Anticipatory Governance Practical Upgrades: Equipping the Executive Branch to Cope with Increasing Speed and Complexity of Major Challenges.

摘要

If we are to remain a well-functioning Republic and a prosperous nation, the U.S. Government cannot rely indefinitely on crisis management, no matter how adroit. We must get ahead of events or we risk being overtaken by them. That will only be possible by upgrading our legacy systems of management to meet today s unique brand of accelerating and complex challenges. Anticipatory Governance responds to this need by introducing three critical elements to existing Executive Branch functions: foresight fused to policy analysis; networked governance for mission-based management and budgeting; and feedback to monitor and adjust policy relative to initial expectations. This report suggests practical upgrades to Executive Branch systems that are light on resources, compatible with the existing structures and processes of government, and fully executable under customary Presidential authorities (requiring no congressional action). The Problem. A well-functioning Republic needs time for deliberation, and the U.S. Constitution was designed to make sure that this time would be protected. On the other hand, challenges presenting themselves today are increasingly fast-moving complex: they involve concurrent interactions among events across multiple dimensions of governance; they have no regard for our customary jurisdictional and bureaucratic boundaries; they cannot be broken apart and solved piece by piece; and rather than stabilizing into permanent solutions, they morph into new problems that have to be continually managed. This pattern profoundly challenges the adaptive capacity of our legacy systems of government, which are essentially modeled on the early industrial period: vertical, hierarchical, segmented, mechanical, and sluggish. Our 19th-century government is simply not built for the nature of 21st-century challenges.