THE DEATH OF HISTORY?

Last week, in a B&G Report titled, “Information Can Be a Buried Treasure,” we wrote about our concerns about the use of artificial intelligence as a the be-all and end-all source of information for a growing cadre of researchers. Our fundamental point was that AI only can draw upon information that’s been digitized and available on the internet, leaving out potentially valuable information that has no flaw other than that it was never scanned.

One personal example. We have many years of completed survey instruments  from the Government Performance Project, which was supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts for over a decade until 2010. These surveys are unique repositories of information from all fifty states about areas like human resources, budgeting and performance management. A treasure trove, we think, but one that is currently buried in boxes in an office we rent. Someday we’ll get around to having them scanned and available to researchers, but for now they might as well not exist.

We were chatting about the general idea of valuable historical information that’s not now available, with a public official at the recent American Society for Public Administration’s annual conference in Washington D.C., and he called this phenomenon “The Death of History.”

Pretty strong words, and the more we reflected, the more we began to realize that they’re right on target.

The fact is that as time passes, we’ve become increasingly aware that many of the leaders in state and local government come up with ideas they think are brand new, without digging into the files, or talking to people who preceded them, to see whether their notions are really new or just a retread of something that’s been tried before.

Exhibit A: A few years ago we were interviewing a leader in performance management in a large southern city. The individual told us that the city had embarked on a new and innovative performance management effort that hadn’t been tried before and that it was relying on outcomes or results and not just outputs.

At risk of seeming overly snarky (which maybe we were) we pointed out that this city was well known about 25 years ago, for something not very different than was being tried today. We had written about it back then.

Honestly, we didn’t know why the previous initiative hadn’t lasted, but it seemed abundantly clear that this was information that could be very helpful now.

The value of describing something as an “innovation,” helps feed this unfortunate fire. We speculate that it’s not easy selling the legislature on a program that existed in the past, but didn’t last. As we wrote in this space some few months ago, “The very word innovation (or its cousins, “innovate,” and “innovative”) is used by elected officials as a kind of magic wand that can create better tomorrows.”

This phenomenon is nothing new. We recall several conversations with Harry Hatry, one of the great gurus of performance management, after the book "Reinventing Government" came out in 1992. It was a huge best seller (and allegedly sat on a shelf next to President Clinton’s bed), and popularized a number of ideas, including the benefits of looking at outcomes when trying to evaluate government.

Though the book had great value by popularizing concepts that continue to make sense today, Hatry was annoyed at the general sense that this was the first time such notions had been written about. He had been preaching this gospel for years, and as Shelley Metzenbaum, an American nonprofit executive, academic, and former government official specializing in public sector performance management, told us, “Harry called for increased attention to outcome measurement and management as early as the 1970’s.”

We don’t want to be too harsh on researchers, practitioners and academics for missing out on the important history that could help inform their current work and we have to give credit, as well, to internet resources like Google Scholar with its vast repository of academic writing that record contemporary government history.

But with the speed of change today and the increasing reliance on summarized answers from AI we can’t help worrying about what is lost.

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