The Oversight Fallacy
By: Peter Block
There is a
persistent belief in this culture that when you have a problem, the way
to solve it is to find blame, institute controls and watch it more
closely. If there is violence in a community, we want more police. If
someone is shot, if students aren’t learning, if costs are high; we
assign blame, pass a law, and watch like crazy. This process, which we
sanitize by calling it oversight, has become the universal solvent.
For
all our love of watching, the measures that are never taken are the
social and economic costs of oversight. The oversight function in this
culture may be designed to provide a service, but it often costs much
more than it benefits. There is some wisdom in the ironic saying that
“research causes cancer in rats.”
Illness Caused By
the Cure
The idea that what is intended to help, often results in more harm is
vividly addressed in a book by Ivan Illich, entitled, “Medical Nemesis.”
In it he describes what he calls iatrogenic illness. This is
doctor-induced illness. Oversimplified, he claims that physicians have
become so powerful in controlling the diagnosis and cure of disease that
they can interfere with our capacity for mutual self-care and therefore
our health.
He
describes how any helper, such as a physician, can cause sickness by the
over-application of their tools, namely prescription drugs and surgery.
Illich thinks physicians undermine health by becoming too central to the
process of healing, which in turn, discounts our own faith and capacity
to care for ourselves. Our passion for oversight has the same iatrogenic
effect: to wound what we intend to heal.
Structures that
Misuse their Power
A cost is incurred the moment we start believing that if we closely and
critically watch something, it will get better. When did we start to
believe that the public pronouncement of evil ever got rid of it?
Three
structures that symbolize how control and inspection undermine
institutional effectiveness are city councils, not-for-profit boards of
directors and boards of education. There is much nobility in the
willingness to serve as a public official or to volunteer to be a member
of a board, but when we think that oversight is their prime mission, and
we construct the role of board member and elected official to act as
judge, examiner and jury, we corrupt the role.
Here are some
iatrogenic effects of council and board leadership—ways they damage what
they are intended to help.
1. A small question
can incur a large cost.
Elected officials and Board members continuously demand more data and
more study. They often ask $.50 questions that require $100 worth of
response. Every request for more data generates paid staff time to
answer it and much of the time, when the data is provided, the issue has
moved on and the official or board member forgot that they asked the
question.
2. Elected officials and board members do not suffer any consequences
for the demands that they make. They are exercising power over a
system in a way that has no personal consequence to them. They demand
cost reductions, squeeze jobs, products or services and use the media to
manage conflict, yet the elected official or board member’s position is
untouched by what they initiate. They can be punishing and never guilty
and incur costs they never pay for.
3. Elected officials
and board members are temporary participants in complex systems that
they have little experience with.
Only in the public sector do we have amateurs influencing control over a
domain that they did not grow up in. They therefore act more out of
personal ideology than personal experience or knowledge. If they are
wrong, there is little accountability.
4. The act of oversight reinforces monarchy. It establishes the
stance of a superior looking down at the response of an inferior. Watch
a city council meeting and simply look at the room. The elected
officials own the high ground and look down upon the people they are
there to serve. Similarly, boardrooms are designed for status and power.
These settings and the way the meetings are conducted breed a sense of
unearned royalty that unnaturally serves the status needs of the
official or board member, often at the expense of the operating
well-being of the institution.
As
a result, board members and elected officials develop an exaggerated
sense of their own importance. Instead of developing the humility of
service, this special class thinks they exist for the sake of corrective
action. What evidence do we have that the call for corrective action
actually leads to an answer?
5. Oversight breeds defensiveness and anxiety in what it watches.
It carries the ill effects of blame, which is to discourage risk and
reduce honest conversation. It reduces trust by highlighting the
vulnerability of those being overseen and reinforces the power and
innocence of those doing the looking and judging.
We
justify the oversight function by the need for public institutions to be
accountable to the community. True, but there are other ways to achieve
this accountability. To constantly place an institution under the shadow
of inspection and review undermines it. Oversight is appropriate where
fraud or dishonesty is in question, but this is rare.
Rethinking the Role
1. Shift the role from oversight to advisory. Let the community get
involved through what we would call an Advisory Group rather than the
legislative role of council member or board member. Take the power and
status out of the role and restrain it to one of help and service.
2. Establish a
guideline that any study requested by a board member should require 10
hours of personal participation by the board member in the study. Let
them join in paying the price of their questions.
3. Civil servants
and paid staff should regularly evaluate council and board members.
These assessments should be made public to all board members and should
be framed as an organization improvement process. Accountability for
contribution should flow in both directions. If oversighters want to
evaluate staff, fine. Just make the opposite true.
4. Make dialogue the
purpose of their meetings. Meet in flexible spaces where the status
differences between board, staff and citizens disappear and where real
conversation is encouraged. The pompous settings where the groups meet
make this difficult. Let the setting carry the message that we come
together as partners and advisors rather that barons and monarchs.
Of
course, the problem with our oversight obsession is broader than just
the role of boards and councils; they are just a symbol of the problem.
The whole quality movement recognized that while inspection may identify
a symptom, it did not help much with improvement. We need to apply this
insight to the broader society and stop passing laws and looking for
someone to blame every time there is a crisis. The real concerns of
safety, health, the well-being of the next generation or the
effectiveness of our public institutions will be solved by building
stronger communities, not by creating more avenues for criticism and
enforcement.
When
we begin to value insight above oversight, and invest more in connection
than in correction, we make real accountability possible and we can put
to rest the belief that blaming our institutions and those who run them
creates any social good.
This
article appeared in
News for a Change published by AQP in May 2000
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