The Belocrat: a servant leader

This post on Best Of A Great Lot is a part of a series on the subject of designing a new form of governance. Each piece aims to stand alone, but fits together on the Table of Contents.

Previous: A Sketch of Belocracy, Evaluation as Feedback Cycle, Idea Generation and Sifting. Next: Converting Ideas to Proposals.

It's natural with any system of governance to ask who its leaders are. We all know the names of our Presidents and Prime Ministers and expect them to have wide influence on our society. But for every widely celebrated one, there are several stories of self-serving ones. Before I describe the leadership roles within belocracy, let's carefully think about what we actually need from them.

The Founders of the United States called for us to have no King to rule us. Did they succeed? Our Presidents aren't hereditary, and they don't serve for life, but they do exude a certain King-iness in other ways: e.g. most people expect that it's the President's job to decide what the government will do. We speak about the President's agenda and the President's budget, even though deciding the legislative agenda and setting the budget were explicitly reserved by the founders as the job of Congress. Congress reserves the right to impeach Presidents and Supreme Court Justices, but has never removed a President and hasn’t even threatened a Supreme Court justice in living memory.

Singular leaders typically grow their power over time. Roman consuls became more and more important until Caesar turned the role into an imperial one. In the 20th century, we've allowed Presidents to expand the power of the executive branch to the point where there’s a popular and respectable book calling it Imperial. Historically a lot of this expansion came from the Roosevelts, who most remember as among our greatest Presidents. Perhaps it is inevitable in the way that we think about leadership. After all, we remember and teach the names of the Emperors of Rome, and not nearly as many of the republic’s Consuls or Praetors. We teach children the names of the Presidents, not the Speakers of the House. We like a hero story, and Presidents fit.

Having one singular leader has costs and benefits. Power-seekers pursue power centers, which inevitably leads to abuse of that power. It's a good slogan to claim that we hold Presidents accountable — the buck stops here, as Harry Truman claimed. It's another and much rarer thing to actually hold them accountable, any more than we do when CEOs say that they take accountability for the decisions that led them to the need for layoff; they never seem to take a paycut or feel any real consequences. In the history of the Presidency, only a few have been impeached, none convicted and only one resigned. The only consequences they’ve faced have been stronger political opposition, which is hard to really call accountability. Few historians would argue that only Nixon committed actions deserving of being called to account.

The power of the Presidency is also one of the key drivers of bundled governance. If you think one party is going to do a bad job in international relations but will appoint the Supreme Court justices you like and vice versa, you are forced to choose between caring about the rest of the world or the interpretation of the Constitution.

In their favor, a singular leader can act as a coordinator and decisionmaker that prevents endless dickering and chaos. The President acts as a driver of their agenda which helps Congress agree on which things to spend their time on. If we simply had the agency heads or the heads of committees, they would fight for prominence in ways that prevent them from working well together. Should FEMA, the CDC, the FDA, Health and Human Services, or the Transportation department be in charge of responding to an emergency (FEMA) involving a novel pathogen (CDC) that we need to figure out medicines to treat (FDA), is overwhelming our hospitals (HHS) and traveling rapidly around the country (Transportation)? What if they step on each others' toes? What if the CDC thinks we had better shut down the airports and the Transportation secretary feels that their job is to keep the airports open? Or the Transportation secretary shuts down the airports and this gets in the way of CDC staffers conducting essential research? If your answer is that all of these feel like the job of Homeland Security… tada, you've created a new version of the President with a different title, and over time, they end up subsuming every part of government under their authority.

Officially leaderless organizations exist, but often their official leaderlessness covers up an implicit hierarchy that is harder for outsiders to navigate, has less accountability, and is generally worse for everyone except the illegible power brokers. Jo Freeman wrote compellingly about this in the 1970s in her essay The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Formal consensus organizations exist but do not scale to thousands of people. There are various methodologies to try to enable them to work better - holacracy, sociocracy, etc — but none of them are so mature as to be an obvious choice.

Dichotomies should make you nervous, though. Leaderless and a central leader don't have to be the only choices. Many leaders in private companies over the past half century have been interested in other models than the one epitomized in George W. Bush's famous statement "I'm the Decider" but have shied away from leaderlessness. Two of those models that are frequently discussed in industry are servant and host leadership. Servant leadership is the better-known term, so I’ll use it to refer to both. Let’s understand how they work with an example.

During the negotiation of a major trade treaty, like NAFTA, the negotiator might hand to the President 2-page briefing memos about politically sensitive decisions like production quotas and tariffs for cars made in Mexico or assurances to Canada that we won’t undercut prices on maple syrup. Presidents, like CEOs, often believe that these most important decisions need to be decided by them, since they keep track of many different sensitive political situations and know how they interact with each other, where the negotiators generally only know about their own. Perhaps the auto unions are about to go on strike (the maple syrupists don’t have unions yet).

Someone steeped in servant leadership would want to flip this script. Instead of the leader using their knowledge of strikes to direct the negotiator on the best decision, they’d want to help the negotiator understand what the unions care about so they can use that knowledge directly. The negotiator, after all, is the person who’s spending every day thinking about the details of the treaty. They’re much more likely to be able to notice small details that can add up to real improvements, especially if they have the freedom to make changes independently. With a servant leader, instead of the negotiator writing up a 2-page briefing memo for the President to make a decision from, it would be the President sending them a briefing memo of all the political considerations in play and trusting the negotiator to make the final decision. In our current system this cannot work because of principal-agent problems. The President is more directly accountable to the people than the negotiator is, and the negotiator, if they have real power, can easily be captured by special interests since they have few incentives that align them with what the citizens want.

Since belocracy relies on evaluations to push policy designers to create policies that are good for everyone, the role that oversees this process — the Belocrat — can be designed as a servant leader. Instead of being deciders, Belocrats can be made to be shepherds who enable policy designers to succeed. This is enforced by strict limits on what powers their role entails. Formally, they are responsible for prioritizing topics, requesting policy proposals from the designers and the engaged public, connecting policies with jurisdictions which are willing to try them out and setting dates for reviewing proposals. They also have important and powerful, but carefully circumscribed roles in the ever-critical arena of budgeting, and are equivalent to a board member in the executive aspect of belocracy, both to be described in a later chapter. Informally, they can and should act as advocates and mentors, encouraging people to engage with problems and advising them how to do so.

Each Belocrat is responsible for an arena of policy, like the Secretary of Transportation is responsible for transportation-related issues. The Last Belocrat acts as the central coordinator: formally, they are the tiebreaker if two or more Belocrats dispute who should take lead on some topic. In the case of our novel pathogen above, the Last Belocrat could decide that the Belocrat in charge of Health, not Transportation, would take lead, and direct all relevant proposals to their arena.

The Belocrat's main power is prioritization: deciding which problems will be scheduled for new policies. This is actually an enormously powerful role, as we’ve seen time and again in legislatures when the leader of the legislature decides through prioritization what the agenda is. Belocrats persuade and direct policy designers and researchers to work on these areas, but have no power to direct the policy designs. They schedule the policy jury which will review the proposals that are created, but cannot decide which proposals are reviewed by the jury. They are one part prioritizer, one part evangelizer, and one part project manager, but have few decisions that could lead them to imperialism.

Belocrats are selected through a filtered SIEVE. To be eligible, a candidate must have at least at one point been a professional policy designer or researcher, valor, Belocrat, or top leader of one of a societal benefit organizations, and must have maintained a reputation within the top 10% of society. They serve for one term but are selected halfway through the previous Belocrat's term to be the junior Belocrat working under the direction of the current senior Belocrat. This ensures continuity if a Belocrat is sick or dies, and prevents the problem of someone being new to their role that we have with Presidents on their first day. If a term is decided to be 8 years, they would serve 4 years as junior Belocrat and then 4 years as the senior one with a new junior Belocrat working for them.

Their prioritization role is essential to the system’s success. Many of the topics that are trending in the news or on the short-form internet site-du-jour aren't actually important or going to be in the public consciousness in a week. Sometimes this is a reflection of our short attention span, and a Belocrat should be taking advantage of the momentum of interest. More often it’s like rubbernecking at an accident: things pop into the collective consciousness because they fascinate us for a moment, but have no staying power. Meanwhile, long-term actually-important issues like car crashes and cancer and (a personal hobbyhorse) the soul-sucking nature of a suburban landscape designed to make us drive everywhere simply aren't what we're constantly talking about. Deciding which topics are actually important for us to work on and solve is a difficult and important task that requires a dedicated, mature perspective. But for the belocratic data system to be highly accessible, we have to contend with a mix of viral interest in important topics appearing out of nowhere and flash-in-the-pan nonsense temporarily taking up all the oxygen in the room. The Belocrat's job is to notice when that sudden spike of interest can drive real improvement and make use of it, and also to avoid making bad policy just because people's blood is hot. In the judicial system they say that “bad cases make bad law.” Belocrats should have a similar saying: bad news makes bad policy.

The Belocrats maintain a priority list of areas and problems that we're focused on improving. As the belocratic data system highlights problems or options, the Belocrats update their priority list and decide to direct policy designers to work on those problems based on that priority list and whether the options seem like they are well thought out and trending toward something worth trying. In the case where society is clearly thinking and talking about a topic, we should expect policy designers to be working on that topic in response. In cases where people lose focus, the Belocrats act as shepherds, keeping things moving so that problems turn into options turn into proposals turn into experiments.

Belocrats' prioritization decisions are subject to Evaluation Panel review and petition, but penalties should only be handed out if they are egregiously bad. Prioritization is impossible to perfect, and easy to argue. Belocrats’ are rewarded for successful policies just as policy designers are, though they receive smaller individual rewards since they have a smaller effect on many more policies.

Because how they are selected means they’re usually very experienced and knowledgeable, they can play the editor role to the policy designers' authorial equivalent, if the policy designer welcomes it. Encouraging designers to come to a conclusion in a timely manner is a delicate art. Sometimes it requires setting deadlines, and sometimes it requires letting things slide because a better outcome is possible with more time.

At some point for any particular problem, a Belocrat sets an end date, though an end date can be appealed by policy designers. That appeal, if it gathers enough reputation, should be reviewed by an evaluation panel. Announcing the end date sets in motion the SIEVE which selects the policy jury for this set of proposals, and opens the floor for citizens to write in and support or oppose the equivalent of Amicus Curiae - their best arguments for why the directions that are being considered are good, bad, or indifferent.

There will be times when the citizens want something pushed forward and the Belocrats do not. In keeping with the idea of self-governance, if a problem is pushed to a high enough level of reputation, it can overcome the Belocrats prioritization and trigger a policy jury. Effective Belocrats will ensure this rarely happens by being ahead of the citizen pressure, but it’s good to have at least some of these happen every year so that Belocrats see which topics they’re neglecting. One way to ensure that this happens is to set the reputation threshold required for a problem to trigger a policy jury at the level that, the previous year, would result in 1% of the policy juries having been started by citizens rather than Belocrats.

Removal

The role of Belocrat is a highly trusted one, and incompetence, abuse and corruption in it must not be tolerated. To prevent these, Belocrats can be removed in several ways. The Last Belocrat can initiate removal proceedings, in which case the other Belocrats will vote. In general, the threshold for removal should be low enough to maintain citizen confidence in the legitimacy of government. For example, a belocracy might adopt a rule saying that if even a third of other Belocrats think that one should be removed, that removal should proceed. Changes to this threshold would be policies like any others, and when those changes are evaluated by an evaluation panel, they would generally review whether society at large feels confidence in the Belocrats and the belocratic system. Distrust in the key roles of belocracy is deadly to the legitimacy of the government, and should be prevented.

If people have no confidence in a Belocrat (or worse, all of them) they can petition to have them removed. This petition, if it receives a reasonable threshold of reputation within the system, goes to a petition jury, not an evaluation panel. Petition juries are less likely to be made up of people who have a personal stake one way or another in the Belocrats’ careers. They should be instructed that their job is to maintain the trust that the citizens have in the system’s effectiveness.

Specific Belocrats

The Last Belocrat is one of a few named roles within this design, but not the only one worth calling out. Most Belocratic arenas should be flexible and emerge from the belocratic process itself: Health and Commerce seem like they’re probably separate arenas, but perhaps the Business of Healthcare is its own, or there may be even more splits. Perhaps Medicine R&D (Drugs and Technologies) and Healthcare Infrastructure are sufficiently different that need to be split apart. I leave most specific arenas to to belocracy itself to define. But there are a few whose equivalent we don’t have in our current system and are worth calling out.

One Belocrat should be assigned to work specifically on changes to the structure of government. Because they are selected independently and work independently, they are less likely to be bound up in trying to support the current structure than in our system. Ideally they’re able to propose changes to internal jurisdictional boundaries, for those who wish to change the city, county and state borders that we have inherited to something more coherent and more effective to govern. They should also be the Belocrat to review changes to the list of arenas. Perhaps they can be called the Metacrat.

One Belocrat should be responsible for simplifying the system wherever possible. They should have a mission to be opposed to organization creep and continual law growth and systemic overgrowth everywhere. They can glory in the removal of unnecessary rules and laws. They can be called Occam’s Belocrat.

One Belocrat should be focused entirely on the underlying systems that enable Belocracy. How do we demonstrate that the randomization of SIEVE is correct, and the reputation system is a correct mix of fair and effective, and the belocratic data system itself is accessible to all. They can be called the Plumbing Belocrat.

One Belocrat should be the red-team leader, responsible for a team of policy designers who are trying to ensure that our system is robust in the face of shocks and disasters. They can lean into the discipline of chaos engineering and be called the Chaos Belocrat.

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