There's a very good reason government isn't agile.
"Individuals and interactions over processes and authority", "Empowered civil servants over procedures and bureaucracies", and "Responding to change over following a plan" are all fantastic descriptions of a dictatorship. Deadlock, bureaucracy, process, jurisdiction, authority, barriers and limits to power are defining characteristics of a limited, constitutional government.
"Deadlock" is another way of saying the government isn't currently changing the rules. It amazes me that people think this is a bad thing.
It's good that we have a government that is able to change the rules. It's very good that the government has to follow the proper process/procedure to do so, that they have to get broad support and go through all of the necessary legislative, judicial, and executive steps in order to change the rules citizens must follow. It's a good thing that "individuals" and "empowered civil servants" can't go changing the rules on a whim; those are not hallmarks of agile governments but of corrupt ones.
Strangely enough, Greece (which I had in mind when I wrote the blog post) has plenty of processes, procedures, bureaucracy, and comprehensive regulations AND also ranks quite low in the Transparency International Corruption Index, in part due to endemic clientilism.
Historically, someone empowered to act outside of the normal bounds and restrictions of the republic was called a "dictator". The word we use today is derived from the actual title the Romans gave someone when they wanted their republic to be what we would describe as "agile". Eventually, that tactic worked against them.
What you're saying strikes me as hopelessly anachronistic. Nothing like "what we would describe as 'agile'" can possibly be retrofitted thousands of years back. The agile movement comes out of a humanistic anti-corporatist agenda (for want of a better way of describing it) that is practically unthinkable before, say, 1950. If not 1970.
The thing that is it missing is, oddly enough, the very thing we see in large organizations that try agile: accountability. That is, if you have a small team building a web site for a startup, you either do the job well or you starve. If you have a larger team working as part of a 1200-team project to build product X, you just play the game, doing your best to look good and keep your immediate bosses happy. Organizations have traditionally set up large bureaucracies -- to manage agile teams. Sounds totally crazy, and it is, but we have to keep reminding organizations that agile means distributed control and accountability, not just the same teams doing the same thing inside a complex organizational structure just with a different name and emphasis on stuff.
In American government, job responsibilities are purposely split up between the federal, state, and local government. In addition, each level has three different branches to handle different kinds of work: making laws, enforcing laws, interpreting laws. The idea here is that if your local elected official wants to outlaw bazookas in town, and the townspeople don't like it, they can march down to his office (or home) and ask him to do something about it. That's what is called accountability. Governments "closer" to the people are traditionally given more power over their lives, and those "farther away" -- like in Washington -- are given less control. (This is one of the ways gun control used to work so well. You lived in a crowded city, local officials can tell you not to have guns in such close proximity. You live on the open range, nobody cared what type of weapon you owned. You can continue making this analogy with other forms of state control, such as abortion or property taxes) In this way our agile government teams can have timeboxed work and get regular feedback. Timeboxing and feedback are critical parts of agile. (Also note how critical timeboxing becomes in government. You don't want instant feedback -- that's mob rules. You also don't want no feedback. You must have regular feedback for the thing to work)
The problem is that the federal government is taking control of everything. Also the districts have been rigged so that most federal elected officials always get reelected: its becoming like a new nobility. This means that effectively there are no timeboxes and everything is being controlled from the top-down. Can't have agile teams in an environment like that. You can have sales picthes, feel-good meetings, wonderful speeches about change, and marketing plans, but you can't have agile.
The author's heart is in the right place, though. [People get so worked up about what they want government to do that they never get around to talking about how it does it. If the overall structure is bad, the results are going to be bad.]
> People get so worked up about what they want government to do that they never get around to talking about how it does it. If the overall structure is bad, the results are going to be bad.
This is a very good point that needs to be emphasised. Get the structure right (the right set of incentives), and the organisation will run well. Get the structure wrong, and bad results will inevitably occur.
Excellent points. We need more local decision making.
I'm a big fan of the Swiss model. You can even leave a jurisdiction if you are unhappy with its performance. That would impose discipline on cities with insane budgets.
And many actions of Swiss government have to be approved by referendum. They seem to have done better with the mechanics of democracy.
"Individuals and interactions over processes and authority", "Empowered civil servants over procedures and bureaucracies", and "Responding to change over following a plan" are all fantastic descriptions of a dictatorship. Deadlock, bureaucracy, process, jurisdiction, authority, barriers and limits to power are defining characteristics of a limited, constitutional government.