Making the Most of Mess
Reliability and Policy in Today's Management Challenges
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Duke University Press
Published:27th Mar '13
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Emery Roe suggests productive ways to manage "messes"—complex, large-scale problems that cannot be easily resolved. He develops his argument through an analysis of the 2008 financial crisis and policymakers' responses to it.In Making the Most of Mess, Emery Roe emphasizes that policy messes cannot be avoided or cleaned up; they need to be managed. He shows how policymakers and other professionals can learn these necessary skills from control operators who manage large critical infrastructures such as water supplies, telecommunications systems, and electricity grids. The ways in which they prevent major accidents and failures offer models for policymakers and other professionals to manage the messes they face.
Throughout, Roe focuses on the global financial mess of 2008 and its ongoing aftermath, showing how mismanagement has allowed it to morph into other national and international messes. More effective management is still possible for this and many other policy messes but that requires better recognition of patterns and formulation of scenarios, as well as the ability to translate pattern and scenario into reliability. Developing networks of professionals who respond to messes is particularly important. Roe describes how these networks enable the avoidance of bad or worse messes, take advantage of opportunities resulting from messes, and address societal and professional challenges. In addition to finance, he draws from a wide range of case material in other policy arenas. Roe demonstrates that knowing how to manage policy messes is the best approach to preventing crises.
"If only regulators would read this book, instead of talking to each other and the businesses they regulate, we might have a chance of avoiding another major financial meltdown."—John Kay, Financial Times columnist and author of Obliquity: Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly
"In Making the Most of Mess, Emery Roe outlines an analytical scheme that helps us to make sense of today's messes and offers a true alternative to currently fashionable 'all or nothing' solutions. He is a highly creative, often provocative, truly original, and erudite thinker."—Arjen Boin, Professor of Crisis Management, Utrecht University
“Roe’s deep and disciplined discussion in this book is a ‘coherent frame of reasoning’ that dimensionalizes messes . . . It provides a coherent, inclusive language and vocabulary that enables people to sort conditions of mess into meaningful dimensions.” -- Karl Weick * Public Administration *
“Overall, Roe highlights the critical problem of managing complex, adaptive systems in real-time and underscores the importance of training policy and management professionals to function in these difficult operational contexts more effectively. The book makes a substantive contribution to the policy and management literature, especially in reference to complex adaptive systems.” -- Louise K. Comfort * Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis *
“The great merit of Roe’s book is that one of the core questions in public administration and policy science – how to unravel decisions (thinking and speaking) and actions (practice, doings) in tackling messes created by policy and administration (rather than by external sources and forces) – gets clear-headed and persuasive answers.” -- Robert Hoppe * Critical Policy Studies *
ISBN: 9780822353072
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 435g
224 pages