Making decentralization work

As the world around us grapples with the surge of COVID-19, confining people and their mobility. The tide has declined the growth rate to 7.2 days from the earlier value of 3 days of doubling cases. While this outbreak has been disastrous in every way, it has also uncovered vulnerabilities of governance systems across the globe.

The availability of essentials and sanitation facilities became crucial — urban planning as a process, and delivery of services has become vital. In retrospect, we have realized that we need a proactive and reactive approach, but the current centralized system offers a reactive strategy. As a proactive approach, we need our health care systems to respond faster and have well-knit communication. In a decentralized model, communication and knowledge composition promote creativity and opportunity for team members to innovate and implement their ideas.

How does it differ?

Before we discuss how to implement a decentralized system(basis my experience from the past) to make an effective governance system, let’s quickly look at the difference between the two systems in question.

In a centralized state, the decision-making authority is centered in the hands of the central government or top hierarchy, which takes decisions and gives directions on how functions are performed. Conversely, in a decentralized state, decision-making power and responsibilities are scattered across sectors and domains.

There are set objectives and teams across work towards them in a centralized system to achieve final goals. In the decentralized expertise of every team member, they are considered to achieve final goals without laying down directions or guidelines.

How to implement a Decentralized system of functioning

One fundamental notion behind decentralization is to give decision-making authority to those who know best. Larger the organizational structure, the idea of decentralizing some decision-making away from the central unit becomes critical, with the reduction in response time and drop in dependency. Hence for decentralization to work, we need to — :

• Define culture, values, and goals: Make sure your cultural values and ethics are living. Remember, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Don’t lip service your values, ethics, and goals. Make sure you call them out explicitly, and your team understands that. It is good practice to broadcast these values and ethics being lived as stories as a group/organization.
• Be Transparent: “A lack of transparency results in distrust and a deep sense of insecurity.” Be transparent in your communication, monitoring process, feedback framework, key issues, and regulations. And it starts with being approachable. Encourage peers to walk in or reach out to leaders when in doubt preventing any delay in the right decision-making capability.
• Competencies & Efficiencies: Incompetent processes lead to loss of productivity in the system. For operations and procedures to be efficient, make sure team members are competent and up to date and continuously work on increasing the skill set needed to run the system efficiently.
• Understand Value System As-Is: Everyone needs to understand processes and flows to uncover inefficiencies/bottlenecks and identify areas for improvements. Uncovering is the first step towards success. Once you know what improvements need to be made, prioritize all improvements and encourage the team to find solutions and implement them in order of decreasing priority.
• Understand Communication Styles: Not everyone is alike; huge organizations/systems have people from different cultures and backgrounds. It is not possible to build a standard style of collaboration and communication. Hence in this scenario, transparency and complete knowledge of activities and issues become all more important. This makes coordination and communication more straightforward with an understanding of local conditions as well.
• Finally, how to identify decisions to be decentralized: Decisions that need local resources and responsiveness should be decentralized. While decisions that are long-term and require compliance and regulation check should be centralized. Another factor could be the cost of delay (tangible or intangible). Centralizing these kinds of decisions could lead to the high cost of delay make things complex. A simple tool to analyze whether to centralize or decentralize decision is -

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Examples

Conclusion

Decentralized planning can help with the efficient delivery of services by decentralization of authority and resources.

They also provide a feedback mechanism for the preparation of goals, reducing the overall burden at the central level and at the same time providing robust and sustainable systems to fight sudden variabilities in the system.