James Balzer is a policy analyst in the New South Wales Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. He was recently admitted into the Next Generation Foresight Practitioners Fellowship supported by the School of International Futures.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
Reference List
Boin, Arjen. 2014. "Chapter 7: Designing Resilience: Leadership Challenges in Complex Administrative Systems." In Designing resilience: Preparing for Extreme Events, edited by Comfort, Louise, Boin, Arjen, and Demchak, Chris C. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA.
Hines, A., Bengston, D., Dockry, M., & Cowart, A. 2018. Setting up a horizon scanning system: A U.S. federal agency example. World Futures Review, 10(2): 136-151.
Inayatullah, S. 2008. “Six pillars: Futures thinking for transforming”. Foresight, 10(1): 4-21.
Kingdon, John. 2011. Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policy. Longman, Michigan. Levin, Kelly, Cashore, Benjamin, Bernstein, Steven, and Auld, Graeme. 2012."Overcoming the tragedy of super wicked problems: constraining our future selves to ameliorate global climate change." Policy Sciences 45: 123-152. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-012-9151-0
Meadows, Donella. 1999. Leverage points: Places to Intervene in a System. The Sustainability Institute, Hartland, VT.
Patton, M. Q. 2010. “Developmental evaluation: Applying complexity concepts to enhance innovation and use.” Guilford Press, New York City.
Roberts, Nancy. 2000. "Wicked Problems and Network Approaches to Resolution." International Public Management Review 1 (1): 1-19.
Sharpe, B., Hodgson, A., Leicester, G., Lyon, A., & Fazey, I. 2016. “Three horizons: A pathways practice for transformation.” Ecology and Society, 21(2). https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-08388-210247
Transcript
Peter Hayward: Working in the public policy space, especially trying to promote an of intergenerational equity is surely one of frustration and diappointment. You face many decision-makers and their constituents who want simple and short-term solutions to wicked and even super-wicked problems. How can a policy person not give in to despair?
James Balzer: You need to find those early adopters and they might be a very small group of people. They might be very niche focus group. But early adopters are characterized by those that have a problem, they know they have a problem, and they're actively looking for a solution. And early adopters, therefore, are the most proactive group of people.
And even during times when there is not a lot of attention towards a particular policy agenda, And that policy agenda might not even be in the systemic agenda stage yet. You need to keep that early adopter base energized, because then the big challenge, but also the moment where big change can begin, is trying to jump between those early adopters.
And the early majority are the ones who know there's a problem and they have the problem, but they might not be proactively looking for a solution. And that's often because they don't think there are other people out there. They can work with, they don't think there is political will.
They don't think they have the resourcing, but if you can energize that early adopter base enough, you can overcome the aversion, so the early majority group might ultimately gets them interested in a particular topic.
Peter Hayward: That is my guest today of FuturePod James Balzer who works in government and was admitted to the Next Generation Foresight Practitioners Fellowship sponsored by the School of International Futures.
Peter Hayward: Welcome to FuturePod, James.
James Balzer: Thank you very much, Peter. It's great to be here with you, and thanks for this wonderful opportunity.
Peter Hayward: Oh, it's a pleasure. That's what it's for. It's about promoting the field and the people in it.
So let's start with the first question, the James Balzer story. How did you get involved in the Futures and Foresight community?
James Balzer: It's a very weird story. I was invited to attend a webinar by Adam Sharpe, who many people in the futures community know. I'm going to give a shout out to him and Sohail Inayatullah, who also co-hosted this webinar.
I was living in Canberra at the time working for the federal government and I was driving home to Sydney. I had to jump on this webinar. So I was in a McDonald's parking lot in North Canberra and I had my iPhone on my dashboard and attended this webinar and I didn't really know what I was getting into.
I'd never really heard of futures or foresight at the time. But it just sounded interesting. Adam posted something on LinkedIn. I thought, ah, just check it out. And the more I engaged with that webinar just for half an hour, I realized there's something in this that's really useful, particularly in my domain of expertise being sustainability and climate change, because we deal with such complex, wicked problems with very vague cause and effect with regard to policymaking.
With many synergies and many trade-offs operating in that complex, wicked environment, you need to use something like futures to achieve outcomes. And so instantly I got really hooked on the idea of futures. So from there, I then actually published in the Journal of Future Studies, in the essays section of that, looking at the how to achieve positive future path dependence for federal climate change policy in the US.
Really enjoyed that. Then from there, the big breakthrough moment, was last September, I got admitted into the Next Generation Foresight Practitioners Fellowship, which is done as part of the School of International Futures, where I'm looking at, once again, positive long term path dependence, but for the sake of achieving better extreme heat governance outcomes in Sydney and Singapore.
And I'm trying to scale that to other cities right now as well. So that's a theme - you'll hear a lot about the idea of positive path dependence, because that's the crux of where a lot of my futures work orients around.
Peter Hayward: Futures people, I've taught a few in my time and I've met quite a lot. Futures is an add-on or a meta frame on disciplines they already have studied or lived or worked in, so for you, what are the kind of other things that you bring to bear on a project, on an area like sustainability and climate change,
James Balzer: I'm coming at this more from a policymaking perspective. I work for the government here in the New South Wales government Department of climate change, energy, the environment, water, and in policymaking, you're often thinking through very linear empirical frames.
Perhaps contrary to what some people think, I don't think the more traditional linear way of thinking is necessarily bad, as long as it's also complemented by systems thinking and futures methods and anticipatory foresight. I think what I bring to the table, to complement my futures practice, is that very, I guess what I would call hard graft policy craft.
The ability to negotiate, with big P and small P politics to get what you need. The ability to use empirical evidence-based methodologies like randomized control trials, multivariate regression analysis, the ability to communicate complex policy in simple ways, all that kind of normal policy craft.
With what is a more, although not entirely, intangible set of methods being futures and foresight methods. And so if you can tie the kind of grounded, pragmatic nature of hard graft policy craft with futures and foresight methods, you get the best of both worlds in a way. And that's what I seek to try and achieve.
Peter Hayward: when you got involved with Cat Tully and the people at school of international futures and the next generation program, what did you get from that?
James Balzer: So I find I've really opened my horizon, but I was going to say horizons, but that's maybe a bit of a play on words in this context because we talk about three horizons framework, but I really opened my mind to thinking perhaps in a slightly less systematic way about everything and thinking more through the imaginaries, if you will.
So using science fiction and Solar punk futures and kind of story driven futures to try and understand possible futures. I'm someone who typically, and this is a symptom of my government background, thinks in very systematic ways about everything. I have to try and ‘tangify’ everything.
I have to make everything coherent. As I've said before, that's not a bad thing necessarily. There are many advantages to that, even in futures, but not everything can be clearly pieced together in a coherent, structured way. So by being part of SOIF and the Next Generation Foresight Practitioners community, being exposed to artists and musicians and writers and people from that more creative, less systematized, less structured background and seeing how they apply futures, has really helped me broaden my mind with regard to how innovative that type of futures can be.
And how, if you backcast from that kind of more imaginary future, you can actually blend that more creative, conceptual, story driven future with the more systematized. methods that I naturally prefer.
Peter Hayward: One of the giants of our field was Wendell Bell wrote a series of books called the foundations of future studies.
And the second volume of that book is very interesting because Wendell made the claim that all futures thinking is based in moral philosophy because you have to have a basis of what you believe is good. That you either move towards, or alternatively, what is not good, in which case you move away from that. How does sustainability and climate change operate in a moral universe?
James Balzer: It's a really good question, because we often, in academia and in policy analysis, we talk about empirical versus normative thinking. So empirical thinking is how can we objectively measure through qualitative and quantitative means, certain phenomena and cause and effect, right?
Which is really important, but that doesn't account for the normative discussion, which is about values and subjective world views. And sometimes you can have all the facts empirically built up about the amount of emissions we need to reduce, the amount of deforestation we need to reduce, the amount of investment we need in clean energy, et cetera, but you need to also understand the normative perspective and the normative implications.
Those decisions based on empirical information must be accompanited by moral philosophy – in other words, normative thinking. For example, if, based on the data that Australia to meet its national nationally determined contribution under the Paris agreement has to close X amount of qualified power plants by 2035.
And you know that you need X amount of investment in green energy to enable that transition. That's the empirical discussion. But what do you do for the coal mining communities? What do you do for those who work at the port of Newcastle, whose entire job and two generations before them's entire job was exporting coal.
What do you do for those who need in developing countries who need Australian coal to keep the lights on in their current energy system? And these are really important questions you have to ask irrespective of what empirical information says. So I think sometimes in empirical discussions and in policymaking, it can be easy to think that data and empiricism is virtue or values free and maybe to some extent it is, but that's not necessarily a good thing because in the real world when you're trying to engage stakeholders, you're trying to bring people along the journey with you, you're navigating complex politics.
You want to have participatory processes. You need to have that normative discussion grounded in moral philosophy. That's how I would ask that question.
Peter Hayward: So I've already played around with a little bit of your fundamental frameworks and philosophies, but let's lean into the question of your toolbox and particularly what, what are the kind of core, either methodologies or philosophies, that James operates from? What are the core frameworks for you that orientate you and your craft?
James Balzer: I'm a huge fan of the work of Ben Cashore - Dr. Ben Cashore, I should say.
So he runs the Institute for Environment and Society at the National University of Singapore. And in fact, his work has inspired my NGFP fellowship and a lot of the work I continue to do. So I want to go back to what I talked about before with regard to positive path dependence and what that means in different policy circumstances, particularly in the realm of sustainable development.
He wrote a paper with his then PhD student, Kelly Levin, in 2012, and it looks at how to reverse engineer the characteristics of path dependence, which we often characterize as a negative thing - as something that prevents adaptation and change - and instead reverse engineer it to achieve positive path dependence for the future.
And what characteristics underpin achieving positive path dependence? And this conveniently, although not intentionally, overlays with the Three Horizons framework. So Ben Cashore and Kelly Levin, in their paper, talk about the need to achieve short term stickiness. Overcoming business as usual. That's horizon 1, medium term disruption or what they call in ‘entrenchment’, which is basically horizon 2 and long term ‘expansion’ - horizon 3.
Do I really enjoy the use of those positive path dependence. Characteristics overlay the three horizons framework, and that includes the work by Bill Sharpe, for example, who's really emphatic about exploring the three horizons framework, and in order to achieve long term change, you need to understand how to use positive path dependence as described by Levin and Cashore over the work of the Three Horizons Framework and Bill Sharpe, and that really informs a lot of my outlook and how I work in the future space.
Peter Hayward: Given that positive path dependence is not, dare I say, commonly thought of, there must be some significant forces that operate to prevent that from occurring. What are those?
James Balzer: This is where the futures triangle then comes in. So the futures triangle I often use with the positive path dependence framework, because it complements it well, because, as you said, once you can identify what you need to achieve positive path dependence, you then need to think why are we not achieving that.
And so the weight of the past, to use the language of the futures triangle, is often defined by what Nancy Roberts characterizes as ‘wicked problems’. Wicked problems is a term that's used a lot. But Nancy Roberts, in one of her papers from the year 2000, looks at how wicked problems are basically defined by four characteristics.
People don't want to own the problem. No stakeholder really wants to take it by the horns and really guide the reins to get to where they need to get to. And no one, secondly, no one wants to own the solution. Thirdly, it's a bit vague as to who actually will benefit and who will suffer as a result, which, makes people averse to want to solve the issue, but also that there is an excessive level of perhaps expectation that top down management will solve the problem and that multi stakeholder agile thinking will not solve it.
And because there's this contested definition and responsibility with regard to the problem and the solution, that often means there's lots of policy inaction. And that combined with short term interests, 24 hour media cycle, political discord and so forth means we don't actually achieve that positive path dependence we need.
So what the thing about Ben Cashore and Kelly Levin's work is it acknowledges wicked environmental problems as the justification for their path dependence framework. What they argue is that you need to think about coalition building and co benefit creation as a way of getting enough buy in from enough people to want to own the problem and own the solution. And by doing that you can actually help generate coalitions that can actually have the will to drive long term change.
Peter Hayward: How do those coalitions come about if you've got those factors you described like short termism and a media? 24 hour news cycle and a very divisive and non partisan political system.
James Balzer: It's a really good question. There's a good way, the way to think about this is, and it's a bit unfortunate, but policy, comes and goes in policy windows. So John Kingdon's work, which is quite seminal in public policy literature, looks at the creation of policy windows.
There needs to be a ‘problem stream’, as he calls it, which is where there is acknowledgement of the problem from the relevant stakeholders with power.
There is a solution stream, which is when those same stakeholders actually work together and want to achieve a solution and recognize there is a solution.
And the political stream, which is that there is a political buy-in from both government and non-government actors.
And basically what John Kingdon argues is that when those 3 streams come together as a confluence, that creates a policy window, which may only last for a little bit of time. So actually it's funny because Cashore and Levin, in their positive path dependence framework, the stickiness aspect, when it's overlaid on the three horizons framework, is actually defined by the creation of those policy windows as described by John Kingdon.
And then the ‘entrenchment stage’, which is that horizon two stage, is a result of coalition creation as a consequence of those policy windows. So the problem is, as you can imagine, policy window implies short term, somewhat flash in the pan kind of moments that bring attention to a problem and actually help provide the foundations for long term solution building.
And so we need to both. This is a very hard question to answer in a podcast, but we need to think about how do we generate those three streams? How do we get them to come together? And once they do, even for a short while, how do we then jump onto that to jump to Horizon 2, which is the ‘entrenchment’ stage as Cashore and Levin talk about.
Peter Hayward: One of the terms in the futures and foresight business is basically called, foresight by stealth, which is either building coalitions or keeping lines of communication open when the conditions are not conducive to this kind of thing, and getting ready for the times when the seasons change. And then being able to move and mobilize quickly, because you can't wait for the times to change and then start. You need to have momentum.
James Balzer: It's interesting, because there's also this whole discussion around policy subsystems. Okay, so we talk about policy windows, but the underpinning ingredients for policy windows are policy subsystems, which are those disparate stakeholders who all have a common set of interests for whatever reason, and how they need to somehow find a way to actually communicate with each other to come together to draw attention towards a particular policy issue.
And the idea of policy subsystems is that you initially, if you bring those subsystems together, you have what they call the the systemic agenda, so that systems across society, even if they're disconnected, understand even vaguely the need to address a particular problem and that what you have to do over time is somehow break through.
Then, there’s what they call the institutional agenda. So actually make an issue in politics and in civil society at large, and then break through to the decision agenda as in it's getting to the cabinet, it's getting to the executive branch of government, it's getting to the judiciary, and there's actually momentum to make decisions on these complex issues.
But along the way, getting through these agenda domains is really difficult, and there are barriers each way. And so ultimately, what I think before we even talk about policy windows, is we need to think about policy subsystems and the ability for those subsystems to come together almost as early adopters, if you will, of these complex problems to then work their way through the institutional and then the decision agenda.
And once on the decision agenda, that's when you can create a policy window. Based on political problem and solution streams coming together.
Peter Hayward: How do you sustain hope in those periods of time where the windows aren't open and the subsystems seem to be absent or really not energized?
James Balzer: You've got to use the work of Molitor, I guess the innovation adoption curve, and apply that in this context.
You need to find those early adopters and they might be a very small group of people. They might be very niche focus group. But early adopters are characterized by those that have a problem, they know they have a problem, and they're actively looking for a solution. And early adopters, therefore, are the most proactive group of people.
And even during times when there is not a lot of attention towards a particular policy agenda, And that policy agenda might not even be in the systemic agenda stage yet, you need to keep that early adopter base energized, because then the big challenge, but also the moment where big change can begin, is trying to jump between those early adopters and the early majority. These are the ones who know there's a problem and they have the problem, but they might not be proactively looking for a solution. And that's often because they don't think there are other people out there they can work with. They don't think there is political will.
They don't think they have the resourcing, but if you can energize that early adopter base enough, you can overcome the aversion. So the early majority group might ultimately get them interested in a particular topic.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. We refer to it as the bleeding edge and the leading edge.
People don't like necessarily being too early. I think you've laid your philosophical and Cognitive framework out quite well. Can we actually put some specific things that you're paying attention to right here right now, either, demonstrating some of the things or giving you hope that actually we can start to move towards these positive pathways.
James Balzer: I think a huge reason why sustainability has taken off as a popular discussion in the last decade has been basically because the most powerful actors with the most powerful levers being the private sector, banks, financiers, industry, et cetera, now have the commercial and technical authorizing environment to actually drive sustainable long term change.
So in particular, basic things like the fact that solar energy is so much cheaper than it used to be, and it's gone past that inflection. It's hit that inflection point of price where now adoption and scale is really economically sustainable and environmentally sustainable. The fact that battery costs and the size of batteries is a lot smaller and cheaper, means that EVs can be made. The fact that there is, a lot of marginal cost involved in the production of fossil fuel as an energy source, but there's zero marginal cost in the production of clean energy. These are all technical and commercial factors that have given economic authorizing environment to enable private sector stakeholders who frankly hold the most power in society to actually drive sustainable change.
And I think what's interesting is that's essentially the solution stream of the policy window. But to even go back one step further, we look at the decision agenda and the systemic agenda. And for a long time, a lot of activists and not for profits and academics have talked about things in the realm of the systemic agenda with regard to sustainability and climate change.
But the big breakthrough when things got to the decision agenda was when the private sector came in and there was that technical and commercial authorizing environment, which has ultimately helped, I think, drive things closer to the decision agenda and has helped create the policy stream of that policy window.
So for a long time, there's been the problem stream since the Brundtland Commission of 1987. In particular, there often has not been a solution stream until recently, when the technical and commercial factors to enable sustainable change have become in such a way that private sector stakeholders are really keen to jump on the net zero transition, and as a result of that, now there is a much stronger political stream.
As a result, you now have a policy window, and I think we're starting to see that horizon one, or that stickiness, as Cashore and Levin describe it, manifest. And ultimately what I think is going to happen in the next 10 years is you're going to get to that entrenchment stage, horizon two, which I think we're beginning to see a bit of right now as well.
Peter Hayward: I hope you're enjoying the podcast. FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We're able to do podcasts like this one because of our patrons, like our newest Patreon Matt. Thanks for the joining as a patreon Matt. If you'd like to join Matt as a patron of the Pod, then please follow the Patreon link on our website. Now, back to the podcast.
Peter Hayward: How does activism or how has activism played out either as a a force for good, so to speak, but also possibly even a hindrance. And I'm thinking of a couple of specific forms of activism. Prior to COVID, we had the Greta Thunberg and the student driven where young adults started the Leave School and March around the world. We had it in Australia it was all around the world, where they marched against what they saw was the inactivity of political systems to deal with climate change. And then of course you've got, the Extinction Group, the group that, to disrupt the present going ons of business. How does activism operate in this kind of sustainability ecology that you're describing?
James Balzer: Yeah, so I think the key thing is you, they're the early adopters, if you will, and they're the ones that really embrace the systemic agenda, even when the decision and the institutional agenda are not established, and they're often the ones who, if you go back to the policy window idea, have the problem stream in mind for a long time and have established the problem stream.
But they're not necessarily the ones to establish the solution stream, and maybe they can help establish the political stream, but that's, once again, I think, ultimately, that's dependent on the solution stream actually being available first, in my opinion. I think Sohail Inayatullah's about causal layer analysis or Donella Meadows work about the need for changing worldviews and values.
That is what the role of activists ultimately is. Now, as Sohail talks about metaphors and worldviews being the underpinning factors that drive the litany and the systemic, which is what activists are trying to do - they're trying to change world views and values and outlooks. But they also help drive change in through, the way Donella Meadows describes it being, the need to change paradigms and values.
So I think if you want to go back to futures literature, the work of Sohail Inayatullah and Donella Meadows. Regarding changing values and worldviews as a way of establishing the solution stream, if you will, for policy windows is really good and a good way to think about the role of activists.
Peter Hayward: I think also that Donella used to talk about finding the point of leverage in the system.
James Balzer: Yeah,
Peter Hayward: Exactly. The thing that I was struck by the by the student protest was, it was almost like the next generation asking the present generation to do something and act rather than, leaving it for them. And it was so interesting because you had politicians, whichever political party they came from, were making disparaging comments back to these people go back and get an education, get back into the classroom.
James Balzer: I think when we're dealing with policymaking and politicians, there's always that temptation to jump on the sound bites and what will the meat be that you throw to your voting base that while perhaps not sensible and logical in a policy sense, create a sense in a political sense.
And if you tell all these people to go get a job and go get educated and brush them off, it in a way appeals to the base that is not particularly concerned about intergenerational fairness; that is more driven by short term interests.
Perhaps those from older generations that have already achieved what they need to achieve and have wellbeing and have wealth and won't be around when the earth is 3 degrees warmer. I think that's what's going on there. So that's not necessarily the solution stream or the problem stream.
It's short term interests and I guess putting on ideological blinkers in a manner that is not conducive to long term thinking
Peter Hayward: You mentioned this with your work with the School of International Futures the role played by the portrayal of climate in culture and I'm thinking everything from books like, the ministry for the future and films displaying you know Hollywood's version of Catastrophe. Are these factors that operate in the early stage of the early adopters?
James Balzer: They are, and I think you need that story. So once again, going back to the Causal Layered Analysis. You need the underpinning metaphor, which is essentially a story, right? So you need story to underpin driving the systemic and the litany. And you also, as a consequence, need story and metaphor to package and communicate stories that change the cultures and worldviews. And that once again goes back to Donella Meadows argument of cultures and worldviews being the leverage point for change. I think that's where perhaps normative discussion is really important going back to that point we discussed earlier, but also where that story based speculative futures perspective becomes really important.
And my preference of a more systematized methodical futures method actually doesn't hold up when you're trying to change cultures, worldviews, and outlook. So that's where you need that metaphor of the CLA system. That's what you need. Donella Meadows, Leverage Points for Change, and so forth.
Peter Hayward: Nice. I'm interested in how you tackle the communication question, how do you explain to people what James does when people don't understand what it is that James does?
James Balzer: I say I it's interesting. It's actually a very good question. I have, if you want to ask me what I do with my government job, I say every day I move the blob forward, which is a slight, perhaps a slightly crass thing to say, but, It's, when you're trying to drive change in the public sector, it's like it's incremental.
And it's, to use the words of Charles Lindblom, it's the ‘science of muddling through.’ You're often taking three steps forward, two steps back, one step forward, two steps back, five steps forward, three steps back. And it's all a bit. And there are changing goalposts as to what we characterize as success.
So you are not moving in a bullet train kind of fashion. You're not super-fast. You're not super directed. You're just the blob that's moving forward, but government plays a really important role in driving change. So I don't say that as a way to scrutinize government or public sector.
It's actually, if anything, just a reality check. But I also think it’s indicative of the fact that complex problems take a long time to change and you need to have the patience and the tenacity to drive it forward over the long term. Now, if you're asking what I do with my futures work, which complements our work in the government anyway, you're looking at driving long term intergenerationally fair decision making.
And I do a lot of work in intergenerational fairness with the World Economic Forum, with SOIF, with NGFP, and so forth. And intergenerational fairness, I think, is at the real core of the work of positive path dependence, because when we talk about positive path dependence, and we talk about policy windows, and we talk about decision agendas, et cetera, we ultimately are trying to think about the extra-long term here.
We want to think a hundred years plus, which is about intergenerational decision making and intergenerational fairness. So in government, I move the blob forward, but in my future's work, I build foundations for long term intergenerational transformation.
Peter Hayward: One of the aspects of wrestling with wicked changes, of course, is humility. Because the thing that you are trying to manage, so to speak, is moving itself. And you have to almost be taught by it as to what is possible, and it's less about solutions, as about learning and patience and influence. How does that as a communication strategy sit with people of authority who feel they have to have solutions?
James Balzer: It's a really good point. I, one of my big interests, which is a more recent interest, is the idea of developmental evaluation. It's a term that was, I believe, coined by Michael Quinn Patton.
And the idea is that you don't evaluate policy and programs as a linear, almost hindsight driven method, where you do something and then evaluate in hindsight. You have consistent framing and reframing of problems. You have consistent build, measure, learn cycles to use Eric Rie’s startup terminology as a way of building something, measuring its success, and then learning from it and going back to the drawing board.
You use the Stanford design principles of Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test
Peter Hayward: I'm thinking of the OODA loop, of course. Yeah, that's another one.
James Balzer: Yeah, that's another one.
Now, that's the science of it, but there's an art to it as well. And part of the art is how do you get people in power to want to do that?
Because a lot of times going back to the point I talked about with Nancy Roberts and the definition of wicked problems is there's a dependence on top-down management, not naughty stakeholderism or agile. Management of complex problems. So this is where you might know the answer. It might be clear what we have to do, but the art of actually getting people to want to do it is much trickier.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. There's again, for all the wicked problems that have pretty clear solutions, there's a whole lot of powerful forces that ensure those solutions are never put on the table.
James Balzer: Yeah, that's right.
How do we solve a problem when by solving it, we actually compromise on our own interests.
There's also Arjen Boin who looks a lot of crisis management and government inaction, looks at how they can be ideological inaction, which is driven by, misaligned ideologies. There can be inadvertent inaction, which is driven by bounded rationality and a lack of horizon scanning and monitoring, which is the work Andy Hines looks at with his environmental scanning methods. But there's also sometimes calculated inaction where policymakers and decision makers think by waiting and not taking action, they're actually doing the right thing.
And so in COVID, we saw a bit of that all around the world. Some people thought we will wait and wait for the data to manifest before making any decisions. By that time, it's too late anyway. The velocity of the pandemic had taken off.
So for those listening, there's some really good literature for you to look at as well and the need to overcome these, governance pathologies or these leadership dysfunctions as a way of achieving long term action.
Peter Hayward: And I imagine too, for decision makers, for people who are driving change, there is really what I would call the developmental skill to look at yourself.
As you described yourself as, not necessarily a person who's solving the problem, you're probably a person who's also involved in creating the problem. And so that self awareness, I suppose you would call it critical thinking critical reflexivity those are higher level cognitive skills that senior leaders possibly learn, have to learn to develop.
James Balzer: Yeah, and that's the thing. It's, the OODA loop to go back to the idea of the OODA loop, right? OODA was actually developed during the Korean War and it was U. S. Air Force pilots who had to observe. Orient, decide, act, observe, orient, decide, act, often outside the constraints of very strict top-down management principles that's synonymous with the military.
And even during the first Gulf War, one of the reasons why the Americans could function much better than the Iraqi soldiers was because the Iraqi soldiers had to have very top-down control. Orders given from very high up the hierarchy and individual squads didn't have the autonomy to make quick decisions based on very local circumstances.
Whereas American soldiers and military doctrine enabled that decentralized leadership. So in the real world, in real crises, You need to have leadership culture that enables that decentralized leadership style to make quick decisions informed by very local insights.
Peter Hayward: So we're getting to the end, James. We've covered a lot of ground. There'll be a lot of information in your show notes for people to check up on. Can you wrap this up? If people want to grasp what you believe, how we go about and do these things, what are the kind of take homes for you?
James Balzer: The take homes for me are that any good decision needs to be grounded in long termism and intergenerational fairness, but we have to move beyond surface level events as a way of achieving that and rather change world views and values at a systemic level and also within public sector organizations and the private sector as well.
So all stakeholders involved in driving change, particularly for sustainable development. So you can't be in some parochial niche that thinks they're going to change the world just as the early adopters alone. You need to jump to the leading edge, being the early majority, and try and drive change with a multi stakeholder approach that changes world views and values and outlooks.
And that's how you achieve long term positive path dependence. For sustainable change in the era of the Anthropocene.
Peter Hayward: Thanks, James. It's been thoroughly interesting and I hope for listeners a stimulating conversation, but good luck with your work in this space. And thanks for spending some time with FuturePod.
James Balzer: Thank you very much, Peter. Greatly appreciate it.
Peter Hayward: It was so uplifting to hear from James that future focussed policy is not a pipe dream. And that he is so committed to the graft of his craft. James has given you a great literature review for working in this space and I am sure he would delighted if anyone listening wanted to reach out to him. Future pod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the pod then follow the Patreon link on our website. This has been Peter Hayward. Thanks for joining me and I'll see you next time.