Reading James Plunkett’s piece, I kept thinking about how strange it is that modern states still imagine they govern through decisions. Mostly they govern through reduction

Reading James Plunkett‘s piece, I kept thinking about how strange it is that modern states still imagine they govern through decisions. Mostly they govern through reduction. Join the conversation on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_the-centre-is-from-mars-the-edges-are-from-activity-7460354986712039424-lO28?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAACuq-oBecVFDW6PCf3lkoG-peMeuLBeoho

Reading James Plunkett‘s piece, I kept thinking about how strange it is that modern states still imagine they govern through decisions. Mostly they govern through reduction.

The centre can’t ‘see’ society. It sees spreadsheets, categories, targets, complaints, fiscal envelopes, legal abstractions, institutional myths; representations of reality designed to survive upward travel. By the time reality reaches the top of a large system, it has been laundered several times.

It’s not corrupt; it’s thermodynamics (‘thermocline layers’).

A frontline worker encounters a human situation with effectively infinite dimensionality. They compress it into case notes. Systems compress those into metrics – and costs. Managers compress those into dashboards. Ministers compress those into narratives. A breakfast presenter asks whether the system is ‘working’ – and we wonder why everyone feels insane!

So the edge knows things the centre cannot know. Not cause frontline workers are morally superior, but because knowledge changes form with distance.

You can see this everywhere:

– Teachers know attendance isn’t really about attendance

– GPs know demand isn’t really medical

– Police know vulnerability isn’t reducible to crime categories

– Housing officers know ‘antisocial behaviour’ is often failed mental health infrastructure

The further upward you move, the more institutions are forced to substitute symbolic coherence for direct perception.

At the centre, ambiguity becomes politically dangerous. Contradictions are to be flattened, trade-offs to disappear. Confidence has to be performed.

That’s why large institutions become weirdly theatrical during periods of stress – more meetings, assurance frameworks, reporting, ceremonial language: the organisation consumes representations of itself instead of contact with reality.

So then the edge adapts.

Frontline services learn which truths travel safely upward and which don’t. So they maintain two simultaneous descriptions of reality: one for institutional digestion, and one to get through Wendesday afternoon. Most experienced public servants become bilingual in this sense.

And a lot of ‘transformation’ fails because it threatens this translation layer without grokking its function. Reformers image they’re removing inefficiency when often they’re removing the adaptive mechanisms keeping the system socially viable. Sometimes the bureaucracy everyone hates is the scar tissue from previous waves of abstraction.

The deeper problem is that modern managerial systems still carry an industrial fantasy: that enough data collection eventually eliminates uncertainty. But complexity doesn’t disappear when measured. Often it expands in response to measurement. And so the centre becomes increasingly hungry for legibility precisely as reality becomes less legible.

Nice to see some of this documented here – and with pragmatic actions:

https://lnkd.in/efdkckDh