• 6 Posts
  • 67 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
cake
Cake day: June 8th, 2025

help-circle


  • It’s more than just “getting consultants.” Organizations need to have systems in place to manage their work. Consultants might know some things, but they are not systems. Systems usually are born out of experience and become more mature over time. They are complex and interlinked and adapt to nuances in the understanding of their work.

    The prevailing metaphor for organizational capacity is that they are comprised of interchangeable parts that can be rebuilt or replaced any time. However, the actual reality is they are more like plants that grow. Privatizing the public sector is akin to planting a tree with the aim of having it give you shade, except every 5-10 years you cut it down and replant a new one. In the end, you never really get what you’re supposed to, but a bunch of people are making money off it.



  • I would argue they didn’t become more efficient. They just outsourced everything to private contractors. And private contractors have an overhead of needing to compete for contracts, so they’re all spending money on staff that writes up the bids. Additionally, they only hire the workers when they win the contract and those contracts usually expire after 5-10 years. This means there is no long term, institutional capacity building. It might be fine for small projects, but for large complex projects, tearing down an organization only to reassemble it under another contractor every 5-10 years is in fact terribly inefficient and produces worse outcomes. Organizations cannot become good at the work. I’ve seen it first hand. There are many contractors that specialize only in federal procurement regulations, but have almost no in house technical knowledge of how to run the projects they’re bidding on beyond what is they need to say to win. And, most importantly, knowing what to say to win is different than having a mature organization in place to do the work.








  • No, I was stating a fact… Trump taking a certain action would be a violation of the words as they are written in the constitution. That’s not denying reality. It’s calling it out. You called even discussing it “naive and willfully ignorant” because we should just expect it now.

    I say this “pre-acceptance” of our leaders not following the law, enables them to not follow the law. If they do something like this and we don’t react, they think they can get away with it again. If they feared the population would react with massive protests, they wouldn’t do it. Trump becoming a dictator is dependent on people with attitudes like yours doing nothing.




  • You’re part of the problem. We need to acknowledge the violations of the constitution if we are going to do something about them. I’m not naive, your “oh well” and condescending attitude towards people who actually would like to do something contributes to the continuation of most Americans doing nothing. You’d have been the German public saying “well Hitler is just gonna keep rounding up Jews at this point, don’t be naive, nothing we can do about it.” Go to hell.

    You act this way because it gives you an excuse to do nothing. It’s easier to throw up your hands.