"Relentless reformers"

Gordon Brown claims that “Labour will be restless and relentless reformers.” This seems an oafish thing to say. Being a relentless reformer is like being a DIY enthusiast who always lives in a mess because he is forever in the middle of a job that he never actually finishes.
The notion of relentless reform clashes with two principles.
1. Self-regulation and negative feedback systems. Successful organization doesn’t necessarily require relentless meddling. It just requires the right feedback. Take, for example, the job of setting the temperature in your house. You could keep switching the heating on and off manually, and relentlessly reform the temperature. Or you might just set the thermostat right and leave it alone.
A thermostat is a simple example of negative feedback. And we see other examples so often that they are unnoticeable. Well-functioning markets are like thermostats: an over- or under-supply of goods leads to price changes that eliminate the glut or shortage.
It would be entirely sensible - laudable even - to ask how such mechanisms might be imported into the public sector: this would draw, I think, on the work of Shann Turnbull on corporate governance. What’s not so sensible is the idea that reform must be relentless and top-down.  
2. Optimality. There must, surely, come a point when one has to say: “I can’t think how to improve this. We’ve got the best that we can get.” For small c conservatives, this point is usually now; the status quo is as good as we’ll get. For others, there might be remediable evils in the status quo which should be fixed. But how can it make sense to say: “There are faults in the system which we can identify now and fix. But when we’ve fixed those, there’ll be other things to fix. And then there’ll be more, and so on forever“? 
There is, I fear, one possible answer. Reformers, like progressives, believe that they know a little bit better than the mass of humanity and so know how to organize things better. And Brown is claiming not only that he knows better now, but that he will always know better, notwithstanding the fact that the need, ex hypothesi, for relentless reform after his relentless reform might be evidence against this.

Comments

[Hazel Edmunds]

He's had long enough to reform anything that needed reforming - the fact that he hasn't surely speaks for itself!

[Metatone]

Not to defend NuLab, because all my experience is that changes need time to bed in to be successful and "relentless reform" has been a major problem since Thatcher's time (esp. in the NHS.)

Still, I think you need to read up on some complexity/complex adaptive systems theory. Permanent optimality in things like public services is an illusion.

As for automatic feedback systems, they tend to work well when you're interested in a single variable pair (e.g. matching supply to demand) but as soon as you have more concerns, the equations get hairier...

[Subrosa]

I can't find an email for you but notice I've had lots of visitors from here in the last 24 hours. Can't see a link either but then I'm the least techy blogger in the land!

Like your style of argument so am off to add you to my reader.

[Tom]

'But how can it make sense to say: “There are faults in the system which we can identify now and fix. But when we’ve fixed those, there’ll be other things to fix. And then there’ll be more, and so on forever“?'

Because society changes. A system that might have worked as well as possible fifty years ago wouldn't today, because since then we've had major technological advances, significant globalization, external and internal immigration, social and cultural changes, etc etc etc. I agree that reforms need time to bed down and be assessed, but I doubt we'll ever reach a moment where we can just rest on our laurels entirely and consider ourselves perfect.

[RH]

if Tom is right then last year's reforms were useless because come next year they have to be reformed further. Should not reforms need time to take effect?

And why do we have to concentrate on crime and immigration during elections when equally if not more serious issues are crying out for attention?

Me tend to think that they are useful distractions.

[[email protected]]

Systems Thinking - as you point out - are already being used successfully in the public sector.

In fact such is the success and sophistication of systems thinking method, that the targets dreamt-up by politicians are exposed as pointless.

With the right measures (ones that tell the truth about performance) feedback is instant and measures in the hands of workers is leading to innovation unheard in top-down control systems run by the current government.

http://www.thesystemsthinkingreview.co.uk/

[Ian R Thorpe]

One of the reasons western nations are all in a mess is that in the past few decades social change has been forced at too fast a pace for human communities to adapt to.

As we look forward to a jobless economy further degradation of the quality of life seems inevitable

http://www.greenteethmm.com/jobless_economy.shtml