The logic of the internet is leaving government hopelessly stuck in the 20th-century industrial age, trying to respond to the 21st-century digital era, writes tburton.
The discussion also heard from former UK Cabinet Office strategist and CEO of social innovation agency Nesta, Geoff Mulgan.Plunkett worked for former prime minister Gordon Brown and persuasively argues that because digital capitalism is more profitable than industrial capitalism, it will inevitably emerge as the dominant form of production. This will take time, but it’s only a question when, not if.
Whereas businesses have to adapt or die – so-called creative destruction – no such constraints exist for governments. But from his Downing Street experience, Plunkett observes governments inevitably wait for issues to mount up before a “mudslide” occurs, forcing governments into precipitative and often ill-considered responses –Among the seminar speakers there was consensus that nowhere is this governance gap more apparent than in the paucity of policy responses to the most obvious problems digital capitalism is already throwing up.
Already it is crystal clear that the ability for digital platforms to rapidly scale up has created a perilous winner-takes-all world. This has typically made inner-city knowledge workers wealthy, but left large slabs of the community either excluded or having to live on gig titbits. Plunkett argues our public sector institutions are still largely structured according to last century’s logic: hierarchical, siloed, process-driven, risk-adverse, and with old-school work practices that are light years away from the agile, cross-cutting autonomous teams that digitally centric firms have long embraced.
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