the disciplines of interior, radio, foreign affairs, culture, &c. Ministries resemble academic departments rather than effective project fulfilling teams.
The connection between the authority at all levels is too loosely coupled for effective rapid progress. There is a familiar pattern in Europeian politics that occurs every 70 days. Each ministry is held against ephemeral and ill-defined standards whilst presidential candidates are virtually free to make up policy. This candidate-policy is often never delivered on and is substantially different, if not orthogonal to, the enacted policy. The loose coupling between intended, enacted and experienced policy is the root of our ineffectiveness. We have experienced repeated policy failure in recent memory because of this.
Cabinet is, right now in effect, organised like areas of interest, for example: those who in general like foreign affairs, go to the foreign affairs ministry. This places people in general areas of interest. And similarly, this places ministers as leaders of general areas of interest.
The projects Cabinet undertake are now so ambitious and large that they feasibly touch on each general interest area. Take for example the Europeian Outreach Operations project. This particular project covers (on the face of it) the general interest areas of foreign affairs, communications, radio, training, education, the ministry of justice, and the navy. We now have a problem of ownership. It appears the foreign affairs ministry “own” this project but it cuts through other areas of ownership. In a loosely coupled system, this just does not work.
It has not worked for Radio and Communications. At the start of Radio’s life, it was managed by people who saw it as part of a wider system. And because this appreciation was there you had tight coupling between intended, enacted and experienced policy. The strategy was explicit and integration, for example, between text and audio was at heights it would never again reach.
Radio and Communications split and the tight integration was lost. Ministers would bemoan that they hadn’t been able to collaborate fully and the full potential of Radio was lost for simple forum change. The forum split and ministry making literally increased the collaboration costs for the two ministries. It was literally difficult to have a continuous forum based conversation. Whilst some might argue that the absolute collaboration cost was small, they fail to recognise that a small absolute cost is large when you are playing as a volunteer.
This is the problem of interfaces and it is a problem that the EO2 encountered. The Americans in their space program quickly developed an expertise in dealing with interfaces, the boundaries between components, whether mechanical, electrical or human. This large project is beset with interfaces where no adequate solution exists. If it did exist then we would not have the paucity of audio-text integration we do now.
In the next installment, I will examine the idea of personal capacity and its implications.