In the land of Gilgamesh and the garden of Eden.....

from Patrick
In the week when George W got a bit of a kicking in the mid term polls which by all accounts was because of the handling of Iraq post war, I thought it might be worth looking at this using the Mosaic Transformation model.

The post war taming and reconstruction of Iraq was tackled largely using the classical change model: get a government (start at the top of the hierarchy) and then get them to build and/or change successive levels of public infrastructure. I say largely tackled because of course, the exception was Kurdistan in the north. Overwhelmingly, this approach has failed as indeed it was doomed to do. Too big a job, with far too many highly diverse, but massively interconnected problems, and far too little management resource available, in other words, yet another doomed attempt by a government to break Ashby's law. And the inevitable result is that very few problems have been sorted at all and very few areas function.

So how could it have been different? Well a Mosaic solution would firstly have started with identifying the necessary changes as discrete packets of achievable changes and second would have involved searching for available resource to effect them. So two huge resource pools that were disbanded immediately post war were the Iraqi army and the civil service, without this level of resource, only very limited change was ever going to be possible. It is generally recognised now that this was a mistake, but from a mosaic perspective, the folly of doing this was very clear. As far as discrete changes go, the design was to institute change across the country, but that hasn't happened, a very very familiar pattern of failure: of course some areas would be harder and slower to change than others. The mosaic solution is to simply accept it, protect the boundaries of the areas you are able to change (in this case literally protect the boundaries from insurgent infiltration) and work within the areas where change is possible.

The failure pattern we can see, is so familiar, failure of the top-down, homogeneous change plan and its gradual replacement by a more heterogeneous pattern of ad hoc changes - like Kurdistan, a functioning state within a state. And if they had planned for discrete changes? We would probably have had significantly more development in the fast-track parts like Kurdistan, and certainly, the south around Basra could have been further advanced than it is now. Some parts of the centre would be as far from reform as they are now, but could have been prevented from causing quite as much disruption as they have. Outside the boundary protected enclave of the Kurds, that disruption that looks as though scupper the whole project and condemn another generation to anarchy in the land that first gave us civilisation.

from Peter
Riverbend: the voices are out there.