(2024-10-30) Davies Last Chapters And How To Avoid Them

Dan Davies: last chapters and how to avoid them. “Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better” by Jennifer Palkha. Strong positive recommend.

a very good and very general book about management, government and structure – it’s rather like “The Mythical Man Month” in that it’s only really about technology because that happens to be the industry the author worked in.

Like Fred Brooks’ masterpiece, it’s really about human beings, communication and complexity. As I occasionally say, some things are big because they’re complicated, some things are complicated because they’re big and some things are both.

Websites, for example, are pretty simple when they’re small, but start getting very complicated indeed when they have to serve lots and lots of people. They’re complicated because they’re big. Healthcare administration is for the most part big because it’s complicated – there are loads of special cases that need to be taken into account and things are changing all the time.

Consequently, something like the website for the US Veterans’ Administration (VA) was always at risk of turning into an organisational disaster, and it does indeed form one of the main case studies.

government IT procurement system (and implicitly, lots of other systems) works according to a set of rules which simply don’t have sufficient variety to cope with the system they’re meant to regulate.

Consequently, the rules get used as accountability sinks, and you get a sort of ecosystem building up in which people might complain from time to time about the overwhelming sense of sclerosis, but in which everyone’s daily living is dependent on operating within the rules, rather than adjusting the rules to fit the situation

one of the impressive things about Recoding America is that it doesn’t do this; there’s a real empathy and attempt to understand why people do what they do, even when it appears objectively crazy and counterproductive

To try to summarise the message of the book, it’s that the nature of complex systems management that small investments in higher-level coordinating and intelligence functions can have utterly disproportionate effect compared to much larger expenditure “at the coal face”.

But what I really like about “Recoding America” is that it doesn’t suffer from the great curse of nonfiction writers, “Crap Last Chapter Syndrome”.

“Recoding America” gets over this by, more or less, making every chapter a last chapter, detailing the actual solutions that were found to specific problems, or the reasons why things never really got satisfactorily resolved.

Which is a technique I think I’m going to try to steal; if you go through enough of these specific cases, there’s much less pressure to pretend to discover general silver-bullet principles.