On top down versus bottom up

NOT THAT KIND OF TOP, OR BOTTOM...
No, that's NOT what this post is about - get your mind out of the gutter, you perverts! Oops, I said the soft part loud again :o)

So here's what I've been thinking about (partly because I've been living this, and partly because we're all living this). There are at least two ways for change to be processed or instigated. Or perhaps there are two ways I'm viewing change (perhaps there are infinitely many other ways to view it). One way is top down. It would go like this. Someone at the top says "This situation needs to change, here is my Master Plan for how it will change to address the goals I've set, now go to it and do it." And then with that direction, perhaps with a lot of modification, input, and so forth, change happens. Note that the Master Plan does not have to be enacted exactly as prescribed, that's not implicit in Top Down, but there is a Master Plan, there is a clear Architect (or perhaps architectural committee), and it is, to some extent, orchestrated. When I'm thinking politics I think of the New Deal as perhaps an expression of Top Down change. True, conditions had to be right from the ground up, but you got this guy in office, FDR, and he had these tons of ideas and plans, and he pushed as many of them through as he could, and he made change happen. It was a restructuring and it was deliberate. So that's the way things could happen.SEE CAVEATS BELOW

Then you have change from the bottom up. That's more incremental change driven by group psychology, group action. It's the kind of change that takes place all over the place, with no orchestration, and often without people even realizing it is happening. Think about how the country is currently dealing with the oil crisis. Lots of little stuff happening, here and there. People drive a bit less, they buy energy efficient cars a bit more, they bitch and moan A LOT. The government tries to incentivize this, prohibit that, restrict the other thing. But a lot of those changes appear, at least from a distance, to be disjointed, often ineffectual or token in nature. Change DOES occur, but without the Master Plan or the architect. I think of this kind of change and I think of the Invisible Hand and good ol' Adam Smith. Never mind that the Invisible Hand may be flicking us all off (invisibly), but it's there and it's at work.

Now in my own business life I've seen both kinds of change. We have a Central Office, which is national, which has been hysterically mandating change - very top down. I don't know if there's a Master Plan in place, or if it's just knee jerk paranoia driving it, but aside from that it fits all the other criteria. And then we have bottom up change, driven by the consumers, or the staff, or the interaction of the two. I have come to kind of loathe the top down approach because when someone in Washington decides to tell me how to do my job, even though they have good intentions, they often screw things up on several levels: 1) they assume I don't know how to do my job and they have to tell me (and my staff) how to do it. Sometimes they demonstrate that they clearly know how to do our jobs much less well than we do, and so we are mandated to do things that make no sense. 2) They have no idea (and no way of knowing, or accounting for) the individual circumstances in over 600 national sites that they are dictating to. So even if what they are mandating makes sense overall, it may not make any sense in each local setting. Again we end up with mandates that in our own locality make no sense. 3) (and this may be particular to my setting) what they are TRYING to do is ensure that we do our jobs well. But our jobs are not the kind that you can simply say "do what the manual says" and it ensures they are well done. They THINK that's the case but it just is not. So they end up coming up with more and more regulation that a) does NOT improve our work and b) actually stifles the work that we do need to do.

Wow, what a rambling complaint. But the thing is that I don't think that top down change is necessarily always a bad idea. I think there are some situations that require a degree of top down in order to be resolved. Again, I think of my impressions, based on my very loose education, about the New Deal. Top Down seemed to work then. It seemed outright necessary. It was a situation when sitting back waiting for local control to balance things out was utterly failing, and so you needed that approach. I'm not saying it was all good, or all successful, but it seemed necessary. And so I wonder if there aren't situation in our lives now, such as the oil crisis, the economy (to a lesser extent, perhaps), the mortgage crisis, that could benefit from Top Down leadership. Then I wonder a few more things. First, what would it take to actually have Top Down leadership in these situations. Second, what are the risks of Top Down change. I think that Top Down can be very risky (so can Bottom Up actually, but for different reasons perhaps). The risks are similar to what I face at work, and what we all may face nationally.

Consider.

I believe that the present administration has attempted a Top Down leadership style and it seems to have failed. What I mean is that the present administration seems to have been very much into "do it this way because I said, I don't want to hear any other opinions, and screw the local complexities of the situation." For example, oh I don't know, "Who cares if they had nothing to do with 9/11 or any terrorism, we're invading anyway!" Screams top down to me. Now this may be instructive in a few ways. First, what does it take to be able to do Top Down. I'd say a national crisis helps a lot. 9/11 was such a crisis, and for a time Top Down was quite possible, and they really played it up. New Deal - same thing. Get people scared, poor, dying, what have you, and you can do Top Down. Also doesn't hurt to have majorities in both houses and the Supreme Court. Next, what happens if you have poor leadership in a Top Down situation? Things get bad. My own belief (just my opinion, but what else am I going to write here) is that things are worse now than 8 years ago. My own belief is that some (not all) of this is from poor leadership. Top Down.

So why would I, or anyone, want Top Down change? Well I think that, as I said, some situations may require it. Change, including political, economic, social revolutions, can occur bottom up, no doubt about it. But you can't always afford to wait. Sometimes powerful and good leadership can make things happen faster and perhaps much better. Perhaps if we had good leadership with some guts behind it years back we would not be so dependent on oil right now, for example . (Yes, you could argue that we had great leadership - just leadership that happened to own a lot of stock in oil companies. But that's a different post and one I know even less about). Perhaps if we have good leadership now we can get out of some of these things faster. Perhaps.

So then a lot of other questions: what are the characteristics of a good leader, able to instigate and promote top down change without screwing things up too much? What are the conditions necessary for such a leader to act? Another interesting idea is applying these concepts to change that happens in our own personal lives. What changes have you made, have I made, in your/my life that was top down, i.e., deliberate, orchestrated, goal driven, planful? What changes have we made that have just kind of happened - the accumulation of millions of tiny day to day choices, events, preferences, that have happened without us even realizing it? Are there pros/cons from the two on a personal level that match those on the macro level? Just wondering. More questions abound, but those are at the front of my mind.

Now, IF anyone was reading this, I'd invite them to let me know what they think of this. What ideas they have, and so forth. Normally I'd hesitate to put such a long and potentially political post in a blog when it's out of character, but I figure anyone who comes here is used to some change around (we added a separate author half way through for Chrissakes). And perhaps long and convoluted is better than silence? You be the judge :o)

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CAVEATS HERE

1) I know very little about the New Deal, or any politics, from an academic sense. So anyone reading this with more sense of history may want to comment and point out some of my glaring errors.

2) As I write this I'm thinking that the whole top-down, bottom-up dichotomy is a construct, just as all ideas are, and may not necessarily be the most useful construct. There may be other ways to categorize change and change forces that could lead to more interesting or fruitful discussions. These are just the ones I'm thinking of at the moment.

Ok, thanks for the caveats, take me Back to the Top