‘Rewiring’ needs government to understand what’s happening without imposing destructive order. What would ‘legibility without destruction’ need in practice? https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_rewiring-needs-government-to-understand-share-7515542999414591488-G81T/
‘Rewiring’ needs government to understand what’s happening in a place without requiring the place to organise itself around a data return. What would ‘legibility without destruction’ need in practice?
James C. Scott’s ‘Seeing Like a State’ describes the issue. Forests were remade to resemble the simplified accounts used to tax them: uniform trees, in orderly rows. Legibility to the state came at the expense of the ecological relationships that sustained the forest – and the people who lived in it.
In public services (and, btw, the worlds of digital and venture capital), the danger is that what we report shapes the whole sysem.
A council’s costs fall because a daughter gives up work to provide care. One saving; one lost an income. Now attach incentives to that ‘success’; a reason to reproduce the outcome, without establishing whether it helped anything or anyone.
A neighbourhood isn’t an under-managed bureaucracy. Families, neighbours, associations have purposes beyond delivering our programme or our ‘outcomes’. Their ability to respond to each other depends on understanding and relating no central account can fully contain.
We need ways of understanding across that difference which preserve people’s capacity to act.
– start by putting measures in citizens’ hands: what were you trying to achieve, did the help help, what did it cost you, what’s not fixed? People must be able to challenge both the recorded answer and the choice of question.
– the centre needs summaries but they must be connected to evidence, disagreement, and people able to explain what they leave out. Keep variation visible. Don’t make everyone tell the same story so the figures add up neatly.
– costs need that treatment too. Plot spending against time: the ‘space under the curve’ is total spending. Compare possible futures across services and years, with family effort visible alongside. Revise forecasts as evidence arrives, and don’t confuse lower expenditure with a better life. AI can help with this – to make different views accessible, retain connections to the underlying evidence, and help citizens question assumptions. Those capabilities shouldn’t belong exclusively to central reporting teams. But I haven’t resolved how we stop even a better account becoming another set of funding conditions!
– Government must still protect rights, account for money, and act on inequality. Local knowledge doesn’t abolish those responsibilities; it can expose where the arrangements for fulfilling them are failing.
– and legibility has to work both ways. Citizens need to understand who controls rules/budgets, and how to challenge. When experience shows that the official account is wrong, the people responsible must be able – and required – to change more than the wording of the report.
Where have you seen a public body get the assurance it needed while accepting that local people understood success differently? What made that possible, what happened when it came under preassure!
