A Citizen Centric World
November 17th, 2009 by John Creighton in Dispatches
Tags: Citizen Centric
Institutions have been at the center of our lives for more than a century. Institutions are how we get organized and get things done. We form corporations to do business. We create school districts to deliver education. We build churches to promulgate religion. Institutions have helped to lift our society to become one of the wealthiest and healthiest in history.
We conform our lives to the needs of institutions in order to get things done effectively. We work from 9 to 5 for 40 hours a week. Families schedule vacations around the school calendar. College students go on Spring Break. In Great Britain, they name vacation days after an institution: “Bank Holiday.”
We are in an era now in which we don’t need institutions as much. We can get organized and get things done without the help of institutions. Clay Shirkey discusses the ability for people to form groups and get work done without highly structured organizations in his book Here Comes Everybody.
I have noticed a shift in public attitudes over the past ten years as people have become less reliant on institutions. I conducted a series of education focus groups over two years in the mid-1990s for the Kettering Foundation and The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation. No one mentioned “choice” in those days. I had to bring up the idea that parents and students might select their own school. People seldom engaged. They accepted the idea that school boundaries determined where a student went to school – unless they went to private school.
Today, when I talk to parents and students, choice is a given. Parents and students reject the idea that a student should be forced to go to a school they don’t want to attend (within the public school context). What’s more, families don’t even conform to the school calendar the way they once did. Families do activities and take vacations on their own schedules not the one prescribed by the school district.
These shifts are taking place in other sectors of society, too. The old adage “just what the doctor ordered” no longer applies. When faced with any significant health challenge, more and more people do their own medical research and consult with the doctor rather than passively submit to prescriptions.
Brad Rourke and I have been examining the implications of people’s shifting expectations for institutions. We describe the emerging society as a Citizen Centric World. We’re leaving behind our institution centric society.
Here are a few examples of how people’s expectations for institutions and public leaders are shifting.
Old: Limited options is just the way it is.
New: People expect a range of options to suit their personal interests.
Old: Experts and officials decide and do things for people.
New: People decide and do things for themselves – with advice from experts (who are often peers).
Old: Information is generated by, accessible to and distributed by officials and experts.
New: Information is generated by, accessible to and distributed by anyone.
Old: Institutions operate in a defined space and time.
New: People do things where and when they want.
Old: Accountability is to institutionally defined metrics.
New: People seek transparency; will judge performance based on their own metrics.
These shifts in public attitudes may seem self evident on the surface. “Tell me what I don’t know,” some people might say. But ask yourself, where does your organization fall along the spectrum of meeting people’s old or emerging expectations? For instance, do experts and officials from your organization still decide and do things for people? Or, do you help people decide and do things for themselves?
The private sector has been forced to confront people’s shifting expectations sooner than public sector organizations. In the private sector, a new type of business model is emerging often called the platform organization. The Washington Times Communities is one such example. It is a platform for a wide variety of writers who speak to niche rather than general audiences.
All types of organizations – public and private – are going to have to account for the societal shift from institution-centric to citizen-centric. How well prepared is your organization?
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Picture Credits: Globe in hands by Flickr user noticelj.
2 Responses to “A Citizen Centric World”
I think you’re on to something here, John. People no longer trust institutions the way they used to, and with good reason.
Here are several examples that explain the loss of trust.
Old: I can trust financial giants to manage money properly.
New: It is clear that many once-trusted Wall St. institutions have all the financial management skills of carp, except that carp never needed massive government bailouts.
Old: I can trust Big Science to tell me the truth about the natural world.
New: First they warned us about the New Ice Age, then Global Warming, and now that it’s not warming, we now have “Climate Change,” meaning “we’re pretty sure this coin flip might come up heads or tails, so give us more funding and power because we’re experts.”
Old: I can trust the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution correctly.
New: If we can’t find something in the Constitution, we’ll say it’s in the “penumbra.”
Old: I can trust the public schools to ensure that our kids get a world-class education.
New: The world’s best blow our doors off.
Old: The mainstream media will root out corruption in government.
New: The mainstream media actively protects politicians that it likes, and uses phony stories to attack politicians it doesn’t like (paging Mr. Rather; Mr. Rather, please call your office).
Old: Hollywood has a code of conduct. They would never intentionally aim morally repugnant garbage at children.
New: ‘Nuff said.
Finally, I would suggest that you could leave off the parenthetical phrase at the end of your statement, “Parents and students reject the idea that a student should be forced to go to a school they don’t want to attend (within the public school context).” Many parents and students would join the Kennedys, Clintons and Obamas in fleeing the public school context altogether if the funds were available to do so.
Read the piece and found it provocative. I would love to use it with a 11th or 12th grade USH or Government class. I do see the changes mentioned in the text but I have some worries. I’d like to believe that the shift to citizen-centered society was a sign of increasing democracy but it may just be a smoke screen. Large corporations still control information (in fact our information sources are now in the hands of fewer and fewer corporations/monolpolies). So as much as we may want to believe that institutions don’t tell us what to do, it may simply be a different version of it. I worry that people think they thinking freely but are being controlled through non-elected, for-profit organizations. I distrust large government agencies as much as anyone else but at least there is a sense of oversight built in (even if it is flawed).
So, how do we, as citizens, maintain/regain autonomy? The constitution was explicit about saying that the public must give up some autonomy in order to preserve the public good. I guess I just want to be aware of what the heck I’m giving up –tranparency is key and I’m no convinced our citizen-centered society will guarantee that any better than the OLD version.