JOURNAL: A Competition for Resilience

The typical governmental planning process is to create a committee, hire some consultants, and gather the usual contractors (to share in the spoils). Of course, the result is almost always subpar. To break this cycle of failure, New York City has decided to use transparency as a means of process improvement. To wit: it's launched a design competition to find the best solutions for provisional housing (which can be used after a disaster to house displaced citizens):

The New York City Office of Emergency Management (OEM) is sponsoring a design competition to enhance the City's ability to provisionally house residents after a major coastal storm.

Some valuable philosophy on how to get things done

Here's three simple insights for organizational success in a chaotic, complex, and hyper-competitive environment (and a way to use the wisdom of crowds to unearth talent that you need to thrive):

• The best people (to solve any given problem) don't work for your organization. A corollary to this: if you don't have the best people working for you, you will fail.
• Use transparency and the marketplace to find the best people located outside your organization (simple test: whose ideas capture the greatest mindshare within your organization?). NY City's contest is a great example of using transparency as a means of finding great talent.
• Buy all of the time they have available.

NOTE (on when being good isn't enough): Another trend is that an increasing number of problems are information/knowledge intensive. This means that an old rule from the software world applies: a couple of great programmers are more valuable than a room full of good ones. Apply this rule to any complex information-intense problem you face and you will get much faster, cheaper, and better results.

Comments

[enigma_foundry]

Two points:

1. Design competitions are not new, but have been around for quite awhile, and had been used to collect good ideas, even if those with the best ideas didn't always 'win'. (As a side note that I find interesting, design competitions are much more common in Europe than they are in America.) Some competitions that could provide an interesting benchmark would be the ones for the Saint Louis Arch and the Sidney Opera House.

2. This is another example of municipal government providing things that many had thought were the realm of federal agencies. I had come across a couple of articles which mentioned that municipal syndromic surveillance systems often topped that provided by the feds.

http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/2007/04/19/the-undefended-country/